The 9th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE) University of Ljubljana, 15th–17th September 2022, Book of Abstracts Deveta bienalna mednarodna konferenca o jezikoslovju sodobne angleščine, Univerza v Ljubljani, 15.–17. september 2022, Izvlečki





Organizers / Organizatorji



Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana Oddelek za anglistiko in amerikanistiko Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani



© University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, 2022. All rights reserved.

© Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta, 2022. Vse pravice pridržane.





Editor / Urednica

Vesna Lazović



Graphic design / Grafično oblikovanje

Ina Poteko



Published by / Založila

Ljubljana University Press (Založba Univerze v Ljubljani)



Issued by / Izdal

Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts (Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani)



For the publisher / Za založbo

Gregor Majdič, rector of the University of Ljubljana/ rektor Univerze v Ljubljani



For the issuer / Za izdajatelja

Mojca Schlamberger Brezar, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana/ dekanja Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani



Ljubljana, 2022

First e-edition / Prva e-izdaja



Digital copy of the book is available on: / Publikacija je v digitalni obliki dostopna na:

https://biclce22.ff.uni-lj.si/programme/



This publication is free of charge. / Publikacija je brezplačna.



Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v

Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani



COBISS.SI-ID 121439235

ISBN 978-961-7128-92-5 (PDF)





Contents

1 Conference Call ...................................................................................................................... 4

2 Plenary Speakers .................................................................................................................... 5

3 Conference Presentations ......................................................................................................11

4 Workshops .............................................................................................................................59





3





1 Conference Call



The 9th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE), which was originally going to be held in September 2021, will take place between 15 and 17

September 2022 at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia).



Over the last two decades, the BICLCE conference has become a platform for various theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of English and its varieties. Previous conferences were held in Edinburgh (2005), Toulouse (2007), London (2009), Osnabrück (2011), Austin TX

(2013), Madison WI (2015), Vigo (2017) and Bamberg (2019). With a focus on the holistic presentation of current linguistic research, we look forward to accommodating papers, presentations and workshops on the syntax, morphology, phonology, sociolinguistics, semantics and pragmatics of contemporary English.





Organizing Committee




The conference is organized by the following members of the Department of English (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia):



Monika Kavalir, Lara Burazer, Andreja Drašler, Gašper Ilc, Vesna Lazović, Frančiška Lipovšek and Andrej Stopar.





Scientific Committee


Bas Aarts (University College London)

Christian Mair (University of Freiburg)

Susan Conrad (Portland State University)

Anne O’Keeffe (Mary Immaculate College,

Nikola Dobrić (University of Klagenfurt) University of Limerick)

Teresa Fanego (University of Santiago de

Carita Paradis (Lund University) Compostela)

Hermine Penz (University of Graz)

Lise Fontaine (Cardiff University)

Javier Perez-Guerra (University of Vigo)

Gaëtanelle Gilquin (Université catholique de

Ute Römer (Georgia State University) Louvain)

Khazriyati Salehuddin (Universiti

Martin Hilpert (Université de Neuchâtel) Kebangsaan Malaysia)

Thomas Hoffmann (Katholische Universität

Edgar Schneider (University of Regensburg) Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)

Elena Seoane (University of Vigo)

Patrick Honeybone (University of

Jennifer Smith (University of Glasgow) Edinburgh)

Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (KU Leuven)

Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung Hee University)

Anja Wanner (University of Wisconsin-

Smiljana Komar (University of Ljubljana) Madison)

Manfred Krug (University of Bamberg)

Valentin Werner (University of Bamberg)





4





2 Plenary Speakers



Bas Aarts, University College London, United Kingdom





PRETERITES AS PAST PARTICIPLES


In this paper I investigate a phenomenon that involves the use of the past tense forms of irregular verbs in lieu of past participles, as in the attested examples below: (1) Jenny: Ooh, I don’t mind the chicken one. Lee: I’ve ate that. (Gogglebox, tv programme, 2021) (2) Luckily the first boy had swam away from where the debris fell. (BBC News website, 9 July 2018)



The construction has been referred to as ‘preterite to past participle shift’ (Lass 1994), as ‘past for perfect’ (Wolfram 2003: 146), and as ‘past tense spreading’ (Geeraert and Newman 2015: 11).

I will argue that these labels are unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, and will use the term

‘preterite as past participle’ (PaPP) instead.



I will first briefly discuss the long history of the PaPP construction in English, and will then investigate its use for a large number of verbs which differ in frequency in one of the megacorpora of English, namely the iWeb Corpus (Davies 2018–).



One of the findings of this research confirms Geeraert and Newman’s claim (2015) that the less frequent participles are more likely to be replaced by past tense forms. I will explore the hypothesis that as the distance between the auxiliary ‘have’ and the past participle increases, the chance of PaPP becomes greater. The hypothesis is confirmed by the finding that PaPP is more likely when the verbal sequence contains a negative element (e.g., ‘has not took’), adverb (e.g., ‘has probably took’) or more than one verb, especially a modal verb (e.g., ‘wil have took’).





References


Davies, Mark (2018–) The 14 Billion Word iWeb Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/iWeb/

Geeraert, Kristina and John Newman (2015) ‘I haven’t drank in weeks: the use of past tense forms as past participles in English corpora’. In: John Newman, Harald Baayen and Sally Rice (eds.), Corpus-based studies in language use, language learning, and language documentation. Leiden: Brill. 11–33.

Lass, Roger (1994) ‘Proliferation and option-cutting: the strong verb in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries’. In: Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.) 1993. Towards a standard English: 1600–1800. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 81–113.

Wolfram, Walt (2003) ‘Enclave dialect communities in the south’. In: Stephen J. Nagle & Sara L.

Sanders (eds.) English in the southern United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 141–158.



Short CV: Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at UCL. His publications include: Syntactic gradience (2007, OUP), Oxford modern English grammar (2011, OUP), The English verb phrase (edited with J. Close, G. Leech and S. Wallis, 2013, CUP), The Oxford dictionary of English grammar (edited with S. Chalker and E. Weiner, 2nd edition, 2014, OUP), How to teach grammar (with I. Cushing and R. Hudson, 2019, OUP), The Oxford handbook of English grammar (edited with J. Bowie and G. Popova, 2020, OUP), the Handbook of English Linguistics (edited with A. McMahon and L. Hinrichs, 2nd edition, 2021, 5



Wiley) as well as book chapters and articles in journals. He is a founding editor of the journal English Language and Linguistics (CUP).





Susan Conrad, Portland State University, United States



MAKING SENSE OF DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE, ACADEMIC CONTEXTS, AND NON-ACADEMIC CONTEXTS IN LANGUAGE FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: LESSONS FROM





CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND BEYOND




In this presentation I will discuss a problem that often occurs in teaching and research in language for specific purposes: proficiency in the language of a discipline is equated with academic language proficiency while most students hope to work in non-academic contexts. Using evidence from my own project in civil engineering as well as other projects, I will show why it is misleading to base our understanding of a discipline solely on the academic context and why this can cause problems for students’ language learning. I will demonstrate the need for research to differentiate the values of the discipline generally, the values more specific to academia, and the values more specific to industry contexts, and to see how each of these is reflected in language use. I will then discuss the implications from three perspectives. First, what do these results mean for teaching, especially given that LSP teachers cannot be expected to know all disciplines and all contexts?

Second, what are the implications for research design when disciplines are studied? Third, particularly for corpus-based studies, what additional perspectives beyond text analysis are needed for understanding languages for specific purposes?



Short CV: Susan Conrad is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, USA. Her work has focused on using corpus linguistics to describe and teach English grammar and discourse so that people can investigate language for themselves and understand how to make effective language choices in their own communication. She is co-author and co-editor of numerous books including The Cambridge Introduction to Applied Linguistics (2020), Register, Genre, and Style (2019/2009), Real Grammar (2009), and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999). With grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, she started the Civil Engineering Writing Project, a multi-university project in which corpus linguists, engineering faculty, and engineers in industry collaborate to improve writing instruction for civil engineering students. The work has won two awards from the American Society for Engineering Education. Susan started her career teaching English in Africa and Asia.





Gaëtanelle Gilquin, University of Louvain, Belgium



FROM WRITTEN PRODUCT TO WRITING PROCESS: A NEW DIRECTION IN LEARNER





CORPUS RESEARCH


The field of learner corpus research seeks to investigate learner language through the analysis of authentic language data available in electronic format (see Granger et al. 2015). For writing, the data typically take the form of texts produced by learners in the target language. The International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al. 2020), for example, one of the earliest written learner corpora, is made up of essays as they were submitted by the learners who wrote them. In other words, most learner corpora represent the written product, i.e., the text in its final stage.



6



Although in L2 writing studies, the writing process, i.e., the different steps leading to the final product, has been considered since the end of the 1970s (Matsuda 2003), “the influence of corpora in the study of writing processes has been limited” (Wärnsby et al. 2016: 198). Recently, however, some learner corpora have been compiled that give a glimpse of what the learner writing process may look like. This is the case of corpora that include several drafts of the same text, such as the Hanken Corpus of Academic Written English for Economics (Mäkinen & Hiltunen 2016) or the CityU Corpus of Essay Drafts of English Language Learners (Lee et al. 2015). This is also the case of the Marburg corpus of Intermediate Learner English (Kreyer 2015), which shows some traces of revision in handwritten texts (deletions or insertions kept visible in the manuscripts).



Another learner corpus that gives access to the writing process, in addition to the written product, is the Process Corpus of English in Education (PROCEED; Gilquin 2022). This corpus comprises finished texts, like most learner corpora, but for each text it also includes a screencast video, recorded by means of OBS Studio (Jim & OBS Studio contributors 2012), which shows the screen activity from the beginning to the end of the writing task, as well as a keystroke log file, recorded by means of Inputlog (Leijten & Van Waes 2013), which represents all the keys struck on the keyboard at any point during the whole writing process.

It will be shown how such learner corpora can provide new insights into learner writing, making it possible to investigate aspects such as linearity in text production, writing fluency or the use of online resources. We will also see how the writing process can help explain certain features of the written product, and how the two could be jointly exploited in the description or assessment of L2 writing. More generally, it will be argued that learner corpus research integrating the process dimension can refine our views of learner language in unprecedented ways.





References


Gilquin, G. 2022. The Process Corpus of English in Education: Going beyond the written text.

Research in Corpus Linguistics 10(1): 31–44.

Granger, S., M. Dupont, F. Meunier, H. Naets & M. Paquot. 2020. The International Corpus of Learner English. Version 3. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain.

Granger, S., G. Gilquin & F. Meunier (eds). 2015. The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jim & OBS Studio contributors. 2012. OBS Studio, https://obsproject.com.

Kreyer, R. 2015. The Marburg Corpus of Intermediate Learner English (MILE). In M. Callies & S.

Götz (eds) Learner Corpora in Language Testing and Assessment (pp. 13–34).

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lee, J., C. Yan Yeung, A. Zeldes, M. Reznicek, A. Ladling & J. Webster. 2015. CityU Corpus of Essay Drafts of English Language Learners: A corpus of textual revision in second language writing. Language Resources and Evaluation 49(3): 659–683.

Leijten, M. & L. Van Waes. 2013. Keystroke logging in writing research: Using Inputlog to analyze and visualize writing processes. Written Communication 30(3): 358–392.

Mäkinen, M. & T. Hiltunen. 2016. Creating a corpus of student writing in economics: Structure and representativeness. In M. J. López-Couso, B. Méndez-Naya, P. Núñez-Pertejo & I. M.

Palacios-Martínez (eds) Corpus Linguistics on the Move: Exploring and Understanding English through Corpora (pp. 41–58). Leiden: Brill.

Matsuda, P. K. 2003. Second language writing in the twentieth century: A situated historical perspective. In B. Kroll (ed.) Exploring the Dynamics of Second Language Writing (pp.

15–34). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wärnsby, A., A. Kauppinen, A. Eriksson, M. Wiktorsson, E. Bick & L.-J. Olsson. 2016. Building interdisciplinary bridges. MUCH: The Malmö University-Chalmers Corpus of Academic Writing as a Process. In O. Timofeeva, A.-C. Gardner, A. Honkapohja & S. Chevalier (eds) 7



New Approaches to English Linguistics: Building Bridges (pp. 197–211). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.



Short CV: Gaëtanelle Gilquin is a Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and a member of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics. Her research interests include learner corpus research and cognitive linguistics. She is the author of Corpus, Cognition and Causative Constructions (2010), and one of the editors of Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research (2008), A Taste for Corpora (2011), The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research (2015) and Applied Construction Grammar (2016). She is a co-founding member of the Learner Corpus Association and the coordinator of several corpus projects: the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), the New Englishes Student Interviews corpus (NESSI) and the Process Corpus of English in Education (PROCEED). She is also the co-editor-in-chief of the book series Corpora and Language

in

Use and

an

associate

editor

of

the Cambridge

Elements

in

Corpus Linguistics series.





Manfred Krug, University of Bamberg, Germany

Valentin Werner, University of Bamberg, Germany



LINGUISTIC GLOBALIZATION ACROSS KACHRUVIAN CIRCLES: EVIDENCE FROM THE

LEXICON IN ENL, ESL AND EFL VARIETIES



In this talk, we develop a perspective on English as a as a global contact language. While corpus-based approaches have been dominating the study of English varieties worldwide (including learner Englishes), we relate typologically motivated approaches with variationist questionnaire data (Dollinger 2015; Krug et al. 2016, 2020). Specifically, for our analyses we rely on the lexical portion of the Bamberg Questionnaire Database (Krug & Sell 2013), which comprises information on speakers’ choices pertaining to 68 items (e.g., truck vs. lorry, traffic circle vs. roundabout, autumn vs. fall, etc.) as well as extensive informant metadata (e.g., age, gender, languages, educational profile, etc.). The scope of this resource – which has been compiled over the last decade and is still growing – is broad and now allows for a detailed comparison of varieties across the Kachruvian, status-based variety type spectrum. As of May 2022, it contains more than 5,000

informants with some 300.000 data points overall, and it comprises material from varieties categorized as ‘Inner Circle/English as a Native Language’ (ENL, e.g., American and British English), ‘Outer Circle/as a Second Language’ (ESL, e.g., Gibraltar, Maltese, and Puerto Rican English), as well as ‘Expanding Circle/as a Foreign Language’ (EFL, e.g., German, Slovenian, and Swedish Learner English).



We suggest that such a database can be explored to shed light on a number of interesting issues.

These include (i) identifying the actual existence of distinct regional and/or variety type patterns and, on a related note, (ii) determining the relative influence of British and American English, respectively, as lexifier or “parent” varieties for different ESL and EFL varieties. We also intend to show the benefits of an integrated study of different variety types (see, e.g., Mukherjee & Hundt 2011; Deshors 2018), especially against the backdrop of the observation that boundaries between ESL and EFL varieties are becoming increasingly fuzzy.



Unsurprisingly, perhaps, our study supports the conceptualization of a variety type continuum rather than status-based categorizations. We further argue (i) that variety-internal variation is often motivated lexically rather than socially, and (ii) that, rather than exclusively figuring in a 8



teleological fashion (e.g., as mere Americanization), globalization in the lexicon sometimes figures as a trend towards longer-term free variation.





References


Deshors, Sandra C. (ed.) 2018. Modeling World Englishes: Assessing the Interplay of Emancipation and Globalization of ESL Varieties. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2015. The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology: History, Theory, Practice. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Krug, Manfred & Katrin Sell. 2013. Designing and conducting interviews and questionnaires. In Manfred Krug & Julia Schlüter (eds.), Research Methods in Language Variation and Change, 69–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krug, Manfred, Ole Schützler & Valentin Werner. 2016. Patterns of linguistic globalization: Integrating typological profiles and questionnaire data. In Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja & Sarah Chevalier (eds.), New Approaches to English Linguistics: Building Bridges, 35–66. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Krug, Manfred, Ole Schützler & Valentin Werner. 2020. How British is Gibraltar English? In Paloma Nuñez Pertejo, María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya & Javier Pérez-Guerra (eds.), Crossing Linguistic Boundaries: Systemic, Synchronic and Diachronic Variation in English, 153–186. London: Bloomsbury.

Mukherjee, Joybrato & Marianne Hundt (eds.) 2011. Exploring Second-Language Varieties of English and Learner Englishes: Bridging a Paradigm Gap. Amsterdam: Benjamins.



Short CV: Manfred Krug obtained an MA from the University of Exeter, England, and his PhD

and postdoctoral degree from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He was a guest professor at Portland State University, USA, and held his first full professorship at the University of Mannheim.

Since 2006, he has been Chair of English and Historical Linguistics at the University of Bamberg (and declined offers from several other universities). He has been leading a number of international corpus-based and questionnaire-based research projects, focusing on language variation and change as well as research methodologies.

His research interests are reflected in the books Emerging English Modals: A Corpus-Based Study of Grammaticalization (Mouton de Gruyter) and Research Methods in Language Variation and Change (co-edited with Julia Schlüter and published with CUP), as well as articles and book chapters such as “String Frequency: A Cognitive Motivating Factor in Coalescence, Language Processing and Linguistic Change” ( Journal of English Linguistics), ”Auxiliaries and Grammaticalization” ( Handbook of Grammaticalization, OUP), ”The Great Vowel Shift” ( Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook, Mouton), “Maltese English” ( Further Studies in the Lesser-Known Varieties of English, CUP), and “Patterns of linguistic globalization” ( New Approaches to English Linguistics, Benjamins, co-authored with Ole Schützler and Valentin Werner).



Short CV: Valentin Werner is Associate Professor of English and Historical Linguistics at the University of Bamberg, Germany. His research areas comprise applied linguistics, variational linguistics, media linguistics, as well as stylistics.

In addition to papers published in journals such as Corpora, Corpus Pragmatics, English Language & Linguistics, and Text & Talk, he has (co-)edited the volumes Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture (2022; with Christoph Schubert), Pop Culture in Language Education: Theory, Research, Practice (2021; with Friederike Tegge), The Language of Pop Culture (2018), ReAssessing the Present Perfect (2016; with Elena Seoane & Cristina Suárez-Gómez), as well as several journal special issues, for instance of Linguistics on the replication crisis (2021; with Lukas Sönning), of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics on telecinematic language (2021; with 9



Monika Bednarek & Marcia Veirano Pinto) and of the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research on tense and aspect in learner language (2018; with Robert Fuchs).





10





3 Conference Presentations


Katalin Balogné Bérces, PPCU, Hungary and KU Ružomberok, Slovakia



THE NORTH OF ENGLAND AS A LINGUISTIC TRANSITION ZONE: EVIDENCE FROM

ASYMMETRICAL LARYNGEAL SYSTEMS IN NORTHERN ACCENTS OF ENGLISH



The paper differentiates two laryngeal language types (as common in Laryngeal Realism –

Honeybone 2005, etc.): (i) (true) voice, with a voiced/voiceless distinction in obstruents (e.g., Slavic/Romance

languages;

Dutch);

(ii)

aspiration,

with

a

distinction

between

aspirated/unaspirated (e.g., mainstream varieties of English and German). These also differ phonologically: voice languages typically also have symmetrical (voicing AND devoicing) regressive voice assimilation (RVA), while aspiration languages do not exhibit (phonological) laryngeal spreading.



We claim that the distinction between aspirating and voice varieties of English is crucial for the understanding of the laryngeal settings of certain North-of-England accents: a parallel is drawn between the northernmost regions of England represented by Durham and Yorkshire, and the transition zone Ouddeken (2016) identifies between voicing and aspiration languages in the Dutch-German dialect continuum. As reported in the dialectological literature, these varieties of English exhibit hybrid systems that may lack aspiration and have partial, asymmetrical voice assimilation. Namely, “Yorkshire Assimilation” is a voicelessness-spreading RVA system (Wells 1982, Whisker-Taylor & Clark 2019), whereas in Durham obstruents engage in voicedness-only assimilation (Kerswill 1987).



It is argued that these Englishes exhibit hybrid systems as a result of being geographically intermediate between Scots in Scotland (a voice language like Dutch) and mainstream varieties of English in England (aspiration systems like German). We model the emergence of laryngeal systems as the setting of three parameters: (i) whether the laryngeally marked/specified obstruent series contains [voice] (L-system) or [asp] (H-system); (ii) whether the laryngeal prime is able to spread (right-to-left); and (iii) whether the system has pre-obstruent delaryngealisation (POD) (due to which in C1C2, C1 becomes unmarked/underspecified). While spreading L with POD

derives voice languages and non-spreading H with no POD derives aspiration languages, two mixed combinations derive the inter-mediate categories of Durham and Yorkshire (spreading L & no POD and spreading H & no POD, resp.). We also show that all remaining combinations are attested cross-linguistically or else logically excluded.





References


Honeybone, P. 2005. Diachronic evidence in segmental phonology: The case of obstruent laryngeal specifications. In van Oostendorp, M. & J. van de Weijer (eds.), The internal organization of phonological segments. Mouton de Gruyter. 319–354.

Kerswill, P. 1987. Levels of linguistic variation in Durham. Journal of Linguistics 23: 25–49.

11



Ouddeken, N. 2016. Voicing distinctions in the Dutch–German dialect continuum. In Audring, J.

& S. Lestrade (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 2016. Benjamins. 106–120.

Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English. CUP.

Whisker-Taylor, K., & L. Clark. 2019. Yorkshire Assimilation: Exploring the production and perception of a geographically restricted variable. Journal of English Linguistics 2019: 1–

28.





Dominik Baumgarten, TU Braunschweig, Germany



DIGITAL VISUALIZATION AND INTERACTION WITHIN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH





LITERATURE


Contemporary novels for children and young adults are not only available in traditional print versions. Rather, they are accessible in a variety of digital formats: apart from e-books (which are likely to be considered a static digital equivalent to print) novels are also available online. Novels such as “Cathy’s book” (Stewart et al.: 2010), the “Renate Bergmann” series (Rohde: from 2013) or “The three !!! “ series (various authors) present their narratives in print as well as on multiple online platforms. Their online presence may contain classic webpages, digital applications (apps and further services) and social media (in particular Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube). With these multi-media additions, the children’s novels become complex supertexts (Fix: 2000). A new form of visual communication of literary formats is emerging through the integration of social media.



In 2014, author Tina Wells created the fictional character of Mackenzie Blue and supported her literary narrative with a multi-media supply of information for fans that remind fan pages for human stars. It is possible to view portraits of all main characters and find out more abouit them in their CVs, which share their favourite movies, music and food. The simulation of visual communication by fictional characters demonstrates the current amalgamation of literature and visual media.



Overall, contemporary children’s literature opens new options of individual approach. Not only are the young readers addressed via multiple media, they can furthermore engage on social media –

and therefore contribute own content (comments, images, further interaction) to the literary complex. While adding content on social media platforms, childrem may even become “co-authors”

themselves.



The planned talk aims at comparing the forms of visualization of literary content in contact with digital media. Emphasis is put on the media involved to increase visibility and interaction with the reading children and young adults.





References


Fix, Ulla (2000): Sprachtexte – Bildtexte. In: Ulla Fix/Hans Wellmann: Bild im Text – Text und Bild.

Heidelberg 2000, S. XI–XVII.

Rohde, Thorsten (2014): Ich bin nicht süß, ich hab bloß Zucker. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.

Steward, Sean et al. (2010): Cathy’s Book. Köln: Baumhaus.

Wells, Tina (2014): Mackenzie Blue. New York: Harper.





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Lisa Bierbaumer, University of Vienna, Austria



ELF BEYOND THE SPOKEN – THE USE OF ENGLISH MOUTHING IN CROSS-SIGNING



English as a lingua franca (ELF), a functional resource for international communication, has been intensively studied in the last decades, with a particular focus on interactions between speakers from different linguacultural backgrounds (Seidlhofer 2011; Jenkins, Baker & Dewey 2018).

However, ELF is also used among signers of different sign languages: English sometimes serves as a written lingua franca for international deaf communication and is used at regularly occurring deaf events, alongside International Sign as a signed lingua franca (Hiddinga & Crasborn 2011; Kellett Bidoli 2014; Kusters 2020). Apart from that, English may also be used in direct face-to-face communication, such as in cross-signing, i.e., when signers from different countries with diverse linguistic repertoires meet for the first time and draw on different semiotic resources they have at their disposal to reach common ground. Studies have found that in these situations, signers not only use manual signs and other sign language resources, but sometimes also silently mouth English words to convey meaning (Zeshan 2015; Byun et al. 2020). In my research, I explore the use of English mouthing as a visual manifestation of ELF in 24 elicited dyadic cross-signing interactions between Dutch signers and signers from China and Belgium, recorded at Radboud University in 2019 as part of the project “Deaf communication without a shared language”

led by Onno Crasborn. For this presentation, I will draw on a sub-set of those cross-signing interactions in which English mouthings occur and investigate what kinds of English words are mouthed, how they are combined with other resources, and when they are employed in the interactions. One aim of this study is to expand current knowledge about ELF as it is used in our globalized world – also beyond the spoken modality.





References


Byun, Kang-Suk; de Vos, Connie; Zeshan, Ulrike; Levinson, Stephen. 2020. “Repair in cross-signing: Trulle sources, repair strategies and communicative success”. In Zeshan, Ulrike; Webster, Jennifer M. B. (eds.). 2020. Sign multilingualism. Boston & Berlin: De Gruyter and Lancaster: Ishara Press, 23–80.

Hiddinga, Anja; Crasborn, Onno. 2011. “Signed languages and globalization”. Language in Society 40(4), 483–505.

Jenkins, Jennifer; Baker, Will; Dewey, Martin (eds.). 2018. Routledge handbook of English as a lingua franca. London: Routledge.

Kellett Bidoli, Cynthia J. 2014. “English as a lingua franca in international deaf communities”.

Textus 27, 101–118.

Kusters, Annelies. 2020. “The tipping point: On the use of signs from American Sign Language in International Sign”. Language & Communication 75, 51–68.

Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2011. Understanding English as a lingua franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zeshan, Ulrike. 2015. “‘Making meaning’: Communication between sign language users without a shared language”. Cognitive Linguistics 26(2), 211–260.





Axel Bohmann, University of Freiburg, Germany



WOMEN SEW AND MEN THUNDER: GENDERED PRONOUN SUBJECTS AS A WINDOW





INTO CULTURE




Personal pronouns are indexical in multiple respects. As deictic expressions, they rely on context for their reference. However, beyond this referential indexicality, personal pronouns are also rich 13



sites for social indexicality, as they often encode interpersonal relationships, status, or basic dimensions of social differentiation.



This talk considers the social indexicality of the pronouns he and she in order to explore how gender – understood as a social construct – is linguistically encoded and reconstructed. To this purpose, all verb phrases with a pronominal subject he or she were extracted from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), a 475 million word corpus of written American English from the 19th and 20th century (Davies, 2010). The two pronouns are compared with respect to the overall frequency with which they occur as subjects as well as their distribution across combinations voice, tense, and aspect. Moreover, the verbs that are strongly associated with either he or she are identified. Developments over time and in four different genres are considered.



