Abstract
This chapter has fourteen sections: 1. General; 2. History of English Linguistics; 3. Phonetics and Phonology; 4. Morphology; 5. Syntax; 6. Semantics; 7. Lexicography, Lexicology, and Lexical Semantics; 8. Onomastics; 9. Dialectology and Sociolinguistics; 10. New Englishes and Creolistics; 11. Second Language Acquisition; 12. English as a Lingua Franca; 13. Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis; 14. Stylistics. Section 1 is by Robert A. Cloutier; section 2 is by Anita Auer; section 3 is by Radosław Święciński; sections 4 and 5 are by Phillip Wallage and Gea Dreschler; section 6 is by Beáta Gyuris; section 7 is by Kathryn Allan; section 8 is by Mackenzie Kerby; section 9 is by Lieselotte Anderwald; section 10 is by Alexander Kautzsch; section 11 is by Maja Miličević and Tihana Kraš; section 12 is by Elizabeth J. Erling, Claudio Schekulin, Veronika Thir, Barbara Seidlhofer, and Henry Widdowson; section 13 is by Charlotte Taylor; section 14 is by Chloe Harrison.
1. General
The eleven books discussed in this section can be broadly divided into three groups, discussed in the following order: those dealing with aspects of methodology, those focused on theoretical issues, and those targeted at a more general audience.
A comprehensive guide to the full-range of linguistic methodology is offered in Research Methods in Linguistics edited by Robert Podesva and Devyani Sharma. The chapters are written by leading experts and offer a cursory overview of the given method or methodological issue that, while not always detailed enough to put into practice oneself, offers a sufficient introduction to the topic to better understand research conducted with the particular method or under the conditions discussed in the chapter. For those interested in putting a method into practice, each chapter includes many references that one can consult for more detailed discussion. A useful reference for experienced researchers, this book is also a student-friendly text that is divided into three parts, ordered in successive phases of the research process. Part I (‘Data Collection’) has ten chapters not only devoted to various methods of collecting data (‘Judgment Data’, ‘Fieldwork for Language Description’, ‘Surveys and Interviews’, ‘Sound Recordings: Acoustic and Articulatory Data’, ‘Ethnography and Recording Interaction’, ‘Using Historical Texts’) but also addressing many ethical and practical issues involved in linguistic research (‘Ethics in Linguistic Research’, ‘Population Samples’, ‘Experimental Research Design’, ‘Experimental Paradigms in Psycholinguistics’). The five chapters of Part II (‘Data Processing and Statistical Analysis’) deal with ways of processing one’s data (‘Transcription’, ‘Creating & Using Corpora’) and carrying out some of the more common statistical analyses (‘Descriptive Statistics’, ‘Basic Significance Testing’, ‘Multivariate Statistics’), while Part III (‘Foundations for Data Analysis’) contains six chapters from the perspective of different sub-fields on developing hypotheses, interpreting one’s data and formulating a well-supported argument (‘Acoustic Analysis’, ‘Constructing and Supporting a Linguistic Analysis’, ‘Modeling in the Language Sciences’, ‘Variation Analysis’, ‘Discourse Analysis’, ‘Studying Language Change Over Time’). A strength of many of the chapters is that they include not only state-of-the-art details of various aspects of the methodology presented but also the debates within the respective fields that have contributed to the development of the accepted methodology.
In contrast to the breadth of the previous book, the following two volumes highlight various aspects of corpus linguistic methodology and research. Recent Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and Exploiting Corpora , edited by Lieven Vandelanotte, Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens, and Ditte Kimps, is a refereed collection of papers that were presented at the ICAME 33 international conference ‘Corpora at the Centre and Crossroads of English Linguistics’ in 2012. It contains sixteen articles, including a succinct introduction by the editors that introduces the papers that follow. The book is organized into three parts, each featuring five papers. Those in Part I (‘Corpus Development and Corpus Interrogation’) explore issues related to constructing corpora (specifically the electronic corpus of Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor ( LALP ) (England, c. 1750–1835) by Anita Auer, Mikko Laitinen, Moragh Gordon, and Tony Fairman and a proposed corpus of eighteenth-century English phonology by Joan Beal and Ranjen Sen) or discuss tools for extracting relevant patterns automatically and processing corpus data. Part II (‘Specialist Corpora’) is a rather mixed bag of more descriptive corpus-based research: two papers focus on grammatical patterns in World Englishes (relative clauses in Philippine English by Peter Collins, Xinyue Yao, and Ariane Borlongan and the progressive in South and Southeast Asian Englishes by Marco Schilk and Marc Hammel); a paper by Antoinette Renouf develops a new perspective on neology based on a diachronic corpus of Guardian news texts; and the final two papers make extensive use of cross-linguistic data (Thomas Egan and Gudrun Rawoens use Norwegian and Swedish translations to gain new insights into the seemingly overlapping prepositions amid(st) and among(st) in English, and Kerstin Kunz and Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski examine similarities and differences in the use of cohesive connectives in English and German in terms of frequencies and functions). The papers in Part III (‘Second Language Acquisition’) present research examining ESL/EFL corpus data from various angles: discourse markers used by lecturers, the use of false friends among Spanish learners of English, the use of NLP (Natural Language Processing) tools to uncover unexpected uses of demonstratives by learners of English, and two papers on charting the linguistic development of Dutch students of English over time.
Tommaso Raso and Heliana Mello’s edited volume Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies focuses specifically on issues related to speech-based corpora. The book includes sixteen papers, including the editors’ introduction and an appendix, ‘Notes on Language into Act Theory (L-AcT)’, by Massimo Moneglia and Tommaso Raso, that introduces the most important details of the theory underlying four of the papers in the volume. The main chapters of the book are divided into four sections, the first two of which focus more on methodological issues related to the development of spoken corpora. Section I (‘Experiences and Requirements of Spoken Corpora Compilation’) features three chapters describing experiences and methodological perspectives from different corpus compilation projects. The three chapters in Section II (‘Multilevel Corpus Annotation’) address the next step in the process, namely the methodologies and decision-making related to the annotation of corpus data, which can be performed on various levels. Section III (‘Prosody and Its Functional Levels’) features four chapters that explore how prosody provides information on different phenomena that co-occur in speech activity, for instance, the expression of emotion or stances. The four chapters in the final section (‘Syntax and Information Structure’) consider the relationships among the diverse levels of the utterance (semantics, information structure, prosody) and how these interact with syntax, criticizing the use of the notion of sentence—especially phrase-structure tree based definitions—as an adequate syntactic unit of reference for spoken corpora and suggesting various alternatives.
A contribution oriented towards theoretically informed pedagogical methodology, Writing as a Learning Activity , edited by Perry Klein, Pietro Boscolo, Lori Kirkpatrick, and Carmen Gelati, features studies focused on the changing role of writing in learning. The book includes thirteen articles, including the introduction by the editors that embeds the studies of the volume into the larger discourse of writing pedagogy and highlights three theoretical trends that are having a profound effect on the role of writing in learning: the shift from a domain-general, writing-across-the-curriculum approach towards a domain-specific writing-in-the-disciplines approach; the influence of a writer’s cognitive strategies on learning elicited by writing and the extent to which these strategies can be taught, and the shift from a focus on the individual writer towards activity systems of collaborative writing.
The following four books explore various theoretical issues. Theory and Data in Cognitive Linguistics , edited by Nikolas Gisborne and Willem Hollmann, grew out of a workshop of the same name held at the Societas Linguistica Europaea meeting in Vilnius in 2010. Including the introduction by the editors, the volume contains nine papers that examine various methodological and theoretical issues in cognitive approaches, with many of the contributions addressing these from a diachronic perspective. Clarifying a number of misunderstandings about collostructional analyses, Stefan Gries defines and demonstrates the method in his article and provides references for its successful application (more on collostructional analysis can be found in Section 5). Jóhanna Barðdal, Thomas Smitherman, Valgerður Bjarnadóttir, Serena Danesi, Gard Jenset, and Barbara McGillivray’s innovative research attempts a reconstruction of the syntax and semantics of the dative subject construction in West Indo-European using evidence from various older West Indo-European languages. The contributions by Amanda Patten, Graeme Trousdale, and Willem Hollmann more clearly compare and contrast generative approaches with cognitive approaches to specific linguistic phenomena: Patten examines the history of it -clefts; Trousdale focuses on the what with construction, and Hollmann considers the representation of word classes. Interestingly, the articles form a continuum with respect to proposing a rapprochement between generative and cognitive linguistics, with Patten stating that constructional approaches are better suited than generative ones to explaining the historical data she examines, whereas Trousdale and Hollmann suggest, to varying degrees, the fruitfulness of combining both theoretical frameworks. The strongest proponent of such collaborations between frameworks, Hollmann, even presents evidence that both sides have failed to acknowledge certain highly relevant facts, which he suggests necessitates the use of insights from both for a more complete understanding of linguistic phenomena. Also taking a diachronic perspective, Nikolas Gisborne’s and Sonia Cristofaro’s papers differ from the previous three in that they evaluate different approaches within cognitive theory. Gisborne investigates the development of the definite article in English, and Cristofaro discusses several diachronic processes to evaluate various assumptions about psychological mechanisms and speakers’ mental representations grounded in synchronic distributional patterns, showing that these diachronic processes do not provide any evidence for these assumptions. Teenie Matlock, David Sparks, Justin Matthews, Jeremy Hunter, and Stephanie Huette shed some interesting light on aspect in an experiment in which they ask participants to describe the events in a video. They found that the aspect used in the question itself (‘What happened?’ versus ‘What was happening?’) influenced the way people conceptualize and describe actions, with participants using more motion verbs, reckless language, and iconic gestures in response to the imperfective-framed question than to the perfective-framed one.
The widely held belief among linguists that ‘all languages are equally complex’ is the topic of investigation in Measuring Grammatical Complexity edited by Frederick Newmeyer and Laurel Preston, with the likes of researchers such as John Hawkins, David Gil, Ray Jackendoff, and Peter Culicover, among others, weighing in. As a whole, the volume aims to examine the validity of this widely held belief and the related corollary of complexity trade-offs (the idea that complexity in one part of a language’s grammar is balanced out by simplicity in another part) and to develop metrics for measuring relative complexity cross-linguistically. While the contributions examine interesting data and offer some potentially fruitful proposals in determining relative linguistic complexity, the focus of most articles on particular levels of grammar (or, in some cases, even specific aspects within a level of grammar) unfortunately prevents the volume from attaining its perhaps lofty aims. This, however, does not undermine the value of the book; most of the papers offer informative and interesting evaluations and/or proposals of various metrics for measuring complexity, a necessary step in fully evaluating the linguistic complexity question. The editors’ introduction summarizes the historical and theoretical background of the linguistic complexity issue before introducing the contributions to the volume. The book features fourteen chapters, including the introduction. Some of the strengths are the various theoretical perspectives (generative grammar, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics) through which complexity is examined and the linguistic levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) taken into consideration. It is interesting, though perhaps not surprising, given the differing theoretical perspectives, that the papers offer quite varying ideas on the issue: some argue that there is a continuum of grammatical complexity on which we can place languages (albeit usually with respect to particular linguistic features rather than overall grammatical complexity, thereby softening the claim in the context of the bigger question), others argue the opposite, whereas still others seem to remain agnostic on the issue. These opposing views can largely be related to the differing definitions of linguistic complexity employed by the authors as well as how restrictive the focus of the authors is. Overall, the book contains thought-provoking papers, which contribute an important step towards evaluating the linguistic complexity issue.
Further expounding on some of the ideas in his contribution in the previously discussed volume, John Hawkins’s Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency is an updating and extension of the general theory presented in his 2004 book Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars , with investigations into new areas of grammar and performance from the fields of language processing, linguistic theory, historical linguistics, and typology. In both books, Hawkins presents evidence for the Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis, which states that ‘grammars have conventionalized syntactic structures in proportion to their degree of preference in performance, as evidenced by patterns of selection in corpora and by ease of processing in psycholinguistic experiments’ (p. 3). This approach to variation based on efficiency has wide-ranging theoretical consequences for many current issues in linguistics, including the role of processing in language change, the relative strength of competing and co-operating principles, and the notion of ease of processing and how to measure it, among others. One of the strengths of this framework is that it draws from and integrates insights from and advances in numerous linguistic fields and theories.
Showcasing the breadth and inherent interdisciplinarity of the latest research on colour(s), Colour Studies: A Broad Spectrum , edited by Wendy Anderson, Carole Biggam, Carole Hough, and Christian Kay, is a collection of papers originally presented at the 2012 conference entitled ‘Progress in Colour Studies’ held at the University of Glasgow. The volume contains twenty-six papers divided into four sections, in the first of which the keynote talk stands alone, while each of the three other sections includes a short preface introducing the respective section. The first two sections specifically focus on colour and linguistics. Drawing on evidence from linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, art history, and early literature, Carole Biggam, author of the keynote talk in Section I (‘Prehistoric Colour Semantics’), suggests that it is possible to draw conclusions about prehistoric colour semantics, proposing that proto-Indo-European had no cool-hue basic colour term. The nine papers in Section II (‘Colour and Linguistics’) discuss aspects of colour terminology in non-European (Arabic, Aramaic, Himba) as well as European languages (Italian, Portuguese, Finnic, and four papers on English), including the emergence of new colour categories, metaphor and metonymy (the focus of most of the papers on English), the motivation for colour names, and the mapping of colour terms of the Near East. Most of the contributions in Sections III (‘Colour Categorization, Naming and Preference’) and IV (‘Colour and the World’) are less linguistically oriented but provide interesting discussion on the relationship between colour and cognition and perception.
The final three books discussed in this review are geared towards or otherwise extremely accessible to linguistics enthusiasts, newcomers to the field of linguistics, and interested laypersons. The second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar by Bas Aarts, Sylvia Chalker, and Edmund Weiner incorporates a number of improvements: older entries have been revised and updated, and new entries have been added covering recent terminology and the most important English grammars of the twentieth century and beyond. A potential drawback might be the removal of entries on English phonetics, which the authors justify by stating, ‘it is very unusual for phonetics to be covered under the heading of “grammar”, and this terminology is best dealt with elsewhere’ (p. vi). The dictionary includes not only traditional grammatical terms but also numerous terms from various theoretical frameworks that are relevant to English grammar. When a term has different uses in different frameworks, these are also clearly indicated. The dictionary is clearly laid out with visual aids for ease of reading, including the following among others: headwords are in bold; a line space separates each entry from the next; all cross-referenced terms are clearly marked with an asterisk. All of these traits make this a useful tool for people interested in English grammar.
Philip Durkin’s Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English is a thought-provoking piece of scholarship examining the influx of loanwords into English as well as the many issues involved in such research. The book is divided into six parts, the first giving an introduction to the concepts and data used in the book and the remaining five broadly ordered chronologically with each focusing on particular borrowing situations: Part II covers very early borrowings in Continental Germanic and pre-Old English; Part III examines Latin loanwords in (proto-)Old English; Part IV focuses on Scandinavian influence; Part V is dedicated to French and Latin borrowings in Middle English; and Part VI looks at loanwords after 1500. Not only does the book provide information on the influx of vocabulary items in the history of English, it also offers quite detailed discussion of the techniques and methodology employed in research on loanwords: determining, on the basis of phonological changes, when a borrowing entered the language and the issues involved in deciding whether to consider particular instances of a word as a borrowing or not; for example, Latin borrowings in Old English that always maintain Latin morphology versus those that alternate between Latin and Old English morphology. Though perhaps a bit too technical to maintain the attention of a general audience, the book is quite accessible to non-linguists while still being an invaluable resource for experienced researchers by providing a framework through which one can explore borrowing in any language. (See also Section 5 below.)
Does Spelling Matter? by Simon Horobin outlines the history of English spelling and puts forth the argument that it should remain as it is. His book starts by discussing the evolution of writing systems in general and the complex debate surrounding the relationship between letters and sounds from the Middle Ages up to the present day (and beyond). The subsequent chapters give a chronological sketch of English spelling at its various stages and the various issues and factors that played a role in each stage. Despite its challenges, Horobin argues that English spelling serves not only as a testament to the rich history of the language but also as a way to aid in reading comprehension, which is a side of the argument that typically receives less attention from spelling reformers. The book is very accessible to non-linguists: its use of specialized terminology is minimal, and brief definitions are provided of the terms that are introduced.
2. History of English Linguistics
The year 2014 has once more seen the publication of several studies related to the history of English linguistics. The volume Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900: A Sociolinguistic and Comparative Perspective , edited by Gijsbert Rutten, Rik Vosters, and Wim Vandenbussche, which considers the language histories of Dutch, English, French, and German, dedicates three articles to the linguistic history of English. The first of these, ‘Norms and Usage in Seventeenth-Century English’ (pp. 103–28) by Terttu Nevalainen, discusses diverse processes related to emerging norms, notably those of spelling, lexis, and literary language. This discussion is based on a proposed framework by Bernard Spolsky [2012], which distinguishes ‘between actual usage, language attitudes and language management’ (p. 103). Selected case studies, notably those of spelling and certain types of vocabulary, reveal that usage, i.e. professional practice and interaction, gave rise to norms, which were then imposed on language users. The second contribution, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Normative Grammars and Their Readers’ (pp. 129–50) by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, aims at answering the question of who the readers of normative grammars were. By analysing the list of subscribers to Richard Postlethwaite’s Grammatical Art Improved [1795], the study shows that booksellers, teachers, and clergymen, as well as their relatives, and members of the rising middle classes subscribed to these grammars. The author compares Postlethwaite’s grammar to that of Robert Lowth [1762] and then continues to discuss the transition from grammars to usage guides. Importantly, she observes that ‘a significant part of the reading public of the grammars consisted of other—would-be—grammarians’ (p. 147). The third contribution, ‘Nineteenth-Century English: Norms and Usage’ by Anita Auer, is concerned with grammar writing and grammatical norms during the nineteenth century as well as with actual language usage. Particular attention is paid to the lower social classes, i.e. the language history ‘from below’, also in the context of schooling and what effect, or lack of it, the scarce opportunities had on actual language usage. A linguistic case study of you was/you were in the so-called pauper letters revealed that the stigmatized form you was prevailed in lower-class language usage. This may be taken as an indication that the labouring poor were not necessarily familiar with prescriptions/proscriptions contained in normative grammars. Auer concludes that the nineteenth century, in comparison to previous centuries, still ‘deserves a lot more scholarly attention’ (p. 151).
Another volume published in 2014 that tries to remedy this lack of research on the nineteenth century is Late Modern English Syntax , edited by Marianne Hundt. As regards the history of English linguistics, Lieselotte Anderwald’s contribution ‘The Decline of the BE-Perfect, Linguistic Relativity and Grammar Writing in the Nineteenth Century’ provides some interesting findings. As the title indicates, the paper is concerned with the development of the BE-perfect as reflected in the corpora ARCHER (BrE) and COHA (AmE) as well as the description of the linguistic feature in contemporary grammar books. The corpus study reveals rapid change, i.e. decline (linked to specific verbs) during the nineteenth century, which raises the question ‘whether this change was perceived as such in the grammar books of the time, and if so, whether this engendered any positive or negative evaluations’ (p. 18). The analysis of the self-compiled ‘Collection of Nineteenth-Century Grammars (CNG)’ corpus shows that grammar writers found it difficult to comprehend and describe the linguistic feature, partly because of the lack of adequate terminology. In fact, it was possible to determine that the descriptions of British and American grammar writers developed differently over time. Anderwald thus concludes that the close study of grammatical descriptions allows for a ‘more nuanced view of grammar writing in the nineteenth century’ (p. 35), which is essential to determine the effect of prescriptive comments on actual usage or the lack thereof. In the volume Contact, Variation and Change in the History of English , edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt, and Daniel Schreier, Lieselotte Anderwald uses the same approach, i.e. grammar comments compared to actual usage, in her paper ‘ “Pained the Eye and Stunned the Ear”: Language Ideology and the Progressive Passive in the Nineteenth Century’ (pp. 113–36). Corpus studies on BrE have revealed that the progressive passive rises rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A comparison with North American corpus data shows a different development, namely a lagging behind, which particularly concerns the twentieth century. It can be observed in both varieties of English that the progressive passive is highly text-type sensitive, with newspapers favouring the linguistic features. A close study of prescriptive comments on the progressive passive in 258 grammar books reveals that the use of the linguistic feature, and thereby also its users, was strongly criticized in grammars. Reasons for this particularly negative evaluation of the progressive passive may be its perceived complexity, its rarity overall, and its text-type sensitivity. The corpus of nineteenth-century grammars also serves as the basis of Anderwald’s article ‘Measuring the Success of Prescriptivism: Quantitative Grammaticography, Corpus Linguistics and the Progressive Passive’ ( ELL 18[2014] 1–21). The research question that is tackled here is ‘whether prescriptivism has had any influence on purported differences between British and American English in the rise of the progressive passive’ (p. 1). As in the previously discussed paper by Anderwald, text-type sensitivity is considered the determining factor for the occurrence of the progressive passive in both BrE and AmE. Considering the potential effect of prescriptivism, in AmE a sharp decline of the progressive passive can be observed in the 1950s, notably in newspaper language; this development coincides with the publication of William Strunk and E.B. White’s guide on style [1959], which advises readers to ‘avoid the passive’ (p. 14). This may be taken as an indication that prescriptivism has had an influence in this particular case.
Normative grammars also play a role in Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s monograph In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters , which may be described as a historical sociolinguistic reconstruction of Jane Austen’s language in her letters. The study of Austen’s spelling, grammar, and lexicon is discussed in the context of contemporary processes of language standardization. Particularly chapters 5, ‘The Language of the Letters: Spelling’, and 6, ‘The Language of the Letters: Grammar’, provide some information on eighteenth-century grammars, notably in relation to spelling rules and to selected morpho-syntactic features. Tieken-Boon van Ostade observes that ‘in several linguistic features Jane Austen’s usage goes against the trend of the times’ (p. 229), which may be exemplified by Austen’s preference for preposition stranding over pied piping.
3. Phonetics and Phonology
Some books are like wine—they gain quality with the passage of time. Two such titles have seen ripened and updated editions this year; first, we have a successive (eighth) edition of Gimson’s Pronunciation of English by Alan Cruttenden, which maintains its strong position as one of the most detailed and comprehensive accounts of BrE pronunciation. The major revision of this work consists in the shift of focus from the description of Received Pronunciation (RP) to a more flexibly defined General British accent. Advocating this change, Cruttenden joins the ongoing academic discussion on the selection of a pronunciation model for teaching and justifies his choice by the fact that RP is perceived as posh, regionally limited, imposed, and outdated, and that General British, apart from being less constrained than RP, has a greater number of speakers than the old standard. Also, the book has a completely rewritten chapter on the history of the English language. The other classic that was thoroughly reviewed and updated is the introductory handbook of phonetics by Peter Ladefoged and Keith Johnson: A Course in Phonetics . This extensively illustrated book allows a student without prior linguistic knowledge to learn about speech production, acoustics, and perception, as well as develop practical phonetic skills, including sound production and IPA transcription.
Should one crave entertainment coupled with learning experience, Sounds Interesting: Observations on English and General Phonetics by John C. Wells is likely to satisfy the need. This distinguished scholar has selected entries from his phonetic blog and compiled a highly entertaining and, at the same time, deeply insightful and informative book which is filled with anecdotes, reflections, and observations about numerous topics related to general phonetics and the pronunciation of English. The chapters that the entries are grouped into are devoted to such subject areas as English pronunciation, general phonetics, teaching phonetics in English as a foreign language, English intonation, the International Phonetic Alphabet and spelling, accents of English, and the phonetics of languages other than English. The book is a must for those who are fascinated by the oddities of English pronunciation.
Shifting focus from books to research articles, one should mention a study by Adam Lammert, Louis Goldstein, Vikram Ramanarayanan, and Shrikanth Narayanan, who investigated the vowel segment that appears in the regular past tense suffix -ed in words such as fitted or needed , in ‘Gestural Control in the English Past-Tense Suffix: An Articulatory Study Using Real-Time MRI’ ( Phonetica 71[2014] 229–48). They argue that the vowel that surfaces after alveolar plosives differs consistently from schwa which is present lexically in comparable consonantal contexts. Acoustic measurements of vowel formants showed that the affix vowel is higher and further forward than lexical schwa, yet lower and more retracted than [I]. These findings were also confirmed by real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI). Moreover, the MRI analysis of articulatory postures revealed that in the speech of the examined participants there was evidence for articulatory targets in the production of the affix vowel. These novel results compelled the authors to argue against the claim that the vocoid in the suffix is targetless when regarding articulatory gestures.
Another instrumental study of English pronunciation was carried out by Marc Garellek, who set out to establish if word-initial vowels and sonorants become strengthened by means of increased vocal-fold adduction. As described in ‘Voice Quality Strengthening and Glottalization’ ( JPhon 45[2014] 106–13), the study consisted in analysing the articulation of proper names with stressed and unstressed initial vocoids, such as Laura , Igor , or Annette . The lexical items were placed in sentence frames in four prosodic positions: utterance-initially (after a breath), IP-initially after a high boundary tone (H%), ip-initially after a high phrase accent (H−), and ip-medially. Utterances, thus prepared, were read out by twelve speakers of AmE and recorded with an electro-glottograph (EGG) and an audio recorder. The subsequent analysis consisted in calculating the vocal-fold contact ratios for the investigated sounds as well as determining the frequencies of the first two harmonics (H1 and H2) and calculating the difference between them to estimate voice quality. The results showed that only initial prominent vowels became strengthened by an increased degree of glottal constriction, which indicates that there occurred word-initial glottalization.
Pre-vocalic glottal stops appear not only in word-initial position. Evidence is provided by Lisa Davidson and Daniel Erker in ‘Hiatus Resolution in American English: The Case against Glide Insertion’ ( Language 90[2014] 482–514). Davidson and Erker’s investigation focused on examining the way speakers of AmE pronounce vowel hiatuses. To accomplish this task, they recorded passages of text that contained stimuli of three types: word-internal vowel hiatuses (e.g. nuance , kiosk ), phrases with vowel sequences across word boundaries (e.g. two images , she overheard ), and vowel-glide-vowel sequences across word boundaries (e.g. see yachts , knew whiskey ). The first two types of vowel sequence provide contexts for glide insertion ([w] and [j]) as the first vowel is non-high. The vocoids in the test tokens were assessed with regard to voice quality (creak vs. modal phonation), glottal stop insertion, and glottalization. Additionally, extensive acoustic measurements were performed. The results of the experiment are surprising. Contrary to the general assumption that hiatuses are resolved in English by an intervening glide, the findings of the study revealed that the preferred strategy for hiatus resolution across word boundaries is glottal stop insertion. What is more, glide insertion was not attested as a strategy for resolving hiatuses, and in many cases, particularly within words, the hiatuses were not resolved at all.
AmE flaps appear not to be as plain as it may seem at first sight. A number of researchers published articles devoted to this group of sounds in 2014. Aaron Braver, for instance, in his experimental study ‘Imperceptible Incomplete Neutralization: Production, Non-Identifiability, and Non-Discriminability in American English Flapping’ ( Lingua 152[2014] 22–44), confirms previous claims that /t/-flaps and /d/-flaps in AmE are not completely neutralized. Having measured the length of vowels, Braver found that those that are followed by /t/-flaps are shorter than the vowels followed by /d/-flaps by 5.69ms, on average. This result seems to reflect the process of pre-fortis clipping that operates in English. The more interesting results of this investigation concern the listeners’ perception of the difference between the two types of flap; the participants of the experiment found it difficult to judge correctly the consonants in both identification and two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) tasks. As a result, the author postulates recognition of two kinds of incomplete neutralization: one that produces segments that can be identified and discriminated between and, on the other hand, incomplete neutralization that renders sounds that evade correct identification and discrimination, such as AmE flaps.
Taps and flaps display variability not only when it comes to the length of preceding vowels. They also differ in the way they are articulated. Donald Derrick and Brian Gick, in ‘Accommodation of End-State Comfort Reveals Subphonemic Planning in Speech’ ( Phonetica 71[2014] 183–200), examine the variability of flap/tap realizations in AmE from the perspective of kinematics. With the use of ultrasound imaging, they identify four categorically distinct articulatory variants of the sounds on the basis of the direction of tongue tip/blade movement (alveolar taps, down-flaps, up-flaps, and post-alveolar taps). In a production experiment, Derrick and Gick find indications that particular realizations do not occur randomly; the attested productions display long-distance subphonemic planning that aims at avoiding articulatory conflict. Thus, for instance, if one of the following segments is another tap/flap or a rhotic sound, the selected variant will facilitate the kinematic needs of that segment. The explanation of the phenomenon is grounded in anticipatory co-articulation and end-state comfort effect. Taps/flaps have been found to anticipate upcoming articulations not only within words, but also across syllable, morpheme, and word boundaries, which indicates that the range of this effect is not limited to the immediate lexical context.
It was politicians who came under Valerie Freeman’s scrutiny in ‘Hyperarticulation as a Signal of Stance’ ( JPhon 45[2014] 1–11). The author analysed a political talk show to verify if the speakers hyperarticulated new information (contrasted with given data) and concepts about which they expressed attitudinal stances. To reach this objective, the concepts reiterated in the recordings at least three times were classified as new or given, and evaluative or neutral. Thus classified tokens were subjected to acoustic analysis to determine if there occurs hyperarticulation in any of the categories. Freeman measured speech-rate over a word/phrase, the fundamental frequency (F0), the frequency of the first two formants (F1 and F2) in the midpoint of stressed vowels within the word or phrase, and vowel duration. The results showed that the speakers hyperarticulated both stance-expressing items and new information. Speech-rate and vowel duration proved to be the most reliable indicators of hyperarticulation in English, whereas pitch did not provide valuable insight.
The issue of the phonological status of affricates in English continues to be a matter of contention. Another scholar to accept the challenge of solving the dilemma is Jeroen van de Weijer, who presents a phonotactics-based account of the problem in ‘Affricates in English as a Natural Class’ (in Caspers, Chen, Heeren, Pacilly, Schiller, and van Zanten, eds., Above and Beyond the Segments: Experimental Linguistics and Phonetics , pp. 350–8). Van de Weijer maintains that the English affricates 
and 
constitute a separate natural class of sounds and should be regarded as single underlying units, rather than as phonological sequences. To substantiate this claim, he presents an analysis of their phonotactic restrictions and patterning. The data provided is said to support the Complex Segment Approach to the representation of affricates, in which the phonological specification of the segment includes features that are in common with stops as well as fricatives at the same time.
Finishing this year’s section on phonetics and phonology, we review a highly commendable article by Susan Lin, Patrice Speeter Beddor, and Andries W. Coetzee, who examine the strength of anterior and dorsal constrictions in the English lateral. The results of their study are presented in ‘Gestural Reduction, Lexical Frequency, and Sound Change: A Study of Post-Vocalic /l/’ ( LabPhon 5[2014] 9–36). The focus of the paper is on the post-vocalic and pre-consonantal /l/ in AmE, in words such as help or milk . The primary research question is whether the lexical frequency of occurrence has an effect on the constriction magnitude. To find the answer, the authors employ ultrasound imaging and acoustic analysis. Having scrutinized high- and low-frequency words that contain pre-consonantal /l/, Lin et al. arrive at several interesting conclusions. Firstly, they confirm previous findings that apical and dorsal constrictions characteristic of velarized laterals are most pronounced (least reduced) when an alveolar consonant follows. Secondly, the reduction of alveolar constrictions was greater in high-frequency words. Moreover, acoustic measurements of formant frequencies in the laterals reflected the degree of anterior constriction: F1 and F2 were closer together in tokens with more reduced constrictions.
4. Morphology
Only books and volume chapters will be considered in this section and the following one, covering both 2013 and 2014. One book that appeared on morphology in 2013 is The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology , written by Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber, and Ingo Plag. This substantial work provides an overview of an extensive range of issues and topics in English morphology. The authors explain that they aim to be theory-neutral in their approach and want to provide ‘a thorough, data-rich description of all phenomena of English word-formation’ (p. 4). The book opens with a clear definition of central terms, as well as a discussion about methods commonly used in the field. It then provides a very systematic discussion of the basic processes of word-formation: inflection, derivation, and compounding. The book also includes a chapter about the interaction between these processes (such as affix combinations, or combinations of compounding and affixes). The book ends with a chapter on issues of theory and typology of English morphology.
Robert Dixon, in his Making New Words: Morphological Derivation in English , provides detailed studies of 200 affixes (ninety prefixes, 110 suffixes) in English that are productive and that change the word class of the word they attach to, i.e. those affixes that create new words. After an explanation of the aims of the book, and a short overview with definitions of central terms, the remaining chapters discuss all 200 affixes in turn. The chapters are organized according to the category of the affix, starting with prefixes (chapters 5 and 6). The next couple of chapters are based on the word class that is the result of the affixation process: affixes making verbs (chapter 7), adjectives (chapter 8), nouns (chapter 9), and finally adverbs (chapter 10). The final chapter before the conclusion discusses combinations of affixes in individual words. Throughout the book, Dixon highlights many differences between affixes in meaning or use, some of them very subtle. He addresses questions such as what determines the choice between the two productive negative prefixes in- and un-. As Dixon explains, variation can be explained through differences in meaning, phonological factors, historical developments, and, finally, conventions which ‘have grown up during the centuries of evolution of Modern English’ (p. 15). In the case of in- and un- , for instance, the answer is that is that un- was a Germanic prefix and could attach to all sorts of words, while in- is a Romance form in use from roughly 1450, attaching only to Romance words. One theme that recurs at several places in the book is the notion of ‘double duty’, i.e. words that are used for different functions, not always with a change in form and crucially not with a derivational affix. Some examples are perfect (verb and adjective), abstract (verb and adjective), and find (verb and noun). Dixon concludes that double duty was rare in OE but increased from the ME period onwards, leading not only to possible ambiguity but also to a ‘diminishing use (and eventual extinction) of some derivational processes’ (p. 398). However, Dixon ends the book with saying that new words, such as those created by derivation, will keep the language ‘healthy and active’.
5. Syntax
(a) Modern English
Peter Matthews’s The Positions of Adjectives in English is a monograph on adjectives in English, focusing on the various positions that adjectives can occupy. Matthews asks two main questions. The first is how much the predicative and attributive uses of adjectives ( The chief is tall versus The tall chief ) have diverged throughout the history of English. The second question relates to the first, namely whether this divergence is too great to warrant a categorization of both uses as belonging to one word class of ‘adjectives’ or not. His answer to the second question is that words that are traditionally classified as adjectives do belong to the class of adjectives although he admits and discusses that there are many problems with the categorization of adjectives. At the beginning of the book, Matthews brings up many general questions with respect to how words should be categorized, pointing out problems with traditional views on word class. For the adjectives, he provides many examples of uneven distribution: some adjectives can only be used predicatively (such as afraid ) while others can only be used attributively (such as main or utter ). Matthews does not find clear evidence which points to one use being more basic than the other. Another problem for the word class of adjectives is that the words that are generally taken to be adjectives do not seem to have one function that is shared by all adjectives and which is not (often) also a function of words from other classes. However, the most obvious alternative discussed by Matthews, conversion, is not a viable solution, as he discusses in detail. Instead, Matthews argues for what he calls a ‘polysystemic’ approach, which looks at relations between words from different classes, instead of only looking at the properties of a group of words by themselves. Matthews also considers aspects of the historical development of adjectives, addressing topics such as the increased divergence between the predicative and attributive use from the end of the Middle Ages onwards, the standardization of the prenominal position, and the acceptability of combining adjectives (‘stacking’), which is a more recent development.
Quite a number of books appeared in 2013 and 2014 about CxG: both introductions, reference works and historical studies working within a CxG framework. The first general book is The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar , edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale [2013]. This handbook contains twenty-seven chapters, which cover an extensive range of topics within CxG. The book is divided into five thematic sections: ‘Principles and Methods’; ‘Constructionist Approaches’; ‘Construction: From Morphemes to Clauses and Beyond’; ‘Acquisition and Cognition’; ‘Language Variation and Change’. The chapters in Section I explain the fundamental principles of CxG, such as the chapter by Adele Goldberg, titled ‘Constructionist Approaches’ (pp. 15–31) or that by Paul Kay, ‘The Limits of (Construction) Grammar’ (pp. 32–48). The chapters in Section II describe particular directions within CxG (such as ‘Embodied Construction Grammar’, by Ben Bergen and Nancy Chang, pp. 168–90). The remaining sections contain chapters which discuss approaches to traditional areas of linguistic investigation through a CxG framework, such as ‘Morphology in Construction Grammar’ by Geert Booij (pp. 255–73), and ‘Construction Grammar and Second Language Acquisition’ by Nick Ellis (pp. 365–78). Like all Oxford Handbooks, this volume provides an insightful discussion of current issues, as well as an introduction to some of the basic principles of this model. Although it does not deal specifically with English, many of the discussions and explorations of topics are based on English examples.
For a briefer and more introductory work on CxG readers (and students) can turn to Martin Hilpert’s Construction Grammar and Its Application to English . This textbook, from the series Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language, provides an accessible introduction to the principles of CxG. It starts with the basic concepts of CxG: chapter 1 introduces the basic concept of the ‘construction’, and also devotes quite some space on explaining the argumentation behind the development of CxG and its relation to other linguistic theories. The main argument here is that there are too many idiosyncrasies in the meaning of words and sentences to hold on to the so-called dictionary-and-grammar view; rather, the view is that language consists of form-and-meaning pairs. The fundamental ideas are then elaborated on in the following two chapters: chapter 2 zooms in on one area where constructions play an important role, i.e. argument structure, focusing on valency-increasing and -decreasing constructions; chapter 3 discusses in detail the question whether all constructions are meaningful and ‘how speakers’ knowledge of language is organized in the construct-i-con’ (p. 71). The second part of the book discusses central areas of linguistic enquiry and how CxG deals with them. Chapter 4 discusses the major processes of morphology as they have been discussed and how they are dealt with in CxG. Chapter 5, in turn, addresses information structure. Chapters 6 and 7 are concerned with psycholinguistic evidence for constructions, with chapter 6 focusing on ‘comprehension and production’ and chapter 7 on language acquisition. The final chapter deals with the issue of language variation and change, which CxG explains by assuming speakers may have different knowledge about particular constructions. Each chapter ends with a list of study questions and suggestions for further reading, directing the student reader to key academic publications in the field.
In addition to these works on CxG, two student-focused works on present-day English grammar published in 2013 will prove to be useful resources for those who teach introductory undergraduate grammar and syntax classes. Practical Grammar , by Sara Thorne, discusses all the key concepts for a descriptive introduction to English grammar, comprehensively, clearly, and logically. A pair of chapters deals with each particular level of grammar (words, phrases, clauses, sentences, discourse). The first of each pair introduces topics and concepts. It is followed by a chapter of exercises in which students apply the concepts learned to textual analysis. The text provides a comprehensive introduction, particularly for students engaged in textual or stylistic analysis, but it does not deal with more formal aspects of grammar, for example the representation of constituent structure using syntactic trees. English Grammar: A Resource Book for Students , by Roger Berry [2012] , is another comprehensive introduction to English grammar, which is structured progressively into sections of increasing complexity and difficulty. The text presents a lot of material that would enhance an introductory grammar course, particularly linguistic questions or problems that students might work on. It also includes reprints of essays by several authors on grammatical topics. These provide useful additional reading for more inquisitive students and also useful discussion points and data for seminar activities.
While Thorne and Berry provide textbooks for undergraduates, Advanced English Grammar: A Linguistic Approach by Ilse Depraetere and Chad Langford [2013] is specifically designed as a descriptive grammar for university-level learners of English as an L2. It builds on basic concepts of word classes, phrases, and grammatical functions to explain some of the grammatical idiosyncrasies of English, such as subject–verb inversion, ellipsis, uses of the auxiliary do , tag questions, expressions of tense, aspect, and modality, and their use in discourse. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on NPs and VPs, considering complementation and modification patterns, subject–verb agreement, and voice. Chapters 4 and 5 examine aspect and modality in great descriptive detail. Chapter 6 considers discourse-level phenomena such as anaphora and connectives. The final section incorporates a great many exercises to accompany the key points of each chapter.
Finally, Understanding Language: A Basic Course in Linguistics (2nd edition), by Elizabeth Winkler, is an overview of the study of linguistics. As such, it would make a good course-book for the kind of introductory surveys of linguistics commonly found on first-year undergraduate linguistics programmes. The chapters on semantics and pragmatics (chapters 8 and 9) seem particularly comprehensive. Unlike some other books of this kind, the introduction to grammar (chapter 6) includes discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of several grammatical frameworks, including phrase-structure grammar and lexical functional grammar. However, the discussion of language variation and change includes very little on quantitative approaches; it takes a qualitative perspective instead. Chapter 10 discusses the characteristics of computer-mediated communication, and chapter 11 discusses language and gender. The focus of the book is almost exclusively on English, especially AmE, although it does include detailed discussion of several non-standard English varieties.
(b) Early English
In addition to these general works on synchronic CxG, two full-length studies appeared on issues of diachronic syntax from researchers working within a CxG framework. The first of these is Hendrik De Smet’s Spreading Patterns: Diffusional Change in the English System of Complementation [2013]. After the introduction, De Smet outlines the corpus he has compiled for the current study, expanding on the corpora that are already in general use, such as the Helsinki corpus, especially for the lModE period. Chapter 3 provides a detailed description of the issue of complementation, reviews earlier work on the topic, and includes an explanation of how CxG can deal with these topics and what the advantages of the CxG framework are for this type of study. Chapter 4 has a similar set-up but is concerned with diffusional change, i.e. the spread of a linguistic item, in this case a pattern of complementation, to new environments. The remainder of the book consists of three detailed studies of the development of specific patterns of complementation in the history of English. The first is concerned with for … to- infinitives, as in It was neither my intention or aim for this to happen (p. 73), where an NP following for is itself followed by a to- infinitive. De Smet investigates the spread of this pattern of complementation, asking how the regular PDE system evolved, after the first examples were attested in lME. The second pattern investigated is a ‘comparatively unsuccessful’ complementation pattern, that of the so-called Integrated Participle Clauses, as in The receptionist is busy filling a fifth box (p. 102). This type was introduced around the same time as the for … to- infinitives but never became more than a marginal pattern. Finally, by far the largest part of De Smet’s book is devoted to a detailed study of the spread of gerunds as complements, which he calls ‘the most dramatic recent change’ in the system of complementation. An example is Would you mind putting Bessie’s exercise book back exactly where you found it? (p. 131), where the gerund functions as the complement of a transitive verb. Throughout the book, De Smet describes in detail the processes and contexts that play a role in the spread of these patterns, such as analogy (based either on semantic considerations, or regularities in a paradigm), the specific ‘local’ grammatical context for each pattern, and frequency effects. In the conclusion, he also aims to answer the question why diffusion occurs at all. One of the points he makes in this respect is that the synchronic system of complementation, at any given time, is complex and may contain different generalizations at different (abstract) levels. It is this existing potential for variation that often provides the starting point for the spread of particular patterns.
The second study investigating developments in the history of English syntax working within a CxG framework is Peter Petré’s Constructions and Environments: Copular, Passive, and Related Constructions in Old and Middle English. Petré investigates three specific developments in copular and passive verbs in OE and ME. The first question he addresses is that of the disappearance of (ge)weorðan. OE, like other Germanic languages, had two verbs which could be used to form a passive, but while in other languages, the cognate of (ge)weorðan became the standard way of marking the passive, in English this verb was lost entirely. The second question is the merger of is and bið in the present tense, and to a lesser extent weseð . Bið had a specific meaning in OE but this was gradually lost, for instance through the grammaticalization of shall be . The final question is the development of two verbs, becuman ‘become’ and weaxan ‘wax, grow’, which became copula verbs over the course of just one or two centuries during the ME period. After the introduction, in which the author also introduces a biological view on language change, chapter 2 first provides a discussion of previous literature on the topics, chapter 3 presents the theoretical framework and the methodology used for the corpus studies, while chapters 4 to 6 discuss the three case studies mentioned above. Central themes in Petré’s account of the changes are competition and environmental change, based on the analogy with biology. We will illustrate these concepts with the conclusions drawn from the first case study. The answer to the question why (ge)weorðan disappears builds on the notion of competition between the past-tense forms of (ge)weorðan and wesan . Once the most important distinctions in meaning between these two options were lost, the most frequent item, wesan , prevailed. Because competition is not a sufficient explanation in this case, Petré turns to changes in the environment of (ge)weorðan . He proposes that weorðan was part of a so-called ‘bounded’ system in OE, a system which was characterized by V2 inversion and ‘bounded’ time adverbs such as þa . Once this system went into decline after V2 inversion was lost, the other features of the system were also lost, including (ge)weorðan.
One of the areas of (historical) syntax that has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years is the interaction between syntax and information structure, an aspect of discourse that is concerned with navigating between the hearer’s and the speaker’s knowledge. Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages , edited by Kristin Bech and Kristine Gunn Eide, addresses the question of this interaction from a diachronic perspective across a variety of languages and with the use of corpora that are newly annotated for the purpose of the current studies. Several of the chapters in the book deal specifically with English. Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk’s contribution, ‘Testing the Theory: Information Structure in Old English’ (pp. 53–77), is an attempt to arrive at a clearer understanding of the relevance of certain information-status categories that have been proposed in the literature and used in earlier annotation projects. Using a diagnostic that they developed in earlier work, namely preverbal vs. postverbal occurrence of the object, they test several of these categories. Their results clearly show that certain categories should be considered as separate categories, while other subcategories seem to behave like one group; for instance, discourse-old referents behave differently from the group of accessible referents (generic, general, or situational knowledge), which together behave in roughly the same way. The chapter by Erwin Komen, Rosanne Hebing, Ans van Kemenade, and Bettelou Los, ‘Quantifying Information Structure Change in English’ (pp. 81–110), investigates several properties of the category ‘Subject’ which they hypothesize to have changed from OE to PDE as a result of the loss of the V2 constraint. They use an enriched version of the existing corpora of historical English with partially automatically added annotation for information-status categories. Their results provide an interesting outlook on the consequences of the loss of V2 for the subject: the presubject position is less often used for discourse linking, while the subject itself becomes more often inanimate because the subject takes over part of the linking function of the presubject position. In a similar vein, subjects are less often ellipted, presumably because they are less predictable. The chapter by Gea Dreschler, ‘Tracing Overlap in Function in Historical Corpora: A Case Study of English Object Fronting and Passivization’ (pp. 111–39), also investigates a development in the history of English thought to be connected to the loss of V2. She looks at the function of object fronting and passives in OE and finds that their functions in the corpus overlap to a large extent in that they are both used for ‘information-rearranging’. In the second part of the chapter, she provides evidence that the use of passives increases overall after object fronting has been largely lost in eModE, which supports the hypothesis that, as one construction performing a particular function is lost, another construction with the same function increases in use. The chapter by Tamás Eitler and Marit Westergaard, ‘Word Order Variation in Late Middle English: The Effect of Information Structure and Audience Design’ (pp. 203–31), zooms in on variation in V2 word order at the end of the ME period. The authors analyse four texts by John Capgrave, all written around 1450. They investigate the influence of information structure on word-order variation as well as the influence of the intended audience. They find that the most ‘local’ text ( Sermon ) has the highest percentage of a syntactic version of V2 (which is least influenced by information structure), while text aimed at a national audience ( Chronicle ) hardly uses this order. Of the four texts, this ‘national’ text has the most frequent use of non-V2 orders. Eitler and Westergaard also add further details on other topics of V2 variation discussed in the literature, such as the role of verb type (especially auxiliaries and unaccusatives) and of initial adverbs such as then on V2 variation. The final chapter to be discussed here is by Kristin Bech and Christine Meklenborg Salvesen, titled ‘Preverbal Word Order in Old English and Old French’ (pp. 233–70). The authors consider the V2 constraint in OE and OF, stating that while both languages have been described as V2 languages, there are many differences between them; indeed, at the end of the chapter they recommend that the use of the label V2 should be reconsidered. In their study, they focus on clauses in which the subject precedes the verb, investigating the interaction between the subject and other preverbal material. Their main findings are that OF word order is more fixed and the presubject position is more restricted, while OE word order shows more variation, and allows for more types of elements in the presubject position. They conclude that OF is more syntactically driven, while in OE information-structural motivation plays a larger role.
The years 2013–14 saw much interest in OE, particularly in the relationship between OE and other West Germanic languages. In The Development of Old English , Don Ringe and Ann Taylor provide a very detailed discussion of Old English in relation to its West Germanic antecedents. Chapters 2 to7 address phonological and morphological developments in West Germanic from proto-West Germanic to the OE period, with chapter 6 in particular focusing on the prehistory of OE and its divergence from other West Germanic languages. Chapter 8 provides a detailed description of OE syntax within a P&P framework. This volume usefully adds to the literature on OE in at least three respects. First, it emphasizes that OE is not uniform by taking a diachronic perspective, arguing that it undergoes syntactic, morphological, and phonological change, and that many of these changes represent the playing out of changes originating in earlier stages of West Germanic. Second, while the discussion of OE sound change covers much of the same ground as standard grammars of OE such as Hogg and Alcorn (discussed below), Ringe and Taylor situate the OE sound changes in the historical West Germanic context in a much more systematic way. Second, the discussion of OE syntax in chapter 8 differs from that in existing reference works by providing a systematic treatment of OE within a current generative syntactic framework, building on and incorporating insights from much recent work in this area. A second volume, discussing OE derivational morphology and the lexicon, is planned. Together, the two volumes will constitute an important reference work on OE.
George Walkden’s Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic also focuses on some specific aspects of the syntax of OE in relation to its West Germanic antecedents. He adopts a state-of-the-art minimalist syntactic framework for his analyses of verbal syntax, the wh -system and null arguments in West Germanic. Walkden shows, through a combination of methods, including syntactic and quantitative analysis of early textual data and careful historical reconstruction, that we can trace the development of syntactic properties of OE back into earlier stages of Germanic and reconstruct earlier stages of these changes for which we have little or no textual evidence. He argues that although syntactic reconstruction on the basis of linguistic phylogeny is more problematic than phonological or morphological reconstruction, feature-based minimalist theory may constrain permissible syntactic changes in such a way that reconstruction of certain syntactic properties of proto-Germanic, and even proto-Indo European, might be possible using the methods he proposes.
Two other volumes which take novel approaches to the problems of data in OE and its analysis are Fran Colman’s The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England: The Linguistics and Culture of the Old English Onomasticon and Analysing Older English , edited by David Denison, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully, and Emma Moore. Colman makes a case for names as a source of linguistic data—in the sense that the OE onomasticon exhibits linguistic patterning. She first establishes the categorial status of names within the grammar, and their diachronic and synchronic relationship to common words such as nouns and adjectives. She shows that careful philologically informed study of names provides evidence for the phonological and morphological reconstruction of early OE, which antedates the earliest surviving texts. Colman argues that names differ from other linguistic categories in their semantic and grammatical properties, in ways that need to be understood before names can be used as evidence for linguistic reconstruction. The aim of Colman’s research is ambitious in its scope. By necessity, the present book focuses on the place of names within linguistic theory, notably the notional-grammar framework proposed by John M. Anderson. This is rather preliminary to the analysis of names as evidence for the phonology and morphology of early OE, however, and it is clear that the work presented here is only part of a larger story. It will be interesting to see what further insights into OE may emerge from the this onomasticon (for more information on the onomastic aspect of this study, see Section 8 below).
Novel approaches to the analysis of early English data also emerge in Denison et al., eds., Analysing Older English . The papers all share a clear empirical focus on the question of what constitutes data in the study of early English. All address the question of how to handle and interpret incomplete historical data, in order to avoid forcing historical data to fit analytical schema or constructs which are based upon the synchronic analyses of present-day languages, notably PDE. Several papers make clear that viewing change from a present-day perspective can mislead us. Consequently, many of the papers are concerned with questions of historical continuities or discontinuities, and with functional rather than formal, theoretically driven explanations of historical phenomena. They challenge and reappraise formally based analyses on the grounds that these analyses provide an inadequate fit to the historical data. The first section focuses on onomastics, for example the processes of name formation. The second section addresses writing practices and the relationship between changes in writing practices and linguistic variation and change, for example micro-variation in spelling patterns as evidence for phonological micro-variation (Roger Lass and Margaret Laing), spelling patterns as evidence for dialect variation in OE (here, R.D. Fulk argues that there are more Anglian spellings in West Saxon texts than has been standardly assumed). Section III concerns itself with dialectal and sociolinguistic variation. April McMahon and Warren Maguire present the results of a new computational method for classifying languages and varieties based on a range of phonological features. This analysis produces a taxonomy in the form of a network, based on degrees of similarity or differences between the varieties. Identifying these relationships might shed light on the historical development of the varieties in question, in a similar way as do phylogenetic approaches to the reconstruction of proto-languages. Section IV focuses on phonological change. Nikolaus Ritt argues that historically recurrent processes of consonant weakening (where weakening is a decrease in perceptibility) and of vowel strengthening (where strengthening is an increase in perceptibility) are both reflexes of English being a stress-timed language rather than a syllable-timed one. The final section comprises two papers on historical syntax by Olga Fischer and by Anthony Warner. Both pursue a strong empirical focus, with both using large-scale historical corpora to identify generalizations and patterns of change. Crucially, both seek to explain change from the perspective of users of the historical varieties themselves, drawing insights from domains of language other than syntax to explain the behaviour of these speakers.
In 2013 a new edition was published of An Introduction to Old English , written by the late Professor Richard Hogg and revised by Rhona Alcorn. This has been a most useful reference work for students of OE for some time. The new edition represents some of Richard Hogg’s last work, and usefully updates earlier editions by incorporating recent research on OE dialect variation, and the historical and social context in which OE functioned. It remains a comprehensive introduction to OE, suitable for undergraduate students who have mastered basic phonological, morphological, and syntactic concepts. It is more comprehensive than traditional grammars of OE, covering issues of variation in OE (chapter 9), and OE’s relationship to later periods of English (chapter 10), as well as providing an accessible and logically structured outline of the grammar of the language. It is also far more accessible than traditional OE grammars. The text has a very student-friendly, direct, and explanatory style throughout, and successfully avoids being either too erudite or too patronizing. Instead, it makes OE interesting by setting it in its historical and linguistic context, and includes well-designed exercises, which can be used both for independent as well as class-directed study.
Turning to other student-focused works, The History of English by Stephan Gramley [2013] provides a very student-friendly overview of the history of English from its Germanic origins to the present day. It includes chapters on all the major periods of English. Its focus is on describing the linguistic consequences of external historical events in each period rather than on detailed descriptions of linguistic change (e.g. syntactic changes), or mechanisms of language change (e.g. historical sociolinguistics). Chapters 10–13 discuss the development of American, African, and southern hemisphere varieties of English. Chapter 14 discusses English as a global language. Information is set out clearly in a typical textbook style (including introductory chapter summaries, in-text exercises, discussion of linguistic data, and key-point summaries throughout each chapter). The major advantage of this text, particularly for those teaching or studying the history of English at undergraduate level, is that specific points in the text are supported by extensive and detailed web resources.
Broadening the historical focus yet further, The History of Languages by Tore Janson [2013] is a wide-ranging survey of its topic, introducing a breadth of issues rather than pursuing issues in depth. Its aim is to cross the divide between language studies and historical studies. It is accessibly written, and largely descriptive, avoiding linguistic jargon. It provides a useful introduction to language typology (chapter 2), the development of writing systems (chapters 3–5), and the languages of major civilizations, including the Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs, all of which would provide useful background for students of historical linguistics. Later chapters chart how these early languages develop into the national languages we know today. Throughout the discussion, the focus is on external history, but issues of language emergence, language maintenance, and language death are cogently discussed. The book closes with a discussion of the internationalization of languages like English. Throughout, the book provides a clear introduction to questions and issues which could usefully form the basis of more detailed study.
6. Semantics
At least since the influential work by Richard Montague in the 1960s and 1970s, formal semanticists have been occupied with the task of developing systems for calculating sentence meanings from the meanings of their syntactic constituents compositionally. The Fregean idea that some constituents may denote functions from the denotations of others has been instrumental in this enterprise. A radical generalization of such an approach has been spelled out in detail by Chris Barker and Chung-Shieh Shan in their monograph Continuations and Natural Language . Drawing heavily on methods from mathematical logic and computer science, the authors promote the view that certain linguistic expressions may denote functions that take their semantic ‘context’ as arguments. Such contexts, built from the denotations of the remaining co-constituents, are called ‘continuations’, as they ‘prefigure’ the process of semantic derivation. With a particular version of ‘order of evaluation’ in place—linear left-to-right order being considered a default for incremental interpretation—fully formal and principled accounts of scoping and binding phenomena involving reconstruction, cross-over patterns, and donkey anaphora can be given. Among the many case studies, an analysis of sluicing is provided that identifies the missing semantic part in expressions like Mary met someone but I don’t know who with a continuation, namely, the meaning of Mary met , which can be accessed anaphorically. Barker and Shan go to considerable length to make their theory accessible to readers. This involves carefully chosen notation and graphic representations as well as numerous well-chosen exercises throughout the first half of the book.
Compositional Semantics: An Introduction to the Syntax/Semantics Interface is a new introductory textbook on formal semantics by Pauline Jacobson. The book has a broader coverage than most publications of its kind on the market, particularly the popular textbook by Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer [1998], and several design features that distinguish it from the latter. For example, the syntactic theory adopted is Categorial Grammar, reference to intensional phenomena and the formal apparatus (possible worlds and times) needed to handle them is introduced early on, whereas the lambda notation itself is introduced relatively late, reflecting a conscious attempt by the author to emphasize the distinction between model-theoretical objects and the convenient notation for representing them. Also somewhat unusually, the book takes the view of Direct Compositionality on the syntax/semantics interface, according to which each syntactic rule is paired with a semantic rule that gives the meaning of the output of the syntactic rule in terms of the meaning(s) of the input expressions to this rule, although analyses of more complex phenomena (from Part III onwards), are presented additionally from the theoretical perspective that relies on the level of LF. The book is divided into four parts. Part I introduces the goals of semantics, fundamental concepts like model, truth conditions, and possible worlds, the notion of compositionality, and the nature of the syntax/semantics interface; it also provides a brief introduction to Categorial Grammar, discusses the interpretations of syntactic categories such as NPs, intransitive and transitive VPs, adjectives, common nouns, and determiners; and finally it presents the semantics of variables and the lambda calculus. Part II introduces generalized quantifiers, type lifting, and generalized conjunction. In Part III, the interpretation of relative clauses, generalized quantifiers in object position, and the interpretation of pronouns are shown in terms of both LF and Direct Compositionality. The final Part IV introduces NPIs, more sophisticated binding phenomena, the semantics of focus, and intensionality-sensitive words within the syntax/semantics interface.
Compositionality issues are also addressed by several contributions to the collection Approaches to Meaning: Composition, Values, and Interpretation , edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Jan Köpping, and Cécile Meier. ‘Does Context Change?’ (pp. 25–44) by Manfred Kupffer provides a comparison of two theoretical frameworks that can handle the case of two syntactic occurrences of the same indexical expression within an utterance referring to different objects, as in That is the same planet as that (e.g. when the speaker points to two different photographs of the same planet). Paul Dekker puts forth a new Principle of Compositionality that combines speaker-dependent meanings in ‘The Live Principle of Compositionality’ (pp. 45–84), and Mats Rooth illustrates two ways of accounting for the semantic equivalence of a sentence and its paraphrase in ‘Operators for Definition by Paraphrase’ (pp. 85–101).
Syntax–semantics relations also figure centrally in two of the three semantic contributions to the volume Recursion: Complexity in Cognition , edited by Tom Roeper and Margaret Speas. Explanatory priority is given to syntax by Wolfram Hinzen, whose chapter ‘Recursion and Truth’ (pp. 113–37)—among other things—champions the slogan ‘Intensionality from Syntax’, which is one of the section headings. Taking current Chomskyan minimalist syntax at face value as a model of ‘mental computation’, the author correlates syntactic encapsulation of subconstituents derived bottom-up (in ‘cycles’ or ‘phases’) with pervasive referential opacity of such subconstituents. Some of the more philosophical assumptions of Hinzen’s ‘anti-realist semantics’ are laid out in the remainder. In the chapter ‘Recursion, Legibility, Use’ (pp. 89–112), Peter Ludlow takes the opposite view and argues that rules of semantic composition are ‘prerequisite cognitive abilities’ for recursive syntax. From this perspective, semantic rules like predicate modification and abstraction—these are rules that enable unlimited stacking of predicative expressions—filter the kinds of structures that can be interpreted. This supports the traditional conception of language as a collection of form-meaning mappings. Ludlow attempts an additional grounding of the theory within a ‘meaning-is-use’ approach, designed to replace truth and entities by ‘pro-attitudes’ and referential intentions of language users. Still on the matter of structural layering but concerned with issues at the semantics–pragmatics interface is Manfred Krifka’s contribution entitled ‘Embedding Illocutionary Acts’ (pp. 59–87). Here it is argued that the Wittgensteinian injunction against confusing representations (‘pictures’ of states of affairs) and uses thereof (speech acts) can to some extent be defused by developing a proper theory of act denotations. At the core of this proposal is the idea that illocutionary operators like ASSERT change states—‘indices’, i.e. world-time pairs in the language of formal semantics—such that the commitments of the interlocutors are altered. This allows flexible interaction between these and standard (index-sensitive) denotations like propositions. The resulting formal system is then applied to an analysis of explicit performatives, modification by speech-act adverbials, and indirect speech. In each case, it is shown how speech-act denotations can interact with ordinary semantic operators.
Two collections are concerned with NP reference, that is, the relation between linguistic expressions and entities in the world. Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference , edited by Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Anne Zribi-Hertz, contains eleven studies discussing the referential properties of nominal expressions in a wide range of typologically diverse languages or dialectal groups. One group of contributions is concerned with cross-linguistic regularities in NP syntax and semantics, particularly the impact of information structure, countability, and number marking on interpretation. A second group explores the nature and marking of ‘definiteness’, a heterogeneous concept both from the formal and the interpretational perspective, and one paper, ‘When Articles Have Different Meanings: Acquiring the Expression of Genericity in English and Brazilian Portuguese’ (pp. 367–97), by Tania Ionin, Elaine Grolla, Silvia Montrul, and Hélade Santos, discusses experimental data on the acquisition of the expression of genericity in a second language. The editors of the collection Weak Referentiality , Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Bert Le Bruyn, and Joost Zwarts, see the notion of weak referentiality as ‘a kind of cluster concept, covering the different ways in which an indefinite or definite noun phrase can depart from those noun phrases that straightforwardly introduce or pick up an individual referent in the common ground of a discourse’ (p. 4). ‘Epistemic and Scopal Properties of Some Indefinites’ (pp. 45–72) by Tania Ionin discusses the results and theoretical consequences of an experimental study that aimed to compare English a- indefinites and some -indefinites with regard to scopal versus epistemic specificity, distinguished first by Donka F. Farkas [1994, 2002]. The results show that unstressed and stressed some -indefinites are more compatible with scopal specificity than a- indefinites, but they are less compatible with epistemic specificity as the latter, stress on some playing a major role in both contrasts. In ‘How Weak and How Definite are Weak Definites?’ (pp. 214–35), Florian Schwarz investigates the possibility of providing a unified semantic analysis for regular definites and the class of weak definites, whose properties include the possible lack of uniqueness, the involvement of semantic enrichment in interpretation, and the fact that they do not support anaphora, as argued by Greg Carlson, Rachel Sussman, Natalie Klein, and Michael Tanenhaus [2006]. Schwarz makes the suggestion that weak definites should be treated as regular definites occurring in VPs that denote kinds of events. Ana Aguilar-Guevara and Maartje Schulpen take a closer look at the adjectives that are acceptable in weak definite constructions in ‘Modified Weak Definites’ (pp. 237–64). Building on the account of weak definites by Aguilar-Guevara and Zwarts [2010], according to whom these expressions denote kinds, the present authors argue that only adjectives denoting properties of kinds are compatible with weak definites, which is corroborated by their experimental results. ‘Functional Frames in the Interpretation of Weak Nominals’ (pp. 265–85) by Joost Zwarts puts forth an analysis of weak nominals such as the weak definite in listen to the radio and the bare nominal in watch television , according to which they refer to certain roles in (mostly functional) frames. This explains the uniqueness properties of weak definites, why only certain nouns can form weak definites, and why they only occur with certain nouns and prepositions. In ‘The Indefiniteness of Definiteness’ (in Gamerschlag, Gerland, Osswald, and Petersen, eds., Frames and Concept Types: Applications in Language and Philosophy , pp. 323–41), Barbara Abbott reviews traditional defining criteria for the definiteness of NPs, in terms of strength, uniqueness, and familiarity, as well as newer ones in terms of principal filters, scope-taking, and occurrence in partitive constructions. After carefully investigating how these approaches fare with respect to universal NPs, partitives, possessive NPs, and specific indefinites the author comes to the conclusion that Bertrand Russell’s [1905] proposal in terms of referential uniqueness should be given preference.
