English World-Wide - Volume 39, Issue 1, 2018

The present paper deals with portmanteau terms based on the word English, the bulk of which form a varied and extensive nomenclature used to describe hybrids of the English language with other languages. A citation database of over 3,500 entries was created containing 510 separate terms dating from the early 20th century to mid-2016. These figures indicate a widespread interest in the ways in which English hybridises with other languages and becomes localised in various parts of the globe. The results also show a trend of continuing increase in the coining of such terms to be expected in an increasingly globalised world. However, to date there has been no exhaustive examination of names for English-language hybrids. The present paper examines these portmanteau terms with regard to semantics, etymology, history, frequency, and pronunciation, and presents an alphabetical table of the complete set of terms in the Appendix.

Studies in word-formation in English are common compared to the study of new words that are formed by combining the resources of two linguistic systems. Although new word formations within a language are considered to be highly creative, combining words from two different languages provides another level of creativity to bilinguals in different situations. The objective of this paper is to examine the main types of word creation processes employed in mass media texts, particularly in Hindi-English code-mixed words. The focus is on three main processes of word creation: affixation, blending and compounding (including reduplication) and they are discussed from the perspective of productivity/creativity, distribution and underlying motivations. These processes seem to be illustrative of the nativization of inner circle English in India, particularly in mass media where such lexical adaptations lend texts a distinct flavor through innovation in word-formation.

This paper examines change in the sociolinguistic landscape of Irish English based on a diachronic corpus of radio advertisements from 1997 and 2007, with a focus on the relatively new accent variety, Advanced Dublin English (AdvD) ( Hickey 2013 ). The quantitative and qualitative analyses are based on Sussex’s (1989) “Action and Comment” framework (which differentiates the advertisement components based on discourse genre) and on Bell’s (1984) audience and referee design framework. AdvD is viewed in the 1997 subcorpus as outgroup referee design where it has an “initiative” role in constructing listener identity. In the 2007 subcorpus, the increased frequency of AdvD suggests that it is evolving to an audience designed style. Stylised representations of this accent can be understood as ingroup referee design, a strategy which facilitates the evolution of this form as audience design. These findings illustrate the initiative role of the media in constructing contemporary cultural identities ( Piller 2001 ).

This paper considers pronoun omission in different varieties of English. It argues that omitted pronouns simplify structures if their referents are accessible in discourse, which explains the greater frequency of this grammatical feature in high-contact varieties of English, spoken in speech communities with a history of high numbers of second-language users. A corpus study of two high-contact varieties, Indian English and Singapore English, and a low-contact one, British English, is conducted in order to examine the distribution of omitted and overt pronouns. As expected, pronoun omission is more frequent in the high-contact varieties than in British English. Moreover, pronouns are omitted almost exclusively when they have highly accessible referents as antecedents, which is not a conventionalized feature of the grammars of Indian or Singapore English, where overt pronouns are the default choice when referring to antecedents.