Results show that masculine subjects are about five times more frequent than feminine ones until 1950. From this point on, a marked development towards parity can be observed; however, he in subject position remains about twice as frequent as she. Contrary to expectations, masculine pronouns show a higher percentage of passive voice subjects than feminine ones. The most strongly associated verbs for each pronoun show a clear pattern, with public ( appoint) and cognitive ( estimate) verbs favoring masculine subjects and verbs related to emotions ( sob) and home life ( sew) favoring feminine ones. Change in these associations over time is complex and subject to further analysis.



The study shows how linguistic analysis can provide insight into cultural relationships. Despite its focus on recent history, the results are relevant for current debates around gendered pronoun use (Baron 2020).



References

Baron, Dennis. 2020. What's your pronoun? Beyond he & she. New York; London: Liveright.

Davies, Mark. 2010. Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).

https://www.englishcorpora.org/coha/.





Sarah Buschfeld, Patricia Ronan and Claus Weihs , TU Dortmund University, Germany



MODELING LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES: THE CASE OF ST. MARTIN



The study of linguistic landscapes has gained considerable interest and importance in particular in the last two decades. It postulates that signs both mark geographic territories of language communities and symbolize the legitimacy of given languages in certain places (Landry & Bourhis 1997: 25). So far, only few studies approach multilingual landscapes in quantitative terms (e.g., author 2021), and inferential statistical approaches are still underrepresented. The present paper adds to filling this methodological gap by investigating the linguistic landscapes of St. Martin, an Eastern Caribbean island with an exceptionally small but highly multilingual linguistic ecology, amongst others due to its division between French and Dutch powers in 1648.



The present study therefore aims to investigate: 1. Which languages dominate the linguistic landscape of St. Martin and what role does English play in this multilingual scenario? 2. Do differences exist between the Dutch and French parts? We analyze 200 pictures for each of the main shopping centers of Philipsburg and Marigot, the capitals of the two parts. The data consist of commercial signs in shop fronts and hospitality businesses, as well as infrastructural signs. We quantitatively analyze the occurrences of languages on the different signs and statistically model the data by means of Multi-Label Classification (MLC; e.g., Rivolli & de Carvalho 2018). MLC

14



allows for modeling more than one language in one sign. As the base classification algorithm, we employ classification trees and random forests. As independent variables, we investigate the influence of “Dutch vs. French part”, “type of sign” (e.g., business front, announcement, street sign), and “content of signage” (e.g., brand name, restaurant name).



The results show that the Dutch part of the island, which has never been a British colony, is dominated by English. The French side is strongly multilingual and characterized by both French and English signage.





References


Landry, R. & Bourhis, R.Y. 1997. Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16: 23–49.

Rivolli, A. & de Carvalho, A.C.P.L.F. 2018. The utiml package: Multilabel classification in R. The R Journal 10(2): 24–37.





Herolinda Bylykbashi , University of Prishtina “Hasan Prishtina”, Kosovo ATTITUDES TOWARDS SPEECH: BRITISH ENGLISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH



The main purpose of this study was to come up with reliable data concerning attitudes towards speech, more specifically towards two national varieties of English, American English (GA) and British English (RP). The research tended to provide a basis for contrast between these two varieties of English. Thus, despite of the well-known distinction in pronunciation, other differences between British English (RP) and American English (GA) rely on grammar, lexicology, spelling, etc.



For the purpose of analyzing and finalizing a conclusion correspondent to the conducted research, research sample population were twenty-five first year students of English Language and Literature Department (BA), University of Prizren- Kosovo. Two recordings (the first in American English- GA and the second one in British English- RP) were selected to be played to the respondents and a questionnaire containing six questions was read to them.



As far as the research findings are concerned, 44% of the participants recognized the variety of the first and second speaker, whereas 16% of them didn’t have the ability to recognize each variety of English. Moreover, 64% of the respondents preferred British English over American English (36%), all respondents were able to identify speaker’s gender, a substantial percentage revealed their capability of identifying speakers age, social class (their social status and education based on their language performance), etc.



In addition, the vast majority of sample population (68%) preferred to be able to have competence and performance of British English, however, only 32% of participants were fond of the American English. 68% of respondents admitted that they personally use American English in everyday conversations and academic performance, only 16% claimed that they are fluent in British English, and 16% pointed out the fact that they tend to have equal competence and performance of both varieties of English.





Bibliography


Alego, J. (2010). The Origins and Development of the English Language, Sixth Edition, Based on the original work of Thomas Pyles, Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

15



Alego, J. (2006). British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns, Cambridge University Press.

Darragh, G. (2000). A to Zed, A Guide to the Differences Between British and American English, First Edition, Editorial Stanley.

Davies, C. (2005). A Guide to British and American English, Divided by a Common Language, Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, New York- Copyright.

Hosseinzadeh, N. M. et al. (2015). British and American Phonetic Varieties, ISSN 1798-4769

Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 647–655, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0603.23.

Huddleston, R., Pullum, G. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge University Press.

Huddleston, R., Pullum, G. (2005). A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, Cambridge University Press.

Janicki, K., Naukowe, P. W. (1977). Elements of British and American English, Warszawa.

Ling, Zh. (2015). Differences Between American English and British English in Lexicology, US-China Foreign Language, Vol. 13, No. 9, 623–627, doi:10.17265/1539-8080/2015.09.002.

Marak, P. (2006). Comparison of British and American Idioms with Equivalent Meaning, Masaryk University.

Najmiddinov, A. (2015). Study the Differences Between American and British English, DOI: 10.15550/ASJ.2015.03.075.

Quirk, R. Greenbaum, S. et al. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, Longman London and New York.





Alexander Carr, Cardiff University, United Kingdom



THE INFLUENCE OF DEFINITENESS AND PROCESS TYPE ON THE TEMPORALITY OF





FOUR UNDERIVED NOMINALS




Underived event nominals (UENs) intriguingly express temporality despite not being morphologically and semantically designed to (Huyghe 2017, p. 12). For example, a fire construes a dynamic event that can ‘take place’ over time (Vendler 1967, p. 141). Currently, we know little about how UENs express temporality. This paper aims to shed some light on their temporal nature by examining the influence of definiteness and ‘process type’ (Halliday 1985). Definiteness relates to the representation of entities by a speaker as identifiable or unidentifiable to a recipient (Schiffrin 2006, p. 70). Although literature on definiteness and temporality is sparse, it merits a closer look since definiteness can establish identifiability and type in the nominal group which may induce (temporal) boundaries on our conceptions of nominals. Besides definiteness, different types of process encoded within the clause may pattern towards certain nominal semantic structures. Halliday and Martin (1993) suggest an association between nominalized technical terms and processes which express a ‘relational’ function, as relational processes support the classification and description of nominals. However, empirical evidence on the association between process type and temporality expressed by UENs remains unavailable.



Accordingly, this research will evaluate the extent to which definiteness and process type influence the expression of temporality across four UENs.



The data consists of 500 random instances of four different UENs (N=2000), extracted from the Timestamped JSI Web Corpus 2014–2021 English. The instances were annotated for definiteness and analysed for the process type of the clause they functioned in, using Halliday’s 16



(1985) six process types. A set of syntactic probes (Dowty 1979); (Balvet et al 2011) was then used to annotate the instances for Aktionsart (Vendler 1967; Smith 1991). Using multinomial logistic regression, this study will uncover the extent to which the four chosen UENs express temporality and how definiteness and process type influence this expression.





References


Balvet, A., Barque, L., Condette, H, M., Haas, P., Huyghe, R., Marín, R. and Merlo, A. (2011) Nomage: an electronic lexicon of French deverbal nouns based on a semantically annotated corpus. In WoLeR 2011 at ESSLLI, International Workshop on Lexical Resources: 8–15.

Dowty, R, D. (1979) Word meaning and montague grammar: the semantics of verbs and times in generative semantics and in Montague’s PTQ. Dordrecht, Holland; London: D. Reidel.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1985) An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K. and Martin, J, R. (1993) Writing science: literacy and discursive power.

London: Falmer Press: Taylor and Francis Inc.

Huyghe, R., Barque, L., Haas, P. and Tribout, D. (2017) The semantics of underived event nouns in French. Italian Journal of Linguistics 29(1): 117–142.

Shiffrin, D. (2006) From linguistic reference to social reality. In de Fina, A, Schiffrin, D. and Bamberg, M. (eds.) Discourse and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

103–132.

Smith, C. (1991) The parameter of aspect. Kluwer: Dordrecht.

Vendler, Z. (1967) Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell University Press.





Oliver Currie, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia



BALANCING

TECHNICAL

INACCESSIBILITY

AND

PRESSURE

FOR





PUBLIC


TRANSPARENCY IN LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: THE CASE OF BUSINESS





AND ACCOUNTING ENGLISH




Languages for specific purposes (LSPs) are typically the domain of specialist practitioners and are to varying degrees inaccessible – terminologically and technically – to the wider public.

However, their domains of use directly affect the lives of and are of interest to the wider public. In business and accounting, especially following a series of major corporate scandals and the 2007–

2008 global financial crisis, there has been increasing pressure on businesses to be more transparent. However, the increasing complexity of financial transactions and regulation, including some recent significant changes in accounting terminology such as the (optional) replacement of certain key long-established terms (e.g., profit and loss account by statement of financial performance and balance sheet by statement of financial position) have made accounting texts potentially less accessible.



Based on an analysis of a corpus of the annual reports – based on the same international accounting standards – of 20 listed UK and EU companies in the period 2000–2020, I investigate the following research questions:

-

To what extent and how have accounting texts been adapted to make them more accessible, for example, by trying to explain key technical points in language which is easier to understand for readers without specialist knowledge? Specifically, do they retain traditional terminology (e.g., balance sheet) or adopt new, potentially less accessible terminology?

-

Conversely, to what extent is technical language used to maintain a distance between corporations and the wider public and to reinforce corporations’ authority (in particular in dealing with reputationally sensitive topics such as corporate scandals and redundancies)?

17



-

Is there a greater tendency to use more accessible language in UK company reports compared to EU English language company reports, since British Business English is more locally culturally embedded than Global Business English and since UK company reports are addressed to a greater extent to local stakeholders?





Taofeek Dalamu, Anchor University, Nigeria



ADVERTISING FRAMEWORK: A MANIFESTATION OF ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC

PURPOSES (ESP)



One might classify the teaching and learning English into two sensible domains of General English (GE) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The former points to the knowledge of English from the phonological, morphological, and grammatical perspectives. The latter focuses on the grammatical appreciation of English in an explicit professional or academic sphere (Swales, 1990; Hyland, 2012). However, this study investigated textual mechanisms of advertising, illustrating the grammatical features, epitomizing as ESP. Ten advertisements of beverages, financial institutions and telecommunications served as the data for the examination. With the application of Clause as Exchange, a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches dominated the texts, generating componential frequencies of meaning potential (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014).

The analysis exhibited advertising frameworks as ESP in the configuration of: (i) splintered grammatical structures (Glo with Happiness); (ii) spontaneity of sentential standards such as haphazard capitalizations (Celebrating AFRICA’S BEST), orthographic sentences (One Africa), and small capitalizations of lexemes (Free for One Week); and (iii) alphanumeric codes (REW4RD

4 TWO; 4 VALENTINE IDEAS). One also observed: (iv) slanting paradigmatic wordings (FUEL

YOUR GREATNESS!); (v) deviant word formation procedures (ORIJINAL; FUNTA!); and (vi) logo projections (HARP, FANTA and Habari). Thus, inculcating advertising communications into our students’ syl abi becomes necessary in order to understand the nitty-gritty of advertising styles as a form of persuasive genre, enhancing advertising construction skills.





References


Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen M. I. M (2014). Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar.

Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Hyland, K, (2012). English for academic purposes and discourse analysis Introduction. In J. P, Gee & M. Handford (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, pp. 412–

423. London, GB: Routledge.

Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.





Marta Degani and Alexander Onysko, University of Klagenfurt, Austria



PRAGMATIC MARKERS IN NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH: A FOCUS ON GENERAL

EXTENDERS IN THE NEW ZEALAND STORIES CORPUS



General extenders (e.g., and stuff, or something, and things, etc.) have been described as a category of pragmatic markers (see, e.g., Overstreet and Yule 2021) that have the function of signalling that there is more (adjunctive) or something other (disjunctive) from a class of entities referred to. General extenders also have further pragmatic functions such as marking positive politeness (e.g., Aijmer 2013), hedging, expressing doubts and indicating solidarity (Overstreet and Yule 2021).

18





In the context of New Zealand, pragmatic markers have been shown to be variably used depending, among others, on the ethnicity (Māori or Pākehā ‘non-Māori’) of the speakers.

Meyerhoff (1994), for example, finds a higher incidence of the sentence final tag ‘eh’ among Māori speakers of English. Similarly, Stubbe and Holmes (1995, 2000) and Stubbe (1999) note differences in the use of pragmatic devices that emerge as signals of ethnic affiliation. These findings allude to the existence of ethnolinguistic repertoires (Benor 2010) that speakers can variably employ to signal ethnic identity. Research on general extenders in New Zealand English (cf. Terraschke and Holmes 2007; Terraschke 2010), however, has not yet been concerned with the question of whether their use might add to the indexical function of the ethnolinguistic repertoire, referred to as Māori English or Aotearoa English (Degani and Onysko 2021).





Based on data taken from the New Zealand Stories Corpus, which collects audio recordings of a story-telling task carried out by both Māori and non-Māori participants (see Onysko and Degani 2017), this paper will investigate whether the number, type and functions of general extenders show a different distribution among speaker groups. The results, drawn from a comparison of the speech of 55 Pākehā (‘New Zealand Europeans’) with 55 Māori New Zealanders, will provide insight into the potential role of general extenders as elements of ethnolinguistic repertoires in New Zealand.





References


Aijmer, Karin. 2013. Understanding Pragmatic Markers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Degani, Marta and Alexander Onysko. 2021. Cultural metaphors of personification in Aotearoa English. In Marcus Callies and Marta Degani (eds.), Metaphor in Language and Culture across World Englishes. London: Bloomsbury. 219–239.

Benor, Sarah Bunin 2010. Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14 (2): 159–183.

Meyerhoff, Miriam. 1994. Sounds pretty ethnic, eh: a pragmatic particle in New Zealand English.

Language in Society, 23: 367–388.

Onysko, Alexander and Marta Degani. 2017. Mono-and multilingualism in a specialized Corpus of New Zealand Stories. In Arja Nurmi, Tanja Ruetten and Pivi Patha (eds.), Challenging the Myth of Monolingual Corpora. Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi. 39–57.

Overstreet, Maryann. 2020. The English general extender. English Today 36 (4): 47–52.

Overstreet, Maryann and George Yule. 2021 . General Extenders: The Forms and Functions of a New Linguistic Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stubbe, Maria. 1999. Research report: Maori and Pakeha Use of Selected Pragmatic Devices in a Sample of New Zealand English. Te Reo 42: 39–53.

Stubbe, Maria and Janet Holmes. 1995. You know, eh and other “exasperating expressions”: An analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of New Zealand English. Language & Communication, 15 (1): 63–88.

Stubbe, Maria and Janet Holmes. 2000. Talking Maori or Pakeha in English: Signalling identity in discourse. In Alan Bell and Koenraad Kuiper (eds.), New Zealand English. Wellington: Victoria University Press and Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 249–278.

Terraschke, Agnes. 2010. Or so, oder so, and stuff like that —General extenders in New Zealand English, German and in learner language. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7 (3): 449–469.

Terraschke, Agnes and Janet Holmes. 2007. Und tralala: Vagueness and general extenders in German and New Zealand English.’ In Joan Cutting (ed.), Vague Language Explored, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 198–220.





19



Stefan Diemer and Marie-Louise Brunner, Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany



ANALYZING DIGITAL DISCOURSE ACROSS PLATFORMS: A CASE STUDY OF CUSTOMER





COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA


While digital media have become the focus of an increasing number of studies in all areas of linguistics (Lee & Chau 2018 on hashtags, Mapes 2018 on authenticity, Tuten & Solomon 2017

on engagement, De Veirman et al. 2017 on influencer marketing), the analysis of digital discourse using cross-platform analysis (CPA; Diemer and Brunner 2022) still poses considerable challenges. Each digital platform has distinct affordances which may change in response to technical developments, competition, or shifts in user behavior and which can influence datasets and approaches to analyzing them. Different multimodal elements, styles, and interactional patterns introduce additional complexity and influence the comparability of results. Our paper discusses a corpus-based approach to describing and interpreting digital discourse across several social media platforms from a comprehensive linguistic and multimodal perspective, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We illustrate this cross-platform approach with a comprehensive corpus-based case study on evaluating customer communication across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, with a particular focus on branding, customer engagement and webcare. In addition to lexical, syntactic and pragmatic features, we also investigate key multimodal aspects such as hashtags, emojis, image and video elements (cf. Hu et al. 2014), as well as discourse features such as the creation of rapport, the use of stories and narrative (cf.

Salleh et al. 2015), or the use of plurilingual elements . Our study demonstrates how CPA can be used to analyze a wide range of topics across social media, such as lexical and semantic features, multimodality, discourse patterns, style, and identity. Key aspects to be addressed and illustrated are the development of suitable cross-platform research questions, data selection, available resources and methods for corpus compilation (cf. Diemer, Brunner and Schmidt 2016) as well as the compilation process, ways for quantitative and qualitative analysis, and the identification of criteria that permit the comparison of results. In sum, the study provides insights into the analysis of complex social media datasets and intends to facilitate the creation of cross-platform analyses in varying contexts.





References


De Veirman, M., V. Cauberghe and L. Hudders (2017), ‘Marketing through Instagram influencers’, International Journal of Advertising, 36 (5): 798–828.

Diemer, S., M.-L. Brunner and S. Schmidt (2016), ‘Compiling computer-mediated spoken language corpora,’ International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 21(3): 349–371.

Diemer, S. and M.-L. Brunner (2022). Cross-platform analysis. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis, ed. by C. Vasquez. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hu, Y, Manikonda, L. and Kambhampati, S., 2014. What we instagram: A first analysis of instagram photo content and user types. Eighth International AAAI conference on weblogs and social media.

Lee, C. and Chau, D., 2018. Language as pride, love, and hate: Archiving emotions through multilingual Instagram hashtags. Discourse, context & media 22 (2018): 21–29.

Mapes, G., 2018. “(De) constructing distinction: Class inequality and elite authenticity in mediatized food discourse.” Journal of sociolinguistics.

Salleh, S., N. H. Hashima and J. Murphy (2015), ‘Instagram marketing: a content analysis of top Malaysian restaurant brands’, E-Review of Tourism Research, 6: 1–5.

Tuten, T. L., and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. London: Sage.





20



Andreja Drašler, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia



STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF PEDAGOGICAL TRANSLATION IN AN ESP COURSE AT THE





TERTIARY LEVEL




Since the advent of the monolingual approach and the emergence of fluency tasks in the EFL

classroom, the use of the mother tongue and translation activities have been shunned in ELT. In the last two decades, however, several researchers have advocated the use of pedagogical translation because of its positive impact on language learning if used appropriately and in moderation, considering it as the fifth skill. In ESP courses at the tertiary level (English for Specific Academic Purposes), pedagogical translation plays an important role because students often have to read literature for their studies in English and also write in English – they translate their BA dissertation abstracts into English. Another benefit of using translation as a teaching tool is the achievement of terminological accuracy, which is of utmost importance in ESP. Since learners’

needs are at the core of the ESP syllabus, a questionnaire was designed to determine whether students perceive the use of mother tongue (L1) and translation activities and tasks as useful.

The purpose of the study was to shed light on the use of pedagogical translation in the context of ESAP and to present the results of a quantitative study of geography undergraduate students’

attitudes towards pedagogical translation in their ESAP course. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data. The perception survey results show that the majority of students believe that pedagogical translation is useful and relevant to them. They also think that translating professional vocabulary from L1 to English (L2) is as useful as translating it from L2 to L1.





Elizabeth Erling, University of Vienna, Austria

Anouschka Foltz, University of Graz, Austria



AUSTRIAN IN-SERVICE AND PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ BELIEFS ABOUT STUDENTS’





REGULAR USE OF ENGLISH




There has been a rise in scholarship on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and increased acceptance of the idea that English today is mostly going to be used in intercultural contexts with other ELF speakers. In this questionnaire study, we explore whether in-service English teachers’

(N = 106) and pre-service English teachers’ (N = 92) beliefs about their students’ future uses of English varies according to students’ language and socioeconomic background as previous research has shown that teachers’ beliefs affect the learning opportunities that students receive.

We found that, overall, pre-service teachers have rather positive beliefs about students’ regular (future) use of English with both native and non-native English speakers, which correlate positively with other beliefs about potential benefits of learning English. In contrast, in-service teachers across two school types have more negative beliefs about students’ regular use of English, which tend not to correlate with other beliefs about potential benefits of learning English.

Language and socioeconomic background did not affect these beliefs. We discuss potential reasons why pre-service teachers have such differing beliefs about their (future) students’ use of English compared to in-service teachers as well as the implications of our results for English instruction in Austria.





21



Océane Foubert, University of Lille, France and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany



CAN WOMEN MANSPREAD TOO? A CONVENTIONALISATION ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH





GENDERED NEOLOGISMS




The current feminist movement is accompanied by the emergence of English gendered neologisms denoting typically male/cis/heterosexual undesirable behaviours, such as manspread, a man who spreads his legs, especially on public transport, or himpathy denoting the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy received by men of power accused of misogynistic behaviour (Manne 2017). This linguistic phenomenon echoes the neologisms created as a result of the observation of the androcentric nature of language by feminist linguists since the 1970s.

These linguistic innovations counter the lack of nouns to denote experiences widely shared by women who were encouraged to participate in the language process by creating new words, such as sexual harassment (Spender 1990).



The linguistic innovations of these two periods share the same motivations: to increase the visibility of specific behaviours through names. In order to do so, these neologisms must be used outside the linguistic community from which they originated, which corresponds to the notion of diffusion. Among the few studies of the diffusion of feminist neologisms in the 1970s, Ehrlich and King (1994) analyse the use of these words in the print media, defined as a ‘dominant elite’, and observe the loss of their intended political meaning. The semantic variation of neologisms in the course of their diffusion corresponds to the notion of usualisation (Schmid 2020).



The present study analyses the conventionalisation, i.e., diffusion and usualisation, of 23 English gendered neologisms, which have emerged in the current feminist movement, in the NOW (News on the Web) corpus, which offers a diversity of sources, containing both mainstream and alternative media. This allows us to hypothesise the coexistence of both intended and depoliticised meanings. Preliminary results show, for example, that manspreading is defined in some media as the act of people rather than specifically of men, thus losing its gendered nature.





References


Davies, Mark. (2016-). Corpus of News on the Web (NOW). [https://www.englishcorpora.org/now/]

Ehrlich, S. & King, R. (1994). “Feminist meanings and the (de)politicization of the lexicon”, Language in Society 23 (1), 59–76.

Manne, K. (2017). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmid, H-J. (2020). The dynamics of the linguistic system. Usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Spender, D. (1990 [1980]). Man Made Language. 2nd ed. London/Boston/Sydney/Wellington: Pandora Press.





Stephanie Hackert, Kimberly Nicole Carcámo Rodriguez, Diana Wengler, Catherine Laliberté and Melanie Keller, LMU Munich, Germany



THE “PANAMA LETTERS”: RECONSTRUCTING THE ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY





VERNACULAR ENGLISHES IN THE CARIBBEAN




The proposed paper analyzes a historical correspondence corpus from Panama comprising more than 125 letters written by former Canal workers from the West Indies. These letters are not 22



personal letters in the strict sense: they were sent either to government authorities during the construction phase to plead for better living or working conditions or to the Isthmian Historical Society in 1963 as part of a contest for “the best true stories of life and work on the Isthmus of Panama during the construction years” (Isthmian Historical Society n.d.: 3). Nevertheless, they were all written by (former) laborers coming close to the NORM stereotype and as such constitute a valuable resource for reconstructing the roots of contemporary vernacular Englishes in the Caribbean.



Following tried-and-tested assumptions underlying the analysis of historical African American Vernacular English, we may assume that the Panama letters reflect the state of Caribbean vernacular Englishes as they existed at the beginning of the twentieth century, and, in fact, the competition editor herself remarks in the preface that numerous “features of West Indian speech will be noted” (Isthmian Historical Society n.d.: 4). These features include not only the well-known morphosyntactic variables of past marking, third-person singular, plural and possessive -s, zero copula, and be-leveling, but also phonological ones such as h-dropping. Combining the methods of comparative-historical sociolinguistics (cf. Tagliamonte 2013) with up-to-date statistical modeling, we will present an overview of grammatical variation in the Panama letters and argue for their reliability and validity as a linguistic data set.





References


Isthmian Historical Society. N.d. Competition for the Best True Stories of Life and Work on the Isthmus of Panama during the Construction of the Panama Canal. Panama City: Afro Antillean Museum.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2013. Comparative sociolinguistics. In J.K. Chambers & Natalie Schilling, eds. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 128–56.





Nataša Hirci and Martin Grad, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia





INVESTIGATING TRAINEE TRANSLATORS’ USE OF LANGUAGE RESOURCES IN THE

DIGITAL AGE: THE CASE OF SLOVENIA



The digital age has profoundly changed the way that language resources are used by different target groups. Nowadays digital and online dictionaries and other reference materials are favoured, especially by young people, students included. While user studies on the application of dictionaries and other language resources are relatively well supported by research on the use of language resources in the acquisition of English as a foreign language, information on how language reference works are utilised by Slovene translators appears limited, with few studies exploring the use of translation resources by trainee translators. We therefore aim to shed light on user experience with language resources and other reference materials relevant to translation work undertaken by the students of Translation Studies at the University of Ljubljana. In the first part of the study, an online questionnaire was designed to establish the users’ perception and experience with various language resources, focusing in particular on the Collocations Dictionary of Modern Slovene. The findings of the questionnaire corroborate the assumption that electronic resources are favoured, while also revealing the types of language resources utilized for the English-Slovene language pair and the different search practices of the respondents. The second part of the study provides an insight into the translation process of a group of undergraduate students, revealing their resource utilization and search strategies to finding solutions when translating English collocations. Our investigation of the application of language resources by trainee translators could be a springboard for future studies exploring how to further 23



accommodate contemporary language resources to best cater to the needs of this specific group of users in Slovenia and enhance their user experience in the future.





Jakob Horsch, Catholic University of Eichstaett–Ingolstadt, Germany



ENGLISH COMPARATIVE CORRELATIVES: MORE EVIDENCE FOR PARATAXIS



English comparative correlatives (CCs) consist of two clauses, C1 and C2 (Culicover and Jackendoff 1999, den Dikken 2005):

(1) [ The more we get together, ]C1 [ the happier we’l be. ]C2

Recent corpus-based studies (Hoffmann 2019; Hoffmann et al. 2019, 2020) have shown that in Modern English (ModE) there is a tendency of formal symmetry between C1 and C2, confirming claims of a “paratactic (i.e., quasi-coordinate syntax)” in CCs (Culicover and Jackendoff 1999: 551).