Daphna Heller and Lynsey Wolter are also concerned with the referential properties of definites in ‘Beyond Demonstratives: Direct Reference in Perceptually Grounded Descriptions’ ( JSem 31[2014] 555–95). The paper focuses on the puzzle of why perceptually grounded definites cannot occur in post-copular position in questions, as in * Who do you think is that guy/the man on the left? , and why a question with a post-copular name requires a perceptually grounded answer, as in— Who do you think is Wouter Vossen?—#That guy. / The concertmaster of the Brabants Orchestra. In ‘The Polysemy of Measurement’ ( Lingua 143[2014] 242–66), Jessica Rett argues that all individual-denoting DPs have a derived interpretation on which they denote degrees, provided that the salient dimension of measurement is monotonic on the part-whole structure.
Further important studies on the semantics of nominal elements include ‘Dependent Plural Pronouns with Skolemized Choice Functions’ ( NLS 22[2014] 265–97) by Yasutada Sudo, which offers a new account of dependent plural pronouns as in The first-years all think that they are the smartest student. Alda Mari claims, in ‘Each Other, Asymmetry and Reasonable Futures’ ( JSem 31[2014] 209–61), that the variety of interpretations associated with reciprocal sentences can be captured by assuming that they describe a relation that is either actually or possibly strongly reciprocal over the reference set, to the extent that the possibilities are reasonable. Bert Le Bruyn and Henriëtte de Swart propose an analysis of two types of bare co-ordination structure such as Bride and groom were happy and A man and woman are in love in ‘Bare Coordination: The Semantic Shift’ ( NL< 32[2014] 1205–46) in terms of intersection between sets of matching pairs, which accords with the lexical semantics and pragmatics of natural co-ordination.
We turn now to studies on DP quantification. Capitalizing on important findings about the differences between so-called comparative versus superlative determiners (such as more/less than vs. at least/at most ) by Bart Geurts and Rick Nouwen [2007], Ariel Cohen and Manfred Krifka offer a new interpretation of the latter, which assumes that they quantify over meta-speech acts: ‘Superlative Quantifiers and Meta-Speech Acts’ ( Ling&P 37[2014] 41–90). The authors develop a framework for modelling speech acts and meta-speech acts, the latter of which are taken not to be moves in the conversation but to indicate which moves are possible, modelled in terms of changes of commitment spaces. ‘Extensionality in Natural Language Quantification: The Case of Many and Few ’ ( Ling&P 37[2014] 315–51) by Kristen A. Greer wishes to demonstrate that natural language quantification is always purely extensional by providing a single syntactic-semantic structure for the various interpretations of the determiners many and few (including their proportional, reverse, and cardinal readings) for which intensional analyses have most often been argued in the literature. The account assumes that the semantic arguments of the quantifiers in question are themselves set intersections, and relies on Ariel Cohen’s [1999, 2001] proposal that the universe consists of the union of alternatives to the nominal and verbal predicates. ‘On the Identification of Quantifiers’ Witness Sets: A Study of Multi-Quantifier Sentences’ ( JLLI 23[2014] 53–81) by Livio Robaldo, Jakub Szymanik, and Ben Meijering presents the results of an online questionnaire study that looked at interpretations of so-called Independent Set (IS) readings (aka scopeless readings) of sentences containing multiple quantifiers, such as Exactly three children ate exactly five pizzas . The results argue against Barry Schein’s [1993] ‘global maximization’ approach, which assumes that IS readings of multi-quantifier sentences always take into account all individuals in the model: in the presence of certain pragmatic factors, the sentence’s meaning is shown to be restricted to subgroups of individuals.
‘ No More Shall We Part: Quantifiers in English Comparatives’ ( NLS 22[2014] 1–53) by Peter Alrenga and Christopher Kennedy puts forth a new account of the interpretation of quantificational expressions in the comparative clause, which relies on the assumption of a silent, comparative clause-internal negative degree quantifier, which interacts with other quantificational expressions to derive the observed range of interpretations. Maria Aloni and Floris Roelofsen look at ‘Indefinites in Comparatives’ ( NLS 22[2014] 145–67), aiming to account for their meaning and distribution, with particular attention to the licensing conditions of any in comparatives, as in Michael is taller than (almost) anyone else in his class (with a universal reading), and to differences in quantificational force between any and some (cf. Michael is taller than someone else in his class , which can only have an existential reading).
‘Non-Monotonicity in NPI Licensing’ ( NLS 22[2014] 169–217) by Luka Crnič proposes a new account of the distribution of occurrences of the focus particle even that are adjoined at surface structure to an expression entailed by its focus alternatives (such as even once ). These expressions must occur in a downward-entailing environment, such as in the scope of non-monotone quantifiers, as in Exactly two congressmen read the constitution even ONCE. The focus particle only is the topic of a paper by Katsuhiko Yabushita, ‘A Modal Scalar-Presuppositional Analysis of Only ’ (in McCready, Yabushita, and Yoshimoto, eds., Formal Approaches to Semantics and Pragmatics: Japanese and Beyond , pp. 325–41), which takes a fresh look at the difference between positive and negative only sentences, as in Only Mary can speak French vs. Not only Mary can speak French , according to which only the former is compatible with a continuation and maybe not even she can vs. and maybe he can’t , respectively, that cancels the prejacent, noticed by Manuela Ippolito [2008]. After showing the flaws in Ippolito’s account, Yabushita proposes a modal presuppositional account, a modification of the one proposed by Robert van Rooij and Kathrin Schulz [2007]. Elizabeth Coppock and David I. Beaver look at a range of exclusives such as the adverbs only , just , exclusively , merely , purely , solely , simply , and the adjectives only , sole , pure , exclusive , and alone in ‘Principles of the Exclusive Muddle’ ( JSem 31[2014] 371–432). They propose a lexical entry schema for these exclusives, according to which they share an at-issue contribution of an upper bound on the viable answers to the current question under discussion, and signal that a lower bound on those answers is taken for granted.
We turn now to the semantics of TAM. Within the collection Future Times, Future Tenses , edited by Philippe de Brabanter, Mikhail Kissine, and Saghie Sharifzadeh, Fabio Del Prete addresses an old dilemma in ‘The Interpretation of Indefinites in Future Tense Sentences: A Novel Argument for the Modality of Will?’ (pp. 44–71). The author suggests that will has a temporal semantics, while its modal component is only introduced at a (pragmatic) layer of utterance evaluation. Empirical evidence for the proposal is drawn from certain scopal (non-)interactions between will and indefinites—different from what happens with bona fide modals—as well as from the licensing of modal subordination, which will shares with standard modals. The analysis is worked out formally, and ways of conceiving of its pragmatic component—e.g. differences from familiar versions of pragmatic enrichment—are addressed. Two further contributions to this collection concern the conceptual underpinnings of semantics. In ‘Talking about the Future: Unsettled Truth and Assertion’ (pp. 26–43), Isidora Stojanovic undertakes a systematic formal investigation of four approaches to the problem—familiar since antiquity—of future contingents, that is, ‘the problem of specifying the truth conditions for future-tensed sentences in such a way that the resulting semantics remains compatible with the hypothesis of an indeterministic universe’ (p. 26). Bridget Copley devotes her chapter ‘Causal Chains for Futurates’ (pp. 72–86) to arguing for the possibility of direct causation between plans, conceptualized as stative eventualities, and (planned) events. Among other things, this is taken to underlie contrasts like John is getting married/#sick (tomorrow) in ‘futurate’ readings of the present progressive. What makes genuine futures distinct from futurates is that plannability—treated as a presupposition—is not involved in the former. In addition to providing semantic formalization, Copley argues that only minor modifications yield a satisfactory incorporation of ‘natural futurates’ ( The sun rises/?is rising tomorrow at 6:30 ) into the system.
Adeline Patard is concerned with the modal uses of past tenses in ‘When Tense and Aspect Convey Modality. Reflections on the Modal Uses of Past Tenses in Romance and Germanic Languages’ ( JPrag 71[2014] 69–97). The unified account of the modal interpretations of past tenses in French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, English, and German proposed is based on the idea that the different interpretations of past tenses (including the modal ones) reflect specific instantiations of the notion of reference point as ‘topic time’, ‘aspectual vantage point’, or ‘epistemic evaluation’. ‘The Present Tense Is Not Vacuous’ ( JSem 31[2014] 685–747) by Guillaume Thomas argues against Uli Sauerland’s [2002] analysis of the present tense, according to which its indexical meaning comes about as a result of a pragmatic competition with the past tense. It also develops an analysis of futurates that derives their temporal orientation from their modal properties. Károly Varasdi, ‘Making Progressives: Necessary Conditions are Sufficient’ ( JSem 31[2014]179–207) joins the ranks of recent critics of the standard approach to the truth-conditions of the progressive, proposed by David Dowty [1977, 1979], according to which ‘the progressive operator requires that the event be completed in all the inertia worlds assigned to the evaluation index’ (p. 180), and argues for the significance of the conditions necessary for the completion of the event. Astrid de Wit and Frank Brisard, ‘A Cognitive Grammar Account of the Semantics of the English Present Progressive’ ( JLing 50[2014] 49–90), argue for a unified semantic analysis of the present progressive in terms of ‘epistemic contingency or non-necessity in the speaker’s conception of current reality’ (p. 50), contrasting it to the simple present, which is taken to indicate structural necessity. Susi Wurmbrand, ‘Tense and Aspect in English Infinitives’ ( LingI 45[2014] 403–47), proposes a threefold classification of infinitival complements, based on differences in their temporal composition, which allows us to account for selectional restrictions of different infinitive-taking predicates, and phenomena such as SOT and episodic interpretations.
‘Fake Tense in Conditional Sentences: A Modal Approach’ ( NLS 22[2014] 117–44), by Kathrin Schulz, proposes that the ‘fake’ uses of the past tense marker in English conditional sentences indicate a certain kind of ambiguity of the past tense morphology, which can either mark the presence of a temporal operator or a specific modal operator. The latter interpretation is argued to arise through recategorization, in the course of which the simple past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. Christian Ebert, Cornelia Ebert, and Stefan Hinterwimmer propose ‘A Unified Analysis of Conditionals as Topics’ ( Ling&P 37[2014] 353–408), according to which ‘normal indicative conditionals’ (NCs) and ‘biscuit conditionals’ (BCs), both containing fronted antecedents, are to be analysed in terms of aboutness topics and relevance topics, based on their syntactic and semantic similarities to two left-dislocation constructions in German, which have been argued to mark these two types of topicality.
‘Enablement and Possibility’ (in Leiss and Abraham, eds., Modes of Modality: Modality, Typology, and Universal Grammar , pp. 319–51) by Raphael Salkie promotes an ‘actualist’ approach to modality, eschewing possible worlds. Accordingly, the analysis of can is built from an ‘enablement’ relation, which itself is defined via a fairly abstract interrelation between necessary conditions and the ‘actualization’ of propositions. In addition to exploring differences between can and may , Salkie addresses objections to his approach raised earlier by Renaat Declerck. ‘Modals and Lexically-Regulated Saturation’ ( JPrag 71[2014] 160–77) by Ilse Depraetere presents a new, three-layered model for the analysis of the meaning of modals, which takes these expressions as essentially polysemous, and consists of a context-independent semantic layer, a context-dependent semantic layer, and a context-dependent pragmatic layer. Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk, and Floris Roelofsen’s study, ‘Information, Issues, and Attention’ (in Gutzmann et al., eds., pp. 128–66), considers the interpretation of the modal epistemic might as in John might be in London within Inquisitive Semantics, and argues that it motivates the introduction, in addition to the informative and inquisitive contents of sentences, of a third, ‘attentive content’, which signifies the sentence’s potential to draw attention to certain possibilities. ‘Have To, Have Got To, and Must’ by Cliff Goddard (in Taboada and Trnavac, eds., Nonveridicality and Evaluation: Theoretical, Computational and Corpus Approaches , pp. 50–75) provides Natural Semantic Metalanguage explications for the most important English modals of necessity.
Turning to the semantics of sentence types, Mark Jary and Mikhail Kissine’s work Imperatives , published in the series Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics by Cambridge, provides an informed and systematic survey of the data from a wide range of languages that any serious theory of the semantics/pragmatics of imperatives should be able to account for, as well as a critical discussion of the most influential theories on the market, including the most recent ones. Part I, which reviews the relevant data, is concerned with issues such as the defining criteria for imperative sentences (and their differentiation from other sentence types such as prohibitives or hortatives), the distinction between the imperative verb form and the imperative sentence type, and its impact on the issue whether there are imperative sentences with first- or third-person subjects, the range of uses of the imperative without directive force (as in good wishes, advice, threat, advertising imperatives, permission, audienceless and predetermined cases), and the structure and use of imperative constructions with conditional meaning as a special case of non-directive meaning (as in Come any closer and I’ll shoot ). Part II presents a well-written survey of the main arguments and the critical points of the most significant semantic-pragmatic theories of imperatives in three groups. These include those that view imperatives as encoding directive force, those that treat imperatives as declaratives, and those that see imperatives as representing a distinct semantic type from declaratives, their directive force ‘mediated by pragmatic considerations’. The careful argumentation and the presentation of often highly formalized theories in a non-technical fashion makes the volume an accessible first read on the topic. Patrick Georg Grosz’s ‘Optative Markers as Communicative Cues’ ( NLS 22[2014] 89–115) looks at the apparent obligatoriness of particles such as the English exclusive particles only , just , and but in if- optatives in English and German. The author argues that the systematic appearance of optativity cues, which are perceived to be truth-conditionally vacuous, can be explained by postulating a generalized conversational constraint at the semantics/pragmatic interface referred to as ‘Utilize Cues’: the speaker uses these optativity cues to disambiguate ambiguous structures such as if - and that -clauses towards optative readings, which have a low frequency or prior probability, which mechanism later becomes automaticized.
‘Question Tags and Sentential Negativity’ ( Lingua 145[2014] 173–93), by Adrian Brasoveanu, Karen De Clercq, Donka Farkas, and Floris Roelofsen, argues for the graded nature of sentential negativity. It reports the results of an experimental study trying to quantify the negativity of sentences with the help of a question-tag test. The results show that n -words contribute more negativity than downward-entailing items, and that the strength of negativity induced by both is sensitive to the syntactic position of the negative expression. Regine Eckardt’s study of the vocative construction, ‘Dear Ede! Semantics and Pragmatics of Vocatives’ (in Gutzmann et al., eds., pp. 223–49), is built on the basic observation that it is impossible for vocatives to occur in reported and indirect speech, and claims that ‘the vocative not only conveys a property of the addressee of the utterance, but also implicates that the literal content of the utterance is intended as a message by the speaker to that specific addressee’ (pp. 223–4), which is trivially satisfied in direct-speech situations, but leads to a mismatch between the message sent and the message commented on in indirect speech.
An exploration of Lying at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface is undertaken by Jörg Meibauer in an attempt to enrich the debate of what is said vs. what is implicated with detailed linguistic studies within the domain of deceptive language use. On the semantic side, this involves revisiting the lexical semantics of the verb lying , the vagueness and subjectivity of predicates of taste, the modal and illocutionary semantics of sentence types, the semantics of (varieties of) quotation, including the currently much-discussed phenomenon of ‘mixed’ quotation ( Ken said that the project ‘is hard to understand’ ), as well as interpretative aspects of factivity, verum focus , and discourse adverbs. The insight gained this way is instrumental in making a case for the idea that false implicatures and presuppositions form part and parcel of deliberate lying. Meibauer successfully demonstrates the viability of an agenda that ‘integrates insights from a number of linguistic, philosophical, and psychological areas’ and he achieves a commendable level of clarity and systematicity, not the least through condensed presentation of ‘difficult’ theories and controversies in tabular form. Mixed quotation is also investigated by Emar Meier in ‘Mixed Quotation: The Grammar of Apparently Transparent Opacity’ ( S&Prag 7[2014] 1–67), who proposes a compositional account of the construction that handles its simultaneous opacity (meaning that indexicals are ‘not adjusted to integrate into the reporting context, and even speech errors or idiolectal variation is preserved’, p. 63), and its fully grammatical incorporation into the reporting sentence.
One of the most popular topics at the semantics–pragmatics interface has been the discussion of the origin, classification, processing, and appropriate modelling of scalar implicatures. Salvatore Pistoia Reda, the editor of the collection Pragmatics, Semantics and the Case of Scalar Implicatures , isolates three components of scalar implicatures in his introduction, ‘Some Remarks on the Scalar Implicatures Debate’ (pp. 1–12), namely, the exhaustivity operator, the generation of scalar alternatives, and the ‘avoid-contradiction’ procedure. In ‘The Roots of (Scalar) Implicature’ (pp. 13–39), Laurence R. Horn presents a lucid overview of the historical development of the concept that was referred to by H.P. Grice as implicature, and the subtype of the latter that came to be known as scalar implicature in neo-Gricean frameworks. ‘Intermediate Scalar Implicatures’ by Uli Sauerland (pp. 72–98) compares pragmatic and semantic accounts of scalar implicatures, which differ, crucially, in their treatment of structures where a scalar item occupies a position in the scope of two quantificational operators. The author shows that in these structures the implicature can take scope above one operator but below the other one, which can only be accounted for by a semantic analysis. Bob van Tiel, ‘Embedded Scalars and Typicality’ ( JSem 31[2014] 147–77), is interested in the issue of whether scalar terms in embedded structures like some in All the squares are connected with some of the circles lead to embedded upper-bounded inferences ( some but not all ). He accounts for the fact that his experimental data concerning the relevant types of sentences point towards different conclusions by arguing for the decisive role of typicality effects.
The contributions to the collection Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages , edited by Barbara Hemforth, Barbara Mertins, and Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, present further experimental results at the interfaces of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Oliver Bott and Fritz Hamm, ‘Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect’ (pp. 83–109), found that coercion of simple form accomplishments into an activity reading by means of for -modification leads to processing difficulties in self-paced reading experiments in English, but not in German. They account for the English data by claiming that simple form accomplishments, due to competition with the progressive form in this language, automatically receive a perfective interpretation, which leads to a temporary contradiction with the meaning of the for -adverbial, which can only be resolved by a complete revision of their meaning. Bergljot Behrens, Barbara Mertins, Barbara Hemforth, and Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen argue, in ‘Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach’ (pp. 23–51), on the basis of experimental data from English, Czech, German, and Norwegian, that there is a preference for temporal overlap interpretations of VP co-ordination in contexts that do not force a consequential or resultative interpretation. These findings contradict the predictions of the ‘extended script theory’ (Robyn Carlson [2002]), according to which the default interpretation of co-ordination is sequential. The preference for temporal overlap interpretations of co-ordinated VPs is also confirmed by Bergljot Behrens, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, and Lyn Frazier in ‘Pairing Form and Meaning in English and Norwegian: Conjoined VPs or Conjoined Clauses?’ (pp. 53–81), which shows that conjoined clauses are even more strongly biased towards simultaneity than conjoined VPs, and this bias is independent of the telicity of the first conjunct. They also illustrate that whenever the second conjunct expresses an adversative or concessive relation, conjoined clauses are preferred to conjoined VPs, but in the absence of adversativity, conjoined VPs are preferred.
Emmanuel Chemla and Lewis Bott, ‘Processing Inferences at the Semantics/Pragmatics Frontier: Disjunctions and Free Choice’ ( Cognition 130[2014] 380–96) report on four experiments that aimed to test whether treating cases of free choice permission, where conjunctive inferences unexpectedly arise from disjunctive sentences (as in Mary is allowed to eat an ice-cream or a cake ), as second-order scalar implicature is supported by processing data. Graeme Forbes offers ‘A Truth-Conditional Account of Free-Choice Disjunction’ (in Gutzmann et al., eds., pp. 167–86), proposing that the apparent conjunctive interpretation of disjunctive or in comparative clauses with than as in A is taller than B or C is to be accounted for by interpreting the comparative clause as a universally quantified identity statement.
Further contributions addressing issues on the semantics–pragmatics interface include ‘The Semantics of Sluicing: Beyond Truth Conditions’ ( Language 90[2014] 887–926) by Scott AnderBois, who offers a new perspective on the relationship between the antecedent clause and the elided clause in cases of sluicing, as in John ate something, but I don’t know what John ate . It argues that sluicing is both sensitive to truth-conditional information and the alternative-evoking or issue-raising capacity of the antecedent clause (in the sense of inquisitive semantics), leading to the result that sluicing is licensed only in case the issue introduced by the question in the elided clause has already been introduced by the antecedent clause. ‘A Note on the Projection of Appositives’ (in McCready et al., eds., pp. 205–22), by Rick Nouwen, looks at the scopal properties of (nominal) appositives, concentrating on cases where appositives occur in the scope of a matrix operator, contradicting traditional descriptive generalizations. The paper claims that certain restrictive interpretations of appositives anchored by indefinites, such as the preferred reading of If a professor, a famous one, publishes a book, he will make a lot of money , are to be accounted for in terms of a flexible attachment approach, but also calls attention to the fact that appositives can express different (e.g. inclusive or restrictive) relations to indefinite anchors. Mark Steedman presents ‘The Surface-Compositional Semantics of English Intonation’ ( Language 90[2014] 2–57), which assumes that the primitive components of literal meaning are distinguished along four dimensions, such as contrast, information-structural role, claimed presence in (or absence from) the common ground, and claimed speaker/hearer agency, and that other meanings and functions traditionally attributed to the intonational tunes of English (politeness, deixis, affect, commitment, turn-taking, etc.) arise indirectly.
Computational aspects of interpretation are discussed by Henk Zeevat in Language Production and Interpretation: Linguistics Meets Cognition . Among the design goals for any cognitively adequate, full-fledged theory, the author identifies compatibility with incrementality in interpretation and the ‘well-established psychological hypothesis that interpreting involves simulated production’. One of the core applications concerns definiteness and definite descriptions, for which it is claimed that a particular kind of ‘mental representations’ can reconcile classical Russellian approaches, the familiarity, and the functional theory. The format in question consists of a ‘graph structure of concepts’ meant to enrich classical discourse representations. Zeevat’s ambitious project combines structural insights from categorial grammar, form-meaning mappings from OT, and interpretation selection procedures in terms of Bayesian probabilism. The contributions to the collection Computing Meaning , volume 4, edited by Harry Bunt, Johan Bos, and Stephen Pulman, are concerned with three interrelated issues within computational semantics, namely, the appropriate form of meaning representations, suggestions for modelling natural language inference, and issues related to the construction of semantically annotated corpora and their application in machine learning of meaning computation.
Cross-linguistic differences in what Sapir called the ‘formal organization of meaning’ are at the heart of Martina Wiltschko’s study The Universal Structure of Categories: Towards a Formal Typology . The author argues that in order to reconcile such differences with anything like a ‘Universal Base Hypothesis’, familiar categories like tense and number have to be taken as instantiations of more abstract notions. According to Wiltschko, classification, point of view, anchoring, and (discourse) linking form a hierarchy of deep categories that conforms with (a larger set of) the phrase structures of the languages of the world. They form a ‘universal spine’ responsible for the make-up of both verbal and nominal projections. In addition to empirical documentation and formal specification of category and feature systems, attention is paid to methodology, drawing among other things on classical language theory such as that laid out by Humboldt and the Port Royal grammarians. The interdisciplinary collection Frames and Concept Types , edited by Gamerschlag et al., investigates frames, ‘cognitively founded and formally explored devices of representing knowledge about objects and categories by means of attributes and their values’ (p. 3) and their relation to concept types in language, philosophy and science, with particular attention to ‘emphasiz[ing] the potential richness of frame representations’ (p. 4). Sebastian Löbner’s background paper ‘Evidence for Frames from Human Language’ (pp. 23–67) argues for a ‘uniform structure of human cognitive representations of linguistic gestures’ (p. 65) in terms of recursive attribute-value structures with added constraints (referred to as ‘Barsalou frames’, cf. Lawrence W. Barsalou [1992, 1999], Barsalou and Christopher R. Hale [1993]). The author argues that certain aspects of grammatical structure, such as constituency, dependency structure, and grammatical function, are in general agreement with representations in terms of frames, and the latter is particularly favoured for representing grammatical features. Similar arguments are made for representing verb case frames, semantic composition, the meaning of argument terms, and the evolution of a vocabulary of abstract attributes. ‘Concept Composition in Frames: Focusing on Genitive Constructions’ (pp. 243–66) by Wiebke Petersen and Tanja Osswald illustrates the applicability of frame theory to the analysis of genitive constructions.
7. Lexicography, Lexicology, and Lexical Semantics
This section begins with a discussion of publications in the field of lexicography, and goes on to look at work in lexicology and lexical semantics. In each part, the more general publications related to each sub-field will be discussed first, followed by more specialized publications. Research on current synchronic topics will precede historical studies.
The changing landscape of lexicography is reflected this year by a number of publications about the move away from print, and the new formats and methods available. ‘Digital Dictionaries: Introduction’, by Michael Hancher ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 272–4), begins a themed collection of three papers and commentary by noting the decline of printed dictionaries, and drawing a parallel between modern ‘pop-up’ definitions and medieval interlinear glosses. In ‘Lexicography 2.0: Reimagining Dictionaries for the Digital Age’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 275–86), Ben Zimmer asks ‘What is gained and what is lost in the shift from page to pixel?’ (p. 276), and argues that the reinvention of dictionaries for the digital medium offers multiple advantages that can make them better informed, more engaging resources. The starting point for Peter Sokolowski’s article, ‘The Dictionary as Data’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 287–98), is the potential that online dictionaries offer for tracking the words people look up. Sokolowski traces the relationship between social and political history, discusses temporary increases in interest in particular words, and considers what people are trying to find out by looking up very familiar words. David Jost surveys the dictionary digitization projects of the publisher Houghton Mifflin, including their encoding of the American Heritage Dictionary from the late 1980s onwards ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 299–302). Finally, Lisa Berglund briefly sketches the educational uses and possibilities of digital dictionaries for students and other users in ‘Reflecting on Digital Dictionaries’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 303–6).
More in-depth discussions of the interaction between digital-format dictionaries and their users are included in another special issue on the topic, introduced by Marie-Claude L’Homme and Monique C. Cormier’s paper ‘Dictionaries and the Digital Revolution: A Focus on Users and Lexical Databases’ ( IJL 27[2014] 331–40), which sketches out current themes in this branch of research and concludes that the new formats will rejuvenate the dictionary. In Robert Lew and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver’s ‘Dictionary Users in the Digital Revolution’ ( IJL 27[2014] 341–59), the authors discuss different methods of user research and the issues these can address; one of their observations is that the traditional divide between dictionaries and other kinds of reference work is breaking down. Christiane Fellbaum looks specifically at ‘Large-Scale Lexicography in the Digital Age’ ( IJL 27[2014] 378–95), arguing that the digital revolution has fundamentally changed the potential size of dictionaries, access to databases for professional and non-professional dictionary creators, and the methods by which dictionaries are created. The article looks particularly at the design and evolution of WordNet but also considers other resources ‘based on linguistic hypotheses’ (p. 388). Marie-Claude L’Homme addresses the question ‘Why Lexical Semantics Is Important for E-Lexicography and Why It Is Equally Important to Hide Its Formal Representations from Users of Dictionaries’ ( IJL 27[2014] 360–77), and details a project to convert two specialized lexical multilingual databases, which were created using lexical frameworks, into usable and user-friendly dictionaries.
Dictionary use and users are also the focus of Carolin Müller-Spitzer’s edited volume Using Online Dictionaries . This includes a number of papers concerned with German lexicographical resources, which will not be reviewed here, but Parts I, ‘Basics’, and II, ‘General Studies on Online Dictionaries’, are of interest although they are not restricted to the lexicography of English. After an introduction (pp. 1–10), in which Müller-Spitzer argues that the dominance of the Internet makes this an appropriate locus for this branch of meta-lexicography, Antje Töpel presents a useful and thorough ‘Review of Research into the Use of Electronic Dictionaries’ (pp. 13–54), which includes individual summaries of important studies from 1993 to 2012. Alexander Koplenig’s discussion of ‘Empirical Research into Dictionary Use’ (pp. 55–76) details the typical process involved in this kind of study with reference to existing work; this is intended for potential researchers, and will be a helpful guide for anyone new to the field. Koplenig and Müller-Spitzer briefly describe ‘The First Two International Studies on Online Dictionaries—Background Information’ (pp. 79–84), conducted in German and English, which provide data for the remaining four papers in Part II. In ‘Empirical Data on Contexts of Dictionary Use’ (pp. 85–126), Müller-Spitzer interrogates the results of a survey and concentrates on ‘more offbeat circumstances of dictionary use’ (p. 90), including use for word games of various kinds; she considers how usage varies with user, making a distinction between ‘experts’ and ‘recreational users’ of different kinds. ‘General Issues of Online Dictionary Use’, jointly authored by Koplenig and Müller-Spitzer (pp. 127–41), looks at the range of dictionaries that users consult and the devices they most commonly use to access online dictionaries. Amongst other findings, the study shows that online dictionary use has marginally overtaken print, and large-screen devices are prevalent; as with the other chapters discussed here, it would be very interesting to compare the results if the survey were replicated now. Müller-Spitzer and Koplenig go on to examine ‘Online Dictionaries: Expectations and Demands’ (pp. 143–88), and find that survey respondents do not value highly many of the features that a digital format facilitates, such as multimedia content and adaptability; however, a further experiment showed a learning effect where users’ ratings of these features were more positive after being presented with their potential applications. Finally, Koplenig and Müller-Spitzer discuss ‘Questions of Design’ (pp. 189–204), and find that regardless of native language, background, or age, most users prefer online dictionary entries to be presented in a ‘tab view’ where information on different aspects of word use is presented in different sections.
‘Expanding the Notion of Addressing Relations’, by Rufus Gouws ( LexAsia 1[2014] 159–84), considers the links between lemma and article (in his terminology) in a range of dictionaries including the American Heritage Dictionary and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and OALD . Gouws proposes a distinction between primary addressing, what is found in traditional ‘condensed’ entries, and secondary addressing, where entries are written in full sentences that include the lemma. Henning Bergenholtz and Heidi Agerbo propose that ‘There Is No Need for the Terms Polysemy and Homonymy’ ( Lexikos 24[2014] 27–35), in a paper that discusses different possible approaches to multiple meanings. They illustrate different ways of presenting the uses of pigtail depending on both semantics and grammar, and conclude that electronic formats make it possible to take a new approach which foregrounds grammatical differences and therefore lists more lemmas. Henning Bergenholtz and Rufus Gouws adopt ‘A Lexicographical Perspective on the Classification of Multiword Combinations ( IJL 27[2014] 1–24), informed by a small number of examples from English, Dutch, and Afrikaans and a Danish database. The authors compare how consistently and transparently these expressions are presented across different general and specialized dictionaries, and propose twenty classes that could be used, with a simplified version of the classification for general dictionaries.
In ‘Towards Improved Coverage of Southeast Asian Englishes in the Oxford English Dictionary ’ ( LexAsia 1[2014] 95–108), Danica Salazar describes the OED ’s changing editorial policies on the inclusion of non-British words, and shows through a number of examples how Southeast Asian lexis has been presented. OED3 editors are working to improve coverage but face challenges in collecting and labelling data that represents a range of varieties. Lorna Hiles considers ways to adapt existing controlled defining vocabularies for a different variety of English in ‘Towards a Southern African English Defining Vocabulary’ ( Lexikos 24[2014] 178–85); a further possibility is to compile an entirely new vocabulary, though Hiles does not endorse either method as more viable. In ‘Statistical Methods for Identifying Local Dialectal Terms from GPS-Tagged Documents’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 248–71), Paul Cook, Bo Han, and Timothy Baldwin consider the potential of GPS metadata for corpus lexicography. Using a corpus of tweets, they use statistical techniques to examine the usage of known localisms (identified by using the Dictionary of Regional American ), and to identify expressions with restricted geographical usage that have not previously been recognized as such.
Learners’ dictionaries are the focus of Alice Y.W. Chan’s paper ‘Using LDOCE5 and COBUILD6 for Meaning Determination and Sentence Construction: What Do Learners Prefer? ( IJL 27[2014] 25–53). She uses tests and questionnaires to compare the usage habits of nine participants; one suggestion is that learners need to be taught to be more critical in their dictionary use, particularly because of difficulties in identifying the relevant sense of a polysemous word. Anna Dziemianko writes ‘On the Presentation and Placement of Collocations in Monolingual Learners’ Dictionaries: Insights into Encoding and Retention’ ( IJL 27[2014] 259–79), considering differences between the ‘Big Five’ dictionaries in a study of 358 Polish learners of English and twelve verb + noun collocations. She concludes that the most effective production and retention is achieved by presenting collocations in bold towards the end of an entry and repeating them in examples. ‘The Inclusion of Word Formation in OALD8: The Case of Undefined Run-Ons’, by Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc ( Lexikos 24[2014] 291–309), examines a sample of entries and details the nature of the undefined run-ons, i.e. related forms listed at the end of entries rather than treated separately, and the kind of difficulties that they present to learners. They advocate a more transparent approach, and note that electronic presentation, which is less space-limited, allows more detailed treatment of this kind of lemma. Bartosz Ptasznik and Robert Lew ask ‘Do Menus Provide Added Value to Signposts in Print Monolingual Dictionary Entries? An Application of Linear Mixed-Effects Modelling in Dictionary User Research’ ( IJL 27[2014] 241–58), and look at the value of sense-guiding devices for learners of English. An experiment with 118 participants shows an average 20 per cent reduction in access time when signposts are used, but less of an advantage in selecting relevant senses, while combining signposts with menus does not offer additional benefits.
As always, this year there has been a great deal of work on bilingual and multilingual lexicography, and a few examples will be included here. Pádraig Ó Mianáin and Cathal Convery report on the New English–Irish Dictionary ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 318–33), which will be published in print in 2016. The authors set out the lexicographical and socio-historical context for the work and detail its aims and content, before concluding that it is a completely original dictionary that ‘has heralded a new dawn for Irish lexicography’ (p. 332). In ‘Community Engagement in the Revised Chamorro–English Dictionary’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 308–17), Sandra Chung and Elizabeth Diaz Rechebei describe ongoing efforts by a group of speakers to preserve their minority language by revising its dictionary; this project is led by a small team of lexicographers but involves non-experts in its design and production. D.J. Prinsloo gives an account of ‘Lexicographical Treatment of Kinship Terms in an English/Sedepi–Setswana–Sesotho Dictionary with an Amalgamated Lemmalist’ ( Lexikos 24[2014] 272–90), and concludes that, while amalgamated dictionaries have great potential for African languages, this particular domain challenges lexicographers at the macro- and micro-structural levels. M.A. Petrova’s paper ‘The Compreno Semantic Model: The Universality Problem’ ( IJL 27[2014] 105–29) looks at data from a range of languages in a multilingual database, and considers the issues and challenges of a semantic model which can accommodate all of these languages.
Specialized dictionaries have also been the focus of some attention, notably Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Sven Tarp’s very detailed Theory and Practice of Specialised Online Dictionaries: Lexicography Versus Terminography . This begins by asserting that specialized dictionaries merit more attention and a higher status than they have sometimes been afforded, particularly since (according to one study) in 2008–9 they constituted around three-quarters of lexicographical output. In a series of ten chapters, the authors describe and reflect on the theory, practice, and context of this branch of lexicography, devoting a significant portion of the volume to online dictionaries and their particular challenges, and particularly focusing on the Function Theory of Lexicography. Chapter 7 presents ‘A Critical View of Terminography’, and notes that this varies in different traditions and that it has not excited much interest among native English speakers. Like the rest of the book, this chapter surveys the existing literature in a thorough and comprehensive way. Chapter 8 reviews eighteen online dictionaries of various languages, including monolingual dictionaries such as the Cambridge Business English Dictionary and cross-language resources like the United Nations Multilingual Terminology Database . The conclusion to the volume advocates collaboration between subject experts and lexicographers, and recognition that specialized lexicography is on a continuum with other branches of lexicography.
Michele F. van der Merwe and Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera present a study of ‘The Influence of the User Needs Paradigm in Specialised Lexicography: Some Reflections in Connection with Two South African Wine Dictionaries’ ( IbéricaR 27[2014] 77–96), comparing dictionaries published forty years apart and the changing needs of their users. The authors propose that subject field labels like those in the 2012 dictionary are particularly valuable for non-experts using specialized dictionaries, and are easier to devise for these works than the word sketches which provide a foundation for non-specialized dictionaries. Sandro Nielsen explores ‘Example Sentences in Bilingual Specialised Dictionaries Assisting Communication in a Foreign Language’ ( Lexikos 24[2014] 198–213), giving a thorough survey of the existing literature on the topic and (real and imagined) examples of the different approaches that have been adopted, and comments that online dictionaries offer additional possibilities for access to example sentences.
Shifting the focus to work with a historical perspective, Vincent McCarren’s suggestion that OE glosses were a source for an English–Latin bilingual dictionary is questioned by John Considine in ‘Old English Glossaries and the Medulla Grammatice ’ ( N&Q 61[2014] 478–80); he concludes that there is insufficient evidence to prove this kind of relationship. Gabriele Stein’s Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer looks in detail at the work of an important figure of the sixteenth century, who produced an early Latin–English dictionary as well as several other prose works; his translations and treatises are still well known today, and the dictionary can be seen as influential in English lexicographical history. His reputation as a linguistic innovator is supported by OED evidence indicating that he introduced new grammatical terminology. Stein suggests that Elyot’s dictionary has not had the scholarly attention it deserves because it is such a complex work, bringing together ‘the vast knowledge of the classical world and the scientific thinking of his own day, which he had acquired through his reading and studies, and which he made accessible for his countrymen by using their common tongue, English’ (p. 17). The study looks at the historical and linguistic context of Elyot’s work, but the main part is devoted to a detailed examination of the dictionary itself, including word list and editorial principles, Elyot’s awareness of its readership and the stylistic implications of this, attention to regional variation, and Elyot’s approach to headwords, which is compared to that of his predecessors. Chapter 9, ‘Elyot’s Achievement as a Lexicographer’, examines the nature of the OED first attestations attributed to Elyot, which show a mixture of borrowings, new formations, and words which must have already existed in the language. In the final chapter, Stein assesses Elyot’s impact on subsequent lexicographers, which seems considerable. This is a meticulous study which is useful both in its treatment of Elyot’s work and in its critical examination of OED evidence.
A very significant work which should be noted here even though it does not deal exclusively with English lexicography is John Considine’s study of Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800 . This presents a unified account of the ‘academy tradition’ that emerged in Europe in the Renaissance (though Considine is cautious about the use of that phrase (p. 5)), with detailed treatment of the context in which academy dictionaries emerged, including the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française and the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft . Most relevant for this publication are the chapters that focus on the period leading up to the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language , which discuss the individuals and societies with interests in such a project, and lead on to an examination of Johnson’s work itself. Considine argues that ‘Johnson’s Dictionary towered above works like [Nathan] Bailey’s, and this was, first and foremost, because of its place in the academy tradition’ (p. 122), and he goes on demonstrate this by comparing Johnson’s intentions and practices with those of contemporaries in England and around Europe. The book ends with a consideration of lexicographical projects published or under way in the late eighteenth century, including the Russian dictionary Slovar′ Akademii Rossijskoj . This is an enormously useful volume which is both erudite and readable, and it is likely to be a standard work in the field for some time to come. The relationship between Johnson’s lexicographical work and other writing is explored in Robert DeMaria Jr.’s paper ‘Johnson’s Editorial Lexicography’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 146–61). DeMaria argues that the glosses Johnson includes in editions of works by Thomas Browne and Roger Ascham represent ‘hidden acts of lexicography’ (p. 146), and these glosses are collected together and presented as addenda to the Dictionary .
In ‘Linguistics, Lexicography, and the “Early Modern” ’ ( JEMCS 14:ii[2014] 94–9), Hannah Crawforth explores the way in which concerns about the relationship between past and present provoked and shaped early English lexicography, and argues that this suggests ‘an important pre-history to our own debates about periodization and the concept of the “early modern” that lies within the period itself’ (p. 94). A fascinating paper that explores a different aspect of the same period is Lindsay Rose Russell’s examination of the nature of women readers in ‘Before Ladies and Gentlewomen Were Unskillful: Honorific Invocations of Learned Women in Early Modern Bilingual Dictionaries’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 93–120). The involvement of women in some of the lexicographical projects of the period, specifically the bilingual dictionaries that are the focus of this paper, problematizes their representation by many dictionary writers, for example Robert Cawdrey’s conflation of ‘Ladies, Gentlewomen and any other unskilfull persons’ in the title of the Table Alphabeticall . John Considine looks at the work of two lexicographers who appear to have independently created models for later historical dictionaries in ‘John Jamieson, Franz Passow, and the Double Invention of Lexicography on Historical Principles’ ( JHI 75[2014] 261–81). Neither man seems to have been aware of making a significant methodological breakthrough, perhaps partly because their work grew out of a particular literary and cultural context, but both created milestones in historical lexicography. Ammon Shea revisits the question of Shakespeare’s linguistic innovativeness in ‘A Sure Uncertainty: On Some Difficulties Using OED Online Data to Establish Shakespearian Coinages’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 121–45). The number proposed has fallen as new evidence has become available and as different methodologies have been employed; Shea points out that a definitive figure based on OED is highly problematic, but equally significant is the difficulty of what it means to invent a word.
John Considine’s short paper ‘The Deathbed of Herbert Coleridge’ ( N&Q 61[2014] 90–2) uses contemporary sources to reassess the final months of the first editor of OED , and concludes that received accounts are not accurate, though Coleridge does appear to have worked on a range of academic projects until the very end of his life. Traci Nagle focuses on a slightly later period of OED history in ‘The Visible and Invisible Influence of Yule’s Hobson-Jobson on Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary ’ ( IJL 27[2014] 280–308), and concludes that between 50 and 75 per cent of OED entries for South Asian words use material from Hobson-Jobson , though without acknowledgement in the early part of the OED. In later parts, collaboration between the editors was explicitly signalled by Murray, and letters provide evidence of their discussions.
Michael Adams describes the founding of a recent learned society with its own dictionary in ‘The Dictionary Society of North America: A History of the Early Years (Part I)’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 1–35). As well as giving a detailed account of the naming of the society and its journal, Adams describes the lexicographical work that took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the various conferences and meetings that led to its founding and early evolution. David Jost traces the varied trends and themes in the articles that make up ‘Thirty-Four Years of Dictionaries ’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 36–92), a summary which includes a full bibliography of work published in the journal during this period.
David Scott-Macnab and Kelly-Anne Gilbertson examine a treatise on equine medicine that attests words previously unrecorded in OED and MED , as well as new senses and antedatings, in ‘Unrecorded Middle English Lexical Items in the Fifteenth Century Treatise Medicines for Horses : A Preliminary Study’ ( N&Q 61[2014] 344–9). The main part of this article is an annotated wordlist which includes detailed notes on context and use. Javier Ruano-García examines the contribution of a glossary that has previously received little attention in ‘Cumbrian Lexis in the English Dialect Dictionary : William Nicolson’s Glossarium Brigantinum (1677) in Focus’ ( DJDSNA 35[2014] 162–86). This work was used by Joseph Wright to illustrate the use of dialect words from both Cumbria and Westmorland, and in a large proportion of cases provided the only evidence for these words.
Turning to lexical semantics, a particularly important and practical publication is Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative Studies in Polysemy and Synonymy , edited by Dylan Glynn and Justyna Robinson. The editors note in the opening outline that the aim of the volume is to encourage ‘constructive communication’ (p. 1) between the methodologies of linguists using corpus data and more traditional approaches involving introspection, and is intended to have both didactic and scientific functions. Section I presents a collection of studies on English and other languages that employ state-of-the-art techniques of corpus analysis, with a focus on cognitive semantics; in Section II, statistical techniques and their uses are described and explained by experts in the field, with chapters on R, frequency tables, collostructional analysis, cluster analysis, correspondence analysis, and logistic regression. The latter will not be discussed further here, but these are clear, well-judged guides that promise to become invaluable to many in the field who lack familiarity or confidence with these approaches. Several papers in Section I are relevant here. Dylan Glynn begins with a discussion of ‘Polysemy and Synonymy: Cognitive Theory and Corpus Method’ (pp. 7–38), which surveys research in the cognitive semantic tradition and argues that quantitative techniques represent a necessary and logical step forward, one that follows on from introspection-based radial network studies and prototype semantics. In ‘Rethinking Constructional Polysemy: The Case of the English Conative Construction’ (pp. 61–85), Florent Perek examines a construction which, unlike many others, does not appear to attract a particular kind of verb. He employs a variant of collexeme analysis which focuses on verbs by semantic class, and contends that his findings have implications for the kind of generalizations that can be made about the polysemy of this construction and others. Justyna Robinson discusses the sociolinguistic distribution of the meanings of polysemous adjectives including awesome , gay , and wicked in ‘Quantifying Polysemy in Cognitive Sociolinguistics’ (pp. 87–115), using survey data from seventy-two speakers, which is analysed via hierarchical agglomerative clustering, decision tree analysis and logistic regression analysis. Her results provide convincing evidence for the ‘social grounding of polysemous conceptualisations’ (p. 111), and for the marrying of these approaches. Similar interests inform Dylan Glynn’s paper ‘The Many Uses of Run : Corpus Methods and Socio-Cognitive Semantics’ (pp. 117–44), which aims to refine the theory, methods, and results of an earlier paper by Stefan Gries by applying a multifactorial usage-feature analysis to corpus data for the verb run ; the study makes a case for the impact of sociolinguistic factors on semasiological structure. Guillaume Desagulier looks at the conceptual structure of four degree modifiers, and ‘attraction’ between them, in ‘Visualizing Distances in a Set of Near-Synonyms: Rather , Quite , Fairly and Pretty ’ (pp. 145–78). Drawing on several statistical methods and using data from COCA as the basis for collostructional analysis, Desagulier examines the fine semantic differences between these lexemes and the entrenchment of the constructions in which they occur. Sandra C. Deshors and Stefan Th. Gries make ‘A Case for the Multifactorial Assessment of Learner Language: The Uses of May and Can in French–English Interlanguage’ (pp. 179–204) by analysing the distribution of morphosyntactic and semantic features with a hierarchical cluster analysis and a logistic regression. Their study suggests that learners build up relatively coherent mental categories which inform their choice of one or other of these verbs but do not always lead to a ‘correct’ choice. Finally, ‘A Diachronic Corpus-Based Multivariate Analysis of “I Think That ” vs. “I Think Zero” ’ is presented by Christopher Shank, Koen Pleveots, and Hubert Cuyckens (pp. 279–303), based on spoken and written corpus data from 1560 to 2012; the Corpus of English Dialogues and the Old Bailey Corpus are used to approximate earlier speech. A logistic regression analysis suggests a decrease in zero complementation over time, rather than the increase indicated by previous research. A separate article which is also valuable to lexicographers and lexicologists interested in harnessing (relatively) new technology for research is ‘Sketch Engine: Ten Years On’ by Adam Kilgarriff, Vít Baisa, Jan Bu 
ta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel ( LexAsia 1[2014] 7–36). This paper reviews the functions, users, and approaches of this ten-year-old corpus tool, traces its revisions and input corpora, and surveys other similar resources; it shows clearly why Sketch Engine is so important in lexicographical research, and why Adam Kilgarriff is such a very great loss to the discipline.
Worth mentioning briefly here although it does not limit its focus to English is Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka’s book Words and Meaning: Lexical Semantics across Domains, Languages and Cultures . This builds on the authors’ previous work in Natural Semantics Metalanguage (NSM), and examines a number of different categories and domains including words for physical qualities (including sweet and rough ), colour, and pain, and the semantics of proverbs. The first chapter presents a survey of research in semantics and then sets out the principles and methodology of NSM. Subsequent chapters compare the terms found in two or more languages, including English, Russian, Malay, and Polish. Chapter 7 looks solely at English and specifically speech-act verbs, which appear to be more numerous in English than other European languages, and concludes that this large repertoire results from the cultural prominence of writing. Chapter 9 considers the distinction between abstract and concrete nouns and proposes that nouns in the two groups have different semantic structures; this discussion looks particularly interesting for scholars in the field. This is an impressive and thought-provoking book which draws from a very wide range of sources, both very recent and much more established (and in some cases, relatively little-known and neglected). It is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about NSM, but even for critics this is a worthwhile read. One study this year which employs NSM is Sandy Habib’s ‘Dying in the Cause of God: The Semantics of the Christian and Muslim Concepts of Martyr’ ( AUJL 34[2014] 388–98). Habib explicates each in terms of semantic primes and molecules, and notes a fairly high level of similarity between the two concepts, though there is a difference in whether the referent is a combatant or not. Another volume which looks across cultures and languages to explore the relationship between words and concepts is the collection Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000 , by Ute Frevert, Christian Bailey, Pascal Eitler, Benno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, Margrit Perna, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, and Nina Verheyen. It explores one area of vocabulary as represented in German, French, and English encyclopedias. Despite its title, much of the volume focuses on cultural rather than linguistic history, but with more attention to language than is often the case; it may therefore be of interest to linguists interested in terms for emotions in modern times.
A very different perspective is offered by Roy Harris and Christopher Hutton’s Definition in Theory and Practice: Language, Lexicography and the Law . Harris and Hutton survey the practices and theories of definition that have been employed in the present and the past, and compare lexicographical and legal approaches; they contend that integrating ideas from the two disciplines is valuable, not least because the law is unusual in the way it ‘relies overtly upon the possibility of determining verbal meanings’ and often refers to dictionaries. They divide their study into three sections. Part I, ‘Definition and Theory’, is a survey of definition in Western thought, discussing stipulative definition, ‘real’ definition, which aims to bypass words in favour of concepts, and ostensive definition; chapter 2 also considers ‘common usage’. Part II, ‘Definition and the Dictionary’, looks at the intentions and practices of Johnson and editors of the OED and the definitional types that are used in lexicography, and compares definitions and uses of words as diverse as liberty and mahogany . Part III moves on to ‘Definition and the Law’, noting the surprising lack of attention to questions of definition; the three chapters present a number of legal cases and the ways in which these dealt with questions of meaning, and look at the question of whether the law can be considered a science. In the concluding chapter, ‘Definition, Indeterminacy and Reference’, the authors reject pessimistic views that ‘see attempts at definition as doomed in advance to failure’, and argue for an integrationist approach that privileges first-order linguistic experience.
Julie Coleman’s edited volume Global English Slang: Methodologies and Perspectives is a collection of eighteen papers on current use by a wide range of speaker groups around the world. These are preceded by an introduction which interrogates the notion of slang itself. As Coleman notes, ‘the definition of slang remains unstable to the point that a dozen slang experts happily spent three days circling around this very issue [at the workshop which led to the volume]’ (p. 2). A theme of the book is the notion that slang is a product of context and function rather than of any characteristic linguistic features. The papers are presented in four sections. Part I describes ‘Contemporary Slang in the United States and England’, and includes studies of the slang of hip-hop, inner-city New York, American college students, University of Leicester students, multicultural London, and ‘the new canting crew’, i.e. English prison inmates and those involved in criminal activities. Like many other papers, the latter considers the origins of a number of expressions, and makes some observations about media attention to this kind of slang. Part II has a broader geographical range, discussing ‘Slang in Other English-Speaking Countries’, namely Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Jamaica, and India. Part III looks at ‘English Influence on the Slang of Other Languages’, and these are Norwegian (specifically Norwegian teenagers), Italian, and Japanese. Finally, Part IV, ‘Slang and the Internet’, looks at slang in ‘new media’ including Usenet and Twitter, Urban Dictionary, and gestural slang, and finally considers ‘Global English Slang in the Era of Big Data’. A strength of the volume is its varying scope: the inclusion of papers on both very large regional areas and small, narrowly defined groups affords readers some interesting comparisons. The large number of examples that illustrate each chapter make this an informative point of reference for scholars in the field and non-experts, and it looks likely to be a well-used and valued resource.
At the intersection between etymology and lexicology is Philip Durkin’s monograph Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English . This is an enormously impressive piece of scholarship built on Durkin’s research as OED deputy chief editor, which incorporates detailed close analysis of individual word histories throughout. Perhaps more importantly, though, it steps back from this data to survey the language in different periods, and explore the impact of borrowing in a methodologically sophisticated way. Part I details the approach of the study, and the nature and challenges of the data. Durkin interrogates the notion of ‘the vocabulary of English’ and its difficulties: there are lexical differences between regional varieties, but just as significant is variation between the active and passive vocabularies of individual speakers. Because of these differences, ‘when we speak about the vocabulary (or lexis) of a language, it can be useful to think of a (not very precisely defined) common core of basic vocabulary’ (p. 19). Durkin uses corpora and basic-meaning lists to identify this ‘common core’, examining the 1,000 and 100 most frequent words in English and considering the proportion of loanwords from different sources. The main part of the book is divided by period and input language, looking first, in Parts II to IV, at OE (and proto-OE) and languages with which it had contact; as in the following sections, there is detailed discussion of the historical context and motivations for borrowing, and the relationship between language change and external history. Part V moves on to ME, focusing on borrowing from Latin and French and the nature of contact between the three languages. Part VI explores the period from 1500 onwards, and moves from Latin and French loanwords to borrowing from a diverse range of European and non-European languages. Finally, Durkin looks at the long-term effects of borrowing and presents general conclusions and a summary of each period. The volume builds on existing research in linguistics and beyond to present an insightful account of the process of borrowing and its effects on English; its careful and transparent handling of the evidence and accessible presentation make it essential for anyone working in this field (more information can be found in Section 1 above).
Sara M. Pons-Sanz’s The Language of Early English Literature: From Caedmon to Milton is essentially a stylistics textbook, but one which unusually includes chapters on semantics, borrowing, and word-formation (as a means of lexical expansion). Each of these considers the relationship between lexis and its historical and textual context, introduces the topic in a way that makes an eloquent case for its importance to stylistic study, and does not assume detailed linguistic knowledge. The discussion of wordplay in the semantics chapter is a particularly welcome addition to a topic that is relatively under-researched. The historical range of the volume, and the way in which it balances simple, engaging explanation with sophisticated analysis make it a valuable work for students of both literature and linguistics. Another publication at the interface between stylistics and lexicology is ‘A Case Analysis of Lexical Features in English Broadsheets and Tabloids’, by Yingxia Li, Dongyu Zhang, and Wanyi Du ( IJEL 4:iv[2014] 115–22). This compares the lexical choices in tabloids and broadsheets from both the US and UK, and finds that fuzzy words are used more frequently in broadsheets, but more numbers can be found in tabloids.
Javier Calle-Martín writes ‘On the History of the Intensifier Wonder in English’ ( AUJL 34[2014] 399–419), tracing the development of the adverb across the history of the language from OE onwards. The study considers collocational patterns and attitudinal features, and is based on data from a large number of corpora, painstakingly and thoughtfully assembled; it also makes illuminating comparisons with other word histories. The history and treatment of an Anglo-Indian expression which was used in the title of an influential dictionary is the focus for James Lambert’s ‘A Much Tortured Expression: A New Look at “Hobson-Jobson” ’ ( IJL 27[2014] 54–88). The account of this expression given by the editors was not supported by evidence in the dictionary itself and is not wholly accurate; Lambert reassesses the evidence, and presents senses and uses not recorded previously. William Sayers looks beyond the OED account and considers the nature of the referents in an eModE phrase which is now obsolete, ‘Like Harp and Harrow’ ( N&Q 61[2014] 482–3).
At the more popular end of the market is Jonathon Green’s well-informed and entertaining volume Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue . In his conclusion, Green writes that ‘Slang is a language of themes’ (p. 385), and this is the principle by which the book is organized: most chapters explore a particular area of slang lexis, including the vocabulary of crime and punishment (chapter 4) and gayspeak (chapter 13), while others focus on the slang of a particular region such as Australia (chapter 8) or London (chapter 10). Green weaves examples into a discussion of linguistic and social history which also tells the story of slang lexicography, pausing specifically to describe nineteenth-century slang dictionaries and their writers in chapter 12. Like his other publications, this is a fascinating and highly readable account which has appeal for both linguists and non-linguists. Also published this year is Green’s memoir Odd Job Man: Some Confessions of a Slang Lexicographer , in which he reflects on his career and its place in the history of slang lexicography. This is a much more personal book, but again it features a colourful range of historical figures and events, and refers to many of the slang words and phrases that Green has collected and catalogued in his career to date. Finally, Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary , by David Crystal, provides an accessible entrance point for general readers. Fifteen chapters present simplified HTOED extracts with commentary on each entry, each with a brief introduction; the sections chosen range from words for ‘nose’, ‘fool’, or ‘prostitute’, to terms of endearment, to oaths and exclamations. The general introduction to the volume is a helpful explanation of how the thesaurus classification works and how the data is presented in the version integrated into the OED Online , and is a very gentle beginning for anyone new to HTOED .
8. Onomastics
Last year’s publications in the field of onomastics were focused on power; this year’s selection of publications is similarly thematic. Much of the work cited below concentrates on influence. Of the books and articles published, researchers tended to investigate the formation of names by powerful individuals, such as Christopher Columbus, or they concentrated on the role that names play in various environments (for instance that of a prison yard), or on the concept that names shape identities, like minority names in university settings. Although the studies published in 2014 were sparse, they indicate a profound shift in onomastics. Based on the research mentioned here, it is clear that onomastics will continue to combine multiple academic fields to explore the relationship between names, their creators, and their evolution. It will be interesting to see what future onomastic studies will bring us, what new critical thought will arise with respect to names and their role in our society.
It is a pleasure to announce an important contribution to the formation of names entitled The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England: The Linguistics and Culture of the Old English Onomasticon . Fran Colman reports on the significance between onomastics and the onomasticon in arguing that names as a category, including the lexical parts they are composed of, must be studied by way of the onomasticon. The onomasticon, which includes structural information about the formation of lexical items, paints a fuller picture of their etymology, semantics, and grammatical behaviour. Colman also investigates how names function within OE and compares them with Germanic and non-Germanic naming systems. The book comprises three parts: an introduction and two sections entitled ‘On Names’ and ‘Towards the Old English Onomasticon’. The introduction offers insight into why the onomasticon plays a different and unique role from the study of onomastics alone. Further, it provides information on names’ sources and gender. ‘On Names’ contextualizes names as words and not as nouns. Specifically, the researcher includes chapters entitled ‘Names as Words’, ‘Names Are Not Nouns’, and ‘A Name Is a Name.’ Further chapters in the second part are concerned with ‘Old English Personal Name Formation’, ‘General Lexical Formation’, ‘Structures of Old English Personal Names’, ‘On the Role of the Paradigm as a Marker of Lexical-Item Formation’, and ‘An Old English Onomasticon’. For example, the chapter discussing lexical formation goes into great detail about the differences between lexicon formation and word formation, derivational morphology, and stress assignment, among others. Colman notes that these changes or reductions in word structures have implications even for the present-day English lexicon, which may include ‘either gunwale or gunnel ’ (p. 189). This thorough exploration of personal names is thought-provoking in its use of the onomasticon and is a nice addition to any onomastics library (for information on the morphosyntactic relevance of this study for OE, see Section 5 above)
Another full-length study published in the field of onomastics is Christopher Columbus’s Naming in the Diarios of the Four Voyages (1492–1504) written by Evelina Gužauskytė. This book investigates the naming practices used by Christopher Columbus in his travels to the Caribbean Basin. Despite popular belief, Gužauskytė suggests that Columbus’s naming practices were not a result of his pride, or of prejudices he may have had. The names chosen by Columbus are, instead, a reflection of the complexities within the European world, the Basin’s inhabitants, nature in the area, and the geographical location. The book is divided into six chapters, plus an introduction, conclusion, and a final appendix. The introduction is fairly lengthy; it begins with an interesting account about the ‘Capitalaciones de Santa Fe’, otherwise known as the contract between the Spanish Crown and Columbus. Gužauskytė notes that the original contract did not mention place names and that this may have served several purposes, including diplomacy, politics, and secrecy. The book continues with chapters entitled ‘ “Named Incorrectly”: The Geographic and Symbolic Functions of Columbian Place Names’, ‘Words and the World: The Known Corpus of Columbian Place Names’, ‘ “Y Saber Dellos Los Secretos de la Terra”: Taino Typonymy and Columbian Naming’, ‘Heavenly Bodies and Metallurgy in Columbian Typonymy’, ‘Iguana and Christ’, and ‘Infernal Imagery: Spirituality and Cosmology in the Final Two Voyages’. On the basis of the title, some may wonder if being a fluent Spanish speaker is necessary for reading this book. While Spanish names are indeed found in it, the book serves as a key text in the onomastic understanding of naming procedures in the Caribbean Basin. The most interesting part of the study is to be found in the appendix, which offers ‘A Comprehensive List of Columbian Place Names’. The entries in this list provide a description of the meaning of the place names and when or where they were first noted. The list of nearly thirty pages of place-name entries follows the order in which they were first noted by Columbus in the diarios . Remaining names are listed on the basis of the numerous primary sources that Gužauskytė consulted. Gužauskytė even takes the trouble to include alternative spellings and dates first mentioned, where this information is available. In addition, translations are provided for the names.
Finally, a book released in 2014 on the study of place names is Indigenous and Minority Placenames: Australian and International Perspectives , edited by Ian D. Clark, Luise Hercus, and Laura Kostanski. This book is the third volume in the series; its focus is on the investigation of place names in Australia, with some toponymic research in other countries such as Canada, Finland, South Africa, New Zealand, and Norway. As with the earlier volumes, the book contains various papers written by different authors, each of which utilizes various disciplines such as anthropology, geography, history, and, of course, linguistics. The vast majority of papers are the product of a conference on place names which took place at the University of Ballarat in 2007. The volume begins with an introduction containing a summary of all the papers included. Each summary includes the general idea, a couple of illustrative examples from the text, and shows where the paper fits into the present context of toponymic studies. Unfortunately, there is no organization or grouping of papers into coherent sections. The individual papers present research on various place names including, but not limited to, the etymologies of place names in Gundungurra and New South Wales, language dissemination via place names, and the use of these names within the language. One of the more interesting chapters is the one entitled ‘Doing Things with Toponyms: The Pragmatics of Placenames in Western Arnhem Land’ by Murray Garde, who claims that place names are a dense part of the language system within aboriginal cultures that manifest themselves in the frequent use of toponyms in conversation. Garde specifically uses an indexical approach to investigate the pragmatic use of place names in the Bininj Gunwok dialect. The researcher shows that these names are used pragmatically for various roles including the making of mental maps. The volume as a whole should be an interesting read for those interested in the progression of current onomastic research.
In this year’s scholarly articles, onomasts investigated several different areas of naming including place names, personal names, and nicknames. Richard Coates attempts to reconcile different interpretations concerning the etymology and meaning of the place name Oundle in ‘Oundle, Northamptonshire’ ( JEPNS 46[2014] 40–4). Coates first notes that Oundle is the death-place of both St Wilfrid and St Cett as well as the burial-place of Wulfstan of York, the archbishop. The article continues by showing the various pre-Conquest forms of the name, including ‘Undalum’, ‘undelum’, and ‘Undele’. Next, Coates briefly summarizes common views of the name from Ekwall, Cox, and Watts, who each argue that the name is tribal. Coates contests that it is unlikely for an ‘adjective which is itself derived from a noun then to be morphologically “re-equipped” as a tribal name’ (p. 41). Two alternatives are then proposed for the meaning of the original form. The first is that the name is one of topographical importance. The second, and admittedly more plausible, alternative is that the name is a compound noun comprising two elements that together could mean ‘shares of divisions made by grant’ (p. 42). Even though the article is short, it covers much ground about competing theories of the name’s background and meaning and is an excellent representation of onomastic work at its core.
Just as important as the etymologies of place names is the changing and replacing of toponyms. Within onomastics the study of names as commodities and as nationalistic symbols tend to be separated. It is interesting, therefore, that Chris W. Post and Derek H. Alderman combine these two areas of study in ‘ “Wiping New Berlin off the Map”: Political Economy and the De-Germanisation of the Toponymic Landscape in First World War USA’ ( Area 46[2014] 83–91). This research focuses on the name of the town New Berlin, Ohio, which was changed to North Canton, Ohio, during the First World War. The onomasts posit that the name change was not simply to de-Germanize the town, as many would suspect. Instead it was a combination of symbolic capital, symbolic annihilation, and rescaling of economic linkages. W.H. Hoover and Hoover Suction Sweeper, two businesses located in the town of New Berlin, viewed the place name as a liability (in terms of profits, customers, and advertisers lost) to their businesses due to its association with Germany. In addition, the name change served as an ‘erasure of racial and ethnic histories and identities for the purpose of constructing and selling an exclusive American landscape narrative in which certain social groups are made to appear not to belong or matter’ (p. 89). Finally, the renaming of the town allowed for new scalar configurations and associations to be made between the new name North Canton and a nearby city Canton, which was a mecca for large business production. Post and Alderman claim that the name change of New Berlin was not merely a result of a growing nationalistic sentiment against Germany in the US but was also contextualized within a ‘wider political economy of local development and employment’ (p. 90).
