Lexical-grammatical patterns in spoken English

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadja Nesselhauf ◽  
Ute Römer
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Future Time ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Pattern Frequency

Based on a large set of data from one of the biggest available corpora of spoken British English (the 10-million word spoken component of the BNC), this article explores central lexical-grammatical aspects of progressive forms with future time reference. Among the phenomena investigated are verb preferences, adverbial co-selection, subject types, and negation. It is demonstrated that future time progressives in spoken British English are patterned to a considerable extent (for example that it is individual verbs, rather than semantic groups of verbs, that preferably occur in such constructions) and that actual language use often runs counter to claims that can be found in traditional grammatical descriptions of the construction. A number of general and often neglected issues in the analysis of lexical-grammatical patterns are also addressed, in particular the notion of pattern frequency.

scholarly journals Orientations towards English among English-medium Instruction Students

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Karakaş
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
American English ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
English Medium Instruction

Abstract Based on the empirical data of my PhD research, this paper analyses the perceptions of 351 undergraduate students enrolled at English-medium universities towards English in terms of the language ideology framework. The students were purposively sampled from three programs at three Turkish universities. The data were drawn from student opinion surveys and semi-structured interviews. The findings paint a blurry picture, with a strong tendency among most students to view their English use as having the characteristics of dominant native varieties of English (American English & British English), and with a high percentage of students’ acceptance of the distinctiveness of their English without referring to any standard variety. The findings also show that many students’ orientations to English are formed by two dominant language ideologies: standard English ideology and native speaker English ideology. It was also found that a large number of students did not strictly stick to either of these ideologies, particularly in their orientation to spoken English, due, as argued in the main body, to their experiences on language use that have made them aware of the demographics of diverse English users and of the diverse ways of using English.

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.

“It’s always different when you look something from the inside”

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Louise Brunner ◽  
Stefan Diemer ◽  
Selina Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Communication Strategies ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
L1 Influence

The article discusses linguistic creativity in informal Skype conversations between university students from eight different European countries. The basis for the study is the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE), a corpus of Skype conversations in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context. With the help of qualitative examples, the article examines innovative language use and proposes a taxonomy for functionally accepted innovations, distinguishing instances of L1 influence, approximations and ad hoc innovation. Our findings point towards an assertive and creative perspective on language use, which seems to have a positive influence on the communicative setting, e.g. illustrated by code-switching in combination with laughter. CASE participants use non-standard forms and innovations freely, accommodating to each others’ language use. They also establish their own ephemeral communication strategies and showcase and emphasize their respective language and cultural backgrounds.

The English general extender

English Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-52
Author(s):  
Maryann Overstreet
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
General Category ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Pragmatic Markers

In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999), a new category is identified in the grammar of the English phrase. In conversational data, the most frequent forms cited as examples of this category are or something, and everything, and things and and stuff, which are described as ‘coordination tags’ by Biber et al. (1999: 115–16). This label has not been widely adopted, but the linguistic category it describes has clearly become established as part of modern English. The term ‘general extender’ (Overstreet, 1999) is now commonly used to refer to this category: ‘“general” because they are nonspecific and “extender” because they extend otherwise complete utterances’ (1999: 3). There are two subcategories: adjunctive general extenders, beginning with and, and disjunctive general extenders, beginning with or. In casual conversation, general extenders are typically phrase- or clause-final, consisting of and/or plus a vague noun (stuff/things) or a pronoun (something/everything), with an optional comparative phrase (like that/this). In everyday spoken British English, the phrase and (all) that is also extremely common. In written and formal spoken English, forms with quite different structures, such as et cetera, and so on, and so forth, and or so are more typically used to fulfill related functions. All of these forms are grammatically optional and fall within the more general category of pragmatic markers, along with you know, I mean, like and sort of, ‘expressions which may have little obvious propositional meaning but which oil the wheels of conversational social interaction’ (Beeching, 2016: 1).