Diachronically, CCs were hypotactic (Hoffmann 2019: 59), as optional that-complementizers in C1 show: (2) [ The more [ that]THAT-complementizer he says, ]C1 [ the less I wanna say. ]C2

In introspective studies, that-complementizers are used as evidence for hypotaxis in ModE CCs, arguing that they mark C1 as subordinate (Den Dikken 2005: 502). Corpus studies, however, have shown them to be highly dispreferred in PdE, making up less than 2% of tokens in Hoffmann’s COCA (2019) and Hoffmann et al.’s BNC (2020) data.



Corroborating these findings, I present the results of a psycholinguistic experiment using the magnitude estimation method (Bard et al. 1996; Cowart 1997: 73–84, Hoffmann 2011, Hoffmann 2013) that requires participants to generate their own scales to rate the grammaticality of sentences, resulting in more accurate judgments. To make results comparable, z-scores were calculated (‘centering’).



Data was thus collected from almost 600 L1 speakers using pen-and-paper questionnaires in four locations (USA, South Africa, Singapore, Kenya). The results show that while generally, that complementizers were not rated as ungrammatical, they were clearly dispreferred (cf. Fig. 1

showing results from USA) compared to test items without any that-complementizers. This supports the claim that ModE CCs are “rather paratactic than hypotactic in nature” (Hoffmann et al. 2020). Furthermore, variety-specific effects indicate that-complementizers are more preferred in varieties at stage V of Schneider’s Dynamic Model (2003, 2007), proving the predictive power of the model (cf. Fig. 2).





24





Figure 1: Z-scores of THAT vs. NO THAT (Ř) in C1:C2 (dark gray horizontal lines: filler means; light gray lines: standard error) (thatcomplementizer experiment), USA (n=38)





Figure 2: Scatter plot of C1 that-complementizer ratings across varieties with superimposed linear regression line, red dots indicate variety means





25



References

Bard, Ellen G., Dan Robertson & Antonella Sorace. 1996. Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability. Language 72(1). 32–68.

Cowart, Wayne. 1997. Experimental Syntax: Applying Objective Methods to Sentence Judgements. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Culicover, Peter W. & Ray Jackendoff. 1999. The View from the Periphery: The English Comparative Correlative. Linguistic Inquiry 30(4). 543–571.

Dikken, Marcel den. 2005. Comparative Correlatives Comparatively. Linguistic Inquiry 36(4).

497–532.

Hoffmann, Thomas. 2011. Preposition Placement in English: A Usage-based Approach (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Hoffmann, Thomas. 2013. Obtaining introspective acceptability judgements. In Manfred Krug & Julia Schlüter (eds.), Research Methods in Language Variation and Change, 99–118.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Hoffmann, Thomas. 2019. English Comparative Correlatives: Diachronic and Synchronic Variation at the Lexicon-Syntax Interface (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Hoffmann, Thomas, Jakob Horsch & Thomas Brunner. 2019. The More Data, The Better: A Usage-based Account of the English Comparative Correlative Construction. Cognitive Linguistics 30(1). 1–36.

Hoffmann, Thomas, Thomas Brunner & Jakob Horsch. 2020. English Comparative Correlative Constructions: A Usage-based account. Open Linguistics 6(1). 196–215.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2003. The Dynamics of New Englishes: From Identity Construction to Dialect Birth. Language 79(2). 233–281.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties of English around the World.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP.





Ai Inoue, Toyo University, Japan



IDIOM VARIANTS OBSERVED IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH: SYSTEMATIC OR CREATIVE?



Idiom variants (IVs) such as only the peak of the iceberg – as opposed to the more standard only the tip of the iceberg – are essential to the understanding of how idioms, which are integral subjects of research in phraseology, are being used today. However, it has been established that idioms are generally defined as word combinations whose holistic meanings cannot be deduced from the sum of its components and whose components cannot be replaced with other words.

Previous studies have merely described IVs or discussed what components of IVs may be replaced with other words from a morphological perspective

(Cserep 2017a, b, Moon 1998, Szcezepaniak 2006). Few studies have investigated the systematic or creative dispositions of IVs.



Here, I have incorporated a descriptive approach (i.e., corpus pattern analysis) to fulfill the following objectives: (1) to introduce and discuss the semantic features of IVs referring to specific aspects, including the sea, anger, and playing cards, which are otherwise irrelevant to the subject being discussed; (2) to clarify the ways in which IVs expand semantically from their original idioms; (3) develop the rules and processes involved in the conception of IVs; and (4) differentiate between idioms that transform IVs and those that do not.



It was found that idioms become IVs following certain rules and processes. Interestingly, some IVs develop their own semantic and syntactic features that differ from those of an original idiom, 26



whereas others share semantic and syntactic features with the original idiom despite the lexical replacements of the components of the original idiom. Semantically complex idioms never alter IVs.

The results suggest that idioms systematically transform IVs. These findings of this study indicate that idioms do not change arbitrarily. These results contribute to shaping the general understanding of phraseology.





References


Cserep, A. 2017a. ʻIdiom variation and decomposability Part I: Verbal variation.ʼ Yearbook of Phraseology Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp. 95–122.

Cserep, A. 2017b. ʻIdiom variation and decomposability Part II: Variation in the noun phrase.ʼ

Yearbook of Phraseology Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp. 123–144.

Moon, R. 1998. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-Based Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Szcezepaniak, R. 2006. The Role of Dictionary Use in the Comprehension of Idiom Variants.

Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.





Eva Jakupčević, University of Split, Croatia

Jelena O’Reilly, University of York, United Kingdom



YOUNG EFL LEARNERS’ DEVELOPMENT OF DISCOURSE MARKER USE



Discourse markers (DMs) are an essential feature of natural, pragmatically appropriate speech, which makes them relevant for EFL learners of all ages. Despite this, there has been very little research on how young language learners (YLLs) acquire or use these linguistic elements, while longitudinal studies in this area are even scarcer. YLLs have been shown to be able to acquire pragmatic features of language from the very beginning of language learning, which is why it is important to shed more light on how young EFL learners’ DM use develops in order to inform materials

and

programmes

aimed

at

this

age

group.

The present study aims to provide longitudinal insight into the DM use of a group of young EFL

learners. Thirteen Croatian YLLs performed picture-based narrative tasks at age 10–11 (T1, 4th year of learning) and repeated the same task two years later (T2, 6th year of learning). Their performance at the two time points was compared focusing on the frequency and diversity of DM

use. At T2, the learners used a wider variety of DMs and they employed them more frequently than at T1. However, they continued to rely heavily on a limited range of DMs to structure their narratives, ignoring some common ones. Although the YLLs mostly use these basic DMs correctly and strategically at both time points, the results point at possible missed opportunities for the acquisition of a wider range of these units. This is further corroborated by the emphasised differences between the individual learners, pointing to a need to include DMs in EFL programmes for YLLs in a more timely and consistent manner.





Nikola Jokić, University of Graz, Austria



IS IT ALL GREEK TO YOU? AN ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AMONG





ERASMUS STUDENTS




The goal of this paper is to investigate English as a lingua franca (ELF), a phenomenon that has attracted linguistic attention in the last twenty years. Specifically, it aims to analyse communicative strategies non-native speakers of English employ with a view to securing understanding. With 27



respect to that, informal ELF conversations among Erasmus students at the University of Graz are investigated. This study deploys qualitative methods, i.e., semi-structured interviews with Erasmus students were tape-recorded and transcribed. Students were asked questions about their Erasmus experience, the status of English in the world and in Graz, cultural shock and similar topics. The crucial task was to build a taxonomy of strategies that non-native speakers of English use in informal spoken conversations. Therefore, communication strategies that contribute to mutual understanding are presented along with the examples and the frequency of their usage.

Furthermore, the numerous functions of communication strategies are mentioned with the possible explanations of their use. The findings show that Erasmus students employ various strategies with the aim of achieving mutual understanding and preventing possible communication problems.





Barış Kabak, University of Würzburg, Germany

Janne Lorenzen, University of Cologne, Germany



IS FORESTRESSING IN AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH STILL ALIVE? AN EMPIRICAL





INVESTIGATION USING CORAAL




Prosodic cues constitute an understudied area in sociophonetic research on African American English (AAE) although they are known to be vivid markers of ethnic identity (Thomas 2015). This paper focuses on one such prosodic feature, namely forestressing. Forestressing is characterized by primary stress placement on word-initial syllables that carry non-initial stress in mainstream Englishes, e.g., ′October (AAE) vs. Oc′tober (General American, GA). This feature is supposedly stratified by social factors such as age, region and socioeconomic status (Thomas 2015), although systematic data are lacking. Furthermore, CV.CVC structures were suggested to promote forestressing (Baugh 1983), however, little is known as to which other structural factors (e.g., part of speech, segmental and prosodic structure of words) modulate this phenomenon. As a feature tapering off at least in urban Southern American English (Tillery & Bailey 2004), an inquiry into AAE deviations requires systematic inspection of large amounts of AAE spoken data for words that bear non-initial prominence in other varieties.



Using the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall & Farrington 2021), we focused on the stress pattern of 84 carefully selected words and analyzed 3200 tokens.

Logistic regression analyses revealed that the degree of forestressing is modulated by speakers’

region and birth year. In particular, it is more conspicuous in southern regions and especially among older speakers. Furthermore, nouns and words with heavy initial syllables bearing secondary stress in GA are more conducive to forestressing in AAE.



We will examine in how far AAE forestressing follows the tendencies in word prominence patterns reported for L2 and postcolonial varieties of English (Altmann & Kabak 2015) and discuss the consequences of the regional and generational alignment of forestressing attested in our data for two scenarios: (i) the disassociation of AAE speech from regional features and their culmination in supraregional norms (Wolfram & Thomas 2002) vs. (ii) the convergence to mainstream lexical stress patterns constitutive of GA norms.





References


Altmann, H. & B. Kabak (2015). English word stress in L2 and post-colonial varieties: Systematicity and variation. In Ulrike Gut, et al. (Eds.), Universal or Diverse Paths to English Phonology, 185–208. De Gruyter.

28



Baugh, J. (1983). Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.

Kendall, T. & C. Farrington (2021). The Corpus of Regional African American Language.

Version 2021.07. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project. http://oraal.uoregon.edu/coraal.

Tillery, J., & G. Bailey (2004). The urban South: phonology. In E. Schneider, K. Burridge, B.

Kortmann, R. Mesthrie, & C. Upton (Eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English: Vol. 1: Phonology (pp. 325–337). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Thomas, E. R. (2015). Prosodic Features of African American English. In J. Bloomquist, L.

Green, & S. Lanehart (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (pp.

420–436). Oxford Univ. Press.

Wolfram, W., & E. R. Thomas (2002). The Development of African American English. Language in Society: Vol. 31. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.





Sviatlana Karpava, University of Cyprus, Cyprus



(IM)POLITENESS, REQUEST SPEECH ACTS AND MITIGATING STRATEGIES IN L2





ENGLISH


This study aimed to investigate (in)directness of L2 English request strategies used by L1 CG

undergraduate students, request perspective as well as internal and external modification and whether they are affected by the type of the task: oral vs. written along with power and social distance variables. The focus was on their pragmatic behaviour and interactional practices in different social settings and possible transfer from L1 CG into L2 English (Taguchi and Roever, 2017; Ogiermann and Bella, 2020).



The participants of the study were 80 Greek Cypriot (CG) first year undergraduate students (17–

25 years old, 44 male and 36 female, normal speech and hearing), who were learners of L2

English at a private, English-speaking university in Cyprus. Their L2 English proficiency was from low intermediate to advanced (5–9 IELTS scores, Mean 6.5).



The pragmatic tests based on the Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962) as a theoretical framework: discourse completion task, multiple-choice questionnaire and a role-play adapted from Rose (1994) were implemented in the research. The tasks had four conditions regarding power and distance variables: [+social distance, status equals], [–social distance, status equals], [+social distance, hearer dominance] and [–social distance, hearer dominance]. The linguistic (socioeconomic) background questionnaires were used as well.



The results showed that the participants used conventionally indirect strategy more than other strategies in all three tasks. The participants had an overall strong preference for the hearer perspective due to a possible L1 transfer from CG in terms of pragmatic knowledge and preferred perspective. The findings of our study give a further evidence in support of the general pattern of the underuse of lexical modifiers by L2 English learners in comparison to native English speakers (Faerch and Kasper, 1989; Trosborg, 1995; Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2008, 2009; Wigglesworth and Yates, 2011; Hassal , 2001, 2012; Göy et al., 2012).





References


Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria, 2008. Internal and external mitigation in interlanguage request production: The case of Greek learners of English. Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture 4 (1), 111–138.

29



Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria, 2009. Interlanguage request modification: The use of lexical/phrasal downgraders and mitigating supportive moves. Multilingua, 28 (1), 79–112.

Faerch, Claus, Kasper, Gabriele, 1989. Internal and external modification in interlanguage request realization. In: Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Julianne House and Gabriele Kasper (Eds.), Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 221–247.

Göy, Elif, Zeyrek, Deniz, Otcu, Bahar, 2012. Developmental patterns in internal modification of requests. In: Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis (Ed.), Interlanguage request modification.

Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins, pp. 51–86.

Hassall, Tim, 2001. Modifying requests in a second language. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL) 39(4), 259–283.

Hassall, Tim, 2012. Request modification by Australian learners of Indonesian. In Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis and Helen Woodfield (Eds.), Interlanguage Request Modification.

Amsterdam, Netherlandd: John Benjamins, pp. 203–242.

Ogiermann, Eva, Bella, Spyridoula, 2020. An interlanguage study of request perspective: Evidence from German, Greek, Polish and Russian. Contrastive Pragmatic, 1–30.

Taguchi, Naoko, Roever, Carsten, 2017. Second Language Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Trosborg, Anna, 1995. Interlanguage Pragmatics. Requests. Complaints and Apologies. Mouton De Gruyter, New York.

Wigglesworth, Gillian, Yates, Lynda, 2011. Mitigating difficult requests in the workplace: What learners and teachers need to know. TESOL Quarterly 41 (4), 791–803.





Matthias Klumm, University of Augsburg, Germany



THE LINGUISTIC REALIZATION OF DISCOURSE RELATIONS BY MEANS OF TEMPORAL





ADJUNCTS


Discourse relations (DRs) are of key importance for the structuring of discourse and the con-strual of discourse coherence. Two of the cognitively most salient kinds of DRs are continua-tive and contrastive DRs, which differ with regard to whether or not they indicate a halt in the flow of discourse. As regards their linguistic realization, DRs may be encoded in coherence strands (Givón 1993), and they may be signal ed with discourse connectives, pragmatic word order (i.e., clause-initial adjuncts) and/or metadiscursive comments (Fetzer 2018).



Like most other types of adjuncts, temporal adjuncts show a strong preference for being placed in clause-final position in English (Hasselgård 2010). The placement of adjuncts in clause-initial position constitutes a marked choice and is functionally motivated.



This paper investigates the use of temporal adjuncts as signals of continuative and con-trastive DRs in written English discourse, focusing on the clause-initial occurrences (Ntotal = 561) of 42

phrasal adjuncts (e.g., until recently, last summer, etc.) retrieved from the magazine and newspaper sections of the British National Corpus. The results suggest that continuative and contrastive DRs constitute a continuum with regard to their linguistic realization (see Figure 1): While continuative DRs tend to be signalled by means of clause-initial temporal adjuncts only, this pattern is less frequently found for contrastive DRs, which in turn tend to be signalled through both temporal adjuncts and additional contrastive connectives (e.g., but or however). In cases without any additional connective, the boundary between continuative and contrastive DRs may become fuzzy (as illustrated by the grey shading in Figure 1), allowing for both continuative and contrastive interpretations. It will be argued that in these cases it is the clause-internal coherence 30





strands (i.e., topical (dis)continuity, referential (dis)continuity, action (dis)continuity, aspectual/temporal/lexical coherence) that serve to disambiguate the particular type of DR.



Figure 1: Linguistic realization of continuative and contrastive DRs References

Fetzer, Anita. 2018. The encoding and signalling of discourse relations in argumentative discourse: Evidence across production formats. In María de los Ángeles Gómez González

& J. Lachlan Mackenzie (eds.), The construction of discourse as verbal interaction, 13–

44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Givón, Talmy. 1993. English grammar: A function-based introduction (2 vols.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hasselgård, Hilde. 2010. Adjunct adverbials in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.





Svenja Kranich and Hanna Bruns, University of Bonn, Germany



EXCUSE ME, SIR OR HEY GUYS – CHANGES IN THE USE OF GENERIC NOMINAL

ADDRESS TERMS IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY



Comparing present-day English usage with usage conventions of past decades, it is evident that many changes can be linked to changing conceptualizations of social relations. Address terms stressing differences in power and social distance, such as sir, are now common in much fewer contexts than they used to be. This can be linked to democratization, a tendency gaining ground since the 1960s in many societies, which leads to an avoidance of stressing hierarchical differences (cf. Farrelly & Seoane 2012: 393) and is visible e.g., in a decline in formal address (titles and last name) (cf. Leech 2014: 293).



The present paper focuses on changes in the use of generic address terms, such as sir, madam, man, girl, for singular addressees, and ladies and gentlemen, guys for a group of addressees

using the Corpus of Historical American English (focusing on 1900–2010). The first hypothesis,

that formal terms are decreasing and informal terms are increasing, is clearly borne out:

comparing 1900–1909 to 2010–2019, sir decreases by more than half, while guys rises

dramatically from 0.55 to 241.36 per a million words. The second hypothesis posits that this is

due to a loss of acceptable contexts for more formal terms and an increase of contexts for informal terms. Based on random samples of sir and guys from different decades, we will classify speaker-addressee relations (based on Buyle 2021) to investigate the type of power and distance relation that exists in speaker-addressee pairings. The qualitative analysis conducted so far seems to support the hypothesis of an ever-increasing range of guys (from informal and highly colloquial to acceptable in various neutral contexts) and a growing restriction in the range of contexts for sir (from very wide-spread in all types of constellations to +P interactions and even a high concentration of instances in military contexts).





References


Buyle, A. (2021). Between grammar and pragmatics: Social deixis in English address terms and directives. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. KU Leuven 31



Farrelly, M., & Seoane, E. (2012). Democratization. In T. Nevalainen & E. C. Traugott (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English (pp. 392–401). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leech, G. N. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.





Catherine Laliberté, Melanie Keller, Diana Wengler, Kimberly Nicole Carcámo Rodriguez and Stephanie Hackert, LMU Munich, Germany



THE LANGUAGE OF 21ST-CENTURY HISTORICAL FICTION: BRIDGERTON (2020) AND

DOWNTON ABBEY (2010–2015)



Historical fiction presents narratives that must reconcile representations of the past with present-day audiences. It relies on distinct linguistic strategies such as the use of archaic or formal language (see Mandala 2010) to balance evoking the past with remaining grounded in the present for the modern reader. TV series in this genre follow suit in employing such linguistic conventions to portray olden times. This study explores some of these features in the dramas Downton Abbey (set in 1912) and Bridgerton (set in 1813). Corpus linguistic and variationist sociolinguistic methods (Tagliamonte 2012) will be used to interrogate how these features convey a sense of the past.



In the proposed paper, we will focus on two linguistic features whose usage depends on degrees of formality: clitics and modality. Regarding the former, author Barry Unsworth explicitly advocates the “avoidance of contracted forms” when writing historical fiction (Unsworth 2009). Modals and semi-modals have changed in significant ways since the early 19th century (Krug 2000) with studies showing that modals ( shall, must, need) have been declining for decades while semi-modals ( have to, need to, be going to) have been on the rise. This decline is closely tied to the colloquialization of English and shifting conventions regarding formality (Leech 2013). Since the currently declining modals are thus perceived as overly formal and old-fashioned, we expect these to be over-used in both series, compared to present-day English. Semi-modals may, in turn, be less frequent. Relatedly, we presume that clitics will be comparatively dispreferred.



Downton Abbey and Bridgerton are expected to be linguistically similar and to reflect the strategies employed in this genre generally. We argue that such period dramas do not attempt to reproduce actual historical language but further entrench features that are typical of present-day historical fiction.





References


Bridgerton. 2020-. Created by Chris van Dusen and written by Shonda Rhimes. Netflix.

Downton Abbey. 2010–2015. Created and written by Julian Fellowes. ITV Network.

Krug, Manfred G. 2000. Emerging English modals: a corpus-based study of grammaticalization.

Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Leech, Geoffrey. 2013. Where have all the modals gone? An essay on the declining frequency of core modal auxiliaries in recent standard English. In Juana I. Marín Arrese, Marta Carretero, Jorge Arús Hita & Johan van der Auwera (eds.), English modality: core, periphery and evidentiality, 95–115. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Mandala, Susan. 2010. Language in science fiction and fantasy: the question of style. London: Continuum.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2012. Variationist sociolinguistics: change, observation, interpretation.

Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

32



Unsworth, Barry. 2009 Oct 07. “The Economy of Truth”. Key West Literary Seminar, Audio Archives

posted

by

Arlo

Haskell.

www.kwls.org/podcasts/barry_unsworth_the_economy_of/





Gordana Lalić-Krstin, University of Novi Sad, Serbia

Nadežda Silaški, University of Belgrade, Serbia

Tatjana Đurović, University of Belgrade, Serbia



COVIDNOMICS AND APPLENOMICS: MEANINGS OF –NOMICS IN NEWLY COINED





ENGLISH WORDS


Blends have long been a source of new lexical elements in English word formation. Classic examples of such elements include –burger in words like soyburger or –scape in cloudscape with more recent examples including –cation (staycation) or –splain(ing) (mansplaining). Typically, these new lexical elements originate as splinters and are later reused in the formation of other words as ready-made elements, undergoing the process of morphemization along the way. In this paper we explore –nomics as a relatively new such component evidenced in formations such as covidnomics or applenomics, in which this component originates from economics as a source word. The material was collected by querying two corpora for the *nomics string: the iWeb Corpus (Davies, 2018), a static corpus containing 14 billion words, and the NOW Corpus (Davies, 2016-), a monitor corpus which contains newspaper and magazine texts from 2010 to the present time.

The latter allowed us to supplement the data with more recent instances of –nomics, especially those coined from 2020 onward. Upon several rounds of refining the obtained list of -nomics words, we came up with the final number of words to be analysed – 780. The results show that although the meaning of -nomics derived from economics as ‘the study of the way that goods and services are produced and sold and the way money is managed’ (Macmillan Dictionary, 2020) is detected in many of the examples in the corpora, this combining form has also extended its meaning, giving rise to additional senses. Our aim is to classify these possible meanings of –

nomics and illustrate them with relevant examples as well as to discuss some aspects of the formation of –nomics coinages and describe the process of analogy through which they seem to have been formed.





Vesna Lazović, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia



THE DEGREE OF POLITENESS AND FORMALITY IN STUDENT–TEACHER INTERACTION

VIA E-MAIL IN ACADEMIC CONTEXTS



Being a ubiquitous and preferred means of communication, e-mail has influenced the way students and teachers interact in academic contexts. Due to the problems with formality and politeness in students’ e-mails, a number of educational institutions worldwide have already decided to introduce e-mail etiquette and help students use appropriate language by providing templates. However, if there are no clear guidelines on how and when (and when not) to e-mail, teachers may receive abrupt and impolite messages which contain, among others, informal greetings, direct requests and stylistic errors.



This paper aims at providing an overview of rhetorical strategies found in university students’ emails when writing to faculty members. The analysis is based on a self-compiled corpus of 200

e-mails written in English and sent by the English major students at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, during a one-year period. More specifically, the paper examines this sample in terms 33



of the language, the politeness strategies as well as the overall tone of the message. Finally, it discusses the extent to which the students are able to employ a variety of rhetorical strategies to interact successfully in academic contexts.





Lisa Lehnen, University of Würzburg, Germany



PRAGMATICS

AND

WORLD





ENGLISHES


– ASSESSING THEORETICAL AND

METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES IN THE STUDY OF DISAGREEMENTS IN HONG KONG





ENGLISH




The study of World Englishes has traditionally focused on the structural description of varieties and largely neglected the level of pragmatics (E. W. Schneider, 2007, p. 47). The framework for the analysis of pragmatic variation in first languages offered in Variational Pragmatics (K. P.

Schneider & Barron, 2008) can, however, also be applied to second language varieties (e.g., Schröder & Schneider, 2018). While Variational Pragmatics is methodologically flexible, studies are often based on elicited written data, which do neither necessarily reflect natural language use, nor allow for an interactional analysis. However, especially for speech units that are negotiated across several turns, such an approach becomes essential (Kádár & Haugh, 2013, p. 60).



The present study deals with the theoretical and methodological integration of pragmatics and World Englishes using the example of DISAGREEMENTS in Hong Kong. Hong Kong constitutes a diverse speech community in which English still plays an important role (Bolton et al., 2020).

While DISAGREEMENTS have been traditionally conceptualised as face-threatening (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and dispreferred (Pomerantz, 1984), more recent work with a less Anglocentric focus reveals their multifunctionality (Hoinărescu, 2016; Konakahara, 2015; Sifianou, 2012).

Cultural influences on their realisation have also already been shown in conversations between Hongkongers and Americans (Cheng & Tsui, 2009). Following the methodological requirement of contrastivity (K. P. Schneider, 2010, pp. 252–253), Hong Kong Chinese are compared to Mainland Chinese, returnees and expats. In video recorded dyadic conversation, they talked to an acquainted or unacquainted person about uncontroversial topics, such as the local cuisine or entertainment industry. Moreover, the interlocutors were retrospectively interviewed about their perception of potential DISAGREEMENTS in their conversation. The aim is to reveal sociopragmatic variation in the realisation and assessment of DISAGREEMENTS within a speech community in which English has the status of a second language.





References


Bolton, K., Bacon-Shone, J., & Luke, K. K. (2020). Hong Kong English. In K. Bolton, W. Botha,

& A. Kirkpatrick (Eds.), The handbook of Asian Englishes (pp. 449–478). Wiley Blackwell.

Cheng, W., & Tsui, A. B. (2009). ‘ahh ((laugh)) well there is no comparison between the two I think’: How do Hong Kong Chinese and native speakers of English disagree with each other? Journal of Pragmatics, 41(11), 2365–2380.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.04.003

Kádár, D. Z., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge University Press.

Schneider, E. W. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge University Press.