The onomasts in the above-mentioned article demonstrate that place names can represent authority in multiple facets; in a similar way personal names can play a significant role in the shaping and maintaining of one’s identity. In an interesting study about the reading of names during convocation ceremonies—‘Reading and Righting the Names at a Convocation Ceremony: Influences of Linguistic Ideologies on Name Usage in an Institutional Interaction’ ( Names 62[2014] 37–48)—Karen Pennesi suggests that the reading and correcting of names is influenced by linguistic ideologies and that this procedure mirrors the use of names in international institutions. In a pilot study, the researcher compared audio recordings of pronunciations of name cards with handwritten notations from two convocation ceremonies in June 2012. The convocations took place at Western University, a Canadian university with a student population of nearly 30,000. A sizeable percentage of these students are international students from about 100 countries. Given the cultural diversity of the students, it is no surprise that a large number of graduating students’ names were considered ‘unfamiliar’ to the Anglo-Canadian orators. In addition, the researcher analysed interviews with four faculty members/orators, five administrative staff, and twenty-one students prior to the convocations. The onomast works from the assumption that the convocation should be seen as a speech event, one which marks the transition from being a student to being a graduate. The speaking of the name is important to several different interlocutors, including the orator, the graduate, the graduate’s family, the other convocation personnel, and other spectators. Each of these different groups of people needs to be satisfied by the reading and ‘righting’ of the graduate’s name in order for the speech event to be considered successful. The researcher briefly reviews the protocol for the graduation ceremony indicating that the graduates themselves write comments on the notecards that have their names. From that point, the graduate hands the card to the chief orator, who whispers a proposed pronunciation of the name to the graduate, receives approval from the graduate, and then hands the card to the orator at the microphone, who finally pronounces the graduate’s name. In connection with this procedure, it is important for Pennesi to note the competing linguistic ideologies of names. On the one hand, names are considered words that must be pronounced correctly. On the other, names are persons serving a role in the cultural or multicultural identity of the graduate. Pennesi argues that ‘subjective experiences play an important role in the development of linguistic ideologies, and these ideologies influence interactions’ (p. 43). More simply put, the negotiation of identities between those who are named and those who are saying the name is influenced by the competing linguistic ideologies.
Similarly, nicknames can influence individual identity. The notion that personal names and nicknames have power is not new. However, nicknames in a prison yard may have significantly different power, and this power many manifest itself in different ways. Nicknames in prison yards have been studied before, but Sharon Black, Brad Wilcox, and Brad Platt investigated this phenomenon in a unique way in ‘Nicknames in Prison: Meaning and Manipulation in Inmate Monikers’ ( Names 62[2014] 127–36). Black and Wilcox took the suggestion of Holland (cf. YWES 68[1990]) of collaborating with a prisoner, in this case Platt, an Arizona State Prison inmate. From this relationship, they were able to collect observations and informal interviews regarding the power of nicknames. Much of the article presents anecdotal evidence for pre-existing research. For example, the use of nicknames to unify a group had already been presented by Holland; however, Platt’s observations and informal interviews added real-life testimony to what most researchers do not have access to. Platt’s authority in and familiarity with Arizona State Prison allowed for other prisoners to speak more freely in presenting their experiences. Similarly, evidence here substantiated claims that nicknames are a sign of friendship or acceptance, a sign of unacceptance, or a reflection of individuality. They can also be used as a covert form of in-group communication where members who are not in the group are excluded from the conversation based on their lack of nickname awareness. The origin of individual nicknames in prison society was also unique. Nicknames are derived from inmate appearance, personality traits and preferences, and background and experience. As the authors put it, ‘the prison yard is a microcosm of humanity under pressure and stress. Considering the phenomenon of prison nicknames can give us all more understanding of the people and conditions they represent’ (p. 135).
Just as nicknames serve various purposes in the prison yard setting, monikers also have multiple functions for those outside the prison system. In ‘The Adoption of Non-Heritage Names among Chinese Mainlanders’ ( Names 62[2014] 65–75), Peter Sercombe and Tony Young investigate non-heritage names (NHNs) of the mainland Chinese, showing that that NHNs can take on personal, interpersonal, and political uses. The authors are interested in how and why some mainland Chinese students in English-speaking environments assume NHNs. They investigated 156 English linguistic majors, 97.4 per cent of whom had adopted an NHN. The pilot study consisted of two parts, including three days’-worth of informal diary accounts by the researchers and semi-structured interviews with eight subjects. The results show that self-selected or endowed NHNs were used regularly and that the NHN had some sort of connection to a Chinese name or had positive associations such as sounding nice or having a positive meaning. These findings led to the distribution of 156 questionnaires. Even though 97.4 per cent of those surveyed had adopted an NHN, 31.4 per cent indicated that their NHN was less important than their Chinese nickname—suggesting that since their names had been adopted or chosen recently, they could be more easily changed. One of the functions or results of the NHN is to develop a closer relationship between the student and the teacher, with 54 per cent suggesting that the use of the NHN in the classroom increased the closeness in the relationship. Furthermore, 55 per cent indicated that they felt more English and 80 per cent felt less Chinese because of their NHN. The researchers suggest that one of the functions of the NHN is for Chinese students to more easily interact with the non-Chinese. In addition, the use of this NHN enables them to play a part in China’s goal of becoming a more globalized country. As stated by Sercombe and Young, ‘proficiency in English empowers individuals, suggests a positive image to other Chinese, indicates a degree of cosmopolitanism and reflects China’s increasing and desired involvement in the world market’ (p. 73).
A relatively unstudied area of onomastics is the relationship between alphabetical name placement and political success. In ‘Alphabetical Effects on Political Careers’ ( Names 62[2014] 229–38), R. Urbatsch investigates if ‘alphabetically early surnames may promote electoral success’ (p. 229). The study makes use of a septemvigesimal system which assigns one number to each letter in the alphabet. Each letter of the names is then assigned a numerical value. Alphabetical distribution of names was calculated for elected officials and for the general population. While these two populations were reviewed, more specific criteria were used to review each research question. Urbatsch sought to discover whether elected officials have alphabetically early names and whether alphabeticism affects leadership positions once elected. In general, Urbatsch found that ‘political success is more likely for those whose names appear earlier in the alphabet’ (p. 236). This adds credence to recent literature suggesting that alphabetically early names in mock-elections have an advantage (C.R. Bagley [1965]; Andrew J. Johnson and Chris Miles [2011]). More specifically, leadership positions in the House of Representatives are more likely to be filled by members whose names have an early alphabetical position. On the other hand, the Senate does not show this correlation.
With the possibility of names in Congress having a significant impact on political careers, it would be interesting to see how unisex names may shape the future in this respect. Herbert Barry III and Aylene S. Harper investigate unisex names given to infants in ‘Unisex Names for Babies Born in Pennsylvania 1990–2010’ ( Names 62[2014] 13–22). Unisex names are names with ‘substantial frequency of both genders in the same population in the same year’ (p. 13). The authors remind the reader that females are generally given unisex names more frequently than men, as indicated in Herbert Barry III and Aylene S. Harper [1993] and Stanley Lieberson et al. [2001]. To examine this trend more closely, first-name frequencies from 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 were sampled using Pennsylvania birth certificates. These first-name frequencies were evaluated by change of gender preference and consistency of gender preference. In addition, ethnicity was an evaluation criterion, separating names given by ‘white mothers’ and ‘black mothers’. These evaluation criteria created four groups pertaining to unisex names. Statistical analysis was completed using SPSS. Barry and Harper’s findings give further support to earlier research that suggests that female babies are more frequently given traditionally male names than vice versa. The researchers posit that this may be due to the fact that male names are more typically associated with status. In addition, the letter ‘n’ being found in the final position of the name might be an indicator of unisex naming. This is because ‘n’ as a final letter is highly popular for both male and female names. Given this popularity and the fact that there is a trend of male names being given to baby girls, it is no surprise that ‘n’ could be a marker of unisex names. In all, Barry and Harper’s findings on unisex naming add evidence to the notion that naming in the United States is greatly diverse and that this diversity is due in part to the trend of names becoming appropriate for both genders, the dying out of particular unisex names, and their replacement by new unisex names.
9. Dialectology and Sociolinguistics
In the field of dialectology and sociolinguistics we will start with general works and textbooks, where we note the publication (actually from last year) of John Edwards’s Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction [2013]. This series is designed for ‘anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way into a new subject’ (according to the blurb), and this ‘anyone’ will be taken on a romp through a very wide range of topics on just over 100 (very small) pages, since Edwards deals with attitudes to variation, prescriptivism, endangered languages and language loss, multilingualism, and, among others, variationist sociolinguistics (well—two of Labov’s studies are cited). Wide-ranging, quite readable, this book(let) will give you Edwards’s perspective on what is done in the field. Why he feels he has to start with Chomsky, though, beats us. More geared to the (beginning) expert (i.e. student), and more narrow in outlook is Daniel Schreier’s Variation and Change in English: An Introduction . He sets the scene by explaining that variation is inherent in language (or, perhaps better, societies), introduces variationist sociolinguistics and in particular the sociolinguistic interview as the data-collecting method of choice, and then discusses the data analysis of variation as conditioned by various social processes. This is not as hands-on as some other textbooks, but Schreier does use established studies and talks his readers through them, which makes the way sociolinguists work clear, and should also help students read other studies. Schreier also looks at contact and change (under the headings of creolization, New Englishes, and dialect contact) and ends with the ‘million dollar question’ (i.e. actuation), to which not much in the way of an answer has been found yet, and which may ultimately turn out to be unresolvable. Altogether, this book is a neat basic introduction to variationist sociolinguistics for undergraduate beginners, which could easily be expanded for a university course by adding more in-depth, original studies. All chapters are followed by questions and suggestions for further reading, making this quite a compact first introduction to the topic.
Much more detailed (and voluminous) is Janet Holmes and Kirk Hazen’s edited volume on Research Methods in Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide . Here, more advanced students will learn that there are more methods besides the sociolinguistic interview (which of course also features, in a contribution by Michol Hoffman), such as written surveys and questionnaires (introduced by Erik Schleef), experimental methods (explicated by Katie Drager), or the investigation of computer-mediated discourse (by Jannis Androutsopoulos—more on this topic below). After this first part, with chapters on ‘Types of Data and Methods of Data Collection’, the remainder of the book presents several ‘Methods of Analysis’, both more narrowly variationist ones and also some sociocultural ones. Variationist analyses include historical sociolinguistics (presented by Terttu Nevalainen), the use of corpus linguistics more generally (Paul Baker), and detailed articles on various levels of analysis, i.e. phonetics (Erik R. Thomas)—although ‘sociophonetics’, the buzzword of the past few years, is notably absent here; phonology (Paul Kerswill and Kevin Watson, even though phonological analyses are actually only rarely encountered in sociolinguistic work), morphosyntax (Julia Davydova), vocabulary (Michael Adams—with interesting advice on how to construct a sociolinguistic glossary), discourse (Janet Holmes), and an extra (actually very useful) contribution on statistics (Gregory R. Guy). The sociocultural part then adds anthropological analysis, in particular an ethnographic analysis of context and indexicality (Alexandra Jaffe), conversation analysis (Paul Drew), geographical dialectology (David Britain), speech communities and communities of practice (Robin Dodsworth), multilingual contexts (Rajend Mesthrie), style and identity (Nikolas Coupland), and children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic competence (Carmel O’Shannessy). All chapters are written from a personal perspective and typically deal with the author’s own data. The reader is often directly addressed (‘you should measure many tokens of each vowel’), and the more technical discussions are regularly supplemented by sections on ‘quagmires and troubleshooting’, advice, tips, and project ideas, which make this collection of essays a must-have for young researchers, and also looks helpful if you want to expand your own work into a direction you are not too familiar with yet. Highly recommended!
The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork , edited by Nicholas Thieberger [2012], is now published in paperback. Although this handbook is really geared towards linguistic anthropologists and means ‘fieldwork’ in the sense of language documentation, it contains some chapters that may also be relevant for sociolinguistics in a narrower sense, especially the chapter on ‘Sociolinguistic Fieldwork’ (pp. 121–46) by Miriam Meyerhoff, Chie Adachi, Golnaz Nanbakhsh, and Anna Strycharz. Although, as the authors note, sociolinguistics is an extremely heterogeneous field, the extent of the range of fieldwork methods is quite well described by the sociolinguistic interview on the one hand (as we have already seen above), and participant observation on the other. They also helpfully point out that the ‘usual’ sociolinguistic variables (age, gender, class, ethnicity) ‘were never intended to be programmatic’ (p. 124), but that sociolinguistics deals (or should deal) with any socially meaningful groups. But in addition, if you are thinking about investigating the ‘Language of Food’, ‘Ethnomathematics’ or ‘Cultural Astronomy’ in a society near you, this handbook may well be worth looking into.
We also note here the publication of what may become a new standard reference work: Raymond Hickey’s A Dictionary of Varieties of English , a monumental collection of headwords, linguistic detail, and variationist references in the widest sense. Although there is also a short introduction on ‘Research Trends in Variety Studies’ (pp. 1–7), the bulk of the book is made up of dictionary-style headwords and their entries. In addition, several appendices give an overview of the lexical sets and the phonetic symbols employed, as well as a useful overview of differences between transcription practices (pp. 355–62). The book also contains an extensive ‘Reference Guide for Varieties of English’ (pp. 363–431), subdivided thematically into regions, roughly following Braj Kachru’s concentric circles (although this model is not explicitly used by Hickey). Curiously (given the title), there is also a (short) section on literature of ‘Overseas Forms of Spanish’ (p. 430)—presumably because of its potential influence on varieties of English overseas (for the same reason, again presumably, some technical Spanish-language terms are found in the entries, such as seseo ). The dictionary entries themselves include some very basic vocabulary from all levels of linguistics (‘phone, phoneme, pharynx, coronal, apocope, sentence, question, imperative, syntagm, synonym, antonym, theme, rheme, aphasia’); some clearly dialectological terms (‘apparent time, incipient change, chain shift’, including popular non-technical terms like ‘brogue, hoi toider, Jafaican, strine’, or ‘Mockney’), but also some biographical sketches (e.g. of linguists such as Sir Randolph Quirk and Otto Jespersen, creolists such as Hugo Schuchardt and Derek Bickerton, variationist linguists such as Peter Trudgill, William Labov, A.J. Aitken, Hans Kurath, and Ossi Ihalainen, but also of explorers, including Walter Raleigh, James Cook, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and even Christopher Columbus); sketches of varieties and languages, including practically unknown ones (Polari, Shelta); individual linguistic features (e.g. ASK-metathesis, positive anymore , CHAIR-CHEER merger, never with punctual time reference); geographies (Antigua and Barbuda, Antilles, East Indies); and, finally, corpora (mostly for StE, but the author’s own Corpus of Irish English is included, as is COLT, FRED, or NECTE). Perhaps unexpected is the inclusion of terms relating to language prescriptivism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (s.v. Samuel Johnson, Bishop Robert Lowth, John Walker, ‘prescriptivism, elocution, complaint tradition’), as well as issues of standardization (with entries like ‘Inkhorn Controversy’, ‘Neologizers’, ‘Archaizers’, King James). In other words, ‘varieties of English’ here has a very wide range, and it might be worth looking up what you’re interested in in this volume—we at least haven’t found much yet that was missing, perhaps with the exception of the ‘Tar Heels’ (see below!). Even some comic relief is catered for (s.v. ‘pun’).
With this dictionary we already move to general publications dealing with English accents and dialects. Some more technical individual contributions have appeared this year. Thus, William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., Ilkka Juuso, and C. Thomas Bailey propose a ‘Computer Simulation of Dialect Feature Diffusion’ ( JLG 2[2014] 41–57), where the application of a simple update rule (adopt a variant if two, three, or four neighbours use it, maintain the variant if five or more neighbours use it) in their ‘cellular automatons’ leads to complex behaviour from which patterns emerge, patterns of the kind we typically see in linguistic atlas data. Vaclav Brezina and Miriam Meyerhoff ask: ‘Significant or Random? A Critical Review of Sociolinguistic Generalisations Based on Large Corpora’ ( IJCL 19[2014] 1–28). In fact, they can show nicely that ‘by aggregating data we lose track of the individual speaker differences’ (p. 10), and random aggregation leads to ‘spurious results with very little bearing on social reality’ (p. 23). The authors propose that help might be at hand, in the form of the Mann-Whitney U test that can take account of inter-speaker variation, but ultimately researchers should of course know their material, and evaluate their results critically, to obtain meaningful results.
One important general factor that is discussed this year is the role of media, highlighted in a special section of the Journal of Sociolinguistics (18:ii[2014]). The bone of contention is Dave Sayers’s focus article on ‘The Mediated Innovation Model: A Framework for Researching Media Influence in Language Change’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 185–212), where he argues that the mass media (actually, he produces a model for TV, but does not include the Internet) may indeed be a relevant factor in the global spread of linguistic variants, but the audience has to have a high emotional investment and engage with the TV series in question. Traditionally, of course, mass media are taken to be completely irrelevant to language change (except, perhaps, for the diffusion of lexis), as argued by Peter Trudgill in his reply ‘Diffusion, Drift, and the Irrelevance of Media Influence’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 214–22), since ‘to deny that face-to-face contact is the principal factor in language change would be foolish’ (p. 215). Other sociolinguists are not as dogmatic; thus Jannis Androutsopoulos, in his rejoinder ‘Beyond “Media Influence” ’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 242–9), urges researchers to study media-engagement practices, audience design, representation, and style more systematically, but also cautions us that since the English language itself is an important phenomenon of globalization, the anglophone world might be quite untypical in the wider perspective when it comes to media involvement in contact-induced innovation and change. Jane Stuart-Smith, who is one of the few sociolinguists who has actually conducted some of the studies Sayers quotes, claims that potential media influence now is ‘No Longer an Elephant in the Room’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 250–61), and calls for more sociolinguists to study this in their speakers, since ‘a fundamental problem for any informed discussion is just how little evidence … there is’ (p. 250). This point is elaborated on by Jane Stuart-Smith and Claire Timmins in ‘Language and the Influence of the Media: A Scottish Perspective’ (in Lawson, ed., Sociolinguistics in Scotland , pp. 177–96); they combine variationist sociolinguistic studies of Glasgow innovations with media effects research, based on questionnaires, interviews and participant observation. Overall, only consonantal variants ( th -fronting, l -vocalization and dh -fronting) are influenced by engagement with the (London-based) soap opera EastEnders , and media engagement is never the strongest, representing only a contributing factor. This calls for a nuanced understanding of media influence. Finally, Sali A. Tagliamonte, in ‘Situating Media Influence in Sociolinguistic Context’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 223–32), points out that in the course of only a few years we have been able to observe rapid shifts in the media, and focusing on only television series and film might already be obsolete. On the other hand, she claims that ‘social media do not replace the networks that exist in the real world. Instead, they reinforce them and make them stronger’ (p. 230).
Ana Deumert’s monograph Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication takes up Jannis Androutsopoulos’s call to try and develop a new sociolinguistics of mobile communication. Thankfully, she moves away from the focus on the Western (cultural) world of many earlier works, and writes from a South African perspective; her differentiated analysis of the use of mobile communication especially (but not only) in developing countries makes this contribution particularly relevant. For example, Deumert points out that ‘the experience of connectivity in the [global] South is strongly shaped by mobile-centric access’ (p. 43) because, for many, computers are unaffordable; this is very different in the global North where resources are plentiful, and ‘genres of participation’ therefore differ (although there might still be huge internal differences, shaped by gender, class, rurality, ethnicity). Typical genres are ‘hanging out’, ‘messing around’ (i.e. learning to do things online), and ‘geeking out’ (intense media engagement in peer-learning networks, e.g. blogging or gaming), but even inside one country (such as South Africa) there might be huge differences between the haves, the have-less(es), and the have-nots. It is clear that these constraints also shape linguistic practices (e.g. if you cannot afford pictures). Deumert also looks at the Internet as a linguistic landscape, and investigates multilingualism, especially in Wikipedia (in chapter 4), and intertextuality (with remixes, mash-ups) with the example of Barack Obama’s slogan ‘Yes, we can’ (in chapter 5). The most linguistic is chapter 6 (‘Bakhtin Goes Mobile’), where she investigates the high linguistic variability in text messaging and argues that rather than use Labov’s concept of ‘structured heterogeneity’, it might be more profitable to think about this in terms of the ‘cafeteria principle’, which would allow users to pick and choose features to create tensions and harmonies, and be creative in performance and stylization. Going on from this creative use, Deumert also looks at ‘Textpl@y As Poetic Language’ (chapter 7), where ‘skilful’ digital writing is analysed. Overall, this is an insightful book that takes the reader on a fascinating journey into areas of the digital world that we perhaps have not explored yet academically, and sets youth practices (which are not confined to ‘youth’) in a wider frame of sociocultural analysis; as Deumert concludes, ‘the digital draws attention to the material aspects of communication and shows intertextuality, heteroglossia, performance and the poetic to be central to meaning-making and sociolinguistic indexicalities’ (p. 168).
Away from the media, William Labov argues against micro-analyses (and against generative grammar) in ‘The Sociophonetic Orientation of the Language Learner’ (in Celata and Calamai, eds., Advances in Sociophonetics , pp. 17–29), where he asks: ‘What are the data that the child attends to in the process of becoming a native speaker?’ (p. 17). He proposes several principles, among others the priority of the community over the individual, and language as a social fact, rather than individual grammars constructed on the basis of some input. In fact, Labov even goes so far as to claim that ‘the individual does not exist as a unit of linguistic analysis’ (p. 18)—instead, he compares a range of studies that show that children continually compare their parents’ dialect with those of their peers, and do not adopt those features of their parents that do not match. This already takes us to more theoretically inclined approaches to variation. In this section, we have deplored the failure to take variation into account in formal analyses. This lacuna is remedied this year by several contributions that have appeared in the volume Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English , edited by Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence R. Horn (most of which are discussed in the regional sections below). A general problem is taken up by Christina Tortora in ‘Addressing the Problem of Intra-Speaker Variation for Parametric Theory’ (pp. 294–323). The only possible model (or at least the one Tortora takes as given) seems to be to propose two (or more?) separate grammars in speakers. Tortora also calls for the use of apparent-time scenarios, the investigation of related dialects, and the collection of non-standard corpora in order to identify real instances of language change—probably revolutionary ideas for formal linguists, but quite commonplace in sociolinguistics. On the whole it has to be said for this collection that only a minority of contributors here actually take account of the sociolinguistic work that has already been done on the phenomena discussed, and a true interaction of variationists and formalists thus still seems to be some way away.
From the opposite perspective, Rusty Barrett criticizes (and deconstructs) ‘The Emergence of the Unmarked: Queer Theory, Language Ideology, and Formal Linguistics’ (pp. 195–223). He proposes that queer theory can have important implications for formal linguistics, which traditionally does not even include questions of gender or sexuality—as Barrett argues, this already ‘produces forms of social normativity through performativity’ (p. 196). For example, the tenet that language is autonomous and socially neutral ‘is itself a form of language ideology that can have serious consequences’ (p. 201), e.g. for speakers of marginalized varieties. Example sentences in formalist studies of syntax have long been criticized for reproducing sexism, misogyny, and homophobia, and illustrating ‘the’ language by examples from standard English only gives a false picture of homogeneity and disregards non-standard dialects—Barrett speaks of the ‘flagrant … illegitimation of a nonstandard variety as something other than English’ (p. 203). In addition, the assumption of an essentialist ‘universal grammar’ equates UG with humanity—meaning that ‘exclusion of some humans from that definition always lies just beneath the surface of discussions of whether some feature of UG is found in a given grammar’ (p. 209). Finally, the underlying principle of binarity at every level of linguistic description (phonetic features, syllable structure, syntactic trees, parameter setting, etc.) ‘erases the variation found across different languages in order to maintain uniformity within the theory. Such an outcome is … the very basic pattern of normative ideologies of all kinds’ (p. 212). Barrett’s arguments surely also accord well with the more general desideratum that formal linguistics should pay much more attention to variation, and work in variationist frameworks.
From a different theoretical perspective, Gerard Docherty and Paul Foulkes provide ‘An Evaluation of Usage-Based Approaches to the Modelling of Sociophonetic Variability’ ( Lingua 142[2014] 42–56), the most important question perhaps being how to account for ‘the production, processing and acquisition of social-indexical information woven into the speech signal’ (p. 42). Especially exemplar-based models seem well suited to handle this complexity, because exemplars can be detail-rich, including any association between form and linguistic or non-linguistic factors (and in this respect the exemplar model is a counter-model to Labov’s sociolinguistic monitor (see also below), which acts as a separate module). Talking of usage-based linguistics, William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. sketches out the repercussions of employing ‘Complex Systems in Aggregated Variation Analyses’ (in Szmrecsanyi and Wälchli, eds., Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis: Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech , pp. 150–73). He criticizes much usage-based linguistics for ‘trying to align with formal linguistic studies’ (p. 150), and for reifying the concepts of grammar and grammaticalization. Instead, usage-based linguistics should take seriously two fundamental properties of language as a complex system, the ‘nonlinear distribution of frequencies of a large number of variants’ (p. 154), i.e. Kretzschmar’s well-known A-curves, and the fact that they appear at every level of analysis, i.e. scalability.
A number of articles have been published this year that focus on methods. Thus, Karen P. Corrigan, Adam Mearns, and Hermann Moisl discuss ‘Feature-Based versus Aggregate Analyses of the DECTE Corpus: Phonological and Morphological Variability in Tyneside English’ (also in Szmrecsanyi and Wälchli, eds., pp. 113–49). Since feature-based approaches tend to focus on ‘well-known shibboleths’ (p. 125) to the detriment of most other features, aggregate analyses such as cluster analysis are called for, at least in combination with feature analysis, in order to ‘unlock the secrets of variability in languages’ (p. 145). In the same collection, one of the editors, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, provides an introduction to the hows and whys of dialectometry in ‘Forest, Trees, Corpora, and Dialect Grammars’ (pp. 89–112)—more specifically, he details how a frequency-based analysis of morphosyntactic features that is derived from a corpus (rather than atlas data) provides a more realistic picture of the ‘forest’, i.e. the ‘multitude of features that characterize a given dialect’ (p. 91). Jack Grieve offers ‘A Comparison of Statistical Methods for the Aggregation of Regional Linguistic Variation’ (pp. 53–88), and argues in favour of the new method of multivariate spatial analysis (developed by himself) that allows researchers to ‘identify clearer patterns of aggregated regional linguistic variation than the standard approach to dialectometry’ (p. 53); this method combines local spatial auto-correlation with factor and cluster analysis.
For Britain, Martijn Wieling, Clive Upton, and Ann Thompson draw on regional information in ‘Analyzing the BBC Voices Data: Contemporary English Dialect Areas and Their Characteristic Lexical Variants’ ( L&LC 29[2014] 107–17). Based on the postal-code information provided in this questionnaire study, the authors use methods from dialectometry (hierarchical clustering) to investigate the distribution of the most frequent variants for each of the thirty-eight lexical/conceptual variables included in the questionnaire. The main regional clusters that emerge are Scotland, northern England, and a common area: southern England/Wales/Ireland, but the authors also note that ‘characteristic variants for one cluster can appear in another … distinctiveness of a whole area is thus essentially a relative rather than an absolute attribute’ (p. 116), a result that ties in quite nicely with Kretzschmar’s A-curves above.
Moving to regionally specific studies, we start with Ireland, and here we have come across a number of historical contributions this year. Thus, Kevin McCafferty says ‘ “I don’t care one cent what [ø] goying on in Great Britten”: Be -Deletion in Irish English’ ( AS 89[2014] 441–69)—a feature stereotypically associated with AAE, but, as McCafferty shows, also present in the historical letters corpus (CORIECOR) he has compiled for IrE (and, apparently, also attested in Scotland and northern England, if only patchily). However, the pattern of be -deletion seems to differ from present-day AAE (and creoles); especially NP subjects seem to have favoured be -deletion in IrE, as did what/it/that/this- contexts (much in parallel with Irish Gaelic). McCafferty concludes that ‘Irish English is thus unlikely to have exerted much direct influence on be -deletion in AAE and Caribbean varieties’ (p. 441), unless of course the present-day AAE distribution is a more recent development. Based on the same corpus, Kevin McCafferty and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno investigate the claim that ‘ “[The Irish] Find Much Difficulty in these Auxiliaries … Putting Will for Shall with the First Person”: The Decline of First-Person Shall in Ireland, 1760–1890’ ( ELL 18[2014] 407–29). The authors are able to show that this stereotyped feature of IrE (preferring will over shall ) is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. In the eighteenth century, shall was still dominant; in particular, it was ‘a variant used primarily by urban writers and in more formal contexts’ (p. 409)—perhaps not surprisingly, since the distinction between shall and will follows ‘the kind of rule requiring an arcane and rather arbitrary distinction that is likely not to be acquired … in informal settings’ (p. 410). In shifting to will , the more vernacular variant, in the late 1800s in the wake of rising literacy, IrE followed the same trajectory as other varieties of English (e.g. CanE, AmE), but did not drive this change.
For present-day IrE, Alison Henry finds ‘Object Shift in Belfast’ (in Rhys, Iosad, and Henry, eds., Minority Languages, Microvariation, Minimalism and Meaning: Proceedings of the Irish Network in Formal Linguistics [2013], pp. 24–35), a phenomenon otherwise only known from Scandinavian languages, but which she links (in a generative framework) with overt subject imperatives in Belfast English ( Make always you a good effort! Give her you that book! ). This shift is available for pronominal objects (as in the examples), but a subset of speakers even allow full DP objects. In the same collection, Mariachiara Berizzi and Silvia Rossi provide a generative analysis of ‘The Syntax of the After Perfect in Hiberno-English’ (pp. 53–68), which they analyse in line with spatial PPs. Thus, in their analysis the preposition after is the modifier, and the retrospective aspect is encoded in a specific projection of the functional domain. The history of this construction is investigated by Kevin McCafferty in ‘ I think I will be after making love to one of them : A Revised Account of Irish English be after V-ing and Its Irish Source’ (in Haugland, McCafferty, and Rusten, eds., ‘Ye Whome the Charms of Grammar Please’: Studies in English Language History in Honour of Leiv Egil Breivik , pp. 197–221). As McCafferty points out, first occurrences of the after -perfect in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were mainly in the future tense (as in the example of the title). Rather than dismiss reports of these early examples as ‘Stage Irish’, McCafferty argues that both senses were borrowed from the Irish construction, which in earlier times also had future uses. Over the course of the nineteenth century (with the switch from Irish to English), future uses declined, and today the be - after -V- ing construction is used in the perfect sense only. Finally for Ireland, Jeffrey L. Kallen discusses ‘The Political Border and Linguistic Identities in Ireland: What Can the Linguistic Landscape Tell Us?’ (in Watt and Llamas, eds., Language, Borders and Identity , pp. 154–68). However, Kallen does not look at varieties of English, but at the use (or non-use) of Irish Gaelic in Northern Ireland as opposed to the Republic of Ireland. Perhaps not wholly unexpectedly, given official bilingualism, Gaelic is regularly encountered in the Republic, but has very different associations with nationalism, Catholicism, and republicanism in the North, and is not found on official signs.
A host of variationist studies on Scotland have appeared this year. Based on the SCOTS corpus, John Corbett broadly re-examines ‘Syntactic Variation: Evidence from the Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 258–76). Corbett is able to substantiate some features proposed by Jim Miller (e.g. in 2004; YWES 85[2006] 71–2) as typical of Scots (separate negation markers, higher frequency of never , a markedly different distribution of modals), but also qualifies some of his claims. For example, Corbett points out that ‘some of the features of spoken usage that Miller identifies as “Scottish” are also found in British and American English speech’ (p. 272), such as the use of the past tense with ever ( were you ever in Memphis? ), or the use of the progressive with stative verbs. Based on the same corpus, Wendy Anderson exclaims, ‘ “But that’s dialect, isn’t it?”: Exploring Geographical Variation in the SCOTS Corpus’ (in Bamford, Cavalieri, and Diani, eds., Variation and Change in Spoken and Written Discourse [2013], pp. 137–51). Since the 20 per cent of spoken texts in SCOTS come from a large number of varieties, both urban and rural, it is possible to use them to conduct studies, say, on the regional distribution of lexemes. In addition, regional variation is also a topic of discussion, and some qualitative analysis (e.g. on the status of Scots, or on the perception of dialect differences) is therefore also possible.
The Scottish–English border is singled out by a number of publications. Thus, Dominic Watt, Carmen Llamas, Gerard Docherty, Damien Hall, and Jennifer Nycz investigate ‘Language and Identity on the Scottish/English Border’ (in Watt and Llamas, eds., pp. 8–26). They look at a feature that is not stereotyped for English/Scottish differences, namely voice-onset timing (VOT), which is generally shorter in Scotland than in England. Although differences are small, they carry social meaning, as the authors find out in their attitudinal study. As for other features investigated, the Scottish–English border seems to be a stronger differentiator in the east than in the west. Chris Montgomery suggests, in ‘Perceptual Ideology across the Scottish/English Border’ (pp. 118–36), that this asymmetry might in turn be related to commuter patterns (cf. also David Britain below for a similar argument). In addition, his comparison of map-drawing tasks completed by Scottish and English teenagers shows that both groups differentiate the English dialects in quite a similar way, but the English informants have only a rather fuzzy picture of Scottish varieties. Dominic Watt, Carmen Llamas, and Daniel Ezra Johnson also examine another feature, rhoticity, in ‘Sociolinguistic Variation on the Scottish–English Border’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 79–102). As noted above, the border seems to play different roles; in the east, rhoticity north of the border seems to be increasing. In the west, on the other hand, there are ‘signs of greater linguistic homogeneity among young speakers’ (p. 98), and the new (English) labial variant /υ/ seems to be gaining ground on both sides of the border. Further north, other developments seem to be under way with respect to /r/. To clarify this, Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson, and James M. Scobbie take the reader on a tour through twentieth-century studies of coda /r/ in ‘Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A Sociophonetic Journey’ (in Celata and Calamai, eds., pp. 59–96). De-rhoticization (i.e. R-loss) is attested especially in working-class speech (and thus has associations of ‘street-smart’), is led by men, and is stronger in the western conurbations (especially Glasgow) than elsewhere. By contrast, in middle-class speakers /r/ is strengthening, to mark a specifically ‘Scottish (not UK) middle-class identity’, and also as ‘differentiation from working-class identity’ (p. 65)—a change from above led by women. The authors’ careful auditory and acoustic analysis, especially with the new method of UTI (ultrasound tongue imaging) reveals that de-rhoticization arises from differences in timing (a delay in the tongue-tip gesture), and in tongue shape. The same authors (in different order, i.e. Eleanor Lawson, James M. Scobbie, and Jane Stuart-Smith) also provide more detail on the same feature in ‘A Socio-Articulatory Study of Scottish Rhoticity’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 53–78), where they point to the fact that acoustic analyses can be misleading, and that speakers obviously produce covert variants that analysts find difficult to analyse, but which nevertheless show clear social stratification, and thus presumably carry social meaning.
Staying with Glasgow, Robert Lawson asks: ‘What Can Ethnography Tell Us about Sociolinguistic Variation Over Time? Some Insights from Glasgow’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 197–219). His ethnographic approach to several ‘communities of practice’ in a Glasgow high school uncovers interesting patterns. In particular, three boys who engage differently with specific groups can be shown to use noticeably different realizations (especially raised and retracted variants) of what Lawson calls the cat vowel (equivalent to Wells’s trap, bath, and palm vowels). Staying with the same group of informants, Lawson advises us ‘ “Don’t even [θ/f/h]ink aboot it”: An Ethnographic Investigation of Social Meaning, Social Identity and (θ) Variation in Glasgow’ ( EWW 35[2014] 68–93). For this variable, [h] is the traditional (working-class) variant, whereas th -fronting ( fink for think ) is the newcomer, surprising because dialectologically it is firmly associated with London (see also Jane Stuart-Smith above on the potential media influence on this change, and Lynn Clark below for another study on this feature). In his adolescent informants, Lawson finds that [f] is increasing in real time at the expense of standard [θ], not the local [h], and that it indexes an ‘anti-establishment stance’ (p. 86), whereas [h] has remained as a marker of tough masculinity (the stereotypical Glaswegian ‘hard man’).
Over in Edinburgh, Ole Schützler asks about ‘Vowel Variation in Scottish Standard English: Accent-Internal Differentiation or Anglicisation’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 129–52), and finds that in his younger speakers, there is little evidence of diphthongization in the face and goat vowels (which are monophthongs in SSE, but diphthongs in RP), and thus no anglicization. However, there is a tendency to produce face with a more central, and goat with a more front vowel, and thus a trend away from the more traditional Scottish variants. Moving north (a little), Lynn Clark tests ‘Phonological Repetition Effects in Natural Conversation: Evidence from th -Fronting in Fife’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 153–76), the same London feature we have already encountered in Glasgow, but that seems to be spreading rapidly elsewhere too (see also below for data from Carlisle). In fact, in Clark’s data, over half of her speakers use th -fronting more than half the time, and th -fronting thus seems to be very frequent indeed. In addition, Clark can show that the realization of (th) as [f] is subject to priming effects, and is thus the more likely the closer another instance of [f] appears in the context. This is an important insight, because it means that once the priming effect is taken into account, we might get a clear picture of the real innovators in a ‘community of practice’.
Thorsten Brato studies ‘Accent Variation and Change in North-East Scotland: The Case of ( hw ) in Aberdeen’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 32–52), which is traditionally [f] in Aberdeen, but is increasingly coming under the influence of the Scotland-wide change from [ʍ] to (StE English) [w]. As Brato notes, the traditional [f] (as in fit for what ) ‘is now lexically restricted and socially marginalised’ (p. 49). Older speakers switch to the supra-local Scottish [ʍ], whereas younger speakers ‘bypass this variant’ and adopt [w] straight away. An interesting suggestion in Brato’s study comes from his observation that teenage working-class boys may be reviving the traditional [f], as an act of dissociation from the standard forms—perhaps a development to look out for in future studies. A relic community not far from Aberdeen is investigated by Robert McColl Millar, with the assistance of Lisa Marie Bonnici and William Barras, in ‘Change in the Fisher Dialects of the Scottish East Coast: Peterhead as a Case Study’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 241–57). Perhaps as expected, detailed lexis connected with traditional fishing, but also with local flora and fauna, is eroding, memory is becoming fragmentary, semantic detail is becoming blurred, and as a result, ‘gender- and age-mates know different parts of the original lexico-semantic “mosaic” ’ (p. 255). In this way, what was once community knowledge has individualized, and the dialect (lexis) is slowly dying out. This topic is taken up in more detail by the same authors (McColl Millar, Barras, and Bonnici) in their monograph Lexical Variation and Attrition in the Scottish Fishing Communities . Here they present the complete study, which besides Peterborough also includes the old fishing communities of Wick (in the very north-east of the country), Lossiemouth, Anstruther (on the Fife peninsula), and Eyemouth near the border with England. Starting out from an extensive collection of fishing-related dialect words in thesaurus-like fashion culled from general Scots and local dictionaries and a host of individual studies plus archive materials, they devised a questionnaire that was intended to prompt informants to discuss topics with the fieldworker, and in this way elicit dialect lexis, but also knowledge of cultural practices. The results are not completely straightforward, as their detailed studies of fish names, fishing-trade lexis (including typical clothing), words for seaweed and seabirds, sea mammals, and the sea and wind conditions shows. Overall, the northern communities (Wick, Peterborough, and Lossiemouth) have preserved more local words and phrases, perhaps due to their overall isolation from the industrial Scottish south. Generally, an awareness of change seems most prominent in the middle-aged informants, and if they remember local lexis (which cannot have been from work experience) ‘there is a powerfully conscious element to these informants’ knowledge’ (p. 168); some other, younger, informants’ knowledge seems to be linked to the heritage industry rather than direct experience and is thus a mediated, second-order relationship that is culturally conditioned. Overall, however, the authors find that ‘what evidence we have for counter-currents to lexical attrition are largely confined to individuals’ (p. 170). Lexical attrition is visible everywhere (although perhaps not very salient to locals), and local terms have been replaced by non-local (or perhaps supra-local) koineized terms—an early example of ‘globalization’ in this sense is the word sou’wester that is known only under this name everywhere.
Finally, even further out north, Mercedes Durham studies adolescents’ attitudes on Shetland in 1983 and ‘Thirty Years Later: Real-Time Change and Stability in Attitudes towards the Dialect in Shetland’ (in Lawson, ed., pp. 296–318). She finds that ‘the proportion of outsiders [i.e. children of parents who came to the islands during the 1980s oil boom] is such that they also influence the local children and they too have begun to use the dialect less’ (p. 309); in fact, language use now seems to have reached a tipping point in favour of English, which is increasingly also used within the local community. On the other hand, the written use of dialect has increased, especially in the new media (text messaging and on Facebook), no doubt in order to create a local identity online.
Over in Wales, Bethan Coupland and Nikolas Coupland report on ‘The Authenticating Discourses of Mining Heritage Tourism in Cornwall and Wales’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 495–517), based on oral history interviews with tour guides (ex-miners) they conducted at both sites (a Welsh coal mine and a Cornish tin mine). The authors find that these miner-guides ‘prove to be sophisticated critical analysts of, and performers of, the multidimensional authenticities of heritage tourism’ (p. 501); these multidimensional authenticities refer to material authenticity (the ‘realness’ of mines as physical spaces, which the ex-miners authenticate with their presence), cultural authenticity (the ‘truth’ behind mining practices, where the miners serve as interpreters and commentators), performative authenticity (the miner-guides acknowledge that a degree of performance is necessary, but portray themselves as authentic cultural brokers, amongst other things, by using their vernacular accents, which in this context strongly indexes authenticity), and recreational authenticity (since the visitors come as tourists, or ‘heritage consumers’). With the ex-miners as meta-cultural agents, Coupland and Coupland claim that rather than de-authenticating heritage-ization, authenticity is ‘rationalised and given value’ (p. 512) in these different frames. One of the vernacular features of Welsh English the miners are perhaps using more widely is the progressive, and this is investigated by Heli Paulasto in ‘Extended Uses of the Progressive Forms in L1 and L2 Englishes’ ( EWW 35[2014] 247–76). Compared with some other varieties, Welsh English is distinctive in using the progressive much more frequently in the extended habitual sense ( my friend is speaking quite a bit of Welsh ), a fact Paulasto puts down to substrate influence.
Moving to England, Sandra Jansen discusses ‘Salience Effects in the North-West of England’ ( LinguistikO 66[2014] 91–110), again with respect to th -fronting, which is also attested in Carlisle and rises steeply in apparent time. There are some intriguing indications that it is not necessarily a recent import from Cockney, but may be of older provenance—surely a suggestion that deserves some more historical investigation. Jansen finds that th -fronting is preferred by younger, male, working-class speakers, which for her indicates the covert prestige of this variant. By contrast, the discourse markers she also investigates (clause-final like , eh , and like eh ) are stereotyped, and openly commented on. Especially clause-final like seems to be on the rise again, and is being recycled by the youngest speakers—a development quite different from many other dialect areas.
As is the case for Ireland, a number of studies concentrate on the history of features. Thus, Marcelle Cole traces the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) further back in time in her monograph Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphosyntax and the (Northern) Subject Rule . Usually, this complex distributional pattern of verbal - s is held to be an early ME development. In her careful study of the interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, Cole uses quantitative statistics to investigate all variables that might influence the shift from - th to - s , and the establishment of the NSR (with its pronoun and its proximity constraints), and finds that the NP/Pro constraint ‘was already a feature of Old Northumbrian’ (p. 3), where it (non-categorically) conditioned verb endings, but the same constraints also affected the process of the reduction of verb morphology (- e, -n to -Ø) in the indicative more generally.
Sylvie Hancil looks at ‘The Final Particle But in British English: An Instance of Cooptation and Grammaticalization at Work’ (in Hancil and König, eds., Grammaticalization: Theory and Data , pp. 235–55). This feature is usually documented for IrE (cf. YWES 94[2015] 43) with the meaning of EngE ‘however’, but Hancil does not mention this heritage. Instead, she proposes that this ‘relatively recent phenomenon in BrE’ (p. 235) (actually—in Tyneside, since she uses the NECTE corpus for her evidence) can be analysed as conveying meanings on a grammaticalization chain from a subordinating conjunction to a final particle with various meta-communicative or metatextual meanings (adversative, intensifier, filler). It is curious, though, that the regional provenance does not play a role here, given the strong historical link of Tyneside with Ireland, nor does Hancil discuss whether the ‘new’ British instances of clause-final but have the same meaning as in IrE, or are a separate development.
Staying with the north, Hilary Prichard provides ‘Northern Dialect Evidence for the Chronology of the Great Vowel Shift’ ( JLG 2[2014] 87–102), in particular evidence in favour of the push-chain scenario and of a unitary interpretation. Prichard looks at phonetic realizations of the price, fleece, face, mouth, goose, and goat vowels and finds that for the front vowels, there are ‘no locales which might be described as having an irregular or incomplete form of the shift’ (p. 96), whereas the back vowels ‘show far less influence of the GVS’ (p. 98), mainly due to the fact that north of the Ribble–Humber line, there were distinct vowel changes (especially ō-fronting, and the lack of an 
from OE ā) that prevented the GVS. In addition, she identifies a coherent band of locations in a transition zone with both ō-fronting and ū-diphthongization (so far regarded as ‘irregular dialect outcomes’) and argues that this geographical distribution is better interpreted as the result of dialect contact, i.e. as the product of diffusion of the shifted ū-forms from the south. For sixteenth-century Yorkshire, Julia Fernández Cuesta listens to ‘The Voice of the Dead: Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation in Early Modern English Wills and Testaments’ ( JEngL 42[2015] 330–58). Fernández Cuesta finds that the three northern linguistic features she analyses (Northern Subject Rule, uninflected genitive, 3pl pronouns) were differently resistant to supra-localization; in particular, urban testators used less dialectal forms than rural ones, and testaments of the high clergy were less dialectal than those of the low clergy. Thus (as could be expected from present-day sociolinguistic insights) both the urban/rural dichotomy and the social rank of the testators already played a role in the supra-localization (standardization) in the north in the first half of the sixteenth century. For a period 300 years later, Paul Cooper claims that ‘ “It Takes a Yorkshireman to Talk Yorkshire”: Towards a Framework for the Historical Study of Enregisterment’ (in Barysevich, D’Arcy, and Heap, eds., Proceedings of Methods XIV: Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, 2011 , pp. 158–69). In historical texts (mainly dialect literature and literary dialect) from the nineteenth century Cooper finds a consistent feature pool that is used to indicate Yorkshire speech: Definite Article Reduction (DAR), and morphologically variant forms like sen (for self ), nowt , owt , mun (for must ), or gan (for go ). Rosalind A.M. Temple looks at one other feature of present-day York English, (t,d)-deletion (but that is not specific to this dialect) in ‘Where and What Is (t,d)? A Case Study in Taking a Step Back in Order to Advance Sociophonetics’ (in Celata and Calamai, eds., pp. 97–136). She suggests that rather than being conditioned by lexical and post-lexical rules (i.e. in Lexical Phonology) (t,d)-deletion is ‘a function of common Connected Speech Processes’ (p. 99), in parallel with many other processes of lenition, and co-articulation. Extrapolating from synchronic data to the diachronic state of things, Sali A. Tagliamonte, Mercedes Durham, and Jennifer Smith discover ‘Grammaticalization at an Early Stage: Future Be Going To in Conservative British Dialects’ ( ELL 18[2014] 75–108). A comparison of ten locations across the UK (from the Shetland Islands to Cornwall) shows that some small communities in Scotland and Northern Ireland are the most conservative ones (with be going to present only in an incipient stage). Here, the authors discover a strong correlation of be going to with questions, in subordinate clauses, and with near-future meanings—environments they analyse as ‘trigger environments’ for the grammaticalization of going to.
The Midlands, in other years often a rather neglected dialect area, also feature this year in a couple of publications. Natalie Braber, in a short essay aimed at lay readers rather than colleagues, reports on ‘The Concept of Identity in the East Midlands of England’ ( EnT 30[2014] 3–10). The East Midlands (especially Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire) are linguistically often identified as a transition zone with features from both the north and the south. However, many of Braber’s (teenage) informants did not identify as either northern or southern, but as specifically Midland, and this may be the start of a new regional identity. Lindsey Bourne contributes a booklet on Lincolnshire Dialect also aimed at the general lay reader (and, presumably, local people) that contains an alphabetical list of dialect terms—although it is unclear what the sources used are—and a longer part on local customs, local history, and some local heroes (Isaac Newton, Margaret Thatcher, Alfred Tennyson, and George Boole). Although this is a little book with not much intrinsic linguistic interest, it might be a relevant resource if you are interested in the potentially beginning enregisterment of this variety in the light of Braber’s findings above.
The north–south dichotomy is also taken up by David Britain a bit further south, who asks, ‘Where North Meets South? Contact, Divergence and the Routinisation of the Fenland Dialect Boundary’ (in Watt and Llamas, eds., pp. 27–43). Britain adds another important factor to thinking about geographical and psychological barriers, namely routines. He claims that the dialect boundary of the Fens has survived even after the Fens became passable because ‘the boundary effect of the original marshland, and the consequent boundary effects that this engendered—attitudinal, infrastructural, socio-economic—has shaped people’s routine socio-spatial behaviours’ (p. 39). One important factor not so far taken into account in dialectology is the obligatory school boroughs that follow administrative districts, which may lead to divergence effects at borders since they affect adolescents in their formative years. In (almost) the same area, Chris Joby reinvestigates ‘Third-Person Singular Zero in the Norfolk Dialect: A Re-Assessment’ ( FLH 35[2014] 135–71). This feature is striking because it sets apart East Anglia as a dialect area from the rest of Britain. Peter Trudgill has famously linked the emergence of the complete lack of agreement markers in this part of the world to the Spanish Inquisition, but Joby claims in his detailed historical study that 3sg ‘zero-marking was already in use in Norfolk before the arrival of the Strangers’ (Dutch immigrants fleeing the Spanish) (p. 145). In addition, there is little evidence of (now StE) 3sg - s in written documents from East Anglia before the seventeenth century, whereas Trudgill’s argument hinges on a three-way competition between older - th , new - s , and zero.
Erez Levon and Sue Fox discuss ‘Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor: A Case Study of ING and TH-Fronting in Britain’ ( JEngL 42[2014] 185–217), two variables which they argue differ considerably in social salience (i.e. in the ‘relative availability of a form to evoke social meaning’, p. 185). In contrast to America (- ing ) is not as perceptually salient in Britain and does not carry the same strong associations with education or intelligence (vs. casualness, informality of the non-velar variant) that it does in America, possibly due to the fact that [ i n] was used well into the nineteenth century by the landed gentry, and is still ‘a sort of shorthand for upper-class Britishness’ (p. 196). th -fronting, on the other hand, is highly socially and gender-stratified (it is mainly used by working-class men), and enregistered as urban youth language. Nevertheless, in their matched-guise experiment a speaker was not downgraded on the professionalism scale for using either [ i n] or th -fronting overall, very different from the logarithmic pattern found by Labov for American variables.
Away from mainland Britain, Anna Rosen investigates a variety only rarely in the focus of variationists in her monograph Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English . On the basis of interviews with forty speakers, questionnaires, archive material, and some participant observation, Rosen can draw a comprehensive portrait of the grammar of Jersey English, and fill in this gap in the map of varieties. She documents some features rarely documented elsewhere, such as particle eh (strongly reminiscent of CanE), FAP (‘first verb plus and plus plain infinitive’, a kind of pseudo-coordination that lacks tense agreement, as in I went and marry a farmer ), emphatic post-posed pronouns ( we were lucky, us ), or adjectival plenty ( he’s got plenty daughters ), but also old favourites of varieties everywhere, such as the lack of agreement in existentials, relative what , or differences in prepositional use. The close-knit, rural, bilingual speakers use the transfer features predominantly, whereas the other features of dialect levelling or supra-localization can be observed in the younger, more mobile speakers. By and large, there does not seem to be much awareness of Jersey English as a separate variety—this is perhaps also due to the fact that the function of identity-constituting variety is taken over by the local variety of (Norman) French, Jèrriais . Also, there does not seem to be a movement (yet?) of reviving the local vernacular, or using it for emblematic purposes—surely something to look out for in the future.
And with this study we move further across the Atlantic, where Joe Pater analyses ‘Canadian Raising [CR] with Language-Specific Weighted Constraints’ ( Language 90[2014] 230–40), in particular CR before flaps, where the determining factor, voiced vs. voiceless obstruents, is neutralized, but where CR follows the pre-flapped patterns (i.e. writer is raised, but rider is not). Instead of rule ordering, Pater proposes that ‘preflap raised diphthongs are licensed by a language-specific, phonetically arbitrary constraint’ (p. 231) in harmonic grammar. This analysis has the advantage of not postulating abstract underlying phonemes and of being learnable by gradual learning algorithms. More sociolinguistic in approach, Charles Boberg gives a general overview of the kinds of ‘Borders in North American English’ (in Watt and Llamas, eds., pp. 44–54), in particular a history of dialect areas inside the US and the relevance of the political border with Canada. Boberg also distinguishes dialect areas inside Canada, usually held to be homogeneous: the west (British Columbia and the Prairies), Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland. Investigating the internal differentiation of CanE seems to be a trend this year. We will report on regional studies roughly in east-to-west order, starting with Newfoundland. Drawing on materials from Petty Harbour (a small fishing village outside St John’s), Becky Childs and Gerard Van Herk observe ‘Superstars and Bit Players: Salience and the Fate of Local Dialect Features’ (in Barysevich et al., eds., pp. 139–48). Their ‘superstars’ (salient local features) are verbal - s ( I goes ), but also th -stopping ( dis ting ), which both show U-shaped (curvilinear) trajectories in apparent time as their decline (avoidance) is reversed (revival) due to changes in the local economy, especially the fact that with an increase in tourism today, ‘many residents profit … from demonstrations of traditional ways of life’ (p. 141). Other linguistic features, like the local marking of past habituality (by would rather than used to ) or Canadian Raising, show no age effect, and presumably differ in salience. Also for Newfoundland, Sandra Clarke reports on ‘Adapting Legacy Regional Language Materials to an Interactive Online Format: The Dialect Atlas of Newfoundland and Labrador English’ (in Barysevich et al., eds., pp. 205–14), where interested scholars (and the general public) can now investigate the pronunciation, but also dialect lexis and morphosyntactic features of Newfoundland and Labrador online. On the basis of data from Quebec, Robert Prazeres and Stephen Levey investigate a phenomenon that is surely attested much more widely: ‘Between You and I: Case Variation in Coordinate Noun Phrases in Canadian English’ ( EWW 35[2014] 193–224). They note that although generally the accusative is gaining ground ( her and her sister ), the opposite direction (as in the title) is also regularly heard, possibly as a hypercorrect form (they call it the ‘polite’ pattern) through century-long exposure to prescriptive norms. At least for older speakers, there is a correlation with education (the more education, the more nominative in subject position). This does not hold for the younger speakers, however, who prefer the accusative, leading the authors to confirm also for Quebec English that the accusative ‘is increasingly assuming the role of default case in coordinate constructions’ (p. 193).
Charles Boberg looks at ‘Ethnic Divergence in Montreal English’ ( CJL 59[2014] 55–82), a city where English has clear minority status. His analysis of vowel differences in the major ethnic groups in the anglophone population (British, Jewish, and Italian) shows a huge degree of diversity. Thus, the Italians lag behind in goose -fronting and have less Canadian Raising, Jews have more diphthongal variants in face and goat , and a variant near /o i / in words with (ay) (e.g. loin for line ). Strikingly, these differences do not become less with time (as in other cities), but are becoming more pronounced, and Boberg links this lack of assimilation to the minority status of English in Montreal and the high degree of social and residential segregation; ethnic pride might be another factor (for example, unfronted goose seems to be linked to a popular macho stereotype for Italian men, the ‘Italian-American tough guy from Brooklyn’, p. 76). In this way, the fact that French is the dominant language has ‘preserved a greater degree of diversity among the major ethnic components of the English-speaking community’ in Montreal than elsewhere (p. 55).
Sali A. Tagliamonte and Derek Denis move our attention to south-eastern Ontario, where they are ‘Expanding the Transmission/Diffusion Dichotomy: Evidence from Canada’ ( Language 90[2014] 90–136), more specifically from Toronto and three locations outside the city. In the diffusion of features from Toronto to these smaller communities (a city, a village, and a hamlet), constraints on the features change, indicating that ‘diffusing changes do not perfectly replicate the model system’ (p. 90). Specifically, Tagliamonte and Denis look at four variables undergoing change, two with little time depth (the rise of quotative be like , and the rise of intensifier so ), and two that have been changing for longer (the rise of the semi-modal have to (over must ), and the rise of possessive have as a full verb). For stative possessive have , they find no differences in the constraints, and thus ‘a quintessential case of transmission of change in the North American context’ (p. 104). For deontic modality, have to (despite more internal differences) also ‘progressed through parallel transmission’ (p. 110) from a common source. The changes in the intensifying system paint a more differentiated picture. Contrary to expectation, intensifying so (part of the cyclic renewal of intensifying forms) is a stable form in south-east Ontario, and thus probably ‘a takeup of latent tendencies in the extant system’ (p. 120), i.e. an instance of drift rather than diffusion. Be like , finally, is appropriated as a formulaic chunk, replicating only parts of the Toronto constraints and patterns (especially its high use in the 1sg), and is thus a clear case of imperfect replication in diffusion. Staying with Toronto, Sali A. Tagliamonte and Julian Brooke tell ‘A Weird (Language) Tale: Variation and Change in Adjectives of Strangeness’ ( AS 89[2014] 4–41). As the authors show, in this semantic field strange is ‘quickly moving out of favor’ (p. 4), and its place is taken by weird —in fact, weird is used in 85 per cent of all instances by adolescents—another case of recycling and renewal (in case you were wondering, other alternative terms are odd , creepy , bizarre , freaky , unusual , eerie , peculiar , whacky , or abnormal , and this shift actually illustrates change across Kretzschmar’s A-curves brilliantly, although the authors do not explicitly mention him). Bridget L. Jankowski and Sali A. Tagliamonte are ‘On the Genitive’s Trail: Data and Method from a Sociolinguistic Perspective’ ( ELL 18[2014] 306–29). In the same Toronto material as for the previous studies, they find for spoken language that the animated possessor seems to be the strongest constraint on the genitive variation (human possessors appear almost categorically with the s -genitive, non-human possessors with the of -genitive). Elsewhere, the s -genitive seems to be coming in in apparent time, especially with short possessors and through names for ‘places that are possible locations for humans’ (p. 306) (e.g. Canada’s Silicon Valley ). This change is promoted through the speech of working-class speakers.
Still staying with Toronto, Naomi Nagy, Joanna Chociej, and Michol F. Hoffman discuss different ways of ‘Analyzing Ethnic Orientation in the Quantitative Sociolinguistic Paradigm’ ( L&C 35:i[2014] 9–26; special issue). They mainly look at the ‘heritage language’ patterns of Cantonese, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish speakers of several generations, although they include some variables in their speakers’ English (two vowels involved in the Canadian Shift, and (t,d)-deletion) as well. Rather than individual correlations, they advocate the use of multivariate analyses because factors may become significant in tandem. Overall, ethnic orientation (i.e. the attitude towards a language and its speakers, differentiated by cross-ethnic comparisons, cross-generational comparisons, cross-linguistic comparisons, and cross-variable comparisons) does not explain all the variation but they do claim that ‘it is a key factor in modelling variation in Heritage Language communities’ (p. 9), and in fact seems to be more relevant for the use of English than for the use of the heritage languages themselves. Laura Baxter and Jacqueline Peters discuss an ethnic group not yet included in Nagy et al.’s above study, ‘Black English in Toronto: A New Dialect?’ (in Barysevich et al., eds., pp. 125–38). Most blacks in Toronto are of Caribbean heritage, in particular from Jamaica. Baxter and Peters investigate the rate of (t,d)-deletion, which is extremely high for speakers who reside in an ethnic enclave (Jane and Fitch), compared to non-enclave speakers. This suggests that (in contrast to other ethnic groups in Toronto, like Chinese or Italian Torontonians), ‘Black speakers do not … share a linguistic system with the other ethnic groups in Toronto’ (p. 127) but adopt Jamaican features to construct their ethnic identity, in this way creating the new variety of Black Toronto English. Far over in the west, Panayiotis A. Pappas and Meghan Jeffrey investigate ‘Raising and Shifting in BC English’ (i.e. British Columbia) (in the same collection, pp. 36–47). On the basis of data from Vancouver and Victoria, they find that (despite claims to the contrary) Canadian Raising ‘is still a robust phenomenon in BC’ (p. 39), and the Canadian Shift is quite advanced, led by women; however, younger men are now ‘catching up’ (p. 44).
For the US, Robert Urbatsch employs a new resource for studying linguistic variation, ‘Historical Regional Variation in Census Occupation Terms’ ( AS 89[2014] 74–88). He uses the 1880 national census to collect data on naming ‘workers at drinking establishments’ (p. 75) and finds striking regional distributions, such as barkeepers (southern) vs. bartenders (northern), bars vs. saloons (both used across the nation) vs. taverns (mid-Atlantic states), and the collocations tending vs. attending bar (also mid-Atlantic states). Urbatsch does not comment on this, but not surprisingly, we also get a ‘long tail’ of infrequent variants ( public house , drinking house , beer house , dram shop , ale house , tippling house , grog shop , etc.) as predicted by Kretzschmar’s A-curve. Hélène Margerie looks at ‘ He was angry awful: Intertwining Paths of Development to New Degree Modifier Constructions in American English’ ( AS 89[2014] 257–87). This is a new (late twentieth-century) construction of AmE where the booster is postposed, and only terrible , horrible , bad , and awful can appear in this slot. Quite possibly, He was angry awful originated in the earlier construction It scared him awful with a zero-marked adverb, or through analogy with He was worried sick (or both).
We come now to specific regional investigations for the US, again reported on roughly in east-to-west order. James N. Stanford, Nathan A. Severance, and Kenneth P. Baclawski, Jr. uncover ‘Multiple Vectors of Unidirectional Dialect Change in Eastern New England [ENE]’ ( LVC 26[2014] 103–40). As we have been reporting over the past few years, studies have shown that traditional eastern New England features are disappearing rapidly in the face of economic and demographic change, and the authors here show that especially young speakers in New Hampshire ‘are discarding many traditional ENE pronunciations in favour of levelled, non-regional forms’ (p. 103). However, there is a difference in speed (and, presumably, salience), such that some of these features are receding very quickly (non-rhoticity, fronted father , broad- a in bath, unmerged mary/marry/merry ), whereas for others the change is slower (fronted start , the hoarse / horse distinction), and, as the authors argue, is ‘overshadowed’ by the fact that /r/ is also present in the same syllable. A dialect feature not discussed before is the topic of Jim Wood’s investigation of ‘Affirmative Semantics with Negative Morphosyntax: Negative Exclamatives and the New England So AUXn’t NP/DP Construction’, as in I play guitar. B: Yes, but so don’t I (meaning: and so do I ) (in Zanuttini and Horn, eds., pp. 71–114). The geographical distribution seems to centre on western New England, and as Wood’s formal analysis shows, both constructions are formally affirmative, despite containing the morphological negative. According to Wood, ‘the morphological negation reflects the negative proposition that the speaker wants to reject’ (p. 110).
A little further south, we now have the first monograph on New York City English (NYCE) since Labov’s seminal study more than fifty years ago, this one written by Michael Newman, although with sixteen informants (students) from Queens based on a much narrower range of informants. Newman relates NYCE to its updated ‘Geography Demography and Cultural Factors’ (chapter 2), where he points out in particular the enormous increase in racial diversity through immigration after 1965. Thus, the number of Latinos has more than doubled, and Asians have very recently emerged as a sizeable community (cf. YWES 92[2013] 92 and below for some first studies). The chapters that follow are a (very readable) mix of summaries of earlier studies (starting before Labov, and taking account also of studies that have reproduced, or continued, his work), of reports on his sixteen informants where appropriate, anecdotes and personal memories, and many film and pop-culture references. Newman covers a very comprehensive set of features (in fact many more than Labov originally investigated), both phonetic (the vowel system, the short- a split, the low back vowels, the consonants: (r) (th), consonant clusters), morphosyntactic, ethnic variation (AAE, Spanish English, Jewish English), differences in conversational style, and in the lexicon. The most striking result is perhaps the ‘prominence of race’ (p. 151) that becomes apparent in all the detailed case studies, and as an undercurrent the high stigma that NYCE still carries. For example, the slow increase in rhoticity (reported on in chapter 3) is mainly a white (and Asian) phenomenon, as is goose -fronting, whereas l -vocalization is found much more in AAE speakers, and in Latinos who affiliate closely with African Americans. Despite general trends of supra-localization, NYCE is phonologically still clearly different from other varieties of English, and inside the variety, especially black speakers still use a distinct system of organization. Newman also notes a ‘predominant racial split’ for morphology (chapter 4, e.g. p. 89) because of the presence of many traditional AAE forms, also promoted through popular culture like hip-hop, and he points out that these forms ‘have spread most intensively and systematically into other Black communities and least into White and East Asian groups’ (p. 95). In addition, Newman also reports on Spanish calques and Yiddish contact features, where much more research could surely be done. Differences in conversational style (the topic of chapter 5) include the perception of NY speakers as ‘rude’, which Newman analyses as a difference in politeness culture (New Yorkers setting more store by positive politeness, which may be interpreted as uncivil, or too direct), AAE discourse practices, and Latino code-switching. For the lexicon (chapter 6) Newman notes that Yiddishisms play a more important role than in other places, as do terms from Italian, but Newman also finds some terms of Dutch origin ( cruller , stoop , or kill for a brook or stream), and a long list of terms with a specific NY meaning (or reference). The lexicon is also often racially divided, as the split of the term neighbourhood into nabes (well-off middle-class residential areas) and hoods indicates. Overall, the volume contains a wealth of individual details, a host of reports of other studies, memorable analyses of actors getting the NYC accent wrong (and why), but also a wider view of US society where it differs from New York’s. Despite all this commendable academic detail, the book is still a very enjoyable read and should be appreciated by your students as much as your colleagues. In fact, Newman is also very good at pointing out areas where not very many studies have been conducted yet, so anyone looking for a research topic linked to NYCE should have a look at this..
