scholarly journals Corpus-based Dialectometry: Aggregate Morphosyntactic Variability in British English Dialects

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
British English ◽  
Morphosyntactic Variation ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Frequency Vectors ◽  
Dialect Geography

The research reported in this paper departs from most previous work in dialectometry in several ways. Empirically, it draws on frequency vectors derived from naturalistic corpus data and not on discrete atlas classifications. Linguistically, it is concerned with morphosyntactic (as opposed to lexical or pronunciational) variability. Methodologically, it marries the careful analysis of dialect phenomena in authentic, naturalistic texts to aggregational-dialectometrical techniques. Two research questions guide the investigation: First, on methodological grounds, is corpus-based dialectometry viable at all? Second, to what extent is morphosyntactic variation in non-standard British dialects patterned geographically? By way of validation, findings will be matched against previous work on the dialect geography of Great Britain.

Tiger Woods as a linguistic role model?

English Today ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-61
Author(s):  
Brian Poole
Keyword(s):  
Role Model ◽  
British English ◽  
The Media ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Tiger Woods

ABSTRACTInternational sports stars are often required to speak to the media after their performances. When Tiger Woods does so, it is noticeable that he makes use of the formulaic expression ‘I feel/felt like I’ as a means of introducing descriptions of, or generalizations about, his actions or motivations. Drawing on corpus data, this paper offers some observations about this expression in relation to its use by speakers (and to a lesser extent writers) of both American and British English, and also investigates the apparent disparity in frequency between instances of ‘she’ and ‘he’ when it is used.

Great Britain and the United States: Two nations divided by an attitude?

English Today ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Carmen Ebner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
British English ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
The Us ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Similar Search

Having studied attitudes towards usage problems such as the notorious split infinitive or the ubiquitous literally in British English as part of my doctoral thesis, I was intrigued by the sheer lack of scientific studies investigating such attitudes. What was even more intriguing was to discover that the same field and the same usage problems seem to have received a different treatment in the United States of America. While my search for previously conducted usage attitude studies in Great Britain has largely remained fruitless, besides two notable exceptions which I will discuss in detail below (see Section 3), a similar search for American usage attitude studies resulted in a different picture. Considerably more such studies seem to have been conducted in the US than in Great Britain. On top of cultural and linguistic differences between these two nations, it seems as if they also hold different attitudes towards studying attitudes towards usage problems. Now the following question arises: why do we find such contradictory scientific traditions in these two countries? In this paper, I will provide an overview of a selection of American and British usage attitude studies. Taking into account differences between the American and British studies with regard to the number of usage problems studied, the populations surveyed and the methods applied, I will attempt to capture manifestations of two seemingly diverging attitudes towards the study of usage problems. By doing so, I will provide a possible explanation for the lack of attention being paid to usage attitudes in Great Britain.

Temporal adverbials and the present perfect/past tense alternation

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentin Werner
Keyword(s):  
Cluster Analysis ◽  
Hierarchical Cluster Analysis ◽  
Hierarchical Cluster ◽  
Phylogenetic Networks ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Cultural Proximity ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
The Difference

Specification by certain temporal adverbials has been shown to be one of the typical triggers of the present perfect in British English. Often, however, L2 varieties display different patterns of temporal co-occurrence, especially using the simple past tense. This study is based on corpus data from twelve components of the International Corpus of English and analyzes the distribution between present perfect and past tense for a number of co-occurring temporal adverbials. In addition, it establishes three measures of similarity across the varieties (hierarchical cluster analysis, phylogenetic networks and a distribution-based measure). On the basis of 6 353 adverbials in total, this paper suggests (1) that there is a L1–L2 divide, (2) that the difference between “traditional” and “transplanted” L1 varieties is less pronounced, (3) that L2 varieties allow more variation, which indicates that in these varieties, the present perfect is partly used as a tense (sensu Quirk et al. 1985), and (4) that some temporal adverbials are less categorically attached to either present perfect or past tense than others. Finally, some conclusions with regard to the importance of geographical and socio-cultural proximity of certain varieties can be drawn.

Linguistic change and diffusion: description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography

1974 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Trudgill
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Variation ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Sociolinguistic Variation ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
British English ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
And Diffusion ◽  
Dialect Geography

ABSTRACTLinguistic geography has remained relatively unaffected by recent developments in sociolinguistic theory and method and theoretical geography. In this paper it is argued that insights and techniques from both these disciplines will be of value in improving descriptions of geographical variation in language, and that these improvements will in turn lead to more adequate explanations for certain of the social and spatial characteristics of linguistic change. Evidence in favour of a sociolinguistic methodology and new cartographic techniques in dialect geography is drawn from empirical studies in urban dialectology, in East Anglia, England, and rural dialectology, in Norway. (Sociolinguistic variation, dialectology, linguistic change, British English, Norwegian.)

scholarly journals “Traces of my tears will remain on this paper ...”: Letters from Elizabeth Stephens to M. M. Speransky

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (8) ◽  
pp. 412-427
Author(s):  
K. A. Sozinova
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Private Life ◽  
National Library ◽  
Interstate Relations ◽  
British English ◽  
Special Place ◽  
History Of

