nglish anguage verseas erspectives and nquiries Vol. 12, No. 2 (2015) Journal Editors: SMILJANA KOMAR and UROŠ MOZETIČ Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani Ljubljana, 2015 ISSN 1581-8918 nglish anguage verseas erspectives and nquiries Vol. 12, No. 2 (2015) Journal Editors: SMILJANA KOMAR and UROŠ MOZETIČ Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani Ljubljana, 2015 Contents Part I: Language Šarolta Godnič Vičič Variation and Change in the grammatical Marking of Stance: The Case of That-Complement Clauses in research articles Variiranje in spremembe slovnične označenosti vrednotenja propozicij: Primer stavčnih struktur z “that” v znanstvenih člankih Smiljana Komar 29 Linguistic Features of Persuasive Communication: The Case of DrtV Short Form Spots Jezikovne značilnosti v prepričevalnem sporazumevanju: Primer kratkih tv oglasnih sporočil z neposrednim odzivom Inger M. Mees, Christina Hoock Osorno 53 Cardiff english: a real time Study of Stability and Change between Childhood and Mid-adulthood Cardifska angleščina: Študija stabilnosti in sprememb med otroštvom in srednjo odraslostjo Marija Perić, Sanja Škifić 79 english Words and Phrases in Croatian: a Small-Scale Study of Language awareness and attitudes Angleške besede in besedne zveze v hrvaščini: Študija jezikovne osveščenosti in odnosa do jezika Frančiška Trobevšek Drobnak 99 Iconicity and Distribution of Complex Verbal Phrases in english Ikoničnost in raba opisnih glagolskih zvez v angleščini Alma Vančura 113 nonverbal elements in War Poems across Cultures: a Case Study of english and Croatian Neverbalne prvine v vojnih pesmih z medkulturnega vidika: Študija primerov v angleščini in hrvaščini Part II: LIterature Mirko Starčević 129 John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement: a Poet of the Church John Henry Newman in Oxfordsko gibanje: Pesnik cerkve Part III: eNgLIsH LaNguage aNd LIterature teaCHINg Agnes Pisanski Peterlin, Lisa Botshon 149 What does the digital student Want? Cross-Cultural Collaboration and Wikis in academic Literacy Kaj hočejo digitalni študenti? Medkulturno sodelovanje in wikiji pri razvijanju akademske pismenosti Katja Težak 161 Creative Thinking and decision-Making Processes in eFL Creative Writing Kreativno mišljenje in procesi odločanja pri ustvarjalnem pisanju v angleščini kot tujem jeziku Irena Vodopija-Krstanović, Maja Brala Vukanović 175 students of today Changing english Language studies of Yesterday Kako današnji študenti spreminjajo včerajšnji študij angleškega jezika Part IV: traNsLatION studIes Primož Jurko 193 evaluative Meaning in translation Vrednotenjski pomen v prevajanju Kristina Kočan Šalamon 211 translating Culture: Contemporary african american Poetry Prevajanje kulture: sodobna afriško ameriška poezija Veronika Rot Gabrovec 225 translators: travellers, Not tourists Prevajalci: Popotniki in ne turisti List of Contributors 241 Part I Language 2015, Vol. 12 (2), 9-28(244) Šarolta Godnič Vičič revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope university of Primorska doi: 10.4312/elope.12.2.9-28 Slovenia uDC: 811.111’42:338.48 Variation and Change in the Grammatical Marking of Stance: The Case of That-Complement Clauses in Research Articles abStraCt Variation in the genre of research articles has been extensively studied across different disciplines and languages; however, diachronic change and intradisciplinary variation in this academic genre have received less attention. Therefore this paper aims to shed light on change and variation in research articles within a multidisciplinary field of research by focusing on the use of that-complement clause constructions which are known to mark stance. The corpus-based study uses tourism studies as an example, and covers the time span from 1995 to 2010. Diachronic change in the use of that-complement clause constructions was found in instances when they are marked by a verb as well as in the kinds of stance meanings conveyed. Significant intradisciplinary variation was also found across the journals. Keywords: research articles; that-complement clause constructions; stance; variation; diachronic change Variiranje in spremembe slovnične označenosti vrednotenja propozicij: Primer stavčnih struktur z “that” v znanstvenih člankih PoVzetek znanstveni članki so kot žanr dobro preučeni po posameznih vedah in v različnih jezikih, vendar raziskave redkeje načenjajo vprašanja diahronega spreminjanja in intradisciplinarnega variiranja tega akademskega žanra. Cilj tega prispevka je razkriti spreminjanje in variiranje znanstvenih člankov v angleškem jeziku na multidisciplinarnem raziskovalnem polju turističnih študij z vidi­ka vrednotenja propozicij s pomočjo stavčne strukture z besedo “that”. korpusna analiza besedil se osredotoča na obdobje med 1995 in 2010. Izsledki raziskave kažejo na diahrono spreminjanje rabe te stavčne strukture vrednotenja v primerih, ko trditve vrednotijo glagoli, pa tudi v po­menih, ki jih vrednotenja izražajo. ugotovljeno je bilo tudi variiranje v rabi stavčne strukture vrednotenja med revijami. Ključne besede: znanstveni članki; stavčne strukture vrednotenja z “that”; vrednotenje; variiranje; diahrono spreminjanje Variation and Change in the Grammatical Marking of Stance: The Case of That-Complement Clauses in Research Articles1 1 Introduction This paper deals with intradisciplinary variation and diachronic change in the use of that-complement clauses. Such clauses are known to provide a rich source of stance expressions in research articles (RAs). Stance has been identified as one of the most important aspects of academic discourse and numerous studies have investigated it across various disciplines, focusing on hedging and boosting devices (Hyland 1996, 1998), adverbials (biber and Finegan 1988), reporting clauses (Charles 2006), complement clauses (biber 1999, 2004; Hyland and Tse 2005a, 2005b; Charles 2007), and highlighting the many ways in which these linguistic expressions allow writers to convey their personal feelings and assessments. This study is part of a larger corpus-based and corpus-driven exploration of variation and recent change in RAs of a rapidly evolving multidisciplinary research field – tourism studies – over a time span of 15 years. The word that has been preliminarily identified as one of the key grammatical words in the tourism RA corpus when compared to the british National Corpus, with a log likelihood (LL) value of 55.36 (p<0.0000000001); its frequency increased significantly between 1995 and 2005 (LL 85.33). The number of 2-, 3- and 4- word clusters including that which were used at least 5 times in the individual yearly tourism studies subcorpora increased as well.2 Clusters with the word that were thus used significantly less often in 1995 than in more recent years (LL values ranged from 76.74 to 306.33), which seems to suggest that the academic community is, increasingly, using some of the phraseology with that more often than before. Finally, the most frequent left collocates included suggest, indicate, show, argue, the fact, which all govern that-complement clause constructions that are typical stance expressions in RAs. Therefore it seemed reasonable to expect that the analysis of that-complement clauses would reveal relevant findings about variation and change in the genre of RAs in the field of tourism studies. The following review of the literature will provide a short overview of research on variation and change in the genre of RAs, stance in RAs, and tourism studies as a field of scholarly inquiry. In the next section, the materials and methods used in the study will be outlined, followed by the presentation of the results of the corpus-based analysis of that-complement clause constructions. In the final part of this paper, the findings will be discussed together with their contribution to our understanding of intradisciplinary variation and diachronic change in RAs and their implications for further research. 2 Literature Review 2.1 Variation and Change in RAs Academic genres, especially the genre of RAs, have been extensively explored over the past four decades or so. While the early studies focused mainly on the typical linguistic features 1 The article is based on the author’s PhD thesis project at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. 2 That was always the last word in these clusters. and rhetorical structures of research articles or their parts in a single discipline or a range of undifferentiated disciplines (see Swales 1990 for an overview), later studies have been increasingly focusing on rhetorical organisations (Paltridge 1997; Ozturk 2007; Lin and Evans 2012) and the linguistic realisations of discoursal features that display specificity of individual disciplines (gledhill 2000; Hyland 2000, 2008; Hyland and Tse 2005a, 2005b; Hu and Cao 2015). This has placed variation across disciplines at the heart of linguistic research. Since genres are perceived as communicative events that serve particular communicative purposes shared and recognised by members of discourse communities (Swales 1990), variation in the genre of RAs is generally attributed to the values, epistemology and research practices as well as varying communicative purposes of individual discourse communities (Hyland 2000; Hyland, 2005; Samraj 2005; Ozturk 2007; Mcgrath and Kuteeva, 2012). However, connecting variation in linguistic and discourse features of RAs with variation in meaning at the level of epistemology is not possible without an understanding of the contexts in which the texts were created and used. This is probably why studies of academic literacies which aim to provide insight into the contexts of academic communication (Harwood 2009; Lillis et al. 2010; Jarc and godnič Vičič 2012; Mcgrath 2014) have recently gained in importance. Yet, variation in the genre of RAs does not only occur across disciplinary divides, but also within individual disciplines. Although intradisciplinary variation is rarely the object of linguistic inquiry, research has nevertheless shown that it is affected by authors’ various linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Salager-Meyer et al. 2003; Peterlin Pisanski 2005; bondi 2009; Mur Duenas 2010; Lorés Sanz 2011), the existence of different research paradigms within a discipline (gray 2013; godnič Vičič and Jarc 2015), the types of research paper written (Harwood 2009), specificities of subdisciplines (Samraj 2005; Maswanaa et al. 2015) and the degree to which they are established within the discipline (Ozturk 2007), multidisciplinarity, not to mention interdisciplinarity in the field of study (Samraj 2005; godnič Vičič 2013, 2015; Tessuto 2014) and the niches occupied by individual journals (godnič Vičič 2013; godnič Vičič and Jarc 2015). Diachronic change in the genre of RAs has been addressed even less often. Halliday (1988) and bazerman (1988) were among the first to trace the origins of this genre – the former by exploring the diachronic evolution of scientific language and the latter by investigating scientists’ quest for objectivity and accountability in writing and the changing formats of research articles. Later studies (Atkinson 1992; Salager-Meyer1999; Taavitsainen and Pahta 2000) also revealed the shift in the history of scientific discourse from author-centred to object-centred narratives that are highly informational and abstract. The stylistic changes in the genre have been attributed to the increasingly competitive nature of discourse communities (Salager-Meyer 1999; godnič Vičič 2013), globalisation processes (Salager-Meyer et al. 2003), changes in writing, publishing and reading practices (Solaci and Pereira 2004; Li and ge 2009; godnič Vičič 2013), as well as the development of information technologies and online environments (Li and ge 2009; Pérez-Llantada 2013; godnič Vičič 2013). 2.2 Stance in RAs The notion of science as value-free, factual, objective and impersonal has long been challenged. Assessments of past research, interpretations of evidence as well as the need to convince readers (i.e., members of the writer’s discourse community) of the value of one’s assessments are all part and parcel of academic writing and cannot be overlooked. Studies focusing on these aspects have greatly contributed to the evolution of the concept of stance. Actually, researchers have approached it from different angles almost simultaneously, each building on different earlier works and using different terms and theoretical frameworks to explain the same phenomenon.3 However, these terms that range from stance (biber and Finnegan 1988), hedging and boosting (Hyland 1996, 1998) to appraisal (Martin 2000; Martin and White 2005) and evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000), all distinguish meanings that “(a) indicate a speaker/writer’s personal attitudes, emotions and assessments, and (b) comment on the epistemic status of an entity or, more commonly, a proposition containing a piece of information” (gray and biber 2012, 19). These two meanings are not equally important in all genres: stance expressions vary to some degree from genre to genre not only in their frequencies (they are far more frequent in spoken language than in RAs) but also in their preferred lexical realisations and their functions (biber et al. 1999, biber 2006). The linguistic realisation of stance in English ranges from grammatical to lexical, while in speech, paralinguistic features can also express stance-related meanings (biber et al. 1999). grammatical markings of stance include modal and semi-modal verbs, stance adverbials, complement clause constructions (that- and to-complement clauses) and stance noun + prepositional phrase constructions (biber et al. 1999). While the first two groups have been explored quite extensively (e.g., biber and Finegan 1988; Hyland 1996, 1998), researchers’ interest in the latter two has arisen more recently. That-complement clause constructions,4 which are the focus of this study, often mark the main argument, summarize the purpose of the research, form an assessment of the validity of information presented and comment on the writer’s own work (Hyland and Tse 2005b). They do so by allowing writers to thematize attitudinal meanings and present the proposition as new information (Hyland and Tse 2005a). The evaluation of the proposition can be attributed to humans (the writer or other researchers), an abstract entity (e.g., results) or to a concealed source (Charles 2003, 2006, 2007; Hyland and Tse 2005a, 2005b) (e.g., “It is well known that Antalya is the most globally-connected and dense tourism area of Turkey.”). That-complement clause constructions comprise an expression of stance and a proposition which is marked by that stance. For example, if we compare “tourist behavior is different from regular consumer behavior in several ways” with “gitelson and Crompton (1984) claim that tourist behavior is different from regular consumer behavior in several ways”, we can see that the former statement is presented as a fact while the second, which is marked by the communication verb claim, is attributed to gitelson and Crompton, which allows the writer to avoid taking responsibility for the proposition’s truth value. The choice of the verb in this construction is meaningful in itself: by choosing a particular reporting verb, the writer chooses to convey a particular attitude or assessment. That-complement clauses can be marked by different categories of verbs: communication (e.g., argue, reveal, suggest), attitudinal (e.g., ensure, expect, feel) and epistemic, i.e., factive (e.g., find, note, show) and likelihood verbs (e.g., assume, believe, indicate) (biber 2004, 2006). They can also be governed by nouns and adjectives: 3 See Hunston and Thompson (2000) and Hyland and guinda (2012) for an oveview. 4 Hyland and Tse (2005a) call them “evaluative that-structures”. “Place dependence is derived from a transactional view that suggests people evaluate places against alternatives.” “Hence, it is not surprising that public transport supply is not affected by the average prices of a passenger per km.” That-complement clauses can be governed by communication nouns (e.g., comment, proposal, report), attitudinal (e.g., fear, reason, view) and epistemic nouns – i.e., factive (e.g., conclusion, fact, result), and likelihood nouns (e.g., expectation, idea, perception). The adjectives controlling that-complement clauses are attitudinal (e.g., aware, concerned, surprising), evaluative (e.g. essential, noteworthy) and epistemic adjectives (e.g., clear, likely, possible) (biber 2004, 2006).5 Research has been consistent in that that-complement clauses governed by verbs are most frequent in RAs while those governed by nouns and adjectives are far less common (biber 1999, 2004, 2006; biber et al. 1999; Hyland and Tse 2005a, 2005b). There is also agreement that there is variation in the frequencies of individual grammatical markings (i.e., verbs, nouns, adjectives) of stance across disciplines and genres (biber 1999, 2004, 2006; biber et al. 1999; Hyland and Tse 2005a, 2005b; Charles 2007; gray and biber 2012) and that these change in time (biber 2004). The complementizer that is almost always retained in RAs (biber 1999; Hyland and Tse 2005a), although it is frequently omitted in spoken language. Finally, that-complement clauses governed by nouns are most typical of written academic genres but largely absent from spoken language (even from spoken academic genres (biber 2006)). 2.3 Tourism Studies Tourism is perceived by tourism professionals as a business activity that can bring economic benefits to countries around the world, and by academics as an object of serious scholarly inquiry. Tourism studies, as academics often call it, is a dynamic multidisciplinary research field that has been expanding and evolving from the 1960s onward, buttressed by sociology, geography, economics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, etc., each bringing their theories, paradigms, methodologies and languages into the study, extending existing concepts from their original fields to the field of tourism studies (Tribe 2010). While some perceive this field as an emerging new discipline (Leiper 2000), others claim it is but a field of studies in which knowledge is created through multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and extradisciplinary approaches (Tribe 2004, 2010). The status of tourism studies remains a contested issue of great importance to the academic community (Tribe 1997, 2010; Franklin and Crang 2001; Pritchard et al. 2011; Tribe et al. 2015). Research in the field has either a strong business focus (e.g., management, marketing) or deals with non-business issues altogether (Tribe 2004, 2010). The different traditions and schools of thought coexist, and research focuses on a wide range of themes and uses a broad range of methodological approaches. While quantitative research approaches prevailed in the beginning, qualitative methodologies started to gain a stronger footing in the late 1990s. The academic community is rather diverse and largely employed at universities. While universities can stimulate research, they can also adversely affect it with organisational, time and funding constraints as well as requirements to publish in top-tier journals (Tribe 2010). Research is too In biber (2004) and biber (2006), the classification of verbs, nouns and adjectives that govern that-complement constructions differ slightly in category names. LANgUAgE often driven by tourism industry needs (Franklin and Crang 2001); however, as tourism research can be relatively inexpensive, the academic community can find their ways to academic freedom (Tribe 2010). As regards membership, the community has a long way to go in terms of gender balance (Aitchison 2001). Furthermore, while the community is multinational, the great majority of the 100+ scholarly journals in the field is published in English. About 80% of tourism studies journals are published in the USA, UK, Canada or Australia (Cheng et al. 2011). It comes as no surprise, therefore, that English is the ‘lingua franca’ of the field and that research published in other languages mostly goes unnoticed (Dann 2011). The range of topics explored by tourism research has widened since the 1970s. However, recently-established journals are increasingly specialised compared to earlier ones (Cheng et al. 2011). Annals of Tourism Studies was the first journal included in Thomson Reuters’ Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), in 1982, while others were slow to join. A special category called “Hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism” was created within SSCI in 2008, with only eleven tourism journals in it at present (Yuan et al. 2014).6 The most prominent among these are Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Sustainable Tourism and Journal of Travel Research as assessed by SSCI impact factor and by quality ratings of scholars themselves (Pechlaner et al. 2004; McKertcher et al. 2006; Yuan et al. 2015). 3 Materials, Methods and Tools Variation and change in the use of that-complement clause constructions to mark stance in RAs is explored using a corpus and a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis (McEnery et al. 2006). The material for the Tourism Studies Corpus was compiled based on journal quality and prominence in the tourism studies discourse community as well as the time of publication. The corpus thus comprises RAs from the following journals: Annals of Tourism Research (ATR), Journal of Sustainable Tourism (JST), Journal of Travel Research (JTR) and Tourism Management (TM) (Table 1). Table 1. Details of the journals. Although all four journals publish papers dealing with topics such as tourism marketing and management (Yuan et al. 2015), they manage to occupy distinct niches within the field of tourism studies that are recognized by experienced scholars. Thus ATR is the only journal that targets the 6 The category includes more journals; however, scholars agree that tourism studies are far too different from hospitality, leisure and sport to be included in the same group. As a result, Jamal et al. (2008) suggest that SSCI’s ratings of journals do not reflect tourism journals’ relevance correctly. 14 Šarolta godnič Vičič Variation and Change in the Grammatical Marking of Stance: The Case of That-Complement ... academic community alone, while the remaining journals’ intended audiences include academics, practitioners and educators alike, which reflects the emphasis that the academic community places on practical relevance of research. ATR is also a distinct social sciences journal with a multidisciplinary approach to tourism research. TM and JTR publish papers with a stronger business orientation, the former covering a more diverse range of topics than the latter. JST is a more recent and highly specialized journal publishing research on the topic of sustainable tourism development only. It welcomes papers with economic, social, organisational, environmental as well as interdisciplinary approaches. Finally, ATR and TM are both published by the same publisher, Elsevier. JST was published by Channel View Publications until 2008, when Taylor and Francis (Routledge) bought it, continuing its publication. This coincided with the journal’s inclusion in SSCI. JTR is supported by the Travel and Tourism Research Association and published by Sage. The corpus includes yearly volumes of RAs from the four journals at five-year intervals from 1995 till 2010. The corpus comprises 723 RAs and about 4.5 million words in all (Table 2). The corpus was split into smaller subcorpora when needed for the analysis of variation and change in the use of that-complement clause constructions across the journals and time periods. Table 2. Details of the tourism studies corpus. biber’s (2004) extensive list of stance words7 was used for the analysis. This list of stance words is not perfect, as biber himself acknowledges (gray and biber 2012). However, expanding it with other stance expressions is difficult as these do not tend to be used in explicit lexico-grammatical patterns which would allow large-scale analysis (gray and biber 2012). The list’s expansion, therefore, remains beyond the scope of this paper. Following biber (1999) and Hyland and Tse (2005a), cases where the complementizer that is omitted were disregarded. WordSmith Tools 5 (Scott 2008) was used to retrieve frequencies of words and clusters with that, to compare words across time and journals and inspect concordances. Clusters of words with that and individual categories of stance meanings were compared with the Online log likelihood calculator of Lancaster University (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html). There are some differences in the way log likelihood is calculated by WordSmith Tools 5 and University Lancaster’s Online log likelihood calculator; however, at a p-value threshold of 0.001, these seem of minor importance. 4 Findings 4.1 Diachronic Change in the Use of That-Complement Clause Constructions That-complement clauses governed by verbs, nouns and adjectives were significantly less frequent Only that part of the list which covers the verbs, nouns and adjectives which govern that-complement clauses was used for the analysis. LANgUAgE in 1995 than in 2000, 2005 or 2010 (LL 33.84, 67.93 and 23.04, respectively).8 The average number of these stance expressions per paper has increased from 25 in 1995 to 33 in 2000 and 37 in 2005, while decreasing slightly in 2010 to 36. This drop (expressed in actual frequencies of that-complement clauses), however, was statistically relevant (LL 19.68). As Figure 1 shows, the change was not equal across the groups of grammatical words that govern that-complement stance expressions. In line with other research (biber 1999, 2004, 2006; biber et al. 1999; Hyland and Tse 2005a, 2005b), the verb group was the most frequent and the adjective group the least. The overall increase in the use of that-complement clauses to express stance is exclusively due to the increase in complement clauses governed by verbs (the comparison of the 1995 subcorpus with the 2000 subcorpus produced LL 44.28, the comparison to the 2005 subcorpus LL 78.15, and the comparison to the 2010 subcorpus LL 46.11). The instances of that-complement clause constructions governed by nouns and adjectives decreased between 1995 and 2010, but this change was not statistically significant. The fall in the frequency of that-complement clauses governed by nouns between 2005 and 2010 was, however, statistically relevant (LL 17.48). Since stance expressions are also categorized along the cline from epistemic (i.e., expressing certainty and likelihood), communication (style of speaking/writing) to attitudinal meanings, these three categories of stance meanings were also explored separately. While the use of verbs, nouns and adjectives expressing attitudinal meanings decreased slightly between 1995 and 2010, their drop between 2005 and 2010 was distinct and statistically relevant (LL 20.39) (Figure 2). While the increase in the frequencies of that-complement clauses controlled by verbs, nouns and adjectives with epistemic meanings was statistically relevant only when the 1995 and 2000 subcorpora were compared to the 2005 subcorpus (LL 28.00 and 13.26, respectively), the increase in the use of that-complement clause constructions with a communication meaning was statistically relevant when 1995 was compared to 2000, 2005 and 2010 (LL was 44.77, 44.08 and 31.80, respectively). The decrease in the frequency of this stance meaning between 2005 and 2010 is not relevant. Figure 1. Frequencies of stance verbs, nouns and adjectives per 1,000,000 words. 8 The higher the value of LL is, the less likely it is that the result is due to chance. The threshold value of p < 0.001, which is used in this study, indicates that at the critical value of 10.83 there is 99.9% confidence that the difference is significant and not due to chance fluctuation. 16 Šarolta godnič Vičič Variation and Change in the Grammatical Marking of Stance: The Case of That-Complement ... Figure 2. Frequencies of that-complement clause constructions according to meaning expressed per 1,000,000 words. A closer look at the nouns and verbs from the communication meaning group (Figures 3 and 4) reveals that the increase in the use of communication meanings is entirely due to the verbs: firstly, because communication nouns represent a tiny fraction of the total number of nouns controlling that-complement clauses, and, secondly, the number of communication nouns is relatively stable while the number of communication verbs has increased significantly in the 2000 subcorpus (LL 44.94) and remained significantly higher in both 2005 and 2010 (LL 32.43). In the attitudinal meaning group, both attitudinal verbs and attitudinal nouns exhibited similar trends in change over the years; however, the change was relevant only in attitudinal verbs – i.e., the fall in the frequencies of attitudinal verbs between 2005 and 2010 (LL 13.17). Whereas the number of factive nouns in the epistemic meaning group dropped after 2005, the number of factive verbs showed a steady increase throughout the period studied – a statistically relevant increase between Figure 3. Frequencies of nouns controlling that-complement clause constructions by meaning per 1,000,000 words. Figure 4. Frequencies of verbs controlling that-complement clause constructions by meaning per 1,000,000 words. 1995 and 2010 (LL 30.32). The frequency of likelihood verbs in this group increased until 2005 (the difference is relevant: LL is 16.82) and then fell (LL 11.25). The frequency of likelihood nouns, on the other hand, fluctuated, but the differences were not statistically relevant. All in all, the most relevant changes in the use of that-complement clause construction seems to be related to the use of verbs in this stance device. Interestingly, none of the individual nouns or adjectives that can mark that-complement clauses showed any relevant increase or decrease in the period studied. As regards the individual verbs, three groups were identified: verbs with no relevant change in frequencies (the great majority of verbs were in this group), verbs whose frequency increased between 1995 and 2000 (the difference was statistically relevant) and then dropped by 2010, such as state, assume and indicate, and verbs whose frequency increased between 1995 and 2005 and went on increasing in 2010 as well, such as contend, reveal, demonstrate, find and show. A detailed analysis of their meanings and textual functions will have to be left for future research. 