Kara Becker sets out to fill some of these gaps in several studies published this year. In ‘Linguistic Repertoire and Ethnic Identity in New York City’ ( L&C 35[2014] 43–54), she provides a detailed case study of one speaker. The three features she analyses (copula absence (a typical AAE feature), bought -raising (a typical NYCE feature across ethnicities, see also below), and non-rhoticity (potentially a feature of both, see Newman above) are used by the speaker to convey ‘intersectional identification practices that go beyond ethnicity and regional identity’ (p. 43), e.g. as a young woman, a neighbourhood housing activist, an authentic Lower East Sider, someone opposed to gentrification, etc. Identity thus has to be construed as a more fluid resource, and ‘ethnolinguistic repertoire’ is probably a more useful concept than the static ‘ethnolect’, since linguistic features can now be viewed as ‘potential resources for the conveyance of indexical meanings’ (p. 50). Becker also examines ‘The Social Motivations of Reversal: Raised bought in New York City English’ ( LSoc 43[2014] 395–420) in her new Lower East Side study. Based on sixty-four informants of various ethnicities, the study finds that the reversal of bought -raising is ‘led by young people, white and Jewish speakers, and the upper and lower middle classes’ (p. 396). Her analysis of the indexical meanings of the (traditional raised) variant suggests that it indexes an ‘icon of earlier time’ (p. 415), a New York character type that is negatively evaluated, namely an older, white ethnic New Yorker from the outer boroughs who is mean and aloof. Another classic marker of NYCE is the subject of another of Becker’s studies this year, ‘(r) We There Yet? The Change to Rhoticity in New York City English’ ( LVC 26[2014] 141–68). This study shows that rhoticity is still increasing, although at a much slower pace than in other localities (such as, say, the American South), and that the change is led by young people, women, middle-class speakers of Chinese, and of Jewish and white ethnicities. In fact, Becker’s informants use postvocalic /r/ in 68 per cent of all cases—quite a high percentage, which also indicates that (in contrast to Labov’s 1966 data) postvocalic /r/ in NYC is no longer a feature of formal speech only. On the other hand, non-rhoticity is remarkably stable in African Americans, and they also differ in using linking-r far less. The still comparatively slow speed of this change may be due to the fact that non-rhoticity is not only seen negatively, but also linked to positive values like local authenticity.
A bit further south, in Philadelphia, Suzanne Evans Wagner observes ‘Linguistic Correlates of Irish-American and Italian-American Ethnicity in High School and Beyond’ ( L&C 35:i[2014] 75–87) in young women and finds differences in particular in their boat vowels (Italian Americans produce a less fronted vowel), their bite vowels (which is more retracted for Irish Americans in this peer group and indexes ‘toughness’; the non-retracted variants on the other hand seem to be linked to ‘Italian girls’ prissiness’, p. 80), and for (- ing ) (where Irish Americans use more of the non-standard alveolar variant). At least for some of these variants, the ethnic differences disappear after high school, and social differences become more important. Staying with Philadelphia, Suzanne Evans Wagner, Kali Bybel, and Kathryn VerPlanck study general extenders in ‘Back and Forth with Classes and That Kind of Thing: A Panel Study of General Extender [GE] Use in Philadelphia’ (in Barysevich et al., eds., pp. 337–48). They find that Philadelphian teenagers use or something , and and everything . GE based on stuff seem relatively less frequent (also compared to other places). They also find little evidence of grammaticalization, and conclude that the use of GE is a feature of age-grading. William Labov investigates ‘The Role of African Americans in Philadelphia Sound Change’ ( LVC 26[2014] 1–19) and finds evidence of divergence, caused by residential segregation. This is shown in particular by (non-participation in) the traditional Philadelphian short- a split, a complex distribution of lexemes across tense and lax a that is not acquired faithfully through (adult) diffusion. (To wit: /a/ is tensed before front nasals and voiceless fricatives, before inflectional suffixes, before /d/ in mad , bad , glad , but not in irregular verbs, function words, polysyllabic words, or learned words).
Moving to the inland north, quite a well-known phenomenon is exemplified by the title of Elspeth Edelstein’s contribution, ‘This Syntax Needs Studied’ (in Zanuttini and Horn, eds., pp. 242–68). Edelstein calls this the ‘alternative embedded passive’, and argues that it behaves syntactically differently from the standard construction ( this syntax needs to be studied ), and for that reason cannot be derived from it through ellipsis of to be .
Wil Rankinen moves us to ‘The Michigan Upper Peninsula English Vowel System in Finnish American Communities in Marquette County’ ( AS 89[2014] 312–47). His study of sixty-nine informants shows that ‘younger speakers use variants typically associated with neighbouring Canada’ (p. 312), namely the cot-caught merger, Canadian Shift (CS) and Canadian Raising, rather than features of the substrate Finnish system, or of Michigan Lower Peninsula English (with or without the Northern Cities Shift). Especially in apparent time, the lowering and backing of the lax front vowels (CS) becomes very clear. Just south of the (state) border, Miranda E. Wilkerson, Mark Livengood, and Joe Salmons examine another ethnic group in ‘The Sociohistorical Context of Imposition in Substrate Effects: German-Sourced Features in Wisconsin English’ ( JEngL 42[2015] 284–306). Quite contrary to the belief that, by the third generation, substrate effects completely disappear, the authors can show that in eastern Wisconsin English, where historically (i.e. in the early twentieth century) English was acquired to a large extent from other first-language speakers of German, German ‘has left clear structural traces on the local dialects’ (p. 286). These structural traces include the final fortition of obstruents ( auslautverhärtung ) and th -stopping, but also singular forms for scissors , tweezers , clippers (which are singular in German), different verbal particles (the stereotyped come with , go with ), and traces of German modal particles, like the ‘softening’ once ( come here once ), which have become local (rather than German ethnic) features, and (some of them at least) are spreading rather than receding.
For Minnesota, Sara S. Loss discovers ‘Iron Range English Reflexive Pronouns’ (in Zanuttini and Horn, eds., pp. 215–41) to be a true counter-example to the usual properties of long-distance reflexives. In this dialect, John thinks that Matt believes in himself is possible with himself referring to John (not Matt )—at least according to Loss’s informants’ judgements.
Moving to the American South, Michael Montgomery, Michael Ellis, and Brandon Cooper ask: ‘When did Southern American English Really Begin? Testing Bailey’s Hypothesis’ (in Buschfeld, Hoffmann, Huber, and Kautzsch, eds., The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond , pp. 331–48). On the basis of the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, the authors argue that the shift towards what we now know as typical southern forms was a gradual one, and began before the American Civil War, in fact before the 1850s. Their data confirm that a -participles, plural verbal - s , and liketa were already prevalent before 1875, but so were you all (with associative meaning), which is actually used by 82 per cent of their letter writers, and fixin to , which also seems more widespread—and thus a distinctively southern feature—earlier than supposed. A subset of the material, the North Carolina Civil War letters, also features in a separate publication (actually from last year): Michael Ellis’s North Carolina English, 1861–1865: A Guide and Glossary [2013]. Six of the letters are also reproduced in facsimile, with transliteration. Ellis provides a very detailed introduction to the material, on the socio-economic background of the letter-writers, and the shape of the letters themselves. The most interesting part of the introduction, however, is an ‘Overview of North Carolina English, 1861–1865’ (pp. liii–lxix), which contains a regional grammar based on the letters, with extensive quotations from the letters themselves, also including frequency information. Anyone interested in dialect grammar (rather than, say, the lexis) is here saved the cumbersome work of having to go through the extensive glossary that makes up the remainder of the book. Here you will find the early attestations of you all that Montgomery et al. discuss above, but also relative what , at , or as , a host of non-standard verb forms, subordinating and , or existential they (and of course many more features). A treasure trove that deserves careful exploration, and use in further studies.
The state of North Carolina is also dealt with at length in another publication, this one intended for the wider public, by Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser, Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina (the Tar Heels being people from Carolina, possibly named for the petroleum industry that dominated the state economy). As the authors claim, the ‘linguistic richness [of the state has] not been celebrated in the same way as other cultural and historical treasures’ (p. 2), and they intend to set right this oversight. They first introduce the various lay terms that are being used to refer to speakers from North Carolina (such as the Tar Heels of the title, but also the more recent North Cackalacky, of dubious etymology) and the attitudes that have surrounded southern speech, and North Carolina speakers more specifically. They then look at ‘The Origins of Language Diversity in North Carolina’ historically (chapter 2), retelling both its prehistory and its settlement by Europeans (English in the seventeenth century, Scots-Irish, German, Welsh, and French Huguenot settlers in the eighteenth, and of course African slaves since the very end of the seventeenth century). The authors also look at the wide range of the ‘Landscaping Dialect: From Manteo to Murphy’ (chapter 3), look at urban/rural differences in ‘Talkin’ Country and City’ (chapter 5), and investigate Appalachian English in ‘Mountain Talk’ (chapter 6). They also look at ethnic varieties. Thus, chapter 7 is dedicated to ‘African American Speech in North Carolina’, chapters 8 and 9 look at ‘The Legacy of American Indian Languages’ and more specifically ‘Lumbee English: Tar Heel American Indian Dialect’, respectively. The most recent arrival on the scene, Latino English, also gets its own chapter: chapter 9 discusses ‘Carolina del Norte: Latino Tar Heels’. The final chapter, 10, gives an overall appreciation of ‘Celebrating Language Diversity’. As the chapter titles indicate, the intended readers are lay people, but this does not mean that the wealth of materials Wolfram and Reaser can draw on from their own (and many colleagues’) fieldwork would be lost on professionals. On the contrary, this is an extremely well-written, readable, yet highly informative work—by all means read it with your smartphone barcode scanner by your side, which will give you immediate access to online videos, audio clips, word lists read out, etc. A wonderful addition to any bookshelf on southern US English.
Talking of Walt Wolfram’s colleagues, and of Appalachia, albeit the West Virginia region of it, Kirk Hazen finds ‘A New Role for an Ancient Variable in Appalachia: Paradigm Leveling and Standardization in West Virginia’ ( LVC 26[2014] 77–102). In particular, Hazen looks at was/were- levelling—a feature in ‘direct conflict with social processes of standardization’ (p. 77). Perhaps not surprisingly, this feature is in sharp decline across age groups, and levelled was is used particularly by speakers with lower social status and less education. However, instead of levelled was younger speakers increasingly use a reduced (contracted) variant ( we’s late yesterday ) that is ‘poised to succeed by concealing a vernacular form from the pressures of standardization’ (p. 98). Also dealing with an Appalachian feature, Rafaella Zanuttini and Judy B. Bernstein analyse ‘Transitive Expletives in Appalachian English’ (in Zanuttini and Horn, eds., pp. 143–77), in particular they (or there ) in combination with a negated finite auxiliary, a quantificational subject, and a transitive verb (e.g. they can’t many people say that ). They provide a formal analysis of they/there as an expletive pronoun. The negated auxiliary can raise to a position higher than the subject since informants also allow negative auxiliary inversion, apparently a prerequisite for transitive expletive constructions. Another well-known southern feature is analysed by Corinne Hutchinson and Grant Armstrong in ‘The Syntax and Semantics of Personal Datives in Appalachian English’ (pp. 178–214). The authors claim that constructions like I love me some apple pie are a kind of applicative, more specifically a satisfactive applicative, because ‘the direct object matters to the applied argument because the latter is satisfied through the event described by the transitive verb that supplies the third argument of the applicative head’ (p. 189). However, the additional meaning is only added as an implicature.
One other distinctive southern feature already mentioned by Montgomery et al. above is discussed in much more detail by Jay L. Myers, ‘ Fixin’ to: The Emergence of an American Quasi-Modal’ ( AS 89[2014] 42–73). Myers follows the development of the lexical verb to fix (‘to fasten’ > ‘to put in order’ > ‘to get ready’ > ‘to intend’) to the quasi-modal it is used as today. Especially when compared to be going to , be fixin’ to has the added semantic layer of contextual relevance, has ‘implications of assessment and commitment’ (p. 64) and conveys a sense of ‘urgency/immediacy’ (p. 65). From quasi-modals to double modals: J. Daniel Hasty claims that ‘We Might Should Be Thinking This Way: Theory and Practice in the Study of Syntactic Variation’ (in Zanuttini and Horn, eds., pp. 269–93). As the other contributions to this book, Hasty provides a formal analysis of this construction, arguing against an analysis of the first modal as an adverb, but also against an analysis of both modals as just one underlying modal. Instead, he shows that the first modal expresses modality, and the second tense. This contribution is also interesting because Hasty takes sociolinguistic evidence more seriously than the other contributors to this volume, and thus truly attempts to integrate micro-parametric variation and social constraints (and insights).
Moving west (a bit), Michael D. Picone links ‘Literary Dialect and the Linguistic Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana’ ( AS 89[2014] 143–69). He takes the use of literary dialect as indicative of nineteenth-century enregisterment of dialect features that helped to construct ‘the mystique of the South’ (p. 144), and tries to reconstruct from this the actual use of phonological features (such as velar/uvular /r/, or th -stopping), discourse markers (e.g. right dislocation), dialect lexis, and code-mixing practices between French, Creole, and English.
We have already seen a great interest in the investigation of various ethnic (not necessarily non-white) groups in the regional sections. This trend is also taken up by Lauren Hall-Lew and Malcah Yaeger-Dror, who have edited a special issue of L&C on ‘New Perspectives on Linguistic Variation and Ethnic Identity in North America’ ( L&C 35:i[2014]). In the introduction (pp. 1–8), they point out that ethnolects are not seen as monolithic anymore but as much more fluid and negotiable, and that incorporating this flexibility into sociolinguistic models complicates them, making them more complex and multidimensional. A paper more methodological in nature is the contribution by Kimberly A. Noels, who discusses three psychological approaches to studying ‘Language Variation and Ethnic Identity: A Social Psychological Perspective’ ( L&C 35:i[2014] 88–96), such as laboratory experiments, questionnaires (especially including hypothetical scenarios), and self-reports. Noels draws attention to the fact that the ethnicity of the investigator might be an important factor, and thus ‘researchers should specify whether interviewers are in- or outgroup members vis-à-vis the participant, and whether participants perceive them in this manner’ (p. 93).
Besides the regional analyses reported on above, relatively little has been published on AAE this year. Marcyliena H. Morgan gives a more general introduction to AAE in her Speech Communities . She begins by looking at the historical evolution of the AAE community and its long tradition of communicating in a counter-language and using indirectness, features that also resurface in ‘Youth Communities: The Hiphop Nation’ (chapter 5)—a chapter that also looks at the emigration of hip-hop artists to Paris, and the local impact there (even on the last French presidential election). Morgan also looks at women’s language in ‘Voice and Empowerment in Gender and Sexuality’ (chapter 6), at online speech communities (chapter 7), AAE in the classroom (chapter 8), and the performance of identity in the speech community (chapter 9). The chapters are quite short and evidently meant for students—thus they contain discussion questions and suggestions for further reading. Their shortness, however, also means that most topics are only dealt with anecdotally, with one or two case studies (often by Morgan herself) cited, with little room for in-depth analysis or controversy—so this monograph gets a mixed review in this respect.
Other contributions on AAE have a strong historical focus this year. Thus, Salikoko S. Mufwene defends ‘The English Origins of African American Vernacular English: What Edgar W. Schneider has Taught us’ (in Buschfeld et al., eds., pp. 349–64). Based on his ecological approach, Mufwene claims that AAVE and White Southern English shared ‘almost two centuries and a half of common social history’ (p. 358) and that AAVE only started to diverge after the abolition of slavery and the institutionalization of race segregation. In this sense, Mufwene argues, ‘AAVE is an invention of Jim Crow’ (p. 358). Ulrich Miethaner looks at data that could support this position in ‘Innovation in Pre-World War II African American English? Evidence from BLUR’ (pp. 365–85), BLUR being a collection of early twentieth-century blues lyrics. In these texts, Miethaner finds evidence of habitual be , resultative be done , semi-auxiliary come , intensifying steady and counterfactual call oneself —all of them supposed innovations of AAE after the Second World War. Since these constructions were clearly present in the early twentieth century (some of them still in the process of grammaticalization), divergence must have started earlier than posited by Labov, possibly in the nineteenth century, as argued by Mufwene above. John R. Rickford rediscovers ‘An Early Study of the Speech of Young Black Children in California: Why It Matters’ ( AS 89[2014] 121–42), conducted in 1971 by Stanley Legum, Carol Pfaff, Gene Tinnie, and Michael Nicholas, that has remained unpublished until today. Rickford contextualizes it and argues that it could provide us with important real-time data on AAE. In addition, these earlier data support the assumption that AAE children’s speech becomes more vernacular as they grow older: as the original authors said, ‘many nonstandard forms are learned after children enter school’ (p. 123). The California study also lent support to the idea that AAE across the US was relatively uniform grammatically. However, there was also a minority vote by Gene Tinnie, one of the authors, who cautioned that emphasizing the differences of AAE from StE might contribute to racism rather than solve problems, and this might have been one of the reasons why the rest of the material was never analysed in sociolinguistic detail.
Lisa Green moves us to present-day AAE with her insightful formal analysis of ‘Force, Focus, and Negation in African American English’ (in Zanuttini and Horn, eds., pp. 115–42), where she proposes that negative-auxiliary inversion (NAI) in declaratives (as in Don’t nobody want no tea ) has the function of ‘focussing or giving the subject an absolute negation reading’ (p. 131), i.e. ‘There is not a single person who wants tea’, in this way providing emphasis. NAI is also attested in embedded questions and if -clauses, although it is not obligatory there.
Sonya Fix looks at the use of one AAE feature, l -vocalization, by white women in her paper ‘AAE as a Bounded Ethnolinguistic Resource for White Women with African American Ties’ ( L&C 35:i[2014] 55–74). Fix is particularly interested in women who have ‘close interracial contact over decades through long-term intimate partnerships and kinship ties’ (p. 56). She uses a complex network and cultural practice index to measure their degree of identification with AA culture and identity and finds that ‘the participants with the highest rates of /l/ vocalization … happen to be the participants with highest current AANSS [network] scores’ (p. 66), although of course ultimately speakers are unique persons with their own agency. In this way, they use available (not just linguistic) resources to ‘reflect ethnic allegiance and cultural alignment with the African American community’ (p. 72). In fiction, the effect seems to be different; thus Qiuana Lopez shows that white girls appropriating hip-hop language are typically portrayed as ‘Aggressively Feminine: The Linguistic Appropriation of Sexualized Blackness by White Female Characters in Film’ ( G&L 8[2014] 289–310), since hip-hop and ‘coolness’ are ideologically associated with (black) masculinity. In the Hollywood films Lopez investigates, the use of hip-hop language allows the (upper-middle-class) female characters ‘to gain limited access to communities outside of their … environment’ (p. 307); however, in this portrayal hip-hop culture, gang culture, and street culture are conflated (and identified with being black), and femininity is equated with sexual promiscuity.
Moving to yet another ethnic group, Robert Bayley and Cory Holland uncover ‘Variation in Chicano English: The Case of Final (z) Devoicing’ ( AS 89[2014] 385–406). Their investigation of young speakers in south Texas shows that (z) devoicing, a ‘stereotypical feature of ChE’ (p. 388), is conditioned by phonotactic features, by the morpheme status of (z), the speaker’s orientation towards the community, and gender, but not by competence in Spanish: preceding stops and following voiceless segments favour devoicing, as does morpheme status, not wanting to leave the community, and being female—in fact, speakers whose first language is English devoice final (z) more often than speakers of Spanish, and Spanish-language influence thus does not seem to be tenable (at least synchronically). Erik R. Thomas and Janneke Van Hofwegen examine more ‘Consonantal Variation in the English of a Spanish-Substrate Community’ in Texas (in Barysevich et al., eds., pp. 48–58), in particular the quality of /l/, /r/, realization of th , and voice onset time (VOT). For /l/, they find a complex ‘boomerang’ pattern of change over the four generations investigated, ‘from light to dark to light again’ (p. 51), quite possibly due to the perception that Chicano speakers experience more power today. th is realized as a stop frequently, but less frequently assimilated to a preceding consonant. These two variables seem to be ethnically salient. For /r/, the authors document high levels of non-rhoticity, correlating with (lack of) education. VOT similarly seems to be associated with ‘standard unmarked, mainstream speech’ (p. 57) and correlates with years of education, but not ethnicity. Rosalyn Negrón investigates ‘New York City’s Latino Ethnolinguistic Repertoire and the Negotiation of Latinidad in Conversation’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 87–118), more specifically in one business conversation. Negrón shows that a variety of features from Spanish and English (in this case, NYC English, AAE, other varieties of English, multiple Spanish dialects and shared ideologies and expectations) belong to the arsenal of the ethnolinguistic repertoire that speakers use flexibly to ‘customize their self-presentation to other Latinos’ (p. 90), in the process also invoking latinidad to ‘transcend racial, cultural, and even linguistic differences in the service of imagining a collective past and future for all Latinos’ (p. 92).
And finally, Asian Americans have increasingly come to the attention of linguists. Amy Wing-mei Wong and Lauren Hall-Lew link ‘Regional Variability and Ethnic Identity: Chinese Americans in New York City and San Francisco’ ( L&C 35[2014] 27–42). In particular, the authors investigate the bought -vowel (as did Becker above) and find that ‘Chinese Americans in the two cities pronounce bought in ways that are more similar to their respective regional patterns than to one another’ (p. 27), i.e. raising in NYC, but merging with bot (the cot-caught merger) in San Francisco. Nevertheless, the authors are reluctant to call this assimilation; they suggest instead that regionality and ethnicity intersect here in complex ways, since bought (formerly also raised in San Francisco) used to be associated with a local ‘white’ ethnicity (San Francisco’s Mission District) but is today presumably only heard as old-fashioned, or indeed as indexing Brooklynese.
Moving to age-related studies, Anna-Brita Stenström discovers a new pragmatic marker, ‘The Pragmatic Marker [PM] Come On in Teenage Talk’ (in Haugland et al., eds., pp. 381–94). OK, the marker may not be new, but it hasn’t been investigated before, or had the status of PM conferred upon it. Stenström analyses it as an interpersonal marker with three meanings: it is used as a directive, or as a reactive (both with different degrees of intensity), or as an evaluative (signalling reorientation or emphasis). In addition, Stenström shows that in her teenage speakers, come on is used mainly by girls. Stenström has also contributed the (short) monograph Teenage Talk: From General Characteristics to the Use of Pragmatic Markers in a Contrastive Perspective , where she contrasts Spanish with English. This small book is more illuminating for the Spanish than for the English analysis, which consists of very short summaries of Stenström’s earlier work reported here before (in particular on anyway , come on , cos , like , okay , well , and you know ), but it may also serve as a striking reminder that in spite of all the differences, teenagers and their pragmatic markers are really quite similar, even across language boundaries. The same point could also be made about Eli-Marie Danbolt Drange, Ingrid Kristine Hasund, and Anna-Brita Stenström, who call attention to striking cross-linguistic parallels involving ‘ “Your Mum!” Teenagers’ Swearing by Mother in English, Spanish and Norwegian’ ( IJCL 19[2014] 29–59). They distinguish ritual insults, name-calling, expletive interjections, and intensifiers, and find that ‘swearing by mother’ (SBM) (i.e. offending someone by way of his/her mother) is much more common in Spanish than in English, and least used in Norwegian, presumably linked to the strong Catholic taboos on the concept of the ‘whore mother’. The development in English and Norwegian is more recent, and in Norwegian is probably due to loan translations from English. In both languages, SBM mainly has the function of ritual insults, whereas in Spanish it is also used for name-calling, as an expletive, or as an intensifier. Indeed, this material could be used (but isn’t by the authors) to make a strong point about cultural transfer that includes not only the linguistic material, but also the cultural practice of, indeed, SBM and that can be clearly linked to African American popular subcultures.
We now come to studies that focus on gender. Starting with rather traditional studies, Frank Herrmann, Stuart P. Cunningham, and Sandra P. Whiteside investigate ‘Speaker Sex Effects on Temporal and Spectro-Temporal Measures of Speech’ ( JIPA 44[2014] 59–74). In the thirteen women and eleven men investigated they find evidence for ‘lower levels of coarticulation in the speech samples of the women speakers’ (p. 60), corroborating earlier studies of women as more careful articulators. However, the authors unfortunately do not say anything about the social meaning of these gender differences, although we would suspect that ‘careful speech’ is strongly indexed socially. Charlyn M. Laserna, Yi-Tai Seih, and James W. Pennebaker listen to ‘ Um … Who Like Says You Know : Filler Word Use as a Function of Age, Gender, and Personality’ ( JLSP 33[2014] 328–38). As indicated by the title, they investigate the correlation of two ‘filled pauses’ ( uh and um ) and three discourse markers ( I mean , you know , like ) with age, gender, and personality traits. Indeed the two groups of ‘fillers’ pattern differently; thus discourse markers are used more by women and young speakers and are associated with the personality trait of ‘conscientiousness’, whereas filled pauses are used more by older informants. Rosamund Moon looks at adjectives used to describe men vs. women in the Bank of English in ‘From Gorgeous to Grumpy : Adjectives, Age and Gender’ ( G&L 8[2014] 5–41). Moon draws a rather depressing picture of ‘cryptotypes’ (p. 5), i.e. covert categories that signal age indirectly, from positively evaluated adjectives to do with youth ( gorgeous , smooth-skinned , strong , ambitious ) to negatively evaluated ones covertly linked to age ( frail , white-haired , dotty , grumpy ). In addition, these crypto-types are gendered heteronormatively: ‘stereotypically female/feminine characteristics are associated with youth and youthfulness’ (p. 16), young men are breadwinners, middle-aged is already negative (for women, lacking a partner; for men, referring to being overweight and visibly ageing), and for old age, the collocates indicate isolation, abandonment, widowhood (for women), and ill health, shrunken physique, anger, unhappiness, and decline (for men). This is an interesting study because Moon can show how these adjectives alone transmit ‘ageism and sexism … subtly or subliminally’ (p. 36). David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein, and Tyler Schnoebelen correlate ‘Gender Identity and Lexical Variation in Social Media’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 135–60), in particular in a huge corpus of Twitter feeds. Their bottom-up method produces lexical clusters that correlate with (admittedly binary) gender: pronouns, emotion terms (and emoticons), kinship terms, expressive terms (abbreviations, expressive lengthening, exclamation, or question marks etc.), back-channelling and assent terms are all female markers, whereas the language of men is characterized by an absence of these markers, the assent term yessir , and swearing or the use of taboo words. Also, men use more content words overall. More interesting is their application to those authors where the gender predictions fail. They can show that these individuals’ social networks are less gender-homophilous, or, put the other way around, ‘individuals with a greater proportion of same-gender ties make greater use of gender-marked variables’ (p. 149). In this way, mainstream gendered language seems to be promoted by gender-homogeneous social networks.
Tommaso M. Milani moves us to everyday (banal) ‘Sexed Signs: Queering the Scenery’ ( IJSL 228[2014] 201–25)—an aspect of Linguistic Landscapes (LL) so far not investigated; in fact, Milani goes so far as to claim that LL has erased gender and sexuality. His analysis of an airport newsstand reveals predictable patterns (slim, young, white women and larger, muscular, but also young and white men on the cover of glossy magazines) that reproduce ‘the racially short-sighted, ageist … and fat-obsessed character of contemporary consumer culture’ (p. 211) and which are deeply heteronormative. The same can be said about tourist t-shirts that portray men and women as ‘opposite but complementary’ (p. 214), and even injunctions (Milani’s example is from a ‘revolutionary’ queer cafe) not to be ageist, sexist, homophobic, etc. reproduce the very categories they oppose. William L. Leap looks at ‘The Sex Machine , the Full-Body Tattoo , and the Hermaphrodite : Gay Sexual Cinema, Audience Reception, and Fractal Recursivity’ (in Zimman, Davis, and Raclaw, eds., Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality , pp. 129–49) and finds that the audience reception of homoerotic porn movies centres on the construction of ‘hypermasculinity’ in a way that it can erase, incorporate, or rework racial difference, tattooing, and even hermaphroditism. Throughout all the comments, it becomes clear that they are written from what Leap describes as ‘a position of masculine privilege that is grounded in sexual conquest and other forms of achievement’ (p. 131), surely an analysis that is relevant beyond gay sexual cinema. Against this rather dominant (‘homonormative’) position, Jenny L. Davis reports on ‘ “More Than Just ‘Gay Indians’”: Intersecting Articulations of Two-Spirit Gender, Sexuality, and Indigenousness’ (pp. 62–80). The indigenous Two-Spirit Americans (who identify as both male and female) in this study place themselves in at least three binary dichotomies: tribal affiliation vs. native/Indian, tribal vs. pan-tribal, and two-spirit vs. queer. Instead of rejecting one of each poles, the speakers used these dualities to ‘signal multiple levels of community membership, each of which genuinely represented one part of the speakers’ sense of themselves’ (p. 78). Still in the same collection, Elijah Adiv Edelman is ‘Neither In Nor Out: Taking the “T” Out of the Closet’ (pp. 150–69). This rather cryptic title refers to transgender men who practise ‘stealth’ (i.e. do not make their trans history openly visible), a position that is framed in mainstream lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) discourse as pathological: ‘good gay citizens’ are out, and ‘being out’ is equated with a ‘personal, social, and political act of self-actualization’ (p. 151). Quite to the contrary, Edelman argues, for trans people stealth may actually be the equivalent of coming out because it is ‘a resistance to cissexist paradigms where trans disclosure is nonnegotiable’ (p. 160).
Becky Childs and Gerard Van Herk call on speakers to ‘Work That - s ! Drag Queens, Gender, Identity, and Traditional Newfoundland English’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 634–57). The linguistic feature they investigate is verbal - s ( I goes ), which is not only reclaimed (the authors say it is ‘upcycled’, p. 635) by young urban females (as we have seen above), but is used even more frequently by the local drag queens. The authors give several explanations that may play a role here: in the revival of an obsolescent form, ‘drag queens are a step ahead … they’re just cooler … they are likely to be invested in being at the cutting edge’ (p. 649). The old (‘Newfoundlandy’) meaning may also have become overlaid by the new meanings ‘young, urban, female, performed, ironic, playful, in-group’ (p. 650), which all seem particularly useful for drag queen performers. Finally, there is also the nationwide use of verbal - s (especially 1sg Loves it ), with its connotations of ‘arch, diva-ish, perhaps slightly ditzy’ (p. 650—the authors do explicitly mention Paris Hilton). This ‘joke non-standard’ use is derived from media representations of non-standard speakers, especially in comedy contexts (Popeye, Cletus (a character from the Simpsons), Talk Like a Pirate) and thus adds more global stylistic associations to the mix. All of these may be relevant, and this ‘complexity of ambiguity of intent … makes the features so appealing for its users’ (p. 651).
Finally, Erez Levon links ‘Categories, Stereotypes, and the Linguistic Perception of Sexuality’ ( LSoc 43[2014] 539–66). Levon tests this with three linguistic features: higher levels of fundamental pitch, exaggerated pronunciation of /s/, and th -fronting, a typical working-class marker, linked to a careful investigation of informants’ stereotypical gender norms. And indeed, listeners’ ‘affective beliefs about masculinity … influence whether or not a particular feature is perceived as sounding “gay” ’ (p. 554). However, perhaps an even larger role is played by perceptual salience, because especially the presence of sibilance leads to ‘contextual nonattention’ (p. 557) to less salient cues (such as th -fronting). Stereotypes thus play a role but do not seem to be the only factor affecting perception.
10. New Englishes and Creolistics
This section presents this year’s publications in the above fields. The subsection on New Englishes will proceed from supra-regional contributions to country- and variety-specific studies and from general accounts in book format to articles. In a continuation of last year’s survey, countries traditionally categorized in the Expanding Circle will also be covered, especially since the redefinition of the Expanding Circle is among the most thriving areas within the field. The subsection on creolistics will first treat books then articles.
Beginning with publications on New Englishes, we start with two edited volumes which cover several varieties. The first is The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond , edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber, and Alexander Kautzsch. It contains twenty-seven contributions and was published on the occasion of Edgar W. Schneider’s sixtieth birthday to celebrate his contribution to the field as the creator of the widely acclaimed Dynamic Model. After Stephanie Hackert’s series editor’s preface (pp. ix–x) and the editors’ preface, ‘The Evolution of Englishes: In Honour of Edgar Schneider on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday’ (pp. xi–xviii), the introduction (pp. 1–18) by the editors outlines Schneider’s model and the structure of the book and introduces its articles. Eleven papers, which are devoted to applications of the Dynamic Model, are presented in Part I, ‘The Dynamic Model’. Part II contains sixteen further articles, which go ‘Beyond the Dynamic Model’ in taking other ‘Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on World Englishes’.
Part I begins with Bertus van Rooy (‘Convergence and Endonormativity at Phase Four of the Dynamic Model’, pp. 21–38), who uses AmE and SAE to claim that convergence depends on the nature of contact in a postcolonial setting and that endonormativity is a result of rewritten identities. This ties in with Suzan Coetzee-Van Rooy’s ‘The Identity Issue in Bi- and Multilingual Repertoires in South Africa: Implications for Schneider’s Dynamic Model’ (pp. 39–57), in which the author argues that ‘being multilingual’ is an essential part of South African identities. In ‘The Sociophonetic Effects of Event X: Post-Apartheid Black South African English in Multicultural Contact with Other South African Englishes’ (pp. 58–69), Rajend Mesthrie asserts that increased contact among the various ethnic groups in South Africa has not led to a more homogeneous SAE. In her contribution ‘Beyond Nativization? Philippine English in Schneider’s Dynamic Model’ (pp. 70–85), Isabel Pefianco Martin claims that a movement for PhilE beyond the nativization phase is unlikely because it ‘is not an identity carrier for most Filipinos’ (p. 81). In an account of ‘ T -Affrication and Relativization in Ghanaian English’, Magnus Huber identifies ‘Stylistic and Sociolinguistic Variation in Schneider’s Nativization Phase’ (pp. 86–106), which is actually expected only in Phase 5 of the Dynamic Model. Development in the last phase of Schneider’s model is investigated by Pam Peters, who argues that Aboriginal English is ‘the most significant aspect’ (p. 121) of the ‘Differentiation in Australian English’ (pp. 107–25). In ‘The Evolution of Singlish: Beyond Phase 5?’ (pp. 126–41), Lionel Wee identifies ‘linguistic sophistication, migration and commodification’ (p. 138) as factors that need to be incorporated into the Dynamic Model in the age of globalization. William A. Kretzschmar (‘Emergence of “New Varieties” in Speech as a Complex System’, pp. 142–59) shows that a complexity science approach to varieties nicely ties in with Schneider’s model since it is capable of explaining how several varieties can emerge side by side. On the basis of Comparative Correlative constructions ( the…, the …), Thomas Hoffmann (‘The Cognitive Evolution of Englishes: The Role of Constructions in the Dynamic Model’, pp. 160–80) offers a CxG approach to account for differing developments across varieties. Using ‘English in Cyprus and Namibia’ as cases in point, Sarah Buschfeld presents ‘A Critical Approach to Taxonomies and Models of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition research’ (pp. 181–202), arguing that the Dynamic Model is not fully capable of accounting for non-postcolonial Englishes. In a similar vein, Alexander Kautzsch (‘English in Germany: Spreading Bilingualism, Retreating Exonormative Orientation and Incipient Nativization?’, pp. 203–28) provides empirical data to address the status of English in Germany in view of the Dynamic Model. Among other things, he argues that a redefinition of the settler strand of the model is crucial in applying it to the German context.
The sixteen contributions in Part II are grouped into five ‘Focus’ sections. In the first, ‘Contributions with a Theoretical Focus’, Daniel Schreier (‘On Cafeterias and New Dialects: The Role of Primary Transmitters’, pp. 231–48) shows how in studying new dialect formation it is important to identify ‘different types of transmitters’, i.e. members of the community who contribute to the spread of dialect features to different extents. Christian Mair (‘Does Money Talk, and Do Languages Have Price Tags? Economic Perspectives on English as a Global Language’, pp. 249–66) surveys how economists’ views of the global role of English can contribute to World Englishes research and how, conversely, the insights of linguists might be useful for econometrics. Ahmar Mahboob’s ‘Language Variation and Education: A Focus on Pakistan’ (pp. 267–81) looks into textbooks in Pakistan and shows how these are used primarily to transmit Islamic culture rather than giving access to the global use of English. The last article in this section, Stephanie Hackert’s ‘The Evolution of English(es): Notes on the History of an Idea’ (pp. 282–300), points to the fact that a discourse-historical approach to language evolution and its link to a hierarchization of varieties is instrumental in understanding present-day ideologies of language. In the second ‘Focus’ section, ‘Cross-Varietal Contributions’, Heinrich Ramisch (‘At the Crossroads of Variation Studies and Corpus Linguistics: The Analysis of Past Tense and Past Participle Forms’, pp. 301–11) argues that variation studies should rely on spoken rather than written material. In his contribution ‘Compounding and Suffixation in World Englishes’ (pp. 312–30), Thomas Biermeier finds differences in Asian as opposed to African varieties, e.g. that the former have higher type-frequencies than the latter. The third section, ‘United States’, begins with Michael Montgomery, Michael Ellis, and Brandon Cooper, who ask ‘When Did Southern American English Really Begin?’ and aim at ‘Testing Bailey’s Hypothesis’ (pp. 331–48). They conclude that this variety emerged well before the Civil War, i.e. much earlier than claimed by Guy Bailey. Salikoko S. Mufwene gives a survey of ‘What Edgar W. Schneider Has Taught Us’ on ‘The English Origins of African American Vernacular English’ (pp. 349–64), highlighting the English rather than creole origins of this variety. Ulrich Miethaner’s study on ‘Innovation in Pre-World War II AAVE?’ presents ‘Evidence from BLUR’ (pp. 365–85) for the beginning of AAVE in the late nineteenth century. In ‘Focus 4: Asia and Africa’, Andy Kirkpatrick and Sophiaan Subhan investigate ‘The Use of Inflectional Marking for Present and Past Tenses in English as an Asian Lingua Franca’ and ask if their findings can be interpreted as ‘Non-Standard or New Standards or Errors?’ (pp. 386–400). In conclusion, they claim that it is not possible to infer speakers’ L1s from the way they mark tense in English. Lisa Lim’s contribution ‘Yesterday’s Founder Population, Today’s Englishes’ concludes that ‘The Role of the Peranakans’, a prestigious minority group in Singapore, was crucial ‘in the (Continuing) Evolution of Singapore English’ (pp. 401–19). David Deterding scrutinizes ‘The Evolution of Brunei English’ and asks ‘How It Is Contributing to the Development of English in the World’ (pp. 420–33). His conclusion is that from a global perspective this variety is characterized by comparatively restricted developments. In ‘The Evolutionary Trajectory of Cameroonian Creole and its Varying Sociolinguistic Statuses’ (pp. 434–47), Aloysius Ngefac evaluates issues of prestige and functions of this contact variety as reflected in its varying labels. The final three papers are grouped under ‘Old Varieties, New Perspectives’. Roswitha Fischer’s ‘Lexical Creativity Reconsidered’ investigates the neologisms ‘ GUI , cyborg , cred , pay-per-view , techno - and cyber- ’ (pp. 448–69) in The Guardian . Clive Upton examines ‘The Language of Butchery, the UK’s Last Public Craft’ (pp. 470–85) from an etymological and lexicographical point of view. The last contribution, Christina Neuland and Florian Schleburg’s ‘A New Old English?’, evaluates ‘The Chances of an Anglo-Saxon Revival on the Internet’ (pp. 486–504); they come to the conclusion that this ‘new’ online variety suffers from bad grammar and a large impact of PDE.
The second volume on varieties is The Variability of Current World Englishes edited by Eugene Green and Charles F. Meyer. The foreword (pp. v–viii) informs the reader that seven of the ten chapters in this book were presented at the second meeting of the International Society of the Linguistics of English (ISLE) in Boston in 2011. In their introduction (pp. 1–9), the editors set the scene for the investigation of variation ‘in a range of new and older varieties’ (pp. 2–3) and survey the contributions, which are grouped into two parts: Part I, ‘Methodological Issues in Distinguishing Varieties’, and Part II, ‘Studies of Features in Particular Contexts’. I will only concentrate on the chapters relevant for New Englishes and creolistics. In the methodology part, Caroline R. Wiltshire (‘New Englishes and the Emergence of the Unmarked’, pp. 13–40) argues that new varieties are more likely to have unmarked as opposed to marked vowels in their repertoire. In ‘Globalisation and the Transnational Impact of Non-Standard Varieties’ (pp. 65–98), Christian Mair uses data from vernacularized computer-mediated communication in Nigerian Pidgin English, Jamaican Creole, and Camfranglais. He is sceptical about the explanatory power of traditional models as regards the impact of globalization and opts for a turn towards ‘complex multilingual settings’ (p. 93) in World Englishes research. In his contribution ‘The Circle of English: An Exploration of the “Core” and “Periphery” of World Englishes’ (pp. 99–124), Gerald Nelson investigates the core vocabulary of ten Inner and Outer Circle varieties of English and claims that World Englishes research might do well to turn its focus on common rather than differing characteristics.
In the first chapter of Part II, Rajend Mesthrie examines ‘Contact and Sociolinguistic Factors in the Evolution of a Variety of Black English in Kimberley, South Africa’, where he spots ‘A Robust, Living Substratum’ (pp. 127–47). He shows that it is quite difficult to label the features he studies as either characteristic of this variety or as products of L2 acquisition. Zhiming Bao studies ‘ Got in Singapore English’ (pp. 147–68) in contexts where it replaces did (‘I got ask you’) and investigates the role of this construction, a transfer feature from Chinese, plays in contact-induced change in SingE. On the basis of four vowels in speakers of JamE and Jamaican Creole who grew up in Canada, Lars Hinrichs examines ‘Diasporic Mixing of World Englishes: The Case of Jamaican Creole in Toronto’ (pp. 169–98). In general he finds a greater tendency towards CanE vowel realizations. Sali A. Tagliamonte’s contribution, ‘System and Society in the Evolution of Change: The View from Canada’ (pp. 199–238), investigates stative passive have got as opposed to have and quotative be like . She concludes that with respect to these features there is no north–south divide in CanE. For be like she found gender differences in the south. In the last chapter, Eugene Green examines ‘The Diffusion of I Need You To + Infinitive in World Englishes’ (pp. 257–84). Quantitative results based on the Corpus of Global Web-Based English reveal that in varieties of English world-wide the occurrence of this pattern is fairly homogeneous, mirroring rapid global diffusion. Due to the lack of sociolinguistic information in the data, a full-fledged analysis of this spread requires other sources. A great benefit of the volume is a ‘contextual statement’ by the editors placed after each contribution to put each respective chapter in a wider perspective of ongoing research.
This year’s third book-length publication is Raymond Hickey’s A Dictionary of Varieties of English , which covers a wide array of topics pertaining to all varieties of English (dialects as well as New Englishes), ranging from all traditional and some new lexical sets relevant for comparing accents world-wide, via important linguists in the field, to an abundance of varieties. Since the dictionary is extensively discussed in Section 9 above, the reader should turn to that section for more detail.
In addition to the edited volumes and the dictionary, a special issue of the Journal of English Linguistics (42:i[2014]), edited by Dirk Noel, Bertus van Rooy, and Johan van der Auwera, presents four articles on ‘Diachronic Approaches to Modality in World Englishes’, one dealing with White SAE, one with Black SAE and one each with AusE and PhilE. In their ‘Introduction to the Special Issue’ ( JEngL (42:i[2014] 3–6), the editors highlight the benefit of a diachronic approach to World Englishes on the basis of corpora especially complied for this purpose, which has been largely neglected so far. The first contribution, by Peter Collins, investigates ‘Quasi-Modals and Modals in Australian English Fiction 1800–1999, with Comparisons across British and American English’ ( JEngL (42:i[2014] 7–30) and concludes that AusE is evolving in ways similar to BrE and AmE. Ronel Wasserman and Bertus van Rooy explore ‘The Development of Modals of Obligation and Necessity in White South African English through Contact with Afrikaans’ ( JEngL (42:i[2014] 31–50) and claim that through contact with Afrikaans must and should tend to shift their meanings and become increasingly polysemous. Bertus van Rooy and Ronel Wasserman, ‘Do the Modals of Black and White South African English Converge?’ ( JEngL (42:i[2014] 51–67), show that the distance between the two varieties under scrutiny is, in fact, increasing as regards the use of modals. Finally, Peter Collins, Ariane M. Borlongan, and Xinyue Yao present their results of ‘A Diachronic Study’ of ‘Modality in Philippine English’ ( JEngL (42:i[2014] 68–88). They conclude that PhilE is different from both BrE and AmE in general although in some areas of modality it seems to be aligning with AmE. These findings are interpreted as a sign of a stage between endo- and exonormative orientation.
Moving on to general articles and articles on a mix of varieties, Edgar W. Schneider, in ‘New Reflections of the Evolutionary Dynamics of World Englishes’ ( WEn 33[2014] 9–32), tests the applicability of his Dynamic Model to Expanding Circle varieties. He concludes that the model is not appropriate for explaining the dynamics in non-postcolonial contexts and introduces the notion of ‘transnational attractions’ as a more suitable concept to describe situations in which English is used as ‘a tool and symbol of modernization, globalization, and economic prosperity’ (p. 28). Bertus van Rooy examines ‘Progressive Aspect and Stative Verbs in Outer Circle Varieties’ ( WEn 33[2014] 157–72). Based on corpora for spoken and written IndE, KenE, and Black SAE, he concludes that the progressive is not merely expanded to stative verbs, as has been argued by others, but rather to contexts where it captures extended duration. Thomas Brunner investigates ‘Structural Nativization, Typology and Complexity’ in ‘Noun Phrase Structures in British, Kenyan and Singaporean English’ ( ELL 18[2014] 23–48). He finds that NP modification in SingE and KenE differ from BrE in accordance with the typological set-up of the respective substrate languages. In a fairly different but also relevant approach, M. Obaidul Hamid investigates ‘World Englishes in International Proficiency Tests’ ( WEn 33[2014] 263–77), reporting that World Englishes-speaking participants in such tests support both StE as the underlying model and ‘varietal equality and non-native speakers’ right to lexical creativity’ (p. 275). As a consequence Hamid demands more awareness-raising on the side of World Englishes research.
Next, we turn to publications dealing with one variety each, starting with Oceania/Australia, with one book appearing on Fiji English and, in addition to Pam Peters’s and Peter Collins’s contributions mentioned above, eight articles on AusE relevant for the present section in the four issues of the Australian Journal of Linguistics (34[2014]).
Lena Zipp’s monograph investigates Educated Fiji English with respect to Lexico-Grammar and Variety Status , intending to analyse and place this type of English within the framework of Schneider’s Dynamic Model . After the introduction (pp. 1–4), chapter 2 gives an account of the ‘History and the Sociolinguistic Setting’ in Fiji (pp. 5–20) and chapter 3 surveys ‘Theory, Methodology and Data’ (pp. 21–54). The following chapters 4 to 6 are the core of the book, basically treating prepositions in different syntactic contexts, on ‘Word Level: Prepositions’ (pp. 55–90), ‘Phrase Level: Verb-Particle Combinations’ (pp. 91–146), and ‘Pattern Level: Prepositions and - ing Clauses’ (pp. 147–86) respectively. In her conclusion (pp. 187–94), Zipp sums up her main results and links her three main hypotheses to her findings. The linguistic analyses aim at identifying qualitative and quantitative similarities between the use of English by the two ethnic groups in Fiji, i.e. Fijians and Indo-Fijians, as well as testing exonormative influence from IndE or NZE with respect to three theoretical hypotheses, two of which can be tentatively confirmed. The first is that Indo-Fijian English exhibits similarities to IndE, although it is not clear if this results from the ‘general similarity of second language phenomena’ (p. 188) or from an exonormative orientation towards IndE. The second hypothesis, that Indo-Fijian English and Fijian English display a high degree of similarity, is confirmed by the features under scrutiny, leading Zipp to claim that a national variety might be evolving. Her third hypothesis, that Indo-Fijian English is closer to NZE than to BrE, could not be backed up by empirical evidence.
In a special issue of AuJL (34:i[2014]), Pam Peters and Michael Haugh examine ‘Speech Styles and Spoken Interaction in the Australian National Corpus’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 1–3), which contains the following two contributions relevant for this section. The first is Kate Burridge and Simon Musgrave’s ‘It’s Speaking Australian English We Are: Irish Features in Nineteenth Century Australia’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 24–49). They find evidence for the influence of several IrE grammatical features in the formation stage of AusE. In the second, Felicity Cox, Sallyanne Palethorpe, and Samantha Bentink have a go at ‘Phonetic Archaeology’ and examine ‘50 Years of Change to Australian English /i:/’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 50–75). Focusing on the degree of onglide in /i:/, they report that the ‘broadness continuum has contracted’ (p. 50).
In another issue of AuJL , Jill Vaughan and Jean Mulder, ‘The Survival of the Subjunctive in Australian English: Ossification, Indexicality and Stance’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 486–505), attribute the continued use of the mandative and the were- subjunctive in AusE to the emergence of certain ossifying frames and the need for indexing certain styles. In ‘A Corpus-Based Study’, Peter Collins and Xinyue Yao examine ‘Grammatical Change in the Verb Phrase in Australian English’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 506–23). With respect to modals, quasi-modals, the progressive, and the present perfect, the authors show that in principle AusE has been changing in ways similar to AmE and BrE, but also point to differences that suggest a certain degree of independence of AusE. Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Marie-Eve Ritz’s ‘Stories Down Under’ examines ‘Tense Variation at the Heart of Australian English Narratives’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 549–65). Based on personal narratives by educated speakers of AusE, the authors find evidence for generational differences in the use of tense for foregrounding, and interpret this as change in progress. Ina G. Malcolm, ‘A Day in the Park: Emerging Genre for Readers of Aboriginal English’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 566–80), discusses an autobiographical narrative written in Aboriginal English and suggests that a distinct genre is emerging for an Aboriginal English readership. Pam Peters investigates ‘Usage Guides and Usage Trends in Australian and British English’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 581–98) with respect to three spelling features. She finds that the differing recommendations in British and Australian usage guides are not mirrored in usage. Kiya Alimoradian, ‘ “Makes Me Feel More Aussie”: Ethnic Identity and Vocative Mate in Australia’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 599–623), examines the self-reported use of this vocative by Australians whose native language is not English and finds similarities to L1 English Australians, but also a correlation between a less frequent use of mate and a stronger heritage orientation.
Moving to South Asia, Marianne Hundt and Devyani Sharma have edited a volume on English in the Indian Diaspora , presenting nine contributions on IndE as used outside India. In their introduction (pp. 1–8), the editors outline the rationale behind this volume, i.e. primarily to test if diaspora varieties are different in terms of outcome from non-diaspora varieties and if across diasporic contexts contact features and processes are similar. Glenda Leung and Dagmar Deuber examine ‘Indo-Trinidadian Speech’ by presenting ‘An Investigation into a Popular Stereotype Surrounding Pitch’ (pp. 9–27). They conclude that a high pitch is indeed a marker of Indo-Trinidadians but also find that this feature is more prominent in women than men. Farhana Alam and Jane Stuart-Smith’s contribution on ‘Identity, Ethnicity and Fine Phonetic Detail’ provides ‘An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of Syllable-Initial /t/ in Glaswegian Girls of Pakistani Heritage’ (pp. 29–53). They find that the girls’ articulation of /t/ as either dental or retroflex correlates with their modern or conservative communities of practice. Claudia Rathore studies ‘East African Indian Twice Migrants in Britain’ by looking into ‘Phonological Variation across Generations’ (pp. 55–83) with respect to rhoticity. She concludes that, while first-generation migrants continue to be rhotic, second-generation migrants adopt local non-rhoticity. Rajend Mesthrie and Alida Chevalier give a survey of ‘Sociophonetics and the Indian Diaspora’ and then take a closer look at ‘The NURSE Vowel and Other Selected Features in South African Indian English’ (pp. 85–104). Their general result is that in Indian SAE stratification by class and gender is setting in. Jakob Leimgruber and Lavanya Sankran investigate ‘Imperfectives in Singapore’s Indian Community’ (pp. 105–30) and find ethnic differentiation between Tamils, Chinese, and Malay. They claim that this is due to subtle differences in the substrate languages of SingE. In ‘Zero Articles in Indian Englishes: A Comparison of Primary and Secondary Diaspora Situations’ (pp. 131–70), Marianne Hundt studies first-generation Indian migrants to Fiji and Fiji Indian migrants to New Zealand. She concludes that, despite a high degree of fluctuation, article use in the secondary diaspora is closer to metropolitan types of English than in the primary diaspora. Rajend Mesthrie’s ‘A Lesser Globalisation’ provides ‘A Sociolexical Study of Indian Englishes in Diaspora, with a Primary Focus on South Africa’ (pp. 171–86). He claims that the examination of the Indian diaspora can greatly benefit from analyses of the lexicon, showing both ‘cultural retentions from different parts of India’ (p. 184) as well as semantic changes due to new contact settings. Lena Zipp (‘Indo-Fijian English: Linguistic Diaspora or Endonormative Stabilization?’, pp. 187–213) investigates language attitudes and use in Fiji and reports that Fijians and Indo-Fijians are in different phases of Schneider’s Dynamic Model. In the last contribution, Devyani Sharma studies ‘Transnational Flows, Language Variation, and Ideology’ (pp. 215–42). On the basis of the pronunciation of /t/, she shows that the ties of second-generation British Punjabis with India have grown weaker, while at the same time educated IndE has developed into a fairly prestigious variety for this group.
A number of journal contributions also deal with South Asia. Tobias Bernaisch, Stefan Th. Gries, and Joybrato Mukherjee investigate ‘The Dative Alternation in South Asian English(es)’, i.e. Bangladeshi, Indian, Maldivian, Nepali, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan English, and aim at ‘Modelling Predictors and Predicting Prototypes’ ( EWW 35[2014] 7–31). They find that these varieties display a large degree of similarity with one another and with BrE, the reference variety, as regards the influence of several factors on the occurrence of the two competing dative patterns for the verb give . On the basis of glossaries of IndE features from the 1930s, James Lambert examines the ‘Diachronic Stability in Indian English Lexis’ ( WEn 33[2014] 112–27). He finds an astounding continuity of features over time and posits that endonormativity in IndE has a much longer history than is widely assumed. Finally, Elizabeth J. Erling, Philip Seargeant, and Mike Solly present the results of a survey of attitudes towards ‘English in Rural Bangladesh’ ( EnT 30:iv[2014] 15–21). They report that people’s attitudes often mirror unrealistic expectations as regards the benefits of a better knowledge of English. As a result, the authors demand that development programmes take these expectations into account to ‘enhance opportunities for economic and social development’ (p. 20).
Next are sixteen articles on English in Southeast Asia. In addition to two papers which deal with several varieties, nine contributions are on English in Singapore, six of which are part of a special issue of World Englishes (33:iii[2014]), two are on Malaysia, two on the Philippines, and one on Brunei. Gerhard Leitner, ‘Transforming Southeast Asian Language Habits’ ( WEn 33[2014] 512–25), gives a survey of the history of English in this region, sheds light on unifying and differentiating linguistic developments, and presents some thoughts on educational implications. Cristina Suárez-Gómez examines adnominal ‘Relative Clauses in Southeast Asian Englishes’ ( JEngL 42[2014] 245–68) in Hong Kong, Singapore, and India (with the latter, strictly speaking, belonging to South Asia). Focusing on relativizers, she finds, among other things, that HKE and SingE similarly prefer that , while IndE tends towards wh -words; she interprets this distinction as a reflex of substrate influence.
Turning to the special issue of WEn mentioned above, the editors Kingsley Bolton and Bee Chin Ng’s ‘The Dynamics of Multilingualism in Contemporary Singapore’ ( WEn 33:iii[2014] 307–18) serves as an introduction to this symposium and surveys history, educational policy, trends in language acquisition, and language shift in Singapore. The contribution by Ying-Ying Tan, ‘English as a “Mother Tongue” in Singapore’ ( WEn 33[2014] 319–39), uses a questionnaire study on language attitudes and on how English is perceived as an identity marker, finding that English is acquiring the status of a native language. Peter Siemund, Monika Edith Schulz, and Martin Schweinberger’s ‘Studying the Linguistic Ecology of Singapore: A Comparison of College and University Students’ ( WEn 33[2014] 340–62) is another questionnaire study on language attitudes and use and finds that Singaporean students are mostly bi- or trilingual and have positive attitudes towards Singlish, English, and their mother tongue. Euvin Loong Jin Chong, and Mark F. Seilhamer investigate ‘Young People, Malay and English in Multilingual Singapore’ ( WEn 33[2014] 363–77). Also using a survey, they confirm the alleged strong status of Malay among L1 Malay-speaking students. Francesco Cavallaro, Bee Chin Ng, and Mark F. Seilhamer examine ‘Singapore Colloquial English’ (Singlish) with respect to ‘Issues of Prestige and Identity’ ( WEn 33[2014] 378–97). Aiming at a reassessment of the widely reported low prestige of Singlish, their matched-guise tests reveal that this non-standard variety, indeed, only has a certain prestige in the private but not the public domain. Despite its title, ‘Singlish Can and Speech Accommodation in Singapore English’ ( WEn 33[2014] 398–412) by Bee Chin Ng, Francesco Cavallaro, and Daphne Shu Ping Koh, is not about can but rather studies how speakers of Singlish and Standard SingE are perceived in salesman–customer dialogues within the framework of accommodation theory. They find that salesmen were rated more positively when they diverged from the language of the customer, while the customers were seen more positively when they converged on the language of the salesmen. Next we turn to the three papers on SingE which are not part of this symposium. In ‘Singapore English and Styling the Ah Beng ’ ( WEn 33[2014] 60–84) David West Brown and Teo Shi Jie study users of English in online forums who style themselves as Ah Bengs (‘hustlers, gangsters’) and find evidence of sociolinguistic variation in SingE with respect to gender, class, and ethnicity. Jakob R.E. Leimgruber investigates ‘Singlish as Defined by Young Educated Chinese Singaporeans’ ( IJSL 230[2014] 45–63). On the basis of definitions of Singlish given by Chinese Singaporeans and of attitudinal tests of Hokkien elements, he calls for a redefinition of Singlish as a linguistic repertoire rather than a bundle of features. Ee-Ling Low presents a meta-analysis of many older and recent studies on SingE in ‘Research on English in Singapore’ ( WEn 33[2014] 439–57). She concludes that the areas of language use, focusing on variation as well as linguistic features and language education, have been covered widely. As future directions, she suggests more work on language acquisition, language pathology, and classroom discourse. Finally she discusses SingE in the frameworks of Braj B. Kachru’s Three Circles and Schneider’s Dynamic Model.
Moving on to English in Malaysia, Azirah Hashim examines ‘English and the Linguistic Ecology in Malaysia’ ( WEn 33[2014] 458–71), discussing emerging tensions between English, Malay, and other local languages. Ultimately she calls for reactions first and foremost in the domain of education and thus language policy. Toshiko Yamaguchi studies ‘The Pronunciation of TH in Word-Initial Position in Malaysian English’ ( EnT 30:iii[2014] 13–21). She finds that a new dental [t] is used by speakers of all ethnicities as an allophone of the voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives. The irregular use of this new [t], however, does not allow a straightforward categorization as a nativized feature. In addition to the two papers mentioned above, PhilE was covered in two further contributions this year. Peter Collins, Ariane M. Borlongan, Joo-Hyuk Lim, and Xinyue Yao provide ‘A Diachronic Analysis’ of ‘The Subjunctive Mood in Philippine English’ (in Pfenninger et al., eds., Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English , pp. 250–80). Their analysis confirms a strong connection of PhilE to its ‘parent’ (p. 259) AmE, but also suggests a certain degree of endonormative stabilization, a result very much in line with Collins et al.’s modality study in JEngL (42:i) above. In ‘Philippine English Revisited’ ( WEn 33[2014] 50–9) Isabel Pefianco Martin sets out to establish a notion of ‘circles within circles’ in Kachru’s Three Circles model. This seems to be a complement to her discussion of PhilE in the framework of Schneider’s Dynamic Model (see above), but she does not cross-reference her two articles, although a combined evaluation would have been welcome. The last paper on Southeast Asia is Noor Azam Haji-Othman and James McLellan’s assessment of ‘English in Brunei’ ( WEn 33[2014] 486–97). On the basis of a literature review they confirm the previous categorization of Brunei English as a new variety, place it between Phases 3 and 4 of Schneider’s Dynamic Model, and call for a closer investigation of sub-varieties and code-mixing in future research.
Moving to East Asia, there is one monograph and one article on South Korea and two articles on HKE. Glenn Hadikin’s Korean English: A Corpus-Driven Study of a New English contains seven chapters, a reference section, and an index, and aims at establishing the English spoken by Koreans as a variety of English on the basis of analyses of word strings and lexical priming in spoken corpora. In chapter 1, ‘Korean English’ (pp. 1–18), the author sets the scene with the intention to show that we are not dealing with bad English but a variety of its own. Chapter 2, ‘From Phraseology to Lexical Priming’ (pp. 19–36), explains the key terms, shows differences between L1 and L2 English phraseology and formulates the objectives of the study. Chapter 3, ‘Capturing and Comparing’ (pp. 37–48), introduces the methodology: the study used a total of four spoken corpora, two from groups of Korean speakers of English living in Liverpool (83,446 tokens) and Seoul (112,621 tokens), respectively, and two covering spoken UK English, i.e. a selection of data from the BNC (3,945,881 tokens) and a corpus of local Liverpool English (106,562 tokens) collected by a colleague of the author’s. Chapters 4 to 6 present the results of the study concerning ‘The of Environment’, a ‘Study of Have a and Look ’, and a ‘Study of the I Environment’ respectively. The author shows that in all patterns the Korean speakers diverge from the L1 English data in terms of collocations, which the author attributes partly to education material used in Korea. Finally, chapter 7 formulates ‘Implications of This Study’ (pp. 177–86), again focusing on the ‘Emergence of Korean Spoken English’, but also critically evaluating variation in the corpora and identifying limitations of this study. Overall, I think Hadikin’s claim that we are dealing with an emerging variety is way too strong; it seems more plausible that the divergence of the Korean data from UK English mirrors Korean learner-English. Nevertheless, the collocation-cum-lexical priming approach to World Englishes is innovative and promising. In the article on English in Korea, Sofia Rüdiger also examines—in a much more cautious way than Hadikin—‘The Nativization of English in the Korean Context’, describing ‘Uncharted Territory of World Englishes’ ( EnT 30:iv[2014] 11–14), identifying some lexical and morphosyntactic patterns as potential candidates for structural nativization of English in South Korea.
Next comes Hong Kong. Anna Danielewicz-Betz and David Graddol take a look at ‘Varieties of English in the Urban Landscapes of Hong Kong and Shenzhen’ ( EnT 30:iii[2014] 22–32) and provide, mostly on the basis of public signs, an overview of the diverse language landscapes of these two cities. They find that in Hong Kong, English is losing ground while in Shenzen it is becoming more prominent. In both areas the authors note a frequent mixing of BrE and AmE. In the other paper, Stephen Evans, in ‘The Evolutionary Dynamics of Postcolonial Englishes: A Hong Kong Case Study’ ( JSoc 18[2014] 571–603), challenges the applicability of Schneider’s Dynamic Model to Hong Kong and other Outer Circle Englishes. Using a corpus of primary sources of HKE (e.g. legislative council proceedings and newspapers) spanning the years 1841 to 2012, the author identifies Schneider’s test cases based on synchronic data and secondary sources as inadequate, suggests a substantial reorganization of the evolutionary phases of HKE, among other things, and calls for the analysis of primary diachronic data to account for the development of English in Outer Circle countries.
In addition to articles on English in Africa in edited volumes and special issues discussed above, there are four journal contributions, one each on Uganda and South Africa, and two on Namibia. Bebwa Isingoma examines ‘Lexical and Grammatical Features of Ugandan English’ ( EnT 30:ii[2014] 51–6). In doing so he counters the widespread practice of subsuming Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Ugandan English under the heading East African English. In her article ‘Coconuts and the Middle Class’ Kirstin Wilmot investigates ‘Identity Change and the Emergence of a New Prestigious English Variety in South Africa’ ( EWW 35[2014] 306–37). On the basis of sociolinguistic interviews and socio-phonetic analyses, she claims that young female speakers educated in elite schools are developing a new social ‘deracialized’ (p. 335) variety of English. In the first of two contributions on Namibia, Sarah Buschfeld and Alexander Kautzsch, ‘English in Namibia: A First Approach’ ( EWW 35[2014] 121–60), introduce the English spoken in Namibia to the field of World Englishes. Namibia is an especially noteworthy case, since it was never a British colony and thus English does not have a long tradition there. Nevertheless, with the 1990 independence, English was introduced as the sole official language. On the basis of a language attitudes and use survey and some tentative candidates for structural nativization, the authors identify clear signals for a shift from foreign to L2 status. Gerald Stell analyses ‘Use and Function of English in Namibia’s Multiethnic Settings’ ( WEn 33[2014] 223–41). More precisely, he investigates English/local language code-switching patterns in inter- and intra-ethnic communication and highlights the relevance for such an approach in examining the emergence of a new variety.
