English World-Wide - Volume 38, Issue 2, 2017

This article examines the Northern Subject Rule in the Irish diaspora, studying letters from two generations of an Ulster emigrant family in 19th-century New Zealand. The study shows that the concord pattern frequently used by the parent generation almost completely disappeared in the language of their New Zealand-born children. The results suggest that the children skipped the stage of “extreme variability” that is claimed to be characteristic of the language of the first colony-born immigrants in the new-dialect formation framework ( Trudgill 2004 ). This study aims to contribute to work on early New Zealand English grammar (e.g. Hundt 2012 , 2015a , 2015b ; Hundt and Szmrecsanyi 2012 ) and it adds new insights into the formation of New Zealand English. It, furthermore, contributes to research on dialect contact between Irish English and other colonial varieties of English as well as new-dialect formation.

Negative concord (NC) (e.g. I don’t know nobody in Havering) has been the focus of a considerable number of diachronic as well as sociolinguistic studies, mainly in terms of its pervasiveness in the most common varieties of English. This paper contributes to the existing literature on the topic by examining NC in the language of British adults and teenagers. The findings, based on the analysis of data from three comparable adult and teenager corpora, indicate that: (i) NC is much more frequent in teenagers than in adults; (ii) the language of teenagers shows a wider variety of NC patterns than that of adults; (iii) the number of multiple negatives (e.g. I don’t want nothing to do with you no more) is not as common as expected, and they are found mainly in the expression of teenagers; (iv) pragmatically speaking, NC structures may be used to accentuate a negative meaning, although they are often equivalent to single negatives.

This study examines the alternation between non-standard preterite come and its standard counterpart came in London English. A major component of the investigation centers on the comparison of come/came variation in the speech of Anglo (British-heritage) and non-Anglo (migrant-heritage) youth. Rates of preterite come vary markedly across different age cohorts and minority ethnic groups, foregrounding the importance of social factors as key determinants of variant use. By contrast, the internal conditioning of variant selection is not robust, as inferred from the paucity of significant linguistic effects. Similarities in variable patterning in elderly and adolescent Anglo speaker groups nevertheless suggest that shared structural affinities may be due to historical transmission. Conversely, comparison of Anglo and non-Anglo adolescents’ use of come/came variation reveals fewer correspondences in the grammar underlying variable use. The results demonstrate that data from non-Anglo groups contribute to a fuller understanding of come/came variation in an ethnically diverse metropolis.

The present paper explores structural nativization in relative clauses in three varieties of English (India, Hong Kong, and Singapore Englishes). All three of these emerged as the consequence of British colonization, developed as varieties through educational systems, and are now consolidating as independent, linguistically different (local) prestige varieties. An analysis of comparable samples from the spoken component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) is carried out; in addition to the varieties mentioned above, data from ICE-GB are included for comparison. The analysis shows that certain features and structures predominate in specific varieties, and also illustrates constructions which are specific to the Asian varieties under investigation. These nativized relative clauses can be explained as cross-linguistic tendencies that go beyond the influence of the local language(s), and hence they are further analyzed in light of cognitive determinants of learning, which favor isomorphism and aim at maximizing transparency.