4.2 Variation and Change in the Use of that-Complement Clause Constructions across the Journals Variation and change in the use of that-complement clauses to mark stance across the tourism journals was studied only in instances where the complement clause was controlled by a verb. The frequencies of nouns and adjectives controlling this stance device were so low (e.g., in 1995, the number of communication nouns in JST and JTR was 0 and 1, respectively) that it would be difficult to draw meaningful conclusions. As the comparisons between the 1995 and 2005 subcorpora showed the most relevant results so far, the verbs in the 1995 subcorpora of the individual journals were compared only to the 2005 subcorpora. The overall frequencies of verbs controlling that-complement clauses increased in all four journals between 1995 and 2005 (Figure 5). While the change was only slight in the two journals with the highest number of that-complement clause constructions – JST and JTR – the increase in the use of this stance device was statistically relevant in ATR and TM (LL 48.49 and 55.69, respectively). Figure 5. Overall frequencies of that-complement clause constructions governed by stance verbs in 1995 and 2005 per 1,000,000 words. A closer look at the groups of stance meanings conveyed by these verbs reveals a slightly different view on these changes (Figure 6). There was a slight downward trend in the use of attitudinal verbs controlling that-complements in JST and JTR as well as in the use of epistemic verbs in JTR. All the remaining categories of stance verbs in these two journals show an upward trend, as do all categories of stance verbs in ATR and TM. Nevertheless, statistically relevant change was found only in that-complement clauses governed by epistemic and communication verbs in ATR (LL 18.87 and 23.02, respectively) and TM (LL 34.98 and 23.98, respectively). 9 Figure 6. Variation and change in that-complement clause constructions governed by verbs across journals per 1,000,000 words.9 Ep – epistemic; Co – communication; At – attitudinal The analysis of frequencies of individual verbs in the communication and epistemic categories of stance verbs in ATR and TM identified two communication verbs whose frequencies changed significantly in ATR – i.e., argue and reveal (LL 11.43 and 20.26, respectively); a communication verb – i.e., reveal (LL 13.30); and three epistemic verbs in TM – i.e., find (LL 14.12), show (LL 28.46) and indicate (LL 16.72). These were further studied in detail in the contexts of the individual journals. Individual functions or categories of use of these verbs, however, have not yet shown statistically relevant changes. Consequently, the following comparisons are descriptive only. In ATR, it seems that the number of authors using that-complements governed by argue is increasing (55% in 1995 and 78% in 2005). This verb is mainly used in the corpora either to comment on the writer’s own work, e.g., “It is argued here that a feminist approach to the study of tourism is equally appropriate.” (ATR 1995) or the work of other researchers, e.g., “In a seminal work on this topic, boorstin (1992) argued that contemporary Americans are unable to experience reality, but that they thrive on ‘pseudo-events,’ i.e., on images or illusions that veil the real world.” (ATR 1995) Such examples can be found in all RA sections. This construction allows writers to build their arguments especially when they are developing their theoretical frameworks as in the examples above. The construction also allows writers to interpret evidence from their data or draw conclusions based on evidence, e.g., “Returning to the weak correlations between representations and perceptions, it is argued that this is explained by the homogeneity of contemporary media productions about Tibet in popular culture.” (ATR 2005) About half of the instances of the propositions in these stance constructions is clearly attributed to other researchers in both 1995 and 2005. About a quarter of instances of this stance device in both subcorpora is used with an it-extraposition, which puts the proposition in focus and gives it an objective appearance (Charles 2006), regardless of whether it is attributed to the writer or to someone else; i.e., “It is argued here that Jafari’s framework is inadequate for the 21st century because it fails to consider ethics and the concept of sustainable development.” (ATR 2005) “It has been argued that regulating the inflow and taxing tourists may remedy the problem (bird 1992; Clarke and Ng 1993; Hughes 1981).” (ATR 2005) That-complement clauses governed by the verb reveal are most frequent in the results section in both journals and in both time frames. The ways in which that-complement clauses controlled by reveal are used in the two journals’ corpora seem similar. They can nevertheless be found in the other sections of the RA too – mainly attributing propositions to some evidence: results, findings, data, studies, analysis and the like; e.g., “The study revealed that American representations of India were embedded with colonial discourse, as the country was portrayed as timeless and primitive.” (ATR 2005) Again, the instances of this stance construction are so few in the 1995 subcorpora that it is not possible to draw significant conclusions regarding diachronic change in the way the construction is used. The epistemic verbs which control that-complement clause constructions and showed significant increase in TM between 1995 and 2005 – i.e., find, indicate and show – are most often used in the results section of RAs. However, they can also be used in other parts of RAs, which is most evident in the larger 2005 subcorpus. That-complement clauses controlled by the verb find are most frequently used in literature reviews and the results sections of RAs. both are equally frequent in the 1995 subcorpus. However, the 2005 subcorpus shows that the number of instances of this stance device is increasing in the literature review – mainly to report the findings of other researchers, i.e., “Similarly, Kippendorf (1987) found that tourists are motivated by ‘going away from rather than going toward something’ and that tourist motivation is self oriented.” (TM 2005) However, instances of that-complement clauses marked with find can also attribute the propositions to the writer, especially following it-extrapositions, e.g., “It was found that each destination has unique knowledge needs and, therefore, the knowledge map structure should be built to meet the needs and preferences of destination knowledge users.” (TM 2005) Obviously, this is one of the ways in which writers can create an appearance of objectivity when reporting their own findings. Although that-complements controlled by indicate can be found in all parts of the RA, they are by far most frequent in the results sections. The propositions in the complement clauses are attributed most often to some research evidence of the writer such as results/findings, analysis, study and respondents, e.g., “The results indicate that tourists to the balearics are not satisfied with the prices of complementary holiday services and the germans, above all, are critical of the urban and environmental setting.” (TM 2005) Interestingly, this stance construction is also used to attribute propositions to other researchers in the 2005 subcorpus but not in that of 1995, i.e., “bartos (1982) indicated that women who were employed were more likely to participate in the pleasure vacation decision-making process than women who did not work outside of their home.” Finally, the verb show governs that-complement clauses when research evidence is the evaluative source, too, e.g., “The results showed that 74.9% of total visitors’ expenditures (US$43,689) were spent outside Carbondale, while 25.1% were spent locally.” (TM 2005) It comes as no surprise then that the most frequent left collocates of this stance verb are research, results, findings, analysis, table #, 10 and figure #. # stands for number. While that-complement clauses controlled by show can be found in various parts of the RA, they are most frequent in the results section. The propositions can be attributed to the writer’s own research, findings by other researchers and to other sources of data. In the 2005 TM subcorpus, the number of propositions attributed to the writer’s own research increased quite substantially. The number of propositions attributed to other researchers has risen, too. They were generally unnamed in the 1995 TM subcorpus (e.g., “A number of other studies have shown that” or “Research has shown that...”) but attributed to specific researchers and their publications in the 2005 subcorpus. 5 Discussion and Conclusion The aim of this study was to explore variation and recent diachronic change in the genre of RAs within a multidisciplinary field of research. Since the word that had been recognized as a salient word in the tourism studies RA corpus and its most frequent collocates included stance verbs and nouns, that-complement clause constructions were selected for further analysis. This stance device is believed to be highly relevant for academic discourse (biber 1999, 2004; Hyland and Tse 2005a, 2005b). Some of the changes in the tourism studies academic community may have affected the ways in which stance expressions are used in RAs. First of all, the circumstances in which researchers in the field of tourism studies work are increasingly challenging and competitive. The formation of the “Hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism” category in SSCI in 2008 not only affected the status of the journals newly included in this index category, but also the impact factors of those that had been in SSCI prior to 2008 – ATR and TM. Publishing opportunities in top-tier journals increased for the community as a result. Changes were also found in the number of RAs published per journal volume, increasing between 1995 and 2010 in all four journals, as did the average number of words per RA. While the increase in the number of RAs per volume was small in JTR and ATR, it was much more substantial in TM from 2005 onward and in JST in 2010. The average length of the articles increased most in the business oriented journals – i.e., JTR and TM – and the least in the social sciences journal – ATR. As it is the editorial boards that determine the maximum length of RAs, just like the number of issues published per year, we can conclude that it is likely that the changes in RA length and number of RAs published were due to editorial decisions made in increasingly competitive circumstances. With higher impact factors and enhanced visibility of the journals, the number of manuscripts submitted for publication probably increased.11 As a result, editorial boards could select RAs for publication based on more stringent criteria. Stance may be an important aspect of academic discourse but it is also relatively infrequent, as gray and biber (2012) suggested. Nevertheless, diachronic change in the use of that-complement clause constructions as well as variation in their use among the journals were both confirmed. While the frequency of this stance device increased significantly between 1995 and 2010, a detailed analysis showed that this change was entirely due to the significantly higher frequencies of that-complement clauses marked by verbs. The frequencies of that-complement clauses marked by nouns and adjectives did not show any significant change until 2005, when their frequencies decreased significantly. This finding is dissimilar to findings by biber (2004) 11 The number of submissions and acceptance rates are most often treated as internal quality control benchmarks; therefore, journals do not publish them on their website. 22 Šarolta godnič Vičič Variation and Change in the Grammatical Marking of Stance: The Case of That-Complement ... for medical scholarly discourse for the time before 1990. The discrepancy in the results may be attributed to a couple of factors. Firstly, there may be differences in the ways that that-complement clause constructions are used in the two fields. Secondly, the ARCHER corpus used by biber (2004) comprises only 10 medical RAs for each 50-year period, which is probably sufficiently large and reliable when general trends are studied but less so when the focus is on details, as in this study. Change was also identified in the individual meaning categories of that-complement clause constructions. Significant increase in the use of stance expressions with an epistemic meaning was found between 1995 and 2005 as well as a significant and steady increase in the use of stance expressions with a communication meaning throughout the period studied. The increased use of epistemic stance expressions is in line with biber’s (2004) findings. When types of grammatical words controlling that-complement clauses within individual groups of stance meanings were studied separately, only the use of verbs with communication, likelihood and factive meanings increased significantly. The analysis of the frequencies of individual words within the meaning groups revealed that the great majority of words in biber’s list of words controlling that-complements did not show any relevant change. The frequencies of the few that did either went on increasing throughout the time frame studied or increased until 2005 and then dropped. The big drop in the number of instances of that-complement clause constructions that took place between 2005 and 2010 affected all categories of word types marking that-complement clauses and stance meanings. However, a closer look at the stance meaning groups revealed that the decrease was significant in that-complement clause constructions with attitudinal meanings, as well as that-complement clauses marked by nouns and likelihood verbs. What circumstances caused this significant downturn is difficult to determine. At this moment we can only suspect that it may be somehow connected with the status changes of tourism journals in 2008. If so, the significantly more frequent use of that-complement clauses marked by communication and factive verbs suggests that, more frequently than before, the authors of the RAs that withstood the scrutiny of peer-review in 2010 used these two particular stance constructions to elaborate on the knowledge claims and findings of their community as well as their own. Attitudinal and likelihood that-complement clause constructions were obviously less valued by the disciplinary gatekeepers. Significant variation was detected among the journals. ATR and TM were identified as the journals in which the overall frequencies of that-complement clauses significantly increased. Furthermore, it is in these two journals only that the number of epistemic and communication verbs marking that-complement clauses rose significantly. both journals are published by Elsevier and have been included in SSCI the longest. However, they also operate in different topical niches: one has a theoretical and multidisciplinary focus while the other has an applicative and business focus. It seems that the journals’ publishing and editorial practices were more influential than the topical niches the journals occupy. The strength of publishing practices has also been recognized by other researchers (Solaci and Pereira 2004; biber 2005; Li and ge 2009). The analysis of the use of individual epistemic and communication verbs that were significantly higher in the two journals between 1995 and 2005 revealed that change occurred most often in the results and literature review sections of the RAs. Although these changes are not statistically relevant on the levels of individual sections, they seem to confirm that that-complement clause constructions play important roles when shared knowledge, research findings, and their interpretations are discussed. The increased use of factive verbs in TM is in line with Hyland and Tse’s (2005a) finding that these verbs are more frequent in business studies than in social sciences. Last but not least, a word or two about the corpus. The time frame used to study change in the use of stance expressions was felt to be too short. Significant change seems to happen slowly even in rapidly evolving fields of study. What is more, when linguistic phenomena are studied that are not very frequent, significant change is even more difficult to determine. Nevertheless, dividing the corpus into subcorpora based on the sources of RAs appears to be a good decision. Variation among journals is something scholars take for granted when they write RAs. This should be recognized when corpora are designed. Corpora have to allow for reliable cross journal comparisons when discourse within a discipline is studied. All in all, we can establish that the increased use of communication and epistemic stance expressions implies that knowledge is probably negotiated more often in RAs than it was before. The communication verbs marking that-complement clauses allow writers to present their own propositions and the propositions of other researchers with different degrees of support for their truth value while the epistemic verbs allow writers to ground findings in research practices and lend them greater credibility. However, as suggested above, connecting these findings with the realities of the academic community remains rather difficult. The writing and publishing practices of the community and the editorial practices of journals, which may all affect writers’ stylistic choices, remain an under-researched topic. This study alone cannot provide a full account of change and variation in the use of stance in tourism studies RAs. Future studies would have to address the remaining types of stance expressions if we are to gain a more thorough understanding of how stance changes over time in RAs and how it varies within individual disciplines or research fields. Finally, further research on publishing and writing practices of scholars engaged in tourism studies would also be needed if changes in linguistic expression identified by research were to be grounded in actual scholarly practices in the field. Acknowledgement This study is funded by the “Innovative scheme for the co-financing of PhD studies to promote social challenges – generation 2012” of the EU Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund. References Aitchison, Cara. 2001. “gender and Leisure Research: The ‘Codification of Knowledge’.” Leisure Sciences 23 (1): 1–19. doi:10.1080/01490400150502216. bazerman, Charles. 1998. “Emerging Perspectives on the Many Dimensions of Scientific Discourse.” In Reading Science, edited by James Martin in Robert Veel, 15–30. 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This paper presents the findings of the structural and the linguistic analyses of three English DRTV short form spots as seen on Highstreet TV. The emphasis is on the verbal strategies used by advertisers to get the consumers’ attention, develop their interest and desire to own the product and to convince them to purchase it. These strategies include different lexical, syntactic and prosodic features. The structural analysis focuses mainly on non-verbal strategies of broadcasting advertisements whose purpose is to inspire interest and credibility in potential consumers. Keywords: direct response television (DRTV) short form spots; AIDA model; persuasive communication; lexical complexity; syntactic complexity; prosody; Coh-Metrix; VocabProfile Jezikovne značilnosti v prepričevalnem sporazumevanju: Primer kratkih tv oglasnih sporočil z neposrednim odzivom POVZETEK Za televizijske oglase z neposrednim odzivom je značilen poseben slog govorne izvedbe, katere glavna naloga je povečati vrednost in prodajo oglaševanim izdelkom. V tem članku so predstavljene ugotovitve strukturne in jezikovne analize treh angleških kratkih reklam z neposrednim odzivom, ki so bile predvajane na angleškem televizijskem kanalu Highstreet TV. Poudarek je na verbalnih strategijah, ki jih oglaševalci uporabljajo, da pridobijo pozornost potrošnikov, pri njih razvijejo zanimanje in željo imeti oglaševani izdelek in jih prepričajo, da ga tudi kupijo. Verbalne strategije zajemajo besedišče, skladnjo in intonacijo. Strukturna analiza pa se osredinja na neverbalne strategije televizijskega oglaševanja, katerih cilj je prebuditi zanimanje in zaupanje v oglaševani izdelek. Ključne besede: kratki oglasi z neposrednim odzivom; model AIDA; prepričevalno sporazumevanje; leksikalna kompleksnost; skladenjska kompleksnost; prozodija; Coh-Metrix; VocabProfile Linguistic Features of Persuasive Communication: The Case of DRTV Short Form Spots 1 Introduction Advertising is a big industry within which television advertisements represent only one form of marketing communication. Although producing a television commercial is costly and time consuming, it is also one of the most effective ways to introduce a product and to convince the audience to buy it. A special type of television advertising is commercials with a direct response, also known as commercials for on-line shopping or shopping from the armchair. Direct response television (DRTV) commercials fall into two categories: infomercials and short form spots. The former are usually 30 or even 60 minutes long, whereas the latter are from 60 to 120 seconds in length. DRTV infomercials in many ways resemble documentary films, are often made to advertise more complex products which require a more detailed explanation, and contain numerous testimonials from experts or celebrities. DRTV short form spots, on the other hand, are brief messages about less complex products, can be easily understood and can achieve an immediate response from the viewers. In many DRTV infomercial campaigns for high-value products, the advertisers also produce a short form spot from its longer infomercial to be broadcast more frequently during the day so that the viewers are constantly reminded of the product (see HawthornDirect n.d.). Regardless of the format, both types of DRTV commercials have one and the same purpose: to boost the product’s value and sale. The guiding principal to meet this goal is the AIDA model whose authorship is attributed to E. St. Elmo Lewis, the American advertising and sales pioneer from the late 19 century (see Communication Theory n.d.). AIDA is an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. A commercial should capture consumers’ attention, create their interest, convince them that they desire the product to satisfy their needs and motivate them to action, to buy the product. Other important strategies include building credibility by expert testimonials, enhancing the value by offering more than the expected and playing on consumers’ emotions and sensory systems by interplay of different linguistic components, music, visual effects and pace of delivery. Advertisers make great efforts to ensure that they meet all the strategic requirements to persuade viewers to buy. The aim of this paper is to analyse verbal and non-verbal components of persuasive communication in DRTV commercials, in particular DRTV short form spots. We believe that producers of DRTV short form spots need to make use of all possible means of communication in order to meet the criteria of the AIDA model. Our analysis will focus mainly on syntactic, lexical and prosodic features of verbal deliveries of the three DRTV short form spots. We expect that specific syntactic structures emphasised by means of marked intonation will be used to capture the viewers’ attention and develop their interest in the advertised products. Due to the shortness of the DRTV short form spots, the producers of these advertisements will also use other, non-verbal strategies to meet the requirements of the AIDA model, such as black and white video clips, as well as written on-screen captions of the main benefits of the products. In Section 2 we present an overview of relevant previous research in the field of persuasive communication which will also serve as the basis for our research questions. Section 3 is dedicated to the structural and linguistic analyses of three DRTV short form spots. In Section 4 we discuss the results and implications for future research. 2 Theoretical Overview and Research Questions 2.1 Theoretical Overview Analysis of persuasive communication is a very complex task which involves disciplines such as psychology, sociology, marketing, media studies and linguistics. As a result, many different approaches and research methods have been used to analyse and understand the strategies used in persuasive communication. In this paper we focus on different linguistic features which contribute to the persuasiveness of DRTV short form spots. Persuasion is generally understood as an attempt to change someone’s beliefs and attitudes. In commercial business, the purpose of persuasion is to change a person’s attitude towards a product or an idea by appealing to their emotions and reactivating positive memories from the past. Petty and Cacioppo (1986) developed the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) according to which there are two routes of processing information: the central and the peripheral route. Persuasion achieved via the central route requires careful and thoughtful processing of information, whereas persuasive results achieved via the peripheral route come from positive associations and emotions. The stimuli received via the peripheral route are more related to the attractiveness of the message than to the logical processing of information. Language Expectancy Theory (LET), developed by burgoon and Miller (1985), is another theory of persuasion according to which people verbally communicate in agreement with socially and culturally appropriate expectations. Violations (conscious or accidental) from these norms can trigger either positive or negative reactions. LET presupposes that people have expectations not only about the culturally and socially acceptable behaviour but also about the appropriate language and linguistic strategies which are used with the purpose of persuasion. These linguistic expectations determine whether a message will be positively or negatively accepted – in the latter case, the message will probably be rejected. LET is based on a close relationship between language and social power. One of the propositions of LET claims that individuals who have credibility, that is, social power, are free to select linguistic strategies to achieve the persuasive goals, whereas those with low credibility and low social power are restricted to more neutral linguistic behaviour. Several studies examined how particular linguistic features convey a speaker’s social power and affect the perception of the message. Lakoff (1975) in her study of language and gender suggested that certain linguistic patterns were typical of female register, which was associated with low social power. O’barr (1982) in his analysis of courtroom transcripts found out that witnesses with low social power used powerless speech whose characteristics were the use of verbal and nonverbal hesitation markers, hedges and tag questions. These markers were absent in the speech of witnesses with high social power. Further research of language and power showed that powerful language plays an important role in persuasive communication particularly when transmitted via audio and video channels. Sparks and Areni (2002) discovered that powerful language triggered more favourable attitudes in audio and video messages than powerless language and that speakers were more persuasive when they used powerful instead of powerless language. There are two possible explanations for their findings. First, it is reasonable to believe that the on-line nature of audio and video messages gave little opportunity for an immediate and critical response to the message. Second, in audio and video messages an important role is played by the speaker’s interpretation and delivery of the message (e.g. intonation, rhythm and speaker’s voice quality). In a further study, Areni and Sparks continued to research the relationship between powerful language and persuasion in video and printed communication. They found out that, regardless of the mode of delivery, “speakers using powerful language were more persuasive than speakers using powerless language” (2005, 507). In addition, the speech markers in powerless language “had the effect of directing thoughts toward the actual speaker” (Areni and Sparks 2005, 521). Other studies showed that there is a close connection between linguistic intensity and processing of the message. According to Reinforcement Theory (Insko 1965), linguistic intensity increases the persuasiveness of the message. A study by Craig and blankenship (2011) showed that the use of linguistic extremity or intensity markers, such as much more, extremely, very and wonderful, as well as strong arguments, increased persuasion as well as credibility. Similarly, Petty and Cacioppo (1986) found that linguistic extremity or intensity markers increase the perception of discrepancy between the initial attitude and the message, which may result in changing the initial attitude. For example, a topic which was initially irrelevant for the addressees may become relevant if presented in a linguistically intense manner. Linguistic intensity or extremity can be achieved in different ways. One way is by using intensity markers which can be regarded as effective linguistic devices whose purpose is to express attitudes and elicit strong emotions in the addressees. Different authors (Quirk et al. 1987; georgakopoulou and goutsos 2004; Tannen 1989) tried to classify intensity markers either according to their morphological categories (e.g. adjectives, adverbs and verbs) or their discourse function (e.g. hedges, emphasizers and amplifiers). In addition to intensity markers, Tannen (1989) recognized also two types of involvement strategies. One was based on sound properties of speech (e.g. rhythm and voice patterns), the other on linguistic interaction with the addressees (e.g. imagery and detail, constructed dialogue, ellipsis and tropes). There are very few studies which analyse lexical and syntactic forms of linguistic complexity and intensity. Averbeck and Miller (2014) studied the relationship between cognitive complexity on the one hand, and syntactic and lexical complexity on the other. They found that more cognitively complex individuals, i.e. those who had a better ability to think on abstract levels, would prefer lexically complex messages. Individuals who had a greater ability to integrate new information would prefer syntactically complex messages which they also found more persuasive (Averbeck and Miller 2014, 87). On the other hand, those individuals who had a better ability to think on concrete as opposed to abstract levels would prefer lexically and syntactically simple messages. DRTV short form spots are a type of broadcast advertisements where the spoken delivery together with the announcer’s voice, sound effects and visual images plays an important role in their persuasiveness. Studies by Chattopadhyay et al. (2003) and Wiener and Chartrand (2014) explored the effects of speech characteristics and voice quality on the efficacy of broadcast advertisements. Chattopadhyay et al. (2003) found that listeners respond less negatively to advertisements where the announcers speak faster than normally and in a lower pitch. Speech rate and low pitch seemed to have a positive influence on the attractiveness, truthfulness and persuasiveness of the advertisement. Wiener and Chartrand came to similar conclusions when they tested consumer response among male and female viewers. They found that female audiences are more responsive to voices and prefer male voices to female. If an advertisement is targeted at a female audience, using a male announcer with a creaky voice will increase the persuasiveness of the advertisement and women will be more likely to buy the advertised product (Wiener and Chartrand 2014, 515). 