Moving on to the Caribbean, we find one monograph on English in Jamaica and Trinidad and one article on JamE. Dagmar Deuber examines English in the Caribbean focusing on Variation, Style and Standards in Jamaica and Trinidad. Using ICE as data source, Deuber aims at describing morphological and syntactic variation with respect to the relationship between standard and creole features in educated speakers. In the introduction (pp. 1–21), the author gives an overview of variation, style, and standard both in Jamaica and Trinidad and in the Caribbean in general and presents the aims and structure of the book. Chapter 2 surveys ‘The Background and Context of English in Jamaica and Trinidad’ (pp. 22–43) and focuses on the relevant sociolinguistic developments. Chapter 3, ‘The Sociolinguistics of Style and the Creole Continuum’, presents the book’s research context, while chapter 4 gives an account of ‘Data and Methodology’ (pp. 67–78). Chapters 5 to 7 are the empirical core of the book. Here Deuber provides an ‘Analysis of Conversations’ with respect to ‘Style in Jamaican English’ (pp. 79–137), the results of which are used as a starting point for a comparison of JamE to Trinidadian English in chapter 6, which presents an ‘Analysis of Four Text Categories’ going into the details of ‘Style and Standard in Trinidadian English’ (pp. 138–201). Chapter 7 investigates what Deuber calls ‘the main question that will be considered in the present study with regard to standards’ (p. 20), i.e. ‘The Modal Verbs Can/Could and Will/Would in Caribbean and Other Varieties of English’ (pp. 202–37). Her main findings, summed up in the conclusion (pp. 238–54), are as follows. Chapters 5 and 6 show that creole features (i.e. direct creole influence) are low in terms of overall frequency but are ‘an important feature of style in spoken English in the Caribbean’ (p. 238), ranging from informal to anti-formal. The results of the modal verb analysis in chapter 7 suggest that indirect creole influence (i.e. English forms with a particular creole meaning) can range, stylistically speaking, from neutral to informal in Trinidadian English. These findings lead Deuber to a reinterpretation of the creole continuum (p. 241), incorporating style as a factor more prominent than social status. In this vein, creole features also contribute to the identity constructions of educated speakers in marking them as ‘professionally competent yet down-to-earth’ (p. 243). With respect to ‘Standards in English in the Caribbean’ (p. 244), the author confirms earlier assumptions that the two varieties under scrutiny are sub-varieties of Caribbean StE. A comparison of the outcomes with other New Englishes shows that informal Caribbean varieties cannot clearly be categorized as either ESL, ENL, or creoles, which is why Deuber suggests employing the rarely used term ESD (English as a second dialect) for such cases. Finally, the volume is complemented by two appendices (‘Markup Symbols’ and ‘Biodata Form’). In the article on JamE, Ksenija Bogetić finds ‘Linguistic Trajectories of Globalization and Localization’ on the basis of ‘ Be Like and the Quotative System of Jamaican English’ ( EnT 30:iii[2014] 5–12). Further contributions on the Caribbean with a stronger creolist focus are treated below.
As stated above, the investigation of the nativization of English in non-postcolonial countries is a hot topic at the moment, especially in European countries. In addition to a contribution on Germany by Kautzsch (see above), four papers have touched upon this issue in 2014 with respect to Finland, Poland, Serbia, and Turkey. Mikko Laitinen, ‘630 Kilometres by Bicycle: Observations of English in Urban and Rural Finland’ ( IJSL 228 [2014] 55–77), takes a linguistic-landscape perspective in surveying the status of English in Finland. On the basis of a quantitative account of English in signs in rural and urban areas, he concludes that English is present everywhere, albeit to different degrees. Aleksandra Kasztalska’s article ‘English in Contemporary Poland’ ( WEn 33[2014] 242–62) surveys the history of English in Poland and the status of English in education, advertising, and the media, provides examples of the impact of English on Polish, and concludes that English in Poland has the somewhat ambivalent status of both being ‘an economic asset and a corrupting agent’ (p. 242). Tvrtko Prćić’s ‘English as the Nativized Foreign Language [ENFL] and its Impact on Serbian’ ( EnT 30:i[2014] 13–20) examines the degree of Anglicization and hybridization of Serbian and concludes that the overwhelming influence of English as a very special foreign language requires sound knowledge of these processes to ensure ‘peaceful co-existence’ of English and local languages. Beril T. Arik and Engin Arik investigate ‘The Role and Status of English in Turkish Higher Education’ ( EnT 30:iv[2014] 5–10). They find that, with about 15 per cent of BA programmes in Turkey being taught exclusively in English, English sees an immense spread in this Expanding Circle country. Interestingly, the subject most frequently taught in English in Turkey is engineering, followed by English-related programmes.
We now turn to the second subsection on creolistics and begin with one edited volume and two monographs. The volume edited by Isabelle Buchstaller, Anders Holmberg, and Mohammad Almoaily investigates Pidgins and Creoles beyond European Encounters . Even if this is not about English-lexifier pidgins and creoles, it is included here since it makes an important contribution to the field by going beyond the trodden paths of a European-centred approach to contact languages. This motivation is explicated in the editors’ introduction (pp. 1–6), which also briefly sketches the contents of the six papers included. Emanuel J. Drechsel (‘Ethnohistory of Speaking: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin in a Trilogy of Historical-Sociolinguistic Attestations’, pp. 7–40) examines the methodological problems involved in reconstructing an extinct contact language, in this case a Polynesian-based pidgin used as a means of communication between locals and British and French explorers in the eighteenth century. On the basis of an early text written in pidgin, Anthony P. Grant (‘The “Language of Tobi” as Presented in Horace Holden’s Narrative: Evidence for Restructuring and Lexical Mixture in a Nuclear Micronesian-Based Pidgin’, pp. 41–56) gives an account of the existence of a Micronesian-based pidgin spoken on Tobi Island. Mohammed Almoaily studies ‘Language Variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic’ (pp. 57–84) on the basis of morpho-syntactic structures. This pidgin, used by native speakers of Arabic and expatriate workers, is claimed to be largely influenced by universal cognitive processes rather than by the substrates or the superstrate. Rajend Mesthrie asks the question, ‘How Non-Indo-European is Fanakalo Pidgin?’ and investigates ‘Selected Understudied Structures in a Bantu-Lexified Pidgin with Germanic Substrates’ (pp. 85–100). He concludes that this pidgin, whose lexicon is 70 per cent Zulu and 30 per cent English and Afrikaans, exhibits a grammar more similar to English than to Zulu but also exhibits structures that result neither from English nor Zulu. Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken tackle ‘Language Change in a Multiple Contact Setting’ based on ‘The Case of Sarnami (Suriname)’ (pp. 101–40). This Indian diaspora contact variety seems to have emerged from an interesting mix of koineization and contact with Dutch and Sranan Tongo, the national vernacular of Surinam. Finally, Kees Versteegh examines ‘Pidgin Verbs’ and asks: are they ‘Infinitives or Imperatives?’ (pp. 141–70). He claims that foreigner-directed speech is crucial in the emergence of a pidgin, just as child-directed speech has an impact on child speech. On the basis of Arabic foreigner-directed speech, the author shows that the verb-form in Arabic-based pidgins frequently is the Arabic imperative. The volume is complemented by area, language, and subject indexes.
The first of the two monographs is Claire Lefebvre’s Relabeling in Language Genesis. The book is made up of nine chapters in which the author elaborates on the concept of relabelling, i.e. relexification, as the driving force behind the creation of contact languages, summarizing and expanding upon her and her associates’ previous work on the issue. Unlike earlier work within the framework of Principles and Parameters (P&P), Lefebvre resorts to a CxG approach here, which she deems more appropriate to capture relabelling, a process that ‘takes place in the lexical component of the grammar’ (p. 5). In her introduction (pp. 1–8) she justifies the need for the book and gives an overview of its structure. Chapter 2, ‘Relabeling: A Central Process in Language Contact/Genesis’ (pp. 9–30), explains the concept under investigation, noting that other labels that have been used (e.g. relexification, calquing, transfer) might cover the same phenomenon; the chapter also evaluates relabelling in a variety of contexts. Chapter 3 provides an up-to-date version of Lefebvre’s ‘A Relabeling-Based Theory of Creole Genesis’ (pp. 31–102), highlighting the fact that other processes only happen after relabelling. In addition, the author deals with comments and criticism and introduces new data to substantiate her claims. The next two chapters are co-authored with Renée Lambert-Brétière. Chapter 4 investigates ‘Relabeling in Two Different Theories of the Lexicon’ (pp. 103–38) and concludes that where a P&P approach fails to explain some aspects of relabelling in creole genesis, CxG, more precisely Radical CxG, succeeds. In chapter 5, the two authors examine ‘Relabeling and Word Order’ from ‘A Construction Grammar Perspective’ (pp. 139–63) to address the at times ambiguous findings on the influence of substrate and superstrate in creole genesis. Chapter 6, then, elaborates ‘On Some Differences between Haitian and Saramaccan’, which have Gbe as a common substrate, in order to identify certain ‘Relabeling Options’ (pp. 164–76) available in creating creoles. Chapter 7, ‘Relabeling and the Contribution of the Superstrate Languages to Creoles’ (pp. 177–222), explains the necessary, though frequently neglected, investigation of the superstrate in the emergence of creoles. Here the impact of the superstrate is largely attributed to the labels and to word order. ‘Relabeling and the Typological Classification of Creoles’ (pp. 223–58) is the topic of chapter 8, where it is argued that creoles have typological traits of both substrate and superstrate, depending on which of the two is in operation in the respective area of grammar. The conclusion (chapter 9) claims to establish relabelling as ‘A Strong Alternative to the Bioprogram Hypothesis’ (pp. 258–71). Here Lefebvre pulls together her findings on relabelling and discusses this process in the light of creole ‘Exceptionalism’ (pp. 258–60), ‘the Principled Contribution of Substrate and Superstrate Languages to Creoles’ (pp. 260–1), ‘Theories of the Lexicon’ (pp. 261–2), ‘Types of Morphemes’ (pp. 262–4), ‘Variation among Creoles’ (pp. 264–6), ‘Other Approaches to Creole Genesis’ (pp. 266–71), most prominently the feature-pool hypothesis, and ‘The Relevance of Pidgins and Creoles in the Debate on Language Origins’ (p. 271).
In the second monograph, Mareile Schramm examines The Emergence of Creole Syllable Structure , providing A Cross-Linguistic Study of six Caribbean creoles with Dutch, English, and French as lexifiers, i.e. Berbice Dutch, Negerhollands, Saramaccan, St Kitts, Guiana French Creole, and Trinidad French Creole. In her brief introduction, Schramm justifies the study by asserting that supra-segmentals, such as syllable structure and phonotactic restructuring, have been largely neglected in the description of creoles, and surveys the structure of the book. Chapter 2 discusses the two core issues, ‘Creole Genesis and Syllable Structure’ (pp. 4–13). In chapter 3, ‘Data and Methodology’ (pp. 14–44), the author explains which creoles have been selected and why, provides the historical background for the creoles under investigation, surveys her corpora, which consist of the earliest reliable sources available, identifies the main lexifiers, and explains how she coded the data and proceeded in the analysis. Chapters 4 to 6 (pp. 45–231) present the empirical results of the author’s analyses of ‘Syllable Structure and Phonotactic Restructuring’ in the Dutch-, English-, and French-based creoles, respectively. These chapters are structured alike: after an introduction, a review of the literature, and some methodological notes, the results are presented by creole language and are divided into the phenomena under observation: word-initial onsets, word-final codas, and word-internal structures. Chapter 7 (pp. 232–53) then pulls together the findings on the ‘Syllable Structure in the Six Creoles’ and discusses ‘Similarities and Differences’, while chapter 8 (pp. 254–308) aims at ‘Explaining Creole Phonotactic Restructuring’. In her concluding chapter, Schramm delivers ‘A Final Assessment’ of ‘Creole Syllable Structure’. Schramm’s overarching aim is to find out which structures of the lexifier languages are kept intact, which ones are restructured, and which restructuring processes can be observed. The analysis presents evidence for a large degree of variation across creoles, first and foremost in word-final position, both in terms of the structures that are permitted in principle and with respect to preferred repair strategies. In sum, most patterns can be explained in the light of L1 transfer, L2 acquisition, and substrate levelling, basically confirming previous observations that general processes of SLA play a major role in the emergence of phonological patterns of creoles.
Turning to articles published in journals, we start with four contributions with a more general orientation. The first two are by Peter Bakker arguing in favour of the distinctiveness of creoles from non-creoles on the basis of empirical data. In ‘Creolistics: Back to Square One?’ ( JPCL 29:i[2014] 177–94), he presents a bitterly ironic account of what non-exceptionalists, i.e. scholars who believe that creoles are in principle not exceptionally different from non-creoles, have contributed to the field, mostly accusing them of using theory and rhetoric—and not data—for their purposes. Even though he does not call himself an exceptionalist, Bakker’s aim is to show that creoles ‘have an exceptional history, and that creoles therefore are distinctive languages, and distinctive as a group’ (p. 188). In his second article, a partly equally ironic guest column in JPCL , he reacts to criticism on his and his associates’ earlier empirical work on the distinctiveness of creoles and addresses some ‘Problems of Sampling and Definition’ with respect to ‘Creoles and Typology’ ( JPCL 29[2014] 437–55). In a reply to John McWhorter’s ‘Case Closed? Testing the Feature Pool Hypothesis’ ( JPCL 27[2012] 171–82; cf. YWES 93[2014] 96), Salikoko S. Mufwene, ‘The Case Was Never Closed: McWhorter Misinterprets the Ecological Approach to the Emergence of Creoles’ ( JPCL 29[2014] 157–71), justifies his ‘ecological approach to the emergence of creoles’ (p. 157). In the fourth general article, Jeff Siegel, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, and Bernd Kortmann use data from Tok Pisin, Hawai’i Creole, and some L1 and L2 varieties of English for ‘Measuring Analyticity and Syntheticity in Creoles’ ( JPCL 29[2014] 49–85). They find that creoles do not show a higher degree of analyticity than non-creoles but display, in fact, a lower degree of syntheticity.
In addition, the following contributions deal with features in particular pidgins and creoles. In ‘A Note on the Haitian Double-Object Construction and the Relabeling-Based Account of Creole Genesis’ ( JPCL 29[2014] 143–56) Claire Lefebvre and Renée Lambert-Brétière aim to substantiate the process of relabelling in Haitian by showing that Haitian has verbs which look as if they were borrowed from French but grammatically behave like verbs from Fongbe, although Fongbe does not have the corresponding verbs. Ahmed-Ibrahim Mousa provides ‘A Comparative Study’ of broad Jamaican-Creole and Saudi learners of English and finds that with respect to the ‘Acquisition of the Labio-Dental Fricative /v/ in English L2 and Jamaican Creole’ ( IJEL 4[2014] 60–9) the two groups under scrutiny resort to the same strategies. Joseph Babasola Osoba examines ‘The Use of Nigerian Pidgin in Media Adverts’ ( IJEL 4 [2014] 26–37) from a discourse-pragmatic point of view to show how these advertisements communicate their meaning through presuppositions and implicatures. In the last paper to be discussed in this section, Brett Baker, Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen, and Simone Graetzer study ‘The Obstruent Inventory of Roper Kriol’ ( AuJL 34[2014] 307–44), the major variety of Australian Kriol, and find that its obstruents show traces of both substrate and superstrate influence.
11. Second Language Acquisition
Work dedicated to English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) has been abundant in 2014. All levels of interlanguage grammar have been studied extensively, as have individual learner differences and the role of the learning context. More general topics such as the influence of the first language (L1) on a second language (L2) are also very present; a lot of attention has once again been paid to methodological advancements in the discipline of second language acquisition (SLA). We proceed with our review starting from L2 grammar, moving on towards contextual and individual factors that play a role in L2 acquisition, and finishing with general and methodological works.
The production of papers dedicated to L2 English phonetics and phonology was very rich in 2014, especially as far as journal articles are concerned. In the domain of phonetics, Hyejin Hong, Sunhee Kim, and Minhwa Chung conduct ‘A Corpus Based Analysis of English Segments Produced by Korean Learners’ ( JPhon 46[2014] 52–67). The purpose of their analysis, based on manual transcriptions of two large-scale speech corpora, was to compare the patterns of segmental variation produced by L2 learners with those produced by native speakers of English; the results were analysed according to how many corpus segments were realized differently from the canonical dictionary-derived transcriptions (in terms of substitutions, deletions, or insertions). The analysis revealed distinct patterns of variation produced by the two groups of speakers, where for the learners, orthography was found to influence the vocalic variations, while L1 influence was detected in the consonantal ones. Ellenor Shoemaker explores the L2 acquisition of allophonic variation as a word boundary cue in ‘The Exploitation of Subphonemic Acoustic Detail in L2 Speech Segmentation’ ( SSLA 36[2014] 709–31). French-speaking L2 learners of English performed a two-alternative forced-choice identification task in which they were required to identify potentially ambiguous phrases in which word boundaries were marked by the word-initial aspiration of plosives (e.g. Lou spills vs. loose pills ) or the presence of prevocalic glottal stops (e.g. see neither vs. seen either ). Participants proved to be more sensitive to the presence of glottal stops than aspiration, suggesting that glottal stops may be a more salient word-boundary cue for learners. The learners were also divided into two groups according to their length of exposure to English; those who had been exposed to English longer identified potentially ambiguous phrases better than those who had been exposed to English for a shorter time.
Dealing with phonetics jointly with grammar, Monika S. Schmid, Steven Gilbers, and Amber Nota tackle the topic of ‘Ultimate Attainment in Late Second Language Acquisition: Phonetic and Grammatical Challenges in Advanced Dutch-English Bilingualism’ ( SLR 30[2014] 129–57). Participants in their study were very advanced Dutch-speaking L2 learners of English who were either university students or teachers of English in the Netherlands, and native English speakers living in the Netherlands, who acted as controls; the two groups did not differ in their general proficiency in English. The participants read a word list and did a film retelling task and an acceptability judgement task testing VP ellipsis; their oral productions were subsequently analysed in terms of voice onset time (VOT), vowel discrimination, and perceived foreign accent (using accent ratings performed by native English speakers living in the UK). The L2 learners were shown not to differ from the controls with respect to VOT, but they did differ in vowel discrimination, global nativeness, and acceptability judgements. These results suggest that some phonetic and grammatical properties of the L2 may not be acquired even at the highest level of L2 attainment.
A volume aimed at bringing together research on phonetics/phonology and pronunciation teaching is Pronunciation in EFL Instruction: A Research-Based Approach by Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska. The book deals with English pronunciation instruction by drawing on the findings of research into EFL learners’ acquisition of pronunciation, the efficacy of different teaching approaches, and the usefulness of teaching materials, with empirical findings coming primarily from Polish-speaking EFL learners. The first chapter concerns the issue of choosing an appropriate pronunciation model for EFL teaching, the second the issue of identifying pronunciation priorities for EFL learners, and the third the issue of effective phonetic instruction. In relation to these issues, the author proposes the NELF (Native English as a Lingua Franca) model for EFL teaching, argues that phonetically problematic words should be given priority in teaching, and proposes a holistic multimodal approach to pronunciation instruction. Each chapter is divided into two parts: Part A contains a discussion of a given issue from a theoretical point of view, and Part B a presentation of some of the author’s relevant experimental studies.
Moving on to phonology, Nan Xu Rattanasone and Katherine Demuth explore ‘The Acquisition of Coda Consonants by Mandarin Early Child L2 Learners of English’ ( BLC 17[2014] 646–59). Three-year-old Mandarin-speaking children exposed to AusE at preschool took part in an elicited imitation task, in which the acquisition of coda consonants and phrase-final lengthening was tested. The children performed well on /t/ and /s/ codas, but poorly on the phonologically and morphologically more complex /ts/, as well as on /n/, which is one of the few codas permitted in Mandarin. When compared to other studies, these results suggest that early child L2 learners may be a distinct learner group from older child L2 learners, showing similarities with monolingual children. Also focusing on child L2 learners, Ellen Simon, Matthias J. Sjerps, and Paula Fikkert investigate ‘Phonological Representations in Children’s Native and Non-Native Lexicon’ ( BLC 17[2014] 3–21). They conducted two experiments with Dutch-speaking 9- to 12-year-old children and adults, who all were L2 learners of English. The task used in the experiments was a mispronunciation task, in which a vowel within a word was substituted by another vowel from the same language. The first experiment was conducted in Dutch and the second in English; the children also participated in a third experiment, which tested vowel discrimination in English. The results showed that both learner groups could accurately detect mispronunciations in Dutch and were more successful (especially children) at detecting substitutions of native vowels (i.e. those that exist in Dutch) by non-native vowels than at noticing changes in the opposite direction in English. Children also proved able to discriminate most of the English vowels. Taken together, these results suggest that children’s perception of English words is strongly influenced by their L1 phonological categories.
Several papers look at the acquisition of L2 prosody. Candise Y. Lin, Min Wang, William J. Idsardi, and Yi Xu examine ‘Stress Processing in Mandarin and Korean Second Language Learners of English’ ( BLC 17[2014] 316–46). Based on the fact that English and Mandarin have lexically contrastive stress while Korean does not, the study explored whether Mandarin speakers have better stress perception in English than Korean speakers. The two groups of L2 learners and a control group of native English speakers took part in a sequence recall task and a lexical decision task. The former task tested participants’ stress-encoding ability for non-words, while the latter examined the role of stress in online word recognition. Mandarin speakers outperformed Korean speakers on both tasks, suggesting that stress-processing in the L2 is indeed influenced by stress-related properties of the L1. In ‘L2 English Intonation: Relations between Form-Meaning Associations, Access to Meaning, and L1 Transfer’ ( SSLA 36[2014] 331–53), Marta Ortega-Llebaria and Laura Colantoni tested the hypothesis that access to contextual meaning increases the chances of L1 influence on L2 intonation. They assessed the perception and production of English contrastive sentence focus on the part of two groups of L2 learners, whose L1s, Mandarin and Spanish, express contrastive focus in a different way, and a native control group. Participants did four tasks in which access to meaning was manipulated by the presence or absence of context. Clearer evidence of L1 transfer was found in the Spanish group than in the Mandarin group. Importantly, L1 transfer effects were stronger in contextualized tasks, supporting the hypothesis that access to meaning increases L1 transfer in the L2 acquisition of focus intonation.
Ulrike Gut and Stefanie Pillai explore ‘Prosodic Marking of Information Structure by Malaysian Speakers of English’ ( SSLA 36[2014] 283–302), focusing on the marking of given and new discourse elements. One group of Malay speakers of English read aloud a 179-word story that contained six given and six new words in English, while another group read aloud a 152-word story containing six given and six new words in Malay. Auditory and acoustic analysis was performed on the given-new word pairs, with a focus on pitch accent type, syllable duration, phonetic realization of the rise and pitch peak alignment. The results show that the L2 learners produce longer rises on new than on given words but do not differentiate between the two types of words in terms of pitch accents, syllable duration, pitch peak alignment and steepness of rises, suggesting that they do not mark new and given information in English in a native-like way. Evidence of L1 transfer was found in the average extent and steepness of the rises as well as the pitch peak alignment. Ineke Mennen, Felix Schaeffler, and Catherine Dickie investigate ‘Second Language Acquisition of Pitch Range in German Learners of English’ ( SSLA 36[2014] 303–29). German-speaking L2 learners of English of moderate to advanced proficiency and native English speakers read aloud a passage in English; another group of native German speakers read aloud the German translation of the same passage. An acoustic analysis showed that the L2 learners mostly produced target-like pitch range values or their approximations. The approximations of the target and deviations from it proved to be position-sensitive, i.e. the L2 learners adjusted their pitch range differently in earlier compared to later parts of intonational phrases.
Four papers are devoted to L2 rhythm acquisition. Aike Li and Brechtje Post investigate the development of speech rhythm in L2 learners of typologically different L1s in ‘L2 Acquisition of Prosodic Properties of Speech Rhythm: Evidence from L1 Mandarin and German Learners of English’ ( SSLA 36[2014] 223–55). Speakers of Mandarin and German with two different proficiency levels in English (lower intermediate and advanced), as well as a control group of native speakers, read aloud twenty English sentences; matching sentences in Mandarin and German were also read by native speakers of these languages. The results of acoustic analysis show that vocalic variability and accentual lengthening develop in a similar way in the two L1 groups. However, the development of the proportion of vocalic material in the utterances is different in the two L1 groups, reflecting L1 influence. These results suggest that L2 rhythm acquisition is influenced by both L1 properties and universal factors. Mikhail Ordin and Leona Polyanskaya look at the ‘Development of Timing Patterns in First and Second Languages’ ( System 42[2014] 244–57). In a longitudinal study, they compared rhythmic patterns in the productions of four monolingual English-speaking children at different ages and four adult L2 learners of English (two of whom were native speakers of Italian and two of Punjabi) at different proficiency levels; children’s and adults’ speech samples were selected from the CHILDES and European Science Foundation (ESF) Second Language databases respectively. The results revealed a progress from more syllable-timed patterns towards more stress-timed patterns in the productions of both groups, suggesting that speech rhythm develops in a similar way in L1 and L2 acquisition.
The aim of the study reported on in ‘Elicited Imitation in Search of the Influence of Linguistic Rhythm on Child L2 Acquisition’ ( System 42[2014] 207–19), by Dorota E. Campfield and Victoria A. Murphy, was to determine whether the ‘prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis’, according to which prosodic cues in the input facilitate lexical and syntactic development in the L1, also holds for L2 acquisition. Polish-speaking children who were beginner classroom L2 learners of English were divided into treatment, comparison, and control groups. Treatment and comparison groups were exposed to a twelve-hour teaching intervention, in which the treatment group was exposed to rhythmically salient input. The effects of the intervention were assessed by means of an elicited imitation task. The results showed that exposure to rhythmically salient input improved the children’s ability to repeat longer sentences, confirming the predictions of the ‘prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis’ in the context of L2 acquisition. In ‘Selected Observations on the Effect of Rhythm on Proficiency, Accuracy and Fluency in Non-Native English Speech’ (in Szubko-Sitarek, Salski, and Stalmaszczyk, eds., Language Learning, Discourse and Communication: Studies in Honour of Jan Majer , pp. 167–91), Ewa Waniek-Klimczak addresses the relationship between the production of elements of the rhythmic structure of English and language proficiency. Speech samples from five Polish-speaking L2 learners of English ranging in proficiency from lower intermediate to near-native were first analysed for their degree of target-like production of selected phonetic variables and then assessed for accuracy and overall language proficiency by experienced Polish-speaking teachers of English. The samples represented fragments of text-reading and semi-spontaneous speech. The results showed that the proficiency ratings corresponded more closely to the elements of rhythm than to segmental articulation. This suggests that the rhythmic organization of speech develops with language proficiency and language experience, while segmental articulation may be subject to fossilization.
Two papers explore the influence of different language-learning experiences on L2 pronunciation. In ‘Opening the Window on Comprehensible Pronunciation After 19 Years: A Workplace Training Study’ ( LangLearn 64[2014] 526–48), Tracey M. Derwing, Murray J. Munro, Jennifer A. Foote, Erin Waugh, and Jason Fleming investigate the effects of a pronunciation training programme conducted at the workplace (a factory) with fossilized Vietnamese- and Khmer-speaking L2 learners who had lived in an English-speaking country for an average of nineteen years. A series of perception and production tasks was administered to the participants prior to and following a seventeen-hour intervention; individual interviews were also conducted in the post-test phase. The participants’ speech was assessed by native-speaker listeners, and the results revealed significant improvement in the learners’ perception, comprehensibility, and intelligibility; however, no improvement was observed in fluency, while accentedness increased in one of the tasks. These results suggest that focused pronunciation instruction can be effective and that accent is partly independent of other speech dimensions. The effects of age and study-abroad experience on the degree of foreign accentedness are examined in ‘Study Abroad and Changes in Degree of Foreign Accent in Children and Adults’ ( MLJ 98[2014] 432–49) by Carmen Muñoz and Àngels Llanes. The participants in the study were Catalan-Spanish bilinguals who were learning English as a foreign language; they belonged to two different age groups (children and adults), and learned English in two different contexts (at home and in a study-abroad programme). All participants took part in a semi-structured interview (pre-test and post-test), did a picture-elicited narrative task, and filled out a questionnaire in the post-test. A group of listeners rated the participants’ speech samples in terms of the degree of perceived foreign accent. The participants in the study-abroad setting were perceived to have a significantly milder foreign accent in the post-test. The greatest improvement was observed in the group of child participants in the study-abroad setting, even though the effect of age did not prove significant.
Other factors and their influence on the acquisition of L2 phonology are also examined. A volume edited by John M. Levis and Alene Moyer, Social Dynamics in Second Language Accent , explores how social factors influence L2 phonological acquisition. Some of the factors considered are attitudes, identity, ethnic group and cultural affiliation, and social contact and networks. The broad question addressed by the volume is why the pronunciation of adult L2 learners is typically non-native-like and how social factors contribute to the observed age effects. The volume comprises chapters devoted to the nature and the learners’ views of L2 accent, the teachers’ approach to L2 accent, and the social impact of L2 accent; the concluding chapter, by the volume editors, gives some directions for future research and for teaching L2 pronunciation. A different factor, namely L2 proficiency, is addressed by Katy Borodkin and Miriam Faust. They examine ‘Native Language Phonological Skills in Low-Proficiency Second Language Learners’ ( LangLearn 64[2014] 132–59) in order to determine whether there is a link between low L2 proficiency and difficulties with L1 phonological processing. Three groups of classroom Hebrew-speaking L2 learners of English (individuals with dyslexia, low-proficiency L2 learners, and high-proficiency L2 learners) did four tasks assessing L1 phonological processing, and an English proficiency test, along with some other tasks. High-proficiency L2 learners outperformed individuals with dyslexia on all four tasks assessing L1 phonological processing, and low-proficiency L2 learners on only two of these tasks: pseudo-word repetition and tip-of-the-tongue naming. These results suggest that both individuals with dyslexia and low-proficiency L2 learners experience difficulties with L1 phonological processing; however, the difficulties experienced by individuals with dyslexia are more pervasive than those experienced by low-proficiency L2 learners.
The role of the learners’ conscious, declarative knowledge in the acquisition of L2 phonology is dealt with in two papers. Firstly, Marcin Bergier looks at ‘The Influence of Explicit Phonetic Instruction and Production Training Practice on Awareness Raising in the Realization of Stop Consonant Clusters by Advanced Polish Learners of English’ (in Łyda and Szcześniak, eds., Awareness in Action: The Role of Consciousness in Language Acquisition , pp. 103–20). In an experimental study participants read English sentences featuring voice-agreeing plosive clusters straddling word boundaries in the context of one intonation unit (e.g. I can’t stop playing my guitar since I got it ). There were two recording sessions, separated by explicit theoretical phonetic instruction and individual production training practice of no release burst in cluster contexts. The results reveal a significant drop in the number of released stops during the second session compared to the first one, suggesting that meta-phonetic awareness facilitates acquisition. Secondly, Ewa Czajka conducted ‘An Investigation into the Learners’ Awareness of Word-Level Stress’ (in Łyda and Szcześniak, eds., pp. 121–9). Upper-intermediate Polish-speaking L2 learners of English completed an oral production test, a written pronunciation test, and a written perception test by means of which their command of English word-stress was assessed. The three different types of pronunciation test were assumed to be related to a different degree to either explicit (declarative) or implicit (procedural) knowledge. The participants also completed a questionnaire aimed at collecting additional information about word-stress learning. An analysis of the relationship between the learners’ level of word-stress awareness and their test scores revealed a positive correlation in the case of the written pronunciation test and no correlation in the case of the oral production test; the results were ambiguous in the case of the perception test. Such results point to the need of further investigation into the relationship between the learners’ awareness and their pronunciation abilities.
Closely related to the domain of phonology are two studies dedicated to L2 orthography. In ‘Reading Russian–English Homographs in Sentence Contexts: Evidence from ERPs’ ( BLC 17[2014] 153–68), Olessia Jouravlev and Debra Jared investigate whether advanced Russian–English bilinguals, born in Russia and living in Canada, activate their knowledge of Russian when reading English sentences. Russian uses Cyrillic script, which shares only a few letters with English but allows for some interlingual homographs (e.g. MOPE , meaning ‘sea’ in Russian). The processing of homographs was studied in a reading task during which event-related potentials were recorded; the focus was on the N400 component, particularly high for semantically incongruent stimuli. Sentences presented to participants contained the English translation of the Russian meaning of a homograph, an interlingual homograph, or a semantically incongruous control word (e.g. MANY FISH LIVING IN THE OPENSEA/MOPE/MACEARE ENDANGERED ). Critical sentences were those in which the Russian meaning of the homographs fitted the context, unlike the English meaning, and it was on these sentences that bilinguals showed a reduction in the N400 component compared to control words, whereas the N400 of monolingual English speakers was of a similar magnitude in the two conditions. This shows that bilinguals automatically activate representations in both of their languages when reading in one of them. Results along similar lines are reported for entirely different scripts in ‘Reading English with Japanese in Mind: Effects of Frequency, Phonology, and Meaning in Different-Script Bilinguals’ ( BLC 17[2014] 445–63), where Koji Miwa, Ton Dijkstra, Patrick Bolger, and R. Harald Baayen present a lexical decision study accompanied by eye-tracking, which examined contributions of frequency, phonology, and meaning of L1 Japanese words on L2 English word lexical decision processes. The response times and eye-fixation durations of late bilinguals were found to depend on L1 Japanese word frequency and cross-language phonological and semantic similarities, but not on a dichotomous factor encoding cognate status. These effects were not observed for native monolinguals; they were explained based on the connectionist model of bilingual interactive activation.
Moving on to the interface between morphology and the lexicon, a topic that continues to receive attention is the role of morphological analysis in reading development and lexical inference. Dongbo Zhang, Keiko Koda, and Xiaoxi Sun, in ‘Morphological Awareness in Biliteracy Acquisition: A Study of Young Chinese EFL Readers’ ( IJB 18[2014] 570–85), examine the contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension, focusing on 11- and 12-year-old Chinese EFL learners in China, and their reading of both Chinese and English. The learners did a set of tasks that measured compound awareness and reading comprehension in English, and compound awareness, radical awareness, and reading comprehension in Chinese. The results revealed that compound awareness contributed to reading comprehension within both languages; in addition, Chinese compound awareness was found to influence English reading comprehension, but not the other way round. Chinese radical awareness, which is orthography-specific, did not play a role in L2 reading comprehension. The authors conclude that cross-linguistic influence is dependent on typological distance, as well as the learning context. In ‘The Role of Morphological and Contextual Information in L2 Lexical Inference’ ( MLJ 98[2014] 992–1005), Megumi Hamada investigates the role of two different types of information that can be used in inferring the meaning of unknown L2 words during reading. Four groups of ESL students from mixed L1 backgrounds, whose proficiency ranged from beginner to advanced, did a pen-and-paper task in which they had to choose the inferred meanings of pseudo-compounds such as rainfime from a series of options. The compounds were presented within sentences; in the Morphology Reliable condition, the familiar part of the compounds provided information about the overall meaning, which also matched the context of the sentences, while in the Morphology Unreliable condition, the known word-part did not provide any reliable semantic information nor did it match the context. Proficiency-based differences were found in choosing morphological versus contextual information when the former did not match the context; specifically, in the Morphology Unreliable condition, higher-proficiency learners were able to choose context-based meanings over morphology-based meanings, reaching the correct inference, whereas lower-proficiency learners were more likely to remain faithful to the morphology-based meanings despite divergent contextual information.
Another two studies deal with inferences. ‘Lexical Inferencing Strategies: The Case of Successful versus Less Successful Inferencers’ ( System 45[2014] 27–38), by Hsueh-chao Marcella Hu and Hossein Nassaji, is based on a reading task in which the meanings of some words needed to be inferred, and on think-aloud procedures; jointly, these methods are used to tap into the inferencing strategies of advanced Chinese-speaking ESL learners and their successfulness. Twelve types of inferential strategies used by all learners were identified in the think-aloud data. The differences between successful and less successful inferencers were found to pertain to the degree to which they used certain strategies, but also to when and how they used them; some of the salient characteristics of successful inferencers were evaluation and monitoring strategies, a combination of textual and background knowledge, self-awareness, and repeated efforts to infer the target word meanings. Moving the focus into the domain of oral comprehension, ‘Lexical Inferencing in First and Second Language Listening’ ( MLJ 98[2014] 1006–21) by Hilde Van Zeeland deals with lexical inferencing success by native and non-native (from different L1 backgrounds) speakers of English. The author explored the effects of contextual clue types, background knowledge, and L2 vocabulary knowledge on inferencing success; native English speakers reached a success rate of 59.6 per cent, while this rate was 35.6 per cent for the non-natives, and success was affected by all three variables under study. The study also measured the L2 learners’ ability to notice unknown vocabulary in speech; limited noticing ability was detected, indicating lack of noticing as a potential limiting element for inferencing opportunities and success.
An additional topic related to bilingual lexical processing is language-(non)selectiveness, i.e. the study of whether bilinguals switch off the contextually inappropriate language when the task at hand is clearly unilingual. ‘Parallel Language Activation During Word Processing in Bilinguals: Evidence from Word Production in Sentence Context’ ( BLC 17[2014] 258–76), by Peter A. Starreveld, Annette M.B. De Groot, Bart M.M. Rossmark, and Janet G. Van Hell, presents the results of two picture-naming experiments that examined whether bilinguals co-activate the non-target language during word production in the target language. The pictures in this study were shown out of context in one experiment and in visually presented sentence contexts in the other; different participant groups performed the tasks in L1 Dutch and L2 English. Picture names were Dutch–English cognates (e.g. apple-appel ) or non-cognates (e.g. bottle-fles ), with the cognate effect serving as the marker of activation of the non-target language; sentence constraint effect was also examined. A cognate effect occurred in both experiments; it was larger in the L2 than in the L1, larger with low-constraint sentences than with high-constraint sentences, and it disappeared in the high-constraint L1 condition. These results point to consistent co-activation of the non-target language in different production situations. Looking at grammatical gender from the perspective of bilingual lexical access, Luis Morales, Daniela Paolieri, Roberto Cubelli, and M. Teresa Bajo, in ‘Transfer of Spanish Grammatical Gender to English: Evidence from Immersed and Non-Immersed Bilinguals’ ( BLC 17[2014] 700–8), explore whether the knowledge of grammatical gender in the native language (Spanish) affects speech production in an L2 that lacks gender (English). The bilinguals tested in this study were split in two groups, those immersed in an L1 (in Spain) and those immersed in an L2 context (in the US). Participants did a picture-naming task in which they had to name pictures in the L2 while ignoring distractor words that could be either gender-congruent or gender-incongruent with their Spanish translation. The results revealed that non-immersed participants were slower in naming the pictures in the congruent condition, suggesting that bilinguals are influenced by knowledge about gender in their native language even when producing utterances in a language to which this information does not apply. Similar influence was not observed for immersed bilinguals.
A monograph and an edited volume are entirely devoted to L2 English vocabulary. Xiaoyan Xia’s Categorization and L2 Vocabulary Learning: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective relies on the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and addresses the role of the L1-based concept categorization in L2 vocabulary; the specific stance taken is that of Experientialism, which stresses a motivational relationship between surface linguistic representations and underlying conceptual structures. The author assumes a unitary conceptual model and hypothesizes that the patterns of one’s L1-based concept categorization will be present in his or her L2 vocabulary learning as well. The focus is on prototypicality and basic-level effects, related to horizontal and vertical dimensions of categorization respectively: concepts at the basic level are psychologically more salient than concepts at other levels, and prototypical concepts are more salient than marginal concepts. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was used in the empirical study: the qualitative data was collected with questionnaires and was used for identifying basic-level and prototypical category members, while the quantitative data came from cued-recall tasks in which the learners were asked to produce L2 words based on cues. The results show that the psychological salience of basic-level and prototypical concepts in one’s L1-based conceptual system is related to better retention and faster retrieval of the corresponding L2 words. The author argues that these two effects are dynamic in L2 contexts, being influenced by factors such as the familiarity of a given concept, formal instruction, and exposure to the target culture. A volume dedicated to a specific approach to vocabulary research and vocabulary selection for teaching purposes is Lexical Availability in English and Spanish as a Second Language , edited by Rosa María Jiménez Catalán. The studies pertaining to English are collected in Part I (‘Lexical Availability in English as L1 and L2’). The volume discusses conceptual and methodological issues related to lexical availability, a vocabulary measure proposed as more relevant for language learners than frequency lists, defined through the ease with which words are generated as members of a given semantic category. All chapters report on studies based on some form of an associative task, in which students are presented with (written) cue words and asked to write down all the words that come to mind in response. Lexical availability indices are calculated on the basis of the position that the words occupy in the list, as well as the frequency with which they occur as associates. As expected, native speakers consistently outperform non-native speakers in the number of words listed in response to the provided cues, and advanced learners outperform lower-level learners.
Among other lexicon-related topics, Xian Zhang and Xiaofei Lu conduct ‘A Longitudinal Study of Receptive Vocabulary Breadth Knowledge Growth and Vocabulary Fluency Development’ ( AppLing 35[2014] 283–304). Their study was based on two versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test, both administered to Chinese-speaking learners of L2 English at three time-points spread over twenty-two months. The first version was administered in paper format and served to estimate participants’ vocabulary breadth knowledge, while the second was in computer format and was used to assess vocabulary fluency (operationalized as the speed of meaning recognition). A significant effect of word-frequency level was found on the rate of vocabulary breadth knowledge growth and vocabulary fluency development, as well as a weak relationship between vocabulary breadth knowledge and vocabulary fluency. Findings also suggest that vocabulary fluency development lags behind vocabulary breadth knowledge growth. Paul Booth focuses on yet another aspect of vocabulary acquisition, looking at ‘The Variance of Lexical Diversity Profiles and its Relationship to Learning Style’ ( IRAL 52[2014] 357–75). He examines the lexical diversity scores in L2 English texts written by low-proficiency and high-proficiency learners from different L1 backgrounds (mostly Korean, Thai, Mandarin, Japanese, and Arabic). The learners performed two writing tasks, a descriptive and a discursive one; their texts were then analysed using the D-Tools programme, which calculated parameter D, a measure of lexical diversity. The learners also completed two learning-style tests (a visual memory test of paired associates and a test of grammatical sensitivity). The results suggest that learners who are more grammatically sensitive appear to be more likely to restructure their language, i.e. that lexical diversity is to some extent shaped by differences within individuals as well as task conditions.
A number of papers are dedicated to the acquisition of multiword sequences; two corpus-based articles rely on data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). The first one, on ‘The Use of Collocations by Intermediate vs. Advanced Non-Native Writers: A Bigram-Based Study’ ( IRAL 52[2014] 229–52) by Sylviane Granger and Yves Bestgen adopts a usage-based approach to language acquisition and looks at how phraseological competence develops as a function of L2 proficiency. Production data from intermediate and advanced French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking learners of L2 English were analysed and significant differences were detected between collocations at these two proficiency levels; for instance, the intermediate learners were found to over-use high-frequency collocations (such as hard work ) and under-use strongly associated but less frequent collocations (such as immortal souls ). A related paper is Magali Paquot’s ‘Cross-Linguistic Influence and Formulaic Language: Recurrent Word Sequences in French Learner Writing’ ( ESLAYb 14[2014] 240–61). The author investigated transfer effects in French EFL learners’ use of recurrent word sequences (lexical bundles) ranging from two to four words in length, using the French component of ICLE as the data source. Different manifestations of L1 influence were detected; many of the learners’ idiosyncratic uses of lexical bundles could be traced back to the properties of French word combinations, e.g. their discourse function and frequency of use. The results are in line with a usage-based view of language that assigns an active role to the L1.
Three studies explore the relationship between conventionalized word combinations and the phonological short-term memory (PSTM). Agnieszka Skrzypek and David Singleton look at ‘Phonological Short-Term Memory and the Operation of Cross-Linguistic Factors in Elementary and Pre-Intermediate Adult L2 Learners’ Collocational Usage’ (in Szubko-Sitarek et al., eds., pp. 193–214). The authors test the hypothesis that, when it comes to L2 collocations, L1 transfer may be more operative in learners with lower PSTM than in those with higher PSTM capacity. The participants in the empirical study were elementary and pre-intermediate Polish-speaking adult L2 learners of English who attended a six-month English-language course in Ireland and completed a collocation test at the end of the course. The test consisted of decontextualized multiple-choice questions, collocation accuracy judgement sentences, fill-in-the-blank sentences, and writing tasks. The learners’ PSTM capacity was assessed using serial non-word recall and recognition tasks. The results showed that at the elementary level the learners with a lower PSTM capacity tended to produce more cross-linguistic errors, confirming the existence of a link between PSTM capacity and the operation of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of L2 collocations. This link, however, did not appear to be strong at the pre-intermediate level. These findings are corroborated by the results of a related study, ‘Cross-Linguistic Influence in L2 Writing: The Role of Short-Term Memory’ by Agnieszka Skrzypek (in Pawlak and Aronin, eds., Essential Topics in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism: Studies in Honor of David Singleton , pp. 69–88), in which the same hypothesis was tested on the basis of the compositions that the same participants wrote at the end of their English-language course. The results of this study again showed that there is a stronger link between PSTM capacity and the operation of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of L2 collocations at the elementary than at the pre-intermediate proficiency level.
Pauline Foster, Cylcia Bolibaugh, and Agnieszka Kotula explore ‘Knowledge of Nativelike Selections in an L2’ focusing on ‘The Influence of Exposure, Memory, Age of Onset, and Motivation in Foreign Language and Immersion Setting’ ( SSLA 36[2014] 101–32). The influence of six variables on the L2 learners’ receptive knowledge of conventionalized word combinations is looked at: engagement with the L2 community, motivation to reach a high level of L2 attainment, age of onset (AoA) of L2 acquisition, length of exposure to the L2, phonological short-term memory (PSTM), and the acquisition context (inside vs. outside the L2 community). Two groups of upper-intermediate/advanced Polish-speaking L2 learners of English—resident in the UK and in Poland—and a control group of native English speakers did a native-like selection test, in which they had to underline non-native selections in an authentic text written by a non-native speaker. A questionnaire was also administered, as well as a serial recall task, measuring PSTM. The results indicate that AoA and context of acquisition are the strongest predictors of the ability to detect non-native selections in a text; nativelikeness is guaranteed only for immersion-early starters. PSTM was the only significant predictor in immersion-late starters, but it was insignificant in foreign language learners, suggesting that PSTM and L2 immersion are necessary for the acquisition of native-like selections in the L2.
The acquisition of L2 idioms and metaphors has also been an object of study. ‘Getting Your Wires Crossed: Evidence for Fast Processing of L1 Idioms in an L2’ ( BLC 17[2014] 784–97), by Gareth Carrol and Kathy Conklin, reports on a cross-language priming study involving high-proficiency Chinese-speaking L2 learners of English (and a control group of native speakers). The participants did a lexical decision task in which the initial words of English idioms (e.g. to spill the … ) and transliterated Chinese idioms (e.g. draw a snake and add … ) were shown as primes for the final words ( beans ; feet ); the goal was to see if in bilinguals cross-language activation would occur for idiomatic sequences in a similar way as for single words. Both native and non-native speakers were the fastest to respond to targets that formed idioms in their L1: bilinguals responded to the target words significantly faster when they completed a Chinese idiom (e.g. feet ) than when they were presented with a matched control word (e.g. hair ), while for targets that formed English idioms they were not reliably faster than controls. A dual-route model, based on either a direct lexical or conceptual route, is proposed as a possible explanation for the bilingual performance as well as monolingual access to formulaic language. Jeannette Littlemore, Tina Krennmayr, James Turner, and Sarah Turner also deal with figurative language and conduct in ‘An Investigation into Metaphor Use at Different Levels of Second Language Writing’ ( AppLing 35[2014] 117–44). Their study aims to provide a preliminary measure of the amount and distribution of metaphor used by language learners in their writing across different CEFR levels. Essays written by Greek- and German-speaking L2 learners of English are examined for the use of metaphor. The main finding is that the overall density of metaphor increases from CEFR levels A2 to C2; in addition, at lower levels, most of the metaphorical items are closed-class, mainly based on prepositions, while at level B2 and beyond, the majority of metaphorical items become open-class and increasingly sophisticated. The productivity of metaphor use also brings about more errors and more evidence of L1 influence.
A connection between the lexicon and morphosyntax is made in ‘Lexical Aspect in the Use of the Present Perfect by Japanese EFL Learners’ ( IRAL 52[2014] 31–57), by Mariko Uno. This study looks at the relationship between tense-aspect morphology and inherent aspectual properties of verb predicates in L2 acquisition, focusing on the use of the English present perfect. Participants in the study were Japanese-speaking learners of L2 English, gathered in a mixed-proficiency group. The participants did a four-passage cloze test, which showed that they associated the present-perfect form with particular semantic aspectual properties of verbs, in particular atelic verbs in contexts with an adverb of duration. Multiple factors are proposed as possible explanations for this finding: perceptual saliency, cognitive processing principles, and prototype formation in the early use of tense-aspect morphology. Verbal aspect and its relation to event conceptualization are dealt with in ‘Grammatical Preferences in Aspect Marking in First Language and Second Language: The Case of First Language Dutch, English, and German and First Language Dutch Second Language English, and First Language Dutch Second Language German’ ( AppPsycholing 35[2014] 969–1000) by Béryl Hilberink-Schulpen, Ulrike Nederstigt, and Marianne Starren. Unlike most related work, which focuses on production, this paper reports on a perception study. Two acceptability judgement experiments were performed, one with native speakers of English, German, and Dutch, and the other with Dutch learners of English and German (at the secondary school diploma proficiency level). The focus of the study was on the relationship between the use of a progressive form and the mentioning of an affected object or endpoint; the participants looked at short videos and judged the accompanying sentences with simple vs. progressive forms and with visible vs. invisible objects. All native speakers demonstrated a preference that corresponded to the inventory of the language they speak, with English speakers choosing the progressive more than the German speakers, and with the Dutch being in between. The learners, on the other hand, treated differently those aspects that are rule-governed (such as progressive marking in English), and those that are a matter of preference. The former were able to overrule the native patterns, whereas the latter were not, and thus proved more problematic for L2 learners.
Among work on syntax, several papers deal with the acquisition of questions. Production of main- and embedded-clause questions is dealt with in ‘Second Language Acquisition of English Questions: An Elicited Production Study’ ( AppPsycholing 35[2014] 1055–86), by Lucia Pozzan and Erin Quirk. The authors look at the impact of L1 and L2 syntactic properties on the learners’ production of questions in a computerized elicitation task; the focus is on non-target subject-auxiliary inversion patterns. The participants tested in the study were intermediate/advanced Chinese- and Spanish-speaking L2 learners of English; the choice of L1s was motivated by word-order differences between Chinese, Spanish, and English. Yes/no and adjunct and argument wh- questions were compared. The results point to some L1 influence, but L2 production was more clearly affected and constrained by the same factors at play in L1 acquisition and dialectal variation, as L2 learners produced higher inversion rates in yes/no than in wh -questions in main clauses, and higher non-standard inversion rates in clause-embedded wh- questions than in yes/no questions. Interpretation of questions is dealt with in ‘Variational Learning in L2: The Transfer of L1 Syntax and Parsing Strategies in the Interpretation of Wh -Questions by L1 German Learners of L2 English’ ( LAB 4[2014] 432–61) by Tom Rankin. This study looks at the interaction between L2 processing and grammatical development, and it examines the interpretation of main-clause wh -questions in L2 English by upper-intermediate learners whose L1 is Austrian German. German and English share word-order patterns in a range of question forms, but these patterns are derived from different underlying syntactic representations and have distinct semantic interpretations, with German questions being ambiguous, and English questions unambiguous, between subject and object readings. Non-target patterns of interpretation show that learners at high-proficiency levels continue to optionally parse English questions with the head-final VP syntax transferred from the L1; L1 processing cues are also transferred to the L2 in the form of animacy cues for ambiguity resolution. This is interpreted within the Variational Learning framework, which assumes that a set of competing grammars underlies an individual’s linguistic performance in both L1 and L2 acquisition, but with the L1 grammatical representation having a privileged status that continues to parse the L2 input where possible.
A much narrower set of questions is explored by Boping Yuan in ‘ “ Wh -on-Earth” in Chinese Speakers’ L2 English: Evidence of Dormant Features’ ( SLR 30[2014] 515–49). Assuming that each lexical item is a bundle of phonological, syntactic, and semantic features that are fully transferred from the L1 into the L2, and treating ‘ wh -on-earth’ questions as polarity items licensed by the question feature, the negation feature, or non-veridical verbs like wonder , the study reported on in this article looked at Chinese speakers’ L2 acquisition of English ‘ wh -on-earth’ questions such as what on earth … or who on earth… . The learners, divided into five proficiency levels from pre-intermediate to very advanced, did an acceptability judgement task, a discourse-completion task, and an interpretation task. The results revealed that they were able to learn the form of ‘ wh -on-earth’, disallowing its discontinuous use (allowed in their L1), but without fully elaborated features, demonstrating problems, for instance, with semantic features having to do with ‘ wh -on-earth’ being licensed by non-veridical verbs, and not being linked to discourse entities. To account for these findings, a distinction between active and dormant features in L2 lexicon is posited in the analysis, where it is argued that features transferred from learners’ L1 can become dormant if there is no evidence in the target language input to confirm or disconfirm them, which leads to random behaviour in L2 learners’ production and interpretation.
A fair amount of work has dealt with the acquisition of the verb be . A monograph on the topic is Mable Chan’s Acquisition of Be by Cantonese ESL Learners in Hong Kong and Its Pedagogical Implications [2013]. The book describes the results of an empirical study in which a grammaticality judgement task, a story-writing task, and an acceptability judgement task were administered to Cantonese-speaking L2 learners of English ranging in proficiency from beginner to very advanced. The goal was to examine the role of the L1, developmental stages, and the relationship between morphology and syntax in the learners’ acquisition of English be ; a control group of native English speakers also participated in the study. The results show that the learners’ L1 plays an important role in the initial state. Developmental trends were observed in the acquisition of both copula and auxiliary be as the learners’ knowledge of these verbs increased with proficiency level, converging on the target at the advanced level. The learners’ use of tense morphemes contrasted with their knowledge of tense, suggesting that problems with surface morphology do not necessarily indicate lack of knowledge of L2 grammatical properties. On the basis of these findings the author evaluates a number of popular beliefs about the effectiveness of instruction in L2 acquisition and gives some recommendations for the teaching of English grammar. In ‘The Functions of the Nontarget Be in the Written Interlanguage of Chinese Learners of English’ ( LangAcq 21[2014] 279–303), Suying Yang explores all instances of ungrammatical uses of be in written English narratives of Hong Kong students aged between 10 and 19 years and placed at five different proficiency levels from (late) beginner to advanced, taking into consideration the nature of the verb that follows be , the syntactic position of be + uninflected verb / be + inflected verb sequence, as well as the tense marking on be and the verb that follows it. The study detects different functions of non-target be , with a function shift taking place between lower and higher proficiency levels: at the lowest levels, be is largely used as a filler for different functional categories related to inflection; later on, it starts to be used more to mark tense/voice, while at the highest level it only performs the function of marking passive voice of unaccusative verbs. In other words, while problems with mapping abstract functional categories onto surface morphology (which lead to the use of be as filler) are temporary and related to lower proficiency levels, over-passivization errors with unaccusatives, due to atypical theme-to-subject mapping of unaccusative verbs, persist into the higher proficiency levels.
Focusing specifically on over-passivization, Taegoo Chung, in ‘Multiple Factors in the L2 Acquisition of English Unaccusative Verbs’ ( IRAL 52[2014] 59–87), studies the impact of external causation, animacy, and verb alternation, i.e. factors related to discourse, semantics, and L1 morphological influence. Chinese- and Korean-speaking learners of L2 English at four proficiency levels (elementary to advanced) were tested on a forced-choice elicitation task in which they were asked to read pairs of sentences and choose the grammatical form (active vs. passive) for the second sentence (e.g. The boy lifted the dog out of the blanket. The dog (appeared / was appeared) slowly. ). The studied factors were found to differ in strength, with the semantics and discourse factors playing significant roles for all L2 learners (the NP semantics factor being overcome earlier). L1 morphological influence in cases of L1/L2 differences was stronger than any other factors, and this influence was the last to overcome.
Also dealing with argument structure are two related papers couched within the framework of CxG and dedicated to verb-argument constructions such as V against N . ‘Second Language Verb-Argument Constructions Are Sensitive to Form, Function, Frequency, Contingency, and Prototypicality’ ( LAB 4[2014] 405–31), by Nick C. Ellis, Matthew B. O’Donnell, and Ute Römer, reports on a series of free-association tasks used to investigate whether the access to L2 verb-argument constructions is sensitive to statistical patterns of usage in a similar way as is the case in the L1. Verb frequency, verb-construction contingency (showing how faithful verbs are to particular constructions), and verb-construction semantic prototypicality were looked at. Advanced German-, Spanish-, and Czech-speaking L2 learners of English had the task of generating the first word that came to mind in filling the verb slot in frames such as he __ across the … , it __ of the … , etc. For each frame, the results were compared with corpus analyses of verb selection preferences and with the semantic network structure of the verbs in these constructions. All learner groups were found to be very similar to native speakers in showing independent effects of frequency, contingency, and prototypicality. To further explore the role of the L1, Römer, Ellis, and O’Donnell also conducted a study on ‘Second Language Learner Knowledge of Verb-Argument Constructions: Effects of Language Transfer and Typology’ ( MLJ 98[2014] 952–75). In this paper the authors analyse the same data as in the study described above, focusing on the differences between learners from different L1 backgrounds, in particular with regard to how their L1s express manner and path of motion. All three learner groups relied more than native speakers on general, highly frequent verbs such as be or do , and produced lower numbers of more specific but less frequent verbs (e.g. reach or crawl ). The results also showed that those learners whose L1 is typologically similar to English in being satellite-framed and encoding manner of motion in the verb, and path in the satellite (Czech and German) produced more target-like verbs than learners whose L1 is verb-framed, i.e. encodes both path and manner in verbs (Spanish). Staying with the cognitive linguistic and usage-based approach to acquisition, Peiwen Li, Søren W. Eskildsen, and Teresa Cadierno write about ‘Tracing an L2 Learner’s Motion Constructions Over Time: A Usage-Based Classroom Investigation’ ( MLJ 98[2014] 612–28). This article considers how specific motion constructions and their underlying semantic components are expressed and developed over time. The study draws on the Multimedia Adult English Learner Corpus, a longitudinal database of classroom interaction; the development of motion constructions is traced in one Spanish-speaking Mexican L2 learner of English over three and a half years and across four proficiency levels, from beginner to high intermediate. An analysis of the linguistic means used to express Motion, Path, and Ground is conducted, as well as an analysis of patterns with the most widely used verbs go and come . Overall, the early inventory contained less varied linguistic patterns with a limited number of linguistic resources for the expression of motion, while subsequent use showed the learner moving towards an increasingly productive inventory of motion expressions, with emergent patterns building on previous experience. Constructions with go and come were initially learned as item-based, and later on showed indication of development into more productive utterance schemas.
Looking at spatial expressions from the perspective of linguistic relativity and the influence of language-specific properties on cognition, Hae In Park and Nicole Ziegler’s ‘Cognitive Shift in the Bilingual Mind: Spatial Concepts in Korean–English Bilinguals’ ( BLC 17[2014] 410–30) shows that speakers with different native languages perceive spatial relations in different ways and that conceptualization patterns of bilinguals are affected by the concepts of both languages. The paper explores the categorization of spatial concepts in highly advanced adult Korean–English bilinguals. Using similarity judgements (in a triad matching task and a free sort task), a comparison was made between the conceptualization patterns of ‘put in’ and ‘put on’ events by Korean–English bilinguals and Korean and English monolinguals, taking into account that Korean distinguishes tight-fitting and loose-fitting events, rather than ‘on’ and ‘in’ events. The results revealed significant differences between the monolingual and bilingual groups, demonstrating the process of convergence of the two languages in the bilingual mind. It was also shown that bilinguals’ conceptualizations are influenced by additional (non-)linguistic factors, in particular English proficiency and frequency of Korean use. The findings lend support to the claim found in previous research that bilinguals’ conceptualization patterns are susceptible to their language experience.
Going back to argument alternations, two papers deal with datives. Within CxG and usage-based approaches to language acquisition, Kim McDonough and Tatiana Nekrasova-Becker ‘Compar[e] the Effect of Skewed and Balanced Input on English as a Foreign Language Learners’ Comprehension of the Double-Object Dative Construction’ ( AppPsycholing 35[2014] 419–42). In L1 acquisition the detection of abstract constructions is facilitated when the input is skewed (i.e. when it contains numerous exemplars with a shared lexical item) rather than balanced (i.e. with a small set of lexical verbs occurring an equal number of times). To test whether this also holds for L2 acquisition, the authors looked at the comprehension of the English ditransitive construction in learners exposed to three different input conditions, skewed first, skewed random, and balanced. Over a two-week period, intermediate Thai-speaking EFL learners randomly assigned to different input conditions did a pre-test and a post-test comprehension test, with input treatment in between. The results revealed that balanced input was most effective when transfer of training to new items was required, suggesting that it may promote broader category generalization than skewed input. Taking a different—generative—perspective, Roger Hawkins, Mona Althobaiti, and Yi Ma had two goals in their paper titled ‘Eliminating Grammatical Function Assignment from Hierarchical Models of Speech Production: Evidence from the Conceptual Accessibility of Referents’ ( AppPsycholing 35[2014] 677–707). The main goal was to test the effects of the conceptual accessibility of referents (specifically, their animacy) on the production of English dative syntactic frames, and the secondary one to see if learners have difficulty integrating syntactic knowledge where it interfaces with conceptual accessibility. Specifically, the study focused on showing that it is unnecessary to assume assignment of grammatical functions in hierarchical models of speech production, where functions such as subject or direct object are thought to be assigned to noun lemmas in the first stage of production planning, with a conceptually more accessible lemma becoming the subject; conceptual accessibility effects are instead explained through linear ordering. The learners were speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Arabic, at intermediate and advanced levels of English proficiency, and they were tested on a delayed oral sentence recall task. The results point to the effects being related to linear precedence rather than grammatical function assignment, and to advanced learners being qualitatively similar to native speakers.
Using corpus data, Clausal Complements in Native and Learner Spoken English: A Corpus-Based Study with Lindsei and Vicolse , by Beatriz Tizón-Couto, compares several groups of English L2 learners and native English speakers, focusing on a complex syntactic phenomenon, and looking separately at complement-taking verbs, adjectives, and nouns. The novel resource introduced in the book is Vicolse, the 100,000-word Vigo Corpus of Learner Spoken English, which contains the production of intermediate-advanced bilingual Spanish-Galician learners. The data from Vicolse are compared to those from the German and Spanish part of Lindsei, as well as the native data from Locnec. Complementation is found to be over-used in all learner corpora (compared to the native corpus), presumably due to the structure of the learners’ native languages, which tend to use more complex sentences than English; this tendency was particularly marked for the Spanish-speaking learners. That -clauses were also over-used by the learners, especially in Vicolse, compared to zero-complement clauses. However, the overall conclusion is that complementation does not represent a problematic area for intermediate-advanced learners of English.
Two studies look at processing issues in L2 English morphosyntax. Holger Hopp investigates ‘Working Memory Effects in the L2 Processing of Ambiguous Relative Clauses’ ( LangAcq 21[2014] 250–78). German-speaking L2 learners of English, ranging in proficiency from mid-intermediate to near-native, and native English controls did an eye-tracking reading experiment and an offline sentence-interpretation task in which their relative-clause attachment preferences were tested in locally ambiguous sentences (e.g. The director congratulated the instructor of the schoolboys who was writing the reports ) or fully ambiguous sentences (e.g. The student had liked the secretary of the professor who was killed in the robbery ) respectively. Additionally, their working memory was tested in a reading-span task and their automaticity of basic lexical processing in a lexical decision task. The results revealed native-like relative-clause attachment preferences on the part of the L2 learners who were matched in working-memory capacity to the native speakers as well as similar effects of working memory and lexical automaticity on the attachment preferences of both groups of speakers. These results are interpreted as suggesting that there is continuity between L1 and L2 processing. In ‘Real-Time Grammar Processing by Native and Non-Native Speakers: Constructions Unique to the Second Language’ ( BLC 17[2014] 237–57), Danijela Trenkic, Jelena Mirkovic, and Gerry T.M. Altmann look at the online comprehension of English (in)definite articles by intermediate Mandarin-speaking L2 learners, whose L1 does not have articles, and native English speakers, keeping in mind that learners with an L1 Mandarin background have been reported to have persistent difficulties with the production of English articles. The two groups of participants did a visual world eye-tracking experiment testing their comprehension of article usage. The results showed that the L2 learners processed articles in a native-like way: they did not over-rely on lexical and pragmatic information and used different types of information as it became available to resolve reference as soon as possible. To account for the comprehension-production asymmetries with Mandarin speakers’ behaviour with English articles, the authors propose that the speakers have multiple meaning-to-form, but consistent form-to-meaning mappings.