Infinitival relative clauses in spoken discourse

1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christer Geisler
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
The Matrix

ABSTRACTThis article concerns infinitival relative clauses, such as Mary is the person to ask, and their distribution in spoken English. It analyzes the correlation between the function of the antecedent in the relative clause and the function of the whole postmodified NP (the relative complex) in the matrix clause. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of spoken British English, I show that the grammatical function of the antecedent in the infinitival relative clause depends on the function of the antecedent in the matrix clause. I argue that the distribution of antecedent functions in the matrix clause can be explained in terms of thematic properties and information structure of the clauses in which the infinitival relatives occur. A key notion is that speakers center their discourse around information that they assume to be important for the communicative event.

Accounting for ELF

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-395
Author(s):  
Ruth Osimk-Teasdale ◽  
Nora Dorn
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Pos Tagging ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Different Types

This paper reports on some issues encountered when using various ‘external points of reference’ in the development of POS-tagging guidelines for the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). VOICE is a corpus of spoken English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) containing naturally occurring, plurilingual data. As in all kinds of natural language use, speakers recorded in VOICE exploit available linguistic resources, often resulting in non-codified language use and language which is difficult to classify unambiguously. However, detailed tagging solutions for such phenomena are rarely reported. We discuss usefulness and limitations of external points of reference with regard to their suitability for POS-tagging VOICE and address methodological as well as practical issues, especially the handling of non-codified language use and different types of ambiguities. We suggest that the solutions found, and the theoretical approach adopted, could be relevant for the tagging of other spoken corpora.

scholarly journals Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robbie Love
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Distribution ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus

Abstract This paper investigates changes in swearing usage in informal speech using large-scale corpus data, comparing the occurrence and social distribution of swear words in two corpora of informal spoken British English: the demographically-sampled part of the Spoken British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994) and the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014); the compilation of the latter has facilitated large-scale, diachronic analyses of authentic spoken data on a scale which has, until now, not been possible. A form and frequency analysis of a set of 16 ‘pure’ swear word lemma forms is presented. The findings reveal that swearing occurrence is significantly lower in the Spoken BNC2014 but still within a comparable range to previous studies. Furthermore, FUCK is found to overtake BLOODY as the most popular swear word lemma. Finally, the social distribution of swearing across gender and age groups generally supports the findings of previous research: males still swear more than females, and swearing still peaks in the twenties and declines thereafter. However, the distribution of swearing according to socio-economic status is found to be more complex than expected in the 2010s and requires further investigation. This paper also reflects on some of the methodological challenges associated with making comparisons between the two corpora.

The English get-passive in spoken discourse: description and implications for an interpersonal grammar

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Carter ◽  
Michael McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Past Participle ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Probabilistic Grammars

Using a 1.5-million-word sample from the CANCODE spoken English corpus, we present a description of the get-passive in informal spoken British English. Previous studies of the get-passive are reviewed, and their focus on contextual and interpersonal meanings is noted. A number of related structures are then considered and the possibility of a passive gradient is discussed. The corpus sample contains 139 get-passives of the type X get + past participle (by Y) (e.g. He got killed), of which 124 occur in contexts interpreted as adversative or problematic from the speaker's viewpoint. Very few examples contain an explicit agent or adverbials. Main verb frequency is also considered. Where contexts are positive rather than adversative, newsworthiness or focus of some kind on the subject and/or events is still apparent. The corpus evidence is used to evaluate the terms upon which an interpersonal grammar of English might be developed, and a contrast is drawn between deterministic grammars and probabilistic ones, with probabilistic grammars offering the best potential for the understanding of interpersonal features.

scholarly journals Evidentiality across age and gender: a corpus-based study of variation in spoken British English

2017 ◽  
pp. 17-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Berglind Söderqvist
Keyword(s):  
Historical Change ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Age Related ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Age Grading ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Effect Of Age

This paper investigates the effects of age and gender on the frequency of the evidentiality categories ‘sensory’, ‘hearsay’ and ‘inferential’ in spontaneous spoken British English. The findings from the main data sample from the British National Corpus (BNC) are also compared to patterns in a smaller data set from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-day Spoken English (DCPSE) in order to estimate the relative effects of age-grading versus historical change. The results confirm statistically significant differences between men and women in their use of evidentiality, but show no significant effect of age or the interaction of age and gender. The comparison of the findings from the BNC data and the DCPSE data suggests that age-related patterns in evidentiality use are more diachronically stable than gender-related patterns.

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