2.2 Research Questions On the basis of the above theoretical assumptions we decided to analyse three DRTV short form spots, for one hygiene and two for household products (Easy Feet, slippers for washing feet; Eggies, dishes for cooking hard boiled eggs; XHose, an expandable garden hose) which were made for Highstreet TV, a multi-channel retailer that spans TV, mobile, web, high street and print. The purpose of the analysis was to answer the following research questions: RQ1: Which verbal and non-verbal strategies are used to meet the requirements of the AIDA model? RQ2: How do the lexical and the syntactic complexity influence the processing of DRTV short form spots? RQ3: What is the contribution of intonation to the persuasiveness of DRTV short form spots? 3 Structural and Linguistic Analyses In order to find out which verbal and non-verbal means of persuasion are used to convince the viewers about the benefits of the advertised products and encourage them to buy (RQ1), we carried out the structural and linguistic analyses of the three DRTV short form spots. First we looked at their structure in terms of duration, speed of delivery, number of words and sentences, as well as the interplay between the visual (action on screen), spoken and written modes (written on-screen captions). 3.1 Structure of DRTV Short Form Spots The three analysed DRTV short form spots have many features in common. Table 1 summarizes the main structural features: they are of similar length in terms of time, number of sentences and number of words. The products’ names occur with a high frequency and at similar average intervals, both in terms of words and seconds. Table 1. Comparison of structural features of three DRTV short form spots. EGGIES EASY FEET XHOSE Length 1’17” 1’30” 1’58” Number of sentences 26 21 27 Number of words 234 270 331 Speed of delivery 3 wds./sec. 3 wds./sec. 2.8 wds./sec. black & white inserts 2 (9 sec) 2 (12 sec) 2 (7 sec) Occurrence of product’s name 8 8 14 Intervals of product’s name (average) 28.7 words 9.6 sec 28.3 words 10 sec 22.4 words 8.1 sec Written on-screen captions (occurrence) 21 20 22 They all exhibit the same problem-solution pattern in which the problem is filmed in the black and white technique, whereas the solution is presented in bright and happy colours with excited faces of actors enjoying the benefits of the advertised product. In spite of the shortness of the three DRTV short form spots, the advertisers follow the principle that potential customers have to be reminded of the problem several times. Hence the black and white inserts appear twice in all three DRTV short form spots: in the beginning and in the second half of the spot (see Appendix 1). Another common feature to all three DRTV short form spots is the written support to the auditory and visual information. At the same time that the viewers see the action on the screen they listen to the narrator while the main benefits of the advertised product appear written on the screen (see Example 1 and Appendix 1). bright colours, capital letters and exclamation marks are regularly used. The viewers’ sensory systems are thus exposed to three different types of stimuli which trigger three different cognitive processes: listening, watching and reading. Example 1. Interplay of visual and + language in Eggies.1 And here’s something really handy. COOKS FLAT! DECORATE because Eggies cook flat on the bottom, they’re easy to decorate. WITHOUT A SINgLE SHELL! Now you can enjoy delicious hard or soft boiled eggs without peeling a single shell. 3.2 Linguistic Analysis 3.2.1 Syntactic and Grammatical Structures The three DRTV short form spots also exhibit very similar patterns regarding the use of syntactic and grammatical structures. The first step in the AIDA model is to capture consumers’ attention. In terms of the contents of the commercial, this is achieved by presenting a problem that the advertised product can eliminate. A syntactic structure that is usually used to elicit the addressee’s attention is an exclamation. The other frequently used attention-seeking device, especially in face­to-face interactions, is the question-answer sequence. both techniques are used in the three DRTV short form spots. Eggies begins with an exclamation which is immediately followed by a negation of the message: Example 2. Opening of Eggies. Messy shells, broken whites, dirty hands! (exclamation) Well, not anymore. (negation) Easy Feet opens with a question-answer sequence which is immediately followed by an affirmative statement expressing a problem and a negative statement indicating the end of the problem and preparing the viewer for the solution: Example 3. Opening of Easy Feet. How do you clean your feet? (question) You bend, stretch any you can’t reach. (answer) Keeping your tired feet looking and smelling great can be such a chore. (statement) but not anymore. (negation) XHose begins with even two exclamations: Example 4. Opening of XHose. The XHose! The incredible expanding hose! (exclamation) The second step in the AIDA model is to create interest for the product in consumers; in other words, to introduce the solution to the problem. In Eggies and Easy Feet this is done by using an introductory pattern typically used in official public introductions of people where the speaker states the name, affiliation and achievements of the person in question. This is realised by statements. Example 5. Creation of interest in Eggies. Introducing Eggies from New Innovations. The fast, fun and easy way to cook hard or soft boiled eggs without the shell. Example 6. Creation of interest in Easy Feet. Introducing Easy Feet from New Innovations. The easy and convenient way to clean, massage and exfoliate from heel to toe. In XHose the interest is created by an invitation (realised by an imperative), followed by a demonstration of the hose (2 imperative-indicative sentences) and another exclamation: Example 7. Creation of interest in XHose. Watch this! (imperative) Turn the water on and the XHose automatically expands to up to three times its original length. Turn the water off and as the water drains, the XHose automatically starts contracting until it’s contracted to a very small size. (imperative-indicative) Amazing! (exclamation) Step three in the AIDA model is to convince the consumer to desire the product. This is the main part of the spot. In all three DRTV short form spots this is achieved by means of enumeration and repetition of the main benefits of the products. The typical syntactic pattern is a combination of statements and imperatives, in the case of XHose also exclamations. Example 8. Development of desire in XHose. Ordinary fifty-foot hoses can be heavy. The XHose is incredibly light. A fifty-foot XHose weighs only about a pound. (3 statements) And what a dream to handle! (exclamation) Just turn the water on and the XHose quickly expands up to three times its length as you effortlessly guide it where you need to go. (imperative-indicative sentence) Imagine using a hose that is this light and this easy to handle! (imperative) The last step in the AIDA model is to motivate the consumers to action, that is, to buy the product. In all three DRTV short form spots this is achieved by means of imperatives. In the case of Eggies, the imperative is preceded by a question. Example 9. Motivating to buy in Eggies, Easy Feet and XHose. got an egg? get an Eggies! (Eggies) Clean, massage and exfoliate with the safe and convenient Easy Feet! (Easy Feet) get your very own XHose, the incredible expanding hose, today! (XHose) In addition to the four steps of the AIDA model, it is also important that an effective commercial convinces viewers by means of credibility and develops a personal relationship with potential consumers. There is more time for achieving credibility by means of personal or expert testimonials in infomercials than in DRTV short form spots.2 Instead credibility in short form spots is developed by means of picture rather than grammatical and lexical structures. Personal relation between advertisers and consumers is manifested by means of a direct address in the form of the second person pronoun you or possessive adjective your, as well as the imperative mood. Table 2 summarizes the syntactic patterns and grammatical features used to realise the AIDA model, including the personal relation. Table 2. Comparison of syntactic and grammatical features. AIDA MODEL EGGIES EASY FEET XHOSE ATTENTION (problem) Exclamation– Negation Question–Answer– Statement– Negation Exclamation INTEREST (solution) Statement Statement Imperative– Imperative+indicative statements–Exclama­tion DESIRE (enumeration and repetition of the product’s benefits) Statements– Imperatives Statements– Imperatives Statements– Imperatives– Exclamations ACTION (motivate to buy) Question–Imperative Imperative Imperative PERSONAL RELATION Imperative You/your Imperative You/your Imperative You/your Table 3 presents the number of occurrences of sentence types used in the three DRTV short form spots. As expected, the highest frequency of occurrence can be observed in statements which are immediately followed by imperative structures. Since the function of the imperative is to create a personal relation between the speaker and the addressee, the high frequency of occurrence is not surprising. Although the imperatives are more frequent in the Eggies and the XHose than in the Easy Feet DRTV short form spots, this does not mean that the last is less personal. On the contrary, the Easy Feet spot has the highest number of incidence regarding the use of the personal pronoun you and the 2 person possessive adjective your, which also contribute to the personal relationship. Table 3. Number of occurrences of sentence types and 2 person address items. EGGIES (n=26) EASY FEET (n=21) XHOSE (n=27) IMPERATIVE 8 (30.8%) 4 (19%) 8 (29.6%) EXCLAMATION 1 (3.8%) 0 4 (14.8%) STATEMENT 16 (61.6%) 16 (76.2%) 15 (55.6%) QUESTION 1 (3.8%) 1 (4.8%) 0 YOU/YOUR 13 19 11 3.2.2 Lexical Analysis In order to establish the influence of the lexical and syntactic complexity upon the processing of DRTV short form spots (RQ2), the texts of the three DRTV short form spots were submitted to two on-line computer programmes which also measure lexical and syntactic complexity: VocabProfile (Cobb n.d.), and Coh-Metrix 3.0 (McNamara 2005).3 VocabProfile (VP) performs lexical text analysis by grouping the words in four categories according to their frequency of occurrence in English. In Category 1 there are the first 1,000 most frequent English words, Category 2 consists of the next 1,000 most frequent words in English, in Category 3 there are 550 words which are most frequent in academic texts and Category 4 is made of words which are not found on other lists. The tool was developed to measure the proportion of high and low frequency words used by native speakers of English in written texts. Table 4 presents the results obtained from VocabProfile analysis of the three DRTV short form spots. Table 4. VocabProfile analysis of 3 DRTV short form spots. EggIES EASY FEET XHOSE 1-1000 wds Function: Content: 69.62% 36.71% 32.91% 69.09% 42.91% 26.18% 75.67% 43.03% 32.64% 1001-2000 wds 16.03% 22.18% 5.04% Academic wds 1.69% 2.18% 5.34% Off-List wds 12.66% 6.55% 13.95% If we accept the claim that “a typical NS [native speaker] result is 70-10-10-10, or 70% from first 1000, 10% from second thousand, 10% academic, and 10% less frequent words” (Cobb n.d.), then we find that the three texts do not altogether meet this formula. The percentage of the most frequent English words (Category 1) is indeed around 70% in all three texts, and the percentage of the second most frequent English words (Category 2) is in the Eggies and Easy Feet texts above, whereas in the XHose text it is below the native speaker’s result. In spite of the fact that the percentage of the words in Categories 3 and 4 are well below the expectations of a native speaker text, we can conclude that the three DRTV texts exhibit lexical features that a native speaker of English can understand. but this does not tell us a lot about the ease with which these texts are processed by a native speaker. For a similar lexical analysis of newspaper articles in reading comprehension tests cf. Ilc and Stopar (2015). LANgUAgE In order to find out the level of readability and complexity of the three texts, we submitted them to the analysis by the Coh-Metrix tool, which is an automated textual assessment tool devised to provide different measures at the level of the text, paragraph, sentence or word. Coh-Metrix provides a large number of different measures, from purely descriptive (e.g. number of words, sentences, paragraphs) to referential. The purpose is to measure cohesion, lexical diversity, syntactic pattern complexity and finally readability by means of Flesch-Kincaid grade Level. Due to the limited duration of DRTV short form spots (max. 120 seconds) in which the advertised product should be effectively presented by meeting all four criteria of the AIDA model, it is expected that it will contain lexical and syntactic features which enable easy and quick processing of information. From the long list of different measures provided by Coh-Metrix, we selected those which play a crucial role in processing of information. Table 5 presents the results obtained from the Coh-Metrix tool. Table 5. Coh-Metrix results for three DRTV short form spots. MEASURES EGGIES EASY FEET XHOSE Sentence length (number of words, mean) 8.207 11.5 11.655 Word length (number of syllables, mean) 1.324 1.312 1.441 Lexical diversity (type-token ratio, all words) 0.504 0.48 0.485 Lexical diversity (MTLD, all words) 81.012 65.638 85.967 Age of acquisition of content words 222.875 256.84 283.711 Familiarity for content words 577.044 585.384 563.946 Concreteness for content words 419.779 425.574 421.888 Imageability for content words 443.929 456.12 443.574 Polysemy for content words 4.338 4.655 4.309 Syntactic pattern density (noun phrase) 294.118 311.594 269.231 Syntactic pattern density (verb phrase) 201.681 199.275 198.225 Syntactic pattern density (adverbial phrase) 33.613 39.855 62.13 Syntactic pattern density (preposition phrase) 67.227 86.957 73.965 Syntactic pattern density (agentless passive voice) 0 0 5.917 Syntactic pattern density (negation) 4.202 10.87 5.917 Syntactic pattern density (gerund) 16.807 21.739 26.627 Syntactic pattern density (infinitive) 18.807 18.116 17.751 Readability (Flesch Reading Ease) 86.495 84.167 73.097 Readability (Flesch-Kincaid grade level) 3.234 4.377 5.959 Sentence and word lengths have an important influence upon the difficulty of the text. It has been established that sentences with more words tend to have a more complex syntax and are as such more difficult to process. Similarly, words with more syllables are more difficult to process (especially in reading). The results obtained by Coh-Metrix show that the average length of sentences is between 8 and 11 words which are relatively short (one syllable and a half long). Although DRTV short form spots rely primarily on spoken delivery where the interpretation may help or hinder the decoding process (see 3.3), the shortness of sentences and words should make the processing of the message easy. According to McNamara et al. (2014, 67) “lexical diversity refers to the variety of unique words (types) that occur in a text in relation to the total number of words (tokens)”. In the case of the three DRTV short form spots we can observe a relatively low lexical diversity (around 0.5). This means two things: a high degree of cohesion and a repetition of the same word several times in the text. MTLD (Measure of Textual Lexical Density) is “calculated as the mean length of sequential word strings in a text that maintain a given TTR [type-token ratio] value” (McNamara et al. 2014, 67). According to MTLD, the Easy Feet spot has a significantly lower text lexical diversity than the other two spots and hence it is even easier to process than the other two DRTV short form spots. Another important set of lexical characteristics which can make a text easier or more difficult to process are the age of acquisition, familiarity, concreteness, imageability and polysemy of content words. The age of acquisition of content words specifies the age at which the word first appears in a child’s language. Results are presented on a scale from 100 to 700, where words with a higher age of acquisition score are acquired later in life. The age of acquisition of content words in the three DRTV short form spots is relatively low (222.875– 283.711), which indicates that the texts are easy to decode. Familiarity of content words is an important indicator since texts with many familiar words are decoded more quickly. Results are presented on a scale from 100 to 700, where more familiar words have a higher score. Familiarity of content words in the three DRTV short form spots is slightly below 600, which means that the three texts are very easy to process. The concreteness index measures how concrete or non-abstract words are. Most concrete content words are those which refer to things that can be touched, heard or tasted. Results are presented on a scale from 100 to 700, where higher scores signify more concrete content words. The scores for the three DRTV short form spots are slightly above 400, which means that the majority of content words are very concrete and hence relatively easy to decode. Imageability index is in close relation with concreteness of content words and it indicates the ease or difficulty with which one constructs mental images of content words. Higher scores on a scale from 100 to 700 indicate content words which are easy to imagine. The results for the three DRTV short form spots are also above 400, which means that the content words are relatively easy to imagine. Polysemy index refers to the number of meanings that a content word may have. Coh-Metrix provides average polysemy for content words. According to McNamara (2014, 75) more frequent words tend to have more meanings. The scores for the three DRTV short form spots are all over 4, signifying the usage of more frequent content words. In addition to lexical diversity and familiarity of lexical items used in texts, the difficulty of decoding also depends on the syntactic complexity which is in Coh-Metrix measured by the incidence of particular syntactic patterns and phrase types. A text with a high number of noun and verb phrases tends to be informationally dense with complex syntax (McNamara et al. 2014, 72). Other syntactic patterns which make the decoding of a text more difficult are negation, agentless passive voice, and the use of gerunds and infinitives. The noun and verb phrase density in the three DRTV short form spots is high especially when compared with the occurrence of adverbial and preposition phrases. The incidence of gerunds and infinitives is also quite high, whereas the incidence of negation is highest in the Easy Feet spot. Agentless passive voice occurs only in the XHose spot. Results from the above indices indicate that the texts of the three DRTV short form spots are relatively easy to process which is mainly due to short sentences and words, familiarity, concreteness and imageability of content words. On the other hand, the density of noun and verb phrases makes the texts informationally condensed and as such more difficult to process. Taking all these indices into consideration, Coh-Metrix tool provides two measures of text ease or difficulty. These are Flesh-Kincaid grade Level and Flesh Reading Ease. They take into account the word and sentence complexity and can predict sentence understanding and reading speed. Flesh Reading Ease is measured on a scale from 0 to 100. High results indicate that a text is easy to understand. In fact, the results for the texts of the three DRTV short form spots are from 73.097 to 86.495, indicating that these texts are easily understood by 11 to 13-year-old readers. The Flesh-Kincaid grade Level translates the Flesh Reading Ease results into a US grade level. The three texts of DRTV short form spots rank from grade 3 to nearly grade 6. In other words, they are easily processed by children from age 8 to 12. 3.3 Prosodic Analysis Due to the fact that DRTV short form spots are delivered via spoken channel, analysis of intonation and its influence on the persuasiveness of the commercials is equally important as the analysis of lexical and syntactic features. If we take into consideration also the assumption that the peripheral routes of persuasion influence the addressees’ emotions, the role of different prosodic features, such as pitch height and movement, volume and speed, is of utmost importance. In Section 2 we presented findings of two studies on the voice quality of narrators and speed of delivery in broadcast advertisements according to which fast delivery and lower pitched voices tend to be more persuasive. The purpose of our prosodic analysis was to establish the contribution of tonality, tonicity and tunes to the recognizable style of delivery in DRTV short form spots (RQ3). 3.3.1 Tonality Tonality (i.e. division into intonation phrases – IP) and tonicity (i.e. the nucleus placement) are two important processes by means of which speakers package information into small chunks and give prominence to important pieces of information. In unmarked contexts, tonality often follows grammatical division into clauses, whereas in marked contexts, IP boundaries may occur between phrases, words or even syllables. Table 6 compares the three DRTV short form spots in terms of the length, number of words, number of intonation phrases and the distribution of content words per intonation phrase. Table 6. Length and structure of IPs. ENGLISH EGGIES EASY FEET XHOSE TIME 1’17’’ 1’30’’ 1’58’’ WORDS 234 270 331 IP 71 (=3.3 w/IP) 72 (=3.7 w/IP) 95 (=3.5 w/IP) 1 CW/IP 21 (29.6%) 19 (26.5%) 26 (27.4%) 2 CW/IP 29 (40.8%) 28 (38.9%) 41 (43.2%) 3 CW/IP 17 (24%) 14 (19.4%) 16 (16.8%) 4 CW/IP 4 (5.6%) 7 (9.7%) 10 (10.5%) 5 CW/IP – 4 (5.5%) 2 (2.1%) NUCLEUS (N) 24 (33.8%) 21 (29.2%) 26 (27.4%) HEAD+N 47 (66.2%) 49 (68%) 62 (65.2%) OTHER 0 2 (2.8%) 7 (7.4%) The three DRTV short form spots range from 77 to 118 seconds in time length and have from 234 to 331 words. The texts are divided into 71, 72 and 91 IPs, averaging 3.3 to 3.7 words per IP. More important than the average number of words per IP is the number of content words (CWs) per IP since these affect the density of the message. In this respect the majority of IPs contain two CWs per phrase (Eggies: 40.8%, Easy Feet: 38.9%, XHose: 43.2%). Intonation phrases which have only one CW come second (Eggies: 29.6%, Easy Feet: 26.5%, XHose: 27.4%), whereas IPs with three CWs are in the third place (Eggies: 24%, Easy Feet: 19.4%, XHose: 16.8%). The Eggies DRTV spot contains only 5.6% of IPs with four CWs and no IP with more than four CWs. The Easy Feet and the XHose DRTV short form spots have 15.2% and 12.6% of IPs with four or even five CWs. Since each IP has at least one pitch-prominent syllable, marked tonality produces utterances which are felt as extremely emphatic and appropriate only for limited contexts of interaction. The large number of IPs and their shortness in the three DRTV short form spots suggest an emphatic delivery of the message, as demonstrated in Example 10, in which one sentence is divided into 5 IPs. Example 10. Fast-and fresh egg sandwiches-or simply-slice an egg-over a scrumptious salad¦ In addition, an IP can have only the nucleus or it can consist of a pre-nuclear pitch prominent segment (head) and the nucleus (for further discussion see 3.3.3). The results presented in Table 6 indicate that the majority of IPs contain two pitch prominent syllables: the head and the nucleus (Eggies: 66.2%, Easy Feet: 68%, XHose: 65.2%) which makes the interpretation even more marked. 3.3.2 Tonicity Analysis of tonicity further supports the assumption of heavily marked interpretation. It has already been established that some words, phrases and even clauses are repeated in the three DRTV texts at regular intervals. A closer look at the location of the nucleus in these repeated structures indicates that they are always spoken with the nucleus located on the same CW, which is in contradiction with the basic principle of tonicity, i.e. the nucleus should occur on a CW expressing new information. Table 7 presents the tonicity and nuclear tones of the products’ names and some very frequently occurring CWs. Table 7. Tonicity and nuclear tones of products’ names and frequent CWs. IP Number of occurrences Nucleus Fall Fall–Rise Eggies3 8 6 (75%) 4 (66.7%) 2 (33.3%) Egg 14 8 (57.1%) 6 (75%) 2 (25%) Shell 5 5 (100%) 4 (80%) 1 (20%) Easy Feet 8 5 (62.5%) 4 (80%) 1 (20%) Feet 10 7 (70%) 6 (85.7%) 1 (14.3%) Foot 3 3 (100%) 3 (100%) 0 Toe 3 3 (100%) 2 (66.7%) 1 (33.3%) XHose 14 12 (85.7%) 7 (58.3%) 5 (41.7%) Hose 10 5 (50%) 3 (60%) 2 (40%) We can see that the products’ names occur very frequently and function as nuclei in very high percentages (Eggies: 75%, Easy Feet: 62.5%, XHose: 85.7%). In the Eggies DRTV spot egg and shell are the other two most frequently occurring CWs functioning as nuclei in 57.1% (egg) and 100% (shell). In the Easy Feet DRTV spot the three most frequently occurring CWs functioning as nuclei are feet5 (70%), foot (100%) and toe (100%), whereas in the XHose DRTV spot the content word hose is chosen as nucleus in 50 per cent of its occurrences. 3.3.3 Tones and Tunes In English there are five basic pitch movements (tones) which can be realized on the nuclear syllable: the fall, the rise, the fall-rise, the rise-fall and the level. Not all tones occur in the English language with the same frequency. According to Cruttenden (2014, 291) the falling tones (regardless of the pitch height) are generally estimated to account for 50 per cent of all nuclear tones, whereas the simple rise and the fall-rise account for a further 40 per cent. The distribution of the tones in the three DRTV short form spots as presented in Table 8 supports this estimated frequency of occurrence of English nuclear tones. Table 8. Tones and their frequency of occurrence in the three DRTV short form spots. TONE EGGIES (N=71) EASY FEET (N=72) X HOSE (N=95) FALL 47 (66.2%) 42 (58.4%) 70 (73.7%) High fall 41 (57.7%) 32 (44.5%) 55 (57.9%) Low fall 6 (8.5%) 10 (13.9%) 15 (15.8%) RISE 8 (11.3%) 12 (16.3%) 5 (5.3%) High rise 7 (9.9%) 7 (9.7%) 1 (1.1%) Low rise 1 (1.4%) 5 (6.9%) 4 (4.2%) FALL-RISE 10 (14%) 7 (9.7%) 15 (15.8%) 4 The underlined syllables indicate the primary stress. 5 CWs feet and hose occur independently and not as part of the compound phrases Easy Feet and XHose. 42 Smiljana Komar Linguistic Features of Persuasive Communication: The Case of DRTV Short Form Spots RISE-FALL 0 0 2 (2.1%) LEVEL 6 (8.5%) 11 (15.3%) 3 (3.1%) Table 8 also shows that the most frequent tone is the falling tone which is the expected nuclear tone not only in terms of its general frequency of occurrence in the English language, but also in terms of the sentence types, i.e. statements, imperatives and exclamations, for which this is the default tone (Wells 2006) and which prevail in the three DRTV short form spots. In addition to the grammatical meaning of nuclear tones, which is manifested by the relationship between nuclear tones and sentence types, we can also find justification for the prevailing occurrence of falling nuclear tones in their pragmatic and discourse meanings. According to O’Connor and Arnold (1973) the falls indicate definiteness, confidence and involvement. The high fall, which is the prevailing form of the fall in the three DRTV short form spots, expresses a high degree of involvement on the part of the speaker. According to brazil (1997), the discourse meaning of the fall is to express something which is not yet part of the common ground between the speaker and the listener. In other words, it is used to proclaim new information. Almost one quarter of all nuclear tones in DRTV short form spots are the non-falling ones (i.e. rise and fall-rise), among which the fall-rise has a higher frequency of occurrence than the simple rise (with the exception of the Easy Feet spot where the simple rise occurs more frequently than the fall-rise). In line with O’Connor and Arnold (1973) and Wells (2006), the non-falling nuclear tones express non-finality or continuity. The prevailing occurrence of the fall-rise nuclear tones in the Eggies and the XHose spots can be best explained by referring to brazil’s discourse approach to intonation according to which the non-falling tones are used to refer to pieces of information which are already part of the common ground. In other words, they have the anaphoric cohesive function, as opposed to the falling tones whose function is cataphoric. And indeed, the fall-rises occur on pieces of information which are repeated at regular intervals as shown. In Example 11, from the XHose DRTV spot, we can see that the product’s name functions twice as the nucleus: in the first IP a fall (\) is used which presents XHose as new information, whereas in the fifth IP a fall–rise (\/) is used, making the anaphoric cohesive reference to the common ground knowledge that exists between the speaker and listener. Example 11. The \XHose-con'tracts to an in\credibly small size-that 'stores \easily. be'lieve it or \not: -a 'seventy–five foot \/XHose-\fits-in a \flower pot. In the pragmatic approach to the study of intonation, the fall-rise is often referred to as the implicational fall-rise whose function is to express contrast, reservations and doubt (O’Connor and Arnold 1973; Wells 2006). Example 12 illustrates the interplay of the discourse and pragmatic meanings of the fall (\) and the fall–rise (\/). The fall-rise nuclear tone used in the second IP is the so-called implicational fall-rise since it implies that by using the Eggies cooking dish, peeling of hard boiled eggs is no longer necessary. The use of the proclaiming falling nuclear tone in the third and the forth IP introduces information which may be new to the listeners, i.e. peeling a hard boiled egg is messy and takes time. Example 12. /.Peeling just \one egg-the \/regular way-can be \messy -and 'take \time/ Nearly seventy per cent of IPs in the three DRTV short form spots consist of more than two CWs per IP. In fact, they consist of two pitch-prominent syllables. O’Connor and Arnold (1973) refer to the syllables from the onset as the head and recognize four different types: high, low, falling and rising. Together with the nuclear tones they form ten different tunes. Table 9 presents the most frequent combinations of the head and the nuclear tone in the three DRTV short form spots. Table 9. Heads and tones. HEAD + TONE EGGIES (N=47) EASY FEET (N=49) X HOSE (N=62) HIGH HEAD + FALL 15 (31.9%) 18 (36.7%) 31 (50.1%) High Head+High Fall 10 (21.3%) 10 (20.4%) 21 (34%) High Head+ Low Fall 5 (10.6%) 8 (16.3%) 10 (16.1%) RISING HEAD + HIGH FALL 15 (31.9%) 9 (18.3%) 3 (4.8%) FALLING HEAD + FALL-RISE 5 (10.6%) 2 (4.1%) 4 (6.5%) FALLING HEAD + HIGH FALL 7 (14.9%) 4 (8.2%) 10 (16.1%) OTHER 5 (10.6%) 16 (32.6%) 14 (22.5%) The table shows that the most frequently occurring tune in the DRTV short form spots consists of the high head and a fall. This is the default tune for statements, imperatives and exclamations. The second most frequent tune in the Eggies and the Easy Feet short form spots consists of the rising head and the high fall. This is regarded as the marked version of the former because of its gradually ascending pitch movement, beginning very low in the pitch range and rising to the upper half of it from where the high fall begins. Due to this extensive pitch movement, O’Connor and Arnold associate with it the attitude of “protest, as if the speaker were suffering under a sense of injustice” (1973, 73). Example 13 illustrates the opening of the Eggies short form spot where four successive IPs all contain the rising head followed by the high falling nuclear tone. This is a good example of an implied protest of the speaker against the traditional cooking of eggs. Example 13. /.Messy \shells -.broken \whites-.dirty \hands¦/Well -.not any \more¦/. When the same tune is used in commands, O’Connor and Arnold claim that they “are not so much orders as recommendations for a course of action” (1973, 74). And indeed, the Eggies spot ends with a recommendation uttered with this tune, as illustrated in Example 14. Example 14. /.get an \Eggies!