Articles have continued to receive attention in other studies as well, as one of the most problematic areas of L2 English due to a lack of a one-to-one form and meaning mapping. Artur Świątek’s monograph looks at The Order of the Acquisition of the English Article System by Polish Learners in Different Proficiency Groups . The theoretical part of the book discusses the relevant background and previous work related to article acquisition in L1 and L2 English. The use of articles is explained through features on the noun: plus or minus specific referent ([+/– SR]), plus or minus assumed-as-known to the hearer ([+/– HK]), which together define generics ([–SR, +HK]), non-referentials ([–SR, –HK]), first-mention nouns or referential indefinites ([+SR, –HK]), and referential definites ([+SR, +HK]), with idioms and other conventional uses singled out as a separate category (cf. Thorn Huebner [1983]). A set of studies involving Polish (another article-less language) learners of English is presented in the empirical part. Elementary, intermediate, and advanced learners were tested, ranging between 14 and 23 years in age. They performed a task that required the completion of fifty sentences with eighty-seven gaps, comprising obligatory uses of definite, indefinite, and zero articles in different referential contexts. The results indicate that the elementary group had least problems with the indefinite article and most problems with the zero article, the intermediate group had least problems with indefinite articles, but had also acquired zero articles, while the highest-proficiency group no longer had problems with zero articles; in addition, generic nouns (which indicate classes of entities) and idioms were consistently found to be the most problematic contexts, with inconsistent article use, which was acquired last.
In a study of cross-linguistic influence in article use, ‘The Role of the Native Language in the Use of the English Nongeneric Definite Article by L2 Learners: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison’ ( SLR 34[2014] 351–79), Anna Chrabaszcz and Nan Jiang examine the effect of the native language on the use of the English non-generic definite article by highly proficient learners with Spanish and Russian as L1 (and a control group of native speakers). Non-generic article uses, those not indicating classes of entities, were divided into five categories: cultural, conventional, situational, textual, and structural; the goal was to look at L1 transfer and its relation to the hierarchy of article difficulty. The learners did an oral elicited imitation task, which was selected instead of a cloze-type task in order to test implicit rather than explicit knowledge of L2 article use. The findings point to a clear L1 influence on participants’ reproduction of the definite article; however, various contexts present different levels of difficulty: the Spanish subjects, whose L1 possesses articles that behave in a similar way with regard to non-generic interpretation, performed at a native-like level of accuracy in the grammatical condition, whereas the L1 Russian subjects, whose L1 lacks articles, showed a tendency to omit definite articles. In the ungrammatical condition, Spanish speakers differed from the native speakers in their use of the definite article in conventional and cultural contexts (where there is greater inter-language variability with regard to the use of the article), while Russian participants supplied the definite article significantly less often than both the Spanish participants and the control group along all article categories, showing that they do have the knowledge of the syntactic distribution of articles but experience difficulties with regard to the semantic aspects. Cross-linguistic influence in a different context of article use was studied by Peter Robert Crosthwaite in ‘Definite Discourse-New Reference in L1 and L2: A Study of Bridging in Mandarin, Korean, and English’ ( LangLearn 64[2014] 456–92). This study looked at the acquisition of bridging: the use of a definite expression to introduce a new referent into the discourse when its familiarity can be inferred based on pragmatic or general world knowledge shared between speakers and their audience (as in I was looking at van Gogh’s self-portrait.Themissing ear made me feel sad ). Bridging is different from the typical use of definite expressions for reference maintenance, and is thus expected to pose particular difficulties to L2 learners. Two related experiments are discussed, one to determine native preferences for English, Mandarin, and Korean, and the other to test the L2 acquisition of bridging in English by speakers of Mandarin and Korean; the learners were selected so that each of the six CEFR levels was represented. The experiment involved a production task based on controlled picture sequences, with neutral, weakly, or strongly inferable referents. It was found that the acquisition of the definite article + noun construction to introduce inferable referents in L2 English occurred at lower CEFR levels for the Mandarin group (A2) than the Korean group (B2), which can be related to positive transfer occurring in Mandarin speakers, as Mandarin—unlike Korean—does make a grammatical distinction between inferable and non-inferable referents.
A different semantics-related topic from the nominal domain is taken up by Shunji Inagaki in ‘Syntax-Semantics Mappings as a Source of Difficulty in Japanese Speakers’ Acquisition of the Mass–Count Distinction in English’ ( BLC 17[2014] 464–77). The mass–count distinction involves a complex relationship between syntax and semantics. Unlike English, which marks mass vs. count meanings syntactically, through number marking on nouns, Japanese relies solely on the conceptual semantics of words for quantity judgements. The study consisted of three experiments, in which intermediate learners judged whether two large objects/portions are more than six tiny objects/portions or vice versa, with the nouns presented with either mass or count syntactic cues (e.g. more string vs. more strings ); parallel studies were conducted with L1 English and L1 Japanese speakers. Results show that learners correctly base judgements on number for count nouns (judging e.g. that six small cups are more cups than two large cups) and object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture), and on volume for substance-mass nouns (judging that two large portions of mustard are more mustard than six tiny portions); however, for nouns that can be either mass or count in English (e.g. string(s) ) or cross-linguistically (e.g. spinach ), they continue to rely on semantics and fail to shift judgements according to the mass-count syntax in which the words appear.
As for studies dedicated to the acquisition of L2 discourse phenomena, Theres Grüter, Hannah Rohde, and Amy J. Schafer explore ‘The Role of Discourse-Level Expectations in Non-Native Speakers’ Referential Choices’ (in Orman and Valleau, eds., Proceedings of the 38th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development , pp. 179–91). Using a story-continuation task, they investigated whether L2 learners make native-like use of available cues in co-reference processing. More precisely, they looked at whether L2 learners create expectations about who will be mentioned next in a discourse on the basis of linguistically encoded information about event structure in the form of grammatical aspect in the preceding context. Participants in the study were Japanese- and Korean-speaking L2 learners of English and native English speakers. The results showed that the L2 learners were less sensitive to the grammatically encoded event structure cue in the previous sentence in their referent choices than the native speakers. By means of an additional, truth-value judgement, task it was ensured that the L2 learners had native-like knowledge of grammatical aspect in English. The authors conclude that L2 learners have reduced ability to generate expectations at the discourse level in the L2. In ‘From Spanish Paintings to Murder’, Muna Morris-Adams focuses on ‘Topic Transitions in Casual Conversations between Native and Non-Native Speakers of English’ ( JPrag 21[2014] 151–65). Topic transitions are a distinct type of topic shift which do not explicitly signal that a shift is taking place but show a connection to the current or a previous topic. Participants in the study were ten intermediate to advanced L2 learners of English from different L1 backgrounds, who auto-recorded one of their informal conversations with a native English speaker. The analysis of the extracts showed that all conversations flowed smoothly and that L2 learners’ topic transitions were skilfully performed. This indicates that L2 learners can successfully master topic management, one of the core components of communicative competence.
Before moving on to pragmatics, and to contextual and individual factors, two studies should be mentioned that concern multiple layers of learner interlanguage grammar. The first is Learner Corpus Profiles: The Case of Romanian Learners by Madalina Chitez, which introduces RoCLE, the first learner corpus of English produced by native speakers of Romanian. The corpus is composed of advanced undergraduate student writing (argumentative essays and literary compositions) with a total size of about 200,000 words. The author is interested in creating lexical, grammatical, and lexico-grammatical profiles of the learners’ English, focusing on word and part-of-speech frequency distributions, as well as collocations. In addition, articles, prepositions, and the expression of genitive are singled out as phenomena studied in more depth. Some of the particularly interesting findings include a higher verb- and a lower noun-ratio and the more frequent use of certain words and phrases, both of which aspects were rarely or not at all found in LOCNESS, the native corpus used for comparison, an over-use of indefinite versus an under-use of definite articles, and incorrect preposition use following verbs. The notion of fluency is examined from a very broad perspective in a volume edited by Theron Muller, John Adamson, Philip Shigeo Brown, and Steven Herder entitled Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia . The editors expand the original understanding of fluency as a property of speaking to all four language skills—speaking, writing, reading, and listening. Understood in such a way, fluency can be defined as ‘the smooth, effortless use of any language skill’ (p. 2) or ‘the ability to process language receptively and productively at a reasonable speed’ (Paul Nation, p. 11). The book comprises literature reviews and empirical studies. A number of chapters deal with fluency in one of the four skills; the chapters are grouped according to the skill they are devoted to. The book also contains chapters discussing fluency from a pedagogical perspective; these explore how fluent language skills can be developed in an EFL classroom. Even though the research reported on in the book was conducted in Asia and pedagogical issues discussed in the book apply primarily to Asian contexts, the book is also relevant to contexts beyond these.
In the domain of L2 pragmatics, Carsten Roever, Stanley Wang, and Stephanie Brophy explore the relationship between ‘Learner Background Factors and Learning of Second Language Pragmatics’ ( IRAL 52[2014] 377–401). More precisely, they investigate the relative contribution of length of residence, proficiency level, gender, and multilingualism to L2 learners’ comprehension of implicature, recognition of routine formulae, and production of speech acts in English. Data were collected by means of a Web-based pragmatics test from learners residing in Germany and the US. The results indicate that proficiency significantly affected all three areas of pragmatics investigated, while multilingualism did not have a significant impact on any area. Length of residence and gender were additional significant factors in the recognition of routine formulae and speech-act production, but their effect was weaker than the effect of proficiency. Soo Jung Youn engaged in ‘Measuring Syntactic Complexity in L2 Pragmatic Production’ in order to ‘Investigat[e] Relationships among Pragmatics, Grammar, and Proficiency’ ( System 45[2014] 270–87). English L2 learners with different L1 backgrounds ranging in proficiency from low-intermediate to advanced performed four written pragmatic assessment tasks, which required them to write texts of different genres. The learners’ pragmatic performance was assessed by three trained raters. Additionally, the syntactic complexity of their production was assessed using three measures: global complexity from mean length of T-unit, phrasal-level complexity from mean length of clause, and subordination complexity from mean number of clauses per T-unit. The results show that the learners’ pragmatic competence did not always correspond to their proficiency levels. With the exception of phrasal-level complexity, a stronger relationship was found between learners’ pragmatic performances and syntactic complexity of their pragmatic production than between their pragmatic performances and proficiency levels. Pragmatically more advanced learners produced longer utterances, more complex structures at the phrasal level, and more subordination, suggesting that syntactic complexity plays an important role in achieving various pragmatic functions.
Hye Yeong Kim looks at ‘Learner Investment, Identity, and Resistance to Second Language Pragmatic Norms’ ( System 45[2014] 92–102). The study investigated how English L2 learners’ investment in their social identity influences their pragmatic choices, and to what extent the learners resist target-language pragmatic norms by exercising their agency. Korean-speaking L2 learners of English having different ages and different lengths of residence in the US at the time of the study completed questionnaires and discourse-completion tests, and took part in role-plays and individual and open-ended interviews. The analysis of the learners’ responses to compliments, requests, and use of titles shows that they made pragmatic choices in a way that enabled them to invest in their social identities. Their pragmatic decisions were influenced by their age and length of stay in the target country, as well as power and social distance, but, above all, by their decisions about which identity to invest in, based on their evaluation of the context. The results suggest that the learners were overall willing to conform to the target-language norms while exercising their agency so as to position and maintain their social identity at the same time.
Two studies deal with speech acts in L2 English. A book-length treatment of the speech act of apologizing is provided in Towards the Pragmatic Core of English for European Communication: The Speech Act of Apologising in Selected Euro-Englishes by Agata Klimczak-Pawlak . The volume’s central part is an account of an experimental study of the realization of the speech act of apologizing in English by highly proficient non-native speakers from eight European countries (Finland, France, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and the UK). The participants completed a written discourse completion test that contained sixteen situations, half of which were aimed to elicit apologies with different power and distance settings. The analysis focused on the strategies used by speakers in different countries in four groups of situations characterized by different power and distance constellations. Despite the differences in strategies found between speakers from different countries, some general tendencies in strategy use were discovered across groups in each situation. These represent the pragmatic core for apologizing in Euro-English, and the idea is that they will provide guidance to L2 learners wishing to communicate successfully in Europe. Focusing on the speech act of refusals, Wei Ren conducted ‘A Longitudinal Investigation into L2 Learners’ Cognitive Processes during Study Abroad’ ( AppLing 35[2014] 575–94). Using retrospective verbal reports (RVRs), the author aimed to gain insight into cognitive processes involved in L2 learners’ pragmatic production. Participants in the study were advanced Chinese-speaking L2 learners of English doing a one-year master’s degree at one of the universities in the UK. They took part in a multimedia elicitation task eliciting status-equal and status-unequal refusals in English at three different times during their study abroad. The analyses of the RVRs revealed an increase in the amount of attention the learners paid to sociopragmatics in context when they responded to each situation of the task across the three phases. This was accompanied by a decrease in pragmatic difficulties and an increase in pragmatic knowledge reported by the learners. Overall, the results suggest that study abroad influences the cognitive processes involved in L2 learners’ pragmatic production.
Study abroad is also the focus of a paper by Julia Jensen and Martin Howard, ‘The Effects of Time in the Development of Complexity and Accuracy during Study Abroad’ in ‘A Study of French and Chinese Learners of English’ ( ESLA Yb 14[2014] 31–64). A longitudinal study was conducted with French- and Chinese-speaking L2 learners of English during their nine-month study at a university in an English-speaking country. The learners participated in three sociolinguistic interviews at intervals of approximately three months. After the second and third interview they also completed a sociolinguistic questionnaire. The interviews were transcribed and analysed in terms of syntactic complexity and accuracy, and the analysis revealed substantial individual variation both within and between individuals: individual learners progressed or regressed in a non-linear fashion over time, and some learners evidenced progress while others did not. The absence of a neat pattern of development either across or within learners points to the complexity of the issue concerning the effect of the duration of the study abroad on L2 development.
A valuable contribution to study-abroad research is a volume edited by Carmen Pérez-Vidal, Language Acquisition in Study Abroad and Formal Instruction Contexts . This collection of papers reports on the empirical findings of the longitudinal Study Abroad and Language Acquisition (SALA) project, which investigated the effects of formal instruction (in the country of origin) and study abroad on a group of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals who were advanced L2 learners of English and who participated in a compulsory three-month study-abroad programme in an English-speaking country as part of their translation and interpreting undergraduate degree at a Spanish university. The project examined the short- and long-term impact of these two different learning contexts on the learners’ linguistic abilities, their motivation, attitudes, and beliefs regarding foreign language learning, use, and status, and their intercultural awareness. The empirical studies included in the volume reflect these objectives as they look into the learners’ phonological, lexical, grammatical, and discourse development, their listening, speaking, and writing skills, their affective characteristics, and intercultural awareness. The volume also includes a chapter explaining the research methodology employed in the project and a chapter describing the design and implementation of the study-abroad programme used. The insights from the volume contribute not only to the understanding of the role of context in L2 acquisition but also to an appreciation of the value of mobility programmes in the education of language specialists.
The relationship between study abroad and affective factors in L2 acquisition is explored by Amy S. Thompson and Junkyu Lee, who examine ‘The Impact of Experience Abroad and Language Proficiency on Language Learning Anxiety’ ( TesolQ 48[2014] 252–74). Korean-speaking L2 learners of English completed detailed background questionnaires in which they self-evaluated their English proficiency using a six-point Likert scale, and expressed the amount of their study abroad on a similar scale. They also completed a Korean online version of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), assessing four anxiety components: English class performance anxiety, lack of self-confidence in English, confidence with native speakers of English, and fear of ambiguity in English. The results showed that study abroad reduces foreign-language classroom anxiety; however, language proficiency also plays a role. It was also shown that study abroad is crucial for overcoming a fear of ambiguity in language learning. Overall, the results suggest that study abroad has a profound effect on affective factors such as language-learning anxiety.
Moving on to individual learner differences proper, a book by Tammy Gregersen and Peter D. MacIntyre, Capitalizing on Language Learners’ Individuality: From Premise to Practice , is practical in orientation and broad in scope. The title and the structure of the volume reflect the authors’ aim to bridge the gap between theoretical views and research findings about individual learner differences, and classroom application of these notions. Each of the book’s seven chapters, devoted to the more prominent learner characteristics (anxiety, beliefs, cognitive abilities, motivation, learning strategies, learning styles, and willingness to communicate) is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. The former summarizes our current state of knowledge and understanding of a given characteristic and explains the relevance of these insights for language learning and teaching; the latter contains hands-on activities for application in the language classroom. Practising language teachers and teachers-in-training can certainly benefit from this book, as can language learners themselves.
Other productions in the field of individual differences focus on individual learner characteristics. In the well-established line of research into motivation, new theoretical and practical insights are provided by Motivation and Foreign Language Learning: From Theory to Practice , edited by David Lasagabaster, Aintzane Doiz, and Juan Manuel Sierra. The first part of the book introduces some new theoretical constructs, explores the relationship between motivation and metacognition, contains ideas and evidence on how to improve teachers’ and learners’ motivation by engaging them in research on their own classroom practices, and offers ideas on how to inspire language teachers’ vision. The second part presents empirical studies exploring the relationship between motivation and different language-teaching approaches, with particular emphasis on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and the learning of English. An innovative approach to motivation is presented in Motivational Dynamics in Language Learning , edited by Zoltán Dörnyei, Peter D. MacIntyre, and Alastair Henry. Theoretical papers (called ‘conceptual summaries’) and empirical studies included in the volume explore motivation from the perspective of the Complex Dynamic Systems Theory. The originality of this approach lies in viewing motivation as a constantly changing feature rather than a stable learner characteristic, and in directing attention to the individual learner, the learning context, and their interplay. The studies included in the volume are interesting and useful not only for their findings on motivation but also for the methodological solutions adopted in studying it. Following a recent approach to motivation as part of the learner’s identity/self, two volumes focusing on the learner’s sense of self make a valuable contribution to research into identity and self-related issues in L2 acquisition: The Impact of Self-Concept on Language Learning , edited by Kata Csizér and Michael Magid, and Multiple Perspectives on the Self in SLA , edited by Sarah Mercer and Marion Williams. The former explores the influence of self-concept on L2 learning and teaching and includes chapters addressing self-concept from a theoretical point of view, empirical studies into self-related concepts (some of which were conducted from the teachers’ perspectives), intervention studies investigating how self-related training improves the students’ motivation, as well as an outline of future research directions in this domain. The latter volume provides an overview of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the concept of self in L2 acquisition research. Each approach is presented in a chapter written by a prominent scholar; a particularly useful feature is the presence of annotated bibliographies containing three titles seen as most representative of a given approach.
Moving from affective to cognitive variables, Carmen Muñoz investigates ‘The Association between Aptitude Components and Language Skills’ (in Pawlak and Aronin, eds., pp. 51–68). The question addressed is whether language-learning aptitude is significantly associated with proficiency in young learners. Ten- to 12-year-old Spanish–Catalan bilingual children who were beginner L2 learners of English were tested on their listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills in English; they also did the Elementary Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT-E) in Spanish, measuring their language-learning aptitude. The results indicate that there are significant correlations between aptitude scores and scores on all language skills; correlation with writing was the strongest and with speaking the weakest. Of the different aptitude components, all language skills most strongly correlated with memory abilities; grammatical sensitivity was most closely related to writing. The results suggest that MLAT-E is a good predictor of achievement at beginner proficiency levels and that children rely on memory to a great extent in L2 acquisition. Agnieszka Pietrzykowska explores ‘The Relationship between Learning Strategies and Speaking Performance’ (in Pawlak, Bielak, and Mystkowska-Wiertelak, eds., Classroom-Oriented Research: Achievements and Challenges , pp. 55–68). English L2 learners studying in an English department and ranging in proficiency from intermediate to advanced completed the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning questionnaire, testing the frequency of strategy use. The data from the questionnaire was correlated with the results of the end-of-year examination of different components of speaking: pronunciation, grammatical accuracy, vocabulary use, and fluency. No significant positive correlations were discovered; memory, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies correlated negatively with fluency.
A notion related to learning strategies is learning styles. An overview of research into this concept is given by Patrycja Marta Kamińska in Learning Styles and Second Language Education . In the first chapter learning styles are defined, and contrasted with learning strategies. In three subsequent chapters different models of learning styles are presented and grouped according to the number of their components: starting with simple (one-dimensional) models, the author moves on to describe compound (two-dimensional) models, and ends with complex (multi-dimensional) models. The final chapter discusses the pedagogical relevance of research on learning styles and suggests its possible applications in the language classroom, including the option of accommodation and stretching learning styles.
Age is one of the most frequently studied individual variables in L2 acquisition; it is the topic that Carmen Muñoz addresses in ‘Contrasting Effects of Starting Age and Input on the Oral Performance of Foreign Language Learners’ ( AppLing 21[2014] 463–82). She investigates, by testing intermediate to advanced Spanish-speaking L2 learners of English, whether early starters outperform late learners in L2 oral performance in instructional settings, as they do in naturalistic contexts. She also examines the effect of four input variables (length of instruction, number of hours of curricular and extracurricular lessons, number of hours spent abroad in an English-speaking setting, and current informal contact with the target language) on the learners’ oral performance. Participants filled out an extensive questionnaire and took part in a film-retelling oral narrative task. The narratives were analysed in terms of fluency, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity. The results show that input is a better predictor of L2 oral performance than starting age, with input quality, contact with native speakers, and cumulative exposure playing a particularly important role. The role of age is also explored by Victoria Murphy in Second Language Learning in the Early School Years: Trends and Contexts . The book contains an overview of research into learning more than one language in childhood in five different contexts. After developing a typology of contexts in the introductory chapter, the author discusses in the five chapters that follow research findings on language learning by simultaneous bilinguals, heritage language learners, minority language learners, majority language learners in immersion programmes, and instructed foreign language learners in primary schools. An important feature of these chapters is a subsection containing a discussion of educational implications of the presented research findings. The final chapter summarizes the previously reviewed evidence, and draws some conclusions. Throughout the book, the author stresses that age is not the critical variable in predicting successful outcomes of bilingual development, discussing a variety of contextual factors that contribute to these outcomes. The social and cognitive benefits of bilingualism are also constantly pointed out.
The topic of bilingualism is also taken up by Aneta Pavlenko in her The Bilingual Mind and What It Tells Us about Language and Thought . The book discusses the relationship between language and thought (or cognition) by drawing on research on bilingualism, understood in a very wide sense of the term. The starting point is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, discussed in the first chapter. The six subsequent chapters examine this hypothesis on the basis of evidence from bilinguals in relation to the categorization of colours, objects, and substances (chapter 2), encoding of number, time, and space (chapter 3), motion categorization and event construal (chapter 4), autobiographical memory and narrative thought (chapter 5), inner speech, interpretative frames, and accomplishment of intersubjectivity (chapter 6), and emotion categorization and affective processing (chapter 7). Directions for future research are given in the concluding chapter. Overall, the book highlights the valuable contributions of bilingualism research to our understanding of the concept of linguistic relativity and the human mind in general.
Before we move to works of general relevance to the field of SLA, we review an interesting book by Mercedes Durham, relevant to the fields of both SLA and sociolinguistics, namely The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Lingua Franca Context . The author investigates the extent to which native speakers of French, German, and Italian, who live in Switzerland and use English as a lingua franca (ELF), have native-like sociolinguistic competence in English, or, in other words, to what extent they display the same variation patterns in their language production as native speakers. Two comparable English corpora were compiled; the non-native corpus consisted of e-mails written by Swiss university students who were members of a medical association, while the native corpus was composed of e-mails written by British university students who were members of a sports society. Patterns of variation with respect to four linguistic features were analysed and compared across the two corpora: future tense, relative pronoun choice, complementizer use, and additive adverbial placement. The results show that native-like variation patterns were acquired for relative pronouns and complementizers, but not for the other two features; the influence of the native language was observed with respect to adverbial placement. The results are interpreted by considering feature type, frequency of occurrence, and whether the feature is overtly thought. The author concludes that ELF is a variety of English not so different from the native models.
Among works of general relevance to the field, an important volume is Interlanguage: Forty Years Later , edited by ZhaoHong Han and Elaine Tarone. Compiled on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Larry Selinker’s seminal 1972 paper ‘Interlanguage’, the volume contains chapters by distinguished scholars who discuss the relevance of Selinker’s paper for past, present, and future SLA research, expanding on or challenging some of the ideas put forth in that paper. A central idea that all scholars agree on is that in the process of L2 acquisition learners do indeed build an independent linguistic system—interlanguage—worth studying in its own right. Christiane Fäcke's, ed., Manual of Language Acquisition , is another valuable new resource for all SLA researchers regardless of the language(s) they are dealing with, despite its focus on Romance languages. Of particular relevance to a wider SLA community is the chapter ‘Second Language Acquisition’ (pp. 179–97) by Alessandro Benati, who offers a general overview of the field and discusses the implications of SLA research for L2 teaching. Also pertaining to a domain wider than L2 English is a thorough treatment of a theoretical framework called MOGUL (Modular-On-line Growth and Use of Language) in The Multilingual Mind: A Modular Processing Perspective by Michael Sharwood Smith and John Truscott. The framework is based on Ray Jackendoff’s modular view of language and it aims to provide an account of both language development and language processing. The book shows how MOGUL sheds light on some of the key notions in SLA, such as the initial state, ultimate attainment, cross-linguistic influence, optionality, and language-learning anxiety. How MOGUL can be applied to explaining the role of consciousness in L2 acquisition is shown by John Truscott in Consciousness and Second Language Learning . The author examines the role of consciousness by looking at how L2 representations are formed in the mind (perception) and how they are modified in the process of memory consolidation and restructuring. An overview of MOGUL is also given in the book, as well as a summary of ideas related to consciousness in SLA.
Three monographs contribute to bridging the divide between SLA theory and the teaching practice. Shawn Loewen, in Introduction to Instructed Second Language Acquisition , deals with the L2 classroom setting, assuming that instruction is beneficial for L2 learning and proposing ways to enhance its effectiveness. Among the topics considered we single out a discussion of the types of knowledge (declarative vs. procedural) that L2 instruction can have an impact on, the role of communication and interaction in the classroom (in particular as regards communicative language teaching and task-based language learning), and focus on form. The acquisition of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and pragmatics is examined in the light of how much pedagogical intervention can improve them. Contextual and individual aspects of classroom instruction are looked at as well, as are some specific teaching environments—immersion classes, content-based instruction, and study abroad. Even more pedagogically oriented, Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani takes the teaching practice as the starting point, focusing in particular on pedagogical proposals found in teacher guides, and it explores how they are supported by the findings of theoretical research. The core of the book deals with internal and external perspectives on the relationship between theory and practice, including topics such as syllabus design, explicit instruction, and error correction, as well as with individual learner differences. In the concluding part of the book, the authors advocate a ‘teaching for learning’ approach, not based on deriving often simplified pedagogical implications from the SLA literature, but rather incorporating SLA findings into teacher guides and other pedagogical literature. Somewhat less broad in scope is Mike Long’s Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching , devoted to an increasingly popular approach to language teaching, which draws on SLA theory and research findings. The book provides an overview of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), as well as a detailed description of how to implement a TBLT programme in practice. The first part outlines the rationale for TBLT, as well as its psycholinguistic and philosophical underpinnings. The second part is more practically oriented and it comprises details pertaining to the six stages of designing, implementing, and evaluating a TBLT programme: needs and means analysis, syllabus design, materials development, choice of methodological principles and pedagogical procedures, student assessment, and programme evaluation. The third part, composed of a single chapter, discusses the future of TBLT and gives directions for further research.
In the reference arena, Vivian Cook and David Singleton’s Key Topics in Second Language Acquisition is a new introductory textbook to the field. It deals with some of the core issues in SLA in a highly accessible manner. Its novelty lies primarily in an approach that links questions from academic research to very practical issues such as expressing one’s feelings in a second language. Eight main questions capture topics from the relationship between different languages in the bilingual mind, the acquisition of L2 lexis, grammar, and writing, to the role of motivation and the relationship between SLA and language teaching. The authors’ considerations related to teaching practice are noteworthy. First, it is clearly stated that the critical period hypothesis does not directly apply to the language classroom and that many additional factors on top of biological age need to be considered when assessing the benefits of early language learning in schools. Second, it is shown that the relationship between SLA research and teaching is still a very weak one, and that SLA researchers need to think more about the everyday reality of the language classroom if they are to draw implications for teaching from their theoretical research. Third, it is pointed out that the monolingual native-speaker norm is not only an unnecessary but also an unrealistic target for L2 learners. Another important addition to the general field of SLA is Kirsten M. Hummel’s textbook Introducing Second Language Acquisition: Perspectives and Practices . The volume provides an introduction to the main concepts, issues, theoretical perspectives, and empirical findings in the field of SLA, as well as brief overviews of the field of first language acquisition (FLA), major L2 teaching approaches, and bilingualism. The topics of language-learning contexts, the age factor, and individual differences in L2 acquisition are treated in separate chapters. Each chapter starts with an outline and overview, and ends with a summary, list of key concepts, self-assessment and discussion questions, exercises and project ideas, suggestions for further reading and viewing, and an extensive list of references. Additional student-friendly features include text boxes on ‘language learning in practice’ and individual learner experiences, bolded new terms with definitions in the margin, and humorous cartoons interspersed throughout the book.
Published in 2013, the third edition of Second Language Learning Theories by Rosamond Mitchell, Florence Myles, and (as of this edition) Emma Marsden, contains an overview of the main theoretical perspectives in the field of SLA, classified as UG-based, cognitive linguistic, interaction-based, meaning-based, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic, each discussed in a separate chapter (or two). Each chapter contains both a description and an evaluation of a given group of theories. The book also includes a chapter introducing key concepts and issues in the field of SLA, as well as one on the recent history of SLA research. In addition to an update on advances in the field since the previous edition (published in 2004), the new edition features a revised and extended treatment of cognitive approaches to SLA, a glossary of key terms, and a timeline of SLA theory development. The year 2013 has also seen the publication of the fourth edition of the highly acclaimed and widely read textbook Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course , previously by Susan M. Gass and Larry Seliner, and now by Susan M. Gass, Jennifer Behney, and Luke Plonsky. The new edition contains a comprehensive overview of the field of SLA, covering the main concepts, issues, theoretical approaches, methodologies, and research findings in the field, as well as an overview of related disciplines. It has been updated, expanded, and somewhat restructured compared to the previous edition (from 2008), containing new information on learner corpora, linguistic interfaces, gestures, and study abroad, among other things. The new didactic features include text boxes summarizing points to remember, providing suggestions for additional activities, and asking questions about the reader’s personal experiences. A companion website contains supplementary material.
Returning to production in 2014, several new books deal with methodology improvement in SLA. Measuring L2 Proficiency: Perspectives from SLA , edited by Pascale Leclercq, Amanda Edmonds, and Heather Hilton, presents studies that look at different ways of assessing proficiency in L2 English (and L2 French). The volume is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with general considerations, language processing, and focused assessment instruments. The first part comprises papers looking at oral and written learner production and the ways they can be used to profile different proficiency levels. The second part contains proposals for processing-based proficiency measures and tasks, such as the coefficient of variation in lexical access times. The last part is concerned with verifying the validity and reliability of specific widely used tests. The focus of the book is divided between general proficiency and proficiency in specific L2 domains, and all chapters deal with issues pertaining to validity and reliability. Also related to L2 proficiency is the paper ‘Exploring Utterance and Cognitive Fluency of L1 and L2 English Speakers: Temporal Measures and Stimulated Recall’ ( LangLearn 64[2014] 809–54), by Jimin Kahng. Fluency is believed to constitute an essential component of L2 proficiency and the differences between native and non-native speakers’ fluency have been a recurring topic in SLA research. The paper investigates utterance fluency and cognitive fluency of native English speakers and Korean-speaking learners of L2 English, where cognitive fluency is defined through the efficiency and automaticity of the processes responsible for the production of utterances, and utterance fluency as those features of utterances that reflect the speaker’s cognitive fluency. Quantitative evidence from temporal measures and qualitative evidence from stimulated recall responses was examined; the proficiency of learners, who were divided into a lower-proficiency and a higher-proficiency group, was also taken into account. The L1 and L2 speakers were found to be different in speed, length of run, and silent pauses. In particular, a striking group difference in silent pause rate within a clause was found, consistent with the claim that pauses within clauses reflect processing difficulties in speech production. Stimulated recall responses showed that the lower-proficiency learners remembered more issues regarding L2 declarative knowledge on grammar and vocabulary than the higher-proficiency learners, which is compatible with the declarative/procedural model and studies on automaticity.
Interesting work has been done on CEFR. Brian North’s The CEFR in Practice , the fourth book in the English Profile Studies series by CUP, deals with the fundamental properties of CEFR and its impact on teaching and assessment. Four core chapters discuss CEFR’s role as a common framework, what it implies for teaching, and the assessment of CEFR levels. Some other issues covered are the relation of CEFR to linguistic theory and measurement theory, with an interesting focus on the criticism of the widely used descriptors from an SLA perspective, a major issue being the fact that descriptors were developed from teacher perceptions rather than from actual longitudinal learner data. The conclusion discusses the extent to which CEFR is generating change, the priorities for curriculum development in the future, and how the framework can be further exploited and developed. A paper by Henrik Gyllstad, Jonas Granfeldt, Petra Bernardini, and Marie Källkvist, titled ‘Linguistic Correlates to Communicative Proficiency Levels of the CEFR: The Case of Syntactic Complexity in Written L2 English, L3 French and L4 Italian’ ( ESLAYb 14[2014] 1–30), contributes to the study of the linguistic underpinning of the communicatively oriented CEFR levels. It reports on research conducted in Sweden, focusing on English, French, and Italian as foreign languages, examining the relationship between CEFR levels (A1–C2) assigned by experienced raters to learners’ written texts and three measures of syntactic complexity (length of T-units, subordinate clauses/T-unit ratio, and mean length of clause). The participants were mostly secondary-school students, between 10 and 19 years old. The data was elicited through two written tasks: a short letter and a narrative. The analysis detected weak to medium-strong positive correlations between the assigned CEFR levels and the three measures of syntactic complexity. Learners at CEFR level A did not vary significantly in syntactic complexity, while at level B differences were found between English and French.
On the purely methodological front, Research Methods in Second Language Psycholinguistics , edited by Jill Jegerski and Bill Van Patten, is a valuable collection of papers devoted to the application to SLA of online methods and techniques typically used in the field of psycholinguistics. The central eight chapters describe one method each, discussing the history of the method, the phenomena studied, the stimuli, data-analysis options, and the method’s pros and cons. Well-established methods such as self-paced reading and eye-tracking are described, as are several more complex paradigms such as cross-modal priming and visual world eye-tracking; two neurolinguistic techniques—event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging—are included too. The importance of the volume lies primarily in the focus on behaviourally sensitive measures, often said to be underrepresented in SLA research. Aek Phakiti’s Experimental Research Methods in Language Learning discusses SLA research within the quantitative research paradigm, with a particular focus on statistical analysis. The book aims to provide an accessible step-by-step introduction to the quantitative paradigm as implemented in language acquisition studies. It starts by explaining the central conceptual issues in experimental research, such as variable types and research paradigms; key statistical notions are introduced next, and numerous types of statistical tests frequently used in SLA are explained, alongside the procedures for conducting them in IBM SPSS. The book is unique in being a single-volume guide through experimental research dedicated specifically to SLA. It includes a valuable glossary of key terms in language learning, and a companion website useful for both instructors and students. A different set of methods is dealt with in Studying Second Language Acquisition from a Qualitative Perspective , edited by Danuta Gabryś-Barker and Adam Wojtaszek. This collection of fourteen papers elaborates on qualitative and combined quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Qualitative methods are placed in a historical context, within their origins in ethnography, philosophy, sociology, and education, and their appropriateness for language acquisition research is discussed. Studies based on methods such as introspection (including diary-writing, interviews, and biographical narratives) are presented, dealing with a wide range of topics from pronunciation learning strategies to teacher reflection; most papers deal with L2 English as acquired by native speakers of Polish. It is also shown that qualitative and quantitative methods are not mutually exclusive but, rather, complement each other.
12. English as a Lingua Franca
If there were any doubt about it, reasons for including ELF as separate section in YWES are made abundantly clear in an entry in the Routledge Companion to English Studies , edited by Constant Leung and Brian V. Street, entitled ‘English as an International Language/English as a Lingua Franca in Postcolonial and Neomillennial Contexts’ by Tope Omoniyi (pp. 100–17). Omoniyi discusses how perspectives on ELF could and should be incorporated into English studies to make it more inclusive, diverse, and appropriate to contemporary realities. Given that English is becoming a language defined by non-native usage, he argues that English studies should not derive solely from the UK and other traditional anglophone countries, but from the English-speaking and English-using world in general. Most of the work on ELF recorded here both endorses and substantiates this view.
The global significance of the phenomenon of ELF continues to be recognized and to engage the intellectual interest of researchers in a number of fields of enquiry. This is evident from the increasing number and extended range of publications in ELF over the years. Some of these are the outcome of particular research projects, like the contributions to the two volumes of Waseda Working Papers in ELF edited by Kumiko Murata. Many others take the form of monographs published in the series Developments of English as a Lingua Franca (DELF), published by de Gruyter and edited by Jennifer Jenkins and Will Baker, and appear as articles in the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca ( JELF ), edited by Barbara Seidlhofer. Although, as their name indicates, these are dedicated to ELF study, the contributions they contain often relate ELF to a wider context of interdisciplinary research. There are articles in JELF which take an explicitly outsider’s perspective. One such example is Susan Gal’s ‘A Linguistic Anthropologist Looks at English as a Lingua Franca’ ( JELF 2[2013] 177–83), in which she identifies the issues of linguistic creativity, standardization, and language ideology that are the common concern of both ELF and linguistic anthropology and which could benefit from collaborative study. Another example is Joseph Lo Bianco’s talk, originally presented at one of the annual ELF conferences and printed in JELF , entitled ‘Dialogue between ELF and the Field of Language Policy and Planning’ ( JELF 3[2014] 197–213). Here Lo Bianco points out that the two areas of study are both involved in language ecology in that both are critically concerned with how languages relate to and compete with each other in different social and communicative contexts. He makes the point that taking a language-planning perspective on ELF can sharpen understanding about its socio-political significance. Socio-political implications of ELF are also addressed in an article by Nora Dorn, Martina Rienzner, Brigitta Busch, and Anita Santner-Wolfartsberger entitled ‘ “Here I find myself to be judged”: ELF/Plurilingual Perspectives on Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin’ ( JELF 3[2014] 409–24). This article challenges the procedure (known as LADO) that is routinely used by immigration authorities in an attempt to determine the country of origin of asylum seekers on the basis of the phonological and other linguistic features of their speech, which in these contexts is often English functioning as a lingua franca. The authors point out that such a procedure presupposes that a language is a fixed entity impervious to variation and change, a presupposition which denies the naturally flexible and adaptive use of language which is evident in the use of ELF.
In view of the increasing recognition of its wider implications, it is not surprising that there has been a good deal of work on ELF-related concerns that has appeared in other books and journals, whose scope nominally extends across other areas of enquiry not specifically concerned with ELF as such. The Italian journal Textus , for example, concerned with English studies in general, has a special issue entitled ‘Perspectives on English as a Lingua Franca’ edited by Maria Grazia Guido and Barbara Seidlhofer ( Textus 27[2014]). Other work has appeared in journals whose disciplinary field would perhaps seem to be less obviously related to ELF. Khalid Bouti and Rajae Borki, for example, write about ELF in their editorial ‘English as a Lingua Franca of Science in Morocco’ ( International Journal of Medicine and Surgery 1:ii[2014] 29–30), raising the question of how far prestige should attach to correct English against the requirement for communicative effectiveness. Another example is Tsedal B. Neeley’s paper published in Organization Science ( OSci 24[2013] 476–97), which, under the title ‘Language Matters: Status Loss and Achieved Status Distinctions in Global Organizations’, deals with the problem familiar in ELF research of the sense of inadequacy experienced by non-native speakers of English and suggests institutional procedures for countering it. Bringing the concept of ELF into the field of economics and development studies, Elizabeth J. Erling and Philip Seargeant, eds., English and Development: Policy, Pedagogy and Globalization [2013], explore the relationship between English and development as this is both promoted in policy and practically realized through education. In this volume, Tom Bartlett’s contribution ‘Constructing Local Voices through English as a Lingua Franca: A Study from Intercultural Development Discourse’ (pp. 163–81) makes a connection between the promotion of participatory approaches in development and ELF by showing how members of a marginalized community in Guyana appropriate English as a means of expressing their local identity and thereby challenge the orthodoxy of the dominant group.
Interest in ELF has also extended to the field of linguistic landscaping, as is evident from the two articles ‘630 Kilometres by Bicycle: Observations of English in Urban and Rural Finland’ by Mikko Laitinen ( IJSL 228[2014] 55–77) and ‘English and Lexical Inventiveness in the Italian Linguistic Landscape’ by Paola Vettorel and Valeria Franceschi ( ETC 6[2013] 238–70). These articles describe the varied and frequently inventive display of English in public notices of different kinds and raise questions about what might motivate such uses. The data here is local. But since ELF is a global means of communication, it is not unexpected to find that there are also studies which deal with its use in globalized digital media of communication such as the Internet. Paola Vettorel’s English as a Lingua Franca in Wider Networking: Blogging Practices published in the DELF series mentioned earlier, is a case in point. This book is a detailed and closely argued investigation of how ELF users exploit linguistic resources for networking through blogging practices, relating these practices to more general issues concerning language and computer-mediated communication. Another publication that deals with the use of English in computer-mediated communication is Christopher Jenks’s article ‘Are You an ELF? The Relevance of ELF as an Equitable Social Category in Online Intercultural Communication’ ( L&IC 13[2013] 95–108). Here Jenks looks at the English used in chatrooms but from a very different point of view. He is of the opinion that it is problematic on ethical grounds for researchers to refer to ELF users since to do so puts them into a social category that diminishes their identity. Jenks’s concern for how the use of ELF bears on issues of identity is taken up again in his article in the same journal ‘ “Your Pronunciation and Your Accent is Very Excellent”: Orientations of Identity During Compliment Sequences in English as a Lingua Franca’ ( L&IC 13[2013] 165–81). With reference again to chatroom data, Jenks seeks to show how, in the particular case of expressing compliments, ELF users relate to each other in the construction of their identities in the process of their intercultural interaction. These matters are also touched upon in Jenks’s book entitled Social Interactions in Second Language Chat Rooms .
The issue of how the use of ELF relates to identity raised by Jenks and the articles by Neeley and Bartlett referred to earlier is a recurrent theme in the ELF literature. In their article, ‘English as a Lingua Franca: A Source of Identity for Young Europeans?’ ( Multilingua 33[2013] 437–57), for example, Claus Gnutzmann, Jenny Jakisch, and Frank Rabe explore the perceptions of a selected group of Europeans—1,061 students at the University of Braunschweig, Germany—with regard to the potential role of ELF in the formation of a common European identity. They find positive attitudes towards the idea of ELF as a useful mode of communication, despite adherence to the idea that native-speaker norms are the most legitimate. And while this sample considers plurilingualism to be one of Europe’s key underlying concepts, most of them report having only competence in their mother tongue and English. This, the authors argue, calls into question the European ideal of equipping every European with skills in two foreign languages in addition to their mother tongue. Examining another European context, Josep Soler-Carbonell, in his article ‘Emerging ELF as an Intercultural Resource: Language Attitudes and Ideologies’ ( JELF 3[2014] 243–68), explores whether English is becoming a language of inter-group communication among speakers of different linguistic backgrounds (i.e. Estonian and Russian) in Estonia. His ethnographically collected data shows that English is only occasionally used (mainly among younger speakers). Focusing on communication rather than on identity, unlike Gnutzmann et al., he finds that both ethno-linguistic groups (Estonians and Russians) continue to learn each other’s languages and English, although there is some indication that younger Estonians are more fluent in English than in Russian (as opposed to the older generations). For this reason, the need for English to overcome communicative obstacles does occasionally arise. The author thus suggests that ELF is an extra resource capable of supporting inter-ethnic contacts and facilitating integration. All these publications are concerned with wide communicative networks, but the expression and negotiation of cultural identity are also enacted on a small scale, as is argued and exemplified by two studies of how ELF is used in the dyadic interactions of couples. One of these studies is Svitlana Klötzl’s ‘ “Maybe Just Things We Grew Up With”: Linguistic and Cultural Hybridity in ELF Couple Talk’ ( JELF 3[2014] 27–48). Klötzl explores how couples use ELF to negotiate a convergence of intercultural identities to maintain intimacy. She shows how in the pragmatic process of hybridization and acculturation they draw upon any available linguistic resources to create their private space. In her article ‘ELF Couples and Automatic Code-Switching’ ( JELF 3[2014] 1–26), Kaisa Pietikäinen takes a different approach. Focusing more on the management of communication than the creation of intimacy, and drawing on ideas from the literature on conversational analysis and content analysis, she describes the interaction between multilingual couples as the easy, often automatic, switching from one language code to another.
These two articles, though dealing with particular small-scale interactions, raise critical questions about how ELF as a use of language is to be defined. And there has been much discussion about the nature of ELF, of what kind of linguistic phenomenon it is. Publications on this question vary widely in their generality. We can begin by taking brief notice of summary accounts that characterize it in broad terms. One of these is the entry ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ by Christiane Meierkord (in Chapelle, ed., The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics , pp. 2–7), which discusses ELF with reference to other lingua francas and represents it as different kinds of ‘Interaction across Englishes’ (pidgins and creoles, second-language and foreign-language Englishes, etc.), some of which are intra- and some inter-national means of communication. Another entry in the same encyclopedia, written by Margie Berns entitled ‘Lingua Franca and Language of Wider Communication’ (pp. 2–6), is mainly a historical account of different lingua francas and attempts, like that of Basic English and Esperanto, to design an international language. The work of what is referred to as the ELF ‘movement’ gets only a brief and dismissive mention. Both of these entries describe the general nature of lingua francas with reference to their emergence in the past. Peter Trudgill’s article ‘Before ELF: GLF from Samarkand to Sfakia’ ( JELF 3[2014] 387–93) explores this topic in rather more detail, drawing parallels between ELF and the lingua franca use of other languages in the past, pointing out that although Latin is usually cited as the main precursor to ELF, Greek was also extensively used as a lingua franca in the ancient world, at times in preference to Latin.
Research on the intrinsic nature of ELF as a use of language, as distinct from these general characterizations, has been both intensive and far-reaching, taking its theoretical bearings from the work of previous years. In focusing on the actual use of English rather than on language as an abstract system, for example, ELF study can be seen as theoretically aligned with recent thinking about usage-based descriptions of language, as is indicated in Cem Aptekin’s ‘English as a Lingua Franca through a Usage-Based Perspective: Merging the Social and the Cognitive in Language Use’ ( LC&C 26[2013] 197–207). Aptekin criticizes what he sees as the tendency to focus on the functions of ELF to the neglect of form and argues, as have many ELF researchers, for the need to investigate how function and form are related: how the communicative experience of using ELF informs the cognitive development of the language system. Another and related theoretical link is made in an article by Robert Baird, Will Baker, and Mariko Kitazawa entitled ‘The Complexity of ELF’ ( JELF 3[2014] 171–96). Here the emphasis is again on actual usage, and the indeterminacy of ELF as performance and practice are seen to exemplify the tenets of complexity theory, which, the authors argue, provide conceptual clarity to observations made elsewhere in the literature about the intrinsic emergent and adaptive character of ELF.
As has been pointed out in the work of previous years, a particular complex feature of ELF is that it not only exploits the encoding potential of English beyond that which becomes conventionally realized in native-speaker contexts, but also draws on whatever other linguistic resources are available and can be appropriately put to adaptive communicative use. The E of ELF, therefore, is essentially variable and can no longer be described in traditional terms as a distinct and bounded linguistic entity. This necessarily calls into question well-established ideas about what it means to be monolingually competent in a language and bi- and multilingually competent in more than one. Suresh Canagarajah addresses this question in his book Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations [2013]. Here he points out that the assumption that language use is simply a matter of conforming to the norms of monolingual competence disregards the empirical fact that actual communication, as is particularly evident in the use of ELF, is a matter of what he calls ‘translingual practice’ in that it is enacted by the exploitation of diverse semiotic resources beyond those afforded by a particular language. Canagarajah therefore proposes that it is more appropriate to think in terms of what he calls ‘semiodiversity’ rather than ‘glossodiversity’, a terminological distinction that corresponds to the distinction that is seen as crucial in current ELF research between variation and variety and is in accord with complexity theory and with recent sociolinguistic thinking about the essential arbitrariness and indeterminacy of language boundaries.
This view of linguistic communication as involving the use of language as a general resource rather than the performance of a particular and separate language is also expressed in Jens Normann Jørgensen and Janus Spindler Møller’s ‘Polylingualism and Languaging’ (in Leung and Street, eds., pp. 67–83). Here the authors use the term ‘polylingualism’ to refer to the phenomenon of what Canagarajah calls ‘translingual practice’, and they propose, as many others have done, that such practice is best described performatively as acts of ‘languaging’, the latter term one that has frequently been used in the description of ELF interactions. This raises the question of what it means to use, or acquire, linguistic or sociolinguistic competence in contexts of ELF use; this question is considered in Mercedes Durham’s book The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Lingua Franca Context . This book examines how the differences between the sociolinguistic competences of native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) are dealt with in ELF interactions. Its focus is not on the mutually adaptive use of language in ELF interactions but on the degree to which the non-natives unilaterally accommodate to the native users by acquiring their patterns of language behaviour and thus approximating to native-speaker sociolinguistic competence.
In its translingual or polylingual functioning, ELF of its nature mediates between speakers of different lingua-cultural backgrounds. This implies that it involves a transcultural as well as a translingual process and so brings into consideration questions about interculturality in linguistic communication in general and in ELF in particular. Will Baker takes up this topic in his chapter ‘Interpreting the Culture in Intercultural Rhetoric: A Critical Perspective from English as a Lingua Franca Studies’ (in Belcher and Nelson, eds., Critical and Corpus-Based Approaches to Intercultural Rhetoric [2013], pp. 22–45), and argues that ELF users, in both spoken and written modes, exploit their cultural resources as they do their linguistic resources in a flexible and adaptable manner in the communicative process.
The question naturally arises as to how this concept of intercultural translingualism relates to multilingualism as conventionally conceived. This question is addressed by Cornelia Hülmbauer and Barbara Seidlhofer in their chapter ‘English as a Lingua Franca in European Multilingualism’ (in Berthoud, Grin, and Lüdi, eds., Exploring the Dynamics of Multilingualism: The DYLAN Project [2013], pp. 387–406), which reports on research on dimensions of multilingualism in Europe carried out in the extensive five-year project ‘Language Dynamics and the Management of Diversity’ (the DYLAN project). In their chapter, Hülmbauer and Seidlhofer further substantiate the view that ELF is a flexible exploitation of linguistic resources afforded not only by English but by other languages as well, so that ELF is plurilinguistically complex of its very nature. They point out, however, that this flexibility operates not across but beyond demarcated linguistic boundaries, in that elements of the source languages cease to be assignable to separate codes but are functionally fused in the process of use to become plurilinguistic modes of communication in their own right. As such, ELF, it is argued, serves the need for a means of inter-communal communication without undermining the role and status of other languages for intra-communal communication and the expression of sociocultural identity. At the same time, this view of ELF as the exploitation of multiple lingual resources suggests that there is a need to question the traditional conception of multilingualism as the knowledge and use of more than one distinct linguistic system.
Hülmbauer takes up and extends this pluralistic view of ELF in her article ‘From Within and Without: The Virtual and the Plurilingual in ELF’ ( JELF 2[2013] 47–73). On the evidence of the ELF data she is concerned with, Hülmbauer demonstrates that ELF users draw on the communicative resources which are virtually available but unrealized in English and other languages. She argues that ELF users draw expediently on these plurilingual resources in the process of ‘languaging’, of negotiating meaning in response to immediate contextual need.
In spite of all the arguments against it, the view is still widespread that ELF furthers the dominance of English in the interests of its NSs, and so constitutes a threat to multilingual diversity. One way of countering this threat is to propose an alternative means of communication across languages. This is what is proposed by Gerda J. Blees, Willem M. Mak, and Jan D. ten Thije in ‘English as a Lingua Franca Versus Lingua Receptiva in Problem-Solving Conversations between Dutch and German Students’( AppLiRev 5[2014] 173–93). The idea is that communication is achieved by receptive multilingualism whereby speakers only make productive use of their own languages and need only to understand those of their interlocutors. Thus unlike a lingua franca, such a lingua receptiva (referred to as LaRa) draws on a single linguistic resource, which is identifiable as a distinct language but assumed to be interpretable by its non-speakers. The claim is that such an approach provides for communication across lingua-cultural boundaries while maintaining linguistic diversity. The article reports on empirical research on the relative communicative and cognitive advantages of putting German and Dutch to productive use as a LaRa as against the use of ELF among university students. How ELF relates to the concept of a LaRa is explored in more detail and conceptual depth by Hülmbauer in her article ‘A Matter of Reception: ELF and LaRa Compared’ ( AppLiRev 5[2014] 273–95). She points out that a lingua receptiva, unlike ELF, is in its production in conformity with native speaker norms so that the burden of adaptation falls on the recipient and meaning is not interactively negotiated but is a function of recipients’ interpretative strategies. Although, she argues, ELF and lingua receptiva can be seen as complementary in that both rely on a sensitivity to and engagement with lingua-cultural similarities and differences, the effectiveness of lingua receptiva is dependent on particular contexts and constellations of participants and so is more restricted in use than ELF.
The notion of a lingua receptiva accords with the concept of a language as a bounded and separate entity, which is at variance with current thinking about ELF that, as noted above, conceives it as a variably adaptable and indeterminate use of linguistic resources. The idea nevertheless persists that ELF is a formal system, a variety of English. In their article ‘Linguistic Baptism and the Disintegration of ELF’ ( AppLiRev 4[2013] 343–63) Joseph Sung-Yul Park and Lionel Wee argue the need to shift the direction of ELF research by recognizing that ELF is not a variety definable by its formal features but a dynamic exploitation of variable linguistic resources, apparently unaware that ELF research has long since held this position. Similarly in ‘Notes on English used as a Lingua Franca as an Object of Study’ ( JELF 2[2013] 25–46), Janus Mortensen identifies what he sees as a tendency in the ELF literature to reify ELF as a bounded object, an independent language system, and argues the need to shift the focus of enquiry to contextual factors so as to describe ELF encounters in more explicit functional terms as speech events using the SPEAKING frame of reference proposed by Dell Hymes. Another article that takes researchers to task for their supposed reification of ELF is John O’Regan’s ‘English as a Lingua Franca: An Immanent Critique’ ( AppLing 35[2014] 533–52). Mortensen’s article pursues a reasoned argument in support of ELF research by providing it with what he calls a ‘conceptual clarification’. In contrast, O’Regan’s article is determinedly negative and tendentious, intent on dismissing the study of ELF as theoretically and ideologically misconceived.
Whereas O’Regan takes a philosophical, predominantly Marxist, vantage point in his castigation of ELF study, the perspective taken by Vivian Cook in his much more impartial consideration of ELF is that of a researcher in SLA, as is indicated in the title of his chapter ‘ELF: Central or Atypical Second Language Acquisition’ (in Singleton, Fishman, Aronin, and Ó Laiore, eds., Current Multilingualism: A New Linguistic Dispensation [2013], pp. 27–44). This considers the nature of ELF by raising the question of whether or not it can be defined as a language. Although Cook continually refers to ELF as a variety, he argues that it does not count as a language or kind of English in that it neither constitutes a formal system nor is it the property of a particular community of users. Though Cook seems to be unaware of it, this view corresponds exactly with current thinking in ELF research, but the conclusions drawn from it are very different. From the SLA perspective that Cook takes, the assumption would seem to be that there must be a specific language, a bounded entity, for learners to acquire and so ELF does not qualify as a subject of study. But in the alternative current conceptualization of ELF, as exemplified by publications earlier referred to, ELF is taken to be the strategic use of multiple linguistic resources which are not confined to one language, and from this point of view acquisition can be seen not as the learning of a particular language but as the learning of how to use language in general.
This issue of whether ELF is defined in formal terms as a distinct varietal code, or in functional terms as a variable mode of communication also figures in the following articles. Beyza Björkman, in the (somewhat oddly titled) entry, ‘Grammar of English as a Lingua Franca’ (in Chapelle, ed., pp. 1–9), describes English grammar usage at a Swedish technical university, observing that ‘ELF usage in this instructional setting shows a considerable level of nonstandard grammar that does not interfere with communicative effectiveness’ (p. 5) though she later says that these features only occur with low frequencies, thus raising the question how frequent features have to be to qualify as commonalities. Björkman reviews other studies that found commonalities of nonstandard grammar in ELF interactions, emphasizing, however, that research in this area is remarkably scarce. The entry concludes by pointing to overlaps of features in ELF usage with WE, pidgins and creoles, and learner language. The next two papers take up similar issues about the supposed formal properties of ELF but in respect of the relevance of ELF for language pedagogy. In ‘English as a Lingua Franca: Ontology and Ideology’ ( ELangT 67[2013] 3–10), Andrew Sewell, like Mortensen (see above), traces a tendency to misrepresent ELF ontologically in essentialist terms as a variety, and this, he suggests, comes about because ELF researchers are ideologically intent on setting ELF in opposition to English as a native language (ENL). He argues that variable and flexible adaptability is a feature of all language use, including ENL, and is not distinctive of ELF. In his reply in the same volume, ‘The Distinctiveness of English as a Lingua Franca’ ( ELangT 67[2013] 346–9), Martin Dewey points out that Sewell’s non-essentialist views of language are actually in accord with the thinking of ELF researchers and that the distinctiveness of ELF is not that it is a variety or formally different from ENL but that its functional variability and focus on communicative effectiveness reveal the dynamic adaptive process of language use with particular clarity.
The claim that ELF is relevant to English-language teaching is given critical consideration in an article by Michael Swan titled ‘ELF and EFL: Are They Really Different?’ ( JELF 1[2012] 379–89). Swan argues that there is no essential difference in that what ELF users produce is simply the approximate version of the language that learners have acquired through their instruction in the standard language. Although he concedes that such versions can be communicatively effective, as has always been the case, they are nevertheless evidence of imperfect learning. Thus he sees the non-conformities that occur in ELF use as essentially learner errors in a different guise. He argues that the acquisition of this approximate competence depends on the learners having an authoritatively described model of competence for learners to approximate to—hence the need for EFL teaching to be based on descriptions of StE and the norms of native-speaker usage. Since descriptions of ELF do not codify it as a variety, as Swan thinks they claim to do, they cannot provide an alternative model and so he concludes that they have little if any pedagogical relevance. Henry Widdowson reacts to this article in ‘ELF and EFL: What’s the Difference? Comments on Michael Swan’ ( JELF 2[2013] 187–93). He points out that Swan’s position is based on the conventional, and conservative, belief that learning English must necessarily be a matter of conformity to what is described and prescribed as the standard language and that this is at odds with the communicatively non-conformist ways in which English, like any language, is actually used as an indeterminate and variable resource. Referring to the distinction that Swan makes between learning English, which requires conformity, and using it, which may not, thereby making use dependent on learning, Widdowson suggests reversing this dependency by focusing not on the linguistic forms of encoded models but on the kind of communicative strategies that characterize the use of ELF. He concludes that although as Swan conceives it, EFL is indeed very different from ELF, in his conception the two can be seen as closely interrelated. Swan reacts in ‘A Reply to Henry Widdowson’ ( JELF 2[2013] 391–6) by citing extracts from his article in support of his contention that his argument has been misunderstood and his position misrepresented. This exchange is only one indication of the controversy about the pedagogical relevance of ELF, and the debate is likely to continue.
While the implications of ELF for ELT are often briefly discussed in descriptive works on ELF, a number of publications in 2013 and 2014 have been exclusively concerned with this topic as well as various issues connected with ELF-informed language teaching. Given that Asian speakers nowadays use English primarily as a lingua franca to communicate with other Asians, Andy Kirkpatrick’s ‘Teaching English in Asia in Non-Anglo Cultural Contexts: Principles of the “Lingua Franca Approach” ’ (in Marlina and Giri, eds., The Pedagogy of English as an International Language: Perspectives from Scholars, Teachers, and Students , pp. 259–86) outlines, as suggested by the title, six principles of a ‘Lingua Franca’ approach to teaching English in the Asian region. These principles, which challenge a number of widespread assumptions in ELT, are as follows: the goals of teaching are mutual intelligibility and intercultural competence rather than native-like pronunciation, adherence to standard grammar, and knowledge of Anglo-American cultures (principles 1 and 2); not NSs, but ‘local multilinguals who are suitably trained’ (p. 29) are the most appropriate English-language teachers (principle 3); lingua franca environments rather than NS contexts constitute valuable opportunities to develop learners’ linguistic and intercultural competence (principle 4); written language differs from spoken language in that the former is not acquired but needs to be learned by both NSs and NNSs and written language norms are largely determined by discipline, genre, and culture (principle 5); assessment needs to be based on ‘how successfully [students] can use English in ASEAN settings’ (p. 32), not on NS norms (principle 6). The pedagogical principles of ELF-informed teaching as regards the models, methodologies, and teaching materials used, language testing, and the status of NSs and NNSs as teachers and learners of English are also discussed in Nobuyuki Hino’s ‘Teaching De-Anglo-Americanized English for International Communication’ ( JELL 60[2014] 91–106).
Ian MacKenzie’s English as a Lingua Franca: Theorizing and Teaching English discusses a number of suggestions that have been made by ELF researchers as to the implications of ELF for ELT, some of which he is more sceptical of than others. This monograph takes a rather critical view of ELF in general. Despite its promising title, however, ‘it is hard to see what contribution it makes to the field [of ELF research]’ (David Deterding in his review in JELF 3[2014] 429–31, p. 431) given that it neither offers new data nor new theoretical ideas.
A number of publications have addressed the status of NS and NNS teachers in connection with ELF. Andy Kirkpatrick, John Patkin, and Wu Jingjing’s ‘The Multilingual Teacher and the Multicultural Curriculum: An Asian Example for Intercultural Communication in the New Era’ (in Sharifian and Jamarani, eds., Language and Intercultural Communication in the New Era , pp. 263–85) challenges the privileged position of NS language teachers in Asia. The authors present extracts from the ACE corpus (see below) illustrating the topics discussed by multilingual Asian ELF users, which tend to presuppose familiarity with and knowledge of ‘Asian cultures and values’ (p. 283). This leads them to conclude that ELF speakers in the region will need to possess cultural knowledge of this kind as well as intercultural competence. These skills will need to be reflected in the local English-language curriculum and, they argue, can best be developed with the help of local multilingual and multicultural teachers with pedagogical training, due to the latter’s ‘intercultural knowledge and skills’ (p. 282). In ‘Can the Expanding Circle Own English? Comments on Yoo’s “Nonnative Teachers in the Expanding Circle and the Ownership of English” ’ ( AppLing 35[2014] 208–12), Wei Ren responds to an article by Isaiah Wonho Yoo ( AppLing 35[2014] 82–6), which disputes the claim of Expanding Circle speakers to the ownership of English. Ren uncovers a number of fallacies in Yoo’s work, such as that in maintaining that Expanding Circle speakers ‘do not speak English on a daily basis, and [that] there are no separate local varieties of English for them’ (p. 3), he fails to take proper account of the widespread use of ELF in the EU and in ASEAN. Ren further argues that NNS teachers from the Expanding Circle will continue to face disadvantages and have their self-confidence undermined if they are required to teach according to NS models. In order for them to be regarded as ‘ideal teachers’, it will be necessary to acknowledge Expanding Circle speakers’ right to the ownership of English, as then ‘the linguistic and cultural resources that [local NNS teachers in the Expanding Circle] bring to the classroom will be appreciated’ (p. 211). Yet, despite these considerations, the discrimination against NNS teachers in ELT seems to continue, as is evident for instance in Nicola Galloway’s ‘ “I Get Paid for My American Accent”: The Story of One Multilingual English Teacher (MET) in Japan’ ( EnginP 1[2014] 1–30).