The author of the article assumes that the interstate relations between Russia and Great Britain in the late 18th — early 19th centuries largely determined the area of private contacts between Russians and the British. English-Russian marriages have a special place in the history of English-Russian relations. Attention is paid to one of such unions — the marriage of the outstanding statesman M. M. Speransky with an Englishwoman Elizabeth Stephens. It is claimed that a significant role in Speransky’s fate was played by A. A. Samborsky, also married to an Englishwoman, in whose house Speransky’s fateful meeting with his future wife took place. It is reported that the Speransky Fund of the Russian national library preserved letters of Elizabeth Stephens to Speransky, previously not widely attracted by researchers, but not all of these letters actually belong to Elizabeth, some of them belong to her sister — Marianne. This study provides the first translation of these letters for the analysis of Speransky’s private life. The author concludes that the preserved correspondence meets the standards and methods of expression of feelings in the era of “sentimentalism.” The problem of how much Speransky was immersed in the cultural context of British reality due to this marriage is also considered. Despite the fact that the marriage was quite short, Speransky’s relations with the Stephens family were quite strong.

Flexible multi-layer spoken dialogue corpora

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Sauer ◽  
Anke Lüdeling
Keyword(s):  
Free Access ◽  
Spoken Dialogue ◽  
Corpus Construction ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Corpus Data

This paper describes the construction of deeply annotated spoken dialogue corpora. To ensure a maximum of flexibility — in the degree of normalization, the types and formats of annotations, the possibilities for modifying and extending the corpus, or the use for research questions not originally anticipated — we propose a flexible multi-layer standoff architecture. We also take a closer look at the interoperability of tools and formats compatible with such an architecture. Free access to the corpus data through corpus queries, visualizations, and downloads — including documentation, metadata, and the original recordings — enables transparency, verifiability, and reproducibility of every step of interpretation throughout corpus construction and of any research findings obtained from this data.

A corpus-driven description of when-adverbial in Nigerian and British Englishes

Glottotheory ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mayowa Akinlotan
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Structural Variation ◽  
Cognitive Factors ◽  
Distributional Analysis ◽  
British English ◽  
Functional Factors ◽  
New Varieties ◽  
Corpus Data

Abstract Syntactic alternation allows us to understand how structural variation, including crucial factors relevant to their meaning and interpretation, operates linguistic varieties. Empirical evidence from such syntactic alternation study can provide insights into how new varieties differ from the established ones. The present study aims at increasing contributions that show the nature of syntactic alternation from new Englishes such as Nigerian English, and how they differ from established varieties such as British English. Taking when adverbial construction in Nigerian English as a reference point (When Trump realised his reelection loss, he changed his political expectations versus Trump changed his political expectations when he realised his reelection loss), the study shows the extent to which previously tested factors influence the ordering of the construction and how they differ from findings reported in British English. Relying on corpus data, together with descriptive distributional analysis, the study shows that, unlike British English in which functional and cognitive factors strongly influence structural patterning, functional factors outweigh cognitive factors in Nigerian English.

The Complex History of Have Gotten in American English

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Lieselotte Anderwald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
American English ◽  
British English ◽  
Perfect Form ◽  
Text Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
Corpus Data

This article challenges the accepted opinion that the American English perfect form HAVE gotten is a straightforward historical retention of an earlier British English form. Although HAVE gotten was presumably part of the settler input in North America, it (almost) died out in American English as well, but was then revived in the nineteenth century, as historical corpus data show. Contrary to expectations, this revival was not an innovation from below. Instead, the rise of HAVE gotten was promoted by careful writers who deliberately avoided the highly stigmatized stative HAVE got. This explains why perfect HAVE gotten appears in more formal text types first, and how it became specialized to dynamic contexts only. The morphological Americanism HAVE gotten is thus a curious case of an (unintended) side-effect of marginally successful prescriptivism.1

Een corpus waar alle constructies in gevonden zouden moeten kunnen worden?* : Corpusonderzoek met behulp van automatisch gegenereerde syntactische annotatie

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-71
Author(s):  
Jelke Bloem
Keyword(s):  
Automatic Annotation ◽  
Specific Research ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Verb Clusters ◽  
Syntactic Annotation

Abstract In this contribution, I discuss the use of automatic syntactic annotation in Dutch corpus research, using a case study of five-verb clusters. Large amounts of text can be annotated automatically, but the parser makes mistakes, while correct annotation is very important in linguistic research. How much of a problem is this, and how can we learn about the extent of these parsing mistakes? There are several approaches to evaluating the quality of automatic annotation for specific research questions. I demonstrate these approaches for the case study at hand, which will help us to make claims based on automatically annotated corpus data with greater confidence.

scholarly journals Sentence-initial I think (that) and I believe (that)

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Dehé ◽  
Anne Wichmann
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
The Other ◽  
British English ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
The One

Sentence-initial pronoun-verb combinations such as I think, I believe are ambiguous between main clause use on the one hand and adverbial or discourse use on the other hand. We approach the topic from a prosodic perspective. Based on corpus data from spoken British English the prosodic patterns of sentence-initial I think and I believe are analysed and related to their interpretation in context. We show that these expressions may function as main clause (MC), comment clause (CC) or discourse markers (DM) and that the speaker’s choice is reflected in the prosody. The key feature is prosodic prominence: MCs are reflected by accent placement on the pronoun, CCs by an accent on the verb, while DMs are unstressed.

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