Search results for "American English"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
Playing with accents
2020
While certain ways of speaking or varieties of English – such as American English or British English – evoke associations of modernity, higher education and urbanity in Uganda, others – such as Ugandan English with strong northern or western accents – stand for backwardness, social strata remote from education and ‘village identities’. Yet concepts of backwardness or modernity are not only based on linguistic criteria but also associated with a specific worldview, contributing to complex signs of higher-order indexicality. In contrast, speakers’ practices of enregisterment reveal how fluid and contextual these indices of urbanity and rurality actually are. Considering diverse repertoires of…
“Holding Grudges Is So Last Century”: The Use of GenX So as a Modifier of Noun Phrases
2020
This article focuses on the X is so NP-construction in American English, as exemplified by “Holding grudges is so last century” (SOAP, As the World Turns, 2002). Drawing on the Corpus of American Soap Operas (Davies 2011-), the aim of this study is to provide an account of the distributional pattern of noun phrase modification with so, including preferences in modified noun phrase (NP) types and concomitant differences in the meaning of so. The analyses reveal that, in line with subjectification theory on intensification (Athanasiadou 2007), so is expanding its functional range from intensification to emphasis. The findings suggest a near-complementary distribution of these meanings, with …
“You’re So Not Going to Believe This”:
2017
A market of accents
2009
This paper describes the cultural semantics of internet courses in American accent. Such courses are offered by corporate providers to specific groups of customers: people in search of success in the globalized business environment. The core of such courses is an order of indexicality which stresses uniformity and homogeneity, producing an invisible accent that replaces existing ‘foreign’ (i.e. authentic, biographic) accents. It is a new form of commodified dialectology, which differs quite substantially from common state and academic attitudes towards dialects and accents. The procedures used by such private providers are instances of language policing aimed at the infinitely small stuff o…
“He should so be in jail”: An Empirical Study on Preverbal So in American English
2021
This paper explores the use of so-called GenX so as a modifier of verb phrases, as exemplified in “He should so be in jail” (SOAP, DAYS, 2005). Drawing on over 1350 relevant tokens retrieved from the Corpus of American Soap Operas (SOAP) (Davies 2011-, 100 million words from 2001-2012), the main purpose of the present study is to provide robust empirical evidence for various findings yielded by small-scale studies and by introspection. The results corroborate some of the previous findings, while others, particularly those based on introspection, are challenged in light of empirical (counter)evidence. The data show that preverbal so is very flexible in that it can occur in various syntactic…
American English Antedatings for Malossol
2019
Lexical Borrowing in the Light of Digital Resources: Nyet as a Case Study
2021
Abstract The mere appearance of a foreign word does not necessarily mark the birth of a loanword, which requires documented usage by the speech community. Relatively little research has been dedicated so far to the “prenatal” stage that would investigate the tentative infiltration of foreign-derived words. Nyet, a borrowing from Russian, is taken as a case in point. Although its first recorded instance in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) is dated to 1928, it had been increasingly recognized in English for several decades. This article focuses on textual attestations for nyet discovered in a range of digital resources, including British and American newspaper archives, and discusses thei…
The grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of cleft constructions in Present-Day English
2012
The present paper examines the development of the variation between a marked and an unmarked infinitival complement clause in three types of cleft constructions in 20th century English. Data from corpora of written and spoken British (BrE) and American English (AmE) evidence a significantly divergent development of these clefts types in speaking when compared to writing. The written corpora show a steady increase in the frequency of clefts, and a decrease of the to-infinitive paired with an increase of the bare infinitive, thus a reversal of preferences in both varieties in all three types of clefts. This erosion of to as an (optional) grammatical marker leads to a higher degree of syntacti…
The phonemic features of and attitudes toward Southern U.S. English : examining individual dialects and their perception by university students
2013
Tämä tutkielma käsittelee amerikanenglannin murteita Yhdysvaltojen eteläisissä osavaltioissa. Tutkielma käsittelee pääasiassa sitä, millä tavalla yliopisto-opiskelijat reagoivat Amerikan Etelävaltioissa puhuttavaan englantiin. Tämän lisäksi tutkielmassa esitellään eteläisten osavaltioiden murrealueen yleisimmät erityispiirteet, esimerkiksi erilaiset tavat lausua sanoja verrattuna standardiin amerikanenglantiin. Tutkielmassa keskitytään analysoimaan amerikanenglantia käsittelevää kyselylomaketta, johon vastasi neljätoista yliopisto-opiskelijaa. Kyselylomakkeen vastatessaan opiskelijat kuuntelivat neljää Internetissä ollutta äänitiedostoa, joidenka puhujien murteet olivat seuraavilta alueilta…
Pareizrakstības variācijas angļu valodas tīmekļa tekstu korpusa reģistros (CORE)
2018
Angļu valodas nacionālās variācijas ir kā puzle, pat dzimtās valodas runātājiem, jo ir daudzas nacionālās variācijas un ir atšķirības ikkatrā no tām. Pētījums balstīts uz divām populārākajām Angļu valodas variācijām – Amerikāņu un Britu Angļu valodu. Pētījuma mērķis ir izpētīt Angļu valodas pareizrakstības atšķirības nacionālajās variācijās, CORE tekstos. Pētījuma jautājums: vai Amerikāņu un Britu pareizrakstība CORE tekstos strikti atbilst Amerikāņu vai Britu pareizrakstības variācijām? Pētījuma metode ir kvalitatīvā un kvantitatīvā korpusa analīze. Darba analīze ir balstīta uz vārdlietojumu biežumu CORE tekstos. Analizējamie vārdi ir no Davies tabulas. Analīzē ir atspoguļoti statistiskie …