Studying language:English in action

This book introduces key ideas and current critical debates about how English functions within its social and cultural contexts, and provides practical examples and guidance on how to approach further work in these areas. It introduces core topics of language study; language variation, pragmatics, stylistics, critical discourse analysis, language and gender and language and education. Each chapter includes case studies providing worked analysis of sample texts, suggestions for further project work and an annotated further reading section.

A statistical method for the identification and aggregation of regional linguistic variation

This paper introduces a method for the analysis of regional linguistic variation. The method identifies individual and common patterns of spatial clustering in a set of linguistic variables measured over a set of locations based on a combination of three statistical techniques: spatial autocorrelation, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. To demonstrate how to apply this method, it is used to analyze regional variation in the values of 40 continuously measured, high-frequency lexical alternation variables in a 26-million-word corpus of letters to the editor representing 206 cities from across the United States.

Dialect variation

Relatively little research on dialect variation has been based on corpora of naturally occurring language. Instead, dialect variation has been studied based primarily on language elicited through questionnaires and interviews. Eliciting dialect data has several advantages, including allowing for dialectologists to select individual informants, control the communicative situation in which language is collected, elicit rare forms directly, and make high-quality audio recordings. Although far less common, a corpus-based approach to data collection also has several advantages, including allowing for dialectologists to collect large amounts of data from a large number of informants, observe dialect variation across a range of communicative situations, and analyze quantitative linguistic variation in large samples of natural language. Although both approaches allow for dialect variation to be observed, they provide different perspectives on language variation and change. The corpus- based approach to dialectology has therefore produced a number of new findings, many of which challenge traditional assumptions about the nature of dialect variation. Most important, this research has shown that dialect variation involves a wider range of linguistic variables and exists across a wider range of language varieties than has previously been assumed. The goal of this chapter is to introduce this emerging approach to dialectology. The first part of this chapter reviews the growing body of research that analyzes dialect variation in corpora, including research on variation across nations, regions, genders, ages, and classes, in both speech and writing, and from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, with a focus on dialect variation in the English language. Although collections of language data elicited through interviews and questionnaires are now commonly referred to as corpora in sociolinguistics and dialectology (e.g. see Bauer 2002; Tagliamonte 2006; Kretzschmar et al. 2006; D'Arcy 2011), this review focuses on corpora of naturally occurring texts and discourse. The second part of this chapter presents the results of an analysis of variation in not contraction across region, gender, and time in a corpus of American English letters to the editor in order to exemplify a corpus-based approach to dialectology.

Regional variation and change in the history of English strong verbs

This thesis investigates how the strong verb system inherited from Old English evolved in the regional dialects of Middle English (ca. 1100-1500). Old English texts preserve a relatively complex system of strong verbs, in which traditionally seven different ablaut classes are distinguished. This system becomes seriously disrupted from the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods onwards. As a result, many strong verbs die out, or have their ablaut patterns affected by sound change and morphological analogy, or transfer to the weak conjugation. In my thesis, I study the beginnings of two of these developments in two strong verb classes to find out what the evidence from Middle English regional dialects can tell us about their origins and diffusion. Chapter 2 concentrates on the strong-to-weak shift in Class III verbs, and investigates to what extent strong, mixed and weak past tense and participle forms vary in Middle English dialects, and whether the variation is more pronounced in the paradigms of specific verbs or sub-classes. Chapter 3 analyses the regional distribution of ablaut levelling in strong Class IV verbs throughout the Middle English period. The Class III and IV data for the Early Middle English period are drawn from A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, and the data for the Late Middle English period from a sub-corpus of files from The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and The Middle English Grammar Corpus. Furthermore, The English Dialect Dictionary and Grammar are consulted as an additional reference point to find out to what extent the Middle English developments are reflected in Late Modern English dialects. Finally, referring to modern insights into language variation and change and linguistic interference, Chapter 4 discusses to what extent intra- and extra-linguistc factors, such as token and type frequency, stem structure and language contact, might correlate with the strong-to-weak shift and ablaut levelling in Class III and IV verbs in the Middle English period. The thesis is accompanied by six appendices that contain further information about my distinction of Middle English dialect areas (Appendix A), historical Class III and IV verbs (B and C) and the text samples and linguistic data from the Middle English text corpora (D, E and F).