/ 4 Discussion The purpose of the structural and the linguistic analyses of the three DRTV short form spots was to provide answers to three research questions. Our first research question addressed the issue of verbal and non-verbal strategies used to meet the requirements of the AIDA model. We found that all three DRTV short form spots share a number of identical verbal and non-verbal strategies. In addition to similar length, number of words and sentences and regular repetitions of the products’ names, they also appeal to the viewers’ sensory systems by exposing them to three different types of stimuli: auditory, visual and pictorial. Since all three stimuli represent the same idea, we can assume that the viewers are saturated with that information. Whether that increases the persuasiveness of the advertisement and convinces the viewers to buy the product remains to be investigated. The first step in the AIDA model is to capture consumers’ attention. In all three DRTV short form spots examined this is achieved by presenting a problem and offering a solution. The non­verbal strategy used to present the problem is by means of a black and white video clips. The verbal strategies include exclamations and question-answer sequences. Developing interest for the product, which is the second step in the AIDA model, is verbally and non-verbally achieved by presenting a solution to the problem. The typical syntactic structures are statements, whereas the non-verbal strategy includes a shift from black and white to colour video clips. The central part of the DRTV short form spots is dedicated to convince the viewers that they desire the product. Verbally this is achieved by means of enumeration and several repetitions of the products’ qualities and benefits by using statements, imperatives and even exclamations. Non­verbal strategies include demonstration of the products’ qualities and their positive influence upon the users, who all look happy, relaxed, and who are smiling and enjoying the benefits of the advertised products. The default syntactic structure to motivate to action is the imperative, which is used in all three DRTV short forms spots to meet the last requirement of the AIDA model. Credibility and developing a personal relationship with consumers are additional and equally important strategies. The former is mainly achieved by means of non-verbal strategies, whereas the latter is manifested verbally by means of the second person pronoun you or possessive adjective your, as well as the imperative mood. Our second research question dealt with the influence of the lexical and the syntactic complexity upon the processing of DRTV short form spots. According to the Lexical Expectancy Theory and research of Averbeck and Miller (2014), it is expected that lexically and syntactically complex texts will be more difficult to process, but at the same time they will be more persuasive. The results obtained from the Coh-Metrix on-line tool indicate that the texts of the three DRTV short form spots contain short sentences and words which make the processing of information easy. Familiarity, concreteness and imageability of content words also add to the ease of information processing. The only factor which makes the decoding process a little more difficult is the density of noun and verb phrases because of which the texts are informationally condensed. According to Flesh Reading Ease and Flesh-Kincaid grade Level results the three DRTV short form texts are easily understood by children between the ages of 8 and 13. because DRTV short form spots exhibit a very recognizable style of delivery, we decided to carry out an extensive analysis of different prosodic features in order to establish their contribution to the persuasiveness of these advertisements (RQ3). The delivery of information in all three DRTV short form spots is highly marked in terms of tonality, tonicity and pitch movements. The texts are not only divided into a large number of short IPs, but the majority of them also contain two pitch prominent syllables: the head and the nucleus. It has already been established that some words, phrases and even clauses are regularly repeated in the three DRTV texts. In addition, these repeated structures are systematically delivered with the nucleus located on the same content word, thus violating the basic principle of tonicity that the nucleus should occur on new information. The analysis of pitch movements used in the three DRTV short form spots showed that the prevailing pitch movement consists of either a high falling tone or in combination with a high level head. This is not surprising since the high falling tones indicate not only the default syntactic structure (statement, imperative, exclamation) but also a high degree of involvement and enthusiasm expressed by the speaker over the advertised products, as well as over their features which are so unique that they deserve to be presented as new information almost every time they occur in the text. A marked version of this tune consists of a rising head and a high fall which in statements usually implies protest, whereas in imperatives it is often used as a suggested course of action. In summary, the findings of the structural and the linguistic analyses of the three DRTV short form spots indicate that these broadcast advertisements exhibit similar patterns of verbal and non-verbal persuasive communication. Whether these patterns really convince viewers and make them purchase the products remains to be researched. Furthermore, an analysis of consumer response related to different linguistic features of DRTV short form spots would be equally interesting and could probably be useful to producers of infomercials or their shorter forms. 5 Conclusion The paper presents a detailed analysis of verbal and non-verbal persuasive communication in three DRTV short form spots. The findings indicate that DRTV short form spots (1) use verbal and non-verbal communication strategies to meet the requirements of AIDA mode; (2) exhibit lexically and syntactically less complex language which can be easily processed by any viewer; and (3) intensify the spoken delivery through highly marked intonation. We suggest that further research should concentrate on response of potential consumers regarding the verbal and non-verbal persuasive strategies used in DRTV short form spots. References Areni, Charles S., and John R. 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New York: Harper & Row. McNamara, Danielle S., Max M. Louwerse, Zhiqiang Cai, and Arthur C. graesser. 2005. Coh-Metrix version 1.4. January 1. Accessed October 15, 2015. https://cohmetrix.memphis.edu. McNamara, Danielle S., Arthur C. graesser, and Zhiqiang Cai. 2014. Automated Evaluation of Text and Discourse with Coh-Metrix. New York: Cambridge University Press. O’barr, William M. 1982. Linguistic Evidence. Language, Power, and Strategy in the Courtroom. New York: Academic Press. O’Connor, Joseph Desmond, and gordon Frederic Arnold. 1973. Intonation of Colloquial English. Second Edition. London: Longman. Pett, Richard E., and John Cacioppo. 1986. Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. New York: Springer. Quirk, Randolph C., Sidney greenbaum, geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1987. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. Sparks, John R. and Charles S. Areni. 2002. “The Effects of Sales Presentation Quality and Initial Perceptions on Persuasion: A Multiple Role Perspective.” Journal of Business Research 55 (6): 517–28. doi:10.1016/ S0148-2963(00)00173-9. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, John Christopher. 2006. English Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiener, Hillary J. D., and Tanya L. Chartrand. 2014. “The Effect of Voice Quality on Ad Efficacy.” Psychology and Marketing 31 (7): 509–17. doi:10.1002/mar.20712. Appendix 1 Transcription of the three DRTV short form spots. Legend: XXXX: black and white film CAPITAL LETTERS: on-screen written text 1. EGGIES Messy shells, broken whites, dirty hands. Well, not any more. EggIES bOILED EggS WITHOUT THE SHELL! Introducing Eggies from New Innovations: the fast, fun, easy way to cook hard or soft boiled eggs without the shell. JUST CRACK & POUR TWIST OPEN Just crack and pour in your egg, boil it right on your hob, then twist open for a perfect-looking boiled egg. COOKS LIKE REAL SHELL! Look inside. EASILY SLIDES OUT! Eggies cook your eggs just like a real shell. And the egg slides right out when you’re done. And here’s something really handy. COOKS FLAT! DECORATE because Eggies cook flat on the bottom, they’re easy to decorate. WITHOUT A SINgLE SHELL! Now you can enjoy delicious hard or soft boiled eggs without peeling a single shell. FAST & FRESH Egg SANDWICHES SLICED FOR SALADS! Fast and fresh egg sandwiches or simply slice an egg over a scrumptious salad. TASTY TREAT KIDS LOVE Eggies help make a tasty treat the kids love to eat. CHOLESTEROL-FREE WHITES You can even cook your egg whites for a cholesterol-free alternative. Look. Peeling just one egg the regular way can be messy and take time. QUICK, EASY& MESS-FREE but you can twist open Eggies eggs quick, easy and mess-free. ADD SEASONINg bEFORE bOIL And because you cook without a shell, you can add seasoning ADD INgREDIENTS bEFORE bOIL and ingredients before you boil. Watch again. CRACK COOK TWIST Just crack, cook and twist. With Eggies unique design to enjoy delicious hard or soft boiled eggs just like this. DISHWASHER SAFE And it’s dishwasher-safe. Save time in the kitchen and enjoy hard or soft boiled eggs for breakfast, lunch or dinner the Eggies way. got an egg? get an Eggies! 2. EASY FEET How do you clean your feet? You bend, stretch and you can’t reach? Keeping your tired feet looking and smelling great can be such a chore. But not anymore. EASY FEET NEW INNOVATIONS Introducing Easy Feet from New Innovations. The easy and convenient way to clean, massage and exfoliate your feet from heel to toe. It’s your very own foot spa to use in your shower or bath so you can treat yourself to a foot massage every day. OVER 1000 bRISTLES CLEANS TOP Easy Feet features over 1000 softly rejuvenating bristles that gently massage and clean the top AND bOTTOM of your feet, the toes and the bottom of your feet. bUILT IN PUMICE STONE It even has a built-in pumice stone for rough, dry heels. So now you can make ugly, dry skin and rough tired feet a thing of the past. (Testimonial 1: “Easy Feet makes me feel a lot more confident when wearing my strappy shoes.”) MASSAgES … EXFOLIATES! Easy Feet’s clever design not only cleans your feet, but massages, and gently exfoliates, too. ELIMINATES DIRT! Plus it eliminates dirt. CLEANS bETWEEN YOUR TOES! And most importantly: Easy Feet cleans in between your toes. (Testimonial 2: “It’s great because you don’t have to bend over and worry about slipping or falling. I can’t believe how great it feels on my feet.”) SECURE TO ANY: SHOWER Just secure the easy to use Easy Feet to any smooth shower or bath surface with the built-in bATH WALL suction pads and turn your bath into a foot spa. It’s like a car wash for your feet. ONE SIZE FITS ALL! Easy Feet is one-size-fits-all. gREAT FOR ALL THE FAMILY! And it’s perfect for people of all ages to help keep your feet clean, fresh and smelling great. USE IN EVERY bATH & SHOWER Leave an Easy Feet in every bath and every shower. USE ANY TIME OF DAY! Don’t get into bed and dirty your sheets when it only takes a minute to clean your feet. NO MORE bENDINg TO CLEAN YOUR FEET! So stop doing that one-legged dance in the shower. CLEAN … MASSAgE … EXFOLIATE! Clean, massage and exfoliate with the safe and convenient Easy Feet. 3. XHOSE The XHose! The incredible expanding hose. Watch this. Turn the water on and the XHose automatically expands up to three times its original length. Turn the water off and as the water drains, the XHose automatically starts contracting until it’s contracted back to a very small size. AMAZINg! Amazing! Ordinary fifty foot hoses can be heavy. INCREDIbLY LIgHT! The XHose is incredibly light. 50’ WEIgHS AbOUT 1 lb! A fifty foot XHose weighs only about one pound. And what a dream to handle! EXPAND UP TO 3 TIMES ITS LENgTH! Just turn the water on and the XHose quickly expands up to three times its length as you effortlessly guide it where you need to go. Imagine using a hose that is this light and this easy to handle. AUTOMATICALLY CONTRACTS! When you’re finished, just drain the water that’s in the hose and the XHose will automatically follow you back as it gets shorter and shorter until it contracts back to a compact size that stores quickly and easily. UNbELIEVAbLE! Unbelievable! bUILT STRONg TO LAST LONg! The XHose is built strong to last long. MADE FROM 2 HOSES! EXPANDAbLE INNER HOSE It’s actually made from two separate hoses: a tough expandable inner hose and a folded outer SUPER STRONg WEbbINg hose made from durable super-strong webbing. WILL NEVER KINK! With the XHose you could never be stopped by kinks again. That’s because its patent pending design makes kinking virtually impossible. WIDE DIAMETER DEPENDENT ON WATER PRESSURE AVAILAbLE POWERFUL SPRAY The XHose expands to a wide diameter that produces a powerful high flow spray for top jobs like cleaning second-floor windows. In the past you had to struggle to get your tangled hose onto the reel. The XHose contracts to an incredibly small size that stores easily. 75FOOT FITS IN A FLOWER POT! believe it or not: a seventy-five foot XHose fits in a flower pot. SO LIgHT! SO EASY! And because it’s so light, watering your flowers and garden or washing your car has never been easier. RVS AND bOATS! Save space in RV’s and on boats. AUTOMATICALLY EXPANDS! And like no other hose in the world, the XHose automatically expands up to three times its length in a matter of seconds. AUTOMATICALLY CONTRACTS! And just as quickly contracts back. get your very own XHose, the incredible expanding hose, today. 2015, Vol. 12 (2), 53-77(244) Inger M. Mees revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope Copenhagen business School doi: 10.4312/elope.12.2.53-77 Denmark UDC: 811.111’282(410.353.11)”1977/2011” Christina Hoock Osorno Sandberg Translation Partners, London United Kingdom Cardiff English: A Real Time Study of Stability and Change between Childhood and Mid-Adulthood AbSTRACT This article describes a real time panel study of a small number of working and middle class female speakers recorded in Cardiff at three points in time over a period of 35 years. The first recordings were made in 1977 when the informants were ten years old. The second date from 1990 when they were young adults, and the third from 2011 when they had entered into mid-adulthood. The linguistic variables investigated were h-dropping and the realisation of /r/ as an approximant or tap. Three issues were addressed. First, the two variables were categorised into indicators or markers/stereotypes on the basis of social and stylistic variation. This served as a basis for the second question, which was to discover if the patterns of change over time were in accordance with those predicted by the literature, with indicators remaining stable and markers/ stereotypes being age-graded. Finally, we looked at individual variation. Keywords: Cardiff English; age-grading; real time panel study; h-dropping; indicators and social markers; language change; linguistic variables; social awareness; social and stylistic variation Cardifska angleščina: Študija stabilnosti in sprememb med otroštvom in srednjo odraslostjo POVZETEK Članek opisuje ugotovitve panelne študije v realnem času, ki je bila opravljena na majhnem vzorcu ženskih govork, pripadnic delavskega in srednjega družbenega razreda iz Cardiffa. Snemanje njihovega govora je bilo opravljeno trikrat v razdobju petintridesetih let. Prvi posnetki so bili narejeni leta 1977, ko so bile govorke stare deset let. Drugo snemanje je bilo opravljeno leta 1990, ko so bile govorke mlade odrasle osebe, in tretje leta 2011, ko so govorke že vstopile v obdobje srednje odraslosti. Opazovali smo dve jezikovni spremenljivki in sicer opuščanje glasu /h/ na začetku besed in uresničitve glasu /r/ kot drsnik ali kot vibrant. Zastavili smo si tri raziskovalne cilje. Najprej smo obe spremenljivki označili kot pokazatelje ali stereotipe družbene in stilistične raznolikosti govora. To nam je služilo kot podlaga za drugo raziskovalno vprašanje, katerega cilj je bil ugotoviti, ali so bili časovni vzorci sprememb v skladu z napovedmi, ki jih navaja literatura, to je da pokazatelji ostajajo stabilni, stereotipi pa so povezani s starostjo. Na koncu smo ugotavljali tudi individualne razlike v govoru. Ključne besede: cardifska angleščina; starostno razvrščanje; panelna študija v realnem času; opuščanje /h/; pokazatelji in družbeni označevalci; jezikovna sprememba; jezikovne spremenljivke; družbena ozaveščenost; družbena in stilistična raznolikost Cardiff English: A Real Time Study of Stability and Change between Childhood and Mid-Adulthood 1 Introduction In this paper, we discuss longitudinal real time speech data from a small number of female speakers who were recorded at four points in time over a period of 35 years. The samples were collected in Cardiff, the capital and largest city of Wales situated on the south-east coast. The eleven/five speakers selected for the present study form a small sub-sample of a corpus originally comprising 80 children (Mees 1983). The first recordings date from 1977, when the participants were ten years old, and represent their childhood speech. Most of the speakers (75) were re-interviewed in 1981, when they were young adolescents; these data will not be discussed here (the results are reported in Mees 1983, 1990). The third and fourth recordings took place in 1990 (56 speakers) and in 2011 (five speakers); see Table 1. The samples from 1990 characterise the participants’ speech as young adults, entering the labour market and starting family life, while the newest samples capture their language patterns in mid-adulthood, having settled into regular employment and carrying family responsibilities (Labov 2001, 101).1 Admittedly, the last of the recordings constitutes a very small sample, but it can nevertheless give a first indication of some of the fluctuations in language use in the course of individual lifespans. Table 1. Size of speaker samples (total and sub-set used in this study). Year of recording 1977 1981 1990 2011 No. of speakers 80 75 56 5 Sub-set in this study 11 11 11 5 Our main objective is to shed light on the phenomenon of age-grading (“the variation … associated with individuals at different ages”, Meyerhoff 2011, 153), which real time studies are ideally suited to investigate (see section 4). We are particularly interested in how social awareness affects the extent to which the pronunciation of sounds is changed, and we therefore selected two phonological variables for scrutiny, one which is highly stigmatised in the community (h-dropping) and one which does not appear to evoke social comment (the realisation of /r/ as an approximant or tap). Three questions are addressed, which we attempt to answer by correlating the linguistic variables with social class, speech style and age/time. Firstly, we analyse the social and stylistic variation in the speech of the ten-year-olds. On the basis of this analysis, the variables are categorised according to the amount of social awareness the speakers attribute to them, using Labov’s distinction between indicators, markers and stereotypes (see section 5.3). This information is needed to address the second issue, which is to examine how these variables develop across the informants’ lifespans. Since we have snapshots of informants in pre-puberty, in their early twenties and in their mid-forties, we are able to see if confirmation can be found for the general assumption that “once the features of the sociolect are established in the speech of young adults, under normal circumstances those features remain relatively stable for the rest of their lives” (Chambers 2009, 197). In particular, we wish to discover if the variables investigated behave in the way predicted by the literature, with indicators remaining stable and markers/stereotypes being age-graded. Our final goal, inspired by Macaulay (1977, 57–60), is to establish if a rank ordering of the individuals according to their social status (defined on the basis of occupation, education and residential area) correlates with their scores for the linguistic variables. In a few cases, the social status of the informants had changed, which made it possible to examine if social mobility had affected their speech. 2 Data Collection 2.1 The Original Cardiff Study The original Cardiff study (Mees 1977, 1983) was inspired by the work of Trudgill (1974) in Norwich and Macaulay (1977) in glasgow, which were the two largest british studies modelled on Labov (1966) at the time. Since the study dealt with children, other important sources of inspiration were Reid (1976, 1978) and Romaine (1975, 1978), who both investigated linguistic variability in the speech of Edinburgh schoolchildren and demonstrated that awareness of the social significance of linguistic variables develops at an early age. The 1977 sample of speakers was drawn from three social classes and both sexes. In order to ensure representativeness of the city of Cardiff, the children were selected from 15 different primary schools located in geographically as well as socially different areas. With the help of an inspector of the Education Authority, eight areas were selected. The social status of these areas was assessed on the basis of the five social and economic measures used in the 1971 census. An additional subjective assessment of the eight areas was provided by a professor at the Department of Sociology at the University College of Cardiff (Mees 1983, 39–42). 2.2 The Present Study: A Small Sub-Sample As we saw in Table 1, the sub-sample used in this study consisted of 11 speakers, five from the middle class (MC) and six from the working class (WC). In selecting the sub-set of informants, a number of factors had to be considered. Many of the original 1977 recordings were unsuitable because they were too short. As stated by Milroy and gordon (2003, 164), “if the number of tokens is lower than 10, there is a strong likelihood of random fluctuation, while a figure higher than 10 moves towards 90 percent conformity with the predicted norm, rising to 100 percent with 35 tokens”; see also section 7. Furthermore, since we wished to focus on changes in Cardiff English, only subjects who had lived in Cardiff most or all their lives were eligible for this particular study. Finally, to avoid introducing yet another parameter, it was decided to include either male or female speakers only. These criteria naturally restricted the number of potential informants. However, the greatest challenge was tracing the original participants in the 2011 re­survey. Twenty-one years had passed since the informants were last interviewed, and during that time many had moved and changed their surnames through marriage, which made the process of finding them considerably more difficult. Eventually, five female informants were located (three from the WC, and two from the MC). Some were found by means of former addresses of the informants or their parents; some by the website Friendsreunited.co.uk; and some by the online british Telecom phone book. For details of the 2011 study, see Osorno (2011). Although it is impossible to generalise on the basis of small-scale studies, even a very limited sample can provide interesting results. For instance, Sankoff (2004) studied two boys who took part in the “7 and Up” project, a longitudinal british documentary series initiated in 1963 in which 14 seven-year-olds from widely ranging backgrounds were re-interviewed at seven-year intervals. Sankoff’s aim was to determine if individuals can and do make alterations to their phonological systems in adolescence and young adulthood. She was able to show that these two speakers had indeed made some significant changes to their speech in post-adolescence, albeit in different ways. However, the two speakers had unique personal histories, and Sankoff reminds us that most individuals do not modify their phonological patterns over their lifetimes. The Cardiff sample is also small, but the limited sample size does have the advantage of enabling us to focus on the individual subjects as well as the groups. As stated by Maclagan, gordon and Lewis (1999, 19), “unless data is available for individual speakers across variables, there is no way of knowing the extent to which individuals within the group are behaving consistently across the variables”. As we shall see in section 8, the patterns that emerge for the Cardiff subjects within each of the two social classes are so regular that there is some basis for assuming that the sample can be generalised to a larger population. Furthermore, we are able to refer to the results of studies of earlier sub-samples of the Cardiff informants (Mees 1983, 1990; Mees and Collins 1999) to discover if the findings in this paper can be corroborated. 3 Types of Change As stated in section 1, the main focus of this article is the phenomenon of age-grading, which is a term used to refer to “the instability of an individual’s use of a feature over the lifespan against a backdrop of community stability for the same feature” (Wagner 2012, 373). Put simply, a variable is age-graded if “all speakers of a community use more tokens of one variant at a certain age and more tokens of another variant at another age” (Meyerhoff 2011, 153). Thus there is no question of a change in progress in the speech community as such, but merely fluctuation within the speech of individuals at different points in their lives; see Wagner (2012) for a discussion of linguistic change at community and individual levels. Since Sankoff (2005), the traditional concept of age-grading has been divided into two types, age-grading proper (defined above) and lifespan changes. Lifespan changes are those where “individual speakers change over their lifespans in the direction of a change in progress in the rest of the community” (Sankoff 2005, 1011). In addition to age-grading and lifespan changes, the relationship between variation and change in the individual and the community can be manifested in three other ways: stability, generational change and community-wide change (see Table 2). These will be explained briefly below, but for a more complete overview, see Sankoff (2005); Sankoff and blondeau (2007); Meyerhoff (2011, 152–59); and Wagner (2012), all adapted from Labov (1994, 83–84). Stable variables are variables where neither the individual nor the community exhibits any change. They are well established as indicators in a community (see section 5.3 below) and “each age cohort of the same class, sex, ethnic background and other social characteristics, will be similar to older and younger groups in the use of variants and the amount of style-shifting” (Chambers 2009, 120). Community-wide change is the opposite of stability, involving a whole community adopting a new variant at approximately the same time. Finally, the term generational change refers to variables where individuals remain stable but the community changes; in other words, a change where each new generation uses the new variant more frequently. The data reported below concern stable and age-graded variables (1 and 2a in Table 2). Table 2. Relationship between change and stability in the individual and the community. (Sources: Labov 1994, 83; Sankoff and blondeau 2007, 563; Meyerhoff 2011, 153.) Interpretation Individual Community 1. Stability stability stability 2a. Age grading 2b. Lifespan change change change stability change 3. generational change stability change 4. Communal change change change 4 Real Time Panel Studies as the Best Approach to Study Stability and Age-Grading As Tagliamonte (2012, 55) observes, “[a]ny claim for linguistic change requires evidence from two points in time. Apparent time is good. Real time is better”. Real time studies involve analysing the same or similar speakers at different points in chronological time while apparent time studies make inferences about the way people speak by comparing speakers of different ages at a single point in time. Tillery and bailey (2003) challenge the general assumption of the superiority of real time over apparent time, and argue that “[r]eal time approaches … are no more a ‘gold standard’ for the study of language change than the apparent time construct is” (2003, 364). They provide an interesting discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of real vs. apparent time, and of panel (same speakers) vs. trend surveys (comparable speakers). Despite certain drawbacks of real time panel studies (the informants may move or die; the sample is likely to become less representative over time), the comparability of the methods and the possibility of examining changes in individual vernaculars lead Tillery and bailey (2003, 361) to conclude that they are “particularly useful for addressing issues of age grading and the stability of individual vernaculars”. In the real time panel study reported in this paper, we focus on one variable which is stable, the realisation of /r/ as a tap or a post-alveolar approximant, and one which is age-graded: h-dropping. Real time panel studies are rare, and “[b]ecause of the inherent difficulty involved in relocating and reinterviewing large numbers of subjects, the majority of panel studies have been restricted, typically comprising one subject … or a small handful of subjects” (Wagner 2012, 377); for examples of re-surveys involving the same speakers, see Tagliamonte (2012, 53); Wagner (2012, 377); Rickford and Price (2013, 145). Another point is that longitudinal studies normally employ merely two time points (Rickford and Price 2013, 164). Two exceptions are Cukor-Avila and bailey (1995), who re-interviewed informants from the rural Texas community of Springville a number of times over a period of ten years, and the Montreal French study consisting of three large corpora (1971, 1984 and 1995) including data from 14 of the same informants over the 24­year period (for details, see blondeau 2001; Sankoff 2005). Our own study is another exception, containing snapshots from four points over a 35-year period (1977, 1983, 1990 and 2011). 