English World-Wide - Volume 40, Issue 1, 2019

Abstract

The present study is a Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) of English blogs and newspaper columns originating from Pakistan and the U.S. using MDA dimensions reported in Grieve et al. (2010): (i) Informational versus Personal Focus; (ii) Addressee Focus; (iii) Thematic Variation; and (iv) Narrative Style. The aim is to examine regional and/or functional variation among Pakistani and U.S. English blogs and columns and its possible causes. The results show that Pakistani and U.S. columns differ significantly from each other, while blogs have less significant differences. Further investigation into sub-categories of blogs reveals significant differences among technology blogs, while news blogs and individual blogs differ less significantly. An examination of possible causes shows that geographical origin, the situational characteristics of the register, and the internet as a medium play a role in variation. It is further suggested that internet registers might be evolving rapidly with the fast-changing landscape of products and services on the internet.

Abstract

Usage-based research in linguistics has to a large extent relied on corpus data. However, a feature’s “failure to appear in even a very large corpus (such as the Web) is not evidence for ungrammaticality, nor is appearance evidence for grammaticality” (Schütze and Sprouse 2013: 29). It is therefore advisable to complement corpus-based analyses with experimental data, so as to (ideally) obtain converging evidence. This paper reviews reasons for combining corpus linguistic with psycholinguistic experimental methods, and demonstrates how research on varieties of English can profit from experimentation. For a study of conversion in Asian Englishes, the maze task (Forster, Guerrera, and Elliot 2009; Forster 2010) was implemented with a web-based, open-source software. The results of the experiment dovetail with a previous analysis of the Corpus of Global Web-based English (Davies 2013). These results should encourage researchers not to base findings exclusively on corpus evidence, but corroborate them by means of experimental data.

Abstract

We chart the incursion of quotative be like into Dublin English, drawing comparisons with similar developments in urban Canadian English as well as with diachronic benchmarks representing vernacular Irish English. Quantitative analysis reveals that be like is the lead variant in the quotative system used by young Dubliners and is advancing along a similar, though not identical, cline of grammaticalization to that found in urban Canadian English. We use the resultant information about the Dublin English quotative system as a baseline to assess the extent to which this system has been acquired by Polish-born L2 speakers of English differentiated in terms of target language proficiency. Comparison of the L2 quotative system with the L1 Dublin English benchmark reveals that not all L1 usage constraints are faithfully replicated by L2 speakers, indicating that the acquisition of the relevant constraints is incomplete, even in the case of advanced learners.

Abstract

This study examined the English accents of English-Malay bilinguals in Singapore to ascertain whether language dominance was a determinant of accent variation in Singapore English, with a hypothesis that a Malay-dominant bilingual would have more ethnic-specific features than an English-dominant one. Ten English-Malay bilinguals – five English-dominant and five Malay-dominant – who differed greatly in their language dominance took part in this study. In an ethnic discriminability task that involved 60 naïve raters, Malay-dominant bilinguals were significantly more often correctly identified as ethnically Malay and were rated as having a significantly more perceivable Malay-accented English accent, while those who were English-dominant had an English accent that lacked ethnic-specific features so much so that naïve raters, including raters who were English-Malay bilinguals, were less able to identify the speakers as ethnically Malay. The results of this study indicate that early sequential bilinguals or simultaneous bilinguals of the same two languages need not have similar accents. The findings also suggest that language dominance is a determinant of accent variation in Singapore English, at least for the English-Malay bilinguals.

This article reviews Second Language Processing: An IntroductionEUR 46978-0-415-70804-3978-0-415-70803-6