The influence of register on noun phrase complexity in varieties of English

Schaub, Steffen

doi:10.1515/9783110443554-012

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…2 Also at the macro-level, it would be interesting to explore sociolinguistic variables (gender, age, education), but only with the second generation of ICE corpora, such as ICE Nigeria, can results be easily contextualized here; the importance of metadata and the limitations of most ICE corpora in this respect are discussed in Hundt (2015), Schaub (2016) and Seoane (forthcoming). 3 The term entrenchment is used here as understood in UBT theory (cf.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a register perspective

Seoane

2017

Miscelánea

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This paper addresses Miller’s (2000) and Brown and Miller’s (2017) hypothesis that the adverbs just, (n)ever and yet are becoming markers of perfect meaning in spoken English, and this at the expense of weakening semantically and reducing the use of the have + past participle periphrasis. The hypothesis is tested in eight varieties of Present-Day English from the perspective of Usage Based Theory (Bybee 2006, 2011, 2013) and with a corpus-based, onomasiological methodology. The results confirm the hypothesis only partially; crucially, data reveal that in order to model morphosyntactic variation in a rigorous way we need to adopt a register perspective such as that used by Biber and associates (e.g. Biber and Gray 2016), who demonstrate that language variation and change is mediated by register variation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a register perspective

Seoane

2017

Miscelánea

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“…Although the ICE corpora facilitate the direct comparison of varieties because they have been compiled following the same guidelines, it is important to bear in mind that the local realities of the territories concerned may differ. For instance, text types are not always comparable due to cultural differences, and are thus sometimes heterogeneous, as Hundt (2015: 383-4) and Schaub (2016) have pointed out. Additionally, there are differences in the sampling dates of some of the corpora.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The coding of perfect meaning in African, Asian and Caribbean Englishes

Suárez‐Gómez

2017

English Language and Linguistics

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The perfect in World Englishes has attracted much attention recently, especially from a semasiological perspective, in which the analytic have + participle is analysed in comparison with the synthetic preterite. This article intends to achieve a more holistic picture of the expression of perfect meaning in World Englishes, which allows us to identify how perfect meaning is expressed in all pragmatic contexts. In this study, all the occurrences of ten high-frequency verbs are examined in order to single out those expressing perfect meaning. The corpus (8.8m words in total) includes ten components of the International Corpus of English: eight Outer Circle varieties from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and two reference varieties: British and American English. The relevant examples are tabulated across variables such as presence of adverbials, type of perfect meaning, lexical verb, mode, text type and evolutionary stage. The results show that the envelope of variation is much wider than the one traditionally acknowledged in current grammars of English, and that type of meaning, lexical verb or text type are crucial determiners in the choice of particular forms to express perfect meaning. By contrast, mode or evolutionary stage does not seem to have a bearing on the differences between varieties.

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“…be like) or intensifiers (super, über, etc.). In addition, the inter-corpora comparability of registers may be threatened by cultural differences, as explained by Hundt (2015: 384-385; see also Schaub, 2016), who cites the example of a student essay in ICE-PHI consisting of scattered thoughts and incomplete sentences. Spoken private registers also illustrate the effects of cultural differences in the compilation of the corpora, because very often the compiler has no choice but to interview speakers, with the spontaneous and natural character of the text-type then becoming questionable (cf.…”

Section: The Ice Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language contact in Gibraltar English: A pilot study with ICE-GBR

Loureiro‐Porto

Suárez‐Gómez

2017

RAEI

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The variety of English used in Gibraltar has been in contact with a number of European languages, such as Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Arabic (Moyer, 1998: 216;Suárez-Gómez, 2012: 1746, for more than 300 years. Studies of this variety have traditionally been based on interviews and observation (e.g. Moyer, 1993Moyer, , 1998Cal Varela, 1996;Levey, 2008Levey, 2015Weston, 2011Weston, , 2013, and a detailed morphosyntactic description is yet to be published. In this context, the compilation of a reliable Gibraltar corpus using the standards of the International Corpus of English (ICE) will constitute a landmark in the analysis of this lesser known variety of English. In the present paper we describe the ICE project and the current state of the compilation of ICE-GBR. In addition, we present a detailed comparison between the section on press news reports of ICE-GB (standard British English) and ICE-GBR, with the aim of identifying morphosyntactic features that reveal the influence of language contact with Spanish in this territory. We explore variables such as the choice of relativizer (assuming a higher preference for that in GBR, in agreement with Spanish que, the most frequent relativizer, Brucart, 1999: 490), the use of titles and pseudo-titles preceding proper names (which, as shown by Hundt and Kabatek, 2015, are very frequent in English journalese and extremely infrequent in Spanish), and the frequency of the passive voice (expected to be lower in ICE-GBR), among others. A preliminary analysis of these variables reveals that the influence of Spanish on the variety of English used in the Gibraltarian press, at the morphosyntactic level, is almost non-existent, limited to occasional cases of code-switching between the two varieties. We hypothesize that a possible 94 Alicante Journal of English Studies explanation for this strong exonormative allegiance to British English, at least in press news reports, can be found in a strong editorial pressure to reflect the prestigious parent-variety.

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The influence of register on noun phrase complexity in varieties of English

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Modelling morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a register perspective

Modelling morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a register perspective

The coding of perfect meaning in African, Asian and Caribbean Englishes

Language contact in Gibraltar English: A pilot study with ICE-GBR

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