5 Social and Stylistic Variation Social and stylistic variation both crucially hinge on awareness of the social significance of the linguistic variables. Certain variants pass unnoticed whilst others arouse strong social judgements. The first question we attempt to answer below is whether different degrees of social awareness are attached to the variables investigated (section 8.1). If there is a large difference between WC and MC speakers and if all speakers use fewer low-status variants in formal than in informal speech, it is likely that the variable is socially stigmatised. 5.1 Social Class Social class has been, and perhaps still is, the most widely used social variable in sociolinguistic studies (J. Milroy and L. Milroy 1998, 55). Research has shown that patterns of social stratification tend to correlate systematically with linguistic variation in most urban areas, at least in English-speaking countries. At the same time, social class is also one of the factors which have been most difficult to conceptualise, quantify, and interpret (J. Milroy and L. Milroy 1998, 54; Foulkes and Docherty 2007, 53) since it is possible to base the classification on different measures, different combinations of measures, and different weightings of measures. One much debated issue is whether or not one should use a combined index of several indicators. Many researchers are of the opinion that the best prediction of social class is achieved by a combination of different factors (see Kiesling 2011, 59–60). However, others argue that such comprehensive indices are unnecessary. Some use occupation as the sole determiner (e.g. Macaulay 1977); certainly “it is hard to imagine a composite index that excludes occupation” (Ash 2004, 419). The original study of Cardiff schoolchildren (Mees 1983, 1990) relied solely on father’s occupation to determine the informants’ social class, this being the only possibility when dealing with children and young teenagers since they have no income and are all at the same stage of education. However, this measure obviously does not capture the changes that take place as each child becomes an adult. At later points in life, their final levels of education may be at variance and they may hold jobs with varying social status (and also different to that of their parents), or they may have moved from a WC to a MC locality. Furthermore, the measures are not independent factors but interrelated in the sense that a higher level of education is likely to lead to a more prestigious occupation with a higher income, and thus enabling the individual to move to a higher-status neighbourhood. In addition to the question of how to determine social class membership, there is also the issue of how many social classes are needed. Obviously, a higher number will result in more fine-grained observations, but such a breakdown requires a large number of informants. As Tagliamonte (2012, 26) states, many “studies of social class have been successfully carried out with binary divisions”, and a number of researchers have opted for a crude dichotomy of WC vs. MC, which to all intents and purposes represents a distinction between manual and non-manual labour (or blue collar and white collar). In their glasgow study, Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Tweedie (2007, 229), concluded that “[w]hile such sampling of social class inevitably simplifies continuous sociolinguistic variation into two categories, we were unprepared for the extent and nature of the polarisation that emerged”. However, perhaps this is not so surprising in view of Trudgill’s observation that “the biggest class division in modern british society is that which exists between the working and the middle classes” (Trudgill 1974, 62). The present Cardiff study also employed a dual classification model of WC and MC. However, basing the categorisation on occupation alone was felt to be too imprecise since we wished to rank the informants individually and identify potential changes in the social status of the individual, and therefore needed a more sophisticated model. It was decided to use a weighted combination of measures (occupation, education and residential area); see section 5.2. 5.2 Social Classification of the Informants in the Present Study After the 11 Cardiff informants had been selected, they were ranked according to a three-component index, based on the criteria of occupation, education and locality (see Table 3 for details; note that all names have been changed for the sake of anonymity). Father’s occupation was used in the 1977 sample but was replaced in 1990 and 2011 by the informants’ own occupations. Locality was included because this was believed to be descriptive of the informants’ social network. As shown by Eckert in her study of “Jocks and burnouts” (Eckert 1989), individuals are much affected by their peer group, particularly during adolescence. Cardiff consists of a large number of areas, but each may be characterised as being overwhelmingly inhabited either by the MC or the WC (section 2.1). Since most informants went to a school located in the area in which they lived, the WC children will have interacted with peers from the same socio-economic class and, likewise, the MC children will have been educated with peers having socio-economic backgrounds similar to their own. As the social circumstances of some of the informants had changed in the course of their lives, three social class indices were constructed, one for each sub-sample. For instance, even though the informants in the 1977 sample all had the same level of education (all being primary schoolchildren), this did not remain the same as some left school while others went on to take A levels and even university degrees. Mainly as a result of different educations, the informants have also moved on to different occupations, and live and work in different localities. The indicators were arranged in order of relative importance (Milroy and gordon 2003, 43). The father’s or the informant’s occupation was multiplied by 2, education by 1 and locality by 0.5 (see Appendix A). The mean of the indicators was then calculated for each informant at each point in time (Appendix b) and finally the grand mean of the two (in five cases three) points in time was computed. Table 3 provides an overview of the rank ordering (from highest social status to lowest) of the 11 informants within each of the two social classes based on this grand mean. The localities in parentheses are areas outside Cardiff and have thus not been included in the calculations. The names shown in bold-faced type are the informants recorded at all three points in time. Table 3. Social class index based on (1) father’s occupation (1977) or own occupation (1990 and 2011), (2) education and (3) locality. Informants ranked from highest to lowest social status. Those recorded at all three points in time are shown in bold-faced type. Middle Class Age Occupation Education Locality 11 Father: economics lecturer Llanishen Angie 25 Own: student University – Librarian (Aberystwyth) 46 Own: administrator of planning licences (Aberystwyth) 10 Father: assistant county treasurer Rumney Judy 24 Own: accountant University – History (Uxbridge) 45 Own: supply teacher (Thame) Alice 11 Father: stock control manager Whitchurch 25 Own: court clerk A levels Whitchurch - - - - Sharon 10 Father: press officer Whitchurch 24 Own: clerical work A levels Whitchurch - - - - Stella 10 Father: sales representative Llanrumney 24 Own: teacher Teacher training college Roath - - - - Working Class Age Occupation Education Locality Gina 9 Father: butcher Splott 23 Own: legal secretary O levels Splott 44 Own: hotel HR and training officer Law degree Splott Rachel 10 Father: lorry driver Splott 24 Own: pub chef/ waitress College – Hotel and Catering Splott 45 Own: clerical work Splott Michelle 9 Father: car mechanic Ely 23 Own: sales assistant CSE Ely - - - - Mandy 10 Father: coach driver Splott 24 Own: cigar factory packer Secretarial course (not completed) Splott 45 Own: carer – nursing home Splott Melissa 9 Father: packer Splott 23 Own: private nanny/ pub waitress One O level + College – Nursing (not completed) Splott - - - - Heather 10 Father: steelworker Ely 24 Own: waitress Finished school at 15 Ely - - - - In the discussion of the results, we shall focus mainly on the five informants for whom we have data for all three points in time. Figure 1 shows how the social class affiliation of these informants develops across their lifespans. In 1977, Angie is the highest ranking girl in the MC, followed 60 Inger M. Mees, Christina Hoock Osorno: Cardiff English: A Real Time Study of Stability and Change between Childhood ... closely by Judy. The two girls are identical as regards social status in 1990 and this remains the case in 2011. both appear to have risen to a higher step on the social ladder as compared with their childhood, but it must be borne in mind that the 1977 figures do not include education, so the figures are not completely comparable. In the WC, gina and Rachel follow the same path, both having higher-status occupations than their fathers. Mandy is notable for showing very little fluctuation in her social status. From the point of view of social mobility, gina and Rachel are perhaps the most interesting because they are very close to entering the MC, and one would predict that their speech patterns would change accordingly. Figure 1. Social class changes for the five informants recorded at three points in time. 5.3 Social Awareness: Indicators, Markers and Stereotypes The notion of consciousness is of crucial importance to Labov’s approach to the study of language variation and change, and consists of a complex of factors which are to an extent interrelated (see Kristiansen 2010 for a discussion). Labov (1972, 314) suggested a three-way distinction of degrees of consciousness of linguistic variables. They are summarised in Labov (1994, 78): stereotypes (“overt topics of social comment”), markers (“not at the same high level of social awareness” though exhibiting “consistent stylistic and social stratification”) and indicators (socially though not stylistically differentiated and “never commented on or even recognized by native speakers”). The difference between indicators and markers/stereotypes can be measured objectively in terms of amount of social and stylistic variation. However, it is more difficult to establish the difference between markers and stereotypes as it “lies in the level of consciousness: stereotypes are subject to metapragmatic discussion, while markers are not” (Eckert 2008, 463). For instance, when the recordings of the children were made in 1977, it was striking how often the teachers mentioned their tendency to “drop aitches” (i.e. a stereotype), while the realisation of /r/ was never commented on (an indicator). For our purposes (research question 2), it is worth noting that age-graded change involves features that have a high degree of social awareness (Labov 1994, 111; Tagliamonte 2012, 47), i.e. markers or stereotypes, whilst “[s]table variables are those that are well established as indicators in a community and are not undergoing change” (Chambers 2009, 120). The former should therefore exhibit patterns of style shifting while the latter should not. In the present study, stylistic variation was measured by means of a simple two-way division into reading passage style (RPS) and interview style (IS). 6 What is the Model of English Aspired to by Cardiff Speakers? Since the purpose of this paper is to see if there are changes in the use of standard and non-standard features, it is important to know which variety of English the speakers orient themselves towards. Walters (2001, 289–290) observes that there are three main influences on South Wales English: English regional dialects (notably the neighbouring areas of England: the West Midlands and the “West Country”, i.e. a term covering the south-west of England), Received Pronunciation (RP), and the Welsh language. Cardiff has been English-speaking since well before 1800 (Mees and Collins 1999, 186), and there appear to be virtually no traces of Welsh. Windsor Lewis (1990, 108) goes so far as to say that “as far as influence from what is properly describable as the Welsh language is concerned, there is no single item of general everyday vocabulary, syntax, morphology or phonology in the dialect which can certainly be assigned to a Welsh-language origin, and which is not shared with the general forms of English”. Coupland (1988, 50–51) arrives at the same conclusion, stating that not only is “Welsh substratal influence on Cardiff English ... minimal”, the Cardiff accent also “bears no close relationship to standard Welsh English pronunciation”. However, there is clear evidence of the other two influences mentioned by Walters (West Country and RP), e.g. the presence of dark l, and the absence of certain vowel contrasts and of “lilting” intonation tunes. Similar to the West Country, basilectal varieties of Cardiff English employ non-standard present-tense endings and extensive assimilation and elision. Speakers from all social classes are non-rhotic (Wells 1982, 75–76), as in RP, though unlike south-western English accents (Collins and Mees 1990, 87–88). Thomas (1984, 178) remarks that the model for the more “evolved” Welsh English dialects of the industrial south, in glamorganshire, and in the eastern counties which border with England is the same as that for most other varieties of british English – RP and Standard English. Coupland (1988, 51) adds: “and this must be particularly true of Cardiff English”. Certainly at the time of the original study (1977), RP appeared to be the accent that was regarded as the norm. The situation may of course have changed from the time of the first recordings. Foulkes and Docherty (1999, 11–12) draw attention to the emergence of influential non-standard varieties in britain which may compete with the standard as a reference point for speakers. On the basis of analyses of data from the whole of Wales, garrett, Coupland and Williams (2003, 130) found that RP is regarded as the most prestigious variety overall. However, they speculate that although it is conventionally held that RP is a “regionless” variety in England and Wales, the increased political independence of Wales (manifested, for instance, by the advent of the Welsh Assembly) may result in RP eventually losing its status as the norm and being replaced by an educated Welsh English variety (garrett et al. 2003, 216–17). Apart from the evidence from the scholars quoted above, substantiation for the fact that RP appears to be the model emulated can be found in the actual Cardiff data. For instance, Mees (1983, 1987, 1990) and Mees and Collins (1999) documented that glottalisation of /t/ following an RP pattern was on the increase in MC speech. Since Cardiff English, like other Welsh English accents, originally lacked this feature (having a range of other allophones depending on the context), a likely explanation is that the MC speakers imitate RP (cf. the situation in glasgow, Edinburgh and belfast, where the target phonological systems of careful speakers are rarely oriented towards RP; see Milroy 2004, 164). Whatever the case may be, MC usage in Cardiff was in accordance with RP for the three variables investigated here. It is in this case therefore immaterial whether the reference accent was RP or Standard Welsh English. If the speakers did adjust to an accent other than RP, it was in this respect identical to RP. For a full description of the phonetics of Cardiff English, see Collins and Mees (1990). 7 The Variables The variables for this study were chosen according to two criteria. Firstly, they had to be examples of either stable variation or of age-grading, which means that we had to be confident they were not recent innovations but were long established in Cardiff English. Secondly, we wanted to include examples of both an indicator and a marker/stereotype. The two criteria are interdependent in the sense that stable variables will typically be ones which do not attract social comment whereas variables which exhibit age-grading are often stigmatised (see section 5.3 above). Wherever possible, a minimum of at least 30 tokens was counted for each variable for each informant. However, in the samples of 1977, a small number of the recordings included only a few tokens owing to the short length of the interview. Nevertheless, only in a few instances was the number of tokens lower than 10, which, as stated in section 2.2, is considered to be the dividing line between a reliable sample moving towards 90 per cent conformity and a sample which is more likely to show random fluctuations.2 Note that in many cases far more tokens than 30 were counted, the highest number being 89, as we continued to register occurrences for all variables until the point of the recording was reached where the minimum for each had been met. 7.1 The Variable (h) H-dropping, which occurs in most of England, is a strongly stigmatised feature. It was introduced to English via French after the Norman Conquest, initially as a prestige variant (Milroy 1983). beal (2004, 340) notes that it was not until the eighteenth century that it became stigmatised, the first writer to condemn this feature being Sheridan (1761). Wells (1982, 254) has called it “the single most powerful pronunciation shibboleth in England” and Mugglestone (1997, 107) “a symbol of the social divide”. Unlike Scottish and Irish English, “South Wales shares with most of England the tendency to H Dropping” (Wells 1982, 391). For instance, in a short specimen of “unsophisticated Cardiff English”, Windsor Lewis (1964, 7) represents having and hard without /h/. Traditionally, (h) has been regarded as a single variable, but owing to the varying social significance of dropping /h/ in different linguistic contexts, this study will follow Mees (1983, 107; 1990), who subdivided /h/ into the variables (h1) and (h2). The variable (h1) represents lexical items, i.e. words which normally carry a high information load, e.g. main verbs, adverbs, nouns, and adjectives. (h2) signifies grammatical items, which carry relatively little information and comprise items such as auxiliary verbs, pronouns, and relative pronouns. The two classes of words further differ in terms of their frequency. (h1), which includes words such as hope, hospital and high, occurs far less frequently than (h2), which contains pronouns such as he. However, some lexical words such as house and home were used regularly, and for some of the informants, they occurred as many as eight times. Following the practice adopted by other researchers (Milroy and gordon 2003, 163), only the first three tokens of each word were included in order not to skew the data with too many occurrences of one particular type. (Impressionistically, the high-frequency items A total of 81 calculations were carried out. These covered three linguistic variables for 11 informants at two points in time, i.e. in 1977 and 1990 (3 x 11 x 2 = 66), and for five of these informants at an additional point in time, i.e. 2011 (3 x 5 = 15). Only in 9 of the 81 calculations was the number of tokens lower than 10. seemed more prone to h-dropping than less common words.) This procedure was not applied to (h2), which consisted of a limited number of items (the only ones documented being he, his, him, himself, herself, her, who, and how). As this category was specifically set up to deal with these high-frequency words, there was no point in restricting the number of items counted. Note that the frequently used full verb have was counted as a grammatical item although in actual fact belonging to the lexical items. Among the child informants, have occurred far more frequently than any other lexical word with (Mees 1983, 112–13). /h/-elision is never permitted in lexical items in RP. However, the loss of /h/ in some grammatical words, particularly pronouns, is quite common in RP in unstressed non-initial positions in connected speech (Cruttenden 2014, 208), e.g. take him back /te.k .m bak/. Since h-dropping is frequently found in RP in these environments, and the variables were to be ranked according to their standard or non-standard nature, these contexts were excluded from the (h2) counts. In other words, only items where /h/ is obligatory in RP were computed. In the present study, this category typically included items which occurred in unstressed, initial positions, e.g. He’s (a store manager). 7.2 The Variable (r) Cardiff English /r/ is either pronounced as an alveolar approximant [.] or a tap [.] (Windsor Lewis 1964, 6). The tap allophone is most frequent in intervocalic position, but it also sometimes occurs after certain consonants such as /b v ./, e.g. very, broke, every, three; it is even used as “intrusive r”, e.g. in nana and (Mees 1983, 89 and 104–5). Coupland (1988, 30) observes that “[t]he tap does not seem to be related to the typically Welsh trilled variant [r], and is acoustically very different from it despite the similarity in the articulatory mechanisms involved”. See also Collins and Mees (1990, 91) for a description of how the Cardiff tap differs from the old-fashioned RP tap articulation. It is not clear how long the tap realisation has existed, but since it was described as characteristic by Windsor Lewis in 1964, the variant has been around for long enough for it not to be a recent innovation. All instances of intervocalic /r/ were calculated, both word-internally (e.g. very, married) and across word boundaries (other end, mother is). The latter included situations where /h/ was dropped, e.g. our house. Similar to (h1), only the three first occurrences of each word were counted. 8 Results and Discussion In the following, the results of the binary variables (h1), (h2) and (r), will be presented and discussed in relation to the factors of social class, style and age/time. The figures show the percentage of non-standard variants. In addition to group means, we also consider the results for the individuals, focussing particularly on those for the five females who were recorded at all three time points. To ensure that the decrease in the number of informants in 2011 did not skew the overall pattern, the mean results of 1977 and 1990 for each class were re-calculated using only the scores of the five informants who were interviewed at all three stages. The new means did not differ substantially from the original results for any of the linguistic variables. Consequently, below, the results for all 11 informants in 1977 and 1990 are compared with the results of the five informants in 2011. 8.1 Social and Stylistic Variation Our first aim was to establish whether the 1977 variables chosen for study were indicators or markers/stereotypes by comparing the results for the reading passage style (RPS) and interview style (IS). In lexical words, i.e. (h1), the percentage of /h/ elision in the MC in the IS was zero per cent while the WC dropped /h/ 47 per cent of the time; h-dropping was completely absent from the RPS in both social classes (Figure 2). Thus there was clear social and stylistic variation for this variable, meeting Labov’s criterion for a marker/stereotype. Figure 2. H-dropping in lexical items in 1977. Social and stylistic variation. In the grammatical words, i.e. (h2), h-dropping was again virtually non-existent in the RPS in both social classes: zero per cent in the MC vs. 3 per cent (a single instance) in the WC. However, in the IS, h-dropping was 19 per cent in the MC against 84 per cent in the WC; see Figure 3. It can be seen that there was a huge discrepancy between the two social classes and between the two speech styles. On the basis of this, h-dropping in grammatical words can also clearly be labelled a social marker/stereotype. Figure 3. H-dropping in grammatical items in 1977. Social and stylistic variation. The scores for (r) (Figure 4) were completely different, showing clear social though little stylistic differentiation. In the MC, there were 14 per cent tap realisations in the IS vs. 11 per cent in the RPS while in the WC [.] was used in 74 per cent of the cases in the IS vs. 90 per cent in the RPS. Thus, surprisingly, for this variable the figures for the RPS were either the same or higher than those in the IS. On the basis of this, (r) can be categorised as an indicator. Figure 4. Percentage of tap realisations in 1977. Social and stylistic variation. Note that the RPS results for 1990 and 2011 revealed the same patterns as those for 1977 in the case of all variables, and the RPS scores will therefore not be reported in the sections below. As we have seen in section 5.3, it is generally assumed that indicators remain stable and markers are subject to age-grading. This will be explored in the next sections. 