Given the fact that a certain resistance to novel teaching approaches that challenge established ways of thinking, as in the case of ELF, is often observable amongst ELT practitioners, two publications in 2014 were concerned with the necessary measures in teacher education to help teachers incorporate ELF into their actual teaching practice. In ‘Pedagogic Criticality and English as a Lingua Franca’ ( Atlantis 36:ii[2014] 11–30), Martin Dewey suggests adopting a sociocultural perspective in teacher education in order to respond to the perceived gap of (ELF) theory and practice so often lamented by teachers. Dewey argues that the convictions about language and pedagogy that teachers hold need to be sufficiently dealt with in teacher education by promoting a critical perspective on teaching practices. He suggests that this might be achieved through narrative enquiry, an approach which consists of teachers recounting their personal experiences, thereby ‘becoming compelled to confront how their understanding of teaching came about in the first place’ (p. 24). The importance of engaging with teachers’ existing beliefs in order to enable the application of ELF-related findings in ELT is also suggested by Nicos C. Sifakis’s ‘ELF Awareness as an Opportunity for Change: A Transformative Perspective for ESOL Teacher Education’ ( JELF 3[2014], 317–35). In it, Sifakis argues that, in order for pedagogical change in line with the reality of ELF to take place, teachers need not only to acquire knowledge about ELF and its pedagogical implications, but also to critically revisit their own convictions. He therefore calls for a ‘transformative’ approach to ELF-aware teacher education which operates in two phases: the first consists of guided readings in the fields of ELF, critical pedagogy, and postmodern applied linguistics, which teachers then reflect on with regard to past experiences and the current circumstances of their teaching. The second phase consists of action research projects during which teachers apply ELF-related matters to their particular teaching context as they see fit. This approach is ‘transformative’ in that during the entire process, teachers ‘engage in a reflective journey that prompts them to become conscious of, challenge, and ultimately transform deeper convictions about ESOL communication and teaching’ (p. 328).
The issue of how the perceived gap between ELF theory and the practice of ELT could be closed is also taken up by several publications that examine methods to integrate ELF into the English-language classroom. Enrico Grazzi’s monograph The Sociocultural Dimension of ELF in the English Classroom reports on a research project on the use of written ELF by Italian high-school students in an Internet-mediated community of practice. After discussing the similarities and differences between ELF and two historical lingua francas (section 1) and a sociocultural approach to ELF rooted in Vygotskian theory (section 2), the author provides a detailed description of the online activities (writing and sharing online book reviews, co-operative writing, and fan fiction) involving the use of ELF by the students participating in the project in section 3 of the book. ELT practitioners who wish to gain an idea of how to provide their own students with similar opportunities for using ELF in natural contexts might find this section particularly useful. The last section presents the results of an ethnographic survey carried out after the project had ended about the students’ and their teachers’ practices in using ELF online and their views on using ELF in Web-mediated communication, which suggests an overall positive attitude towards the teaching method presented here on the part of both students and teachers. Paola Vettorel’s ‘ELF in International School Exchanges: Stepping into the Role of ELF Users’ ( JELF 2[2013] 147–73) reports on a similar project, where European primary-school children from different lingua-cultural backgrounds were offered the opportunity to communicate with each other in speech and writing via the Internet using ELF. An analysis of the resulting spoken and written data showed that, although they were beginner learners of English, the pupils ‘made all efforts to exploit the (pluri)linguistic resources available to them in their aim to communicate and express their intended meaning’ (p. 159), mostly achieving communicative success in the process. Notably, these learners employed a number of linguistic processes and communication strategies attested in other empirical investigations of ELF data (such as grammatical regularization, code-switching, repetition, and asking for clarification or confirmation) when ‘stepping into the role of ELF users ’ (p. 165; emphasis original). This encounter with real-world ELF communication, the author argues, ‘has allowed [the pupils] to connect their language learning experience with real contexts of use, adding a richer value to both’ (p. 169). Vettorel also points to the potential positive effects of such encounters in and with ELF on learners’ motivation and self-confidence, an issue which is the focus of I-Chung Ke and Hilda Cahyani’s ‘Learning to Become Users of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF): How ELF Online Communication Affects Taiwanese Learners’ Beliefs of English’ ( System 46[2014] 28–38). This study investigates whether participating in regular ELF online exchanges with Indonesian peers over a two-semester period affected Taiwanese university students’ conceptions of and orientation towards English. Ke and Cahyani’s findings reveal, amongst other things, ‘a significant change in students’ acceptance of local accents’ (p. 34) and a decrease in the perceived importance of grammatical accuracy in communication with foreigners after the project. However, they also found that ‘most students’ beliefs about English remain[ed] consistent with the traditional NS-based ELT paradigm’ (their abstract).
Another publication reporting on an international writing project is Massimo Verzella and Laura Tommaso’s ‘Learning to Write for an International Audience through Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Text-Negotiation’ ( ChE 21[2014] 310–21). Notably, the project described in this article recognizes the need to prepare not only NNSs but also NSs of English for international communication, and therefore involves American and Italian university students collaborating with each other. However, in contrast to many other international exchanges, this one turns the tables on the traditional distribution of roles between NS and NNS, in which the NS is regarded as the owner of the English language and assumes the role of the linguistic judge or adviser whereas the NNS assumes the role of the one whose language is being evaluated. Instead, in this project it was the Italian students who gave their American partners feedback with regard to the comprehensibility of their writing. Thus, the American students were able to reflect on the process of accommodating their use of written English to the needs of an international audience.
ELF is also brought to the classroom in Stephanie Ann Houghton and Khalifa Abubaker Al-Asswad’s ‘An Exploration of the Communication Strategies Used When Culture-Laden Words Are Translated from Japanese to Arabic in ELF Interaction’ ( L&E 28[2014] 28–40), which reports on an English course at a Japanese university with the aim of promoting intercultural communicative competence through the use of ELF. The focus of their article is on the analysis of the communication and translation strategies employed by Japanese students to explain culture-laden Japanese words to a Libyan instructor through ELF. However, the authors also discuss a number of pedagogical implications of their findings, e.g. how the teaching method described can support learners in developing meta-cognitive awareness of the strategies they employ.
Another way of integrating ELF into ELT is suggested by Nicola Galloway and Heath Rose in ‘Using Listening Journals to Raise Awareness of Global Englishes in ELT’ ( ELangT 68[2014] 386–96). In it, the authors describe the use of listening journals to familiarize Japanese university students with different international varieties of English and ELF usage. The activity involved students listening to a particular type of speaker of English or an ELF exchange of their own choice for a minimum of ten minutes per week, recording in their journals the speakers’ nationality along with their reasons for choosing the particular speaker(s) or exchange in question and a reflection on the properties of the English they had listened to. The listening journals assumed a dual function, constituting not only a pedagogical tool but also a research instrument that allowed the authors to gain insight into the students’ listening preferences and their response to different types of English. The results of the study indicate that students were interested in listening to NNS varieties of English (especially those of neighbouring countries) and that the journals were useful in increasing students’ exposure to the latter. However, it seems that the activity was of limited success with regard to raising students’ awareness of the nature of ELF communication, as rather than reflecting on the communicative strategies employed by ELF speakers, students tended to concentrate on varieties of English and simply measure NNS English against an NS yardstick in their reflections. The authors conclude that for future implementation, such an activity needs to ‘be revised to place more focus on ELF interactions and less on the notion of varieties of English’ (p. 394)—an important observation which seems to apply to other ELF- and ELT-related publications as well.
Galloway and Rose’s study sheds further light on learners’ perspectives on ELF and ELF-related issues in teaching, a theme that is the research focus of several other publications. Another article by Nicola Galloway that addresses this topic is ‘Global Englishes and English Language Teaching (ELT): Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice in a Japanese Context’ ( System 41[2013] 786–803). Galloway employs a mixed-methods approach, using questionnaires and interview data, to investigate the views of Japanese university students on (learning) English and how the latter may have been affected by a Global Englishes class including a module on ELF. Mention also needs to be made of Chit Cheung Matthew Sung, who has published several articles on different aspects of the issue of learner preferences in relation to ELF-informed teaching. His ‘Exposure to Multiple Accents of English in the English Language Teaching Classroom: From Second Language Learners’ Perspectives’ ( ILLT 8[2014] 1–16) is concerned with learner attitudes towards encountering a range of different accents in the ELT classroom, as is often called for in ELF literature. A particular interest of Sung’s is learner (or language user) identities and ELF, especially in connection with pronunciation preferences, as is evident in his papers ‘Accent and Identity: Exploring the Perceptions among Bilingual Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca in Hong Kong’ ( IJBEB 17[2014] 544–57), ‘I Would Like to Sound Like Heidi Klum’: What Do Non-Native Speakers Say about Who They Want to Sound Like?’ ( EnT 29:ii[2013] 17–21), ‘English as a Lingua Franca and Global Identities: Perspectives from Four Second Language Learners of English in Hong Kong’ ( L&E 26[2014] 31–9), ‘Global, Local or Glocal? Identities of L2 Learners in English as a Lingua Franca Communication’ ( LC&C 27[2014] 43–57), and ‘Hong Kong University Students’ Perceptions of Their Identities in English as a Lingua Franca Contexts: An Exploratory Study’ ( JAPC 24 2014] 94–112). Sung’s concern for the recognition of learner preferences and learner choice with regard to ELF is also explicit in his response to Sewell ([2013], reviewed above), titled ‘English as a Lingua Franca and English Language Teaching: A Way Forward’ ( ELangT 67[2013] 350–3).
The learner’s perspective is also the focus of Yongyan Zheng’s ‘An Inquiry into Chinese Learners’ English-Learning Motivational Self-Images: ENL Learner or ELF User?’ ( JELF 2[2013] 341–64). Zheng conducted interviews with eight Chinese English majors to investigate their Ought-to and Ideal L2 Selves according to the framework of Zoltan Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System. She found that the participants’ Ought-to and Ideal L2 Selves were strongly related to NS norms, thereby conflicting with their experiences of and opportunities for using English in their immediate surroundings and thus ultimately leading to demotivation for learning and using English. As a counter-measure, Zheng suggests that teachers could encourage learners to develop more realistic motivational self-images of ‘legitimate ELF users’ rather than ‘perennial ENL learners’ (p. 359). A similar yet large-scale study also enquiring into the perspectives of Chinese speakers of English is Ying Wang’s ‘Non-Conformity to ENL Norms: A Perspective from Chinese English Users’ ( JELF 2[2013] 255–82). Wang’s participants were not learners of English, but users in that they had a certain degree of linguistic experience with using English (including both university students of different disciplines and English-using professionals). Drawing on questionnaire and interview data from over 760 and 35 participants respectively, her study investigated Chinese speakers’ views on non-conformity to ENL norms, for instance as evident in examples from ELF corpus data. Her findings suggest ‘a delicate balance between exonormative and endonormative orientations to English’ (p. 278) on the part of her participants, who subscribed to the idea of the significance of ENL norms but, at the same time, recognized that non-conformity may have an important communicative and socio-psychological function.
That the distinction between learner and user of English is not always a straightforward one becomes clear when considering studies such as Eda Kaypak and Deniz Ortaçtepe’s ‘Language Learner Beliefs and Study Abroad: A Study on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)’ ( System 42[2014] 355–67). This article investigates the impact of an Erasmus-exchange semester spent in an ELF context on Turkish learners’ beliefs about learning English. The participants in the study were thus both language learners and ELF users at the same time. The analysis of the questionnaire data suggested that no significant change in the participants’ beliefs had taken place during their stay abroad in an ELF context. This finding is in agreement with the ones of a similar study by Bakhtiar Naghdipour, ‘Language Learner Beliefs in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Context’ ( AdLLS 5[2014] 22–30). However, the results of Kaypak and Ortaçtepe’s qualitative analysis of five student journals indicate that the stay-abroad experience caused students to develop a new perspective on certain aspects of using and learning English, and, moreover, support ‘the assumption that language learner beliefs are not homogenous and stable, but contradictory from time to time’ (p. 364).
The latter point is stressed by Nicholas Subtirelu in ‘What (Do) Learners Want(?): A Re-examination of the Issue of Learner Preferences Regarding the Use of “Native” Speaker Norms in English Language Teaching’ ( LangAw 22[2013] 270–91). This article is noteworthy in that Subtirelu not only presents the results of his own study on learner preferences with regard to traditional and alternative (e.g. ELF-based) models for learning English but also highlights important theoretical and methodological shortcomings of previous studies with a similar focus. On the basis of these considerations, the author opted for a small sample size (eight participants) and an in-depth analysis of longitudinal data (questionnaire responses in conjunction with interview data, both obtained in four sessions over several months). This methodology allowed him, as is evident from his results, to reveal ‘the ambivalence, contradiction, or complexity inherent in learners’ discussions of their preferences’ (p. 286), which, he argues, a one-off questionnaire is unable to capture.
Another important field of interest for ELF researchers has been the impact (or lack thereof) of ELF-related research findings on teaching materials. Studies of teaching materials are of particular interest as the latter seem to be useful indicators of the degree to which novel approaches in ELT might gain ground: as argued by Paola Vettorel and Lucilla Lopriore in ‘Is There ELF in ELT Coursebooks?’ ( SSLLT 3[2013] 483–504), ‘many innovations in foreign language teaching have been successfully anticipated and diffused mostly thanks to their implementation in teaching materials’ (p. 484). In this article, the authors examine whether research findings in the fields of WE and ELF are in any way reflected in the ten most widely sold ELT course-books used in Italian secondary schools. The results of their analysis suggest that the impact of ELF and WE research on the course-books examined is still fairly limited, as course-books are found to lack awareness-raising activities for WE and ELF and suggestions for language use outside school in the students’ own local context. They also remain rather conservative in their representation of English speakers and of the contexts in which English is used, with characters being mostly NSs operating in Inner Circle contexts while ELF interactions are apparently not considered a legitimate model. However, the authors observe a shift in perspective as regards the teaching of culture and intercultural awareness, with the relevant course-book sections focusing on different cultures around the world rather than the NS target cultures as they are traditionally conceived.
In ‘An Evaluation of the Pronunciation Target in Hong Kong’s ELT Curriculum and Materials: Influences from WE and ELF?’ ( JELF 3[2014] 145–70), Jim Chan carries out a qualitative content analysis of the local ELT curriculum, examination papers and ten local textbooks in order to evaluate the pronunciation target in Hong Kong’s secondary education with regard to its potential WE and ELF orientation. His findings suggest that, although WE and ELF perspectives seem to be partly discernible in the Hong Kong ELT curriculum, due to the sometimes fairly ambiguous wording it is not quite clear ‘which pedagogical ideologies the curriculum conforms to, but it seems to be conceptually still guided by NS norms’ (p. 167). Moreover, certain recommendations of the curriculum that could be considered to reflect a WE and/or ELF perspective (e.g. that learners should be able to understand a range of different accents) are not sufficiently taken up in the textbooks investigated, and characteristic features of the local Hong Kong accent are presented as ‘errors’ in the books’ oral tasks. The author also observes ‘a clear disjunction among the language-using situations (e.g., ELF), the identity of speakers (i.e., mainly NNSs) and their accents (i.e., mainly RP) in the audio listening recordings’ (p. 167). That is, if recordings include speakers identified as NNSs who are conversing in ELF contexts, their grammar and pronunciation generally correspond to NS norms, which ‘may give students the impression that NS pronunciations are the only pedagogical target’ (p. 167).
Another study concerned with the analysis of teaching materials from an ELF perspective is Reiko Takahashi’s ‘An Analysis of ELF-Oriented Features in ELT Coursebooks’ ( EnT 30:i[2014] 28–34). This paper investigates the degree to which sixteen different textbooks used in Japanese high schools incorporate an ELF perspective to ELT, as indicated by e.g. ‘ELF-related contents/topics’ addressed in the course-books (p. 31). The overall trend seems to be that of a traditional foreign-language perspective, in which a Japanese speaker uses English to communicate with an NS. Remaining within an Asian context, Ya-Chen Su’s ‘The International Status of English for Intercultural Understanding in Taiwan’s High School EFL Textbooks’ ( APJLE [2014] 1–19) reports that the traditional focus on NS countries and their linguistic norms persists in the Taiwanese textbooks examined, and although the cultures of various NS and NNS countries are addressed, ‘culturally biased, superficial, and industry-favoured information prevails’ (p. 15).
One field that triggers vibrant discussions in connection with ELF-informed pedagogy is language testing and assessment. In ‘30 Years On—Evolution or Revolution?’ ( LAQ 11[2014] 226–32), Tim McNamara declares that ‘communicative language testing is at a point of fundamental change’ since ‘the growing awareness of the nature of English as a lingua franca communication overturns all the givens of the communicative movement as it has developed over the last 30 or 40 years’ (p. 231) and thus calls for a revolution in the field of language testing. He also critically discusses a particular assessment framework, the CEFR, lamenting that the latter is nowadays often considered ‘ “too big to fail” ’, which he views as a symptom of ‘a general conservatism in the field of language testing’ (p. 229). McNamara criticizes the CEFR for relying on the traditional opposition between NS and NNS competence, which, he argues, ‘can no longer be sustained’ in the light of ELF communication, concluding that ‘a radical reconceptualization of the construct of successful communication that does not depend on this distinction’ (p. 231) is hence necessary. Further criticism on the constructs underlying the English language-testing industry comes from Christopher Hall in ‘Moving beyond Accuracy: From Tests of English to Tests of “Englishing” ’ ( ELangT 68[2014] 376–85). The author discusses the problems of the dominant ‘monolithic ontology of English’ (p. 377) in testing, according to which the language is regarded as a ‘singular reified entit[y]’ (p. 379) that is associated with StE and NS usage, from a cognitive and sociolinguistic perspective. He argues instead for the adoption of a ‘plurilithic’ approach to testing, which views English as ‘dynamic sets of overlapping phonological, grammatical, and lexical resources, stored in millions of individual minds, which interact in multiple communities and cultural practices’ (p. 379), thereby taking account of the diverse experiences of use made by different types of NSs and NNSs of English in particular localities, as in the case of ELF communication. Thus, the aim of English-language tests would not be to evaluate to what extent a learner’s language approximates the norms of StE, but ‘a learner’s Englishing: what they do with the language in specific situations’ (p. 383).
McNamara’s article discussed above is not the only publication taking a critical perspective on the CEFR. Jennifer Jenkins and Constant Leung’s chapter titled ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ (in Kunnan, ed., The Companion to Language Assessment: Abilities, Contexts, and Learners , pp. 1607–16) critically examines the CEFR and a number of widespread English-language tests, which the authors find to be NS-oriented and ‘ “international” in the sense of being used (marketed and administered) internationally rather than in the sense of reflecting international use ’ (p. 1609; emphasis original). They then go on to discuss the implications of empirical ELF research for tests of English, and call for language testing to ‘return to its empirical roots’ (p. 1614) grounded in the Hymesian view that investigations of actual language use should provide the basis for what is regarded as communicative competence. The chapter concludes with some practical suggestions of how testers could put the implications of ELF for testing English into practice, though the authors stress that it will be necessary to ‘devise new approaches altogether to assessing English’ (p. 1614) to take account of the inherently flexible and variable nature of ELF.
Another critical examination of the CEFR is Niina Hynninen’s ‘The Common European Framework of Reference from the Perspective of English as a Lingua Franca: What We Can Learn from a Focus on Language Regulation’ ( JELF 3[2014] 293–316). Drawing on work done for her MA thesis, Hynninen shows that the proficiency level descriptors of the CEFR are centred on NS and target culture norms, which, from the point of view of ELF research, is clearly problematic. She contrasts this with her own research on language regulation in ELF interactions, which suggests that ELF speakers manage their own linguistic and cultural norms rather than consult NSs (even if they are present) for questions of acceptability. Hynninen concludes that ‘the CEFR and particularly its descriptors, where the NNS is expected to adapt to the language and culture of the NS, then, is ill-suited to be applied in ELF situations, and it seems clear that we need to develop new descriptors, possibly a new framework altogether, to address the questions raised by lingua franca interaction’ (p. 311).
Finally, Constant Leung’s ‘The “Social” in English Language Teaching: Abstracted Norms Versus Situated Enactments’ ( JELF 2[2013] 283–313) draws on video recordings of classroom discussions at a school and a university in London involving students from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, for whom English thus constitutes ‘a particular case of lingua franca in an English-dominant environment’ (p. 296). The extracts presented illustrate the complex negotiation of social norms of language use in a particular communicative situation, which, as shown by the author, the descriptor scales of the CEFR fail to capture. Instead, the ‘social’ is often depicted as relating to abstract NS conventions and thus as ‘stable and predictable’ (p. 290) in the CEFR—an observation which also holds true with regard to a number of ELT textbooks examined in this study. Leung hence calls for a reconceptualization of ‘the social’ in ELT that is based on empirical observations of how speakers exploit their linguistic repertoires in socially acceptable ways in a particular context. All the publications mentioned above are complemented by a rich collection of studies examining a range of implications of ELF for ELT entitled ELF 5: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca [2013], edited by Yasemin Bayyurt and Sumru Akcan.
Another area where ELF research has become relevant in educational contexts is that of English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education. The growth in work exploring EMI within the ELF paradigm is occurring along with the significant increase in the number of universities offering English-medium programmes in ELF settings. This has been driven by powerful economic, technological, and societal forces promoting internationalization, a growing emphasis on research publications and rankings, as well the perceived quality of universities from traditional anglophone countries.
A major contribution to exploring this sub-field is Jennifer Jenkins’s book English as a Lingua Franca in the International University: The Politics of Academic English Language Policy . By analysing the websites of a large number of universities across the world and investigating staff perceptions of their universities’ English-language policies and practices, Jenkins finds that image of English remain firmly rooted in NS ideologies and do not reflect the notion of ‘international-ness’ that such institutions are striving to present. By conducting interviews with international postgraduate students in an anglophone context, she demonstrates the impact of NS ideologies on international students in terms of their linguistic practices and identities being marginalized within the institution. She also points out (as does Mortensen [2014], discussed below), that a failure to reconceptualize English in line with internationalization policies can result in a dissonance between international and local students, and thus restrict real opportunities for internationalization for both student groups. In another interesting contribution to exploring the role of English in international education, Desiring TESOL and International Education: Market Abuse and Exploitation , Raqib Chowdhury and Phan Le Ha analyse how ideals of ‘native-speaker’ English are perpetuated in the field of TESOL—and the impact this has on students who both resist and appropriate these labels (e.g. through embracing ELF).
Due to the growing number of higher education programmes offered in English there are a number of new studies investigating the role of ELF in national contexts that have been relatively unexplored until now. In their article ‘Emerging Culture of English-Medium Instruction in Korea: Experiences of Korean and International Students’ ( L&IC 14[2014] 441–59) Jeongyeon Kim, Bradley Tatar, and Jinsook Choi examine the experiences and perceptions of ELF among local and international students at a Korean university that has an EMI policy. The findings show that the two groups of students have different perceptions of their ownership in English—with the international students more likely to embrace an ELF perspective. This embracing of ELF had a positive impact on their active participation in the classroom (in both English and Korean) and their perceptions of their academic ability to use English as the language of their studies. The study highlights the importance of participants in EMI having a shared perspective of English for successful implementation, as well as the need for policies in support of the use of code-switching to facilitate learning for the local students. There is also a need for support in the national language for international students (as it clearly continues to play an important role in Korean higher education despite policies promoting English), as well as support for using English for all students. Similarly, in ‘EFL and ELF College Students’ Perceptions toward Englishes’ ( JELF 3[2014] 363–86), Wenli Tsou and Fay Chen compare attitudes to English among Taiwanese English as a foreign language (EFL) and international students on an English-medium MBA programme (‘ELF students’). Like Kim et al., they found more acceptance of the idea that English is owned equally by its users regardless of their mother tongue among international students. There was also stronger awareness of the need to develop strategies to facilitate successful communication and skills related to cross-cultural understanding. The EFL students, however, who have little exposure to ELF environments, were more devoted to standard ideals of English. Among both groups, there was little acceptance of localized varieties of English. The study thus suggests the need to reformulate English education in Taiwan so that cross-cultural understanding is fostered through promoting awareness of varieties and English is taught with a view to facilitating international communication.
In the context of Japan, Galloway and Rose’s article ‘ “They Envision Going to New York, not Jakarta”: The Differing Attitudes Toward ELF of Students, Teaching Assistants, and Instructors in an English-Medium Business Program in Japan’ ( JELF 2[2013] 229–53) examines a bilingual business degree programme in which positive attitudes to ELF are being embraced and students are being prepared for the changing needs of ELF usage in a globalized society. To do so, a system has been developed in which international students are hired to support students in learning business concepts as well as to provide opportunities for real-life ELF use. The findings of the study indicate that both students and student assistants viewed English as a tool of communication in the business world, and had more ELF-oriented perceptions of how they would use and need English in the future than the instructors had realized. They also show how students in the study are surpassing the changes in the curriculum and are meeting the changing demands of ELF head-on.
In ‘The Role of English as a Lingua Franca in Academia: The Case of Turkish Postgraduate Students in an Anglophone-Centre Context’ ( Procedia 141[2014] 74–8), Neslihan Onder Ozdemir investigates perceptions of Turkish postgraduate students who have been studying in the UK and US regarding the use of English as the international language of science. Findings indicate that these students believe that the benefits of having English as a universal mode of communication to share research and meet professional needs outweigh its negative aspects. However the majority of the participants felt they were at a disadvantage. This perception is related to the students viewing themselves as foreign-language speakers and not as rightful owners of an international lingua franca.
Beyza Björkman, in ‘Peer Assessment of Spoken Lingua Franca English in Tertiary Education in Sweden: Criterion-Referenced Versus Norm-Referenced Assessment’ (in Johannesson, Melchers, and Björkman, eds., Of Butterflies and Birds, of Dialects and Genres: Essays in Honour of Philip Shaw [2013], pp. 109–22) addresses an issue that spans the concerns of ELF pronunciation, academic ELF, and EMI, in that she investigates peer feedback to oral presentations in a university context. She finds that students rely primarily on norm-referenced assessment, focusing on the importance of native-like pronunciation, and give little attention to criterion-referenced aspects such as intelligibility. Björkman concludes that universities that take their international mission seriously in consequence would need to do more to raise awareness for the dynamics of ELF interaction, for instance by offering workshops across subjects and disciplines, and including both instructors and students. Taken together, all these studies suggest that attitudes about standard language use (particularly with regard to writing) are slow to change, especially among students who study EFL, while students using ELF as part of their studies are more likely to accept the changing ownerships and norms of English.
There are a few new studies which provide detailed insight into how English and other languages are being used in EMI programmes. In his article ‘Language Policy from Below: Language Choice in Student Project Groups in a Multilingual University Setting’ ( JMMD 35[2014] 425–42), Janus Mortensen, for example, investigates the patterns of language choice among student project groups in an international study programme in Denmark. He finds that English is the language most commonly used among students; however, the groups demonstrate complex linguistic practices that include Danish as an alternative or supplementary language to English. This shows that the local de facto language policies created by the community are much more complex than the university’s formal language policy, which promotes the exclusive use of English. This study shows how practising a strict pro-English-language policy may ensure local, short-term inclusion of non-Danish-speakers but could ultimately constrain the potential for multilingual and multicultural development that international university education holds. By not giving them opportunities to use the national language, this policy also inadvertently contributes to the long-term exclusion of international students from the wider society. He thus argues that the use of local languages is a legitimate and indeed desirable part of international education. Another rich picture of classroom discourse comes from the work of Ute Smit’s ‘ Language Affordances in Integrating Content and English as a Lingua Franca (“ICELF”): On an Implicit Approach to English Medium Teaching’ ( JAW 3:i[2013] 15–29). Smit draws on a longitudinal database, comprising classroom interactional and ethnographic data that covers the whole duration of an international, four-semester, English-medium hotel management programme set in Vienna. In spite of the absence of any explicit language-learning aims, she finds evidence of language-learning possibilities within ELF classroom discourse. She calls this ‘Implicit Integrating Content and English as a Lingua Franca’ (ICELF). She also finds that English was identified and positively evaluated as multifunctional in relation to its relevance for future hospitality careers and its lingua franca function of the participants communicating with each other in the here and now. She suggests, however, that such implicit practices be made more explicit in policy.
All accounts of EMI use, however, are not positive, and the study ‘Identifying Academically At-Risk Students in an English-as-a-Lingua-Franca University Setting’ ( JEAP 15[2014] 37–47) by Michael Harrington and Thomas Roche investigates a context in which a large number of students are struggling to follow their university content in English, as is the case in Oman. In this context, where the majority of students and staff have limited proficiency in English and the language has restricted uses in society in general, there are a number of at-risk students. This has negative consequences for the individual student, the institution, and the society as a whole. They thus explore the usefulness of post-enrolment assessment (PELA) for identifying academically at-risk students in an EMI programme in the ELF context of Oman. The study concludes that PELA schemes may be one, but not the only, means of identifying and supporting students without sufficient English proficiency to undertake English-medium education in ELF settings.
Key messages arising from this work are that practice is often ahead of policy in terms of embracing ELF and multilingual practice in EMI programmes. These studies suggest that acceptance of ELF seems to go along with acceptance and promotion of using other languages for learning and communication, as well as a recognition of the need for strategies and intercultural understanding for communication. They also demonstrate a need for more acceptance and promotion of the value of local languages (in the classroom and in academic writing) to promote integration between mixed groups of students (and the long-term integration of ‘international’ students into national contexts), the quality of national research, and the work against domain loss of national languages.
There is another strand of work in this area, which is exploring whether the dominance of English in academia may be a disadvantage for NNSs: studies suggest that this sense of disadvantage is minimized if conceptions of ELF are embraced. This need for academics to assert ownership and agency over the politics and uses of ELF is put forward by Barbara Seidlhofer in ‘Hegemonie oder Handlungsspielraum? Englisch als Lingua Franca in der Wissenschaft’ (in Neck, Schmidinger, and Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, eds., Kommunikation—Objekt und Agens von Wissenschaft [2013], pp. 178–85). She argues that embracing ELF can give non-anglophone academics some room for manoeuvre within the global dominance of English as an academic language. Bent Preisler, in ‘Lecturing in One’s First Language or in English as a Lingua Franca: The Communication of Authenticity’ ( ALH 46[2014] 218–42), explores whether being required to teach in English affects the professional authenticity of Danish academics as reflected in their discourses and interactions with students. The analysis suggests that crucial to teachers’ having a sense of authenticity and academic authority are: teachers’ ability to authenticate themselves through appropriate communicative strategies, and teachers and students sharing relevant cultural frames of reference.
The issue of disadvantage is a common theme in the growing body of research highlighting the national, institutional, and individual implicit and explicit policies that reinforce the status of English as the global lingua franca of academia, and issues that ELF scholars face when writing for publication in international journals which are invariably in English. Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry, in their article ‘English, Scientific Publishing and Participation in the Global Knowledge Economy’ (in Erling and Seargeant, eds., pp. 220–42), look at the necessity of participating in scientific knowledge generation and publication in English as part of human development. They point out that necessary resources for publishing in English may often not be present in developing countries, and they show that, even when these circumstances are mitigated, and norms of standard English demanded by journals can be followed, there are further obstacles that face academics from the periphery − including the sites of their research not being deemed significant or representative.
Writing for publication in multilingual contexts is the topic of a special issue of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (13[2014]), edited by Maria Kuteeva and Anna Mauranen, and contributions to this issue both expand the contexts in which such research has been undertaken and provide new insights into the drivers of language choice in writing for publication. In ‘English for Research Publication and Dissemination in Bi-/Multiliterate Environments: The Case of Romanian Academics’ ( JEAP 13[2014] 53–64) Laura-Michaela Muresan and Carmen Pérez-Llantada, for example, investigate the research communication practices and attitudes towards the role of English among social science academics in Romania. They find an overwhelmingly positive acceptance of a global academic lingua franca, despite an acknowledgement of the difficulties of writing in English. However, they also demonstrate a continued need for research publication and dissemination in national languages, and recommend providing guidance on language-policy decisions and language-planning interventions to promote multilingualism. A similar study conducted in Turkey, namely Hacer Hande Uysal’s ‘English Language Spread in Academia: Macro-Level State Policies and Micro-Level Practices of Scholarly Publishing in Turkey’ ( LPLP 38[2014] 265–91), examines macro-level state policies that increasingly promote academic publishing in English and the effects of these policies on academics at two Turkish universities. She finds that academics perceived an advantage of English functioning as the lingua franca of global academia, particularly in the hard sciences, which further endorses the use of English promoted by the government. While these macro- and micro-policies are accompanied by some movements to promote and maintain Turkish as an academic language, she, like Ana Bocanegra-Valle in her article ‘ “English is My Default Academic Language”: Voices from LSP Scholars Publishing in a Multilingual Journal’ ( JEAP 13[2014] 65–77), recognizes the need for policies/practices that will help avoid national-language attrition and raise the standard of non-English published research.
Giving more insight into the process of writing for publication for ELF scholars, Bocanegra-Valle investigates why scholars of Language for Specific Purposes who submit articles to the ‘multilingual’ journal Ibérica , which accepts articles in five European languages, primarily submit articles in English. She finds that their reasons for doing so include global pressures that articles written in English are of greater quality and credibility—and because they can be more widely accessed. Pilar Mur-Dueñas, in ‘Spanish Scholars’ Research Article Publishing Process in English-Medium Journals: English Used as a Lingua Franca?’ ( JELF 2[2013] 315–40), investigates the process of writing research articles by a group of Spanish scholars, and reveals the most common type of language revision of manuscripts that are suggested for publication. This provides insight into the extent to which ELF norms are considered acceptable for publication, or whether Anglo-American rhetorical conventions prevail. She finds that these scholars’ uses of ELF to communicate the results of their research to the international community initially fail, and they have to change their voice (and thus lose part of their local identity) in order to meet the language and stylistic expectations of the gatekeepers. She thus identifies a need for increasing awareness of ELF across academic publications and among the various stakeholders in journals. These issues are also touched on by Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis, who drew on their research into academic writing and publishing practices ( Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English [2010]), to produce A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies [2013], which aims to help ELF scholars explore the broader social practices, politics, networks, and resources involved in academic publishing and to encourage them to consider how they wish to take part in these practices—as well as to engage in current debates about them.
While EMI has received growing attention, interest in the related yet distinct field of academic ELF has continued to constitute a focal point of ELF research, particularly in Scandinavia. This is not surprising, as in some Nordic countries, such as Iceland, virtually all researchers publish in English on occasion, while a majority publish over 75 per cent of their work in English, according to a survey by Hafdís Ingvarsdóttir and Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir published in ‘ELF and Academic Writing: A Perspective from the Expanding Circle’ ( JELF 2[2013] 123–45). The authors argue that, given the pressure to publish in English, the current lack of institutional support for academics needs to be addressed, while also calling for a renewed focus in research on written communication in academic ELF, particularly on the role and impact of ‘different cultural and rhetorical styles’ (p. 141). Similar concerns are raised by Beyza Björkman in ‘Language Ideology or Language Practice? An Analysis of Language Policy Documents at Swedish Universities’ ( Multilingua 33[2013] 335–63). She, too, identifies a lack of ‘sufficient guidance as to how students and staff in these university settings are to use English’ (p. 335), and a pronounced chasm between policy documents, which tend to underscore the importance of protecting Swedish as an academic language, and actual practice. In their current form, Björkman concludes, these policy documents are therefore only of limited use to their intended target audience, and are unlikely to achieve their proclaimed aims.
One site of research that has received much attention in the past two years is the role of idiomatic language (in the sense of phraseological language more generally, not in the sense of NS idiomaticity) in ELF, particularly in academic settings. In ‘Figurative Language and ELF: Idiomaticity in Cross-Cultural Interaction in University Settings’ ( JELF 2[2013] 75–99), Valeria Franceschi builds on earlier work on (re-)metaphorization by Marie-Luise Pitzl and the concept of unilateral idiomaticity by Barbara Seidlhofer, applying them to the analysis of ELFA corpus data. She arrives at the conclusion that, while speakers ‘do not appear to shy away from using idiomatic language’ (p. 95), they are aware of its markedness and employ strategies such as literalization and flagging of idioms by discourse markers to preclude episodes of misunderstanding. Ray Carey, in ‘On the Other Side: Formulaic Organizing Chunks in Spoken and Written Academic ELF’ ( JELF 2[2013] 207–28), investigates both spoken and written sources of academic ELF with a view to potentially different processing mechanisms for high- versus low-frequency idiomatic chunks. His results point towards a higher probability for low-frequency chunks to undergo approximation processes. This pattern holds true for both spoken and written texts (the latter ones unedited, it needs to be pointed out), with the slight differences between these two sets of data not being statistically significant.
Staying with distributional patterns and frequency data in academic ELF, but moving to lexical choices more generally, and cohesive devices in particular, Shin-Mei Kao and Wen-Chun Wang, in ‘Lexical and Organizational Features in Novice and Experienced ELF Presentations’ ( JELF 3[2014] 49–79), explore these aspects in three sets of academic ELF data: first, a corpus of presentations by novice users (i.e. undergraduate students); second, a sub-section of the ELFA corpus, as an exemplar of expert usage by academics in a variety of disciplines; and third, the John Swales Conference Corpus (JSCC), to investigate potentially idiosyncratic patterns among scholars of language in particular. A quantitative analysis of lexical variation, richness, and sophistication yields remarkably similar patterns of usage for both groups of experts, with clear differences in the patterns observed for novice users. The picture is similar for cohesive devices, with a stark contrast between novice and expert users, though here small differences between the ELFA and the JSCC scholars can be detected as well. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of their findings for the teaching of academic English in international settings, stressing in particular the need for instructors to focus on field-specific academic vocabulary. For two complementary investigations of academic conference presentations from a qualitative perspective, see Anna Mauranen’s ‘ “But Then When I Started to Think …”: Narrative Elements in Conference Presentations’ (in Gotti and Guinda, eds., Narratives in Academic and Professional Genres , pp. 45–66) and Francisco Javier Fernández-Polo’s ‘The Role of I Mean in Conference Presentations by ELF Speakers’ ( ESPJ 34[2014] 58–67).
Moving from mostly quantitative, ‘traditional’ corpus-linguistic work on academic ELF to studies with a partly or exclusively qualitative focus, mention needs to be made of Beyza Björkman’s monograph English as an Academic Lingua Franca: An Investigation of Form and Communicative Effectiveness , which investigates both form and function, but with an emphasis on the latter. The publication is definitely an important contribution to the field, but as it is largely based on the author’s Ph.D. dissertation covered in YWES (91[2012] 123), the reader is referred to this earlier discussion (also see Björkman’s ‘An Analysis of Polyadic English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Speech: A Communicative Strategies Framework’ ( JPrag 66[2014] 122–38)). Studies that take a purely qualitative, discourse or CA, approach to ELFA data are Anna Mauranen’s ‘Lingua Franca Discourse in Academic Contexts: Shaped by Complexity’ (in Flowerdew, ed., Discourse in Context , pp. 225–45), which deals mostly with code-switching and other instances that involve negotiations of language use, and Carmen Maíz-Arévalo’s ‘Expressing Disagreement in English as a Lingua Franca: Whose Pragmatic Rules?’ ( IPrag 11[2014] 199–224), which analyses a very small, established community of ELF speakers which seems to function differently from more impromptu ELF contexts. Maurizio Gotti’s ‘Explanatory Strategies in University Courses Taught in ELF’ ( JELF 3[2014] 337–61), on the other hand, arrives at similar conclusions to the previous literature as regards the highly interactive and accommodating nature of interactions in ELF. The phatic element of academic ELF talk is further addressed in Ray Carey’s ‘A Closer Look at Laughter in Academic Talk: A Reader Response’ ( JEAP 14[2014] 118–23), Karolina Kalocsai’s Communities of Practice and English as a Lingua Franca: A Study of Erasmus Students in a Central European Context [2013], which takes an in-depth ethnographic look at a small, relatively close-knit community of ELF speakers and the development of their attitudes and linguistic practices over a longer period of time, and Yumi Matsumoto’s ‘Collaborative Co-Construction of Humorous Interaction among ELF Speakers’ ( JELF 3[2014] 81–107), for which she investigated dyadic interactions using CA methodology, showing that humour can help foster solidarity and minimize potential disagreement among interlocutors. Juliane House, in both ‘Developing Pragmatic Competence in English as a Lingua Franca: Using Discourse Markers to Express (Inter)Subjectivity and Connectivity’ ( JPrag 59[2013] 57–67) and ‘Managing Academic Institutional Discourse in English as a Lingua Franca’ ( FuL 21[2014] 50–66), investigates ELF office hours with respect to code-switching and the use of discourse markers. Especially the second of these aspects seems noteworthy, as House identifies other uses than those canonically ascribed to them. To conclude this brief review of localized qualitative studies, mention can be made of Maicol Formentelli’s ‘A Model of Stance for the Management of Interpersonal Relations: Formality, Power, Distance and Respect’ (in Kecskés and Romero-Trillo, eds., Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics [2013], pp. 181–218), which draws on ELFA data to develop its main arguments, though the paper will most likely be of more interest to scholars of CA as a theory and field of study in its own right.
While academic ELF thus continues to be a prolific site of research, corpus studies of ELF are by no means restricted to this context. An important development in this regard has been the release of ACE, the Asian Corpus of English [2014], compiled by a team around project director Andy Kirkpatrick, who summarizes some of the central characteristics of the corpus in ‘The Asian Corpus of English: Motivations and Aims’ ( LCSAW 1[2013] 17–30). Developed as a parallel corpus to VOICE, and with the input and support of the development team of the latter, ACE is intended to provide an Asia-centric counterpart to the European-focused VOICE. Like VOICE, the corpus is designed to be rich enough in its presentation of the data to allow for both traditional quantitative corpus linguistic studies and more ethnographic qualitative ones. A first representative example of the former is Andy Kirkpatrick and Sophiaan Subhan’s ‘Non-Standard or New Standards or Errors? The Use of Inflectional Marking for Present and Past Tenses in English as an Asian Lingua Franca’ (in Buschfeld et al., eds., pp. 386–400), which concludes—in line with previous research on ELF in other contexts—that native language transfer is not the prime determiner or reason for non-standard linguistic features, in this case tense marking, in the data they analysed. Two examples of qualitative studies on the data made available in ACE are Ian Walkinshaw and Andy Kirkpatrick’s ‘Mutual Face Preservation among Asian Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca’ ( JELF 3[2014] 269–91) and Mingyue Gu, John Patkin, and Andy Kirkpatrick’s ‘The Dynamic Identity Construction in English as Lingua Franca Intercultural Communication: A Positioning Perspective’ ( System 46[2014] 131–42). An extensive study, spanning the quantitative-qualitative divide and ranging from an investigation of pronunciation and lexico-grammar to pragmatic issues such as repairs is David Deterding’s Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca: An Analysis of ELF Interactions in South-East Asia [2013]. The research was conducted on one of the sub-components of ACE while it was still being compiled, as the author was involved in the data collection for the corpus in Brunei. Given the fact that the vast majority of misunderstandings in Deterding’s data can be attributed to phonological and phonetic problems, the book inevitably focuses more on pronunciation than lexis and grammar in ELF interactions. Two other publications are also concerned with the effects of pronunciation-related features on comprehension: Pedro Luis Luchini and Sara Kennedy’s ‘Exploring Sources of Phonological Unintelligibility in Spontaneous Speech’ ( IntJEL 4:iii[2013] 79–88) aims at providing further empirical evidence to fine-tune Jenkins’s [2000] ‘Lingua Franca Core’ by investigating which pronunciation features lead to loss of intelligibility in an ELF encounter between two Indian speakers and the first author, who acted as a participant researcher. Their findings partly confirm the suggestions of Jenkins’s Lingua Franca Core. Despite the small number of participants, this research is valuable in that it does not merely examine the phonological causes of intelligibility problems in ELF in isolation but considers them in conjunction with other factors that might have contributed to loss of intelligibility (e.g. the use of metaphorical expressions, non-familiarity with the interlocutor’s accent, or a lack of cultural knowledge). The article also discusses the interlocutors’ (in)ability to accommodate receptively and productively to each other by considering their different previous experiences of using English. A methodologically different approach is taken in Hiroko Matsuura, Reiko Chiba, Sean Mahoney, and Sarah Rilling’s ‘Accent and Speech Rate Effects in English as a Lingua Franca’ ( System 46[2014] 143–50), which investigates the impact of a non-familiar NNS accent and different speech rates on listening comprehension in Japanese university students using an experimental, quantitative approach.
Returning to the ACE corpus, the scope of research that it will ultimately allow is outlined by Andy Kirkpatrick in ‘English in Southeast Asia: Pedagogical and Policy Implications’ ( WEn 33[2014] 426–38). At the same time, the article gives a useful overview of the status and roles of English in the Asian context, which many researchers outside the region might not be familiar with, thus giving them a proper perspective on the data that is being made available in ACE.
Research on ELF in an Asian context is not limited to corpus-linguistic studies, however. Several papers investigate attitudes towards ELF, albeit from different angles and employing different methodologies. For instance, Phanyamon Ploywattanawong and Wannapa Trakulkasemsuk, in ‘Attitudes of Thai Graduates Toward English as a Lingua Franca of ASEAN’ ( AEnglishes 16[2014] 141–56), take several recurrent lexico-grammatical features of speakers of Asian ELF as their point of departure, and elicit acceptability ratings with regard to these from their respondents. They arrive at the conclusion that these non-standard features, while not completely accepted, do not receive overly negative judgements from their respondents either, which points towards an ongoing development of norms. A final contribution of note which emerges from studies of ELF in Asia is James D’Angelo’s ‘Japanese English? Refocusing the Discussion’ ( AES 15[2013] 2–26). D’Angelo revisits some of the conceptual issues which inevitably arise out of the contact between the WE paradigm and ELF research which have already been alluded to. He underlines that these paradigms offer different perspectives on language use, and should thus not be misunderstood to be concerned with necessarily distinct sets of speakers (relatively uncontroversial) or entirely different contexts of use (the author’s personal stance).
The release of ACE is surely the most consequential development for research on ELF in Asia. In addition to this new entrant to the scene of ELF corpora, 2013/14 has also been witness to major developments as regards the most ‘venerable’ of ELF corpora: VOICE. In 2014, the VOICE development team, under the directorship of Barbara Seidlhofer, released two POS-tagged versions of the corpus—VOICE POS Online 2.0 and VOICE POS XML 2.0—continuing the corpus-builders’ tradition of providing (novice) users with an easily accessible online interface, yet at the same time making the corpus data available in XML format to allow for more powerful and in-depth analysis by tech-savvy, advanced corpus users. Similarly, just as previous versions, the new POS-tagged corpus comes with extensive and meticulous documentation, both in the form of help files in the corpus interface (‘VOICE POS Online. Using VOICE Online’), and a manual published on the project website (‘VOICE Part-of-Speech Tagging and Lemmatization Manual’). The key to understanding the relevance and impact of the POS-tagged versions of the corpus is the close interdependence of theory and praxis that characterized the process, well documented in several publications by the central researcher responsible for the genesis of VOICE POS, Ruth Osimk-Teasdale. In ‘Applying Existing Tagging Practices to VOICE’ ( VARIENG 13[2013] n.p.), she delineates early conceptual stages of the tagging process, reviews how ‘traditional’ L1 or L2 error-based tagging schemes were ruled out because they were inadequate for the task at hand, and discusses to what extent a partly automated POS-tagging process can cope with the non-codified forms in VOICE, a paramount question in the annotation of a million-word corpus. The initial results of the pilot study were promising, at a tagging accuracy of 84.5 per cent (section 5.2), yet also pointed towards the need for an interlaced approach of automated and manual tagging, particularly with regard to non-codified and creative uses of language. Precisely these non-codified items take centre-stage in Osimk-Teasdale’s ‘ “I Just Wanted to Give a Partly Answer”: Capturing and Exploring Word Class Variation in ELF Data’ ( JELF 3[2014] 109–43). Here, she discusses how (word-class) conversion and multifunctionality constitute an essential creative process in ELF data, and how any POS-tagged version of an ELF corpus needs to be designed to reflect this variable nature of linguistic forms and their functions. In line with the exploratory and conceptually critical nature of ELF research more generally, the article does not merely provide a first description of the process of POS-tagging VOICE, but also discusses—and where necessary questions—the underlying theoretical assumptions of such an undertaking. As the earlier, exploratory article by the author foreshadowed, at its heart, POS-tagging—done the traditional way—presupposes an unproblematic and straightforward relationship between linguistic forms and their functions, a premise that ELF data unmasks as precarious, because it is ultimately subject to constant online negotiation and variability. The decision in VOICE POS, therefore, was to present this equivocal association in the tagging format itself, assigning tokens tags for both form and function. While in the large majority of cases, these tags converge, the article focuses particularly on incongruent cases, as these are the ones that demonstrate the fluid and adaptable nature of ELF in particular, but also of natural language use more generally. The implications of the study thus go beyond the concerns of ELF research in a narrow sense, and extend to the wider discourse on linguistic categorization and POS-tagging.
It has already been mentioned in this review that scholars have been increasingly exploring the relationships between WE and ELF, and that the role of common cognitive processes based on comparable functional exigencies leads to similar, albeit independently developed, forms and form-function mappings in both of these contexts of English use. It is precisely this hypothesis that is further pursued in Christopher J. Hall, Daniel Schmidtke, and Jamie Vickers’s study ‘Countability in World Englishes’ ( WEn 32[2013] 1–22), which investigates non-standard uses of mass nouns ( informations , one luggage , etc.) in VOICE and various online (web-as-corpus) sources. Though these forms occur with a frequency that is ‘significantly higher … than IC [Inner Circle] usage’ (p. 14), the authors still argue that it is a ‘marginal phenomenon’ (p. 20), and take issue with ‘linguistic descriptions which highlight such peripheral and communicatively inconsequential formal elements on the basis of their contrastiveness’ (p. 19). At the very same time, they argue that there has been a ‘disproportionate invocation of the count/non-count distinction in prescriptive works for learners’ (p. 19), which is grounded neither in its communicative relevance nor in any strong tendency of speakers to diverge from StE usage, but is merely a reflection of its function as a ‘shibboleth of the native/non-native dichotomy’ (p. 20). Pursuing a similar methodological approach of comparing ELF data to both native and nativized forms of English from around the world, Leah Gilner, in ‘An Analysis of ELF Speakers’ Lexical Preferences’ ( AES 16[2014] 5–16) and ‘High Frequency Words in Spoken English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings’ ( JBGU 14[2014] 1–12), compares the relative proportion of high-frequency words in various ICE corpora and VOICE and ELFA, respectively. In both instances, she finds a remarkable congruence of patterns with regard to these high-frequency words, supporting the view that, far from being isolated varieties bound to diverge on their different trajectories, these manifestations of English are—their differences notwithstanding—still underpinned by a common core. In their article ‘How Do “WE” (World Englishes) Make Sense in ELF Communication? Words and Their Meaning Across Cultures’ ( JELF 2[2013] 365–88), Zhichang Xu and Thuy Ngoc Dinh explore how new meanings are attached to existing English words in ELF communication and whether WE speakers from different cultures share identical meanings of the same English lexical item. Drawing on theoretical concepts from lexical semantics, cultural linguistics, WE, and ELF to analyse the data, they use a ‘free-response word association task’ with ten informants from different cultural backgrounds to explore their instantaneous reactions to twelve English lexical items. They find that it is not always the case that words share identical meanings, that meanings of English words change and vary in accordance with EFL contexts, and that WE speakers expand the connotations of English words and their associated idiomatic expressions and metaphors in different cultural contexts. They therefore suggest that ELF be seen as ‘a heterogeneous entity involving lexical semantic transfer and variation, and nativized forms and meanings through translanguaging across cultures and varieties of English’ (p. 369). They conclude by considering the implications of this for ELF communication and English vocabulary teaching, recommending that English learners be reminded of the fluidity and variation of ELF lexical meaning, and that they be encouraged to take note of the significant role of context and culture in communication. Finally, Heiko Motschenbacher, in ‘A Typologically Based View on Relativisation in English as a European Lingua Franca’ ( EJAL 1[2013] 103–38) and New Perspectives on English as a European Lingua Franca [2013] (the former in essence one topical excerpt from the monograph) likewise draws on, compares, and contrasts the discourses of expanding-circle variety studies (‘Euro-English’), ELF, and related paradigms. His data is fascinating in that it represents a truly (i.e. ideologically) European context, viz. the Eurovision Song Contest. However, the empirical analysis of internal variation ultimately underlines the fact that a variety-based framework is probably not the one best suited to an explanation of variability in ELF, as it fails to account for the fluidity of the data. So, their overlaps and points of contact notwithstanding, it can be concluded that the ELF and WE paradigms are, in the end, underpinned by somewhat different conceptualizations of variation in language, and that they are suited to the analysis of distinct contexts.
Concluding this discussion of corpus-linguistic work, the ‘big three’ in the world of (spoken) ELF corpora as of 2014 are VOICE, ELFA, and ACE—ordered here by date of release/availability. The impact of these resources within the field of ELF research is inestimable, yet they might still be only partly familiar to the linguistic community at large. In ‘Speaking Professionally in an L2: Issues of Corpus Methodology’ (in Bamford, Cavalieri, and Diani, eds., pp. 5–32) Anna Mauranen therefore reviews some of the central desiderata in the compilation of the ELFA corpus for a wider audience. Similarly, Barbara Seidlhofer, in ‘Corpus Analysis of English as a Lingua Franca’ (in Chapelle, ed., pp. 2–5), summarizes the essential characteristics of all three major ELF corpora for those outside the field, and illustrates the kind of research they permit. She concludes with a brief appraisal of how ELF corpus research already has, and will continue to generate, findings of relevance on important issues in applied linguistics such as intercultural communication, language testing, the development of pedagogical prescriptions in ELT, or translation and interpreting. Though these issues of applied linguistics are arguably at the forefront of much of the discourse around ELF, Ana Pirc demonstrates that ELF data can and should equally be a fertile ground for questions of a more formal-linguistic nature. In ‘Construction Grammar and “Non-Native Discourse” ’ ( THEPES 6[2013] 55–73), she draws on ELF data (VOICE and ELFA) as an empirical basis against which to re-evaluate some tenets of ‘theoretical general linguistics’ (p. 56). The limitations of approaches to language which focus exclusively on an idealized NS have been discussed at length by scholars both within and outside the field of ELF. However, Pirc breaks new ground in suggesting that there are, in fact, formal theoretical models that have the potential to accommodate the more variable nature of ELF and non-native discourse more generally, a prime example being CxG. Most of the author’s work is dedicated to an exploration of how features that have been identified as characteristic of ELF can be accounted for by CxG principles. A prime example is the fundamental assumption of CxG that linguistic constructions are not fixed and immutable entities, but constitute a network that is ‘restructured in the course of … linguistic experience’ (p. 58). It is easy to see how well this matches up with the widely recognized fluidity and creativity of ELF discourse. At the same time, Pirc demonstrates how ELF research and data have much to offer to other branches of linguistics and vice versa, so it can be hoped that these implications will be explored further in the years to come.
One of the main domains in which ELF research continues to grow is that of business and workplace communication. This research features a number of workplace domains including multinational corporations, banks, small and medium-sized enterprises, the maritime industry, and engineering. Although the contexts explored in this research are also starting to expand (to Asia and the Middle East), much of it continues to focus on European contexts. In ‘Multilingualism in European Workplaces’ ( Multilingua 33[2014] 11–33), Britt-Louise Gunnarsson provides an overview of research in this area, which includes ELF studies. She highlights the main reasons for the upsurge in this research (e.g. the expansion of the EU, migration, developments in technology); distinguishes key themes (e.g. positive or problem-based accounts); introduces a model which allows for analysis of the complex and dynamic interplay between workplace discourse and its various contextual frames; and identifies areas for future research. Also focusing on multilingualism, Anne Kankaanranta and Leena Louhiala-Salminen’s article ‘What Language Does Global Business Speak? The Concept and Development of BELF’ ( IbéricaR 26[2013] 17–34) traces the development of the concept of Business English as Lingua Franca (BELF) and how their own empirical studies on language use in internationally operating organizations has influenced their views on the development of this concept. The findings of this research show that, for BELF speakers, the genre knowledge of the domain of business, and particularly awareness of its goal-oriented nature, is far more important than grammatical correctness in workplace communication. They therefore argue that in discussing workplace communication, emphasis should be placed on the domain of use rather than the type of English used. Thus, they propose that the referent term for BELF should shift to ‘English as Business Lingua Franca’. Jo Angouri and Marlene Miglbauer provide further detailed insight into the dynamic and diverse linguistic ecology of modern multinational workplaces in ‘ “And Then We Summarise in English for the Others”: The Lived Experience of the Multilingual Workplace’ ( Multilingua 33[2014] 147–72). Drawing on interview data with forty employees in senior and junior management posts in twelve companies situated in six European countries where English is the official corporate language, they find that employees draw on a range of linguistic resources in order to manage their work-related interactions, with a constant interplay between ELF and local languages. Participants also reported code-switching as a common practice, but often saw it as a new skill superimposed upon them in an already demanding work reality. While these employees see their multilingualism as an aspect of cosmopolitanism, an identity the participants readily ascribe to, dominant ideologies about NS English still prevail. In another contribution, ‘Local Languages and Communication Challenges in the Multinational Workplace’, Angouri and Miglbauer (in Sharifian and Jamarani, eds., pp. 225–44) discuss the role of local languages in intercultural communication and the perceived communication challenges that employees face when switching out of their local language. In line with findings of ELF research, employees reported various strategies that they use to enhance intercultural communication, including interactional cooperation; tolerance in pragmatic ambiguity; politeness; and switching from oral to written communication (or vice versa) to ensure understanding. Key messages from this research are that, despite a clear need for and use of ELF in various domains, local languages remain very commonly used in multinational workplaces.
Further studies on the role of local languages in multinational workplaces and the drivers of language choice include Leilarna Kingsley’s ‘Language Choice in Multilingual Encounters in Transnational Workplaces’ ( JMMD 34[2013] 533–48). She explores the explicit official language policy as well as employees’ practices and beliefs (i.e. the implicit policy) in three international Luxembourg banks. The study reveals that while English is the language most frequently used, a number of other languages were used in meetings, informal communication, e-mails, and presentations. Language choices were determined by employees’ linguistic repertoire; transactional goals (e.g. arguing and negotiating one’s case, communicating information accurately); and relational goals (e.g. maintaining and enhancing rapport, solidarity, and collegiality with colleagues). In particular, the goals of inclusion and fairness drove participants’ choice of English. In ‘ “It’s Pretty Simple and in Greek …”: Global and Local Languages in the Greek Corporate Setting’ ( Multilingua 33[2014] 117–46), Ifigenia Mahili investigates the interplay between global and local languages in private businesses in Greece and finds that English is used in higher-ranking posts and Greek, the local language, in lower-ranking posts; this was due to the need of employees with more responsibility for accountability and transparency and communication with parties outside Greece. Use of English was also associated with higher levels of professional expertise: English was used to talk about complex and key business issues while Greek was restricted to simple and informal routine communication. The analysis also shows that language skills are perceived as a commodity related to employees’ job retention and progression, and thus become increasingly relevant during times of economic crisis. Taken together, these studies suggest that any suggestions for language policy in international business contexts be localized, multilingual, and sensitive to the social context.
Several studies make use of discourse-analytic methods to provide detailed insight into ELF workplace communication. Key issues explored include whether convergence is occurring with regard to communication patterns. This is explored in Anne Kankaanranta and Wei Lu’s article ‘The Evolution of English as the Business Lingua Franca: Sings of Conference in Chinese and Finnish Professional Communication’ ( JBTC 27[2013] 288–307). They examine the characteristics of communication between Chinese and Finnish business professionals in international Finnish companies based in China. As Chinese oral communication has been traditionally described as indirect, the study focuses in particular on how Chinese and Finnish business professionals perceive Chinese BELF communication in relation to directness. They found that there was general agreement that clarity and directness contribute to the effectiveness of the communication needed in business to get the work done. The Chinese employees perceived their own communication as more open and direct when they used BELF, particularly the younger employees, while Finns perceived themselves to be less direct than they would be in Finnish. This suggests that Chinese and Finnish BELF communication may be converging, reflecting speakers’ attempts to adjust. However, the Finnish employees still perceive the Chinese BELF communication as indirect, seeing it as bearing national characteristics. However, when exploring BELF in another domain, Geneviève Tréguer-Felten’s article ‘Can a Lingua Franca Bridge the Communication Gap Between Corporations Set in Different Cultures?’ (in Kecskés and Romero-Trillo, eds., pp. 263–82) finds no evidence of convergence. Undertaking a discourse analysis of ELF communication between Chinese and French corporations via corporate brochures or website self-presentations, she concludes that the ELF discourse used to attract a ‘foreign’ audience displayed widely different qualities, which seem to be deeply embedded in the corporations’ respective national cultures. She thus concludes that communication in this context is largely unsuccessful and points to a communication gap not likely to be bridged by ELF use alone. Dissonance in these findings suggest a need for further work in this area.
Building on research which explores how organizations communicate with their consumers by using English, Catherine Nickerson and Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli’s article ‘Business English as a Lingua Franca in Advertising Texts in the Arabian Gulf: Analyzing the Attitudes of the Emirati Community’ ( JBTC 27[2013] 329–52) presents the results of a survey of the attitudes of consumers towards the use of English in advertising texts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Despite the fact that Middle Eastern economies are among those with the highest spending power in the world, this has been until now unmapped territory for BELF research. These authors explored whether consumers were able to comprehend the English in advertising texts and whether the language used influenced their attitudes towards the product and their intention to buy it. They found that most of the participants either had no preference for the language used in advertising or preferred Arabic rather than English, and that the language used in the advertising text did not significantly influence participants’ attitudes towards the ad. There was one exception: the language of the text did influence whether the participants viewed the product as basic or advanced, with Arabic being perceived as marking something more advanced. Finally, there was concern expressed about preserving the Arabic language and cultural identity. This study suggests that English is viewed less neutrally in the Middle East than in other parts of the world and therefore the efficacy of its use in advertising should be considered.
The number of domains in which BELF is being explored is growing, not only including advertising texts (discussed above), but also e-mail exchanges and business meetings. In many of these studies, discourse-analytic methods drawing on corpora are being applied to provide detailed insight into communicative strategies. Many of these studies explore how community and consensus is achieved in multicultural professional communication, as well as the instances in which communication fails. In ‘Managing Discourse in Intercultural Business Email Interactions: A Case Study of a British and Italian Business Transaction’ ( JMMD 34[2013] 515–32), for example, Ersilia Incelli investigates a ten-month e-mail exchange between a medium-sized British company and a small Italian company to account for the salient features of business e-mail communication in the setting of intercultural interaction, e.g. requesting and providing information/clarification, negotiating payment terms, quoting prices, and organizing delivery. The findings reveal how accommodation strategies facilitate understanding; however, there is also evidence of how low levels of language competence and low cross-cultural awareness can lead to miscommunication, putting a business transaction at risk. Patricia Pullin considers the linguistic markers used to ‘Achiev[e] Comity’—solidarity and cooperation—in BELF discourse with respect to ‘The Role of Linguistic Stance in Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) Meetings’ ( JELF 2[2013] 1–23). She applies a fine-grained pragmatic analysis to authentic audio-recorded BELF interaction in meetings, focusing on the use of ‘stance markers’ (e.g. hedges like perhaps , might , sort of and boosters like clearly , excellent ) used to express opinions, evaluation, and affect, and how they contribute to nurturing and maintaining comity. She also found that common ground with regard to business knowledge and conventions, in addition to the role and power of the meeting chair, were important to achieving comity, highlighting—as other studies have—the social as well as linguistic factors important for creating consensus and community in international business communication. Using a sociolinguistic discourse-analytic perspective, Tiina Räisänen investigates a Finnish engineer’s repertoire to give detailed insight into linguistic practices in a multilingual meeting in ‘Processes and Practices of Enregisterment of Business English, Participation and Power in a Multilingual Workplace’ ( SociolingS 6[2012] 309–31). She also finds, similarly to Pullin [2013] (see above), that the achievement of shared understanding in business is not a matter of overall proficiency in English but of an overall competence to use particular, context-specific bits of a communicative repertoire, which consists of language, gestures, and other resources.
Providing an Asian perspective on the interplay of discourse, language and business practices, Hiromasa Tanaka looks at ‘Lying in Intra-Asian Business Discourse in an ELF Setting’ ( IJBC 51[2014] 58–71). He examines naturally occurring business interaction between Japanese and Indian small business owners, and lies told and detected by the interlocutors. Highlighting differences in business practices, language proficiency, and situated identities, the analysis illustrates how Indian and Japanese ELF speakers tried to co-construct meaning and how they dealt with issues emerging from behaviours marked with a certain degree of deception. He thus shows how lying is used strategically to avoid conflict, and thus maintain cross-cultural business relationships. Also investigating an Asian context, Keiko Tsuchiya and Michael Handford’s ‘A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Repair in a Professional ELF Meeting: Not “Letting It Pass” ’ ( JPrag 64[2014] 117–31) examines turn-taking in a multiparty professional ELF meeting from a bridge-building project in South Asia, using a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. In contrast to previous research that shows that ‘letting it pass’ is a widely used practice in BELF communication (e.g. Alan Firth, ‘The Discursive Accomplishment of Normality: On “Lingua Franca” English and Conversation Analysis’ ( JPrag 26[1996] 237–59)), the results of this study show that the chair regularly cut into the conversation, giving corrections or suggestions—something the authors call ‘not letting it pass’. Through post-meeting interviews they found that this strategy was used to ensure comprehension of the audience. The study thus suggests that in this field of construction engineering, less emphasis is placed on face-saving strategies like ‘letting it pass’ because of the need to ensure understanding and focus on safety.