Schneider, K. P. (2010). Variational pragmatics. In M. Fried, J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Variation and change: pragmatic perspectives (pp. 239–267). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

34



Schneider, K. P., & Barron, A. (2008). Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational pragmatics. In K. P. Schneider & A. Barron (Eds.), Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages (pp. 1–32). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Schröder, A., & Schneider, K. P. (2018). Variational pragmatics, responses to thanks, and the specificity of English in Namibia. English World-Wide, 39(3), 338–363.

https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00017.sch





Suzana Marković, University of East Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina



GENDER VARIABLE IN REALIZATION OF DIRECTIVE SPEECH ACTS



The paper deals with the gender variable in the realization of directive speech acts, such as requests, suggestions, advice, etc. Directives, as face threatening acts which have been the subject of various cross-cultural investigations, are speech acts whose aim is to get the hearer to do something. The corpus for this small-scale research consists of approximately 300 instances of directive speech acts which are excerpted from the transcripts of selected dialogues of the popular US sitcom Friends and five American feature-length films. The language of the sitcom and films has purposefully been used because, despite some opposite opinions (Schegloff 1988, Emmison 1993), we believe that the “character’s verbalizations are constructed to resemble realistic language use” (Georgakopoulou 2000). As Boxer writes, it is “a canonical approximation of spontaneous talk in interaction” (Boxer 2002). We will use Blum-Kulka’s classification (1989) of directives into three broad categories – direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect with many subcategories. In this paper, our focus will be on direct strategies typically expressed with imperatives and on conventionally indirect directives usually expressed with interrogative sentences which include suggestory formula and preparatory strategies with special emphasis on their use in male and female language. Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory focuses on the idea that indirect strategies are the most polite form of verbal behavior. The goal of the paper is to analyze and compare gender preferences in using different strategies for the realization of directives, with the assumption that women wil be more thoughtful of the hearer’s face and use indirect forms more frequently than men. This is in line with Holmes’s (1995) characterization of women’s speech as more polite than men’s. We wil analyze the use of these directive strategies in F-F interactions, M-M interactions, M-F interactions and F-M interactions.

The illustrative examples will be analyzed from the perspective of the theory of speech acts and politeness theory using qualitative, quantitative and comparative research methods.





Bibliography


Austin, J. (1962) How to do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blum-Kulka, Sh., House, J. and J. Kasper, J. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: requests and apologies, Norwood: Ablex.

Boxer, D. (2002). Applying Sociolinguistics: Domains of Face-to-Face Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Brown, P. (1980). How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community. In S. McConnell-Ginet, R. Borker, and N. Furman (eds.), Women and language in literature and society, New York: Praeger, 111–136.

Brown, P. and & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambrigde University Press.

Emmison, M. (1993). On the analyzability of conversational fabrication: a conceptual inquiry and single case example. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 16, 83–108.

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Georgakopoulou, A. (2000). On the sociolinguistics of popular cinema: funny characters, funny voices. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 19, 119–133.

Holmes, J. (1995). Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.

Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.

Macaulay, M (2001). Tough talk: Indirectness and gender in requests for information. Journal of Pragmatics, 33, 293–316.

Mills, S. (2003). Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Quaglio, P. (2009). Television Dialogue: The Sitcom Friends vs. Natural Conversation.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Schegloff, E. (1988). Goffman and the analysis of conversation. In P. Drew and A. Wotton (eds.).

Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, Oxford: Polity Press, 89–135.

Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An essay in the philosophy of languagе, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Watts, R. (2005). Linguistic politeness research: Quo vadis? . In R. Watts, S. Ide and K. Ehlich (eds.). Politeness in Language. Studies in Its History, Theory and Practice, xi–xlvii.

Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.





Borislav Marušić, University of Applied Sciences “Lavoslav Ružička” in Vukovar, Croatia



HOW TO MAKE USE OF THE CORPUS TO CREATE TEACHING MATERIALS FOR





BUSINESS ENGLISH CLASSES




Business English teachers frequently face two problems releated to teaching vocabulary: they often lack authentic teaching materials and they are in need of appropriate corresponding exercises for its practice. The aim of this paper is to show how to design oneś own additional teaching material out of the authentic collocations extracted from the corpus of business magazines online. The paper outlines a set of procedures required to create additional teaching materials. Moreover, they range from the corpus compilation to creation of additional teaching materials. The corpus-based analysis enables a Business English teacher to extract the most frequent ADJECTIVE + NOUN collocations and NOUN + NOUN compounds from the corpus and incorporate them into various types of exercises. Such an analysis may prove beneficial when the teacher wants to confront the students with the authentic, frequently used collocations in this variety of Business English. From a pedagogical standpoint, students at faculties for business can be encouraged to develop the regular habit of reading business magazines online and thus to broaden both their vocabulary and their knowledge of business.





Theresa Neumaier, TU Dortmund University, Germany

Asya Yurchenko, TU Chemnitz, Germany

Sven Leuckert, TU Dresden, Germany



ENGLISH IN MADEIRA OR ENGLISH IN PORTUGAL? – A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF





LEXICAL AND MORPHOSYNTACTIC VARIATION




English in Madeira, a lesser-known variety of English (Schreier 2009) in the Atlantic, has developed not only as the language of globalization and tourism, in constant contact with Portuguese, but also due to two British occupations and the long-term settlement of a socioeconomically powerful group of British wine traders and their families. There is first evidence for the variety sharing lexical and morphosyntactic features with other World Englishes while having developed potentially unique Madeiran features (Leuckert et al. 2021). However, no study 36



has compared English in Madeira to English in (mainland) Portugal so far, which would be essential for multiple reasons: Generally, the scenario of a (Portuguese-dominant) island community, geographically removed from the mainland and undergoing temporary occupation by the British, is unique in the World Englishes context and warrants closer investigation. More specifically, to assess potentially Madeiran features, English in Portugal must be considered as a reference for comparison.



This study takes a first step at closing this research gap by carrying out a comparative analysis of a 100,000-word corpus of English-language Airbnb accommodation listings from Madeira and mainland Portugal, focusing on pro-drop and lexical and orthographic ‘Americanization tendencies’ (Gonçalves et al. 2018). Our findings reveal some similarities between the two corpora but also qualitative and quantitative differences which are in line with research on differences between mainland and insular European Portuguese. With respect to pro-drops, Madeiran English follows the pattern found in insular Portuguese (Bazenga 2019).

Americanization tendencies can be identified in both contexts albeit to a lesser degree in Madeiran English, which might be attributable to British influence. Hence, it seems reasonable to distinguish ‘English in Madeira’ from ‘English in Portugal’ and treat both as linked but individual varieties with potentially differing paths of nativization (Schneider 2007).





References


Bazenga, A. (2019). “Aspetos da sintaxe do Português popular falado no Funchal.” Arquivo Histórico da Madeira (Nova Série) 1: 727–758.

Gonçalves, B., L. Loureiro-Porto, J.J. Ramasco, & D. Sánchez (2018). “Mapping the Americanization of English in space and time.” PLoS ONE 13(5): e0197741.

Leuckert, S., T. Neumaier, & A. Yurchenko (2021). “English in Madeira: History and features of a lesser-known variety in the Atlantic.” English Today FirstView.

Schneider, E. W. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schreier, D. (2009). “Assessing the status of lesser-known varieties of English.” English Today 25(1): 19–24.





Niklas Nitsch and Patricia Ronan, TU Dortmund University, Germany



SENTIMENTS ON COVID-19 IN TWEETS



Society is experiencing increasing polarisation regarding stance on the Corona pandemic and measures implemented to contain it. Much of this sentiment is fuelled by interaction on social media and public interaction on social media can influence user opinions and sentiments (Kaligotla et al. 2016). Analysing such shared sentiments amongst different individuals towards the current global crisis can help us to understand these societal processes better (cf. Nagy & Stamberger 2012). While sentiment can most basically be distinguished into positive, neutral and negative (Hagen et al. 2015), further subdivisions can be explored. This paper contributes to this aim of mapping societal developments in the pandemic. Its aim is to investigate sentiments towards the COVID-19 epidemic conveyed in tweets by different individuals and groups.



Twitter is chosen as a source of data as it widely accessible and far reaching and offers any user the possibility to voice their opinion publicly. Data further are easily accessibility and ample previous research exists on sentiment analysis in tweets (e.g., Barbosa & Feng, 2010). For the present dataset, a thousand relevant English-language tweets with specific COVID-19–related hashtags have so far been collected, including #COVID19. In this study, the harvested tweets are 37



categorized according to their most prominent sentiments. For data analysis the Sentiment Analysis R package (Proellochs & Feuerriegel, 2021) is used. The basic sentiment categories (Hagen et al. 2015) are then assigned to different groups of stakeholders.



The analysis shows that different sentiment categories can be observed towards different stakeholders, such as “government response”, “scientists” or “media”. Sentiments towards them can be shown to differ along the positive, neutral or negative scales. The analysis in the paper identifies relevant categories of stakeholders and twitter users’ expressed attitudes towards them.

This allows us to determine key sentiments towards different stakeholders in the epidemic.





References


Barbosa, L. & Feng, J. (2010). Robust sentiment detection on Twitter from biased and noisy data. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, ICCL, 36–44.

Hagen, M., Potthast, M., Büchner, M. & Stein, B. (2015). Twitter Sentiment Detection via Ensemble Classification Using Averaged Confidence Scores. In A. Hanbury, G. Kazai, A. Rauber, N. Fuhr (eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science : Vol. 9022. Advances in Information Retrieval. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-16354-3_81

Kaligotla, C., Yücesan, E. & Chick, S. E. (2016). The impact of broadcasting on the spread of opinions in social media conversations. In T. M. K. Roeder, P. I. Frazier, R. Szechtman, E. Zhou, T. Huschka, & S. E. Chick (eds.), Proceedings of the 2016 Winter Simulation Conference (pp. 3476–87), doi: 10.1109/WSC.2016.7822377

Nagy, A. & Stamberger, J. A. (2012). Crowd sentiment detection during disasters and crises. In L. J. M. Rothkrantz, J. Ristvej, Z. Franco (eds.), 9th Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management.

Proellochs, N. & Feuerriegel, S. (2021). Sentiment Analysis [R package], version 1.3-4.

Retrieved from https://github.com/sfeuerriegel/SentimentAnalysis





Temitayo Olatoye, University of Eastern Finland, Finland



A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF AMERICANIZATION IN NIGERIAN ENGLISH: RECENT





CHANGE IN LEXIS AND SPELLINGS


Americanization has been linked to recent linguistic changes in varieties of English worldwide (Mair 2013); this process describes the grammatical and lexical influence of American English on other varieties of World Englishes. Although recent developments in corpus linguistics have made it increasingly possible to study World Englishes using large amounts of real language data, African postcolonial Englishes have been relatively under-researched (Gut 2012).



This present study investigates the degree to which American-influenced features are employed in Nigerian English lexis and spellings. Based on the variationist sociolinguistic tradition (Tagliamonte 2012), the choice between two functionally equivalent lexical variants such as American English elevator vs British English lift was examined using corpora: the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) and the recently compiled Historical Corpus of Nigerian English (HICE). Preliminary findings indicate that there is considerable variation in the use of American-influenced linguistic features in contemporary Nigerian English.





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References

Gut, U. (2012) Standards of English in West Africa. In R. Hickey (Ed.), Standards of English: Codified Varieties around the World. (pp. 213–227). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mair, C. (2013). The world system of Englishes: Accounting for the transnational importance of mobile and mediated vernaculars. English World-Wide, 34, 253–278.

Tagliamonte, S. (2012). Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Unuabonah, F., Adebileje, A., Oladipupo, R., Fyanka, B., Odim, M., & Kupolati, O. (2022).

Introducing the Historical Corpus of English in Nigeria (HiCE–Nig): A database for investigating diachronic linguistic changes in Nigerian English. English Today, 1–7.

doi:10.1017/S0266078422000037





Manuel Padilla Cruz, University of Seville, Spain



ON THE ROLE OF REPETITION AS AN INDICATOR OF AD HOC CONCEPT





CONSTRUCTION


Relevance-theoretic pragmatics (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson & Sperber 2004) views concepts as mental entities which need adjusting during the inferential processes conducive to a hypothesis about the content explicitly communicated (Sperber & Wilson 1998; Carston 2000, 2002). Two operations, narrowing and loosening, finetune concepts and yield ad hoc concepts, or context-sensitive, occasion-specific concepts (Wilson & Carston 2006, 2007). Although the output of ad hoc concept construction is admitted to be determined by co-occurring linguistic and paralinguistic material in the input, preceding discourse or manifest contextual assumptions, ad hoc concept construction is portrayed as a free enrichment process. As such, it occurs automatically and is hence non-linguistically mandated (Carston 2000, 2010a, 2010b; Jary 2016).



Recent research shows that the need for ad hoc concept construction may be overtly indicated by a variety of linguistic elements: morphological elements like the diminutive and augmentative morphemes, lexical elements occupying the determiner position, phrasal and sentential elements fulfilling adjectival functions, expletive expressives and evidential participles. These elements steer the output of ad hoc concept construction by making manifest a variety of assumptions concerning the features of the denotatum or the speaker’s psychological states and epistemic stance (Padilla Cruz 2020, 2022a, 2022b, In press). Adding up to such research, this presentation will consider a stylistic choice: repetition. This will be analysed as an ostensive signal or pointer that indicates that ad hoc concept construction is mandatory and even directs the output of this process. Repetition will be argued to encourage the hearer to search for specific assumptions that contribute to narrowing the concept encoded by the repeated lexical item.





References


Carston, Robyn. 2000. Explicature and semantics. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12, 1–44.

Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication.

Oxford: Blackwell.

Carston, Robyn. 2010a. Lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts and metaphor: From a relevance theory perspective. Italian Journal of Linguistics 22 (1), 153–180.

Carston, Robyn. 2010b. Metaphor: Ad hoc concepts, literal meaning and mental images.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (3), 295–321.

Jary, Mark. 2016. Rethinking explicit utterance content. Journal of Pragmatics 102, 24–37.

39



Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2020a. Towards a relevance-theoretic approach to the diminutive morpheme. Russian Journal of Linguistics 24 (4), 774–795

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2022a. Is free enrichment always free? Revisiting ad hoc-concept construction. Journal of Pragmatics 187, 130–143.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2022b. On the interpretation of utterances with expressive expletives.

Pragmatics & Cognition 28 (2), 252–276.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. In press. Ad hoc concepts, affective attitude and epistemic stance.

Pragmatics & Cognition.

Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance. Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed.

Oxford: Blackwell.

Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1998. The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon.

In Peter Carruthers & Jill Boucher (Eds.), Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 184–200.

Wilson, Deirdre & Robyn Carston. 2006. Metaphor, relevance and the ‘emergent property’

issue. Mind & Language 21 (3), 404–433.

Wilson, Deirdre & Robyn Carston. 2007. A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In Noel Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Pragmatics. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 230–259.

Wilson Deirdre & Dan Sperber. 2004. Relevance theory. In Larry Horn & Gregory Ward (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 607–632.





Vladan Pavlović, University of Niš, Serbia



ON ELEMENTS OF CULTURALLY INFLUENCED LANGUAGE USE IN THE TOO ADJ TO V

CONSTRUCTION IN AMERICAN AND CANADIAN ENGLISH



The paper addresses the English too ADJ to V construction. This construction typically implies a force-dynamic relation based on the image schema of blockage established between the attribute expressed by the ADJ-element and the event expressed by the V-element, as in the following examples:



1) It is too early to tell how either story will end,

2) I think I am probably a bit too old to be videoblogging,

3) He’s too dumb to understand that virtually all Presidents are moderates once in office.



It first performs distinctive collexeme analysis, as one of the subtypes of collostructional analysis, of the ADJ–V pairs appearing in the given construction in American and Canadian English. It does so based on the data from the relevant sections of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), generally composed of 1.9 billion words harvested from websites in 20 different English-speaking countries. This establishes the most distinctive ADJ–V pairs in each variety relative to the other. The results show that, for example, some such pairs distinctive for American, rather than Canadian, English are those where the ADJ element denotes lack of good judgement or intelligence (stupid, blind). These are then interpreted in view of three models of inter-cultural and cross-cultural communication styles.



In a broader theoretical and methodological perspective, the paper builds on the assumption that verbal behaviour can be reflective of underlying cultural conceptualizations (Jensen 2014, 2015), that differences in phrasing may reflect more general cultural differences (Murphy 2018), and that 40



corpus data and the relevant statistical methods can thereby serve as the basis to investigate the language-culture interrelation rigorously, empirically and systematically.



In addition, methodologically, the paper presents a rare instance of applying distinctive collexeme analysis of co-varying collexemes as an extension of the existing notion of distinctive collexeme analysis.





References


Murphy, L. (2018). The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American and British English. Penguin.

Jensen, K. E. (2015). Inferring cultural models from corpus data: Force-dynamic cultural models reflected in the discursive behavior of a scalar adjectival construction. Globe: A Journal of Language, Culture and Communication, 1, 126–151.

Jensen, K. E. (2014). Force-dynamic cultural models in a scalar adjectival construction [Paper presentation]. 5th UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Lancaster, England.

https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/files/206865129/Force_dynamic_manuscript.pdf.





Bojana Petrović, Language School “Speak Easy”, Serbia





TRANSLATION OF CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH IDIOMS INTO SERBIAN: A CASE STUDY

OF LANGUAGE IN THE TV SERIES “HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER”





This paper deals with the topic of translating contemporary idioms from English into Serbian in the corpus of subtitles from the TV series “How I Met Your Mother”. The research presented aims to analyze the general quality of the translation of idioms and to determine which translation methods were used in the process of their transference into Serbian. The research combines the theoretical framework of descriptive translation studies in the domain of audiovisual translation with the methodological approach of corpus linguistics applied to a parallel corpus compiled from English and Serbian subtitles of the series. The parallel corpus was annotated for occurrences of idioms, which was then used as the basis for analyzing the translation and transference methods used to render contemporary English idioms into Serbian. The analysis also focused on the quality of translation and appropriateness of the translation methods used in the process of rendering the Serbian subtitles. The results show that a small number of English idioms are left untranslated or neutralized in Serbian, while the most used translation method is a functional approximation.

In addition, further analysis reveals that the quality of translation is satisfactory, considering that the analyzed subtitles were written and posted online (opensubtitles.com) by numerous fans of the series, and not professional translators. This paper can serve as a basis for future research on certain translation patterns, texts created by different translators, other (English) language variations, or some other TV formats. As such, this research aims at making a modest contribution to determining the state of the art and prevalent translation methods in the audiovisual translation of idioms into Serbian.





Mariangela Picciuolo, University of Bologna, Italy



AN ELF-ORIENTED CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS INTO THE EMI LECTURERS’ USE OF

SPATIAL DEIXIS ACROSS TWO DIFFERENT TEACHING MEDIA



In the last two decades, English-Medium Instruction (EMI) has fast increased in non-Anglophone

– and particularly European – universities, with the result that non-native English speaker (NNES) 41



lecturers are increasingly using English as lingua franca (ELF) to interact with their NNES

students in the classroom. As such, EMI represents “a prototypical ELF scenario” (Smit, 2018).

However, studies into EMI from an ELF perspective are still quite rare, as evidenced by the fact that much research into EMI lecturers’ talk stil takes English native language as its lubber line (Doiz & Lasagabaster, 2022).



This exploratory study aims to identify and describe language variations occurred in the use of lexical place deixis in EMI lecturers’ talk as a consequence of the reconceptualization of space following the shift to online teaching during the COVID-19 lockdown.



Deictic expressions play a key role in communication by connecting participants’ “with one another’s informational space” (Friginal, et al., 2017: 114). In EMI university classes deixis usage may, therefore, contribute to foster or prevent students’ comprehension. With few exceptions, previous studies conducted on metadiscourse from an ELF perspective have focussed primarily on written academic text (cf. Doiz & Lasagabaster, 2022: 3). Similarly, there is a growing research interest into how ELF is employed in digital media, but studies in this field are still few and mainly deal with blogging (cf. Vettorel and Franceschi 2016).



This corpus-based analysis compares four Engineering Italian EMI lecturers’ use of spatial deixis across two different teaching environments: in-person and virtual synchronous classrooms.

Findings indicate that lecturers’ use of proximal deictics significantly differ according to the context, with social and interactional implications beyond EMI.





References


Doiz, A. & Lasagabaster, D. (2022) “Looking into English-medium instruction teachers’

metadiscourse: An ELF perspective”, System, 105.

Franceschi, V., and Vettorel, P. (2017) “ELF Users’ Perceptions of Their ‘non-nativeness’ in Digital Communication Through English: Falling Short of the Target?”, Altre Modernità, April, 133–48.

Friginal, E. Lee, J.J., Polat, B & Roberson, A. (2017). Exploring Spoken English Learner Language Using Corpora. Learner Talk. Springer: New York.

Smit, U. (2018) Beyond monolingualism in higher education. A language policy account. In J.

Jenkins, W. Baker & M. Dewey (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 387–399.





Katarina Radovanović, PopArt Studio, Serbia





JOURNALISTIC TRANSCREATION OF NEWS AGENCY ARTICLES FROM ENGLISH INTO

SERBIAN: ASSOCIATED PRESS AND REUTERS ARTICLES IN “BLIC” AND “N1” ONLINE





PORTALS


Transcreation is a process of adapting previously translated content to suit the target audience’s context, culture, and expectations. Since the past research has yielded scarce examinations, mainly in the domain of advertising, this paper explores the phenomenon of journalistic transcreation in selected articles published on the Serbian online news portals Blic and N1, compared to their corresponding pieces issued by the news agencies Associated Press and Reuters.



The paper aims to explore the extent of transcreation in Serbian journalism, its methods, and social issues usually subject to transcreation by the journalists of Blic and N1. The analysis also 42



focuses on comparing the original and the adapted text, further exploring social issues that international and Serbian audiences deem (ir)relevant and opinions and narratives (un)welcome by each. To compile a corpus for this research, news articles in English were taken from online portals of the two leading news agencies globally – Associated Press and Reuters – as their articles are regarded as objective and unbiased. In contrast, Serbian texts were taken from Blic and N1, two of the most visited online news portals in Serbia, yet generally regarded as being on opposing ideological and political spectrums.



The findings reveal journalistic tendencies in Serbia and discuss implications of transcreation in the domain of journalism, not only in Serbia but in general. Transcreation was mostly noted within socio-political topics, signaling an attempt to create a disparity in the perception of and feelings on certain international matters between the two target readerships. As a single piece of news can steer the attitudes and shape the thoughts of the public, further explorations of media manipulations should be investigated profoundly.





Stefanie Riegler, University of Vienna, Austria





TOWARDS A SCHEME FOR ANNOTATING PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONS IN ELF

INTERACTIONS: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES IN TAXONOMY





DEVELOPMENT




Research into the way English currently functions as the predominant global lingua franca reveals how its users strategically exploit linguistic resources to achieve their communicative purposes.

In doing so, English as a lingua franca (ELF) speakers engage in a variety of pragmatic practices (see overview in Björkman 2014: 126–127), which is why studying the pragmatics of the most common contemporary use of English round the world is particularly insightful (Widdowson 2016: 35–36). To advance research on communicative processes in ELF use, a scheme to annotate pragmatic functions in spoken ELF interactions is currently being designed for the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) (VOICE 2021). The annotation of communicative practices in VOICE seeks to pre-process ELF data for pragmatically-oriented research by complementing the existing corpus annotation with an additional functional layer, one that may also prove useful for language pedagogic purposes.



This paper gives insight into the development of a manual annotation system for communicative functions in VOICE. It specifically focuses on the establishment of a taxonomy of pragmatic moves which seeks to capture the adaptive and variable nature of ELF interactions and provides the foundation for the VOICE annotation scheme. The aim of this paper is to introduce a preliminary version of the classification system of communicative practices in ELF data. This taxonomy has been designed on the basis of selected VOICE transcripts from a range of different speech event types including, for instance, service encounters, conversations, and interviews. Furthermore, the theoretical and methodological issues which arise when categorizing pragmatic functions in spoken ELF discourse are discussed. Categories from the initial classification scheme will be mapped onto VOICE extracts to illustrate the challenges which the categorization poses.





References


Björkman, Beyza. 2014. “An analysis of polyadic English as a lingua franca (ELF) speech: a communicative strategies framework”. Journal of Pragmatics 66, 122–138.

VOICE. 2021. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version 3.0 online).

https://voice3.acdh.oeaw.ac.at (7 October 2021).

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Widdowson, Henry. 2016. “ELF, adaptive variability and virtual language”. In Pitzl, Marie-Luise; Osimk-Teasdale, Ruth (eds.). English as a lingua franca: perspectives and prospects.

Contributions in honour of Barbara Seidlhofer. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 31–37.





Patricia Ronan, TU Dortmund University, Germany

Gerold Schneider, University of Zurich, Switzerland



MY BAD – HOW TO SAY I’M SORRY IN AMERICAN ENGLISH



The expression “my bad” has arisen in recent decades and is used for admitting fault and taking responsibility for mistakes (OED, s.v. bad N2 4) (Example 1).



1. You got me crying over somebody else’s grandmama, man. Shit. My bad . Y’all all look the same to me. - Get your fat ass away (COCA, 2002, MOV, For da Love of Money)



“My bad” thus shares an envelope of variation with “I am sorry” and “my mistake”. So far, the rise of this new expression has received only very little scholarly attention. Author (fc.) is tracing the rise and development of the structure; however, the question of what influences use and choice of this neologism has not yet been investigated. This question is relevant because it illustrates mechanisms of language change in progress and may help to deliminate parameters influencing diachronic developments. Thus, the present study determines which contextual factors correlate with the selection of my bad over the above mentioned alternatives.



Data stem from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). We extract information on historical development, genres and frequencies via the corpus-query interfaces. Then, we systematically check the semantic context with distributional semantic approaches like word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013) and provide

semantic

maps

of

distributions.

The investigation shows (Figure 1) to what extent differences in genre and formality levels correlate with the choice of variants in the corpora across time and how these changes in form-function mapping can be modeled.





44





Figure 1





References


Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S. Corrado, Jeff Dean. 2013. Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26.

OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press.

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/14540?redirectedFrom=my+bad#eid128748728

Accessed 10-08-2021.





Erika Sajtós, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary





SALIENT PRONUNCIATION FEATURES IN STYLE SHIFTING; A SOCIOPHONETIC STUDY





OF NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH VOWELS


New Zealand English (NZE) is remarkably homogeneous with one regional dialect and slightly different accents (Burridge and Kortmann, 2004). Nevertheless, three social accents – Broad, General and Cultivated – exist, the Broad accent having the most typical New Zealand features, while the Cultivated accent resembles the standard British pronunciation with the General accent in between (Gordon et al., 2004).



This sociophonetic study investigates style-shifting in the speech of educated informants, by analysing the realisation of KIT, FLEECE, PRICE and MOUTH, all being characteristic features of NZE. KIT centralised in the 20th century becoming a schwa-like vowel, and encroached on the phonetic space of FLEECE, causing its diphthongisation (McKenzie, 2005). PRICE and MOUTH

are affected by the diphthong shift. PRICE is pronounced as /ɑe/ and /ɒe/, with a broader variant

/ɔe/. The nucleus of MOUTH is fronter and higher than /a/ (Sóskuthy et al., 2017).



