English World-Wide - Volume 37, Issue 3, 2016

The word canny has long been associated with the dialects of the North East of England, most typically in its adjectival sense. However, it has four distinct functions (adjective, adverb, intensifier and modifier in quantifying expressions), which this paper tracks in a diachronic speech corpus. Although the intensifier (e.g. it’s canny good) is documented in the Survey of English Dialects (Upton, Parry and Widowson 1994), it appears in the corpus later than expected with the profile of an incoming form. Results from a judgement task corroborate the corpus trends and show that people’s intuitions about intensifier canny correlate with age as well as the semantics and position of the following adjective, in such a way that shows the intensifier is not fully delexicalised. The present research highlights the value of combining production and perception data in establishing how the origins of a linguistic item affect its distribution in its new function.

Indian English only (IndE-only), e.g. “I’ll meet you here only”, is rejected as poor English by many IndE speakers. In the present study, we used a mixed method to investigate familiarity, comprehension and use of IndE-only in 20 L1 IndE speakers in the US. Participants completed a psycholinguistic task comprising syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic judgments of IndE, standard English, and grammatically or semantically odd control sentences. L1 IndE speakers’ task performance was compared to a control group of 33 American English speakers. Results showed that IndE speakers were familiar with syntactic aspects of IndE-only consistent with the literature, and were able to extract significantly more information about implicatures and conversational contexts compared to the control group. L1 IndE speakers were also interviewed about their attitudes towards IndE and IndE-only. Qualitative results indicated that despite some stigmatization, mostly in the written form, IndE-only exemplifies the emerging identity of L1 IndE.

This paper presents the findings of a study on the intonational features in ten proficient Malay Speakers of English (MSEs), focusing on a distinct rising tone (the Cooperative Rise, CR). Using Brazil’s (1985) Discourse Intonation as a framework for analysis, the CR discourse function differs from the rise and fall-rise of Standard Southern British English (SSBE). The CR is a referring tone used to provide extra emphasis on important information and create a more cooperative and supportive tone. The form and function of the CR are examined in relation to SSBE and other varieties of World Englishes. The results indicate that duration and pitch range of the CR are significantly different from the standard rise.

This paper presents the first in-depth account of the bee copula form found in Belizean Kriol, which appears to be a copular development not found in other Caribbean English Creoles. Based on approximately 500 tokens of bee from Di Nyoo Testiment (2012), we argue that bee must appear in irrealis contexts. It is frequently used to mark a potential change of state, though this is not a conventional aspect of bee’s meaning. We also show that while bee seems to be emphatic, this aspect of bee’s meaning is best understood as derived via Gricean (1975) reasoning.