GEO-SOCIOLINGUISTIC INVESTIGATIONS: CONSIDERATIONS FOR A DESCRIPTION OF VARIATION PHENOMENA

This paper presents some discussions on the theoretical and methodological principles of the studies on language variation. The reflections take the socio-historical context as an element that affects the performance of speech time and space. Language, more specifically its realization in speech, is taken as belonging to the social order, i.e., as an element that relates to the way of life of individuals, groups and societies, which, through social networks and their entanglements, depict the dynamic and complex set of social relations. Registered in its most alive realization, speech is the axis to which converge multiple connections and different levels of society. This dynamic relationship between language and society, according to the studies of Sociolinguistics and Dialectology, provides the elements for examining the phenomena manifested in speech. The theoretical and methodological approach delineated in this paper does not exhaust the principles that underpin the studies on variation, but it congregates some reflections on the conditions in which the language description can provide elements for a review of the behavior of speakers given the history and culture of the community.

Intermediate Past BE : A Paradigm Reshaped With Data Drawn From HARES

In this paper, I look into a grammatical phenomenon found among speakers of the Cambridgeshire dialect of English. According to my hypothesis, the phenomenon is a new entry into the past BE verb paradigm in the English language. In my paper, I claim that the structure I have found complements the existing two verb forms, was and were, with a third verb form that I have labelled ‘intermediate past BE’. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I introduce the theoretical ground for the study of variation, which is founded on empiricist principles. In variationist linguistics, the main claim is that heterogeneous language use is structured and ordered. In the last 50 years of history in modern linguistics, this claim is controversial. In the 1960s, the generativist movement spearheaded by Noam Chomsky diverted attention away from grammatical theories that are based on empirical observations. The generativists steered away from language diversity, variation and change in favour of generalisations, abstractions and universalist claims. The theoretical part of my paper goes through the main points of the variationist agenda and concludes that abandoning the concept of language variation in linguistics is harmful for both theory and methodology. In the method part of the paper, I present the Helsinki Archive of Regional English Speech (HARES) corpus. It is an audio archive that contains interviews conducted in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The interviews were done in accordance to methods used generally in traditional dialectology. The informants are mostly elderly male people who have lived in the same region throughout their lives and who have left school at an early age. The interviews are actually conversations: the interviewer allowed the informant to pick the topic of conversation to induce a maximally relaxed and comfortable atmosphere and thus allow the most natural dialect variant to emerge in the informant’s speech. In the paper, the corpus chapter introduces some of the transcription and annotation problems associated with spoken language corpora (especially those containing dialectal speech). Questions surrounding the concept of variation are present in this part of the paper too, as especially transcription work is troubled by the fundamental problem of having to describe the fluctuations of everyday speech in text. In the empirical section of the paper, I use HARES to analyse the speech of four informants, with special focus on the emergence of the intermediate past BE variant. My observations and the subsequent analysis permit me to claim that my hypothesis seems to hold. The intermediate variant occupies almost all contexts where one would expect was or were in the informants’ speech. This means that the new variant is integrated into the speakers’ grammars and exemplifies the kind of variation that is at the heart of this paper.

Syntactic change

[ES] En este trabajo se define el cambio sintáctico, se analizan los factores que lo causan o facilitan y se estudian sus tipos principales en griego antiguo.

Mario Pereira de Souza Lima: uma etapa de consolidação do pensamento gramatical brasileiro anterior à NGB

Este trabalho, estruturado em três capítulos, é uma análise crítica da Grammatica Expositiva da Língua Portuguesa de Mario Pereira de Souza Lima, publicada em 1937, pela Companhia Editora Nacional, em sua Bibliotheca Pedagógica Brasileira, Serie 2 Livros Didacticos Vol. 70, somente reeditada, em 1945, pela Livraria José Olympio Editora, sob o título de Gramática Portuguêsa. No primeiro capítulo, faz-se a contextualização histórica do surgimento da Grammatica Expositiva, com a apresentação de seus antecedentes e as correspondentes referências às linhas do pensamento gramatical e do pensamento pedagógico que norteavam as publicações dos compêndios didáticos de estudos gramaticais. Mostra-se a filiação teórica da obra compulsada, no segundo capítulo, no qual se examinam as influências incidentes sobre os procedimentos de interpretação adotados por Mario Pereira. A análise da estrutura da Grammatica Expositiva da Língua Portuguesa é feita, criticamente, no terceiro capítulo, com o intuito de aferir o caráter inovador da abordagem que efetua dos conteúdos gramaticais, explicitando-se as suas peculiaridades, quando confrontada com duas outras obras coexistentes: a Grammatica Expositiva (Curso Superior) de Eduardo Carlos Pereira e a Grammatica Secundaria de Manuel Said Ali, a partir dos critérios de conceituação dos fatos e categorias gramaticais, em especial as classes de palavras e as funções sintáticas. Quanto aos fins pedagógicos e ao perfil do corpus, caracteriza-se a obra, através do exame do conceito de uso padrão adotado, majoritariamente literário, com indícios, entretanto, de preocupação com a variação da língua, com alguns indicadores das diferenças entre o uso brasileiro e o português. Selecionam-se, também, temas acompanhados de comentários, com destaque para o novo, para o descritivamente mais consistente. Em conclusão, é assinalada a singularidade da obra, no contexto dos estudos gramaticais realizados, na época de sua publicação, tendo em vista a sua abordagem inovadora, particularmente, no que se refere à perspectiva morfossintática de exame pela qual se inicia