There are further studies that consider the pedagogical applications of BELF research, and the process of developing research-informed curricula. In the context of Germany, where higher education is being asked to answer the need of industry for a highly trained workforce, Claudia Böttger, Juliane House, and Roman Stachowicz describe how they used research on different pragmatic uses in ELF interaction to inform the design of a practice-oriented English course that prepares employees for communicating more effectively. This is the focus of their chapter ‘Knowledge Transfer on English as a Lingua Franca in Written Multilingual Business Communication’ (in Bührig and Meyer, eds., Transferring Linguistic Know-How into Institutional Practice [2013], pp. 117–36). Given the need for companies to improve their employees’ language and intercultural skills, joint industry–university knowledge-transfer schemes such as the one described here have been proven (through rigorous monitoring and evaluation) to help fulfil employees’ and organizations’ communicative needs, thus enhancing cost-effectiveness. Patricia Pullin also explores how BELF research has been drawn upon in curriculum development for workplace communication (in domains outside business and economics) in ‘From Curriculum to Classroom: Designing and Delivering Courses in Workplace Communication’ ( Babylonia 2[2013] 32–6). With ELF being increasingly used in a number of specific workplace domains, in a number of national and international contexts, such investigation of how the language can be usefully taught to fulfil learners’ needs is timely. This bank of research makes clear that there is a continued need for both NSs and NNSs of English to raise their awareness of business communication patterns and intercultural communication strategies.
The number of publications dealing with the implications of the global spread of English for theory and practice of translation and interpreting has risen sharply over the last few years. This is mainly due to the fact that the widespread use of English in international contexts is perceived as threatening the translation and interpreting market by reducing demand and is also putting great strain on translators and interpreters, who are increasingly required to work with source texts produced by NNSs of English, something they have not been prepared for. Indeed, as Stefania Taviano points out in the abstract of ‘English as a Lingua Franca and Translation: Implications for Translator and Interpreter Education’ ( ITT 7[2013] 155–67), ‘Despite the growth of interest in this field of [ELF] research, however, translation studies has been slow to engage with it.’ This is largely true, although there are scholars who have worked in both ELF and translation studies for some time. In 2013 and 2014, Juliane House explicitly examined the relationship between these areas in several papers, asking, ‘English as a Global Lingua Franca: A Threat to Multilingual Communication and Translation?’ ( LTeach 47[2014] 363–76). House first clarifies the concept of ELF and then uses insights from her own research projects to argue that the widespread use of ELF is inevitable in the globalized world but that its use in multilingual environments should be recognized as an additional option rather than a replacement for other languages. House’s research has shown that the influence on the communicative conventions of German of today’s huge volume of translations from English into that language is marginal, and she concludes that fears of the extensive use of a dominant language inhibiting conceptualization in other languages are unfounded. As far as the need for translations is concerned, House argues that due to globalization, not only ELF but also translation will continue to be in great demand (see also her ‘English as a Lingua Franca and Translation’, in Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, eds., Handbook of Translation Studies [2010], pp. 59–62).
Several members of the translation and interpreting profession have over recent years conducted research into the implications of the vastly increased use of English in settings such as international business, academic conferences, and political meetings, e.g. the institutions of the EU. The titles of Michaela Albl-Mikasa’s articles ‘The Imaginary Invalid: Conference Interpreters and English as a Lingua Franca’ ( IJAL 24[2014] 293–311) and ‘ELF Speakers’ Restricted Power of Expression: Implications for Interpreters’ Processing’ ( TIS 8[2013] 191–210) (the latter in a special issue on ‘Describing Cognitive Processes in Translation: Acts and Events’) give some indication of the degree of unease in the profession due to the increasing amount of non-native English it has to cope with. In both these papers, Albl-Mikasa compares findings of ELF research, which has investigated non-mediated interactions, to the issues reported by (conference) interpreters when confronted with input in L2 English rather than in speakers’ L1s, a phenomenon on the rise in many international meetings. The author’s studies detail the difficulties interpreters face when having to work with non-native English speakers’ conference speeches. Interpreters, she reports, find that the language of these speakers lacks clarity and thus constitutes an enormous cognitive burden for them, which in turn is likely to negatively affect interpretation quality. These mediation situations, in which negotiation of meaning is usually impossible, are of course very different from the interactive translanguaging encounters investigated in most ELF research to date, in which meaning can be negotiated, participants can accommodate to each other, and the linguistic medium is creatively exploited and moulded according to the requirements of specific encounters. This take on ELF communication is a far cry from that of interpreters and translators, who, Albl-Mikasa says ‘are trained for full comprehension and detailed meaning recovery’ ( IJAL 24[2014] 306). Nevertheless, the reports of interpreters’ difficulties with speeches intended to be made accessible by using ELF constitute a new and welcome contribution to ELF research. In ‘Express-Ability in ELF Communication’ ( JELF 2[2013] 101–22) Albl-Mikasa elaborates on interpreters’ views, elicited through questionnaires and interviews, on non-native English speakers’ ‘restricted power of expression’ (abstract) and sets these findings in relation both to reports of the perceived limits of their self-expression by ELF speakers in the ‘Tübingen English as a Lingua Franca Corpus and Database’ (TELF) and to sociocultural and psycholinguistic thinking originating in SLA research. In ‘English as a Lingua Franca in International Conferences: Current and Future Developments in Interpreting Studies’ ( ITSK 18:iii[2014] 17–42), Albl-Mikasa summarizes the results of both her own research as outlined above and that of other scholars and presents suggestions for future research, namely ‘re-consideration of the effectiveness of ELF communication in settings other than informal or semi-formal dialogic interactions, especially in conference settings; re-conceptualization of interpreter training courses; and re-branding of the interpreters’ professional status as multilingual communication experts, including the re-definition of their role and self-image as service providers’ (p. 31).
Closely related to Albl-Mikasa’s themes but based on results obtained through different methods is Karin Reithofer’s ‘Comparing Modes of Communication: The Effect of English as a Lingua Franca vs. Interpreting’ ( Interpreting 15[2013] 48–73). The author again starts from the observation that the use of ELF is gaining ground in international meetings, particularly in the domains of academia, business, and the institutions of the EU, and is therefore being seen by many interpreters as a threat to their profession. Using a complex method of comprehension testing, Reithofer compared the effect on the audience of a short talk in the area of marketing delivered by an Italian speaker of English with the simultaneous interpretation of this talk into German. She concludes that in this particular setting ‘the interpretation led to a better cognitive end-result in the audience than the original speech in non-native English’ (abstract). This article is based on Reithofer’s doctoral research, published as Englisch als Lingua Franca und Dolmetschen: Ein Vergleich zweier Kommunikationsmodi unter dem Aspekt der Wirkungsäquivalenz . This book allows Reithofer space for a more detailed comparison between the two modes of communication, which she characterizes as complementary rather than competing, depending on setting, purpose, speakers, etc. This longer publication conveys a more balanced picture and emphasizes that the results are valid only for the fairly formal monologic, unidirectional communication situation under investigation, a setting which allows no negotiation of meaning. In her concluding chapter, Reithofer discusses the implications of her findings for interpreter education, interpreters’ professional development, and further interpreting research, highlighting the importance of developing ‘coping strategies’ (pp. 260–1).
While most studies relating conference-interpreting to ELF research focus on European contexts, Chia-chien Chang and Michelle Min-chia Wu’s ‘Non-Native English at International Conferences: Perspectives from Chinese–English Conference Interpreters in Taiwan’ ( Interpreting 16[2014] 169–90) explores the impact of ELF on Chinese–English interpreters in Taiwan. Ten experienced interpreters were interviewed, who reported on the resourceful strategies they developed for coping with challenging non-native English input. These included conscious self-training and studying recordings of speakers from different regions of the world. Accents were a factor these interpreters were particularly wary of, but in general they were found to have a more pragmatic and relaxed attitude than their European counterparts reported on above, accepting ELF situations as ‘a fact of life’ (p. 187).
A strong indicator of the rising interest in ELF research among translators and interpreters is the fact that 2013 saw the publication of a special issue of Interpreter and Translator Trainer (7:ii[2013]) on ‘English as a Lingua Franca and Translation: Implications for Translator and Interpreter Education’. Stefania Taviano, the editor, prepares the ground with a very clear and comprehensive overview of the issues that the theory, practice, and pedagogy of translation face due to globalization in general and the current role of ELF in particular. She summarizes the pedagogy-related ELF literature and forcefully argues that it is high time for translation and interpreting curricula to take on board the implications of ELF and to help students ‘become aware of and reflect on the rapidly changing nature of their future profession’ (abstract). In particular, students need to learn to translate texts written in ELF: this is used as a shorthand term in this issue and elsewhere in the translation and interpreting literature, to refer only to what NNSs of English produce, which is at odds with how the term is used in current ELF research. Taviano does, however, go on to specify that she is referring to the function of ELF, i.e. texts ‘produced by international organizations and addressed to international audiences’ (abstract). Taviano’s introduction also summarizes all articles in this special issue, so anybody who only reads one paper on this topic would be well served by this one. The papers in this special issue all focus on (written) translation. Agnes Pisanski Peterlin examines ‘Attitudes towards English as an Academic Lingua Franca in Translation’ ( ITT 7[2013] 195–216) using semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. She finds that trainee translators and experienced scholars/authors have divergent views on written academic ELF, with the former adhering to NS models and the latter being more assertive regarding their use of English for their own purposes. She concludes that ‘ Lingua franca communication does not fit the conventional paradigm according to which a language is embedded in a culture. The findings of the present study suggest that this is something with which trainee translators are not sufficiently familiar’ (p. 210), thus indicating the need for translation educators to address ‘emancipatory’ views on academic ELF in their courses. Along similar lines, Dominic Stewart’s ‘From Pro Loco to Pro Globo: Translating into English for an International Readership’ ( ITT 7[2013] 217–34) engages with advanced Italian university students’ translations of Italian tourist texts for an international readership, thus constituting a move from the local to the global. Like Pisanksi Peterlin, he attributes difficulties that arise with these translations to the fact that students were educated for using Standard BrE appropriate for local consumption but now need to orient to ELF for global purposes. Responding to this challenge proves to be a complex process both for the education of translation students and for assessment. Karen Bennett’s ‘English as a Lingua Franca in Academia: Combating Epistemicide through Translator Training’ ( ITT 7[2013] 169–93) takes a CDA stance towards the dominance of English in academia that she sees as a danger to the rhetorical norms and scholarly traditions in other languages. She argues that translators unwittingly reinforce this ‘slide towards an epistemological monoculture’ (p. 189) when translating academic papers into and out of English for international dissemination. As a counter-measure Bennett proposes awareness-raising for translators and students of translation studies combined with training in the reformulation, editing, and critical analysis of texts so as to enable them to resist dominant discourses. Lance Hewson addresses the question ‘Is English as a Lingua Franca Translation’s Defining Moment?’ ( ITT 7[2013] 257–77), considering the effect the widespread use of ELF is having on the translation market. Though acknowledging recent definitions of ELF as being the communicative medium of choice in any interaction among speakers of different first languages (and so also including native English speakers), Hewson chooses to reduce ‘ELF’ to the opposite of ‘native’, arguing that NS and NNS differ with regard to their linguistic and translational competence. He goes on to discuss the difficulties that ‘ELF target texts’ (p. 265) and ‘ELF source texts’ (p. 270) pose for the practice, pedagogy, and theory of translation, conceding, however, that ‘it can be difficult to say categorically whether [a particular] text is indeed an ELF text’ (pp. 263–4). Hewson therefore highlights the unique strengths of translators working into their A language and the difficulties of translating texts produced by non-native writers. Amanda Murphy’s article presents a rationale for ‘Incorporating Editing into the Training of English Language Students in the Era of English as a Lingua Franca’ ( ITT 7[2013] 235–55). This is done by asking students to engage in reflections on revisions to texts made by expert editors and to use various reference sources before editing documents themselves. The point of this module is to help students arrive at written texts that conform to StE norms and to make them aware of ‘the contradiction between English as a Lingua Franca … in its spoken form and the norms required in international institutions for documents written in English’ (her abstract). In the feature article concluding this special issue, Juliane House, in ‘English as a Lingua Franca and Translation’ ( ITT 7[2013] 279–98), takes the line that the current widespread use of ELF does not threaten other languages but usefully complements them, a stance that contradicts particularly Bennett’s, but also Hewson’s and Murphy’s in this volume. Of greatest relevance to the theme of this issue is House’s discussion of recent developments in translator education that foster students’ skills to translate into a language that is not their first. This, she argues, is a widespread practice in many (especially non-European) contexts and entirely appropriate for many areas of the digital economy of today’s globalized world. This pragmatic view of contemporary translation realities represents a challenge to traditional assumptions about the superiority of translations relying on native-speaker norms and intuitions.
The increasing number of publications by translation and interpreting scholars that engage with ELF research testifies to the extent of the challenge that the global use of English poses to the profession, resulting in suggestions for rethinking both the education of future translators and interpreters and the nature of the profession itself. It is not surprising that a profession whose existence has always rested on the notion of languages as clearly demarcated, separate entities ‘owned’ by those that speak them natively will need to make some conceptual adjustments to engage with the current view in ELF research which, as pointed out earlier, represents ELF use in non-segregational terms as an emergent and adaptive process.
13. Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis
The year 2014 proved to be an exciting one for pragmatics and discourse analysis as it was characterized by a series of cross-over initiatives, reaching out beyond the boundaries of the single fields. In pragmatics, this cross-over was seen particularly strongly in the works on corpus pragmatics. While corpus-linguistic methods have become relatively mainstream in discourse analysis, the reach into pragmatics had been quite limited to date. Another continuing area of interdisciplinary development is the increasing attention which prosodic and multimodal factors are gaining in (mainstream) discourse and pragmatic research. The year’s work was also characterized by the prominence of evaluation and, connected to this, the continued growth in research into impoliteness. Research into discourse has continued past trends but is increasingly characterized by its responsiveness to current affairs and to the impact agenda that is being set by the British funding councils. Given the very large number of publications in discourse and pragmatics, this review will attempt to address these trends (and only as seen in studies of English) rather than survey the entirety of the excellent research published in 2014.
This year saw the publication of the Discourse Studies Reader , edited by Johannes Angermuller, Dominique Maingueneau, and Ruth Wodak, as well as the third edition of the Discourse Reader , edited by Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland. The Discourse Studies Reader approaches discourse studies not as a branch of linguistics but as a project ‘which runs counter to the division of knowledge into specialized disciplines and sub-disciplines’ (p. 1) and the editors explicitly set out to bring together both discourse theory and discourse analysis. This vision is reflected in the broad range of texts, which also represent approaches from different countries. The reader includes seven sections, each of which brings together different viewpoints on discourse. These sections are: ‘Theoretical Inspirations: Structuralism versus Pragmatics’, ‘From Structuralism to Poststructuralism’, ‘Enunciative Pragmatics’, ‘Interactionism’, ‘Sociopragmatics’, ‘Historical Knowledge’, and ‘Critical Approaches’. The Discourse Reader continues with the same overall approach to discourse as before, but a number of chapters have been deleted and others introduced. The readings in the first section, which examine the roots of discourse, are largely unchanged and mainly draw on the same researchers as those used in the Discourse Studies Reader . In the second section, on methods, there has been considerable revision, with chapters on conversation analysis and transcription removed. Part III remains largely the same, while Part IV sees three chapters being cut which, surprisingly, include chapters on politeness and visual interaction, going against the trends identified elsewhere in this review. The fifth section, on ‘Identity and Subjectivity’, is an aspect which shows very little overlap with the other Discourse Studies Reader and has also been substantially revised, with four chapters removed and three new ones introduced (although the topic areas remain broadly the same). The final section, on ‘Power, Identity and Control’, has dropped texts by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler in favour of more recent texts, including a chapter on corpus-based approaches (by Paul Baker and Tony McEnery).
Moving on to textbooks, 2014 saw the publication of two pragmatics textbooks, both of which go beyond a simple teaching tool by presenting different ways of understanding pragmatics .Pragmatics and the English Language by Jonathan Culpeper and Michael Haugh is an important addition to the field; it serves as an introduction both to pragmatics and to a new way of approaching pragmatics: integrative pragmatics. In this approach the authors reject the forced dichotomy of first-order (the view of the researcher) vs. second-order (the view of the participant) perspectives on pragmatics in favour of an approach which acknowledges the importance of both perspectives and focuses on interaction as a way of bridging them. Similarly, they seek to bridge the divide between the North American and European traditions of micro- and macro-pragmatic studies. It is always exciting to see eminent researchers dedicate time to textbooks and the result in this case is a research-driven textbook which is very student-friendly. Each chapter is written in a highly accessible style and combines both theoretical overviews and discussions of case studies. The reflections sections bring in data from a range of Englishes examining variation within and between Englishes and covering both synchronic and diachronic aspects, which is indeed one of the many interesting aspects of the book. The book is positioned explicitly as the pragmatics of English. This is innovative in two ways: first, it acknowledges the plurality of Englishes, and second, it acknowledges the fact that a great deal of pragmatics research is actually English pragmatic research; as they write, ‘unlike most introductory pragmatics books which give the impression that the pragmatic phenomena they discuss are general, applicable to many languages and cultures, we call a spade a spade—this is a book about pragmatics and the English language’ (p. 12). This awareness and honesty are very much appreciated. The chapters cover both old and new ground, including: familiar referential pragmatics, informational pragmatics, pragmatics meaning, pragmatics acts, interpersonal pragmatics, and meta-pragmatics.
Understanding Pragmatics by Gunter Senft adopts the broad view of pragmatics, conceptualizing it as the ‘cultural and social embedding of meaning’ (p. 2) and as a ‘transdiscipline’. The structure of the book highlights the insights and contributions to pragmatics from a range of disciplines, with each chapter covering one of these. Thus, the following are included: philosophy, psychology, human ethology, ethnology, sociology, and politics. This means that alongside expected topics such as speech-act theory and deixis, which are covered in the first two chapters, the third chapter discusses ritual, which is less frequently covered in such depth in introductory books. In the final chapter, Senft looks to the future of pragmatics and discusses emancipatory pragmatics, which was also the subject of a special edition of the Journal of Pragmatics in 2014 (edited by William F. Hanks, Sachiko Ide, and Yasuhiro Katagiri).
Three textbooks which guide students to understanding discourse and the operation of power in texts came out this year, all of which make use of Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to a greater or lesser extent. Analysing Power in Language: A Practical Guide by Tom Bartlett puts SFL at the centre of discourse analysis. The goal of the book is presented as enabling readers to produce textual analyses as ‘gateways to discourse analysis’, that is to say that the methods of SFL are presented to allow for an objective analysis, to support and lead into the interpretation of the meaning in context. The book is written in a personal and accessible style and supported by a number of exercises that make use of a wide range of texts, from the monologues of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King to Tony Blair and George W. Bush to multi-party interactions from the author’s own fieldwork in Guyana. The answers to the exercises are included in an appendix and there is also a glossary, both of which will be appreciated by students. The seven chapters cover topics such as fields of discourse, construing participation, interpersonal meaning, textual meaning, and deixis, thus providing students with a key skills-set for starting to investigate discourse.
Discourse, Grammar and Ideology: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives by Christopher Hart is an introduction to CDA, which entails the investigation of power relations. Hart presents CDA as a set of approaches, each of which has a distinct methodology, but which can be distinguished from other critical approaches by ‘its stringent application of linguistics’ (p. 6). It is this application of linguistics that can lend the investigation rigour and replicability, which are required for scientifically grounded critical-discourse research. Thus, each of the chapters introduces a set of linguistic tools for casting light on the non-obvious features of discourse. The chapters in the first part introduce more established tools, including those of systemic-functional grammar, the appraisal framework and multimodality. The chapters in the second part cover new ground and bring in recent developments in using cognitive linguistics for CDA, an area in which the author himself has been influential. Topics of the chapters in this section include event structure and spatial point of view, metaphor, and deixis and proximation.
Analysing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor by Jonathan Charteris-Black similarly aims to show the reader how to analyse and understand discourse and also makes use of SFL (although it is never mentioned in the book). However, it differs from the two previous textbooks in that the focus is on a single discourse type, i.e. political speeches. The book explicitly presents different theoretical approaches to aid triangulation, based on the idea that ‘just as we may learn about a sculpture by walking round it, so we may learn about speeches by viewing them from multiple perspectives’ (p. xx). These perspectives, the rhetoric, discourse, and metaphor of the title, constitute the three major divisions in the structure of the book. The sections are described as chronological, which presumably refers to when they were first developed rather than the periods in which the approaches are used. The textbook includes a very helpful range of exercises with answers.
Corpus pragmatics, the ‘relative newcomer’ according to Aijmer and Rühlemann (p. 1) asserted itself strongly in 2014 with three significant edited collections . The first, Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook , edited by Karin Aijmer and Christoph Rühlemann, takes the broad view of pragmatics, arguing that if we consider context to be key to pragmatic interpretation, then data is required. Although not explicitly about English pragmatics, all the chapters use English-language corpora, with two chapters bringing in a cross-linguistic element. In their introduction, they put forward that ‘corpus-pragmatic research is more than just pragmatic research and more than just corpus analysis in that it integrates the horizontal (qualitative) methodology typical of pragmatics with the vertical (quantitative) methodology predominant in corpus linguistics’ (p. 12). This ‘more than the sum of the parts’ argument echoes those made in favour of corpus-assisted discourse studies more generally. As they neatly summarize, although research is blossoming in the area of corpus pragmatics, there are currently two dominant patterns of analysis, and in both the researcher starts from the vertical analysis (the quantitative component). In the first, the researcher starts with lexical items, for instance a pragmatic marker such as well , and moves from the vertical reading to the horizontal analysis of functions. In the second, the researcher starts with functions and attempts to identify forms. In this case, the search terms cannot relate to form and so are likely to be meta-communicative expressions leading to a discussion of the function that happens to be of interest to the researcher. However, there is another method that is not included in this division and starts instead from the horizontal reading; this concerns research that uses a corpus which has been manually annotated for pragmatic features. In this case, the annotation of the corpus is the first stage of the analysis and is resolutely qualitative. Following the introduction, which provides a thoughtful overview of the methodological integration of corpus pragmatics, there are sixteen chapters, divided into six sections: ‘Corpora and Speech Acts’, ‘Corpora and Pragmatic Principles’, ‘Corpora and Pragmatics Markers’, ‘Corpora and Evaluation’, ‘Corpora and Reference’, and ‘Corpora and Turn-Taking’. This range of topics and approaches is one of the strengths of the volume, as is the methodological reflection included in some of the chapters. Of particular interest are the ambitious chapters addressing pragmatic principles. In terms of trends this year, the three chapters on evaluation are also particularly salient. These include a chapter by Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber on stance markers in which they review previous work, noting that analyses of stance typically address overt evaluation before going on to explore methods of identifying less explicit devices. The section titled ‘Evaluation’ consists of two chapters. In the first, ‘Evaluative Prosody’, Alan Partington discusses and provides corpus evidence for the properties of evaluative prosody (the phenomenon also referred to as semantic prosody and discourse prosody). The second, ‘Tails’, by Ivor Timmis, focuses on a specific non-canonical grammatical feature, the tail or right dislocation, and approaches the use of this feature from a sociopragmatic variation perspective. What makes the volume as a whole stand out is the reflection on the methodological processes of doing corpus pragmatics. What is somewhat surprising for a 2014 publication is that none of the chapters discuss written conversation or other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC), while in fact many of the spoken corpora date back to the 1990s. In many ways this reflects one of the great constraints on corpus pragmatics, which is that building spoken corpora is vastly time-consuming and therefore expensive, meaning that reliance on older corpora will probably continue for English until the new BNC 2014 is released. However, the accessibility of CMC data makes this a marked omission given that the data is available, being used elsewhere, and, more importantly, that this is an integrated part of our daily interactions.
The Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics is a relatively new series which started in 2013, published by Springer; its very existence neatly illustrates the extent to which corpus pragmatics has established itself. The second volume in the series, edited by Jesús Romero-Trillo, is subtitled New Empirical and Theoretical Paradigms and sets out to ‘offer novel theoretical and empirical models that can explain language better in itself and in its relation to reality’ (p. 1). The book is divided into four sections. In the first, the four chapters challenge existing methodologies, as in Stefan Th. Gries and Allison S. Adelman’s chapter, ‘Subject Realization in Japanese Conversation by Native and Non-Native Speakers: Exemplifying a New Paradigm for Learner Corpus Research’, and also theory, as in Li’s ‘A Corpus-Based Analysis of Metaphorical Uses of the High Frequency Noun Time : Challenges to Conceptual Metaphor Theory’. The second section is grouped by a shared interest in culture, and contains the only corpus study I have come across of Latin in Jacob L. Mey’s intriguing chapter, ‘Horace, Colors and Pragmatics’. The third section is dedicated to L2 studies, which again shows how corpus pragmatics studies are developing and moving away from the analysis of standard languages. The fourth section contains book reviews (which constitutes an appealing aspect of the series). The chapters in this volume cover seven different languages and include historical, regional, and learner varieties of those languages. The contributors are affiliated with universities in ten different countries and range from emeritus professor to current Ph.D. student. This openness to all scholars means that readers are bound to come across researchers, and therefore ideas and methods, that they have not encountered before, and this is very positive for the field.
The third significant contribution to corpus pragmatics is Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics from Benjamins’ Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, edited by Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker, and Jukka Tuominen. This collection follows on from a conference panel but is a much more coherent and comprehensive collection than often results from such origins. It sets out to show the usefulness of the combination of the three disciplines of historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and pragmatics and reflects on the challenges and implications of this combination. In the introduction, ‘Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics: Intersection and Interjections’, the authors position diachronic corpus linguistics as a branch of historical pragmatics, noting that it is a field still in its infancy (although this book will surely change that). As the authors point out, although corpus pragmatics is somewhat more established as a field, what facilitates diachronic corpus pragmatics more specifically is the fact that corpora have been used in historical pragmatics from its inception in the 1990s. This early combination was the result of a wider shift in pragmatics, the serendipity of the emergence of historical pragmatics at the time corpus resources were developing, and indeed largely a result of Jucker’s own previous work in the area. However, the combination is not without its challenges, and these too are addressed in the introductory chapter, with two ‘double binds’ being identified. The first, common to all corpus pragmatic/discourse work, is the tension between the drive for larger datasets and the recognition of the importance of rich contextualization. The second is the tension between the desire to maintain the integrity of the original texts and the need to make them retrievable using corpus software. A partial response to these tensions comes, again, in the form of annotation, which will allow for spelling variations to be tagged with a standardized spelling, rather as word forms are matched to lemmas. Similarly, information about speakers and pragmatic features can be added through annotation, maintaining the richness. Another way of increasing the contextualization is the integration of multimodal elements. The authors give the EMENT corpus as an example, which includes images of the original text and so on. There are twelve chapters following the introduction, divided into the areas of ‘Words’, ‘Phrases and Clauses’, and ‘Utterances and Dialogues’. The first two sections look at analyses which move from form to function, while the last section starts from function. While most of the chapters interpret ‘diachronic’ as ‘historical diachronic’, Jucker and Taavitsainen use the free CoHA and CoCA corpora to cover a range from 1820 to 2000, which makes for fascinating reading. One of the interesting features of this collection is that it covers eight languages. However, for the purposes of this review, the most relevant will be the five chapters on English-language data, which cover investigations into degree modifiers (Claudia Claridge and Merja Kytö), multi-adjectival premodification (Jukka Tyrkkö), epistemic/evidential parentheticals (María José López-Couso and Belén Méndez-Naya), complimenting (Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen), and identification of verbal aggression (Dawn Archer). The last two chapters are especially innovative as they start from functions rather than forms, thus challenging assumptions about the limits of corpus work. Furthermore, each chapter reflects growing trends in other ways. Jucker and Taavitsainen’s chapter, like the Culpeper and Haugh textbook, places meta-communicative expressions in a prominent position. Taken together with Garcia McAllister’s chapter in the Aijmer and Rühlemann volume mentioned above, we have two new ways of investigating speech acts and dealing with the tensions of precision of recall, in which starting with recognized forms will lead to a high degree of precision in retrieving instances of a particular speech act but will only recall a small number of the potential range. This is also addressed in Archer’s chapter, which shows how semantic annotation can be employed in both identifying and theorizing verbal aggression, thus contributing to the burgeoning area of impoliteness studies.
Another major contribution to the integration of corpus linguistics in new areas comes in Paul Baker’s Using Corpora to Analyse Gender . As he notes in the introduction, ‘while discourse analysis has become popular with Gender and Language, this has tended to be based on detailed qualitative studies’ (p. 6); he therefore offers corpus linguistics as a complementary approach. Topics cover both the language used by people of different genders and representations of gender and sexuality, and they range from expressing disagreement to changes in discursive representation over time. To show the reader how corpus methods may be integrated into language and gender work, each chapter has a different corpus methodological focus, moving through frequency, collocation, and concordance analysis. Methodological issues are also raised, both regarding the study of gender and the use and interpretation of corpus data.
If the rise of corpus pragmatics represents one important form of ‘cross-over’ or ‘cross-pollination’, another highly noticeable one came in the form of many articles pushing for more attention to spoken forms and multimodal aspects of pragmatics and discourse. This included a special issue of Text & Talk (34:iii[2014] on ‘Multimodality, Meaning-Making, and the Issue of “Text” ’, edited by Elisabetta Adami and Gunther Kress. In addition, there were stand-alone methodological papers, such as ‘Why Do News Values Matter? Towards a New Methodological Framework for Analysing News Discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and Beyond’ ( D&S 25[2014] 135–58) by Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, which examines the complete multimodal text to seen how newsworthiness is constructed, and John A. Bateman and Janina Wildfeuer’s proposal of ‘A Multimodal Discourse Theory of Visual Narrative’ ( JPrag 74[2014] 180–208). Concerning pragmatics, there were papers addressing themes such as impoliteness: Gerard O’Grady’s ‘The Use of Key in Projecting Face-Threatening Acts in Televised Political Debate’ ( T&T 34 [2014] 685–711); mock-impoliteness: Sean McKinnon and Pilar Prieto’s ‘The Role of Prosody and Gesture in the Perception of Mock Impoliteness’ ( JPolR 10[2014] 185–219); and turn-taking: Timo Kaukomaa, Anssi Peräkyläb, and Johanna Ruusuvuoric’s ‘Foreshadowing a Problem: Turn-Opening Frowns in Conversation’ ( JPrag 71[2014] 132–47).
Continuing the theme of ‘cross-pollination’ in this year’s work, the Handbooks of Pragmatics series published by Mouton de Gruyter explicitly brings the two together, conceptualizing discourse as part of pragmatics. Pragmatics of Discourse , edited by Klaus Schneider and Anne Barron, is the third volume in this series. Following two introductory chapters which tackle the field of discourse pragmatics and the slippery nature of discourse, the book is structured in three sections. The first, titled ‘Approaches to Discourse’, covers approaches such as CDA and CA, but also two of the areas of cross-pollination identified in this year’s review, in chapters on ‘Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis’ (Michaela Mahlberg) and ‘Multimodal Pragmatics’ (Kay O’Halloran, Sabine Tan, and Marissa K.L.E.). The second section surveys discourse structures and again, alongside the familiar topics, we have innovation in the form of Michal Ephratt’s chapter on ‘Silence’. The third section presents discourse types and domains ranging from medical discourse to legal discourse.
Pragmatic Literary Stylistics , edited by Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark, also represents a new interdisciplinary area for pragmatic studies (its publication interestingly coincides with the republication of Roger Sell’s Literary Pragmatics as part of the Routledge Revivals series). The introduction to the volume shows that the rather uncomfortable relationship between the role and contribution of literary stylistics and literary criticism, and interaction between the two, has not been resolved in the time that has elapsed between the first publication of Sell’s study and this volume. In this volume, the editors see the primary role of pragmatic literary stylistics as serving to explain ‘how different audiences arrive at the understandings they do’ (p. 7) and the secondary task as ‘developing arguments in support of particular readings’ (p. 8). Furthermore, they propose that the application may allow for testing of the pragmatic theoretical frameworks. The ten chapters that follow the introduction present a range of case studies working with pragmatic concepts such as implicature, relevance theory, and face-work. The latter is also addressed in a stylistics context in Derek Bousfield’s chapter on ‘Stylistics, Speech Acts and Im/politeness Theory’ (in Burke, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics , pp. 118–35), which presents a thorough overview of this interaction between pragmatics and stylistics.
The year 2014 saw two weighty contributions from established members of the im/politeness community. The first is by Geoffrey Leech, who was one of the first to theorize politeness, and in so doing shaped the direction of this field (as well as several others). The Pragmatics of Politeness reasserts the linguistic origins of im/politeness, the area that Leech refers to as pragma-linguistics (the relationship between pragmatics and linguistic form) as opposed to sociopragmatics (the relationship between pragmatics and society). The first section (four chapters) presents Leech’s view of politeness and explicitly places this within the context of other researchers in the field, which will be very helpful for those coming to the topic for the first time. The second section moves on to analysis and addresses a range of speech acts, from apologies to compliments. In the final chapter in this section he also flips the focus to the intriguing ‘opposites’ of politeness, of which he identifies four: ‘non-politeness’, which is the absence of politeness, ‘impoliteness’, which is the polar opposite of politeness, ‘irony or sarcasm’, and ‘banter’. The last section, titled ‘Further Perspectives’, discusses the methods of data collection, interlanguage pragmatics, and the study of politeness in a historical context.
The second volume to make a significant contribution to im/politeness is Michael Haugh’s Im/Politeness Implicatures . This is a rich and insightful account, which, like Leech’s volume, firmly places im/politeness study in a linguistic pragmatic context. It teases out the relationship between two weighty concepts: politeness and implicature. This pair has been theorized in past research, most notably in the neo-Gricean approaches of politeness as implicature. However, this volume takes a fresh approach, in which im/politeness is not seen as an implicature itself, but as an evaluative social practice. Thus, ‘the puzzle to be explored … is why it is that implicatures only sometimes give rise to politeness, while in other instances they can give rise to other kinds of evaluations, such as impoliteness, mock politeness, mock impoliteness and shades between’ (p. 7). In addressing this question, Haugh calls for a need to situate the analysis with respect to the moral order invoked by participants. This investigation is characterized by a focus on the viewpoints of the participants and the understanding that implicatures may nor reside in a single utterance but emerge over a sequence. Michael Haugh’s paper on ‘Jocular Mockery as Interactional Practice in Everyday Anglo-Australian Conversation’ ( AJL 34[2014] 76–99) further explores one aspect of im/politeness implicatures, that of banter, one of the impoliteness opposites raised in Leech’s volume.
Indirectness also forms the focus of two more papers this year. ‘Disentangling Politeness Theory and the Strategic Speaker Approach: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Predictions’ by Jessica Soltys, Marina Terkourafi, and Napoleon Katsos ( IPrag 11[2014] 31–56) reviews and probes these two accounts of off-record indirect speech. Marcella Bertuccelli Papi’s paper investigates ‘The Pragmatics of Insinuation’ ( IPrag 11[2014] 1–29), in which insinuation is defined as ‘a communicative strategy whereby a speaker intends to make an addressee believe p [proposition], but does not want to be held responsible for communicating p’ (p. 2). Although the paper does not explicitly refer to impoliteness, it makes clear that the ‘mismatch’ strategy used for deception and manipulation is closely associated with other kinds of im/politeness. Impoliteness also received attention from a cross-cultural perspective in ‘Expressing Disagreement in English as a Lingua Franca: Whose Pragmatic Rules?’ by Carmen Maíz-Arévalo ( IPrag 11[2014] 199–224), which found that high-proficiency speakers were more likely to formulate the speech act of disagreement using BrE norms of mitigation. Hadar Netz’s study of disagreements showed that they were unmarked in a study of children in gifted classes in the US and, as such, not performing impoliteness ( JPrag 61[2014] 142–60). In Bernie Chun Nam Mak and Hin Leung Chui’s study of ‘Impoliteness in Facebook Status Updates: Strategic Talk among Colleagues “Outside” the Workplace’ ( T&T 34:ii[2014] 165–85), the use of English itself constitutes one of the strategies and simultaneously helps define the community of speakers. Finally, politeness as a means of investigating community-building was employed in several papers this year, focusing in particular on various forms of informal written conversation. In the study that uses English-language data, Daria Dayer investigates ‘Self-Praise in Micro-Blogging’ on Twitter ( JPrag 61[2014] 91–102)
As we have already seen, evaluation has recurred as a theme in many of the pragmatics collections reviewed here; the publication of Evaluation in Context by Geoff Thompson and Laura Alba-Juez rightly draws attention to this important concept. The authors state that the volume is designed as a sequel to the influential Evaluation in Text [2000] by Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson. While Evaluation in Text brought together the theorists of the major approaches to evaluation at the time and the editors introduced each of these, Evaluation in Context is a more traditional edited volume. The eight chapters following the introduction present a more theoretical approach, ranging from revisiting the appraisal model (Geoff Thompson) to evaluation-driven understanding of irony (Laura Alba-Juez and Salvatore Attardo). The last two chapters in this section also deal with prosody and intonation, again signalling the shift to explicitly include these aspects in theorization. The third part of the book consists of ten case studies which illustrate the different contexts in which evaluation may be studied.
14. Stylistics
The publications within stylistics in 2014 are varied and eclectic, with a prevalence of collected volumes and compendium texts. The research published this year demonstrates the sheer versatility and scope of the discipline. This review considers, first, the ‘handbooks’ of stylistics published in 2014, before moving on to survey the volumes which focus on cognitive applications. The rest of the review is divided thematically and considers the publications which explore reader-response research, the relationship between style and pedagogy, and other cognitive, critical, and corpus-stylistic explorations.
In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics , edited by Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, Katie Wales (‘The Stylistic Tool-Kit: Methods and Sub-Disciplines’, pp. 32–45) discusses how stylistics is frequently described as a ‘toolkit’ for exploring texts; ‘a metaphor which appears time and again in definitions and applications of stylistics’ (p. 32). This is shown to be true for the two prominent stylistics textbooks published this year, The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics and The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics . Both these collected volumes demonstrate the sheer range of what stylistics can offer textual analysis, and show that at the heart of the discipline is the idea that stylistics offers a variety of tools for the excavation of texts.
The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics , edited by Michael Burke, is an accessible textbook, and one which is suitable for a wide audience, from current researchers in the field to those encountering the area for the first time. Featuring contributions from key names in the discipline, the collection is divided into four parts which, when read cumulatively, guide the reader from the origins of the discipline through to the present day and finish with future directions of the field. This volume is centred on the fact that ‘Stylistics is a subject to be enjoyed’ (p. 7). Part I, ‘Historical Perspectives in Stylistics’, begins by providing theoretical foundations of stylistics: ‘Rhetoric and Poetics: The Classical Heritage of Stylistics’ (by Michael Burke, pp. 11–30), ‘Formalist Stylistics’ (by Michael Burke and Kristy Evers, pp. 31–44); ‘Functional Stylistics’ (by Patricia Canning, pp. 45–67); and ‘Reader Response Criticism and Stylistics’ (by Jennifer Riddle Harding, pp. 68–84), the concerns of which are then traced through the rest of the chapters. The second section surveys core issues in the field. Chapter 10, ‘Stylistics, Point of View and Modality’ (by Clara Neary, pp. 175–90), for example, considers ‘one of the most intensively researched areas of stylistic enquiry’ (p. 175): point of view. Neary provides a survey of the wider research on point of view, beginning with the four planes of point of view as outlined by Boris Uspensky [1973] (spatial, temporal, psychological, ideological), and considers, in particular, the relationship between modality and point of view. The chapter finishes by recommending future practice, urging readers to ‘pay particular attention to the context in which [point of view] shifts take place, thereby facilitating investigation of their potential interpretive effect(s)’ (p. 188), and outlines future practice: point of view in drama, reader responses to point of view, point of view in translated texts, and so on. Part III then moves on to explore contemporary topics, such as text-world theory: ‘Stylistics and Text-World Theory’ (by Ernestine Lahey, pp. 284–96). This chapter traces the three ‘main strands of influence’ (p. 284) which informed Paul Werth’s original research on the text-world model: firstly his reaction to shortcomings of Chomskian generative linguistics; secondly the influence from possible world models, and finally influences from cognitive linguistics (such as Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Prototype Theory, and others). Again, like Neary’s chapter, Lahey identifies recommendation for practice by posing some questions in response to a Dan Brown Angels and Demons extract. Like Neary, Lahey outlines the importance of context: how are discourse world elements affected in the process of text-world creation? Furthermore, how can text-world theory be used to explore performative contexts? The book finishes by identifying some emerging trends in the field: ‘Multimodality and Stylistics (by Nina Norgaard, pp. 471–84), ‘Creative Writing and Stylistics’ (by Jeremy Scott, pp. 423–39), and ‘Stylistics, Emotion and Neuroscience’ (by Patrick Colm Hogan, pp. 516–30), amongst others.
The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics similarly celebrates stylistics’ position as an established discipline. This handbook is divided into four sections, and, like the Routledge Handbook , the first section situates stylistics in a historical context, drawing out its historical connections with other fields of study as indicated in the chapter titles: ‘Stylistics as Rhetoric’ (by Craig Hamilton, pp. 63–76); ‘Stylistics as Applied Linguistics’ (by Ronald Carter, pp. 77–86); and ‘Stylistics as Literary Criticism’ (by Geoff Hall, pp. 87–100). The first stylistic analyses are included in Part II, a section which focuses on the relationship between stylistics and literary concepts. Jessica Mason’s chapter on ‘Narrative’ (pp. 179–95), for example, examines a new way of accounting for intertextuality in reading, offering a narrative interrelation model to provide a more reader-centred account of what happens when we make connections between texts and other narratives during the reading process. Mason argues that previous definitions of intertextuality make it a text-driven concept, whereas ‘narrative interrelation’ (as coined by Mason) has a more readerly emphasis. In Part III, ‘Techniques of Style’, Paul Simpson and Patricia Canning’s chapter, ‘Action and Event’, provides a new application of something which has long been a cornerstone of stylistic analysis: transitivity. This chapter examines the notion of event vs. non-event in texts and discusses the importance of ‘narrative gaps’ in the representation of narrative events. It argues that, despite its continuing usefulness, transitivity does not account for action which is presented through counterfactuals, dis-narration, and negation. It does not argue that Michael Halliday’s transitivity system is not still serviceable for stylistic analysis, but rather that it often cannot offer a holistic sense of action in a text. Part IV, ‘The Contextual Experience of Style’, contains chapters which consider the position of the reader within the reading experience. For example in her chapter ‘Ethics’ (pp. 393–407), following the work of Peter Stockwell [2009], Sara Whiteley argues that text-world theory is a useful model through which to consider the ethical experience of reading. Text-world theory concerns situating the reader within the context of reading, and it is this fact—its sensitivity to readerliness—which makes it well suited for exploring the idiosyncratic responses to reading and the relationship between the reader and the text. In this application Whiteley considers the novel Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro [2005]). The analysis observes that the text worlds created in the novel establish different narrator and narratee ‘roles’, and it is seen that readers project themselves into these different narratee roles in order to ‘resist’ or ‘identify with’ the protagonist, Kathy. Whiteley further analyses how there are particular stylistic cues that can create clashes which obstruct or confuse this readerly process of projection.
Another article which considers reader response is Lasse Gammelgaard’s ‘Two Trajectories of Reader Response in Narrative Poetry: Roses and Risings in Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” ’ ( Narrative 22[2014] 203–18). Gammelgaard builds on Wolfgang Iser’s work on ‘wandering viewpoints’ in reader-response theory and puts forward the argument that reader responses to Keats’s narrative poem ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ are contingent upon how readers respond, first, to the ‘narrative trajectory’ and second, to the ‘poetic trajectory’ of the text. By poetic trajectory Gammelgaard refers to (a) features of style that are unique to poems, and (b) language features which are often seen as foregrounded in poetry but which are not necessarily exclusive to the form (p. 204). In his analysis, Gammelgaard observes that these two trajectories move in different directions: ‘As opposed to the narrative’s wandering viewpoint, the poetic trajectory mainly works backwards. The reader’s discovery of the meaning of this trajectory is retrospective rather than anticipatory’ (p. 216). He concludes by suggesting that such a modification of Iser’s original model would also potentially be beneficial for the study of prose narratives.
How readers become immersed within a text is something which many cognitive stylisticians question. For example, in María Ángeles Martínez’s article ‘Storyworld Possible Selves and the Phenomenon of Narrative Immersion: Testing a New Theoretical Construct’ ( Narrative 22[2014] 110–31) considers why some readers undergo a different narrative experience compared to others, and traces these experiences through an analysis using blending theory (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner [2002]) and embodied metaphors: READING IS A JOURNEY; READING IS CONTROL; READING IS INVESMENT (Richard Gerrig [1993]; Peter Stockwell [2009]). Martínez acknowledges that constructs of character have already been discussed in narrative theory, but what about readers’ mental constructions of themselves? This paper puts forward the idea that we all have a ‘Storyworld possible self’: which is ‘preliminarily defined as imaginings of the self in story-worlds, formally conceived as blends resulting from matching features across a particular reader’s self-concept and a focalizer’s character construct’ (p. 119). Like Sara Whiteley’s discussion of identification mentioned above, Martínez argues that readers can project their story-world possible self ‘if, and only if, at least one of the reader’s self-schemas or possible selves is activated by narrative cues, that is to say, if the reader is schematic in one or more of the domains in the narration’ (p. 119). Martínez argues that this concept may account for differing levels of emotional engagement amongst readers, and also for differences between readers’ immersive experiences. The paper concludes by identifying how research into story-world possible selves could be taken forward, and questions how these concepts work in multimodal texts, amongst other potential directions.
The study of literary linguistics often invites scholars to consider how close-text analysis is best taught. Issue 46 of Style was a special issue that focused on responses to Peter Rabinowitz and Corrine Bancroft’s target essay, ‘Euclid at the Core: Recentering Literary Education’ ( Style 48[2014] 1–34), which commented on the challenges of teaching English literature, including when and how to include theory and technical literary language, both at secondary-school level and in the more advanced English classroom in the American school system. They acknowledge early on that in this paper they are not offering a practical guide for how to teach English most effectively but rather that their arguments are centred around one idea: ‘we argue that if education doesn’t give students the tools to discuss important literary questions (including questions about literature’s relationship to the larger world) intelligently, then their education is flawed’ (p. 2). In their discussion Rabinowitz and Bancroft put forward the idea that students respond to books with their own ‘Kid Knowledge’, and that teaching English is about ‘Equipping them with language to name their ideas [which] will allow them to develop confidence to create more complicated ideas’ (p. 28).
Sheridan Blau’s article in this issue, ‘Literary Competence and the Experience of Literature’ ( Style 48[2014] 42–7), maps out some of the ‘problem spaces’ from Bancroft and Rabinowitz’s original article. In his response Blau questions how we should equip English students to take on ‘intellectually challenging and cognitively difficult texts’ (p. 44) and argues that more literary texts are perhaps being neglected while informational texts are given centre stage in the classroom. To address this challenge, Blau offers some practical pedagogical advice and argues that reading and the discussion of reader responses should be a collaborative activity organized in the classroom as ‘social workshops’ (p. 46). On the other hand Kate Oubre’s response, ‘Many “Right Answers”, Many “Wrong Ones”: A Defense of Close Reading in the High School Classroom’ ( Style 48[2014] 66–70), argues that students should become independent readers: ‘students need to learn not to mimic me as their teacher or certain literary theorists or critics; rather, they need to learn to analyze on their own by mimicking the process’ (p. 67). Oubre discusses how specialist literary terms are useful tools for clarifying and justifying readerly interpretation, but also argues that theory should be taught delicately. In other words, it is useful to allow students the space and independence to research and consider theories in which they are interested but that learning them too early or in the wrong context could be problematic and create barriers to learning. Brian Richardson’s offering ( Style 48[2014] 76–8) also finishes with practical advice: on teaching reader-response theory and on exploring the ‘constructedness of fiction’ in the classroom. For example, he mentions that a ‘good exercise while reading is to have the students guess at what the ending will be, what consequences such an ending has, well before they have finished reading the work’ (p. 78). These ideas are of interest to theorists and teachers alike, and will doubtless continue to be discussed along with the changing curriculum.
As acknowledged by Michael Burke in The Routledge Handbook and Craig Hamilton in the Cambridge Handbook respectively, stylistics has its roots in rhetoric; in Susan and Robert Cockcroft’s updated volume of Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric , the study of rhetoric is shown to have continuing relevance. This text explores persuasion in spoken and written and literary and non-literary contexts, and encourages readers to both analyse features of rhetoric and to employ rhetorical strategies in their own writing. Following Aristotle, Cockcroft and Cockcroft identify ‘three permanent working principles of persuasion’, which are: ‘ ethos (persuasion through personality and stance); pathos (persuasion through the arousal of emotion); and logos (persuasion through reasoning)’ (pp. 5–6); and these principles provide the foundation for the entire volume. Rather than situating the study of rhetoric as something of the past, the authors argue that, in fact, the art of rhetoric and the stylistic features of persuasion are pervasive in our everyday use of language today. At the end of the volume they identify how cognitive advances in the field ‘are prompting new ways of thinking about rhetoric and models of argument’ (p. 264).
Cockcroft and Cockcroft’s acknowledgement of the usefulness of cognitive models (text-world theory, schema theory, and so on) to inform research into rhetoric signposts how cognitive stylistics continues to develop and expand. Increasingly, cognitive stylistics is beginning to explore the application of cognitive-linguistic models for stylistic analysis. Cognitive Grammar in Literature , edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell, and Wenjuan Yuan, for example, is the first book of its kind to bring together applications of Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (CG) as a stylistic model. The book features contributions from academics from a range of backgrounds, applying CG to an equally varied range of texts: from the historical to the contemporary and the postmodern; from poetry to prose and multimodal literature. Ronald Langacker contributes the foreword, where he identifies that the ‘comprehensive’ nature of CG, which is centred on grammar as an inherently meaningful phenomenon, means that the model is well suited to literary analysis. The volume begins by introducing and defining some of the central CG concepts: namely, ‘construal’, ‘trajector’ and ‘landmark’ alignment, ‘image schemas’, ‘grounding’, and ‘subjectivity’, amongst others. Peter Stockwell’s chapter, ‘War, Worlds and Cognitive Grammar’ (pp. 19–34), opens the ‘narrative fiction’ section and provides a contrastive analysis of two sections from H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds [1898], using a CG consideration to trace the differences between the ‘grammar of anticipation’ and the ‘grammar of action’ to analyse the literary texture of the scene. In addition to exploring literary texture, many of the chapters in this volume also explore how attention is directed through language. Chloe Harrison’s chapter ‘Attentional Windowing in David Foster Wallace’s “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” ’ (pp. 53–68), for example, considers the title’s post-postmodern text, ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’, in which the central character recalls a traumatic incident from his childhood. The analysis here shows how a stylistic consideration of which portions of a narrative are windowed, gapped, or spliced successfully provides an indication of a narrator’s ‘mind style’ (Elena Semino [2008]). Arguably, CG as a means of exploring point of view in fiction appears to be one of the more prolific and successful applications in this volume, also discussed by Louise Nuttall (‘Constructing a Text World for The Handmaid’s Tale ’, pp. 83–100), Elżbieta Tabakowska (‘Point of View in Translation: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Grammatical Wonderlands’, pp. 101–18), and Michael Pleyer and Christian W. Schneider in a multimodal context (‘Construal and Comics: The Multimodal Autobiography of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home ’, pp. 35–52). Overall, this edited collection demonstrates the versatility and flexibility of the CG framework, while putting forward a convincing argument that CG has a lot to offer stylistic analysis. It provides a means of talking about the experiential processes of reading, but it is identified that more work needs to be done to test the boundaries of the model. Are there, indeed, ‘limits to what CG can offer literature’ (Langacker, p. 14), and where do they lie? These are questions which will hopefully be addressed in future research.
As mentioned, CG traditionally belongs to cognitive linguistics, a discipline which argues that meanings in language are embodied. Put simply, embodiment refers to how our use and understanding of language are shaped by our physical experience in the world. Increasingly, stylistic analyses are beginning to draw on cognitive-linguistic principles in order to strengthen and provide a psychological foundation for the focus on ‘readerly’ interpretation. Though The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics , edited by Jeannette Littlemore and John R. Taylor, is primarily a compendium of cognitive-linguistic concepts, the text does reference clear points of contact between central cognitive-linguistic ideas and what they can offer stylistics. In chapter 5, ‘Cognitive Poetics’ (pp. 218–33), for example, Chloe Harrison and Peter Stockwell centre a review of the field on Keith Oatley’s [2003] notion of ‘writingandreading’. Through this term Oatley ([2003], p. 170) aimed ‘to distinguish between general processes of cognitive construction from the discourse structure, and idiosyncratic processes of each reader’. Using reader responses to the book Naive. Super (Loe [2005]) from Amazon reviews, Harrison and Stockwell observe how readers use ‘enacted metaphors’ (Gerrig [1993]; Stockwell [2009]) to review the text. This chapter also draws together some central cognitive-linguistic components—namely, schemas, conceptual metaphors, and attenuation—to consider in more detail how readers frame their own reading experiences. Although not applied in literary contexts elsewhere in the Companion , these cognitive-linguistic models are expanded on in other chapters, e.g. ‘Lakoff and the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor’ (by Dennis Tay, pp. 49–59) and ‘Embodied Metaphor’ (by Raymond W. Gibbs, pp. 167–84), and certainly provide frameworks which allows stylisticians to explore the more psychological side of reading.
Corpus stylistics continues to be an increasingly popular branch of research in stylistics. In ‘Reading Dickens’s Characters: Employing Psycholinguistic Methods to Investigate the Cognitive Reality of Patterns in Texts’, Michaela Mahlberg, Kathy Conklin, and Marie-Josée Bisson ( L&L 23[2014] 369–88) combine psycholinguistic methods (eye-tracking (quantitative) and follow-up questionnaires (qualitative)) with corpus-stylistic analysis to explore how readers read ‘body language clusters’ (repeated language sequences which describe the body language of a particular character) in Dickens’s fiction. This article leads on from the research in Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction (Mahlberg [2013]), but the psycholinguistic methods used here offer refreshing new insights into how to explore corpus data. As in Mahlberg, this article acknowledges how characterization is a much-discussed feature in Dickens, and considers, from a psycholinguistic perspective, the role readers play in processing Dickensian characters (i.e. how we draw upon schematic knowledge to help ‘fill out’ characters). Mahlberg et al. argue that such body-language clusters appear on a cline from more functional (i.e. helping to ‘contextualize’ the character within the wider scene, which is the focus in the article here) to more ‘highlighting’ (i.e. more likely to impact on our conceptualization of a character). In the study, participants were required to answer questions about the character in the scene provided, and the results of the study suggested that ‘comprehenders remember important character information, but not necessarily the linguistic form in which this information is presented’ (p. 383). The eye-tracking part of the study also suggested that some body-language clusters are read more quickly than others, which indicates that we keep such clusters as ‘units’ in our long-term memory. The paper concludes by arguing that the methods of psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics can be usefully integrated: Mahlberg et al. argue that ‘psycholinguistic methods can add a valuable dimension to the interpretation of corpus stylistic findings’ (p. 370), especially since frequently occurring patterns are of interest to both corpus stylisticians and psycholinguists.
Another study that focuses on characterization is Elena Semino’s ‘Pragmatic Failure, Mind Style and Characterisation in Fiction about Autism’ ( L&L 23[2014] 141–58). In this article Semino identifies a trend in different kinds of fiction to include representations of ‘autistic’ characters and uses three contemporary novels in which the central character has an autism-spectrum disorder as case studies ( Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon [2002]; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon [2003]; and The Language of Others by Clare Morrall [2008]) in order to analyse how the interactional behaviour of these protagonists impacts upon their characterization. Semino observes how a distinctive ‘mind style’ is signposted through stylistic choices: that unintentional impoliteness is prevalent in the texts; that the maxim of relevance (and levels of informativeness) is frequently broken in dialogue; and finally how the protagonists misunderstand metaphors and figurative language. That we as readers are able to notice these patterns suggests that the novels demonstrate a defamiliarization of everyday conversational exchanges: ‘schema refreshment’ (Guy Cook [1994]). The paper concludes that all three novels convey a character who has difficulties with communication: protagonists who experience ‘pragmatic failure’ mostly because they cannot second-guess the intentions of other interlocutors.
Monika Fludernik’s article, ‘Collective Minds in Fact and Fiction: Intermental Thought and Group Consciousness in Early Modern Narrative’ ( PoT 35[2014] 689–720), similarly considers fictional minds but here within a particular sociocultural context: that of the early modern narrative. Fludernik combines an analysis using New Historicism and cognitive narratology (particularly Alan Palmer’s [2004] work on fictional minds) and sets up a comparison between riot scenes in Sir Philip Sidney’s classical text Old Arcadia [1580], and the ‘literary representation of crowds’ (p. 693) as depicted in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles .
Although there is perhaps an emphasis within the discipline on focusing on literary texts, stylistic analysis is equally applicable to non-literary texts. A special issue of Language & Literature , edited by Marina Lambrou, showcases the versatility of the stylistic toolkit in analysing narrative in many different contexts. In ‘Counter Narratives and Controversial Crimes: The Wikipedia Article for the “Murder of Meredith Kercher” ’ ( L&L 23[2014] 61–76), for example, Ruth Page ‘explores the relationship between macro-level social narratives and micro-level narrative analysis with reference to the counter narratives that emerge in a particular context: the chronicling of non-fictional topics in Wikipedia articles’ (p. 62). In particular, Page considers the controversial Wikipedia article which documents the murder of Meredith Kercher and tracks the revisions of its various editors since it was first set up in 2007. In her analysis, Page argues that the presence of multiple tellers works to ‘destabilise’ (p. 74) the dominant narrative. Similarly, in ‘Narrative, Text and Time: Telling the Same Story Twice in the Oral Narrative Reporting of 7/7’ ( L&L 23[2014] 32–48), Marina Lambrou analyses a retelling of the same story: in this instance, a personal narrative of one of the survivors of the 7/7 London terrorist bombings. Lambrou’s article discusses how, through storytelling, people are ‘able to shape and represent their lives as they (re)construct their experiences—and, in so doing, reconstruct their identity—through stylistic choices’ (p. 33). In this study Lambrou focuses in particular on personal narratives as defined in the original work of William Labov and Joshua Waletzky [1967]. The article compares a transcript recording the narrative of a survivor of the 7/7 attacks, Angelo, and then another narrative recorded two and a half years later also spoken by Angelo. Lambrou argues that similarities across both of Angelo’s narratives suggest that people have a ‘mental story template’ (p. 46); she also observes that, interestingly, Angelo ‘appears to position himself outside the events as though he is a witness looking in’ (p. 47), which may be a stylistic feature of dissociation in such accounts of traumatic experiences. Within this L&L issue, it is also demonstrated how reader-response research is an interesting way of examining the narrative effects of particular stylistic choices. Paul Simpson’s article ‘Just What Is Narrative Urgency ?’ ( L&L 23[2014] 3–22) observes how readers—or, in this case, viewers—respond to narrative urgency in fiction, which he defines as the process whereby readers identify with characters and their narrative goals. Simpson draws up a general ‘checklist’ of stylistic features which impact upon a text’s narrative urgency. These features include short sentences, the position within the wider narrative hierarchy, and the precedence of material over mental processes, amongst others. Simpson (p. 7) emphasizes that these features are not a ‘rigid checklist’, but rather ‘a constellation of stylistic tendencies’. The paper sets up an experiment with two groups of students and explores how they respond to two different frame sequences from the film Psycho— specifically, the scene in which Bates is watching Marion’s car sink into the swamp. Group A are shown the original clip, whereas Group B are shown an altered sequence in which the ‘Kuleshov Monitor’—the shifts in camera perspective which show Bates’s expression—is removed. The participants in the study were given a questionnaire, the key question of which was the final one: ‘On a scale of 1–10, how much did you want the car to sink?’ (p. 14). The results indicated that the presence of a narrator’s facial expression directly impacts upon how readers experience narrative urgency: Group A aligned themselves with the protagonist and wanted the car to sink, whereas the results from Group B clustered around the middle of the scale. This study admits that it is experimental, but the preliminary results here indicate that future empirical research into readerly alignment with narrative urgency would be highly interesting.
Evidently the stylistics toolkit works to excavate non-literary texts as well as multi-modal narratives such as films. Since the very first stylistic analyses, however, poetry has been a mainstay of stylistic analyses. In Narrative 22, there was a special issue on the stylistic analysis of poetry. In ‘Narrative in Concrete/Concrete in Narrative: Visual Poetry and Narrative Theory’ ( Narrative 22[2014] 234–51), Brian McAllister considers the relationship between form and content in visual poetry in particular. McAllister begins by comparing two visual poems—‘ershaffung der eva’ (‘The Creation of Eve’) by Ernst Jandl and ‘Silencio’ by Eugen Gomringer—which demonstrate different levels of ‘narrativity’ (Werner Wolf). McAllister considers first how narrativity is built in ‘The Creation of Eve’ largely through the intertextual link provided in the title (its reference to the biblical text Genesis 2:21–4) and argues that the narrativity in this poem ‘arises by negotiating visual and semantic possibilities, balancing movement down the page with the overall shape of the poem, all processed through the title’s biblical filter’ (p. 238). In contrast, the poem ‘Silencio’ elicits an ‘ anti -narrative schema’ (p. 239) and has a much lower level of narrativity. He moves on to consider, amongst other examples by this poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Tea Kettle Drum Water Lily Cup’, which evokes a ‘cup of tea’ schema, an interpretation that requires ‘lots of gap-filling on the part of the reader’ (p. 244). McAllister finally considers Finlay’s work in context (specifically his poetry displayed in a garden, Little Sparta), and concludes that levels of narrativity are affected by poetic and narrative space. In other words, connections between poems in a situated context such as those in Little Sparta and their print-form counterparts help to ‘renegotiate formal features of a text, such as semantic and visual capacities, materiality, political implications, and relationship to surrounding texts and objects’ (p. 248).
In Opposition in Discourse: The Construction of Oppositional Meaning , Lesley Jeffries studies the semantic phenomenon of opposition, which she also labels ‘constructed opposites’, ‘created opposites’, and ‘unconventional opposites’. In this volume Jeffries uses case studies to consider, amongst other aims, what ‘triggers’ unconventional opposites, their function in language, and the relevance of antonymy in the construction of these opposites. The text is divided into five chapters to address these ideas. The first introduces and defines opposites, and the second considers the various types of triggers: structural and lexical. Jeffries argues that such oppositions are prevalent across a variety of text types, and considers how they function in literary contexts (for example, in the poetry of Medbh McGuckian and Carol Ann Duffy, and in prose contexts such as novel openings (chapter 3)), and in non-literary discourse (such as newspaper reporting, magazines (chapter 4)). Chapter 5 looks at constructed opposites from a cognitive-linguistic perspective, and situates opposites as phenomena which are constructed by readers. In other words, Jeffries examines how a reader participates in understanding constructed opposites, and puts forward the idea of an ‘opposition image-schema which, if accepted, would be one of the fundamental building-blocks of human existence and understanding’ (p. 133).
In the studies reviewed thus far, stylistics has been shown to account for a wide range of texts: literary and non-literary, prose and poetry, mono-modal and multimodal. The application of literary linguistic models can also help us to explore the stylistic features of particular periods or genres. For example, Patricia Canning’s monograph Style in the Renaissance considers ‘the ways in which contemporary stylistics helps us, as readers and thinkers, to realise the meaning potential of historical and literary texts’ (p. 1), and questions, in particular, how stylistics representations of ideology indicate the political and theological concerns of early modern England. Canning incorporates both traditional and cognitive stylistic tools, and explores blending in early modern poetry (chapter 1); transitivity and agency in Macbeth (chapter 2); representations of world-view in Macbeth and The Changeling (chapter 3); and metalinguistics and ekphrasis in Catholic poetry (chapter 4). Similarly, Daria Tunca’s Style in Nigerian Fiction demonstrates how a stylistic analysis of a particular fictional genre can shed further light on its literary value. This book begins, for example, by exploring the syntactic arrangements and transitivity in characterization in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus [2003], and draws parallels between the patterns in the text and ‘the author’s awareness of the complexities of her own relationship to postcolonial Nigeria’ (p. 63). Like Canning’s volume, Tunca’s draws upon a range of texts and stylistic frameworks, including ideology in Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie [2006]) (chapter 3); and metaphor in Okri’s The Landscapes Within [1981] and Dangerous Love [1996] (chapter 4), amongst others. At the end of the text Tunca puts forward the idea that a stylistic analysis of African fiction—and postcolonial fiction more generally—is a subdiscipline worth pursuing.
It is clear that stylistics is progressing in new and exciting directions, while demonstrating that the more traditional and core frameworks continue to form the cornerstones of the field. These conventional literary linguistic analyses are positioned alongside emerging applications of the discipline: namely, critical stylistics, cognitive- linguistic extensions, stylistics for pedagogy, and advances in reader-response research, amongst others. It will be interesting to see how these strands are further developed in the research of 2015.
Books Reviewed