45



We aim to prove that speakers behave differently regarding the realisation of these phonemes when shifting between different registers. Our method is based on Wel s’ (1982) observation that the use of positively valued linguistic variables is stable or emphasised in the more formal registers, while the use of negatively valued forms decreases.



The F1, F2 and F3 values were measured in formal speech, text reading and word list reading, and a comparative analysis was carried out. We also investigated the relationship between changes in vowel quality and dynamicity by making relative spectral measurements (Leung et al., 2016) to determine the spectral change in F1, F2 and F3.



The results show that the offglide changes for stigmatised PRICE and MOUTH, and we also detected spectral change here. However, KIT and FLEECE have similar formant values in the three registers. Therefore, the same speaker shows both conservative and innovative behaviour in style-shifting, depending on the social connotation regarding the phoneme.





References


Burridge, Kate and Bernd Kortmann. 2004. ″Introduction: Varieties of English in the Pacific and Australasia.″ In A Handbook of Varieties of English, edited by Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W.

Schneider, Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie and Clive Upton, 580–613. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Gordon, Elizabeth, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury and Peter Trudgill. 2004. New Zealand English. Its Origin and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McKenzie, Jayne. 2005. ″‘But he’s not supposed to see me in my weeding dress!’: The relationship between DRESS and FLEECE in modern New Zealand English.″ New Zealand English Journal 19: 13–25.

Sóskuthy, Márton, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Katie Drager and Paul Foulkes. 2017. ″Early New Zealand English: The closing diphthongs.″ In Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English, edited by Raymond Hickey, 529– 561. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI:10.1017/9781107279865.023

Wells, John Christopher. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.





Julia Schilling and Robert Fuchs, University of Hamburg, Germany



MEDIA PORTRAYALS OF COVID-19 IN BRITISH NEWSPAPERS: A COMPARATIVE





SENTIMENT ANALYSIS


The COVID-19 pandemic has upended life around the globe, leading to intense public debate.

Linguists quickly started to document and analyze COVID-19 discourse (Baines et al. 2021; Saraff et al. 2021), but there is as yet no systematic analysis of the lexical items and discourse patterns that characterize British COVID-19 discourse. We address this research gap through a systematic comparative analysis of public discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a big data approach, (1) we identify distinct keywords linked to the pandemic and (2) track the sentiment of these keywords over time and across the political spectrum.



As news can offer an insight into and simultaneously influence the public’s perception of the COVID-19 pandemic, our analysis focuses on discourse in regional and national English newspapers. The starting point of the analysis is a data-driven approach to identify COVID-19

related n-grams keywords for each month of the pandemic based on log likelihood and log ratio, comparing pandemic with pre-pandemic discourse, while filtering out seasonal effects (e.g., 46



discussion of snow in January). Our data comprises 10% of all articles from 51 national and regional English newspapers published between January 2019 and October 2021, producing a corpus of 386,118 articles and 229,347,771 tokens. We then assign these keywords to semantic fields such as COVID-19 NAMES (e.g., COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2), PUBLIC HEALTH

INSTRUCTIONS (e.g., self-isolation, quarantine), and VACCINATION (e.g., COVID-19 vaccine, booster) and conduct a sentiment analysis of these semantic fields over time and through an unsupervised machine learning approach.





References


Baines, Annalise; Ittefaq, Muhammad & Mauryne Abwao (2021) “#Scamdemic, #Plandemic, or

#Scaredemic: What Parler Social Media Platform Tells Us About COVID‐19 Vaccine”.

Vaccines 9 (421), pp. 1–16.

Saraff, Sweta; Singh, Tushar & Ramakrishna Biswal (2021) “Coronavirus Disease 2019: Exploring Media Portrayals of Public Sentiment on Funerals Using Linguistic Dimensions”.

Frontiers in Psychology 12:626638.





Julia Schlüter, University of Bamberg, Germany



BRITISH OR AMERICAN ENGLISH? MISMATCHES BETWEEN USAGE DATA, ACCEPTABILITY RATINGS AND ATTITUDES OF NON-NATIVE ENGLISH TEACHERS



Most school curricula recognize British and American English as teaching standards (Fenn 2010).

It is however obvious that the two varieties play different roles in countries where English is taught as a foreign language. The imbalance manifests itself, for example, in the representation of the varieties in teaching materials, the impact of mediated language and the attitudes of non-native speakers (Tottie 2002), and it is subject to change over time.



This paper aims to examine the correspondence between conscious orientations and implicit norms of correctness among non-native teachers of English, reporting the results of a combined corpus- and questionnaire-based study. Usage data from the British and American sections of the GloWbE corpus (Davies 2013) are compared with judgements elicited from several hundred professionals teaching English at German secondary schools.



Quantitative research suggests that British and American English differ in more ways than are currently known even to linguists (Tottie 2009). The corpus data collected for the present study attest to divergent usage in an area below the general level of awareness: the choice of prepositions in connection with certain nouns (e.g., in/on the team), verbs (e.g., enrol on/in) and adjectives (e.g., unfair on/to; Algeo 2006). In the questionnaire study, teachers rated the acceptability of these prepositional options, first without and then with information about their usage in British and American English. In addition, participants self-reported their familiarity with and attitudes towards the two standard varieties along various criteria.



A triangulation of these datasets confirms the observed imbalance and reveals additional discrepancies that will be discussed: While the majority of teachers reported stronger affinities with British English, their intuitive acceptability judgements on average resembled American usage, especially among the younger participants. However, after exposure to the corpus data, many participants across all age groups corrected their acceptability judgements towards British usage.





47



References

Algeo, John (2006) British or American English? A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davies, Mark. (2013) Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries (GloWbE). Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/.

Fenn, Peter (2010) A Student’s Advanced Grammar of English. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.

Tottie, Gunnel (2002) An Introduction to American English. Oxford: Blackwell.

Tottie, Gunnel (2009) How different are American and British English grammar? And how are they different? In: Rohdenburg, Günter & Schlüter, Julia (eds.) One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English. ( Studies in English Language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 341–363.





Ninja Schulz and Christina Domene Moreno, University of Wuerzburg, Germany





YOU DO SOUND DIFFERENT! – ANALYSING THE PROSODIC PROFILE OF AUXILIARY

DO IN AFFIRMATIVE DECLARATIVES TO TRACE RECENT CHANGES IN FUNCTION



In affirmative declarative sentences, as in Aliens do exist, DO usually serves the function of denying “a negative which has been stated or implied” (Quirk et al. 1985: 124). It is generally more frequent in spoken language, where it can also serve some discourse-structuring functions (Nevalainen & Rissanen 1986). However, within the last decades, DO has spread to more formal written genres (Schulz 2021), suggesting a functional extension also in written language.

Furthermore, studies have shown a correlation between the functions of DO and the stress patterns of the respective clauses: Using the London-Lund Corpus (LLC) of spoken British English, Nevalainen & Rissanen (1986) observed that unstressed DO correlates with discourse-structuring functions while heavily stressed DO usually expresses contrast. While admitting that the categories are non-discrete, they draw a distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive DO.

Reassessing their data, Gerner (1996) reduces the instances of discursive DO, arguing that most of the occurrences still imply some contrast.



Adopting Schulz’s (2021) approach of treating DO as a multifunctional discourse marker serving textual and interpersonal functions at the same time, this paper compares the use of DO in the LLC and the new LLC2. The study serves the twofold aim of a) reassessing the use of DO in the LLC by introducing a non-binary categorisation system and b) tracing possible functional changes over the last 30 years. The study furthermore tests the function-based categorisation of DO via a fine-grained acoustic analysis of the prosodic structure. To achieve this, we measure stress operationalised by loudness and spectral tilt (Sluijter & van Heuven 1996) and assess pitch contours in these specific contexts found in the corpora. We predict an increase of discourse-structuring functions over time. Furthermore, we expect that these functions can be correlated with stress patterns through a more phonetically informed prosodic categorisation.





References


Gerner, J. (1996). Untersuchungen zur Funktion des emphatischen “do” im Englischen.

Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Nevalainen, T., & Rissanen, M. (1986). Do you support the do-support? Emphatic and non-emphatic DO in affirmative statements in present-day spoken English. In S. Jacobson (Ed.), Papers from the third Scandinavian Symposium on Syntactic Variation.

Stockholm, May 11–12, 1985 (pp. 35–50). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

48



Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.

Schulz, N. (2021). Auxiliary DO in Asian Englishes. World Englishes 40: 4 (pp. 502–518).

https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12537

Sluijter, A. M. C., & van Heuven, V. J. (1996). Spectral balance as an acoustic correlate of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 100(4), 2471–2485.





Ole Schützler, Leipzig University, Germany





IMPLICATIONAL HIERARCHIES AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS: THE VARIABILITY

OF VOWEL CONTRASTS IN SCOTTISH ENGLISH



Typical Scottish English (ScE) vowel inventories are small compared to other accents (Wells 1982). For instance, there are three cases in which a single ScE phoneme corresponds to a pair of long/short vowels in Southern British Standard English (SBSE), resulting in homophonous word pairs like calm- Cam, caught-cot and pool- pull: No.

ScE SBSE

1

/a/

/ɑː, æ/

2

/ɔ/

/ɔː, ɒ/

3

/u/

/uː, ʊ/

A ranking of potential contrasts, interpreted as ordered stages of Anglicisation, has been proposed (Abercrombie 1979; McClure 1994), whereby #2 above implies #1, and #3 implies both

#2 and #1 (but not vice versa).

This paper presents an empirical study of this well-known but under-researched phenomenon.

The leading questions are:

(i)

Do ScE speakers make qualitative differences within the categories /a/, /ɔ/ and /u/, along the lines of SBSE?

(ii)

Can we confirm the implicational hierarchy reported in the literature?

(iii)

Do speaker sex or age correlate with the presence of contrasts?



Inspecting recordings of n = 59 speakers from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Scotland; Schützler, Gut & Fuchs 2017), the first two vowel formants are measured using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2021); potential contrasts are inspected via mixed-effects regression models and vowel plots.



First results suggest that the category /a/ is indeed most susceptible to pairwise differentiation.

Often, however, differences made within the other two categories do not follow the expected implicational pattern. We must therefore either (i) question the idea of an implicational hierarchy of contrasts, or (ii) extend our analysis to include vowel quantity. The latter option is emphatically endorsed for follow-up research; methodological implications are discussed. Finally, there is little evidence of systematic variation by speaker age or sex; for the time being, we must conclude that this type of Anglicisation happens on an individual basis.





References


Abercrombie, David. 1979. The accents of standard English in Scotland. In: Adam J. Aitken & Tom McArthur (eds.), Languages of Scotland. Edinburgh: Chambers. 68–84.

Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2021. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.2.04. http://www.praat.org/

49



McClure, J. Derrick. 1994. English in Scotland. In: Robert Burchfield (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Volume V: English in Britain and Overseas: Origins and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 23–93.

Schützler, Ole, Ulrike Gut & Robert Fuchs. 2017. New perspectives on Scottish Standard English: Introducing the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English. In: Joan C. Beal & Sylvie Hancil (eds.), Perspectives on northern Englishes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 273–302.

Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Vol. 2: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.





Festa Shabani, University of Prishtina “Hasan Prishtina”, Kosovo



STRUCTURAL ASPECTS OF CODE-SWITCHING: EVIDENCE FROM ALBANIAN/ENGLISH





PAIR


This paper examines the speech of Albanian students who are highly exposed to English. They are educated in international schools, with English as their medium of instruction. However, they reside in an otherwise monolingual society with the majority of the population speaking Albanian.

Among other bilingual phenomena, code-switching is examined in terms of whether and how much it occurs in their naturalistic speech. The initial hypothesis expressed at the outset was that code-switching is a prevalent linguistic behavior among Albanian bilingual students observed in informal environments within international schools. Furthermore, while Albanian remains their primary language, English insertions such as single words or whole phrases within an Albanian syntactic frame are common. The following questions were raised at the beginning of this study: To what extent is code-switching practiced among students in Prishtina international schools?

and what constituents are switched and in what ways do the combine with the preceding and following segments within the sentence? The data gathered through fieldwork, thus participant systematic observation revealed that Albanian language is influenced by English, in that the students switch back and forth between English and Albanian, but this varies among different age groups under investigation as proven by quantitative analysis. Furthermore, in terms of structure, Albanian set the morpho-syntactic frame of the mixed clause, while English is the embedded language inserted within an Albanian clause.



This research has implications for language acquisition research since content morphemes and early system morphemes are acquired more accurately and at an earlier stage in the second language acquisition process than late system morphemes. This is consistent with the findings of our study, in which English content morphemes are switched to a greater length than function words. Investigations of such nature are not common in our country and would, therefore, give a great contribution to the studies of sociolinguistics in general, with a focus on English and Albanian specifically, as these two have been in a more intensified and direct contact in the last twenty years or so, but also to the studies of language contacts and bilingualism in particular.





50



Lotte Sommerer, University of Freiburg, Germany Florent Perek, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom



DEFINITENESS AND VERB MEANING: INVESTIGATING THE DEFINITENESS PROFILE OF





ENGLISH VERBS




In English verbs are taken to determine argument structure (Tesnière 1959, Levin 1993, Levin and Rappaport 2005, Perek 2015). At the same time, English marks (in)definiteness overtly and obligatorily by determinatives like (the, a,…). Definiteness marking is seen as a discourse-pragmatic feature which codes identifiability, familiarity, specificity,… (Hawkins 1978; Langacker 1991; Lyons 1999). Argument realization and definiteness marking are typically seen as separate grammatical phenomena.



This paper suggests that the two phenomena are not as separate as it may be assumed. On the basis of a large corpus study of 3.4 million direct object NPs extracted from the British National Corpus (XML Edition) by means of a dependency parser (Chen & Manning 2014), we find verbs to vary widely in terms of the definiteness of their direct object. Among other things – this variation can be related to the meaning of the verb. Specific verb groups tend to occur to a similar extent with (in)definite direct objects. For example, ‘creation’ verbs (produce, develop,…) and ‘desire’

verbs (need, want…) are much more likely to combine with an indefinite NP due to the fact that one produces or needs something that one does not yet possess and hence is most likely unfamiliar with. In contrast, ‘knowledge’ and ‘movement’ verbs (explain, remember, shake, lift…) are highly likely to collocate with a definite NP because one primarily explains what one already knows and what is familiar and specific. Our data show that next to intertextual discourse reasons, the semantics of a particular verb seems to have an influence on the so-called ‘definiteness profile’

of the arguments it licenses. This suggests that, from a usage-based, cognitive point of view (e.g., Goldberg 2006, 2019; Diessel 2019), verbs project not only information about the morphosyntactic encoding of their arguments, but also expectations about their discourse status.





References


Chen, D. and Manning, C. (2014). A Fast and Accurate Dependency Parser Using Neural Networks. InProceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 740 750. Doha, Qatar: ACL.

Diessel, H. (2019). The Grammar Network. How Linguistic Structure is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levin, B. (1993) English Verb Classes and Alternations, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Goldberg, A E. (2006). Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldberg, A E. (2019). Explain me this. Creativity, competition, and the partial productivity of constructions. Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Hawkins, J. A. (1978). Definiteness and Indefiniteness. A Study in Reference and Grammaticality Prediction. London: Croom Helm/Routledge.

Langacker, R W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 2, Descriptive Application.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Levin, B. and Rappaport Hovav, M. (2005). Argument Realization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lyons, C. (1999). Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Perek, F. (2015). Argument structure in usage-based construction grammar: Experimental and corpus-based perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.





51



Tatiana Szczygłowska, University of Bielsko-Biala, Poland





TEXTUAL COHESION WITHIN AN ENGLISH ACADEMIC TEXT: AN ACROSS-SECTION

ANALYSIS OF RESEARCH PAPERS IN THE DISCIPLINE OF PUBLIC HEALTH



Linking adverbials (LAs) are important devices for textual cohesion that express the “writer’s perception of the relationship between two units of discourse” and make “semantic connections between spans of discourse of varying length” (Biber et al. 1999: 558). They facilitate the logical flow of ideas in a text, which as shown by Liu (2008: 499), is particularly noticeable in English academic writing, where LAs are more common than in other registers. Previous research has analyzed LAs in the research articles (RAs) written by writers representing different disciplines (e.g., Peacock 2010), levels of expertise (e.g., Lei 2012) or L1 backgrounds (e.g., Gao 2016). To date, however, no work has investigated variation in the use of LAs within an academic text. Still, the RA “is a not a unitary construct” (Candarli and Jones 2019: 237), and although it constitutes an integrated whole, its sections accomplish their individual discourse aims, which may influence the repertoire of linguistic devices found in them.



Attempting to see how the mechanisms of cohesion work to fulfil the specific discourse functions of each rhetorical section, this study employs Liu’s (2008) taxonomy of LAs to explore in-text variation in their use across the IMRD sections of English-medium RAs in public health. Using a section-coded corpus of 200 discipline-specific empirical RAs published in high impact journals, data

are

presented

to

reveal

that:

(i) textual cohesion in the distinct sections is largely constructed through a small set of LAs; (ii) yet, there are significant differences in LA use across the sections in terms of frequency distribution and usage patterns;

(iii) the contribution of LAs to the construction of textual cohesion is the greatest in Discussions and the smallest in Methods;

(iv) the sections share many high-frequency LAs, but these items fulfil the individual communicative purposes of each section to varying degrees.





References


Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, England: Longman.

Candarli, D., Jones, S. 2019. Paradigmatic influences on lexical bundles in research articles in the discipline of education. Corpora 14(2): 237–263.

Gao, X. 2016. A cross-disciplinary corpus-based study on English and Chinese native speakers’

use of linking adverbials in academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 24: 14–28.

Lei, L. 2012. Linking adverbials in academic writing on applied linguistics by Chinese doctoral students. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11: 267–275.

Liu, D. 2008. Linking adverbials: an across-register corpus study and its implications.

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 491–518.

Peacock, M. 2010. Linking adverbials in research articles across eight disciplines. Ibérica 20: 9–

34.





52



Enikő Tóth and Péter Csatár, University of Debrecen, Hungary



AFFECTIVE DEMONSTRATIVES IN BNPs: A CORPUS STUDY



English binominal noun phrases (BNPs) are N1- of-N2 constructions with many compelling syntactic and semantic features (Keizer 2007), and they often carry evaluative meaning. The determiner of N1 might be realised by a demonstrative. In what follows we restrict our scope of investigation to such cases, consider the attested examples taken from BNC: (1a) this giant of a guy

(1b) that idiot of a principal



The use of demonstrative determiners (Liberman 2008) can itself create an emotional bond between the participants, or might indicate the speaker’s attitude toward the intended referent (Levinson 2018). The use of that, for instance, can create a sense of familiarity, often exploited by advertisements:

(2) Tired of those dull weekends? Fly to Paris for only ... (Swan and Walter 2011) Such uses are labelled as affective or emotional uses by Lakoff (1974) and Liberman (2008).



The aim of our presentation is to explore how the choice of the demonstrative interacts with the literal or figurative meaning of the BNP. We collect data by running corpus queries in two corpora: the SOAP scripted corpus, and the spoken subcorpus of COCA. The following hypotheses are to be tested:

i) affective this has positive connotations;

ii) affective that shows greater variety and is more neutral than affective this, i.e., affective that occurs both with negative and positive evaluative meaning.

Overall, we argue in accordance with Levinson’s (2000) view that English affective demonstratives form a Q-contrast < this, that>.





References


Keizer, E. 2007. The English noun phrase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff, R. 1974. Remarks on ‘this’ and ‘that’. In CLS 10, 345–356. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Levinson, S. C. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge , Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Levinson, S. C. 2018. Introduction: Demonstratives: Patterns in diversity. In S. C. Levinson, S.

Cutfield, M. Dunn, N. J. Enfield, & S. Meira (eds.), Demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 1–42). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Liberman, M. 2008. Affective demonstratives. Available at

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=674.

Swan, M. and C. Walter. 2011. Oxford English grammar course. Oxford: Oxford University Press.





Tobias Ungerer, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Stefan Hartmann, University of Düsseldorf, Germany



ARE SNOWCLONES THE NEW BLACK? A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO





EXTRAVAGANT FORMULAIC PATTERNS


The concept of “snowclones” has gained much interest in recent research on linguistic creativity and in studies on extravagance and expressiveness in language (e.g., Traugott & Trousdale 2013, 53



Bergs 2018, 2019, Tizón Couto 2021). Traugott & Trousdale (2013: 150) define snowclones as

“schemas that grow from relatively fixed micro-constructions that are usually formulae or clichés”.

However, no clear definition offering reliable criteria for identifying snowclones has been put forward so far.



This paper addresses this research gap in a twofold way: On the one hand, we develop an operational definition of snowclones based on the previous (mostly theoretical) literature, arguing that three criteria are decisive for snowclones: (i) the existence of an (alleged) lexically fixed source construction; (i ) partial productivity; (i i) distinctive (‘extravagant’) formal and/or functional characteristics. On the other hand, we offer an empirical investigation of two patterns that have often been mentioned as “prototypical” snowclones, namely [ the mother of all X], as in the mother of all hangovers, and [X BE the new Y], as in scientists are the new pop stars. Drawing on data from COCA (Davies 2008–) and the web corpus ENCOW (Schäfer & Bildhauer 2012), we use collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch 2013) and distributional semantics (Perek 2016) to explore the partial productivity of both patterns in terms of the lexical items that can serve as slot fillers. We show that both patterns recruit their slot fillers from a limited array of semantic domains, which can be seen as a factor that contributes to their extravagance.



In sum, we argue that the concept of snowclones, if properly defined, can contribute substantially to our understanding of creative language use, especially regarding the question of how social, cultural, and interpersonal factors influence the choice of more or less salient linguistic constructions.





References


Bergs, Alexander. 2018. Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist (Picasso): Linguistic aberrancy from a constructional perspective. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66(3), 277–293.

Bergs, Alexander. 2019. What, if anything, is linguistic creativity? Gestalt Theory 41(2). 173–

183.

Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.

Perek, Florent. 2016. Using distributional semantics to study syntactic productivity in diachrony.

A case study. Linguistics 54(1). 149–188.

Schäfer, Roland & Felix Bildhauer. 2012. Building large corpora from the web using a new efficient tool chain. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Terry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk & Stelios Piperidis (eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2012, 486–493.

Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2013. Collostructional analysis. In Thomas Hoffmann & Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, 290–306. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tizón Couto, David. 2021. The rise of COVID ‘snowclones’ – the mother of all linguistic phrases.

https://theconversation.com/the-rise-of-covid-snowclones-the-mother-of-all-linguistic-phrases-167580.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and constructional changes. (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics 6). Oxford: Oxford University Press.





54



Dragana Vuković Vojnović, University of Novi Sad, Serbia



‘EXPERIENCE NORFOLK! EXPERIENCE FUN!’ VS ‘DOŽIVI VIŠE OD OČEKIVANOG’ – A CORPUS-BASED CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF READER ENGAGEMENT MARKERS ON THE





WEB


Tourism promotion is highly focused on attracting visitors and presenting a destination in the best possible way not only through multimodal means such as colourful visuals and exciting video materials but through the power of verbal means as well. The register of tourism language is not neutral, but it emphasizes the positive aspects of the tourism offer and uses the language of power to interact with the reader. In this paper, we investigate how reader engagement markers as defined by Hyland (2005) and Zou & Hyland (2020) are used to establish interaction with potential clients on the web and persuade them to visit a proposed region. The study is based on two comparable corpora in English and Serbian which have been compiled from the web texts of tourism organisations of two regions (https://www.visitnorfolk.co.uk/ and https://vojvodina.travel/).

Although Norfolk’s north-eastern part is a coastal area, the two regions have been chosen since they are both mainly rural areas, sharing some geographical characteristics such as arable, fertile flatland, a network of canals and lakes, quaint villages, historic castles, forested areas, etc, which affects the activities and attractions that are on offer on their websites. They are also connected culturally by the twin towns of Norwich and Novi Sad – the main administrative centres of the two regions. The reader engagement markers are extracted using AntConc software (Anthony 2017) and normalised frequencies per 1,000 are calculated for a more objective quantitative analysis and comparison. This is followed by a qualitative analysis of the most frequent markers found in the two corpora regarding their distribution and communicative function. The results are interpreted in view of the differences and similarities in the two corpora considering the use of reader engagement markers in regional tourism promotion, also considering the cultural aspects of this kind of interaction with the reader. The findings can shed light on the implied concepts underlying reader engagement and show if there are some universal features in the two languages. There are also implications for the study of the written communication practices in the context of specialised discourse, gaining a cross-cultural understanding of tourism language and data-driven teaching of writing in the context of tourism discourse.





Bibliography


Anthony, Laurence. 2017. AntConc (Version 3.5.0) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. https://www. laurenceanthony.net/software

Baker, James 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London, New York: Continuum Dann, Graham M.S. The Language of Tourism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Wallinford: CAB

International.

Gavioli, Laura. 2005. Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gotti, Maurizio. 2008. Investigating Specialised Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang.

https://www.scirp.org/journal/ojml ISSN Online: 2164–2834

Hyland, Ken. 2005. ‘Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse.’ In Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–192.

Jaworski, Adam, and Annette Pritchard. 2005. Discourse, Communication and Tourism.

Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto: Channel View Publications.

Maci, Stefania. 2010. The Language of Tourism. Bergamo: CELSB.

Suau Jiménez, Francisca. (2019). ‘Engagement of readers/customers in the discourse of e-tourism promotional genres.’ In Engagement in Professional Genres, edited by Carmen Sancho Guindam, 341–358. John Benjamin Publishing.

Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. 2010. Tourism Discourse – Language and Mobility.

London: Palgrave Macmillan.

55



Urry, John. 1995. Consuming Places. London: Routledge.

Ying Huang, Huijian Wang, Junhong Tang. 2020. ‘A Study of Interactional Metadiscourse in English Travel Blogs.’ In Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 10, 785–793.

Zou, Hang Joanna. & Ken, Hyland.2020. ‘“Think about how fascinating this is”: Engagement in academic blogs across disciplines.’ In Journal of English for Academic Purposes.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.100809





Michael Westphal, University of Münster, Germany



PRAGMATIC VARIATION IN NEW ENGLISHES: AN ANALYSIS OF QUESTION TAG USE IN

NIGERIAN, PHILIPPINE, AND TRINIDADIAN ENGLISH



Descriptive work on World Englishes mostly focuses on morpho-syntax and phonology (Kortmann

& Schneider 2008), while descriptions of the pragmatics of English varieties are rare (Jowitt 2019).

Most corpus-based research on World Englishes investigates morpho-syntax and lexico-grammar (Hundt & Gut 2012), but there is a growing field of variational pragmatics (K. Schneider & Barron 2008), analyzing mainly ENL varieties. Variational pragmatic research on New Englishes is less frequent and mostly relies on comparisons to British English.