Teoria, proposta e aplicação de uma sequência didática em Educação Linguística: trabalhando os conceitos de língua, gramáticas e normas linguísticas no nono ano do Ensino Fundamental

O ensino-aprendizagem da disciplina Língua Portuguesa se apresenta como um desafio para professores e alunos; muito disso se deve à falta de reconhecimento da diversidade linguística (LIMA, 2014). Há uma tendência no ambiente escolar em se valorizar apenas uma norma linguística, ignorando as diferentes normas que fazem parte do convívio em sociedade. Com isso, os discentes entram em conflito, pois aquilo que é apresentado para eles como a Língua Portuguesa está bem distante da sua experiência pessoal com a língua. Em via de eliminar esse conflito, os PCNs e o PNLD estabelecem a inserção do tema variação linguística no conteúdo programático da disciplina Língua Portuguesa. Entretanto, ainda perdura uma lacuna no tratamento desse tema. A preocupação em preencher essa lacuna motivou este trabalho, que teve como objetivo principal propor e aplicar uma sequência didática que abordasse os seguintes temas: língua, gramáticas e normas linguísticas, a fim de contribuir com a realização de uma Educação Linguística eficaz (BAGNO; RANGEL, 2005). Esses três conteúdos principais geraram desdobramentos que proporcionaram a discussão dos seguintes tópicos: variação e preconceito linguísticos. A sequência didática elaborada é composta por oito etapas em que são intercalados momentos de aula expositiva e de atividades lúdicas. A aplicação da proposta de sequência didática ocorreu em uma turma de nono ano do Ensino Fundamental de um CIEP (Centro Integrado de Educação Pública) localizado na Zona Oeste da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. As ferramentas utilizadas para identificar os conteúdos assimilados pelos alunos foram a avaliação da participação da turma e os resultados de quatro atividades específicas. Considerando a complexidade e o ineditismo dos conceitos apresentados na sequência didática, o desempenho da classe foi satisfatório. Os alunos também responderam a dois questionários, um no início da sequência e outro ao final, que tinham o propósito de avaliar se houve mudança com relação ao entendimento da existência de variação linguística e do preconceito linguístico. O primeiro questionário revelou que a maioria dos alunos já havia sofrido e praticado preconceito linguístico; já o segundo mostrou que a maioria dos discentes assimilou a noção de preconceito linguístico e rompeu com a ideia de certo e errado na língua. Como objetivo secundário, este trabalho intentou deixar um legado para professores, pois com esta dissertação a ação não ficará limitada apenas ao nono ano daquele CIEP, mas poderá contribuir com o ensino linguístico de diversas escolas; e para pesquisadores, pois este registro descreve um modelo de trabalho acadêmico em que se pretendeu aplicar o princípio de indissociabilidade entre ensino, pesquisa e extensão. A expectativa é que, somados a trabalhos similares, seja possível abrir um precedente de trabalhos acadêmicos fundamentados teoricamente e desenvolvidos de forma prática, além de realizados com preocupações sociais e educacionais

El español de los inmigrantes de los Andes bolivianos en el Norte Grande de Chile : convergencias y divergencias dialectales en el marco de una situación de contacto

Cette thèse a été financée par le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada (numéro de référence 767-2010-1310)

Changing standards revisited: children’s awareness and knowledge of features of written standard English at ages 10-11

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale research project which investigated the levels of awareness and knowledge of written standard English of 10 and 11 year old children in two English primary schools. The project involved repeating in 2010 a written questionnaire previously used with children in the same schools in three separate surveys in 1999, 2002 and 2005. Data from the latest survey are compared to those from the previous three. The analysis seeks to identify any changes over time in children’s ability to recognise non-standard forms and supply standard English alternatives, as well as their ability to use technical terms related to language variation. Differences between the performance of boys and girls and that of the two schools are also analysed. The paper concludes that the socio-economic context of the schools may be a more important factor than gender in variations over time identified in the data.

