This study of present-day English genitive variation is based on all interchangeable instances of s-and of-genitives from the 'Reportage' and 'Editorial' categories of the 'Brown family' of corpora. Variation is studied by tapping into a number of independent variables, such as precedence of either construction in the text, length of the possessor and possessum phrases, phonological constraints, discourse flow, and animacy of the possessor. In addition to distributional analyses, we use logistic regression to investigate the probabilistic factor weights of these variables, thus tracking language change in progress as evidenced in the language of the press. This method, married to our large database, yields the most detailed perspective to date on frequently discussed issues, such as the relative importance of possessor animacy and end-weight in genitive choice (cf. most recently Rosenbach 2005), or on the exact factorial dynamics responsible for the ongoing spread of the s-genitive.

Probabilistic Determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: a multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres ABSTRACT. This is a paper about language variation and about language change, investigating the competition between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in Modern English (written and spoken, British and American) as a case study. Drawing on a range of spoken and written corpora and considering a multivariate envelope of seven major conditioning factors (such as possessor animacy and end-weight), we seek to uncover, first, how the probabilistic preferences of British and American journalists might have changed between the 1960s and 1990s, and, second, how such changes in written English relate to the way speakers of English choose between the two genitives. We find that the s-genitive is comparatively frequent in both spoken English and contemporary journalistic English thanks to quite different reasons, and that the recent spread of the s-genitive in press English is due to a process of economization rather than colloquialization.

In corpora of written-edited-published British and American English covering the 1961-1992 period, AmE spearheads this change. We study 16,868 restrictive relative clauses with inanimate antecedents from Brown/LOB/Frown/F-LOB. Predictors include additional areas of variation regulated by prescriptivism. We show:(i) relativizer deletion follows different constraints than the selection of either that or which, (ii) this change is a case of institutionally backed colloquialization-cum-Americanization;

Based on a corpus of private email from Jamaican university students, this study explores the discourse functions of Jamaican Creole in computer-mediated communication. From this participant-centered perspective, it contributes to the longstanding theoretical debates in creole studies about the creole continuum. The book will likewise be useful to students of computer-mediated communication, the use and development of non-standardized languages, language ecology, and codeswitching. The central methodological issue in this study is codeswitching in written language, a neglected area of study at the moment since most literature in codeswitching research is based on spoken data. The three analytical chapters present the data in a critical discussion of established and more recent theoretical approaches to codeswitching. Fields that will benefit from this book include interactional sociolinguistics, creole studies, English as a world language, computer-mediated discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology.

Jamaican Creole and Nigerian Pidgin, both English-derived contact languages that coexist with standard English (StE) in their respective settings, are traditionally oral languages for which no orthographic standard has yet been established. Aided by a significant increase in written usage in computermediated communication (CMC), the past decade has seen tendencies towards grass-roots standardization in the orthography of these two languages. In this paper we (1) identify the dynamics of orthographic standardization for each of the varieties using corpora of CMC data (in particular e-mails and discussion forums posts), (2) discuss the differential results for the two varieties based on the different sociolinguistic situations of Jamaica and Nigeria, and (3) point to possible consequences for language planning in the two countries. We conclude that, without any state-driven initiative toward the standardization of Pidgin/Creole orthography, the gap between the orthographic systems usually recommended by linguists, or "experts" (cf. Sebba, 1998a), and the practices that are being established by "users" is likely to widen further.