This paper adds to the growing field of variational pragmatics by analyzing the variation in the use of question tags in Nigerian, Philippine, and Trinidadian English regarding form and pragmatic function. The aim is to highlight variety differences and common internal linguistic dynamics in these three New Englishes. I analyze variant (e.g., do you) question tags as well as English (e.g., right) and indigenous (e.g., Yoruba: abi) invariant question tags in six dialogue text types from the Nigerian, Filipino, and Trinidadian component of the International Corpus of English: conversations, phonecalls, broadcast dialogues and interviews, classroom lessons, and legal cross-examinations.



In all three varieties question tags exhibit very similar overall frequencies (~5,300–5,700 tokens per million words) and there is a similar distribution across text types. The three New Englishes are characterized by a low frequency of variant question tags, a mix of English and indigenous invariant forms, and multilingual variation is constrained in similar ways by text type. Binary regression analyses show that there are similarities and differences in terms of text type variation and the form-function relationship of selected

English-based forms ( OK, right, you know).



The analysis demonstrates a high degree of nativization at a pragmatic level for the three New Englishes. Future descriptive work of New Englishes should include characteristic indigenous forms as well as the variety-specific pragmatic profiles of English-based forms.





References


Hundt, M. and U. Gut (Eds.) (2012). Mapping unity and diversity world-wide: Corpus-based studies of New Englishes. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Jowitt, D. (2019). Nigerian English. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Kortmann, B. and E. Schneider (Eds.) (2008). A handbook of varieties of English. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Schneider, K. and A. Barron (Eds.) (2008). Variational pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.





56



Guyanne Wilson, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany



AGREEMENT WITH COLLECTIVE NOUNS IN AFRICAN AND CARIBBEAN ENGLISHES



Agreement in collective nouns like government and family, has been studied in Inner Circle varieties of English (Levin 2006), as well as in Southeast Asian Englishes (Hundt 2006), but little is known about how agreement in collective nouns work in African and Caribbean Englishes, except where they (collectives) occur as the head of of-dependencies (Fernandez-Pena 2016).

This study closes that gap by examining agreement in collective nouns in six varieties of African and Caribbean English: Ghanaian, Nigerian, Ugandan, Grenadian, Jamaican and Trinidad and Tobagonian. Both verbal and pronominal agreement were examined.



Except for Grenadian English, for which a new corpus was compiled, the respective corpora of the International Corpus of English (ICE) were used to examine frequencies of singular and plural agreement in 150 collective nouns in spoken and written registers In addition to this, 150

respondents from each of the territories studied participated in an acceptability judgement task, in which singular and plural agreement with collective nouns were judged along a four point Likert scale.



The results show that African and Caribbean Englishes more frequently employ singular agreement with collective nouns, both in speech and writing. Singular agreement is also significantly more positively rated than plural agreement. The only exceptions to this trend involve a handful of nouns, such as majority and police, and pronominal agreement in speech. In both cases, higher frequencies of plural agreement are observed, but stimuli sentences with plural agreement are judged about the same as those with singular agreement.



The study emphasises the merit of working with the ICE corpora to yield comparative results across Englishes, but also highlights the benefits of other sources of data collection to supplement the low token counts associated with small corpora such as ICE.





Haydar Batuhan Yildiz, University of Cologne, Germany

Ingo Plag, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany





THE TEACHER ROLE OR THE TEACHER’S ROLE? DETERMINING THE CHOICE BETWEEN

NOUN-NOUN CONSTRUCTIONS AND S-GENITIVES



Plenty of work is available on the variation between the s-genitive and the of-genitive ( a teacher’s role vs. the role of a teacher, see Bauer et. al. 2013: 146–149 for an overview). However, very little has been reported on the variation between NN constructions and s-genitives, although the two are interchangeable, too (e.g., Rosenbach 2014). The study by Szmrecsanyi et. al. (2016) is the only empirical work available on this alternation, albeit with a focus on its diachronic development. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the alternation between NN

constructions ( a teacher role) and s-genitives ( a teacher’s role), utilizing corpus data from Present-Day English, to ascertain what determines the alternation between these two variants.



We sampled 250 unique constructions of each type from the iWeb corpus (Davies 2018) that are also attested in the competing construction. We coded these tokens for reuse (‘PERSISTENCE’, Szmrecsanyi 2006), ANIMACY (see Rosenbach 2008), DEFINITENESS, GIVENNESS, STYLE, POSSESSIVE RELATION, and the frequency of possessor and possessum. We employed two kinds of analysis. First, we predicted the choice between the constructions based on the above-57



mentioned variables using logistic regression: expository style favors the s-genitive and the NN-variant is more likely to be re-used (cf. Szmrecsanyi et. al. 2016 vis-à-vis the persistence effect).

Additionally, we found an interaction between animacy and definiteness: solely indefinites show more s-genitives with increasing animacy of the possessor. Second, we employed the frequency ratio of the two constructions as the dependent variable (e.g., library website ‘1491’ vs. library’s website ‘669’) in a linear regression model: prototypical (possessive) relations favor s-genitives.

In addition, the frequency of both the possessor and the possessum also had an effect: the more frequent the constituent(s), the less likely the s-genitive. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the genitive variation in English.





References


Bauer, Laurie, Rochelle Lieber & Ingo Plag. 2013. The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Davies, Mark. (2018) The iWeb Corpus. Available online at https://www.englishcorpora.

org/iWeb/.

Rosenbach, Anette. 2008. Animacy and grammatical variation – findings from English genitive variation. Lingua 118, 151–171.

Rosenbach, Anette. 2014. English genitive variation – the state of the art. English Language and Linguistics 18(2), 215–262.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2006. Morphosyntactic persistence in spoken English: A corpus study at the intersection of variationist sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert & Karlien Franco. 2016. Toward more accountability: Modeling ternary genitive variation in Late Modern English. Language Variation and Change 28(1), 1–29.



58





4 Workshops



Workshop:



EXPLORING ENGLISH BY MEANS OF CONTRAST: ENGLISH AND SOUTH SLAVIC





LANGUAGES


In its broad definition the label ‘contrastive linguistics’ refers to investigations of pairs or groups of languages with varying degrees of socio-cultural links. The approach may result in practical applications, especially in teaching or translation. Contrastive approaches to language research have also yielded a wealth of knowledge about contemporary English.



Initially the findings of contrastive studies were centred on the well-known assumption that a systematic comparison between a learner’s mother tongue and the foreign language (FL) reveals similarities and contrasts that make FL teaching more effective. But the focus of contrastive analysis on predicting learner difficulties later moved away from this didactic idea and shifted towards gaining new linguistic insights. In addition, the availability of corpora and corpus-based tools in recent decades have provided contrastive studies with new methodologies, while retaining their applicative potential, especially in translation studies.



This panel continues the long tradition of contrastive studies by addressing the relationship between English and South Slavic languages. Contributors are invited to present their theoretical and empirical research on contemporary varieties of English, in terms of their phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicology, pragmatics, stylistics, translation, etc. The overall aim is to examine the contribution of such studies to linguistic knowledge about English.



Authors are invited to present and discuss:

-

theoretical and/or empirical insights into English gained by means of contrastive analysis;

-

contemporary, especially corpus-based, approaches to contrastive analysis focused on English;

-

methodological issues related to the contrastive approaches to English (e.g., contrastive studies of traditional and contemporary methodological approaches;

-

applicability of findings based on contrastive studies of English.



Workshop Organizers:



Andrej Stopar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Ivo Fabijanić, University of Zadar, Croatia





59



Lise Fontaine, Cardiff University, United Kingdom Monika Kavalir, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia



CONSTRUAL OF NOMINAL GROUPS WITH QUANTITY: EVIDENCE FROM AGREEMENT IN





ENGLISH AND SLOVENE


The nominal group is a key grammatical resource for the linguistic expression of discourse referents. While the basic description of the nominal group is reasonably consistent across European languages in that it typically consists of a configuration of determiners, modifiers and referent type classification, we do find interesting differences across languages concerning the construal of referents as either plural or mass/singular. For example, (1) and (2) provide examples of how <hair> is construed as either mass (grammatically singular) or plural respectively.

(1) Mass: My hair is dirty (ENGLISH), Kosa mi je prljava (CROATIAN) (2) Plural: Mes cheveux sont sales (FRENCH), Imam umazane lase (SLOVENE) This paper investigates how variation in the grammar of quantified nominal expressions in English and Slovene reflects the way they are cognitively construed:

(3) Three coats is/are usually sufficient

(4) Večina Slovencev je telesno aktivna/aktivnih ‘Most Slovenes are physically active(SG)/active(PL)’



We suggest that here agreement reflects a mass vs plural construal, in line with theoretical proposals developed by cognitive linguistics (Langacker 2019). Focussing on Subject-Verb/Predicate agreement in both languages, we draw our data from two corpora accessed through SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al 2014), the BNC (English) and Gigafida 2.0 (Slovene). To capture variation in referent construal, the search queries used are [cardinal numeral + common noun + verb] for English and [ večina ‘majority’ + noun + biti ‘be’ + adjective] for Slovene. The data set consists of a random selection of 1000 instances from each corpus (N=3,860 from the BNC

and N=2,742 from Gigafida 2.0). For each instance, we analyse verb agreement number (singular/plural), tense (past/present/future), verb function (auxiliary/main) and voice (active/passive). We also classify the subject by semantic type following Hanks (2004) and analyse the potential triggers of mass/plural construal.





References


Hanks, Patrick. 2004. “Corpus Pattern Analysis.” In Proceedings of the 11th Euralex International Congress, edited by G. Williams and S. Vessier, 87–98. Lorient, France: UBS.

Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel. 2014. “The Sketch Engine: ten years on.” Lexicography 1: 7–36.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2019. “Construal.” In Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations of Language, edited by Ewa Dąbrowska and Dagmar Divjak, 140–66. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.





Frančiška Lipovšek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia



THE FUNCTION OF MOTION VERBS AND MANNER ADVERBIALS IN ENGLISH AND





SLOVENE FICTIVE MOTION EXPRESSIONS




Languages most naturally describe stationary scenes by means of constructions whose basic reference is motion (e.g., High mountains plunge into glittering lakes). The motion verb in a fictive motion (FM) expression does not express actual motion but may refer to some physical property of the subject entity (e.g., gradient) by virtue of its meaning. The same applies to manner 60



adverbials in FM expressions (e.g., The trail descends slowly). Such metonymic mappings are systematic and rely on contingency relations between the properties of the path and the manner of motion observed not only in actual motion but also in the mentally simulated motion involved in the processing of FM sentences.



Fictive motion, i.e., the conceptualization of stationariness in terms of motion, is a universal phenomenon; however, languages differ in the extent to which individual types of stationary scenes invite this kind of conceptualization. Moreover, the linguistic realization of FM varies across languages with regard to the forms and structures utilized by FM expressions.

We will compare the function of motion verbs and manner adverbials in English and Slovene FM

expressions by addressing the following questions:

1. Which types of motion verbs and manner adverbials are utilized by FM expressions?

2. In what ways do they contribute to the description of stationary scenes?

3. What is their metonymic potential and how do they complement each other in this respect?



A significant difference between the two languages is that the inventory of motion verbs employed by Slovene FM expressions is considerably smaller than that in English. Many English verbs do not find distinct counterparts in Slovene and share an equivalent with a relatively general meaning (e.g., fall, dip, drop, plunge, topple, tumble → padati ‘fall’). English verbs have more specific meanings, featuring semantic components that are easily mappable onto physical properties of subject entities. In Slovene FM expressions, such properties tend to be referred to verb-externally.



To illustrate, the verb plunge designates a sudden movement. In (1) below, this component of meaning translates into the steepness of the mountain slopes:

(1) High mountains plunge into glittering lakes, creating almost fjord-like scenery.

The Slovene equivalents of plunge (e.g., planiti, strmoglaviti) resist FM uses. The most likely solution in such contexts is the verb padati (‘fall’) in combination with the adverbial strmo (‘steeply’).

For example:

(2) Visoke gore [...] strmo padajo proti Tihemu oceanu.

‘High mountains [...] fall steeply towards the Pacific Ocean.’

The geometry adverbial in (2) refers to the property in question very directly. Example (3), by contrast, utilizes a speed adverbial whose metonymic potential is comparable to that of the speed component of plunge in (1):

(3) From the Aegean coast the land rises rapidly to about three thousand feet.



It follows from the above examples that a single property can in principle be referred to via a verb as well as via different types of manner adverbials. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to expect differences in the extent the individual options are employed by English and Slovene FM

expressions.





Bibliography


Jiménez Martínez–Losa, Noelia. 2007. “Towards a Typology of Fictive Motion Events: Review of Existing Proposals and Presentation of New Perspectives.” Interlinguistica 17: 562–69.

Matlock, Teenie. 2004. “The Conceptual Motivation of Fictive Motion.” In Studies in Linguistic Motivation, edited by Günter Radden and René Dirven, 221–48. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Matsumoto, Yo. 1996. “Subjective Motion and English and Japanese Verbs.” Cognitive Linguistics 7 (2): 183–226.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. 1. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Waliński, Jacek Tadeusz. 2018. Verbs in Fictive Motion. Łódz: Łódz University Press.



61



Corpora

ukWaC (web-derived (domain .uk) corpus) ˂https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/˃

FidaPLUS v2 (Slovenian Reference Corpus) ˂https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/˃





Liljana Mitkovska, FON University, Skopje, North Macedonia/Katowice, Poland Eleni Bužarovska, Ss. Cyril & Methodius University, Skopje, North Macedonia



CONTRASTING A PHENOMENON AT THE SYNTAX-DISCOURSE INTERFACE: FULL-VERB





INVERSION IN ENGLISH AND MACEDONIAN


This presentation discusses the results of a contrastive analysis of subject full-verb inversion in English and in Macedonian, a South Slavic language. The term ‘full-verb inversion’ refers to sentences in which the subject NP follows the whole verb group, while some other constituent is usually preposed (Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1385), as illustrated in these examples.

a. [In the forest] [lived] [a family of bears].

(English)

b. [Vo šumata] [živeeše] [edno semejstvo mečki]. (Macedonian) English and Macedonian are both primarily SVO languages, but unlike English, Macedonian has a rich verb inflection system and allows null subjects. Thus, Macedonian is much more flexible regarding word-order restrictions and is more open to discourse-pragmatic motivated variations.



Despite the numerous studies of the English full-verb inversion, there is no consensus as to its nature. Researchers, however, agree that it is an especially marked structure used for topic management, information structure packaging or rhetorical effects (Prado-Alonso 2011). In Macedonian, full-verb inversion is a common devise for discourse purposes and it is immediately obvious that it is much more common than in English. For example, in an 8000-word sample of English short stories we found only 4 examples, while a 5400-word Macedonian sample yielded 40 examples (quotations excluded). The main question that arises from this observation is what this difference in distribution may be due to. To find the answer we set out to compare the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic properties of full-verb inversion in the two languages. For that purpose, we have compiled a sample of translated texts in two genres: fiction and non-fiction. We compare the attested examples in form, function and distribution to determine the level of equivalence of full-verb inversion in these two languages with distinct syntax-discourse interface properties.





References


Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prado-Alonso, Carlos. 2011. Full-verb inversion in written and spoken English. Bern: Peter Lang.





Dragana Vuković Vojnović, University of Novi Sad, Serbia



A CONTRASTIVE CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF ENGLISH AND SERBIAN N + N





COLLOCATIONS IN TOURISM DISCOURSE


Tourism discourse is recognized as a general discourse with some additional specialist features (Lam 2007, 72; Gotti 2008, 22–24). Corpus-based studies that use corpora custom-made of authentic texts provide a data-driven approach and an insight into the actual use of language, which is particularly significant for the investigation of specialized language (Gavioli 2005; McCarten 2007; Geeraerts 2010; Liu and Han 2015; Hyland and Jiang 2017). In this paper, we 62



explore the distribution and use of noun + noun collocations in two comparable specialized corpora compiled from the website texts of tourism organizations and travel agencies of Great Britain and Serbia. In this analysis, collocations comprise a spectrum of word combinations from those whose constituents can be more freely replaced by synonyms to a more fixed set of units (Van Roey 1990; Granger 1998; Ackermann and Chen 2013). Firstly, the collocations are extracted using software tools TermoStat Web 3.0 (Drouin 2003) for the English corpus and AntConc (Anthony 2017) for the Serbian corpus. Based on their normalized frequencies per 10,000 words, the most frequent noun + noun collocations are distinguished and described in terms of their morpho-syntactic features, the relationship of the collocates and the communicative function of collocations. The results show that there are some major differences in the morphosyntactic features of the extracted collocations in the two languages. Namely, the major difference has been observed in the position of the primary collocate or the node. In binary collocational structures, the primary collocate in English collocations is the second noun which is premodified by the secondary collocate (e.g, afternoon tea; buffet restaurant; sea view). On the other hand, in Serbian collocations, the primary collocate is the first noun which is postmodified by an incongruent attribute – either in genitive case without a preposition (e.g., podnožje planine, dolina reke) or in another case with a preposition (e.g., soba sa pogledom na more; noćenje sa doručkom; fotelja na rasklapanje). There are also some similarities regarding their distribution and use in the corpus. Finally, the implications of the study are relevant for understanding the concepts behind noun + noun collocations in English and Serbian, language typology, lexicography, tourism discourse studies, and language education in tourism.





References


Ackermann, Kristen, and Yu-Hua Chen. 2013. “Developing the Academic Collocation List (ACL)

– A Corpus Driven and Expert-Judged Approach.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12: 235–47.

Gavioli, Laura. 2005. Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Geeraerts, Dirk. 2010. Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Oxford Linguistics.

Gotti, Maurizio. 2008. Investigating Specialised Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang.

Granger, Sylviane. 1998. “Prefabricated Patterns in Advanced EFL Writing: Collocations and Formulae.” In Phraseology: Theory, Analysis and Applications, edited by Anthony P.

Cowie, 145–60. Oxford:Clarendon Press Oxford.

Hyland, Ken, and Feng K. Jiang. 2017. “Is Academic Writing Becoming More Informal?” English for Specific Purposes 45: 40–51.

Lam, Peter Y. W. 2007. “A Corpus-Driven Lexico-Grammatical Analysis of English Tourism Industry Texts and the Study of its Pedagogic Implications in English for Specific Purposes.” In Corpora in the Foreign Language Classroom, edited by Encarnacion Hidalgo, Luis Quereda, and Juan Santana, 71–90. Leiden: Brill.

Liu, Jia, and Lina Han. 2015. “A Corpus-Based Environmental Academic Word List Building and its Validity Test.” English for Specific Purposes 39: 1–11.

McCarten, Jeanne. 2007. Teaching Vocabulary: Lessons from the Corpus, Lessons for the Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Roey, Jacques. 1990. French-English Contrastive Lexicology. An Introduction. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters.





Electronic Tools for Corpora Analysis


Anthony, L. 2017. AntConc (Version 3.5.0). Tokyo: Waseda University.

https://www.laurenceanthony.net /software.

Drouin, Patrick. 2003. TermoStat Web 3.0.

http://termostat.ling.umontreal.ca/index.php?lang=en_CA.



63





Branka Živković, University of Montenegro, Montenegro



THE DEGREE OF INTERACTIVITY IN BRITISH AND MONTENEGRIN UNIVERSITY

LECTURES: A CONTRASTIVE AND CORPUS-BASED STUDY



University lectures as a type of spoken academic genre belong to the category of prepared/planned speeches (Biber 1988). Although planned, they can contain features of everyday/informal conversation as they are delivered in a spoken mode. Having this in mind, the paper analyses the degree of interactivity in university lectures and adopts a contrastive and corpus-based approach to answering the questions of what degree of interactivity prevails in British and Montenegrin university lectures in the field of linguistics and whether there are differences or similarities in their degree of interactivity. The corpus comprises 24 university lectures – 12 British lectures taken from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE), British National Corpus (BNC), University of Reading and its Self-Access Centre for Language Learning (SACLL), and 12 university lectures recorded at the University of Montenegro. The results show the difference in the two academic settings and indicate that the British lectures display medium and low interactivity, whereas the Montenegrin ones exhibit high and medium interactivity degree.

It is concluded that professors at the University of Montenegro adopt a more conversational style of lecturing while their British colleagues choose between low and medium interactive teaching style. The findings of the contrastive study could be used as a starting point in additional research regarding the issue of what factors can influence the degree of interactivity in university lectures.





Bibliography


Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Csomay, Eniko. 2002. “Variation in Academic Lectures: Interactivity and Level of Instruction.” In Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation, edited by Randi Reppen, Susan M.

Fitzmaurice and Douglas Biber, 201–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Du Bois, John W. 1991. “Transcription Design Principles for Spoken Discourse Research.”

Pragmatics 1 (1): 71–106.

Flowerdew, John, ed. 1994. Academic Listening: Research Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goffman, Erving 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Savić, Svenka. 1993. Diskurs analiza [Discourse Analysis]. Novi Sad: Univerzitet u Novom Sadu.

Sinclair, John McHardy, and Richard Malcolm Coulthard. 1975. Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. London: Oxford University Press.

Živković, Branka. 2015. “Funkcionalne strukture i njihovi lingvistički eksponenti u diskursu univerzitetskih predavanja [Functional Structures and their Linguistic Exponents in the Discourse of University Lectures].” PhD diss., University of Montenegro: Faculty of Philology. http://eteze.ucg.ac.me/application/showtheses?thesesId=132.

—. 2021a. “Interaktivnost predavanja iz lingvistike na Univerzitetu Crne Gore [The Interactivity of Linguistics Lectures Delivered at the University of Montenegro].” In Primenjena lingvistika

[Applied Linguistics], a special issue in honour of Radmila Šević, edited by Ksenija Šulović, 271–86. Serbia: Applied Linguistics Association of Serbia, Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade.

—. 2021b. “Interaktivnost britanskih univerzitetskih predavanja [The Interactivity of British University Lectures].” Logos et Littera: Journal of Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, 8: 51–57.



64



Workshop:



FRAGMENTS: CONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION



The aim of this workshop is to contribute to the linguistic characterisation of ‘fragments’ in Present-Day English (see Kaltenböck 2007 and Dehé 2014 for a comprehensive approach to the category in spoken language). Fragments are understood here as free-standing, functionally (semantically, discursively, communicatively) felicitous though ‘orphan’, intonational y independent, syntactically defective linguistic units (e.g., Haegeman 1991; Hall 2019). Previous research on fragments focused on, among others, comment clauses (Kaltenböck 2013), parentheticals (Griffiths 2015), appositives (Vries 2012), insubordination constructions (Beijering et al. 2019), Small Clauses (Progovac et al. 2006) and referentiality/dependency/matching issues (Stainton 2006; Harnish 2009).



By adopting an eclectic view that combines empirical (corpus-based, statistical) and theoretical perspectives, this workshop will address a number of research topics and challenges:

• ellipsis-based or ‘reconstructive’ (Morgan 1973) versus non-sentential perspectives (Stainton 2006);

• formal characterisation of fragments: syntactic category, syntactic structure, (implicit/explicit) anchors, missing elements (from a reconstruction-based perspective), etc.;

• corpus-based/driven taxonomies of fragments (Fernández et al. 2007; Bowie and Aarts 2016);

• constructionalist account of (specific) fragments as form-meaning pairings with varying degrees of conventionalisation (Goldberg and Perek 2019); in other words, can the interpretation of a fragment be triggered/evidenced by its form (or the other way round)?;

• register-/medium-specific status and function (Bowie and Aarts 2016).





References


Beijering, Karin, Gunther Kaltenböck and María Sol Sansiñena eds. 2019. Insubordination.

Theoretical and empirical issues. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Bowie, Jill and Bas Aarts. 2016. Clause fragments in English dialogue. In María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo and Ignacio M. Palacios-Martínez eds. Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora, 259–288. Leiden: Brill.

Dehé, Nicole. 2014. Parentheticals in spoken English: The syntax prosody relation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fernández, Raquel, Jonathan Ginzburg and Shalom Lappin. 2007. Classifying non-sentential utterances in dialogue: A machine learning approach. Computational Linguistics 33/3: 397–427.

Goldberg, Adele E. and Florent Perek. 2019. Ellipsis in Construction Grammar. In Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and Tanja Temmerman eds. The Oxford handbook of ellipsis, 188–204.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Griffiths, James. 2015. Parenthetical verb constructions, fragment answers, and constituent modification. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 33/1: 191–229.

Hall, Alison. 2019. Fragments. In Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and Tanja Temmerman eds. The Oxford handbook of ellipsis, 605–623. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haegeman, L. 1991. Parenthetical adverbials: The radical orphanage approach. In Shuki Chiba, Akira Ogawa, Norio Yamada, Yasuaki Fuiwara, Osama Koma and Takao Yagi eds.

65



Aspects of Modern English linguistics. Papers Presented to Masamoto Ukaji on his 60th Birthday, 232–254. Tokyo: Kaitakushi.

Harnish, Robert M. 2009. The problem of fragments. Two interpretative strategies. Pragmatics & Cognition 17/2: 251–282.

Kaltenböck, Gunther. 2007. Spoken parenthetical clauses in English: A taxonomy. In Nicole Dehé and Yordanka Kavalova eds. Parentheticals, 25–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kaltenböck, Gunther. 2013. Development of comment clauses. In Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis eds. The English verb phrase: Investigating recent language change with corpora, 286–317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morgan, J. L. 1973. Sentence fragments and the notion ‘sentence’. In Braj B. Kachru, Robert B.

Lees, Yakov Malkiel, Angelina Pietrangeli and Sol Saporta eds. Issues in linguistics: Papers in honor of Henry and Renée Kahane, 719–751. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Progovac, Ljiljana, Kate Paesani, Eugenia Casielles and Ellen Barton eds. 2006. The syntax of nonsententials: Multidisciplinary perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Stainton, Robert J. 2006. Neither fragments nor ellipsis. In Ljiljana Progovac, Kate Paesani, Eugenia Casielles and Ellen Barton eds. The syntax of nonsententials: Multidisciplinary perspectives, 93–116. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Vries, Mark de. 2012. Parenthetical main clauses – or not? On appositives and quasi-relatives.

In Lobke Aelbrecht, Liliane Haegeman and Rachel Nye eds. Main clause phenomena: New horizons, 178–201. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.



Workshop Organizers:



Yolanda Fernández-Pena, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain Gunther Kaltenböck, Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria

Javier Pérez-Guerra, University of Vigo, Spain





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Samuel Bourgeois, University of Lausanne, Switzerland



ON THE EVOLUTION OF BRACKETED PARENTHETICALS WITH DISCOURSE MARKERS





IN JOURNALISTIC ENGLISH




This paper addresses the change in use of bracketed parentheticals with discourse markers (DMs) in journalistic texts. Parentheticals, a category of fragments, are defined as information units that contrast with the rest of an utterance because:

a. They are syntactically independent.

b. They are set off prosodically (or with punctuation in writing) from the rest of an utterance.

c. Their meaning is “non-restrictive”.

d. They tend to be positionally mobile (with certain ‘weak spots’ where they occur when used sentence medially).

e. Their internal structure is built on principles of sentence grammar but can be elliptic.





