Search results for "British English"
showing 9 items of 9 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…
Target frames in British hotel websites
2015
This article centres on four-word phrase frames in British hospitality websites. Our aim is to identify those frames that are specific to this website genre, which we call target frames. Each phrase frame represents an identical sequence of words except for one variable word, that is A*BC or AB*D. The words that fill the slot, marked with an asterisk, are called fillers. We used a corpus-driven approach using KfNgram software to identify the phrase frames in our corpus (COMETVAL). We regard phrase frames as genre-specific when they are significantly more frequent than those found in the written section of the BNC, which represents General British English. We further filtered our selection o…
A cross-cultural investigation of email communication in Peninsular Spanish and British English. The role of (in)formality and (in)directness
2013
This paper examines the email discursive practices of particular speakers of two different languages, namely Peninsular Spanish and British English. More specifically, our study focuses on (in)formality and (in)directness therein, for these lie at the heart of considerable scholarly debate regarding, respectively (i) the general stylistic drift towards orality and informality in technology-mediated communication, and (ii) the degree of communicative (in)directness – within broader politeness orientations – of speakers of different languages, specifically an orientation towards directness in Peninsular Spanish vis-à-vis indirectness in British English. The aim of this paper is thus to invest…
Getting rid of the Chi-square and Log-likelihood tests for analysing vocabulary differences between corpora
2018
Log-likelihood and Chi-square tests are probably the most popular statistical tests used in corpus linguistics, especially when the research is aiming to describe the lexical variations between corpora. However, because this specific use of the Chi-square test is not valid, it produces far too many significant results. This paper explains the source of the problem (i.e., the non-independence of the observations), the reasons for which the usual solutions are not acceptable and which kinds of statistical test should be used instead. A corpus analysis conducted on the lexical differences between American and British English is then reported, in order to demonstrate the problem and to confirm …
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…
Family Register in British English: The First Approach to its Systematic Study
2015
The present study looks into an unexplored area of research as it is the family register. An alternative to recording family conversations is the use of popular TV series, as their success lies in the audience s identification with their characters and their communicative style. This work analyses two highly popular series in UK. The results suggest that this register has its own communicative richness and internal variation, the knowledge of which may be of great help for students and professionals travelling to English-speaking countries and living or relating with native speakers in family environments.
The social life of emotive interjections in spoken British English
2019
This paper explores the discursive use of selected emotive interjections (Ow!, Ouch!; Ugh!, Yuck!; Whoops!, Whoopsadaisy!) in spoken British English. The data (drawn from the Spoken BNC2014) are coded for age, gender, social grade and type of dyad to identify potential factors governing the discursive use of these interjections. Based on 140 relevant tokens, the results suggest that: 1) The individual interjections vary significantly regarding how frequently they are found in discursive uses (p<0.001***). 2) Whoopsadaisy! is not attested in discursive uses. 3) Young female speakers behave differently from the other speaker groups in that they use emotive interjections discursively signif…
The spoken core of British English: a diachronic analysis based on the BNC
2008
This research takes as its starting point a frequency analysis of the demographicspoken subcorpus of the British National Corpus in order to focus on two aspects of the evolution of spoken core vocabulary in British English. The first is the impact on the core of contact with other languages and, the second, the role of lexical innovation and/or replacement in the history of this core. Our analysis, which, to a certain extent, follows up on that carried out in Fuster (2007) questions the hypothesis that the spoken core is immune to foreign influence or that it is highly resistant to change. pennock@uv.es; fuster@uv.es
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 …