‘That's proper cool’

English Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
James M. Stratton
Keyword(s):  
British English ◽  
Street Food ◽  
Degree Function ◽  
Recent Arrival ◽  
Norman French

Intensifying adverbs are devices which scale a quality up, down, or somewhere between the two (Bolinger 1972: 17). To intensify the adjective cool, speakers of British English have a variety of functionally equivalent intensifiers at their disposal. They can use very, really, so, dead, bloody, right and well, among many others. A seemingly recent arrival to the British intensifier system is proper, as in that was proper cool. Believed to have entered English from the Latin proprius via Norman French (OED, proper), proper now has a variety of denotations in Present Day English. As an adjective, it can denote suitability (e.g., wear the proper equipment), etiquette (e.g., it wouldn't be proper to do that) and worthiness/authenticity (e.g., it's proper street food). As an adverb, proper can function as an adverb of manner (e.g., we like to do things proper in our house), and a marker of degree (e.g., he is proper tall); the degree function applying exclusively to British English. Some examples of proper intensifying adjectives from the present dataset are reported in (1).

Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English

Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

A Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Study of Amplifiers in British English

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Zhonghua Xiao ◽  
Hongyin Tao
Keyword(s):  
British English

Awareness-Raising in the TEFL Phonology Classroom

2004 ◽  
Vol 145-146 ◽  
pp. 219-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
Psychological Needs ◽  
British English ◽  
Linguistic Imperialism ◽  
Teacher Student ◽  
Suprasegmental Features ◽  
Discourse Intonation ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
The Impact

This paper reports on two phases of a study of a group of advanced TEFL (teachers-of-English-as-a-foreign-language) students. To raise their awareness of the importance of discourse intonation while they were receiving teacher training, this study focuses on examining their sociocultural and psychological inclinations in the choice of phonological models. The first phase is an exploration of their attitudes toward, a native-speaker variety (British English) and a nonnative (Chinese EFL-speaker) variety of English pronunciation and intonation. The second reports on a didactic intervention study of the impact of activities that engaged the students in the awareness-raising of the importance of suprasegmental features, especially discourse intonation, on self-perceptions of their efficacy and confidence in communication. The results showed a systematic pattern of participant endorsement for a native-speaker model and a clear improvement in theIr perceptions of the importance of suprasegmental features of standard English because of teacher-student co-construction of meaning through interactive awareness-raising activities. The findings are discussed with reference to the students' sociocultural and psychological needs in TEFL training, particularly with reference to recent academic discourse on the issue of “linguistic imperialism” (Canagarajah, 1999; Phillipson, 1992, 1996) and ElL in pedagogy (Jenkins, 1998, 2002) and their wider implications in typical EFL contexts.

scholarly journals Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions: an analysis of two dense corpora

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Laura E. DE RUITER ◽  
Heather C. P. LEMEN ◽  
Elena V. M. LIEVEN ◽  
Silke BRANDT ◽  
Anna L. THEAKSTON
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Complexity ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Descriptive Data ◽  
British English ◽  
Parent Child Interactions ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
Usage Patterns ◽  
Parent Child

Abstract We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials “after”, “before”, “because”, and “if” in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00–4;07). In comparing mothers’ and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations.

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