Oh chale : Two stance-taking strategies in Ghanaian Pidgin English

A common assumption is that language is used for conveying factual information, but linguistic forms also serve a way to communicate pragmatic features, such as speakers’ intentions and mental state. This study describes and analyses two strategies for stance-taking in GhaPE, more specific the use of discourse particles and complement-taking predicates. Such grammatical resources have been identified in the literature to play important functions in signalling how the speaker evaluates and positions him/herself and the addressee with respect to objects of discourse. The analysis and discussion of forms is informed by Du Bois’ (2007) ‘stance triangle’, which has proved to be a useful analytical device for investigating stance from a dialogical perspective. GhaPE is at times anticipated as fairly simple both by scholars and in the community where it is spoken. This thesis is thus an attempt to display aspects of the richness of the language.

‘Neutral, native-like or authentic’ : Investigating attitudes and beliefs of expanding circle speakers of English

The status of English as the language of international communication is by now well-established. However, in the past 16 years, research has tried to emphasize the fact that the English spoken in international contact situations and between people with other first languages than English has different needs than the English spoken locally amongst native speakers, resulting in the emergence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) as a scholarly field. However, the impact of findings in ELF has so far only led to a moderate shift in English language teaching. Especially in expanding circle countries, where ELF should have the biggest impact, change is only gradually becoming palpable. Accent and pronunciation, as one of the biggest factors on both identity and mutual intelligibility (Jenkins 2000; 2007) are at the root of discussion. The scope of this study is therefore to examine accent choices and the extent to which native speaker ideology informs the preferences of ten speakers of ELF and 27 German natives with experience in international communication. Both ethnographical and sociolinguistic methods, as well as auditory analysis have been applied and conducted. The auditory analysis of six variables in the recorded speech production of the ten speakers suggests that there is no significant preference of one norm-giving variety over the other. Rather, speakers tend to mix-and-match General American- and Standard Southern British English-like features in their pronunciation. When reporting their accent ideals, the idea of a ‘neutral’ English accent is mentioned by four participants. Neutral accents seem to have been understood as ‘unmarked accents’. Expressed beliefs on their own English pronunciation show a comparatively high level of reflection on and confidence in their own production. Results from a rating task and a survey given to 27 German participants reveal attitudes that are more negatively stacked. While Germans reported openness towards NNS (non-native speaker) accents and showed awareness of the priority of intelligibility over accent choice in both their own and others’ pronunciation, they still largely reported NS accent preference. The ratings of the production from ten ELF speakers confirmed this and showed that ‘neutral’ is equated with native-like. In the light of these findings, issues are discussed that ultimately relate to the influence of NS Englishes, identity and the development of English as an international language.

Epistemic marking and multiple perspective : an introduction

This paper discusses forms of epistemic marking that instantiate multiple perspective constructions (see Evans 2005). Such forms express the speaker’s and the addressee’s simultaneous epistemic perspectives from the point of view of the speaker, crucially relying on the assumptions of the speaker with regard to the addressee’s knowledge. The analysis of forms considers established semanto-pragmatic concepts, such as semantic scope, mitigation strategies and communicative intention (as marked by sentence-type) in the exploration of forms. In addition, the notion of knowledge asymmetry is discussed alongside the concepts of epistemic status and stance as tools for a semantic analysis of investigated forms

Epistemic marking in Ika (Arwako)

The paper describes epistemic marking in Ika (Arwako-Chibchan, Colombia) and proposes an analysis in terms of a typologically unusual pattern called conjunct/disjunct, which has been attested for a small number of Asian and South American languages. Canonically, conjunct occurs with first person subjects in statements and with second person in questions, as opposed to any other combination of subject and sentence-type, which is disjunct. The pattern found in Ika both conforms to expectations and, at the same time, contributes to a more nuanced analysis of the functional motivations of the conjunct/disjunct pattern. In Ika, conjunct marking encodes the speaker's direct access to an event that involves either (or both) of the speech participants. In addition, conjunct/disjunct marking interacts predictably with a second set of epistemic markers that encode asymmetries in the epistemic authority of the speaker and the addressee. The analysis builds on first-hand data but remains tentative, awaiting further investigation.

The role of 'perspective' in epistemic marking

The paper focuses on inter-personal aspects of the context in the analysis of evidential and related epistemic marking systems. While evidentiality is defined by its capacity to qualify the speaker's indexical point of view in terms of information source, it is argued that other aspects of the context are important to analyze evidentiality both conceptually and grammatically. These distinct, analytical components concern the illocutionary status of a given marker and its scope properties. The importance of the hearer's point of view in pragmatics and semantics is well attested and constitutes a convincing argument for an increased emphasis on the perspective of the hearer/addressee in analyses of epistemic marking, such as evidentiality. The paper discusses available accounts of evidentials that attend to the perspective of the addressee and also introduces lesser-known epistemic marking systems that share a functional space with evidentiality.

Deictic Demonstratives in Japanese, Finnish and Swedish : First and Third Language Perspectives

The goal of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, it investigates the actual, native use of spatial-deictic demonstratives in Japanese, Finnish and Swedish. Secondly, it investigates and elucidates the interlanguage of Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking learners of Japanese regarding their use of Japanese spatial-deictic demonstratives in the light of respective native use and, in comparison to the descriptions of demonstratives in the teaching materials used. Thus, the present study deals with analyses of two sets of empirical data: data produced by native-speaking informants (L1 data) and data produced by language learners (L2 data). These were elicited by Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) designed, collected and analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods by the author. The results showed that the actual use of demonstratives by the native informants was not always in accordance with the way described in grammars. The typological similarities between Japanese and Finnish were in this study not reflected in the native use of demonstratives, and some uses were not solely based on the spatial relations between the referent, the speaker and the addressee, but rather on social-interactional factors. The main findings regarding the learner data revealed some differences in the usage rate of the demonstratives between the two Finnish-speaking groups and the one Swedish-speaking learner group studied. There were, however, no particular differences found between them regarding the type of demonstrative used. It is suggested that these differences are first and foremost connected both with the teaching materials used and the more or less heterogeneous linguistic environment in which the learners reside, and only thereafter with the typological similarities or differences between their respective native languages, Finnish and Swedish, and the target language, Japanese. It is further argued that the learners’ use of the different Japanese demonstratives, that is the type of demonstrative used, could be explained in terms of familiarity with the grammar. That is, when the situations used in the DCTs were exemplified in teaching materials and were familiar to them, the learners seemed to use Japanese demonstratives as they are described in the teaching materials and as the native Japanese speakers use them. When the situations used in the DCTs were not exemplified in the teaching materials, the learners seem to rely more on their native language. The results, thus, suggest that the learners’ interlanguage is influenced by the grammar of the target language known to the learners, but also by the number of languages (or varieties) that the learners have contact with at the time of learning. The results of the present study have implications for the teaching of Japanese in at least two ways. Firstly, the importance of grammar instruction must be emphasized since its effect on the learners’ language is apparent. Secondly, the contents of teaching materials should be revised on the basis of the native speakers’ actual use of the grammar.