8.2 Variation across Age/Time Having established which variables were markers/stereotypes vs. indicators in 1977, we can now proceed to look at the time variable. As stated above, our discussion will be restricted to the IS. 8.2.1 The Variable (h1) Figure 5. H-dropping in lexical items across social class and time. Interview style. Figure 5 provides an overview of the results for the use of h-dropping in lexical items in the interview style for the two social classes in 1977, 1990, and 2011. From the graph it appears that h-dropping shows sharp stratification (“a wide gap between middle-class and working-class subgroups”, Tagliamonte 2012, 26) in 1977, with the MC having no h-dropping while the WC speakers drop /h/ up to almost 50% of the time. Time-wise, from 1977 to 1990, the loss of /h/ for the WC more than halves, moving in the direction of the MC as the informants grow older and reach adulthood. This pattern continues into middle age. Thus, it appears that past the age style. O indicates the number occurrences where /h/ has been dropped. of 23 (early adulthood), the use of h-dropping seems to stabilise, as predicted by the literature. The mean results have been supplemented by Table 4 showing the loss of /h/ for each individual. Table 4. Distribution of h-dropping for (h1) for the individual informants across time. Interview Distribution of (h1) in the Interview style 1977 1990 2011 Middle Class No. of tokens O % No. of tokens O % No. of tokens O % Angie 6 0 0% 31 0 0% 26 0 0% Judy 15 0 0% 31 0 0% 35 0 0% Alice 24 0 0% 33 0 0% Sharon 7 0 0% 30 1 3% Stella 22 0 0% 31 0 0% MEAN 0% 1% 0% Working Class Gina 19 3 16% 37 5 14% 29 3 10% Rachel 6 2 33% 30 2 7% 36 3 8% Michelle 15 9 60% 26 15 58% Mandy 5 5 100% 31 9 29% 30 17 57% Melissa 12 2 17% 31 2 6% Heather 7 4 57% 30 4 13% MEAN 47% 21% 25% The table clearly demonstrates that, except for a single instance in 1990, MC informants consistently pronounce /h/ in lexical items. Thus social mobility appears not to be an issue for this variable: h-dropping is absent in 1977 and this continues to be the case. Although Angie and Judy (the two MC speakers who were recorded at all three points in time) acquire an even higher social status than they had to begin with, awareness of the social significance of this particular variable appears already to have been fully developed by the age of ten. The results for the WC informants are somewhat more varied, yet still unequivocal: /h/ is dropped considerably more frequently than in the MC. In terms of the time dimension, Table 4 shows a downward trend for the loss of /h/ for all WC informants from 1977 to 1990, some displaying a more significant decrease than others. The trend continues in 2011, except in the case of one of the WC speakers, Mandy, who shows an increase in h-dropping in mid-adulthood. Of the three WC informants for whom we have data at three points in time, two had moved up the social scale (gina and Rachel) while one remained in the same place in the hierarchy (Mandy) (section 5.2). gina and Rachel show a progressive reduction in the amount of h-dropping over the years. Although Mandy also has a significant decrease from 100% in 1977 to 29% in 1990, the downward trend is halted, and in 2011 h-dropping has increased again to 57%. What appears to differentiate these three WC informants is occupation and social ambition. Contrary to Mandy, Rachel and gina acquired degrees (Rachel went to Hotel and Catering College, and gina first worked as a legal secretary and later obtained a law degree) and this may have had a standardising influence on their language. In the 2011 interview, gina states that she has high ambitions, not just for herself but also for her children. “…you want better for your kids…The three of them are really, really good. They’re in the top band… so I’m hoping they’ll go to uni… I was never pushed, which is a shame”. Conversely, Mandy expresses no desire to move up the social scale. Her occupation (carer in a nursing home) does not require her to use prestigious speech, nor, it appears, does her social network, her husband being a lorry driver and her acquaintances being neighbours of the same social standing. All this corresponds well with the findings of Mees and Collins (1999), who showed that the desire to improve career prospects and living circumstances was reflected in the adoption of MC speech features. They investigated a small sub-set of the Cardiff informants (two WC girls without ambitions and two with a strong desire for achievement) at the ages of 10 and 24. Analyses were carried out of the degree of glottalisation of word-final /t/, and it was found that in early adulthood the aspirers had acquired a MC pattern of glottalisation whilst the non-aspirers to a larger extent retained the patterns of their childhood. This distribution of the variable (h1) indicates that h-dropping in lexical items in Cardiff is highly stigmatised, corresponding with the findings of other researchers who have investigated this feature in other communities. Not only is its use almost non-existent in the MC, it is also significantly reduced when the WC informants reach adulthood and become more aware of its negative connotations. Even so, the use of h-dropping in this class never falls below approximately 20 per cent, on average, compared to zero per cent for the MC. It is worth noting that even though gina and Rachel have moved up the social scale, and today, at least in the sample from 2011 and possibly even that from 1990, would be categorised as belonging to the MC, they do not entirely become MC linguistically: despite approximating MC patterns and dropping fewer /h/s than the other WC informants, they still do not have a frequency of h-dropping as low as that of the lowest-ranking MC speakers who were born into this social class. Thus even though it is possible to modify one’s speech in post-adolescence, it appears to be difficult to break the pronunciation patterns which have been established in early life. Our results indicate that h-dropping is an age-graded variable which stabilises in early adulthood. However, one proviso should be made. Recent work suggests that the spread of h-dropping in britain “has been halted or even reversed” (Foulkes and Docherty 2007, 63). Thus it is possible that what we have here regarded as age-grading could also be a change in progress. To corroborate this one would need apparent time data. 8.2.2 The Variable (h2) Figure 6 provides an overview of (h2) (the degree of h-dropping in grammatical items) in the IS for the two social classes in 1977, 1990, and 2011. Figure 6. H-dropping in grammatical items across social class and time. Interview style. As compared with (h1), this variable, which only included h-dropping in those contexts where /h/ has to be retained in RP, shows even sharper stratification at the age of ten, with a vast gap between the MC and the WC. The MC speakers, who consistently pronounced /h/ in the lexical items, exhibit a higher degree of h-dropping (19%) in grammatical items. The WC informants have a conspicuously high rate of /h/-loss (84%) for (h2) vs. 47% for (h1). Nevertheless, for both social classes, the graph shows the same downward slope for (h2) as for (h1) between 1977 and 1990, and flattens out between 1990 and 2011. Thus, as with the variable (h1), (h2) appears to have stabilised in early adulthood, after which little change takes place. Note that the line for the WC is less steep than that for (h1) in the same social class. Thus there appears to be less awareness of the social significance of h-dropping in grammatical than in lexical items. An overview of the individual results is presented in Table 5 below. Table 5. Distribution of h-dropping for (h2) for the individual informants across time. Interview style. O indicates the number occurrences where /h/ has been dropped. Distribution of (h2) in the Interview style 1977 1990 2011 Middle Class No. of tokens O % No. of tokens O % No. of tokens O % Angie 18 2 11% 45 3 7% 54 3 6% Judy 53 10 19% 52 2 4% 45 3 7% Alice 34 2 6% 57 4 7% Sharon 6 2 33% 71 7 10% Stella 18 5 28% 35 2 6% MEAN 19% 7% 6% Working Class Gina 35 26 74% 57 29 51% 46 27 59% Rachel 39 32 82% 44 30 68% 52 34 65% Michelle 76 64 84% 68 65 96% Mandy 23 18 78% 89 84 94% 69 61 88% Melissa 64 55 86% 81 56 69% Heather 15 15 100% 61 35 57% MEAN 84% 73% 71% In terms of the individual results, Table 5 shows a relatively uniform distribution of the zero variant among members of the WC in 1977. The only exception is Heather, who drops /h/ in all cases. This uniform distribution, however, does not seem to apply to the MC speakers, whose usage ranges from six to 33 per cent. However, not a single speaker has frequencies that are higher than any of the WC speakers. Thus a clear gap between the two classes is not only evident from the means but also from the individual results. As to the development of the variable over time, the MC informants drop /h/ less frequently in 1990 than in 1977. The WC informants, on the other hand, show a varied pattern. Although the general trend seems to be a decrease in /h/­loss, two of the informants, Michelle and Mandy, show a considerable increase in h-dropping, omitting /h/ in almost all occurrences. The same mixed pattern is evident for the samples from 2011, with percentages similar to those of 1990. In the middle-class, Angie and Judy retain the patterns of 1990. In the WC, h-dropping has decreased for gina and Rachel (the two socially mobile informants) between 1977 and 2011 while Mandy actually increases her usage across the same time span. All in all, the individual results indicate that h-dropping of grammatical items has stabilised by 1990, as there are only minor fluctuations between 1990 and 2011, whether these be upward or downward. It is notable that even though the variable (h2) may be said to be a subcategory of (h) in general, the degree to which h-dropping occurs is very different from that observed for (h1), thus providing support for the subdivision made in Mees (1983, 1990). Nevertheless, the graphs of the two social classes run parallel to each other. both exhibit a decrease between 1977 and 1990, and both remain stable between 1990 and 2011, showing almost horizontal lines. Thus the gap between the two social classes remains unchanged. Although one can classify (h2) as a marker/ stereotype on the basis of the clear stylistic variation, the relatively high use of h-dropping by the MC indicates that it is not stigmatised to the same extent as (h1). 8.2.3 The Variable (r) The variable (r) can be realised in two ways in Cardiff – either as [.] or as [.]. Figure 7 shows the distribution of the non-standard variant, [.], in terms of social class and time. As can be seen from the table, there is a large gap between the WC and the MC in the use of this feature (sharp stratification). What makes it differ considerably from (h1) and (h2) is that the use of the non­standard variant increases rather than decreases for the WC informants as they grow older, while diminishing somewhat for the MC. The fluctuations are minor and there is nothing resembling the sharp downward slope seen for h-dropping. For an overview of individual differences, see Table 6. Figure 7. Distribution of [.] across social class and time. Interview style. Table 6. Distribution of [.] for individual informants across time. Distribution of [.] in the Interview style 1977 1990 2011 Middle Class No. of tokens [.] % No. of. tokens [.] % No. of tokens [.] % Angie 9 0 0% 34 0 0% 32 0 0% Judy 19 3 16% 35 0 0% 31 0 0% Alice 23 0 0% 43 0 0% Sharon 13 2 15% 34 4 12% Stella 19 7 37% 41 4 10% MEAN 14% 4% 0% Working Class Gina 16 12 75% 30 25 83% 35 31 89% Rachel 15 11 73% 37 30 81% 45 39 87% Michelle 32 28 88% 36 33 92% Mandy 6 4 67% 30 24 80% 39 36 92% Melissa 19 17 89% 31 21 68% Heather 8 4 50% 28 20 71% MEAN 74% 79% 89% Table 6 shows that the means for WC and MC and the findings for the individual informants are in agreement. Even so, the 1977 results for the MC show some variation. Two of the informants never use the non-standard variant, while one informant uses it more regularly. However, as in the case of the (h) variables, even the informant who uses it most frequently in the MC does not surpass the WC informant with the lowest use. The WC informants also show individual variation. Nevertheless, no speakers ever use the non-standard variant less than 50 per cent of the time, and most use it considerably more. As noted above, all the WC informants (except for one speaker) increase their use of the non-standard variant as they grow older. In contrast, the MC informants reduce their use of the non-standard variant following the general pattern observed so far. The increase in the percentage of non-standard forms in the WC indicates that this variant is not a stigmatised feature. It merely functions as an indicator of social class membership. It can be observed by researchers, but it is not generally noticed or disliked by the speech community. In fact, when asked in 2011 what characterises a Cardiff accent, none of the informants mentioned this feature. 9 Conclusion The variables studied revealed a clear difference between the MC and the WC, the latter using far more non-standard forms than the former. Unlike (r), the (h) variables also exhibited marked stylistic variation, and we can therefore conclude that h-dropping is regarded as a marker/ stereotype while (r) is an indicator in the Cardiff speech community (research question 1). In contrast to (r), the (h) variables showed a marked downward trend for most of the non­standard forms between 1977 and 1990, by which time they appear to have stabilised, as no major fluctuations take place between 1990 and 2011. This is in accordance with the pattern expected for social markers/stereotypes. However, the variable (r), our example of an indicator, showed no such downward trend. Rather than decreasing their use of the non-standard variant [.] across time, the WC informants actually slightly increased their use. (The MC showed a slight decrease.) Thus although some variables may be obvious to professional researchers and perhaps to people outside the speech community, they are not always known or recognised by people living inside the community (research question 2). It could perhaps be speculated that an explanation for the low figures for h-dropping in the RPS could be that the orthography would have reminded the informants to pronounce /h/ whereas the standard variant of /r/ cannot be derived from the spelling. However, this does not explain the large difference between (h1) and (h2), and thus the role played by orthography should not be overstated. Like Macaulay (1977, 58–59), we also looked beyond the group means to the rank ordering of the individuals. The most striking result is that in not a single instance did the WC informants, even the most ambitious, increase their usage of standard variants to such an extent that they match the usage of MC speakers (research question 3). We are acutely aware that the sample studied was very small, particularly the 2011 sub-sample. However, if the findings were corroborated using a larger population, we believe the following five conclusions could be drawn. 1) The variables do indeed manifest different degrees of social awareness, and as such Labov’s distinction between indicators vs. markers/stereotypes is clearly valid. 2) Indicators exhibit relative stability over time whilst markers/stereotypes are subject to age-graded variation. The speakers feel little or no pressure to change their tap realisations of /r/ to post-alveolar approximants as the non-standard variant is not stigmatised. The opposite holds true for h-dropping. 3) Features appear to remain constant between early and mid-adulthood. The realisations of the variables changed very little after 1990 when the informants were in their early twenties. Thus we find support for the claim that “by late adolescence … an individual’s linguistic system is thought to stabilize” (Tagliamonte 2012, 45); see also Sankoff and blondeau (2007, 577). 4) The WC speakers who had moved up the social scale (and possibly even entered into the middle class) did not appear to achieve values for standard variants which were as high as those of the lowest MC speakers who were born into that class. If our results can be extended to larger populations, this would imply that it is difficult to fundamentally alter speech patterns established in childhood later in life. 5) The results support the decision to subdivide the variable (h) into lexical and grammatical words. H-dropping is clearly more stigmatised in the former than in the latter. 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Roderick. 2001. “English in Wales and a ‘Welsh Valleys’ Accent.” World Englishes 20 (3): 285–304. doi:10.1111/1467-971X.00216. Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. 3 Volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Windsor Lewis, Jack. 1964. “Specimen of Cardiff English.” Maître Phonétique (3) 42: 6–7. Rpt. in English in Wales: Diversity, conflict and change, edited by Nikolas Coupland, 104. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. ––. 1990. “The Roots of Cardiff English.” In English in Wales: Diversity, Conflict and Change, edited by Nikolas Coupland, 105–8. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Also available at http://www.yek.me.uk/cardiff.html. Appendix A Overview of the three indices used to calculate social class, and the points afforded to the categories under each. Occupation (O) Points Professional workers, employers and managers 5 Other non-manual workers 4 Foremen, skilled manual workers, own account workers 3 Personal service, semi-skilled and agricultural workers 2 Unskilled workers 1 Education (E) Points Some university or college education 5 A-level or equivalent 4 O-levels or equivalent 3 CSE or equivalent 2 Finished school at 15+ 1 Locality (L) Points Whitchurch 8 Llanishen 7 Roath 6 Canton/Llanrumney 5 Rumney 4 Splott 3 Adamsdown 2 Ely 1 Appendix B Overview of the social class index scores for each informant (O = occupation, E = Education, L = Locality) 1977 1990 2011 Middle Class O x 2 E x 1 L x0.5 Mean O x 2 E x 1 L x0.5 Mean O x 2 E x 1 L x0.5 Mean Grand mean Angie 10 3.5 6.8 10 5 7.5 10 5 8 7.4 Judy 10 2 6 10 5 7.5 10 5 8 7.2 Alice 10 4 7 8 4 4 5.3 6.2 Sharon 10 4 7 8 4 4 5.3 6.2 Stella 8 2.5 5.3 10 5 3 6.0 5.7 Working Class gina 6 1.5 3.8 8 3 1.5 4.2 8 5 1.5 4.8 4.3 Rachel 4 1.5 2.8 6 5 1.5 4.2 8 5 1.5 4.8 3.9 Michelle 6 0,5 3.3 4 2 0.5 2.2 2.8 Mandy 4 1.5 2.8 2 3 1.5 2.2 4 3 1.5 2.8 2.6 Melissa 2 1.5 1.8 5 3 0.5 2.8 2.3 Heather 4 0.5 2.3 4 1 0.5 1.8 2.1 2015, Vol. 12 (2), 79-98(244) Marija Perić revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope Croatia, doi: 10.4312/elope.12.2.79-98 uDC: 811.163.42:811.111 Sanja Škifić uDC: 811.163.42’373.613=111 university of Zadar Croatia English Words and Phrases in Croatian: A Small- Scale Study of Language Awareness and Attitudes abstraCt The focus of this paper is on language attitudes towards english words and phrases in the Croatian language. In order to prevent loanwords, linguistic purism has arisen as a theory about what languages should be like. The tradition of linguistic purism in Croatia has been shaped by various socio-historical factors. english may be viewed as a language of opportunity, or as a threat to the survival of other, usually minority and endangered, languages. In order to provide an insight into the use of english words and phrases in the Croatian context, a questionnaire about language attitudes and awareness was conducted on 534 participants. The aim of the questionnaire was to determine participants’ language attitudes and familiarity with english words and phrases. The results show that although people in Croatia generally like english, many of them are not familiar with english words, especially older participants and those with little or no knowledge of the english language. Moreover, the results indicate that the younger generation is more inclined towards english than the older generation; however, they are not as familiar with Croatian equivalents as they claim. Keywords: language contact; borrowing; attitudes; linguistic purism Angleške besede in besedne zveze v hrvaščini:Študija jezikovne osveščenosti in odnosa do jezika PoVZetek Članek se osredinja na odnos do angleških besed in besednih zvez v hrvaškem jeziku. Iz potrebe, da bi preprečili rabo tujk v jeziku, je postal jezikovni purizem teorija o tem, kakšni naj bodo jeziki. na Hrvaškem so tradicijo jezikovnega purizma oblikovali različni družbeno zgodovinski dejavniki. angleščina je lahko jezik priložnosti, lahko pa je tudi grožnja za preživetje manjših in bolj ogroženih jezikov. Z namenom dobiti vpogled v odnos in ozaveščenost glede rabe angleških besed in besednih zvez v hrvaščini, smo opravili anketo med 534 udeleženci. Cilj vprašalnika je bil ugotoviti poznavanje ter odnos udeležencev do angleških besed in besednih zvez. rezultati so pokazali, da imajo ljudje na Hrvaškem v glavnem radi angleščino, vendar veliko starejših udeležencev in tistih s šibkim znanjem angleščine ne pozna angleških besed in besednih zvez. ne drugi strani pa rezultati kažejo, da so mladi bolj naklonjeni angleščini kot starejši, vendar je njihovo poznavanje hrvaških ustreznic angleških besed in besednih zvez slabše, kot trdijo. Ključne besede: jezikovni stik; izposojenke; odnos; jezikovni purizem English Words and Phrases in Croatian: A Small-Scale Study of Language Awareness and Attitudes 1 Introduction attitudes towards a language tend to change as the language becomes global, as it gradually begins to spread around the world. attitudes towards a global lingua franca are particularly interesting from the point of view of non-native speakers. such individuals may be highly motivated to learn the language, or they may see it as a threat to their mother tongue (Crystal 2003, 3). It seems that both of these conflicting attitudes are present to varying degrees in the Croatian context, which is something that the results of this research might shed some light on. english has indisputably gained a symbolic status in the context of modern development. From the purely linguistic point of view, this is confirmed by analyses of instances of borrowing which are predominantly linked to different semantic fields, such as technological advancement, international relations and the media (Cooper 1989, 152; berns et al. 2007, 19; Vikor 2004, 332). The spread of any linguistic variety is facilitated by the possibility of describing it as socially neutral and unmarked. This is true for english as it is described as “culturally neutral” and not bound to the british or american culture (berns 2007, 5). The incredibly fast spread of international communication is another factor contributing to the spread of english. apart from the exposure to different types of mass media, the Internet has become the crucial element for sociolinguistic analyses of language presence (Cook 2003, 26; Holliday et al. 2004, 96; Thurlow 2001, 287). The prestige of english is fairly obvious and understandable as it has become the dominant language in the world today. It plays a large role in Croatia as well, which is evident in, among other areas, its distribution in the names of companies (Croatian Airlines, Croatia Records), newspapers and magazines (Bug, Story), but also the types of apples (golden delicious, granny smith) (kovačić 2007, 65). These examples could also be analysed according to the distinction between necessary and luxury loans,1 i.e. catachrestic and non-catachrestic innovations (onysko and Winter-Froemel 2011, 1550–67). The names of companies (Croatian Airlines, Croatia Records) as well as newspapers and magazines (Bug, Story), could, therefore, be defined as luxury loans, because they are not adapted to the Croatian language and are not necessary, but are used for the purpose of international communication and for achieving competitiveness of a product on the international market. on the other hand, the types of apples (golden delicious, granny smith) could be defined as necessary loans because they are currently used in their adapted form, for example, in supermarkets as greni smit, zlatni delišes (see Winter-Froemel and onysko 2012, 45–49, on the relationship between necessary loans and adaptation). Despite, or even because of, its overwhelming presence, many linguists have campaigned against the usage of english in various sociolinguistic contexts. such activities are evident among Croatian linguists as well. Throughout its history, Croatia was oppressed politically and linguistically by many countries. The lack of a consistent language policy in Croatia could be due to sociohistorical factors including the fact that for a long time the mere existence of the language has been questioned by invading foreign forces. However, nowadays such an explanation simply does not hold. as opačić (2009, 50) points out, Croatia is finally an autonomous country, 1 In this paper, we use the term loanword or loan instead of borrowing, although both terms are misleading because they imply returning of the borrowed element after some time (aitchison 2001, 141). 80 Marija Perić, sanja Škifić English Words and Phrases in Croatian: A Small-Scale Study of Language Awareness and Attitudes oppressed by no one, and there is still no language policy which would regulate the language and the amount of unnecessary loanwords. The aim of this paper is to provide some insight into the importance of linguistic purism, in particular, attitudes in the Croatian sociolinguistic context, and to explore these issues in practice. The hypotheses of the research are the following: the younger generation is more familiar with popular english words and phrases and, therefore, uses them more often. They do not consider the increasing number of english words a problem, nor are they aware of the danger of such exposure to foreign linguistic influences. on the other hand, the older generation, not being as familiar with popular culture and the Internet, will avoid using english and will prefer Croatian equivalents. as far as education is concerned, people with a lower educational level will have the same attitudes as the older generation, while the more educated participants will be more open to the influence of english. Higher proficiency in english among informants is assumed to result in higher tolerance towards loanwords, while among those who have learnt english less than 4 years or have never learnt english there will presumably be a preference for Croatian equivalents and a lower tolerance for mixing english elements in everyday language. Furthermore, this research could greatly benefit from the inclusion of a pragmatic perspective, i.e. analysis of borrowing of discourse markers, interjections, expletives, and vocatives, such as ‘yeah, right,’ ‘sorry’ or ‘hello’ (andersen 2014, 17–33). Various scholars have already contributed significantly to this area, namely Prince (1988) as one of the first scholars to explore pragmatic borrowing, andersen (2001) with his research on pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation, and Clyne (1972, 98–110; 1977, 130) with an emphasis on perspectives on language contact and intercultural communication. although a pragmatic perspective would most likely produce interesting results in analysing contact between english and Croatian (especially the investigation of discourse markers such as sorry or yeah, right), it is not included in this paper because such a perspective would require a new case study. Moreover, the analysis of this type of transfer is most productive in contexts of emphasized cultural, i.e. sociolinguistic, differences, which is the case, e.g., between Chinese and english (Liu 2010). 2 Borrowing as a Result of Language Contact every language changes in various ways and at different rates. numerous linguistic changes are implemented without any conscious effort, mainly due to various sociohistorical circumstances and language contact. During this process, some languages are more open to foreign influences than others. In fact, contact with other languages has greatly affected english. Throughout its history, english has tended to borrow words rather than create new ones; for example, it is estimated that 75% of its vocabulary is derived from French and Latin loanwords (Thomason 2001, 10). today, as the world’s international language, it has become the source of borrowing. borrowing is also referred to by the term ‘importation’ (Clyne 2003, 70; romaine 2004, 49). From the structural point of view, borrowed elements might retain their original structure. In many cases they go through the process of nativization. Thus, phonological, grammatical and even orthographic features become adapted to the system of the receiving language (Jackson 1988, 22). although it may seem that the reasons for borrowing are simple, they cannot be reduced to their essential communicative function, that is, lack of particular primary or conceptual meaning in the receiving language. More often, borrowed words function as stylistic or as social distance markers (Leith 1997, 52). apart from analysing general motives for adopting loanwords, kowner and rosenhouse (2008, 12–16) list the determinants for borrowing english vocabulary: modernization and economic development, prestige, ethnic and linguistic diversity, nationalism, cultural threat, national character, and existence of regulatory linguistic establishments. although our research will not focus on the extent of the role of each of these determinants in the Croatian context, it is clear that each of them plays a role in the process of borrowing and in the usage of borrowed words. once words from a source language enter the target language, it seems that both individual and collective attitudes and judgments define their actual usage. In describing languages, expressions such as “more beautiful” and “more logical” (Milroy and Milroy 1999, 11) are often heard. These assumptions and presuppositions about the prestige of one language over another cannot be proven; however, neither can the fact that they are equal. after all, all languages and variants should be treated equally. nevertheless, it appears that value judgements about different linguistic varieties are very common. such judgements can be the result of prejudice or mirroring a value judgement about an individual to his linguistic usage (suarez büdenbender 2013, 110; simpson 2001, 295). before a more thorough insight into language attitudes is presented, an overview of the status of linguistic purism in the Croatian sociolinguistic context will be provided. 3 Linguistic Purism – The Croatian Perspective In the 1990s, within the european context, different minority languages were subjected to notable changes (o’reilly 2001, 1). This is especially true with regard to languages on territories which had experienced the dissolution of larger sociopolitical units. Languages become strong symbols of national identity in attempts to achieve political independence. before the dissolution of former Yugoslavia, efforts were made to linguistically unite the territory by means of the serbian language. This failed because the language was not considered neutral (tišljar 2002, 37). However, puristic tendencies have been present in Croatia long before serbian became their focus. Most recently, such tendencies have been oriented against anglicisms as well (Drljača Margić 2014, 73). a feeling of threat is usually the source of negative attitudes towards a language (kotze 2001, 327), which is applicable to the Croatian puristic tradition as well. In attempts to distance Croatian and serbian languages, some Croatian linguists not only searched for differences between the two languages, but also, according to some linguists, even made them up (anić 1998, 42). although there are linguists who are raising concerns about the influx of anglicisms in the Croatian language, the fact is that in actual linguistic usage such loanwords are on the increase. What seems to be happening is a change in attitudes concerning Croatian, which is related to changes in the political situation. When language is threatened, we value our language emotionally and protect it from foreign influences. on the other hand, when there is no threat, we evaluate our language rationally (tišljar 2002, 52–53). today, some linguists see english as a threat to Croatian and some do not, which has resulted in two main tendencies: puristic and liberal views. 3.1 Purists In the first half of the 1990s, purists such as stjepan babić, Miro kačić and Mate Šimundić made attempts to purify Croatian from serbianisms (oczkowa 2010, 328). even back in 1953, Croatian linguists talked about purism. For example, Ljudevit Jonke (1953/4, 4) appealed against the use of unnecessary foreign words and underlined the snobbery of certain writers who used foreign words just to sound educated. back in 1986, Filipović wrote about the openness of Croatian to foreign influences and borrowing of foreign words (1986, 15). He also analysed anglicisms according to their phonological, morphological and semantic adaptation (1990, 26). More recently, stjepan babić (2004, 215; 2001, 248) has warned against the threat of anglicisms. He focuses on words which are borrowed not as a result of need, but due to commodity and carelessness (babić 1995, 11). In today’s world, it is clear that our speech is influenced by television and the Internet. This becomes an issue when most of our private linguistic practice is directly associated with public language (kryzan-stanojević 2013, 202), where not only lexical items, but also morphemes and phrases are taken over (belaj 2009, 262). Drljača Margić (2014, 74) outlines the attitudes of linguists who propose that “the use of anglicisms (in the media) clearly reflects Croatian speakers’ snobbery, sycophancy, indifference, conformism and spiritual laziness.” one of the harshest contemporary critics is nives opačić, who in her numerous articles and books warns of the impoverishment of Croatian vocabulary and replacement of good Croatian words with the english ones; moreover, she states that the influx of anglicisms has become “completely uncontrollable” (opačić 2007, 217). Furthermore, she argues against the popular fallacy regarding the use of english to express something that is linguistically more concise and economical. as an illustration, she offers the following examples: ‘on the record’ and ‘off the record,’ which can be expressed more compactly in Croatian: ‘službeno’ and ‘neslužbeno’ (opačić 2006, 128). 