English World-Wide - Volume 39, Issue 3, 2018

Abstract

This paper investigates whether colloquialisation – a stylistic shift by which written genres come to be more similar to spoken genres – has played a role in the endonormativisation of the grammar of Australian English, a variety which has long been noted for its penchant for colloquialism. The study tracks changes in grammatical colloquialism from the early 20th century against the historical backdrop of the progressive decline in Britishness in Australia and the pervasive effects of “Americanisation”. The data are derived from a suite of parallel Brown-family corpora representing British, American, and Australian English of the 1930s, 1960s, 1990s and 2006. Multivariate techniques are used to delimit 26 “colloquial” and “anti-colloquial” grammatical features from a set of 83 potentially relevant features, and to examine changes in their frequencies between 1931 and 2006, in the three varieties, and across the three major genres of fiction, learned writing and press reportage.

Abstract

The present study investigates the system of verbal negation in Bahamian Creole and relates it to the respective systems of historically connected varieties in North America, i.e. contemporary as well as earlier varieties of African American Vernacular English and Gullah. Building on a corpus of roughly 98,000 words, the study provides a variable analysis of the all-purpose negator ain’t and its competitors and offers some remarks on invariant don’t, negative concord, and the preverbal past-tense negator never. It shows that in particular the syntactic and temporal distribution of ain’t, which have repeatedly been discussed in connection with the debate about the origins of African American Vernacular English, reveal striking similarities between Gullah and its immediate descendant Bahamian Creole, while confirming a more distant relationship with African American Vernacular English.

Abstract

This corpus-based study focuses on the alternation between progressive and non-progressive constructions in native and non-native varieties. We adopt a quantitative-qualitative approach starting with a collostructional analysis of the two constructions to assess association strengths between lexical verbs, semantic domains and Aktionsart categories on the one hand, and progressive and non-progressive constructions on the other hand. We then explore the constructions semantically and qualitatively. Overall, associations between the two constructions and Achievements and Accomplishments on the one hand, and semantic domains other than Activity or Existence on the other, do not unanimously influence writers’ constructional choices. Further, there may not be one single core meaning of the progressive, but rather a complex of meanings activated by the use of the progressive construction. Ultimately, we paint a multifaceted picture of the meanings of the progressive and show the benefit of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore constructional semantics across Englishes.

Abstract

In the framework of variational pragmatics, the focus so far has been on L1-varieties of English, and the present paper introduces this area of research into the wider field of World Englishes. It presents first results from a larger questionnaire study on a number of pragmatic variables in Namibian English (NamE), a variety of English that only recently has aroused the interest of a number of researchers because of its unique history and complex variety status. The study employs methods successfully applied in variational pragmatics and describes the realization of responses to thanks in NamE in comparison to three L1-varieties of English. As the paper shows, NamE differs from these varieties in various ways. It argues that these differences, although possibly being more in degree than in kind, nevertheless index local Namibian solutions in the complex linguistic ecology of the speech community. The results of the study furthermore show that some of the results reported for the L1-varieties need to be reconsidered in view of the Namibian data.

This article reviews The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology: History, Theory, PracticeEUR 36.00978-90-272-5832-8

This article reviews Negation and Contact: With Special Focus on Singapore EnglishEUR 95.00978-9-02725-948-6