Pragmatic abilities of high-functioning Greek-speaking children with autism

This paper reports on the findings of the pragmatic abilities of Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Twenty high functioning children with ASD and their typically developing age and vocabulary controls were administered a pragmatics task. The task was based on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV) in the context of a larger study targeting the grammar of Greek-speaking children with autism, and assessed the children’s abilities in communicative role taking, narrative, and question asking. The children with ASD showed an uneven profile in their pragmatic abilities. The two groups did not differ in communicative role taking and question asking. However, the children with ASD had difficulties on the narrative task, and more specifically, on the items assessing reference contrast and temporal links. Yet, they performed similarly on the mental state representations and the false beliefs items. Despite their good performance on mental states and false beliefs, the ASD children’s lower performance on reference contrast can be interpreted via Theory of Mind deficits if we assume that the former involve an additional level of complexity; namely, quantifying the amount of information available to the listener. Lower performance on temporal links is in line with the ASD children’s attested difficulties in organizing events into a coherent gist. Their overall profile, and, in particular, the dissociation between the different sections of the task, does not support single deficit accounts. It rather indicates that the deficits of individuals with ASD stem from distinct deficits in core cognitive processes (Happé & Frith, 2006).

Variação, contato e mudança linguística em Moçambique e Cabo Verde : A concordância variável de número em sintagmas nominais do português

This study investigates variable noun phrase number agreement (VNA) in two second language varieties of Portuguese, spoken in Maputo, Mozambique and in Mindelo, Cape Verde. Quantitative VARBRUL analysis is carried out based on recordings made in Maputo and Mindelo 2007 and 2008. Previous quantitative studies on VNA in varieties of Brazilian Portuguese (Guy, 1981; Lopes, 2001; Andrade, 2003) as well as on VNA in first and second language varieties of Portuguese from São Tomé (Baxter, 2004; Figueiredo, 2008, 2010) indicate contact between Portuguese and African languages as the main origin of this phenomenon. VNA in Brazilian Portuguese is, however, interpreted by Scherre (1988) and Naro & Scherre (1993, 2007) as the result of language internal drift. Varieties of Portuguese from Mozambique and Cape Verde are particularly interesting to contrast in order to investigate influences from African languages on VNA, as in Mozambique Bantu languages are first languages of the vast majority of Portuguese speakers, whereas in Cape Verde, practically all Portuguese speakers are first language speakers of Cape Verdean Creole, whose substrates are West African, and not Bantu, languages. Comparison is also made with previous studies from Brazil and São Tomé. The results of this study comment previously postulated explanations for VNA in Portuguese in various ways. The analysis of the variables onset age and age stratum indicates that VNA in the analyzed varieties is a phenomenon linked to the acquisition of Portuguese as a second language and/or language contact rather than the result of internal drift. The fact that all the compared varieties tend to mark plural on pre-head components contradicts Bantu transfer as an explanation for this pattern, and raises the need to also consider more general explanations based on language contact. The basic structural similarity between the compared varieties suggests the existence of a grammatical restructuring continuum.

Attitudes Towards and Uses of the Japanese Adverbzenzen by Swedish Learners of Japanese

The word zenzen is an adverb that is used frequently in daily conversational Japanese. From the Meiji period (1868-1912) until the early Showa period (1924-1989) the word was used together with both affirmative and negative words to form expressions. In the early Showa period the grammatical rules in education changed so that the only acceptable use was together with a negative word. From the 1990’s onward, the use together with an affirmative word has made a comeback especially among younger Japanese people. However even though the usage together with an affirmative word has made a comeback and was considered normal once in history, in today’s society it is still considered as slang and thus not recommended usage in formal situations. Foreign language learners however, tend not to learn a language only by textbooks but also by imitating the language of native Japanese speakers and Japanese popular culture. This may lead to a confusion regarding what words are acceptable to use in conversations. Therefore in this study, an online survey that examines the usage and attitudes regarding the word zenzen aimed at Japanese language learners at Swedish universities was conducted. The results of the survey showed that although a majority of the learners showed a good understanding of the usage, more than half of the learners displayed a feeling of confusion regarding the usage of the word. The gender comparison regarding the usage showed no major differences. Having lived in Japan, having Japanese friends whom you speak Japanese with regularly and length of Japanese study was associated with an increased understanding of the usage. Regular consumption of Japanese popular culture, however, was not associated with an increased understanding of the usage. A literature analysis was also conducted to examine the attitudes regarding the usage of zenzen in a variety of books with topics including business language and books aimed at Japanese language teachers. The results showed that zenzen used together with a negative word was considered as the norm while zenzen used together with an affirmative word was not recommended to be used in formal situations. When recommending proper usage of the word zenzen together with an affirmative word to foreign learners of Japanese, hijou-ni and totemo was seen as better alternatives to zenzen in a formal situation.