Understanding British English (review)

1990 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
John Algeo
Keyword(s):  
British English ◽  
English I

scholarly journals Compromiser - a notional paradigm

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carita Paradis
Keyword(s):  
Moderate Degree ◽  
Intensity Scale ◽  
British English ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Degree Modifiers ◽  
English I

On the basis of an investigation of the lexical forms quite, rather, fairly, and pretty in contemporary spoken British English, I postulate that these lexical items form a notional paradigm of compromiser within the category of degree modifiers. Compromisers are cognitive synonyms that occupy the middle of an abstract intensity scale, approximating a mean degree of another word, eg quite / rather / fairly / pretty dirty. They are all polysemous and poly-functional words, whose meanings are determined by a crucial semantic trait ‘to a moderate degree’ on the paradigmatic axis, and by a semantic-syntactic, selection-licensing mechanism on the syntagmatic axis.

scholarly journals English in the 2010s – Getting up Close and Personal

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 343
Author(s):  
John Jamieson
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
First Person ◽  
English Speaker ◽  
British English ◽  
The World ◽  
Polynesian Languages ◽  
The Way ◽  
English I

The following is a personal enquiry into how our view of the world may be affected in some very specific ways by the language we speak, and more particularly the way we write, with specific reference to consensus and norms. These musings have arisen over many years of working as a translator, and are based on my interactions as an English speaker with texts in many European, and to a lesser extent, Polynesian languages. The English I speak of here is mainly my English, perhaps my idiolect as a 58-year-old New Zealander. Some of the preferences I mention may be less applicable in British English, for example, but every native speaker's idiolect reflects something of the language as a whole, and I hope my readers will identify linguistically with some of what I am saying. I hope I may be forgiven for writing rather colloquially and in the first person. This choice is entirely consistent with my subject-matter, however, as will become evident.

scholarly journals The Effect of L2 Experience on the Perceptual Assimilation of British English Monophthongs to Thai Monophthongs by L2 Thai Learners

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Patchanok Kitikanan
Keyword(s):  
Perceived Similarity ◽  
British English ◽  
Learning Research ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Sound Learning ◽  
Speech Learning ◽  
Phonological System ◽  
English I

Perceptual assimilation is a well-known task; however, there is no study on the assimilation pattern of the English monophthongs by L2 Thai learners. The aims of this study are to explore the perceptual assimilation patterns of the British English monophthongs to Thai monophthongs by L2 Thai learners and to examine the effect of L2 experience on this perception. The target British English sounds were /iː, ɪ, e, æ, ɒ, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, uː, ʌ, ɜː/ in /bVt/ context. The Thai listeners performed an assimilation task by matching these British English monophthongs with their L1 Thai monophthongs. The results showed no difference in the assimilation patterns between the high-experienced and low-experienced groups in the perception of the English /ɪ, e, ɑː, ɔː, ʊ, ʌ, ɜː/. The degree of the perceived similarity in the matching of these vowels to the Thai sound categories between these two groups was not significantly different from one another either. However, English /e/ was mostly perceived as Thai /e/ in the high-experienced group to a greater degree than the low-experienced group. The findings also showed the difference in the assimilation patterns between these two groups, i.e. for English /æ, iː, uː, ɒ/ suggesting the importance of the L2 experience in the exploration of the L2 speech learning research. The implication for L2 sound learning of this study is that having higher number of phonemes in the L1 phonological system than that in the L2 one is less important than the L2 experience. 

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.

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