3.2 Liberals on the other hand, the liberal view is championed by authors such as Ivo Pranjković, Vladimir anić, Marko samardžija, Josip silić and others, who advocate a more relaxed attitude towards language development and argue against artificially cleansing the language of loanwords (oczkowa 2010, 329). Moreover, they describe such purism as unnecessary and even detrimental. Vladimir anić (1998, 42) emphasizes the importance of self-respect and conscious choice in the creation of the culture of Croatian, stating that it cannot be exclusively determined by the views of “language offices.” Ivo Žanić (2013, 216) argues that the Croatian standard language is not jeopardized because not all of its domains or functional styles are satiated with anglicisms. In short, liberals do not view anglicisms as a danger or threat to the Croatian language and claim that purists are exaggerating the problem. snježana kordić (2010, 23) claims that purism is not, and has never been, the dominant view in Croatia towards borrowing, but that it is a construct of a group of linguists. Many anti-purists, kordić included, refer to concepts of “falling standards” and “moral panic” (Cameron 1995, 40; 83), which are frequently used by purists as arguments to further their puristic campaigns. by analysing these concepts it is possible to discern a type of linguistic ideology that rests on pleas for preserving what is believed to be appropriate not only in linguistic, but also in social, cultural and moral terms. similar linguistic ideologies that rest on puristic tendencies are visible in the investigation of numerous linguistic policies, both in neighbouring and more distant sociolinguistic contexts. such tendencies vary in degree from one context to another and, besides linguistic factors, frequently depend on various non-linguistic ones, such as historical, cultural and political relations. 4 Language Attitudes Linguistic varieties are important factors in evaluation and perception of those who use them (Meyerhoff 2006, 54; kramsch 2004, 235; Paddila 1999, 113). There have been numerous attempts to define the concept of attitude. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact definition because the concept overlaps with other concepts in social psychology such as ‘belief,’ ‘opinion,’ ‘value,’ ‘habit’, ‘trait’, ‘motive’ and ‘ideology’ (Mckenzie 2010, 19–20; baker 1992, 15; garrett 2010, 31–33). In analysing attitudes, it is important to take into consideration the concept of intensity, as stronger attitudes will have a greater impact on evaluative judgements and subsequent behaviour (Mckenzie 2010, 25). stronger attitudes are, consequently, crucial in attempts to identify and measure them. It is important to note that attitudes cannot be measured directly but are inferred from behaviour or measured through self-report questionnaires and interviews (Lasagabaster and gasteiz 2004, 399–401; bainbridge 2001, 82; baker 1992, 11). attitudes may serve different functions (for an overview see e.g., Mckenzie 2010, 24–25; brown 2006, 51; Lasagabaster and gasteiz 2004, 401–2); however, as far as language attitudes are concerned, social ones seem to be crucial. Language attitudes are significant both on the macrosociological and the microsociological level (giles and billings 2004, 187–88). This is also true for the analysis of the inflow of anglicisms in the Croatian language, where it might be argued that those on the macrosociological level precede those on the microsociological level. on the other hand, in distinguishing between instrumental and integrative language attitudes (baker 1992, 32), it is argued that integrative language attitudes are usually created in relation to one’s mother tongue (Liebkind 1999, 144). Thus, it would appear that instrumental language attitudes are more prominent in contexts of analysing anglicisms in Croatian as english primarily plays an instrumental rather than integrative role. In addition to research on native speakers’ attitudes towards english, there are also numerous studies that have concentrated on the attitudes of non-native speakers. Mckenzie (2010, 59) notes that although there are some concerns about the endangerment of native languages, most results show a predominantly positive attitude towards the english language. However, positive or negative attitudes depend on various factors, including success (gutierrez et al. 2007, 56; Lasagabaster 2007, 79), or how socio-politically neutral a language is thought to be (Mettewie and Janssens 2007, 127; o’Laoire 2007, 179; Laugharne 2007, 219). 5 Insight into Familiarity and Attitudes towards Eng­lish Words and Phrases in Croatian as noted above, english is the international lingua franca of the modern world and has, as a result, influenced Croatian on various levels. The increasing number of english linguistic elements in Croatian that can be read in the newspapers, heard on the television or even on the street, is indisputable evidence of how the language is changing. The influence of english on the Croatian language goes beyond anglicisms because some english loanwords have been adapted to the language system and therefore can be tolerated. Discussions and debates are mainly focused on the growing number of unadapted english words and phrases which are used arbitrarily, despite the numerous Croatian alternatives that Croatian native speakers have at their disposal. 5.1 Questionnaire analysis a two-part questionnaire was used in the research. The first part was composed of 22 simple yes/ no statements which provide an outlook on english words and phrases in Croatian. The second part consisted of a list of english words and phrases commonly used in Croatian. Participants had to decide which of the words they were familiar with and to write down a Croatian equivalent, if they knew it. The results of the questionnaire were analysed according to the following variables: age, education level, and the number of years of learning english in school. It was carried out via the Internet using google Docs Questionnaire. The investigation involved 534 participants, including 293 who were younger than 25, 204 who were between 25–45 years of age, and 37 who were older than 45. These participants were further divided into groups according to the variables mentioned above. In terms of education level, a total of 4 participants had completed elementary school, 159 had finished high school, 39 had their bachelor’s degree, 278 had their master’s degree, and 54 had a PhD. elementary school participants were not analysed as a distinct group due to the small number in this category. With regard to the number of years of learning english in educational settings, 16 participants had never learned english, 13 had learned english for less than 4 years, 261 had learned english between 4–12 years, and 244 had learned english for more than 12 years. although there are differences in the number of participants in some educational groups, as well as in groups distinguished according to the number of years of learning english (which could not be controlled, given the way the questionnaire was conducted), we consider these variables relevant to our research. The descriptive analysis of the sample is presented in Figure 1. The results are discussed in the continuation of the paper. Figure 1. Frequencies: age, education level, years of learning english 5.2 attitudes Informants’ responses for the introductory statement, “I like the English language,” reveal that attitudes towards english were mainly positive and that there were no differences according to the variables. small percentages of those who did not like english became present as the number of participants in a group grew. Furthermore, the second statement, “I think that the use of the English language will grow even more in the future,” showed that people were aware of the status of english in the world and in Croatia and agreed that english would become even more important in the future. However, the participants did not feel threatened by the english hegemony and the influence it has on languages. The third statement, “I think there is a possibility that English will replace Croatian completely in the future,” shows that most of the participants strongly believed there was no need to fear that the Croatian language would become extinct. Perhaps such assumptions are based on periods from Croatia’s past which entailed Italian and german hegemony, but which had passed without any severe consequences. nevertheless, there were some participants who answered positively, and this percentage was higher compared to those few participants who did not like english. The following statements were related to the amount of english words in Croatian and the areas in which such words appear. The participants could not decide whether there are too many english words in Croatian – for example, the results for statement number 4, “I think there are too many English words in Croatian,” were predominately neutral. However, agreement with the statement grew with the age of the sample. according to the number of years of learning english, some differences were shown. although the first two categories were smaller than the other ones, even this number of participants showed a connection between english knowledge and the presence of english. namely, 62.5% of those who had never learned english and 61.54% of those who had learned it for less than 4 years thought that there are too many english words in Croatian, and this percentage became smaller as the level of english education increased. Most of the participants thought that young people are the major users of english in everyday speech, as revealed by statement number 5, “I think that young people are mostly the ones who use English words in everyday speech.” There were almost no differences according to age, education level, or the number of years of learning english with regard to this statement. english words and phrases in everyday speech were still considered the preference of younger generations. However, the area of use of english words in Croatian was not specifically defined. Participants were neutral towards statement number 6, “I think that English words are mostly used in the media.” Moreover, in spite of the close number of those for and against the statement, all the groups showed a certain inclination towards it. The discrepancy was found only in the smaller groups – for example, 68.8% of the participants who had never learned english agreed with the statement, whereas among the participants who had learned english for less than 4 years, only 38.5% of the participants agreed with it. The results are inconclusive with regard to the frequency of english words and attitudes towards Croatian. The participants were neutral towards statement number 7, “I think that the increased amount of English words in Croatian signifies carelessness towards the mother tongue.” In spite of the close numbers of those for and against this statement, different groups were inclined towards one of the answers – for example, in the 25–40 age group, those who had learned english for 4–12 years, and those with a bachelor’s degree agreed with the statement; however, the younger-than-25 age group, those that had learned english for more than 12 years, as well as those with high school education and master’s degrees, disagreed with the statement. Carelessness towards Croatian did not indicate that participants perceived the Croatian language to be undeveloped or poor, which is evident in the results of statement number 8, “I think that the presence of English words in Croatian indicates the undeveloped state of Croatian and its indigence,” where almost all the participants disagreed with the statement. This disagreement increased with age, education level and years of studying english. Furthermore, the groups who had never studied english or had studied it for less than 4 years had the lowest percentages, which implies that people who did not know english very well consider english words as a necessity because of the indigence of Croatian. Furthermore, participants did not see the presence of english words in Croatian as a threat to the identity of the Croatian language, as is claimed in statement number 9, “I think that the presence of English words in Croatian threatens the identity of the Croatian language.” all the groups disagreed with the statement, but the strength of the disagreement varied, that is, the most common percentage was approximately 60 to 40. according to the age variable, the middle generation felt the least threatened by the english language. It could be assumed that the disagreement grew with age, but after a certain age declined again. according to the education level variable, the results are inconsistent, whereas the disagreement grew with the number of years of studying english. even though the participants did not see the number of english words in Croatian as a threat to the identity of the Croatian language, they also did not see it as an enrichment or improvement of the language either, as claimed in statement number 10, “In my opinion, the increase of English words in Croatian represents enrichment of the language with some new English words. In that way language is improving.” all the groups disagreed with this statement, but not strongly. The middle generation was mainly open to english words in Croatian and, although they might not improve the language, they did not feel threatened by them nor were they strongly opposed to borrowing. Moreover, the education level of the participants was also a factor; the higher the education level, the less they thought that english words could improve Croatian. The results for the number of years of studying english variable are too inconsistent to draw any conclusions; thus it may be stated that this variable does not significantly influence the statement. affective attitudes towards english words and phrases in Croatian were investigated in the statements 11 to 13. according to statement number 11, “The mixing of English words into Croatian bothers me,” it appears that the older people did not like the mixing of english words into Croatian. on the other hand, education level had little influence on these attitudes, that is, the percentages of higher education were inconsistent. The participants who had spent more years studying english were less bothered and worried by the influence of english. attitudes towards Croatian equivalents (statement number 12), “I think that Croatian equivalents are good enough and the use of English words in Croatian is unnecessary,” showed almost no correlation for the age and education variables. The older generation valued Croatian equivalents and felt more protective than the younger generations, but the percentage of those younger than 25 who were protective of Croatian equivalents was higher than that of the middle generation. The results for the education level variable were inconsistent. However, the variable concerning length of studying english clearly confirms the introductory hypotheses – namely, as the level of english knowledge grew, the less participants felt protective and threatened by english. nevertheless, the participants still valued Croatian equivalents, which is shown in the disagreement with statement number 13, “I think that we do not even need to look for Croatian equivalents for English words and phrases that we use often.” Their disagreement was moderately strong with approximately around 55–60% of the participants in each category disagreeing with the statement. only those older than 45 felt stronger about this statement, as well as those with a master’s degree. The group that stood out was the group with high school education: 49.06% of participants disagreed with this statement. although it is a small percentage, the participants in this group agreed more than they disagreed with this statement. Furthermore, the inevitability of the influence of english is evident in the high percentages among participants who agreed with statement number 14, “I think that the use of English words in today’s society is inevitable.” Most of the percentages are around 75 to 85 percent. Length of studying english is not a relevant factor, but the younger generation, as well as the more educated groups felt more strongly about the inevitability of english. Moreover, the results for statement number 15, “It bothers me when I hear English words on a Croatian television program,” support the hypothesis which stated that older generation as well as people with less knowledge of english dislike hearing english words in the Croatian context. This is probably due to the fact that they are not familiar with the language and do not understand everything. Participants younger than 25 and those from the 25–45 age group were not concerned by the use of english words on Croatian television programs: around 60% disagreed with the statement. However, 56.8% of the older generation agreed with the statement, indicating that they were disturbed by the use of english words on Croatian television. according to the level of education, participants are mostly not bothered by english words. With regard to length of studying english, most groups disagreed with the statement, except those who studied english for less than 4 years, who stated that they slightly agreed with the statement. Furthermore, the questionnaire addressed the question of the usage of english words in everyday speech in statement 16, “I often use English words in everyday speech.” The results show that the percentage of participants who regularly used english words decreased with age. as expected, frequency of use increased with increased length of studying english, whereas according to the education level, the use of english was very high among all of the groups. Moreover, most participants considered the use of english words and phrases as a way of promoting international understanding, which is evident in the results for statement number 17, “I think that the use of English words and phrases fosters international understanding,” in which there was strong agreement among all the groups – for example, the percentage of those who agree was around 70 and 80 percent. However, the lowest percentage of agreement with the statement was found among participants older than 45, as well as those who had never studied english. Indeed, according to statement number 18, “It bothers me when people in my company unnecessarily use English words inside Croatian sentences,” the percentage of people who were bothered by the unnecessary use of english words inside Croatian sentences increased with age. education level had no influence on opinions about this statement. Moreover, it could be concluded that length of studying english slightly influenced the attitudes. In other words, the less that the participants had studied english, the more they were bothered by its unnecessary use. some participants considered english expressions better than Croatian ones, as can be seen from the results for statement number 19, “I think that some English expressions sound better than Croatian equivalents.” according to the age variable, those younger than 25 and those in the 25–45 age group strongly agreed with this statement (more than 77%), whereas those older than 45 just slightly agreed with the statement (54.1%). regarding education level, almost all the groups strongly agreed with the statement (around 80%), with the exception of participants with a bachelor’s degree (56.4%). Moreover, regardless of the length of studying english, all the groups agreed with the statement; however, the groups with fewer years of studying english, did not agree to such an extent. on the whole, people claimed that they can express something more quickly and in a shorter form in english than Croatian. This presupposition is attested in statement number 20, “I think that we use English words and phrases more often because they can express something quicker and shorter.” all the groups strongly agreed with this statement. The lowest percentages of agreement were found among participants who were older than 45, those with a bachelor’s degree, and those who had never learned english. Finally, some of the participants admitted to consciously using english when they knew the Croatian equivalent because they liked english better. according to the results of statement number 21, “Even when I know a Croatian word, sometimes I use consciously English because I like it better,” the use of english in everyday speech decreased with age. education level did not influence the percentages significantly, whereas the conscious preference of english words increased within the group related to length of studying english. Moreover, according to statement number 22, “I often do not understand some English words used in the media,” participants older than 45, as well as those who had never studied english, or studied it for less than 4 years, admitted that they sometimes did not understand some english words used in the media. all the other groups disagreed with the statement. 5.3 Familiarity with english Words and Croatian equivalents The second part of the questionnaire consisted of 20 english words and phrases often used in Croatian, some of them adapted to Croatian, some of them not. The words in the questionnaire were chosen on the basis of discussions by opačić (2006, 2007, 2012). In addition, they were noticed in newspapers. The participants had to decide whether the word was familiar to them and then were required to write down the Croatian equivalent. remarkably, most of the words were familiar to all the groups, but when they needed to be explained, the percentages decreased even though many partial answers were accepted. The analysis of the examples will be presented in three groups. Firstly, the examples the participants were familiar with and for which they knew the Croatian equivalents, secondly, the examples the participants claimed to be familiar with, but showed lack of knowledge of Croatian equivalents, and thirdly, the examples the participants had some difficulties with. to begin with, several english words and phrases in this part of the questionnaire were familiar to the participants and they knew the Croatian equivalents as well. a few examples: atačirati (from ‘to attach’ – priložiti), daunlodati (from ‘to download’ – skinuti s interneta), look (izgled), celebrity (poznata), slavna osoba (‘famous person’) or zvijezda (‘star’)), luzer (gubitnik) or breaking news (najnovije vijesti). nevertheless, among the participants older than 45 and those who had never learned english, there were a few examples in which the wrong Croatian equivalents were chosen, like napadati (‘to attack’) for atačirati, for it was more difficult for them to admit that they did not know the word than it was for the younger or more educated generations. It is well-known that increased language study facilitates familiarity with the language. Thus, the group who studied english for more than 12 years had the highest percentage of the correct Croatian equivalent for the anglicism atačirati. Moreover, the percentage of participants familiar with the term daunlodati and those who knew the Croatian equivalent skinuti (s interneta) slightly dropped with age, whereas the group which gave most of the wrong answers were the participants who were older than 45. education level had no impact on the results; the biggest discrepancy between familiarity with the term and knowing its Croatian equivalent was among participants with little or no knowledge of english. Moreover, the percentage of incorrect answers was the highest in those two groups as well. secondly, with regard to well-known english words and phrases, as participants claimed, the results reveal a lack of knowledge of Croatian equivalents, as well as misunderstanding of meaning. The results refer to the following examples: spiker (from speaker – govornik, voditelj), backstage (soba iza pozornice), blockbuster (najuspješniji film), developer (poduzetnik), involviran (from ‘involved’ – uključen), mobbing (zlostavljanje na radnom mjestu), all inclusive (uključujući sve), off the record (neslužbeno), and feedback (povratna informacija). The older generation was more familiar with some of the examples than the younger generation was. The anglicism spiker was familiar to all the groups. However, the percentages of knowledge of Croatian equivalents were visibly lower. The percentage of participants who knew the Croatian equivalent increased with age and years of studying english, whereas the education level variable showed no consistency. Furthermore, almost all of the participants claimed they were familiar with the example backstage, but the majority failed to give a correct Croatian equivalent and showed a lack of knowledge of meaning, defining it as pozornica (“stage”) or stražnji ulaz (“back entrance”). In terms of the age variable, it was found that older participants were better at supplying Croatian equivalents compared to the younger ones. some of them even used neologisms like zapozorje and zabinje. With regard to education level and length of studying english, it was found that the percentages increased both with the education level and the duration of language learning with the exception of correct answers (87.5%) which were provided by the participants who had never learned english. The example blockbuster, referring to a very successful movie, was also familiar to the participants. However, knowledge of the Croatian equivalents and description of the term was not very high. Participants younger than 25 were less familiar with this example than the older generations were. The results for education level and language study showed a lack of consistency. Lack of knowledge of the meaning of the word was obvious from some of the answers given, which included defining the term blockbuster as velika reklama (“big poster”) or najava filma (“film announcement”). In addition, the example mobbing was familiar to most of the participants, but there were some wrong answers when it came to providing the correct equivalent. The following equivalents were given for the term mobbing: korištenje interneta preko mobitela (“using the Internet via mobile phone”), zlostavljanje putem interneta (“bullying on the Internet”), rulja (“crowd”). Familiarity with the Croatian equivalent increased with age. Inconsistent numbers were found among the education level variable. Moreover, the results of the expression all inclusive show that participants older than 45 had the highest percentage of correct Croatian equivalents, while the lowest percentage of correct answers was found among participants younger than 25. nevertheless, the situation was reversed when participants had to decide whether they were familiar with the term, namely, more participants younger than 25 were familiar with the term compared to those older than 45. The percentages of correct Croatian equivalents increased with education level and with years of english language learning. However, many incorrect answers were given, for example, isključivo (“exclusive”), izloženo (“exposed”), samo odabrani (“only the chosen”). Finally, the example off the record was yet another expression which was highly familiar to participants. regarding the age variable, the highest percentage of a correct Croatian equivalent was found among the participants from the 25–45 age group. The other two groups had a significantly lower number of correct answers. In terms of education level, the highest percentage of correct Croatian equivalents was found among the participants with a bachelor’s degree. Participants who had studied english the longest had the highest percentage of correct answers; however, the lowest percentage was found among the participants who had learned english for 4–12 years, not the participants who had never learned english, as was presumed. nevertheless, some of the answers showed a complete lack of knowledge of the real meaning, for instance, za zapamtiti (“to be remembered”), da se zna (“for the record”), iza zastora (“behind the curtains”), izvan teme (“besides the point”), nepovjerljivo (“incredulously”), skinuti s ploče (“take off the board”), za tvoju informaciju (“for your information”). on the other hand, several examples were found to be more familiar among the younger generations. For instance, the example developer was more familiar among the younger generations, whereas the percentage of correct Croatian equivalents decreased with age. Furthermore, both the familiarity and the number of correct Croatian equivalents increased with the number of years learning english, whereas the education level variable showed no consistency. Moreover, in the example involviran, correct Croatian equivalents were the lowest among the participants older than 45. It was found that the percentages of correct answers increased according to the education level variable (high school – 76.7%; PhD – 90.7%), whereas participants who had never learned english had the lowest percentage of correct answers (43.8%), while other groups among this variable had similar high results (around 83–89%). The results reveal a spectrum of incorrect answers, including zaostao (“backward”), provociran (“provoked”), moderan (“modern”), izazvan (“prompted”). Finally, another example more familiar among the younger generation was feedback. The lowest percentage of correct answers was found among the participants older than 45, whereas the middle group had the highest percentage. The numbers were inconsistent with regard to education levels, whereas the percentage of correct Croatian equivalents increased with greater length of english language learning. several examples were not as familiar to the participants as others, and there were some difficulties with Croatian equivalents as well – for example, intimidirati (from “to intimidate” – zastrašiti, zastrašivati), play-off (doigravanje, odlučujuća utakmica or utakmica na ispadanje), approval rejting (from “approval rating” – stupanj podrške javnosti), prime time (udarno vrijeme), and rookie (početnik). The highest percentage of correct Croatian equivalents for intimidirati was among the middle age group and the lowest was among participants older than 45. Inconsistent numbers were found in the education level variable, whereas an increase in the number of correct Croatian equivalents was found in participants who had studied english for a longer time. Incorrect answers were also found for this expression, for example, miješati se u nečiju intimu (“to interfere with somebody’s privacy”), postati intiman (“to become intimate”), posredovati (“to intermediate”), zbližiti se (“to become more intimate”), prilagoditi (“to adjust”), biti točan (“to be precise”). Moreover, the participants gave numerous incorrect answers for the expression play­off, for instance, duel, isključiti (“to turn off”), odustati (“to give up”), prekini radnju (“to stop an action”), ugasiti (“to shut down”), isplata (“payoff”), zaleđe (“offside”). Familiarity with the term, as well as the number of correct equivalents, increased with age. The numbers were irregular with regard to the education level variable, whereas the groups that had never learned english or learned it for less than 4 years claimed that they were 100% familiar with the term. Participants who had never learned english had the most incorrect answers, and only 43.8% actually knew the correct Croatian equivalent. The group with the highest percentage of correct Croatian equivalents were the participants who had studied english for less than 4 years (61.5%), whereas groups that had learned english longer had lower percentages. Moreover, the number of correct Croatian equivalents for the expression approval rejting increased with age. However, the number of incorrect answers was highest among participants older than 45, whereas the participants younger than 25 mainly wrote that they did not know the answer. regarding education level, the results were inconsistent; on the other hand, the percentages both of familiarity and of correct Croatian equivalents grew with the number of years spent learning english. Furthermore, the percentage of the participants familiar with the expression prime time increased with age as well. However, the percentage of correct Croatian equivalents was higher in the 25–45 age group compared to participants older than 45. some of the incorrect answers reflect lack of knowledge, for example, prvo vrijeme (“first time”), primarno vrijeme (“primary time”), pravovremen (“timely”). The results for the education level and length of english language learning variables were irregular. Finally, the percentage of Croatian equivalents for the word rookie increased with age. The youngest and the oldest group had lower percentages of familiarity and knowledge of Croatian equivalents compared with the middle group. The results were inconsistent with regard to the education level and length of english language learning variables – the highest percentage of familiarity and correct Croatian equivalent was found among the participants with more than 12 years of language learning experience, and the lowest percentage was found among participants who had studied english for 4–12 years. Interestingly, some of the participants gave completely incorrect answers, for example, izvanredan (“exceptional”), profesionalac (“professional”), unovačen (“recruit”), propalica (“thug”), majstor (“craftsman”), lovac na talente (“headhunter”). 