(adapted from Kaltenböck et al. 2011: 853)



Concretely, I argue that bracketed parentheticals with DMs like (1) and (2) are increasingly used in journalistic texts (cf. Leech et al 2009: 246), particularly in ways that express the subjective and/or intersubjective stances of the authors (cf. Traugott 2010; Jaffre 2009; Du Bois 2007). This paper analyzes American journalistic texts by taking advantage of three corpora: the journalistic sub-corpora of the COHA and COCA as well as the NOW corpus. Furthermore, this study combines a diachronic (20th century to today) and qualitative investigation of the development and the functions of these parentheticals in written journalism.

(1) In contrast, less than a quarter of the residents of Montana, Hawaii (well, duh) and Maine wanted to leave their state. (NOW 2014, emphasis added)

(2) I'm told there are even some sites (like, ahem, The Huffington Post) that aggregate news content, feature original reporting, and host bloggers. (COCA: Magazines 2010, emphasis added)



Moreover, I will contextualize the increased use of these parentheticals with the broader shifts occurring in American journalistic writing, such as ‘colloquialization’, ‘informalization’ and

‘densification’ (see Leech et al. 2009; Mair 2006). Furthermore, this study wil fil in the gaps that currently exist in the research of bracketed parentheticals in writing. For example, though past research has discussed how bracketed parentheticals are particular to and increasingly used in writing (e.g., Leech et al. 2009: 246), detailed empirical research looking into how these parenthetical constructions are used and how they are changing in writing is severely sparse in the current linguistic literature.





References


Du Bois, John. 2007. The Stance Triangle. In Englebretson, Robert (ed.), Stance taking in Discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 139–182. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Jaffe, Alexandra. 2009. Introduction: The sociolinguistics of stance. In Jaffe, Alexandra (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives, 3–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kaltenböck, Gunther, Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2011. On thetical grammar. Studies in Language 4. 852–897.

Leech, Geoffrey & Hundt, Marianne & Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicolas. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mair, Christian. 2006. Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2010. (Inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification: A reassessment. In Davidse, Kristin & Vandelanotte, Lieven & Cuyckens, Hubert (eds.), Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, 29–74. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.



Corpora:

Davies, Mark. 2016. Corpus of news on the web (NOW) Available online at https://www.englishcorpora.org/now/.

Davies, Mark. 2010. The corpus of historical American English (COHA). Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/.

Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Available online

at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.





Yolanda Fernández-Pena, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain Javier Pérez-Guerra, University of Vigo, Spain



NON-FORMULAIC HIGHLY/PARTIALLY CONVENTIONALISED FRAGMENTS IN WRITTEN

ENGLISH: A CORPUS-DRIVEN TAXONOMY



Previous research on ‘fragments’, that is, free-standing, functionally felicitous but structurally non-canonical units in English has mainly focused on their (ellipsis-based or non-sentential) interpretation (Merchant 2004; Staiton 2006) and communicative function in spoken registers (Bowie and Aarts 2016), corpus-based/driven studies and written registers having garnered little attention in the area. Our investigation comes to bridge that gap by providing a corpus-driven taxonomy of fragments in written (i.e., planned/edited) Present-Day English.



In this study, we narrow down the concept of ‘fragment’ to (potentially) finite fragmentary structures only (e.g., …if any.; As requested…), with a focus on non-formulaic but highly or partially conventionalised fragments. The data are retrieved from a written sample of the parsed British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) (Nelson et al. 2002), through grammatically specified searches (i.e., with the ‘grammaticon’ and Fuzzy Tree Fragment queries).

Our main aim is to provide a corpus-driven taxonomy of fragments based on formal and textual criteria (i.e., category, (clausal/phrasal) structure, anchor, finiteness, (in)dependence) and, ultimately, to account for their varying degrees of conventionalisation from a constructionalist perspective (i.e., as form-meaning pairings; Goldberg and Perek 2019).



The preliminary results provide an array of fragmentary structures that have been broadly classified into phrasal ( Enough about me.), non-finite dependent clauses ( …if any.) and finite independent clauses ( If only it would! ), with finer distinctions according to the category, anchor and degree of conventionalisation. Our contribution also confirms that fragments are not uncommon in written registers and, thus, deserve further scholarly attention.





References


Bowie, Jil and Bas Aarts. 2016. Clause fragments in English dialogue. In María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo and Ignacio M. Palacios-Martínez eds. Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora, 259–288. Leiden: Brill.

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Goldberg, Adele E. and Florent Perek. 2019. Ellipsis in Construction Grammar. In Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and Tanja Temmerman eds. The Oxford handbook of ellipsis, 188–204.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Merchant, Jason. 2004. Fragments and ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy 27/6): 661–738.

Nelson, Gerald, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts. 2002. Exploring natural language: Working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Stainton, Robert J. 2006. Neither fragments nor ellipsis. In Ljiljana Progovac, Kate Paesani, Eugenia Casielles and Ellen Barton eds. The syntax of nonsententials: Multidisciplinary perspectives, 93–116. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.





Francisco Gonzálvez-García, University of Almeria, Spain



CAPTURING GENERALIZATIONS AT VARYING LEVELS OF GRANULARITY THROUGH

FRAGMENTS AS WELL AS CONSTRUCTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM COGNITION VERBS IN

SECONDARY PREDICATION IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH



First, this paper examines the main points of convergence and divergence between Interactional Linguistics (Bybee and Hopper 2001; Thompson 2002; Fox 2007; Bybee 2013) and Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006, 2013) against the backdrop of other functionalist, cognitivist and/or constructionist approaches (Butler and Gonzálvez-García 2014), with special focus on the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of fragments vis-à-vis constructions. Second, it is argued that Thompson’s (2002) fragment analysis of (finite) complementation in English, while insightful, cannot satisfactorily account for a range of meaning restrictions on the NP and the XPCOMP in secondary predication in English and Spanish. The Thompsonian analysis alone cannot capture the grammatical relations holding between clitics and matrix verbs, on the one hand, and matrix verbs and their XPCOMPs, on the other hand, in dialogic Spanish data involving right or left dislocation (Gonzálvez-García 2014) or between the topicalized element and the matrix verb in the Presentational Relative Construction (see Duffield and Michaelis 2011 for English), as shown in (1)-(2), respectively:



(1) Eso lo encuentro evidente (CREA)



(2) Hay una serie de medidas que entendemos fundamentales (…) (adapted from CREA) Thirdly, this paper addresses the relevance of Newmeyer’s (2003: 174) contention that

“[c]ategorial information is necessary in statements of subcategorization and argument linking”.

In line with Gonzálvez-García (2009), it is argued that fragments and constructions need to include a most delicate mapping between morphosyntactic realizations and their inherent meaning/function properties to maximize their explanatory adequacy. Finally, the Goldbergian analysis proposed here for (1)-(2) under the rubric of a family of “subjective-transitive”

constructions (Gonzálvez-García 2009, 2011, 2014, 2017) draws on the dynamic interaction of specific, locally-bound fragments as well as more abstract constructions affording high(er)-level generalizations, thus corroborating the need to reconcile the emergentist nature of usage and the stable dimension of morphosyntactic facts (Langacker 2010; Verhagen 2010; Harder 2012).





References


Butler, Christopher S. and Francisco Gonzálvez-García. 2014. Exploring functional-cognitive space. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bybee, Joan L. 2013. Usage-based theory and exemplar representation. In Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale eds. The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, 49–69.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bybee, Joan L. and Paul J. Hopper eds. 2001. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Duffield, Cecily Jill and Laura A. Michaelis. 2011. Why subject relatives prevail: Constraints versus constructional licensing. Language and Cognition 3: 171–208.

Fox, Barbara A. 2007. Principles shaping grammatical practices: An exploration. Discourse Studies 9/3: 299–318.

Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goldberg, Adele E. 2013. Constructionist approaches. In Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale eds. The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, 15–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gonzálvez-García, Francisco. 2009. The family of object-related depictives in English and Spanish: First steps towards a constructionist, usage-based analysis. Language Sciences 31: 663–723.

Gonzálvez-García, Francisco. 2011. Metaphor and metonymy do not render coercion superfluous: Evidence from the subjective-transitive construction. Linguistics 49/6: 1305–

1358.

Gonzálvez-García, Francisco. 2014. Bringing together fragments and constructions: Evidence from complementation in English and Spanish. In Hans C. Boas and Francisco Gonzálvez-García eds. Construction Grammar perspectives on Romance languages, 181–226. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gonzálvez-García, Francisco. 2017. Exploring inter-constructional relations in the constructicon: A view from Contrastive (Cognitive) Construction Grammar. In Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Alba Luzondo Oyón and Paula Pérez-Sobrino eds. Constructing families of constructions, 135–172. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Harder, Peter. 2012. Emergent and usage-based models of grammar. In Hans-Jörg Schmid ed.

Cognitive pragmatics, 507–532. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2010. How not to disagree: The emergence of structure from usage. In Kasper Boye and Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen eds. Language usage and language structure, 107–143. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2003. Theoretical implications of grammatical theory – Grammatical relation mismatches. In Elaine J. Francis and Laura A. Michaelis eds. Mismatch: Form-function incongruity and the architecture of grammar, 149–178. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Thompson, Sandra A. 2002. ‘Object complements’ and conversation: Towards a realistic account. Studies in Language 26: 125–163.

Verhagen, Arie. 2010. Usage, structure, scientific explanation, and the role of abstraction, by linguists and by language users. In

Kasper Boye and Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen eds. Language usage and language structure, 45–71. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.





Gunther Kaltenböck and Ozan Mustafa, Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria



ELLIPSIS AS ADDITION: THE CASE OF SEMI-INSUBORDINATION



Ellipsis is generally seen as an omission of obligatory grammatical elements which need to be recovered by the hearer from either the linguistic co-text or the situational context. The motivating principle for the speaker to use ellipsis is generally identified as one of economy (e.g., Goldberg and Perek 2019), omitting linguistic material that is redundant. The overarching theme in studies of ellipsis is thus one of subtraction and structural ‘deficiency’ combined with reconstruction and recovery. This paper argues that the raison d’être of elliptical structures is not just one of economy and omission, but can also be one of addition: creating new shades of communicative meaning.

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A case in point are so-called semi-insubordinate structures (Van linden and Van de Velde 2014), as in (1), which have so far received little attention in English.



(1) a.

Well, funny you should ask, Florence. (COCA:1999:SPOK)





b.

Pity that she had not lived longer (COCA:1997:FIC)

Based on 911 instances from the Corpus of Contemporary American English the paper investigates the formal and functional properties of these structures. Formally, they can be related to different full-blown matrix clauses, notably it-extraposition and exclamative clauses.

Functionally, they are shown, however, to differ from these in subtle ways, with semi-insubordination exhibiting some functional idiosyncrasies: generally speaking, they express subjective speaker evaluation and deictically anchor a proposition that is neither presupposed nor exclamative. It is therefore concluded that semi-insubordination is best treated as a construction in the sense of Construction Grammar.





References


Goldberg, Adele E. and Florent Perek. 2019. Ellipsis in Construction Grammar. In Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and Tanja Temmerman eds. The Oxford handbook of ellipsis, 188–204.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van linden, An and Freek Van de Velde. 2014. (Semi-)autonomous subordination in Dutch: Structures and semantic-pragmatic values. Journal of Pragmatics 60: 226–250.





Joanna Nykiel, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Nele Põldvere, Lund University, Sweden



ELLIPSIS IN A LESS WELL KNOWN ENVIRONMENT: THE REACTIVE WHAT-X





CONSTRUCTION IN ENGLISH




In this talk, we present, and suggest a theoretical analysis of, what is known as the reactive what-

X construction, depicted in (1)-(2). This construction has interrogative and clarificational, as well as anaphoric properties (i.e., it requires an antecedent in the preceding context), as has been shown by recent corpus work on spoken British English (Põldvere and Paradis 2019, 2020). We begin by summarizing the syntactic properties and the main functions of the reactive what-X

construction as requests for information and requests for verification, based on data drawn from the London-Lund Corpora. In the second part of this talk, we address patterns that haven’t been noticed before, i.e., that this construction also has properties aligning it with certain kinds of elliptical constructions, in particular, with fragments (see (2)). We next pursue a theoretical analysis that explicitly captures the elliptical properties of the reactive what-X construction. We do so by taking as our starting point the Construction Grammar analysis of this construction offered in Põldvere and Paradis (2020) and relating the construction to reprise fragments, shown in (3).

This allows us to analyze the reactive what-X construction as a type of in-situ interrogative clause whose elliptical properties are licensed by a constraint that permits a fragment to be the sole daughter of an S node (see Ginzburg and Sag 2000; Nykiel and Kim 2021).

(1) A: She was like, it would’ve been gross to put it in my car and leave it there for a whole day, and I was like, yeah it’s gross to just pick it up anyway. It’s got its head coming off, Jesus.

B: What she would eat it?

(2) A: Have you ever been out there before?

B: What to Russia?

(3) A: This is it for Harvey.

B: Harvey?



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References

Ginzburg, Jonathan and Ivan A. Sag. 2000. Interrogative investigations: The form, meaning and use of English interrogatives. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Nykiel, Joanna and Jong-Bok Kim. 2021. On the grammaticality of morphosyntactically reduced remnants in Polish sluicing. Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0071.

Põldvere, Nele and Carita Paradis. 2019. Motivations and mechanisms for the development of the reactive what-x construction in spoken dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics 143: 65–84.

Põldvere, Nele and Carita Paradis. 2020. ‘What and then a little robot brings it to you?’ The reactive what-x construction in spoken dialogue. English Language and Linguistics 24/2, 307–332.





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Workshop:



TODAY’S INNOVATIONS, TOMORROW’S CONVENTIONS: USAGE-BASED APPROACHES





TO INCIPIENT DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH


The conventional structures of present-day English result from the linguistic innovations and changes made by generations of speakers. However, innovation and change are not just a thing of the past. What is new or in flux in contemporary language may presage the norms and variational patterns of a future stage of the language.



In cognitive approaches to language, linguistic structures are never stable; they are constantly emergent from usage events and become entrenched and conventionalized through repetition (i.a., in slightly varying flavors, Hopper 1998; Bybee 2006; Auer & Pfänder 2011; Diessel 2019; Schmid 2020). There is no principled distinction between synchronic states of a language and diachronic change from one state to another (cf. Diessel 2019: 4; Hilpert 2019: 110). Under these premises, we can study contemporary language use with a perspective of potential and incipient change.



There is consensus that outright predictions about language change are impossible; trajectories of on-going developments can be estimated, albeit with caution (cf. the contributions in Sanchez-Stockhammer (ed.) 2015). But there are generalizations that link longitudinal developments to language use in the here-and-now. Language change in the long term often involves developments with at least an appearance of directionality. Recurring mechanisms of change have been observed (e.g., chain shifts in phonetics/phonology, analogical levelling in morphology, cliticization, pathways of semantic change, etc.), which necessarily have their basis in synchronic usage preferences and are probably driven by cognitive and communicative strategies (e.g., analogical and metaphorical thinking, pragmatic inferencing, articulatory reduction and sufficient discriminability, social indexing, etc.).



While historical research can point to these motivations, it runs the risk of overstating their effects due to its focus on ‘successful’ instances of language change (cf. Fischer 2000). Studies of ongoing developments can also provide ‘negative’ evidence of the suspected direction of a change (cf. Mair & Leech 2006: 321). Likewise, we can seek empirical evidence that a possible or hypothesized change is or is not being initiated, which sheds light on the limits of the mechanisms of change – for example, chunking and reduction produce new forms, but these will only become conventional under favourable circumstances (cf. Bybee et al. 2016; Lorenz & Tizón-Couto 2017).



In addition, as change depends on innovation, innovation depends on current conventions: New uses, forms and structures are more likely to be replicated and transmitted when they are easily inferable from established uses, forms and structures (cf. De Smet 2016). Change may occur through gradient shifts in usage without violating existing conventions, and even highly creative innovations cannot fully transcend the rules of the system (Ariel 2008: 182f; Bergs & Kompa 2020).

Thus, current language use can then tell us something about potential next steps of change, the chance of success of new variants, or whether and how a suspected change is being initiated.

This in turn opens up possibilities for experimental testing of hypotheses about change and its cognitive mechanisms – to name two examples, Croft (2010) found that morpho-syntactic innovations in an experimental setting correspond to grammaticalization paths; Hilpert & Correia Saavedra (2018) found no evidence for a supposed mechanism, asymmetric priming, in language processing.



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Observing synchronic language use with a view of language change therefore allows us to test cases of potential or incipient change and to make plausible statements about likely future trajectories of on-going variation. Finally, it can bring synchrony and diachrony together in a usage-based perspective by taking stock of the dynamic nature of language.

The aim of this workshop is to present studies of present-day English (and its varieties) not as locked in time but as dynamic and emergent: a system which is constantly being rearranged and adapted in communication, subject to changes that are guided by cognitive mechanisms but also constrained by convention.



The workshop includes contributions that:

- present instances of on-going change and their likely further trajectory;

- study current or recent innovations with a view of their potential actuation and propagation;

- investigate how known mechanisms of language change might continue to shape cases of current variation and language use;

- discuss the role of specific cognitive processes (e.g., social cognition or memory-related processes) in the interplay between innovation and convention;

- discuss the role of deliberate creativity vs subtle shifts ‘below the radar’ in the dynamicity of the language system;

- assess theoretical concepts and methodological approaches in the context of linguistic innovation and shifts in convention.



References:

Ariel, Mira. 2008. Pragmatics and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Auer, Peter & Stefan Pfänder. 2011. Constructions: Emergent or emerging? In Peter Auer & Stefan Pfänder (eds.), Constructions: Emergent and Emerging, 1–21. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Bergs, Alexander & Nikola Anna Kompa. 2020. Creativity within and outside the linguistic system.

Cognitive Semiotics 13(1): 20202025.

Bybee, Joan. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language 82(4).

711–733.

Bybee, Joan, Richard L. File-Muriel & Ricardo Napoleão de Souza. 2016. Special reduction: a usage-based approach. Language and Cognition 8: 421–446.

Croft, William. 2010. The origins of grammaticalization in the verbalization of experience.

Linguistics 48(1). 1–48.

De Smet, Hendrik. 2016. How gradual change progresses: The interaction between convention and innovation. Language Variation and Change 28: 83–102.

Diessel, Holger. 2019. The grammar network. How linguistic structure is shaped by language use.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fischer, Olga. 2000. Grammaticalisation: unidirectional, non-reversable? The case of to before the infinitive in English. In Annette Rosenbach, Olga Fischer & Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of Change. Grammaticalization in English, 149–169. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hilpert, Martin. 2019. Chapter 5: Historical Linguistics. In Ewa Dąbrowska & Dagmar Divjak (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics – A Survey of Linguistic Subfields, 108–132. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Hilpert, Martin & David Correia Saavedra. 2018. The unidirectionality of semantic changes in grammaticalization: an experimental approach to the asymmetric priming hypothesis.

English Language and Linguistics 22(3). 357–380.

Hopper, Paul J. 1998. Emergent Grammar. In Michael Tomasello (ed.), The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, Vol.1, 155–175.

Englewood Cliffs: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Lorenz, David & David Tizón-Couto. 2017. Coalescence and contraction of V-to-Vinf sequences in American English – Evidence from spoken language. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1515/cllt-2015-0067

Mair, Christian & Geoffrey Leech. 2006. Current changes in English syntax. In: Bas Aarts and April McMahon (eds.), The Handbook of English Linguistics, 318–342. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sanchez-Stockhammer, Christina (ed.). 2015. Can We Predict Linguistic Change? (Studies in Variation,

Contacts

and

Change

in

English

16).

Helsinki:

VARIENG.

http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/16/index.html

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2020. The Dynamics of the Linguistic System. Usage, Conventionalization, and Entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



Workshop Organizers:



David Lorenz, University of Rostock, Germany

David Tizón-Couto, University of Vigo, Spain





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Alexander Bergs, University of Osnabrück, Germany



FROM CONSTRUCTIONAL INNOVATION TO LINGUISTIC CHANGE



This paper investigates, on the basis or corpus data from Present-day English, deliberate linguistic speaker innovations from a constructional perspective. It discusses as a major factor in these innovations Keller’s (1994) maxims, extravagance (Haspelmath 1999), and socio-cognitive salience (Schmid & Günther 2016). A second question to be addressed in this paper is how these deliberate and noticeable (salient, extravagant) innovations spread and may become routinized or conventionalized.



From a constructional perspective, structures may be copied verbatim, leading to an increase in token frequency. A simple increase in token frequency may already result in conventionalization and loss of salience. Other constructions may not only be copied verbatim, but also in their abstract patterning. The result would not necessarily be an increase in token, but in type frequency, resulting in what has been termed snow cloning. Arguably, snow cloning may lead to a slower loss of salience, e.g., while the abstract pattern and some individual instances are less salient, some new, innovative tokens are still considered extravagant and may keep the pattern productive and noticeable.





References


Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37:6. 1043–1048.

Keller, Rudi. 1994. On Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language. London / New York: Routledge.

Schmid, Hans-Jörg & Franziska Günther. 2016. Toward a unified socio-cognitive framework for salience in language. Frontiers in psychology 7. 1110.





Gunther Kaltenböck, University of Graz, Austria

Elnora ten Wolde, University of Vienna, Austria



JUST SO: A NEW PURPOSE SUBORDINATOR IN THE MAKING



The inventory of adverbial subordinators and their respective meanings have been shown to fluctuate considerably over the centuries (Kortmann 1997). This paper discusses a new addition to the set of purpose subordinators in present-day English, viz. just so, as illustrated in (1).

(1) I definitely need more Legos, so we need to have kids just so I can justify the toys. (COHA) On the basis of data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), we will discuss the recent emergence and possible further development of just so as a purpose subordinator and its use in the recently developed pragmatic marker just so you know, as demonstrated in (2).

(2) Honestly, it’s probably weirder to me than it is to you. Look, I can’t believe I have to say this, but just so you know, there’s no way the two of you work. (COCA) In detail, the subordinator just so most likely stems from the earlier manner so in clause initial position (e.g., König & Vezzosi 2022). The subordinator just so signaling purpose is attested slightly before the just so condition subordinator in the mid-19th century. Our dataset of over 3,500

tokens from the last 200 years shows a semantic specialization of the just so purpose subordinator with the condition function decreasing rapidly from the 1980s until the present.



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In the mid-20th century, examples of an interpersonal use of the just so purpose subordinate clause, as demonstrated in example (3), begin to appear. In these uses, the just so clause no longer denotes the purpose for an event described in the main clause (as in (1)), but relates to the speaker-hearer interaction, typically to the illocutionary force of an utterance, cf. [ I’m telling you this] just so you understand. This group includes semi-formulaic phrases like just so you understand. The most frequent form, just so you know, has developed into a pragmatic marker.

(3) But, just so we understand each other, slick, we’re talking about a bag job, right? (COCA) In sum, this paper not only discusses the just so subordinator use but also tracks the grammaticalization (i) from just so that to just so subordinator marking purpose or condition, (ii) to the ascendency of the just so purpose and the loss of condition, (iii) to just so purpose clauses being co-opted for interpersonal uses, culminating (iv) in the emergence of the pragmatic marker just so you know.





References


König, Ekkehard & Letitia Vezzosi (2022). On the development of OE swā to ModE so and related changes in an atypical group of demonstratives. In Los, Bettelou, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone & Graeme Trousdale (eds.), English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning. Papers from the XXth ICEHL, 309–344. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kortmann, Bernd. 1997. Adverbial subordination. A typology and history of adverbial subordinators based on European languages. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.





David Lorenz, University of Rostock, Germany



INCIPIENT GRAMMATICALIZATION IN CONTEMPORARY LANGUAGE USE – EPISTEMIC





PHRASES AND ADVERBIALS




This paper studies grammaticalization synchronically, by tracing its features in variation and incipient change. It tests the oft-proposed coherence of semantic or structural reanalysis and morphophonological reduction (cf. Heine 2003). The paper combines corpus and experimental research into cases of potential grammaticalization of epistemic phrases.



In the corpus study, variants of the items (it) could/might be are analyzed in spoken corpora (Spoken BNC1994, Spoken BNC2014) and in informal, unedited writing (the BrE ‘Blog’ section of GloWbE, Davies 2013). In critical contexts for grammaticalization (Diewald 2006), the phrase can be reanalyzed as an epistemic adverbial (compare maybe); these are uses with scope over a proposition (1), as a postmodifying parenthetical (2), or as an isolated phrase (3).

(1) C ould be Bob’s stil so hung over, he’s sleepin’. (GloWbE GB) (2) oh unless it’s on the <anon type=“place”/> it’s the other side of the cars could be (Spoken BNC2014, S73U)

(3) ... maybe the government are polluting us and killing us off.

Could be. (Spoken BNC 2014, S5PW)



These contexts show relatively high rates of omission of dummy subject it, suggesting that the connection between formal and functional/structural aspects of gram-maticalization holds even in the absence of attested diachronic change.



The finding is further tested with a sentence shadowing experiment, in which participants repeat recorded input sentences. Shadowers may ‘restore’ missing elements or delete existing ones (Caines 2012), e.g., the subject pronoun in ∅ /it could be. Critical contexts should inhibit ‘fluent 77



restoration’ (∅ -> it) and promote deletions ( it -> ∅) . This is partly borne out, but does not show a fully reliable effect. The results indicate that formal reduction may be tied to grammaticalizing contexts even before the respective item becomes frequent. This, however, awaits confirmation from further testing. Both parts of the study also show aspects that require explanations by other factors.





References


Caines, Andrew. 2012. You talking to me? Corpus and experimental data on the zero auxiliary interrogative in British English. In Stefan Th. Gries & Dagmar Divjak (eds.), Frequency Effects in Language Learning and Processing, 177–205. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Davies,

Mark.

2013.

Corpus

of

Global

Web-based

English

(GloWbE).

https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe

Diewald, Gabriele. 2006. Context types in grammaticalization as constructions. Constructions, Special Volume 1. 1–29.

Heine, Bernd. 2003. Grammaticalization. In Brian D. Joseph & Richard D. Janda (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Malden: Blackwell. 575–601.

Love, Robbie, Claire Dembry, Andrew Hardie, Vaclav Brezina, and Tony McEnery. 2017. The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations.

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:3. 319–344.

The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, on behalf of the BNC Consortium. www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/





Eric Mélac, Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3, France



THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF EVIDENTIALITY IN ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY





OF EMERGING INFERENTIAL MARKERS


Despite increasing interest, evidentiality is only starting to establish itself as a major semantic notion, and recurrent patterns leading to its grammaticalization have recently been observed in genetically unrelated languages (Friedman 2018; Kuteva et al., eds., 2018).



Even though English is often presented as lacking grammatical evidentials, this study investigates recent linguistic developments that point at an incipient gram-maticalization of inferential evidentiality. My analyses will be based on three case studies.



