English World-Wide - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2007

Previous research on Shetland speech has not explicitly dealt with speech forms leaning towards Scottish Standard English (SSE) but has focused on Shetland dialect, the local Scots dialect. This paper argues that a local accent of SSE can be identified in Shetland, especially for speakers in Lerwick, the largest town in Shetland. The accent has not been previously fully described, and this paper presents an analysis of systemic, distributional and realizational aspects of the vowel and consonant systems, based on data from a recent survey (Sundkvist 2004). It is suggested that the Lerwick accent displays a phonemic inventory and lexical distribution similar to that commonly reported for mainland accents of SSE, with the exception of a somewhat larger inventory of vowel phonemes. At the level of phonetic realization, the Lerwick accent shares several features with mainland varieties of SSE, but displays a number of localized features in addition.

This article investigates the effect of the external variables speaker age and sex on the use of the quotatives be like, go, be all, and say in present-day spoken American English. The study is based on a large computerized corpus of naturally-occurring conversation collected from a wide range of speakers across the United States. The results show that there are striking differences in the way that men and women under the age of forty use these quotatives. Young women are in the lead in the use of be like, but the use of this quotative decreases dramatically among women in their late 20s and in their 30s. In contrast, the use of be like increases among men in their late 20s. The patterns of use described here represent a departure from previous findings and suggest that the effect of speaker’s age and sex on quotative use is more complex than has been posited so far.

The modal verbs of English have been undergoing change since the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods. Recent research suggests dramatic recent developments, particularly in American English. In this paper, we focus on the encoding of obligation/necessity, which involves the layering of must, have (got) to, got to, and need to. Building on a longitudinal research program on (spoken) English dialect corpora, the present investigation examines data from a 1.5 million word corpus of the indigenous population of Toronto, Canada, the country’s largest urban centre. Variation analysis reveals that the system of obligation/necessity in this community has undergone nearly complete specialization to have to. Moreover, a comparison of these results with earlier studies suggests that the underlying system is organized differently than elsewhere. We argue that while change is sensitive to the social evaluation of forms, internal (grammatical) constraints may differ across major varieties. Canadian English appears to be on the forefront of change.

This paper investigates the use of only and itself in Indian English, drawing on data from the Indian subcorpus of the International Corpus of English (ICE-India). In all varieties of English, only is used as an exclusive focus particle and itself as a reflexive pronoun and intensifier. Indian English has developed an additional use for only and itself as presentational, i.e. non-contrastive focus markers. The paper investigates the syntactic and semantic contexts of itself and only in order to capture the two lexical items’ functional extension in current Indian English. One interesting finding concerns the distribution of the two forms within the corpus: Itself is mainly found in written texts, while only is restricted to the spoken language. The paper further considers the origin and the likely future of this innovation in Indian English: Whereas it is quite clear that substrate influence is directly responsible for the innovative usage, the question whether this usage will also become accepted as part of an emerging Indian English standard remains to be settled.