6 Conclusion nowadays, english, as the major international lingua franca of the modern world, has a great influence on most languages and it has influenced the Croatian language on various levels as well. The aim of this paper was to explain the importance of language awareness and attitudes in practice, and the investigation attempted to complement such research in Croatia. The hypotheses were stated as follows: members of the younger generation are more familiar with popular english words and phrases and use them more often and, therefore, do not consider the amount of english words a problem; nor are they aware of the danger of such exposure to foreign linguistic influences. on the other hand, the older generation is not as familiar with popular culture and the Internet, so they will avoid using english and prefer Croatian equivalents. However, considering education, people with lower education levels will have the same attitudes as the older generation, while the more educated participants will be open to the influence of english. The questionnaire began with the statement, “I like the English language,” which was positively rated in all the categories. no differences were found among the age, education level and length of english language learning variables. Moreover, the participants were aware of the status of english in the world and Croatia and accepted that this influence would grow even more, but they still considered the increasing amount of english words in Croatian as the language of younger generations. The inevitability of english was strongly defended, they were not afraid of hegemony, they thought that there was no reason to fear the extinction of the Croatian language, and they supported the notion that english words and phrases could foster international understanding. on the other hand, the analysis focusing on the amount of english words in Croatian shows clear differences in age and language competence – that is, they confirm the hypothesis that older generations prefer Croatian equivalents because they are not that familiar with english. english words can be categorized as the language of youth, as young people admitted to using english words in everyday communication, but this was not the case for media language, as the participants were neutral towards english words in the media. although the participants were aware of the presence of english words, they did not consider this to be carelessness towards their mother tongue. They disagreed with the statement that english words enrich the Croatian language, but they were not strongly opposed to it. older participants were more concerned by the influence of english and the mixing of english words into Croatian and were less bothered with english language learning. Croatian equivalents were devalued among the younger generation and participants with higher knowledge of english. However, participants still thought that Croatian equivalents should be sought, but here the percentage was very low. Furthermore, the younger generation strongly believed that some english expressions sounded better than Croatian equivalents, and the older generation slightly agreed with them. english is considered to be compact and efficient and, according to some participants, a beautiful language. nevertheless, most of the participants claimed that they could express something quicker and shorter with english words. Furthermore, the use of english in everyday speech was a characteristic found mainly among younger people and those who had studied english longer. all in all, it appears that adopting english vocabulary is not a necessity but a choice because Croatian does not lack the terminology. bearing in mind kowner and rosehouse’s list of motives and determinants for adopting loanwords (2008, 12–16), it should be noted that most english words in Croatian are adopted due to prestige and the influence of the mass media. The second part of the questionnaire shows that some participants did not understand the meaning of english words and phrases commonly used in Croatian, which should be considered an appeal for change. However, it is interesting that the lack of Croatian equivalents mainly bothered the participants younger than 25; specifically, they claimed they were familiar with the words, but failed to give a Croatian equivalent. The terms they were most unfamiliar with included play-off, mobbing, approval rejting, prime time, all inclusive, off the record and rookie, whereas participants older than 45 did not know terms such as daunlodirati, feedback, intimidirati or involviran. With regard to the education level, the highest percentages of familiarity were found among the participants with a bachelor’s degree, whereas the lowest percentages were found among the participants with a PhD. The lowest percentages of correct answers were found among the participants who had never learned english, while the highest percentage of correct answers was found among those with more than 12 years of english language learning, which confirms one of the hypotheses. english is all around us, and although some people might think they know and understand it, the amount of incorrect answers shows otherwise. answers like napadati (“to attack”) for atačirati, postati intiman (“to become intimate”) for intimidarati, or koristiti internet preko mobitela (“using the Internet via mobile phone”) for mobbing are just some of the examples which clearly show the level of knowledge and awareness of english loanwords. References aitchison, Jean. 2001. Language change: Progress or Decay? Cambridge: Cambridge university Press. andersen, gisle. 2001. 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Appendix Gender: a) M b) F Age: a) less than 25 b) 25–45 c) older than 45 Education level: a) elementary school b) high school c) bachelor’s degree d) Master’s degree e) PhD Country: a) Croatia b) other: _____________ Mother tongue: a) Croatian b) other: _____________ I’ve learned English: a) I have never learned english b) Less than 4 years c) 4–12 years d) More than 12 years Decide whether you agree with the statements above and choose Yes or no for each statement. 1. I like the english language. 2. I think that the use of the english language will grow even more in the future. 3. I think there is a possibility that english will replace Croatian completely in the future. 4. I think there are too many english words in Croatian. 5. I think that young people are mostly the ones who use english words in everyday speech. 6. I think that english words are mostly used in the media. 7. I think that the increased amount of english words in Croatian signifies carelessness towards the mother tongue. 8. I think that the presence of english words in Croatian indicates the undeveloped state of Croatian and its indigence. 9. I think that the presence of english words in Croatian threatens the identity of the Croatian language. 10. In my opinion, the increase of english words in Croatian represent enrichment of the language with some new english words. In that way language is improving. 11. The mixing of english words into Croatian bothers me. 12. I think that Croatian equivalents are good enough and the use of english words in Croatian is unnecessary. 13. I think that we do not even need to look for Croatian equivalents for english words and phrases that we use often. 14. I think that the use of english words in today’s society is inevitable. 15. It bothers me when I hear english words on a Croatian television program 16. I often use english words in everyday speech. 17. I think that the use of english words and phrases fosters international understanding. 18. It bothers me when people in my company unnecessarily use english words inside Croatian sentences. 19. I think that some english expressions sound better than Croatian equivalents. 20. I think that we use english words and phrases more often because they can express something quicker and shorter. 21. even when I know a Croatian word, sometimes I use consciously english because I like it better. 22. I often do not understand some english words used in the media. There is a list of Anglicisms and some English words and phrases often used in various media. Your task is to circle the words you are familiar with and write the Croatian equivalents of these words. 1. atačirati __________________ 2. Daunlodati __________________ 3. Look __________________ 4. Celebrity __________________ 5. spiker __________________ 6. Luzer __________________ 7. Play-off __________________ 8. backstage __________________ 9. approval rejting __________________ 10. blockbuster __________________ 11. Developer __________________ 12. Prime time __________________ 13. Intimidirati __________________ 14. Involviran __________________ 15. Mobbing __________________ 16. rookie __________________ 17. breaking news __________________ 18. all inclusive __________________ 19. off the record __________________ 20. Feedback __________________ 2015, vol. 12 (2), 99-112(244) Frančiška Trobevšek Drobnak revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope university of Ljubljana doi: 10.4312/elope.12.2.99-112 Slovenia uDc: 811.111’367.625:81’367.4 Iconicity and Distribution of Complex Verbal Phrases in English abStract The aim of the paper is to look into how the use and distribution of complex verbal phrases in english comply with the postulates of the theories of constructional iconicity, frequency asymmetries and naturalness, especially in the initial stages of their proliferation. The three theoretical frameworks are first outlined and compared, and predictions ensuing from them are formulated as to the expected behaviour of complex versus simple linguistic constructions. two types of complex verbal constructions are examined from the point of view of these predictions: the progressive verbal phrase be + present participle and the composite predicate consisting of a semantically bleached verb + deverbal noun. Keywords: iconicity; frequency; naturalness; progressive; composite; deverbal Ikoničnost in raba opisnih glagolskih zvez v angleščini Povzetek osnovni namen članka je ugotoviti, ali in kako se raba opisnih glagolskih zvez v angleščini ujema z napovedmi konstrukcijskega ikonicizma, s pogostnostjo pogojenimi jezikovnimi asimetrijami in z napovedbmi jezikovne naravnosti. Postulati omenjenih teorij so najprej na kratko opisani, nakar so iz njih izpeljane napovedi o pričakovanem vedenju opisnih glagolskih zgradb v primerjavi z enostavnimi glagoli. Dve vrsti angleških glagolskih opisnih zgradb sta analizirani s stališča omenjenih napovedi: glagolska zveza biti + deležnik sedanjika ter glagolsko-samostalniška zgradba pomensko ošibljeni glagol + izglagolski samostalnik. Ključne besede: ikoničnost; pogostnost; naravnost; progresivni; sestavljeni; izglagolski Iconicity and Distribution of Complex Verbal Phrases in English 1 Introduction The emergence and the proliferation of complex verbal constructions in English have been discussed mostly from the point of view of their meaning (Wierzbicka 1982; Nickel 1978) and/or collocations (Akimoto 1989), but as conclusive as the findings may be the propensity of speakers to choose a complex verbal phrase over its simple alternative, to favour “packing thinner [semantic] bundles into two or more words” (bolinger 1971, 45), remains elusive in many contexts. The theories of linguistic iconicity, of frequency asymmetries and of linguistic naturalness all suggest that the choice between two linguistic variants depends (also) on their respective outer forms. The present paper examines the validity of the predictions of these theories by exploring whether (and if so, to what extent) they comply with the emergence and proliferation of the construction be + present participle in the English language, and whether or not comparable results would be found in a formally similar construction, the combination of a semantically bleached verb with a deverbal noun. The paper first outlines the postulates of the theories of linguistic iconicity, frequency asymmetries and naturalness, as well as their predictions about the expected behaviour (distribution) of formally less or formally more elaborate linguistic variants. The diachronic aspect of the predictions ensuing from each of the theories is also summarized. Complex verbal phrases may be qualified as formally more elaborate linguistic variants of simple verbal structures, especially in contexts where both are acceptable or even synonymous. In the broadest sense of the word, a complex verbal phrase is any structure which consists of more than a simple verb and acts as a predicate, including periphrastic tenses, phrasal verbs and combinations of semantically bleached verbs with deverbal nouns. The paper then introduces the periphrastic verbal phrase be + present participle, and predictions ensuing from the above theories are applied as to emergence, expansion and functions of the construction from Old English to Modern English. The construction has been chosen because of its attested interchangeability with corresponding simple verbal phrases (at least) in initial stages of its assertion in Old English. The absence of any meaningful contrast between two constructions makes the relevance of other factors, such as grammatical environment, more discernible. The predictions are compared with the relevant findings of previous studies of the use and function of the construction (Trobevšek Drobnak 1990; Elsness 1994; Dennis 1940; Ranta 2006). If the behaviour of the verbal phrase be + present participle complies with the predictions of the three theories applied – and this is to be interpreted as contingent on its outer form – similar results should be obtained in the case of other elaborate verbal constructions. For the purpose of this paper, the combination of a semantically bleached verb and a deverbal noun has been chosen, mainly because of its near-synonymy with a corresponding simple verb, and the elusive rules of its use. The emergence, the proliferation and the function of this construction from Old English to Modern English are therefore described and assessed from the point of view of the predictions of the theories of iconicity, frequency asymmetries and naturalness, and the findings are compared with those pertaining to the construction be + present participle. The findings of earlier studies are used to that effect (Akimoto 1989; Matsumoto 2005; Iglesias-Rabade 2001; Wierzbicka 1982). A pilot analysis of the grammatical environment of all the instances of semantically bleached verbs with deverbal nouns in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest is added, in order to assess the affinity of the construction for a more complex grammatical environment, as predicted by the theory of naturalness. 2 Iconicity, Frequency Asymmetries and Naturalness Linguistic iconicity is broadly described by cognitive linguists as “the intuition [...] that the structure of language reflects in some way the structure of experience” (Croft 1990 [2003], 102). greater quantities are so referred to by longer expressions (iconicity of quantity), meanings that are related are expressed by more cohesive forms (iconicity of cohesion), and more complex meanings are conveyed by more complex formal structures (iconicity of complexity) (Haspelmath 2008, 1–2). Of all the types, iconicity of complexity is the one most frequently suggested as the possible motivation behind the choice of formally more or less elaborate structures. The iconicity of complexity (also called constructional iconicity) has been defined as the correlation between marked meanings and marked forms (Jakobson 1963 [1966], 270). The notion of markedness was introduced by the Prague School in the 1930s. It has survived to this day, but it can be further understood in at least twelve different senses (Haspelmath 2006, 31). Applied in phonology, it first referred to specification for phonological distinction (Trubezkoy 1931), but more recent authors define it in terms of difficulty of articulation and lower frequency within and across languages (Haspelmath 2006, 26). Outside phonology, a distinction has been made between formal and semantic markedness. Formal markedness generally means “overtly expressed”. Semantic markedness, which extends to different values of grammatical categories, is measured either by the number of features needed to describe the meaning of an expression (Lehmann 1974) or as specification for semantic distinction. So, for example, Jakobson (1957 [1971]) describes the perfective aspect in Russian as marked in comparison with the imperfective aspect, since the former refers specifically to the completion of the event and the latter is noncommittal in that respect. Other expressions used with respect to constructional iconicity are (correlation between) “semantic complexity” of a sign and its “phonological representation” (Lehmann 1974, 111), “a larger chunk of information” and a “larger chunk of code” (givon 1991), “conceptual intensity” and “morphological expression” (Haiman 2000, 283). Typical examples of isomorphism between semantic complexity and formal expression of grammatical categories in English are:1 PLURAL number as opposed to SINgULAR number (girl : girl-s) gENITIVE case as opposed to NOMINATIVE case (children : children-’s), FEMALE gender as opposed to MALE gender (lion : lion-ess) PAST tense as opposed to PRESENT tense (work : work-ed) NEgATIVE polarity as opposed to AFFIRMATIVE polarity (is : isn’t) IMPERFECTIVE as opposed to PERFECTIVE/AORISTIC aspect (wrote : was writing), etc. Mayerthaler (1981, 11–12) and Orešnik (et al. 1990, 7–8) propose that the singular is less marked than the plural, the present tense is less marked than the past tense marked, the positive polarity less marked than the negative, etc. LANgUAgE The notions of markedness and constructional iconicity are brought up in the theory of linguistic naturalness. This theory was first formulated as natural phonology (Stampe 1979; Donegan 1985) and natural morphology (Mayerthaler 1981; Dressler 1987), later extended to syntax (Ryden 1979), and eventually it became a language-universal theory (Dotter 1990; Orešnik et al. 1990; Dressler 2000). Naturalists currently operate with the terms naturalness scale, sem-values and sym­values (Mayerthaler 1988; Orešnik 2004). The naturalness scale rests on the assumption that, from the speaker’s point of view, some morphosyntactic structures are more natural (nat), since the latter “strain the human language capacity” (Wurzel 1998, 63). A typical plural > dual CASE: nominative > accusative > dative PERSON: 3rd > non-3rd (1st and 2nd) DEgREE: positive > comparative > superlative VOICE: active > passive MOOD: indicative > subjunctive POLARITY: affirmative > negative TENSE: present > future Haspelmath believes that “the great majority of universal morphosyntactic asymmetries are economically motivated [...]. Economical coding is functionally motivated if it occurs with frequently expressed meanings” (Haspelmath 2008, 2–3). This explains why complementary prototypes, i.e. typical associations of a particular value of a given category x with a particular value of another category y, behave differently than their respective constituent parts. Example: [2ndPERSON, IMPERATIVE] constitutes a more frequent association of person and mood than [3rdPERSON, IMPERATIVE], hence the more economical Run!, as opposed to the more elaborate Let him/us/them run!. The main effect of frequency is predictability. The relation between (un) predictability and the required amount of encoding material is iconic (givon 1991, 87). Rather than ruling it out, the principle of frequency asymmetry and economy complements the iconicity of complexity. Furthermore, frequency could be one of the major factors contributing to the naturalness of “some phenomena [being perceived] more easily than others” (Wurzel 1994, 2592). 3 Distribution of Alternative Constructions: Diachron­ic Aspect There are several (potential) phases of language change: (1) Innovation: any type of alteration of the language configuration – either the rise or the loss of any feature of phonemic, morphological, syntactic or lexical material. It may be externally or internally motivated.2 The two labels should not be understood as forming a mutually exclusive dichotomy, but rather as referring to two possible sources which can be identified in a language change, the description of whose differential interaction is an essential part of accounting for this change (Hickey 2012, 402–3). (2) Coexistence of pairs of competing linguistic variants which differ on the level of expression, but their respective functions may overlap and in certain contexts they are interchangeable. Within the framework of constructional iconicity, one member of such a pair may be described as formally more marked and the other one as formally less elaborate or unmarked. (3) Expansion of the new linguistic feature/structure. On diachronic level, the theory of naturalness posits that the behaviour of a linguistic innovation depends on how its outer form compares to the form of the “older” alternative construction. If the innovation is formally more elaborate (more marked), it will be, post status nascendi, favoured in “difficult” environment, which stretches beyond the extra-linguistic or contextual circumstances of communication into the complexity of the immediate grammatical environment. A weaker (less elaborate) alternative spreads faster (or survives longer) in an “easy” environment, which includes a less complex grammatical environment (Orešnik, et al. 1990, 5–11). (4) Regularisation of the function of competing alternative structures. As the new linguistic structure spreads, its interchangeability with the older structure may give way to specialized (diverging) function(s). The prediction based on the postulates of constructional iconicity is that the formally more marked structure would eventually assume the function of expressing the more marked (complex) meaning, if compared with the function assumed (or retained) by its less marked alternative. The prediction ensuing from frequency based postulates is that formally more elaborate structures would “specialize” for less frequently evoked meaning(s), and formally less elaborate structures would be preferred with more frequently evoked meaning(s). 4 Composite Predicate: be + present participle The periphrastic construction be + present participle has been most frequently referred to as expanded, progressive or continuous, of which the term progressive seems to be universally accepted Externally-motivated language change is induced by sociolinguistic factors, a typical example of which is language contact. An example of an internally-motivated change is grammatical restructuring due to phonetic weakening or loss. LANgUAgE nowadays. In this paper it will be referred to as progressive verbal phrase (PVP), although in Old English this construction was not consistent in portraying the action as being in progress. The Old English construction consisting of the verb beon/wesan + present participle can be found in the oldest English manuscripts. While there are only four instances of it in beowulf (Klaeber 1950), it is relatively frequent in texts translated from Latin. Mossé attributes them to either direct or indirect influence of Latin: Quelles que soient leur nature, leur dates et leur origins, poésie ou prose, traductions ou originaux, tous les textes du vieil-anglais nous ont été transmis sous la forme que leur avaient donnée des clercs, c’est-a- dire des lettrés qui tous savaient le latin. (1938, 53–54). According to Mossé, the introduction of this construction was further motivated by the collapse of the old germanic system of the lexical aspect in verbs (Aktionsart). Nickel (1966, 83–207), on the other hand, dismissed the influence of Latin as the main instigator of the construction since he found no correlation with comparable constructions in the original Latin texts. In Orosius, dating probably from about CE 890, PVP is relatively independent from Latin: of 237 instances in the Old English text, 131 correspond to simple verbal phrases (SVP) or have no equivalent in the Latin original (Mosse 1938, 66; Nickel 1966, 112) and 154 are rendered as SPV in either or both of the Modern English translations (Nickel 1966, 330–51). Traugott also points to examples of Old English PVP in Orosius which would definitely be rendered as SVP in Modern English (Traugott 1972, 90). The electiveness of PVP in Orosius provides sufficient argument for this construction to be treated as a syntactic variant (alternative) of a corresponding simple verbal phrase (SVP) in Old English. On the basis of the postulates of linguistic theories described above, the following predictions can be formed as to the assertion of PVP in English: (1) In Old English PVP was formally more marked than SVP. (2) In Old English PVP was less frequent than SVP. (3) In Old English PVP was favoured in grammatically complex environment. (4) When not (no longer) interchangeable with SPV, PVP assumed semantically more marked meaning(s). The Old English finite verbal phrase (SVP) typically consisted of a verbal stem and a personal ending, both in the present and in the preterite tense, in the indicative and in the subjunctive mood. Its Modern English formal descendent is the Present/Past Simple Tense form. The Old English PVP consisted of the auxiliary beon/wesan in the appropriate form, the present stem of the verb and the participial ending –ende. When compared with the Old English SVP, Old English PVP may be described as formally marked, and Old English SVP as a formally unmarked linguistic construction. To account for the distinction between formal and semantic markedness, the qualifier
form to SPV in this paper. Old English PVP was much less frequent that SPV: in Orosius (Sweet 1883 [1959]) there are 237 clauses containing PVP and 2565 clauses with simple SVP (Trobevšek Drobnak 1990). In Shakespeare, Marlow and Milton, the construction is still rarely found, but it has been gaining ground, especially after 1700. Dennis (1940, 856) reports that the gospel according to St Mark contains 29 instances of PVP in the King James bible from 1611, and that all but one of these instances are kept in their progressive form in a 20th-century version of the bible, with the addition of 78 new cases of PVP, formerly rendered as SPV. The validity of the hypothesis of the theory of naturalness, that Old English PVP were initially favoured in grammatically complex environment, was tested on the use of PVP in the Old English translation of Historiarum Adversus Paganos by the historian and theologian Orosius).3 The basic sample consisted of 237 clauses with PVP as the predicator, and the control sample consisted of 855 clauses with SPV as the predicator. The probability rates of any chosen grammatical category for assuming a particular value was computed for the basic and for the control sample. The grammatical environment of selected constructions was determined as to its scope (e.g. sentence, clause, matrix verbal phrase) and as to the observables. Initially, these were traditional grammatical categories which were assigned binary values – one defined as constituting a more complex (com) grammatical environment. In the absence of other reliable criteria, the attribute form construction). The predictions based on the postulated of the theory of naturalness were confirmed in the case of the tense, the aspect, the type of verbal complementation (object) and the number. The propensity of com labels were used for the assessment of the complexity of grammatical environment of chosen constructions, and not for the evaluation of the complexity of constructions themselves. 5 Prepositional phrase as a complement to a transitive verb was assigned the qualifier