Firstly, typological work has revealed that inferential evidentials may emerge from specific uses of the perfect aspect (Willet 1988; Johanson 2018). The overtone of present relevance inherent to this aspect often induces contexts where a past event is inferred from the observation of its resultant state. Pragmatic strengthening may lead a perfect form to specialize in the expression of inferential evidentiality, thus presenting a typical case of secondary grammaticalization (i.e., further semantic developments of already grammaticalized forms). A corpus-based semantic investigation of the uses of the present perfect will reveal whether Standard English is likely to be conventionalizing this inferential implicature.



Another recurrent source of grammaticalization of inferential evidentiality is a form which is primarily used to encode deontic modality, e.g., must (Narrog & Van Der Auwera 2011). Several symptoms indicate that the auxiliation of ‘ have to’ is progressing, and I will argue that both epistemic modality and inferential evidentiality are necessary concepts to account for the new semantic developments of this semi-auxiliary.



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Finally, inferential evidentials can grammaticalize from lexical expressions that describe appearances, i.e., seem (Mélac 2014). We wil see how left-periphery ‘ ØLooks like’ has risen as an inferential marker in recent years, and now displays numerous symptoms of grammaticalization, such as paradigmatization, desemanticization, and backgrounding (Mélac in press). I will investigate the cross-variational diffusion of the marker and patent signs of its standardization.



This study thus aims to assess to what extent English should be reconsidered as an ‘evidential language’, and whether a complete grammaticalization of the notion is plausible in the near or distant future.





References


Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (ed.). 2018. The Oxford handbook of evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Friedman, Victor. 2018. Where do evidentials come from? In Aikhenvald (ed.), 124–47.

Johanson, Lars. 2018. Turkic indirectivity. In Aikhenvald (ed.), 510–24.

Kuteva, Tania, Bernd Heine, Bo Hong, Haiping Long, Heiko Narrog & Seongha Rhee (eds.). 2019. World lexicon of grammaticalization, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mélac, Eric. 2014. L’évidentialité en anglais – approche contrastive à partir d’un corpus anglais-tibétain. Doctoral dissertation. Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3.

Mélac, Eric. In press. The grammaticalization of evidentiality in English. English Language and Linguistics.

Narrog, Heiko, & Johan Van Der Auwera. 2011. Grammaticalization and semantic maps. In Heiko Narrog & Bernd Heine(eds.). The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, 318–27.

Willett, Thomas. 1988. A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12(1), 51–97.





Eleni Seitanidi, Nele Põldvere, and Carita Paradis, Lund University, Sweden



THE FOCALIZING ALL-CLEFT CONSTRUCTION IN THE LONDON–LUND CORPORA OF





SPOKEN BRITISH ENGLISH




Adopting a Construction Grammar approach, we examine the focalizing all- cleft construction in spoken British English in London–Lund Corpus 1 (LLC–1) (Greenbaum & Svartvik, 1990) and London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC–2) (Põldvere et al., 2021). All-cleft constructions comprise two clauses connected by the copula be with one clause introduced by all, which means ‘only’

(Traugott, 2008) and which contributes to the construction’s ‘below expectation’ reading (Kay, 2013: 6). We aim to contribute to the scant research on all-cleft constructions (Traugott, 2008: 9) by determining their formal and semantic features and their discourse functions thereby highlighting their development over the past half a century. Following Biber at al.’s (1999) classification of cleft constructions, all-cleft constructions are grouped into (1) proper ( all I was going to say was I don`t know), (2) reversed ( hydrogen is all I have available), and (3) demonstrative ( that`s all I know) all-cleft constructions. In order to identify the discourse functions served by the construction, we consider the discourse context, e.g., spontaneous commentary, in which the construction is used and the relationship between the discourse participants, e.g., equals/disparates, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, e.g., frequency word lists and collocations.



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Preliminary findings suggest that all-cleft constructions are used more in LLC–2 monologues and dialogues. In both corpora, proper all-clefts are the most frequent, followed by demonstrative all-

clefts. Regardless of power relations, LLC–2 speakers seem to use all-cleft constructions more for explicitly criticising the addressee or another person, e.g., all he has to do is forward an email to the solicitor and just hasn’t, whereas LLC–1 speakers express their criticism less directly, e.g., if that`s all we can offer yes. Given the construction’s evaluative character (Traugott, 2008: 9), the process underlying the development of the construction seems to be subjectification.





References


Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Harlow: Pearson Education.

Greenbaum, S. and Svartvik, J. (1990) The London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English, in J.

Svartvik (ed.), The London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English: Description and Research, pp:11–59, Lund: Lund University Press.

Kay, P. (2013) The Limits of Construction Grammar, in G. Trousdale and T. Hoffmann (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, New York: Oxford University Press.

Põldvere, N., Johansson, V., and Paradis, C. (2021) On the London–Lund Corpus 2: Design, challenges and innovations, English Language and Linguistics, 25(3), 459–483.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674321000186

Traugott, E., C. (2008) “Al that he endeavored to prove was…”: On the emergence of grammatical constructions in dialogual and dialogic contexts, in R. Cooper and R. Kempson (eds.) Language in Flux: Dialogue Coordination, Language Variation, Change and Evolution, pp: 143–177, London: Kings College Publications.





Lotte Sommerer, University of Freiburg, Germany



S OME AS AN INDEFINITE ARTICLE IN PDE: A CASE OF ANALOGIZATION, PARADIGMATIZATION AND OBLIGATORIFICATION?



This paper investigates a current trend of English speakers to mark indefinite reference in plural and mass NPs by using some (ex. a) instead of opting for a “ bare” solution (b).

a) I need to buy [some milk/apples]NP object.

b) I need to buy [milk/apples]NP object.

a) I see [some cars]NP object driving along the road.

b) I see [cars]NP object driving along the road.



It is hypothesized (Sommerer & Hofmann 2021) that next to being a quantifier, some has developed an additional, determiner (i.e., ‘near-article’) function in EModE and that this function is currently spreading (see examples above where some is clearly no longer a quantifier). It will be tested if this coding preference is really gaining ground in Present Day English due to paradigm pressure and a shifting strategy in English towards marking referentiality overtly and obligatorily (Sommerer 2018).



On the basis of a large corpus of 3.4 million direct object NPs extracted from the British National Corpus (XML Edition) by means of a dependency parser (Chen & Manning 2014), I analyze plural and mass NPs functioning as syntactic objects which either occur bare or have some as a determinative. The question is how often and in which constructional environments some really qualifies as a (near)-article. The results of the study are used to discuss to what extent language change follows expected trajectories.



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Theoretically, this paper subscribes to a usage-based, cognitive constructional model of change (DCxG) (e.g., Barðdal et al. 2015; Diessel 2019, Smirnova & Sommerer 2020; Hilpert 2021) and investigates diachronic and cognitive mechanisms like analogization (Traugott & Trousdale 2013; Fischer 2018) and obligatorification/paradigmatization (Lehmann 1995) from a constructional network point of view.





References


Barðdal, Jóhanna; Smirnova, Elena, Sommerer, Lotte & Gildea, Spike (eds.). (2015). Diachronic Construction Grammar. [CAL, Vol. 18]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Chen, D. and Manning, C. (2014). A Fast and Accurate Dependency Parser Using Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 740–750. Doha, Qatar: ACL.

Diessel, Holger. (2019) . The Grammar Network. How Linguistic Structure is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fischer, Olga. (2018). Analogy: Its role in language learning, categorization, and in models of language change such as grammaticalization and constructionalization. In S. Hancil, T.

Breban, & J. V. Lozano (Eds.), New Trends in Grammaticalization and Language Change (pp. 75–104). (Studies in Language Companion Series; Vol. 202). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Hilpert, Martin. (2021). Ten Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar. [Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics]. Brill.

Lehmann, Christian. (1995) [1982]. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. [LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, 1]. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Smirnova, Elena & Sommerer, Lotte. (2020). The nature of the node and the network: open questions in Diachronic Construction Grammar. In Lotte Sommerer & Elena Smirnova.

(Eds.), Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar. [CAL, Vol. 27].

Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1–42.

Sommerer, Lotte. (2018). Article Emergence in Old English. A Constructionalist Perspective.

[TIEL series, Vol 99]. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Sommerer, Lotte & Hofmann, Klaus. (2021). ‘Constructional competition and network reconfiguration: investigating sum(e) in Old, Middle and Early Modern English’. English Language and Linguistics, 25(1), 1–33.

Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Trousdale, Graeme. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.





Eva Zehentner, University of Zurich, Switzerland



‘I’M ALL VIRTUAL PEOPLED OUT’: CREATIVITY, PRODUCTIVITY, AND SCHEMATICITY IN

THE CASE OF INNOVATIVE NP + OUT COMBINATIONS



This paper zooms into a case of recent emergence of a new constructional template, namely the

[( all) NOUN- ed out] construction illustrated in (1).

(1)

(a) I am just virtual-peopled out ( Twitter, July 2020) (b) If March has left you all basketballed out ( deseret.com, April 2015) (c) I've been all John-ed out this weekend. I saw him like everyday! ( urbandictionary.com) These patterns – typically instantiating a meaning of exhaustion through an over-exposure to the entity, person or action indicated by the noun – are strongly associated with informal language and highly marked (Van Lancker Sidtis et al. 2015). They often evoke an additional, humorous or provocative meaning (cf. Haspelmath’s 1999 concept of ‘extravagance’).

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The paper presents a quantitative investigation of relevant data from the COCA (Davies 2010-), using collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch 2013) and other productivity/association measures (Desagulier 2016). Specifically, I trace the nouns attested in the construction over time, with the goal of (i) establishing their historical development, as well as (ii) the potential origins of the construction in participial patterns involving elements with both verbal and nominal uses (2), and (iii) their relation to active, transitive constructions as in (3).

(2) she senses her husband is all stressed out (COCA, 2005) (3) Today they have templed me out ( monnerystravelblog.com, 2006) Following recent discussions in construction grammar approaches, I model these developments with a focus on constructional productivity and schematicity (e.g., Zeschel 2012; Traugott & Trousdale 2013; Perek 2016) as well as linguistic creativity and ‘extravagance’ (Hoffmann 2018; Uhrig 2018; Bergs 2019; also e.g., Ungerer & Hartmann 2020 on ‘snowclones’). In particular, I aim to determine the extent to which the emergence of the construction in question corresponds to typical, established trajectories in constructionalisation, and can be compared to similar, well-researched phenomena of constructional innovation and extension (Traugott & Trousdale 2013).





References


Bergs, A. 2019. What, if anything, is linguistic creativity? Gestalt Theory 41(2), 173–184.

Desagulier, G. 2018. A lesson from associative learning: Asymmetry and productivity in multiple slot constructions. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12(2), 173–219.

Haspelmath, M. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37(6), 1043–1068.

Hoffmann, T. 2018. Creativity and Construction Grammar: Cognitive and psychological issues.

ZAA 66(3), 259–276.

Perek, F. 2016. Using distributional semantics to study syntactic productivity in diachrony: A case study. Linguistics 54(1). 149–188.





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Workshop:





WORLD ENGLISHES AND SOCIAL MEDIA


Social media have been increasing in popularity and user numbers for upwards of two decades now, with platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram each attracting more than a billion active users on a regular basis (Statista 2021). As a by-product of their popularity, social media platforms also showcase an ever-increasing diversity in languages and varieties of languages used on them. World Englishes on social media are a particularly interesting research object for numerous reasons: First, members of the diaspora may stay in touch with people from their home country using social media (see, for instance, Heyd 2016 on the Nigerian context).

Second, being online fosters linguistic creativity and often takes place in informal contexts in which phenomena such as code-switching and code-mixing are prevalent (see Dovchin 2017 for English-Mongolian mixing on Facebook). Third, social media platforms offer completely novel ways of both presenting (from the user perspective) and accessing World Englishes (from the researcher’s perspective), as discussed by Schneider (2016) for the case of World Englishes on YouTube.



As social media keep changing, so does the representation of World Englishes on them, and, as a highly dynamic research field, there are still many questions to be explored. In this workshop, we intend to explore varieties of English on social media platforms in all of their facets, including, but not limited to, ethical questions and research methodology, linguistic features and creativity, and meta-discourse.





References


Dovchin, Sender. 2017. “The Role of English in the Language Practices of Mongolian Facebook Users.” English Today 33(2): 16–24.

Heyd, Theresa. 2016. “Narratives of Belonging in the Digital diaspora: Corpus Approaches to a Cultural Concept.” Open Linguistics 2(1): 287–299.

Schneider, Edgar. 2016. “World Englishes on YouTube – Treasure Trove or Nightmare?” In: Seoane, Elena and Christina Suárez-Gómez, eds. World Englishes – New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 253–282.

Statista.com (2021). “Most popular social networks worldwide as of April 2021, ranked by number of

active

users.”

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/. Last access: 27 July 2021.



Workshop Organizers:



Jakob Leimgruber, University of Basel, Switzerland and University of Freiburg, Germany Sven Leuckert, TU Dresden, Germany

Sofia Rüdiger, University of Bayreuth, Germany





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Wiebke Ahlers, TU Dortmund University, Germany



THE CITIZEN SOCIOLINGUISTS OF SOUALIGA: A (META)ANALYSIS OF AN INSTAGRAM





DICTIONARY


In the age of the internet, sociolinguistic approaches to English have presented an increasing interest in identity work online. Online spaces such as forums (Heyd 2016), Twitter (Ilbury 2020) and YouTube are unique spaces to observe the social life of Englishes, both naturally and metalinguistically (Scheider 2016). Many platforms allow for content creation and social evaluation at the same time, creating a unique opportunity for multilevel investigations.



Language content creators are curious Citizen sociolinguists with a keen eye for aspects of language and identity. It is the central idea of Citizen sociolinguistics to “document, learn from, and advocate for the importance of public participation in sociolinguistic inquiry and exploration and its potential to illuminate our contemporary communicative environment” (Rymes & Leone 2014: 25).

As an example of Citizen sociolinguistics applied to post-colonial Englishes, the present talk analyses an Instagram channel that displays S’-Maatin English (St. Martin English) phrases and lexical items.

Two research questions are addressed:

1.) Which form-level structures of language are socially salient features of S’Maatin English?

2.) Which social meanings do these features carry for content creators and commentators?



The database for this analysis includes the 70 dictionary entries posted thus far, frequency of likes per post, user comments and a meta-interview carried out with both content creators. To evaluate RQ1, I first provide a form-level analysis of the dictionary entries, categorizing the items themselves into nouns, verbs and phrases, to then discuss the creator’s descriptions as jargon, phrase or expression.

For the analysis of RQ2, I evaluate the frequency of likes, comments and the content creators’

interview to gauge two types of meaning: The micro-level social meanings of the most liked items and the macro-level social meaning of the blog as a whole. Finally, I discuss how this multi-perspective methodology involving both the sociolinguist’s analysis and the citizen sociolinguist’s content and meta commentary could be used in future investigations of social meaning in Englishes worldwide.





References


Heyd, T. 2016. Narratives of belonging in the digital diaspora: Corpus approaches to a cultural concept. Open Linguistics 2(1). 287–299.

Ilbury, C. 2020. “Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE. Journal of Sociolinguistics 24(2). 245–264.

Rymes, B. & A.R. Leone. 2014. Citizen Sociolinguistics: A New Media Methodology for Understanding Language and Social Life. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL) 29(2). 25–43.

Schneider, E.W. 2016. World Englishes on YouTube: Treasure trove or nightmare? In: E. Seoane and C. Suárez-Gómez, eds. World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 253–282.





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Axel Bohmann, University of Freiburg, Germany Fatlum Sadiku, University of Freiburg, Germany

Panagiota Papavasileiou, University of Freiburg, Germany



A DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE ON DIASPORIC SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNICATION



Recent theoretical developments in World Englishes away from national standard varieties and towards dynamic contact phenomena have been proposed directly on the basis of social media discourse (Mair 2013). The Nairaland corpus, a collection of all posts made to the eponymous (diaspora-) Nigerian web forum from its launch in 2005 until 2014, has played a particularly prominent role in this regard (Honkanen 2020; Heyd & Mair 2014). To date, however, the Nairaland forum has been treated as a relatively stable backdrop to the analysis of individual, situated examples of diasporic discourse.



In this paper, we develop a dynamic understanding of Nairaland itself undergoing significant changes in its user base, the intensity of diasporic engagement on the forum, and the linguistic nature of its content. We trace the quantitative contribution of users from Nigeria, the USA, the UK, and elsewhere over time and measure the extent to which these groups are in contact with each other. Specifically, for each user pair, we calculate a cosine similarity over all threads, binarily coded for whether a user did or did not post to this thread. This procedure reveals that, as Nairaland rises in popularity and its Nigerian user base grows (with a marked jump around 2012), its diasporic character recedes.



We also explore the linguistic consequences of these developments. Linguistic divergence and convergence between user groups over time is expressed by means of a distributional word vector model (Bamman et al. 2014). We show that the linguistic distance between Nigerian and diasporic users increases over time. Further, the model allows us to identify individual words with particularly marked tendencies towards divergence or convergence. Many forms of African American English origin show convergence, whereas specifically Nigerian items show divergence over time. We illustrate this with examples in context.





References


Bamman, David, Chris Dyer, and Noah A. Smith. 2014. Distributed Representations of Geographically Situated Language. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 828–834.

Heyd, Theresa & Christian Mair. 2014. From vernacular to digital ethnolinguistic repertoire: The case of Nigerian Pidgin. In V. Lacoste, J. Leimgruber, T. Breyer (eds), Indexing Authenticity (lingue & litterae 39). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Honkanen, Mirka. 2020. World Englishes on the Web: The Nigerian Diaspora in the USA.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Mair, Christian. 2013. The World System of Englishes: Accounting for the transnational importance of mobile and mediated vernaculars. English World-Wide 34(3). 253–278.





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Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales, University of Michigan, United States Jun Jie Lim, University of California, United States

Jakob R. E. Leimgruber, University of Basel, Switzerland and University of Freiburg, Germany

Mie Hiramoto, National University of Singapore, Singapore



IS IT IS IT IS A PROBLEM? THE MANY FUNCTIONS OF IS IT IN COLLOQUIAL SINGAPORE





ENGLISH


This paper analyses the variation in the use of is it in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) using data collected from the Corpus of Singapore English Messaging (CoSEM). Scholars have proposed that CSE is it is an invariant and default tag question (e.g., Leimgruber, 2011; Wong, 2014) that is typically attached to the end of a proposition, similar to canonical tags in ‘standard’

English. From CoSEM, we found that mainstream CSE users have a unique set of conventions for using is it beyond the stated canonical tag marker. The question tag is it is used for general

‘unmarked’ questions and an innovative preposed is it for rhetorical, playful yes/no questions.

Our results also show that variation in the use of is it strategies is associated with specific social groups. For example, the younger generation tends to use is it in rhetorical, playful yes/no questions. While the younger generation uses different variations in the writing of is it, orthographic choice does not correlate with question-forming strategies. Overall, we argue that the is it question-marking system in CSE is systematic and innovative, despite variation. A discussion on the development of CSE is it based on the analysis of variation concludes this paper.

We suggest CSE is it has acquired an additional function apart from as a simple yes/no tag, due to the Mandarin Chinese shi bu shi ‘is it or not’ interrogative construction.





References


Leimgruber, Jakob R. E. 2011. Singapore English. Language and Linguistics Compass 5.1: 47–

62.

Wong, Jock O. 2014. The Culture of Singapore English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.





Sofia Rüdiger, University of Bayreuth, Germany

Sven Leuckert, TU Dresden, Germany



“ASIAN ACCENT IS AWESOME” – VALUING ENGLISHES ON YOUTUBE



The internet has provided fertile grounds for the English language to expand in function and form (Seargeant & Tagg 2011, Friedrich 2019) and the use of data from digitally mediated communication has become increasingly commonplace in the field of linguistics. The focus of our study is the video-sharing platform YouTube, which enables everybody who owns a video-recording device to upload material and become a video producer. The platform thus constitutes a digital place where “individuals and groups representing different traditions and backgrounds can find [and express] their own communicative and sociocultural needs” (Leppänen & Elo 2015: 114). The potential (but also limitations) of using YouTube material for the study of World Englishes has recently been recognized by Schneider, who invites linguists to harness this data type for future research (2016: 280).



In our study, we investigate the reality TV format Asia’s Next Top Model (Season 3, aired in 2015).

Asia’s Next Top Model (unlike other pan-Asian reality TV formats like Asia’s Got Talent) has an English-only policy, which means that English is used between the contestants (from various 86



Asian countries) as well as between judges and other actors on screen (e.g., guests of the show, industry insiders). This provides a rich starting point for different kinds of analysis (e.g., features of Asian English as a Lingua Franca). Our analysis, however, focuses on the shows as posted to YouTube, which means that the comment section enables viewers to respond to the Englishes as performed on screen. This meta-commentary on language use featured on Asia’s Next Top Model reveals 1) that viewers consider themselves as familiar with Asian varieties of English and judge the authenticity of contestants’ English use (e.g., “[contestant name] had the most authentic filipino accent”), 2) that viewers consider themselves proficient English users and able to judge contestants’ English level (e.g., “they all speak perfect English), and 3) various folk perceptions of varieties of English (e.g., “Asian accent is awesome”). This provides important evidence for attitudes towards Asian Englishes and their acceptability within and outside the community.

Consequently, our talk shows up the rich potential of YouTube (and other social media platforms) for meta-studies of World Englishes.



In addition to the analysis of linguistic meta-commentary in the YouTube comment section, we also draw attention to the ethical dimension of working with comments on openly accessible social media platforms. We offer several solutions to the dilemma (depending on the aim of the research) such as exemplification via modification and data aggregation.





References


Friedrich, Patricia. 2019. When Englishes go digital. World Englishes 2019 (early view). 1–12.

Leppänen, Sirpa & Ari Elo. 2015. Buffalaxing the Other: Superdiversity in action on YouTube. In Karel Arnaut, Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton & Massimiliano Spotti (eds.), Language and superdiversity, 110–136. London: Routledge.

Schneider, Edgar. 2016. World English on YouTube – Treasure trove or nightmare? In Elena Seoane & Cristina Suárez-Gómez (eds.), World Englishes – New theoretical and methodological approaches, 253–281. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Seargeant, Philip & Caroline Tagg. 2011. English on the internet and a ‘post‐varieties’ approach to language. World Englishes 30(4). 496–514.





Vincent Wai Sum Tse, Monash University, Australia and University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Andre Joseph Theng, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom



“WHAT A SHAME OF HONG KONG” – CONSTRUCTING (NON-)OWNERSHIP OF ENGLISH





IN YOUTUBE METALINGUISTIC COMMENTARY




The affordances of social media, alongside the present political climate in Hong Kong, has meant that English use and translingual practices have become mobilized as an ambivalent emblem (Agha, 2006) of Hong Kong-ess (Li et al., 2020). This is accompanied by an increasing recognition of Hong Kong English as a variety in itself (Wong, 2017). While all these appear to suggest Hong Kong people’s ownership of the English language, the use and subsequent mediatization of tokens of non-standardness beyond politics and explicit playfulness have continued to be policed, including on social media (Chau, 2021). This paper uses the case of a popular Hong Kong singer whose use of English in an interview went viral on YouTube, attracting more than one million views since 2009. Focusing on 735 comments connected with the video, we draw on stance (Du Bois, 2007) and scales (Blommaert, 2007) to examine language ideologies underpinning the use and function of English in the city. Preliminary observations indicate that the evaluation of the English of this singer is, in many comments, simultaneously the evaluation of the status and value of English in Hong Kong. Particular linguistic ‘errors’ made by the singer are (re)scaled by 87



commenters in order to speak to questions surrounding English education in Hong Kong, English standards of Hong Kong people and/or even Hong Kong (or China). Taking a misalignment stance at different scales, those netizens claim a superior position that in turn gives them the authority in policing others’ language practices. The majority of comments highlight an exonormative orientation among listening subjects (Inoue, 2003) of English in Hong Kong, which we argue is a hindrance to the ownership of English by Hong Kong people.





References


Agha, A. (2006). Language and social relations. Cambridge University Press.

Blommaert, J. (2007). Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(1), 1–19.

Chau, D. (2021). Spreading language ideologies through social media: Enregistering the ‘fake ABC’ variety in Hong Kong. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(4), 596–616.

Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139–182). John Benjamins.

Inoue, M. (2003). The listening subject of Japanese modernity and his auditory double: Citing, sighting, and siting the modern Japanese woman. Cultural Anthropology, 18(2), 156–193.

Li, W., Tsang, A., Wong, N., & Lok, P. (2020). Kongish Daily: Researching translanguaging creativity and subversiveness. International Journal of Multilingualism, 17(3), 309–335.

Wong, M. (2017). Hong Kong English: Exploring lexicogrammar and discourse from a corpus-linguistic perspective. Palgrave Macmillan.





Michael Westphal, University of Münster, Germany



CODE-SWITCHING IN GLOBAL SKATEBOARDING – A CASE STUDY OF MARGIELYN

DIDAL’S MULTIVOCAL SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONA



Modern skateboarding evolved in California in the 1970s and has become a global sport, subculture, and industry (Kilberth & Schwier 2019). The USA has remained the hub of global skateboarding as most companies and media outlets are in California and (American) English is the global lingua franca of skateboarding. Sports brands sponsor athletes, who represent these brands in magazines, videos, and social media, like Instagram. As skateboarding became an Olympic sport in 2020, Olympian athletes started to represent their countries in addition to brands and a global subculture via Instagram, where these global and local interests interact linguistically.

This paper presents a case study of code choice and code-switching on Margielyn Didal’s Instagram account. She is a Filipino skateboarder who has become a national icon as she placed 7th in the Olympic street-skateboarding event 2021. On her Instagram, she combines English and Filipino, the two official languages of the Philippines, to communicate to a global and Filipino audience. The code choice and the mix of English and Filipino is determined by the content of the post and the location. Posts for global sponsors and posts geotagged for the USA or Europe are dominated by English. Posts advertising Filipino brands, representing the Philippines, and/or are geotagged for the Philippines show a higher density of Filipino and often blend both languages.

Audiovisual posts are mostly in English or use subtitles for Filipino passages.

This paper adds to research on English-Filipino code-switching (Bautista 1991; Thompson 2003; Borlongan 2009) and shows that social media are valuable data to studying written/multimodal code-switching in Philippine English and other World Englishes as social media personas often blend local and global interests and linguistic resources (Sharma 2012). However, code choices cannot only be interpreted as acts of identity but are constrained by situational and economic factors (i.e., sponsorships).





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References


Bautista, M. L. S. (1989). Code switching studies in the Philippines. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 88: 19–32.

Borlongan, Ariane (2009). Tagalog-English code-switching in English language classes: Frequency and forms. TESOL Journal 1: 28–42.

Kilberth, Veith & Jürgen Schwier (Eds.) (2019). Skateboarding between subculture and the Olympics: A youth culture under pressure from commercialization and sportification. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Sharma, Bal Krishna (2012). Beyond social networking: Performing global Englishes in Facebook by college youth in Nepal. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16(4): 483–509.

Thompson, Roger (2003). Filipino English and Taglish: Language switching from multiple perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.





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