English World-Wide - Volume 41, Issue 1, 2020

Abstract

The way-construction (e.g. He sang his way into our hearts) is a highly idiomatic English Argument Structure construction. Apart from a brief discussion in Davies and Fuchs (2015: 13), however, no study has looked at the construction in World Englishes. Drawing on more than 14,000 tokens from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), we present the first in-depth empirical analysis of the construction across various types of World Englishes. Our results provide support for Hoffmann’s (2014) claim of the correlation of Dynamic Model stage (Schneider 2003, 2007) and constructional productivity: the overall frequency of the construction as well as the productivity of the verbal, nominal, and prepositional slots of the construction correlate positively with a variety’s phase in the Dynamic Model. Moreover, it turns out that the less entrenched a variety is according to the Dynamic Model, the stronger is its tendency to select specific prototypical, or frequent, fillers in the constructional slots. Finally, we find no evidence for the reliteralisation hypothesis, i.e. that less advanced varieties exhibit a preference for concrete verbs or nouns.

Abstract

This paper analyzes fronting constructions in spoken Korean(ized) English. Non-canonical syntax is an important means of structuring discourse, but its use by speakers of Expanding Circle Englishes has so far received only insufficient attention in studies of World Englishes. Taking a corpus-linguistic approach, this study determines to which extent topicalization and left-dislocation are used by South Korean speakers of English in informal conversations. In our explanation of the results, which show that fronting constructions are clearly part of the Korean English repertoire albeit used with varying frequencies, we mainly draw on notions of language contact (i.e. Korean as the substrate being a topic-prominent language) and language acquisition processes.

Abstract

This article describes the swearing practices of a group of young people aged 14–16 in the UK. The young people are in a specific context – a Pupil Referral Unit catering for pupils who have been excluded from mainstream school. The study’s narrow focus builds on existing knowledge by providing a level of precision in terms of speaker and context not usually found in swearing research. 13 key words are examined in terms of meaning, structure, frequency, and use between genders. Shit and fuck, as the most common terms, are explored in more detail, with use of the latter compared to existing accounts based on the British National Corpus. Examining the swearing practices of this group of people adds detail to our knowledge of a particular style of English, paves the way for future research into the socio-pragmatic functions of teenage swearing, and helps us to better understand the linguistic behaviour of an often-marginalised section of society.

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of speech-unit final like (SUF like) in standard Irish English (IrE) and takes a variationist approach based on the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-IRL). The analysis includes both sociolinguistic factors (age, gender, occupation type, religious affiliation, conversation type, audience size, type and zone of residence) and a psycholinguistic factor (priming). The statistical analysis extends previous research on SUF like in that it applies the principle of accountability and shows that priming significantly facilitates SUF like use, that SUF like has increased between an earlier (1990–1994) and a later phase (2002–2005) of data collection and that, between 2002 and 2005, SUF like use correlates negatively with audience size but not so in data collected between 1990 and 1994. The relative absence of significant social stratification of SUF like use suggests that SUF like continues to be a frequent feature of standard IrE and substantiates that it is a linguistic marker of Irish identity.

This article reviews Modeling World Englishes: Assessing the Interplay of Emancipation and Globalization of ESL VarietiesEUR 99.009789027201232

This article reviews Offers and Offer Refusals: A Postcolonial Pragmatics Perspective on World EnglishesEUR 99.009789027201737