English World-Wide - Volume 31, Issue 3, 2010

bro’Town is a popular animated comedy whose language is that of stylized performance. It deals with the adventures of a group of five teenage Pasifika boys growing up in Auckland, New Zealand, and showcases performances of the Englishes spoken by Polynesian immigrants and their descendants. A range of varieties are performed on the show by a handful of actors. We analyzed several linguistic variables in the speech of three of the main characters — the 14-year-old twins Vale and Valea, and their father Pepelo. Pepelo produces high levels of the vernacular features of DH-stopping and TH-fronting, consistent with his biography as a second-language speaker whose pronunciation is influenced by his native language, Samoan. His sons, as second-generation speakers, have these features too but at lower frequencies. The twins also differ from each other, with the streetwise Valea, who is more aligned with Pasifika youth culture, producing higher levels of the variables than the studious Vale. Pepelo produces unaspirated initial /p/s, again a Pasifika language feature, while his sons do not. Linking-/r/, however, appears to index a youth identity but not adult immigrant status. We conclude that performed varieties can reflect the linguistic production of a community in their selection of specific features. The quantitative patterns can be quite variable, but here succeed in indexing salient identities for their audiences.

We report on longitudinal changes in the system of intensification in an innovative corpus that spans five decades of dialectal speech. Our analyses allow us — for the first time in a British context — to trace the quantitative development in the variable across four generations. Longitudinal analysis across real and apparent time determines the effect of extralinguistic and intralinguistic variables on intensification in Tyneside and tests to what extent real time data corroborates trends reported from previous apparent time analyses. Long-term competition within the variable manifests itself in distinctive developmental trajectories: expansion — both proportionally within the variable as well as across adjectival categories — tends to follow one of three types of patterns, exemplified, respectively, by really, so and dead. Variant retraction, however, follows only one schema. Importantly, numerical decline in the system does not necessarily go hand in hand with a reduction in breadth of application.

Discourse markers are a feature of everyday conversation — they signal attitudes and beliefs to their interlocutors beyond the base utterance. One particular type of discourse marker is the invariant tag (InT), for example New Zealand and Canadian English eh. Previous studies of InTs have clearly described InT uses in one language variety (e.g. Berland 1997, on London teenage talk; Stubbe and Holmes 1995, on NZ English; on sociolinguistic features e.g. Stubbe and Holmes 1995 and on single markers e.g. Avis 1972; Love 1973; Gibson 1977; Meyerhoff 1992 and 1994; Gold 2005, 2008 on eh). However, the class of InTs has not yet been fully described, and the variety of approaches taken (corpus- and survey-based) does not easily allow for cross-varietal or cross-linguistic comparison. This study investigates InTs in three varieties of English from a corpus-based approach. It lists the InTs available in New Zealand, British and Indian English through their occurrences in their respective International Corpus of English (ICE) corpora, and compares usages of four tags across the varieties. The description offers a clearer overview of the InT class for descriptive grammars, as well as more explicit definitions and usage guides for e.g. EFL/ESL pedagogy. An unambiguous description of several InTs and their meanings will also allow more thorough comparison in studies of other English varieties. Finally, the results offer another viewpoint on the issue of representativeness in corpora with respect to regional versus national varieties of the Englishes.

The article examines register variation in East African English by submitting the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to a complete multidimensional analysis (Biber 1988). A six-factor model was extracted using 67 linguistic features (Biber 1988). The results show that the extent of register variation is not less in ICE-East Africa than in Biber (1988). However, East African English displays unique stylistic features across registers. The overall effect is that East African English leans more towards the formal side (especially Dimensions 3, 5 and 6). There is a strong emphasis on the involvement of the addressee, more formal features for the encoding of information, and delineation of reference by textual rather than contextual means, even when the information is not very abstract. The paper establishes a baseline of the extent of register variation in East African English, and identifies certain typical features across all registers.