Which English Should We Stand For? Voices from Lecturers in Thai Multicultural Universities

The rapid transformation of English linguistic landscapes has introduced the world to newly emerging English varieties or World Englishes, which are not typically employed in the Inner Circle. To address the defying phenomenon, this qualitative study explored the perceptions of Thai university lecturers on World Englishes, Thai English and the feasibility of implementing World Englishes and Thai English in the classrooms. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 15 English lecturers in 5 universities across the Thai regions. Analyzed by content analysis, findings revealed that the participants demonstrated mixed perceptions. While most of the participants viewed British and American Englishes as representations of standard English varieties and questioned the legitimacy of World Englishes and Thai English, others reportedly recognized and accepted the existence of World Englishes and considered Thai English as a tool to convey Thai identities and cultures. The findings also indicated that most participants outright disapproved of World Englishes and Thai English in teaching practices, and these varieties were substantially marginalized and devalued. However, to prepare learners for realistic use of English and increase their awareness of World Englishes and Thai English, the remaining participants suggested that English language teaching should embrace flexible linguistic conventions that allow spaces for Inner Circle, Outer Circle and Expanding Circle Englishes.

Fighting for Their Future: An Exploratory Study of Online Community Building in the Youth Climate Change Movement

While offline iterations of the climate activism movement have spanned decades, today online involvement of youth through social media platforms has transformed the landscape of this social movement. Our research considers how youth climate activists utilize social media platforms to create and direct social movement communities towards greater collective action. Our project analyzes narrative framing and linguistic conventions to better understand how youth climate activists utilized Twitter to build community and mobilize followers around their movement. Our project identifies three emergent strategies, used by youth climate activists, that appear effective in engaging activist communities on Twitter. These strategies demonstrate the power of digital culture, and youth culture, in creating a collective identity within a diverse generation. This fusion of digital and physical resistance is an essential component of the youth climate activist strategy and may play a role in the future of emerging social movements.

Comparing Conventions

We offer a novel account of metalinguistic comparatives, such as 'Al is more wise than clever'. On our view, metalinguistic comparatives express comparative commitments to conventions. Thus, 'Al is more wise than clever' expresses that the speaker has a stronger commitment to a convention on which Al is wise than to a convention on which she is clever. This view avoids problems facing previous approaches to metalinguistic comparatives. It also fits within a broader framework --- independently motivated by metalinguistic negotiations and convention-shifting expressions --- that gives linguistic conventions a role in the semantics.

Evaluating Parameters of the Present-Day Public Discourse Linguistic Correctness and Communicative Efficiency

The article studies in linguo-philosophical and linguo-communicative angles the problem of speech ecology in the conditions of the present-day society along with the violations, caused by it, of linguistic and communicative norms of cooperative speech intercourse. Proceeding from the language-as-a-doer conception and also from the fact of limited linguistic censorship in the sphere of present-day mass communication, the author justifies possibility of all kinds of irregularities in public discourse and analyses how their appearance can affect the eventual communicative efficiency of the discourse as a whole. The article gives a chronological observation of the practice of discourse analysis acquiring the four basic criteria of evaluating linguistic utterances – grammaticality, acceptability, truth, and reference – which were gradually introduced in linguistics as the result of influence from adjacent areas of knowledge. On the basis of selected examples the author tries to find out whether appliance of these speech evaluation methods is justified inasmuch as they help to evaluate linguistic conventions implementation and ability of speech utterances to transmit communicator's intentions implicated in them. Having studied different kinds of speech deviations violating, to this or that extant, the norms of grammar, syntax, conceptualization processes, and communication canons, the author comes to the conclusion that violations of norms do not always cause ultimate communicative failures. According to the author, verbal communication can only be estimated as unsuccessful when it fails to receive adequate perception on the part of the addressee. Based on that, the conclusion is made that while evaluating discourse linguistic correctness and pragmatic consistency, one should, first of all, consider peculiarities of the extra-linguistic context and the category of the receptive audience rather than whether the discourse does or does not conform to the norms of usage and standard speech ethics.

Context and Coherence

Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express indefinitely many different meanings on an occasion of use. And yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover this meaning so quickly and without effort? This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that fully determine the interpretation of context-sensitive items. Contrary to the dominant tradition, which maintains that the meaning of context-sensitive language is underspecified by grammar, and depends on non-linguistic features of utterance situation, this book argues that meaning is determined entirely by discourse conventions, rules of language that have largely been missed, and the effects of which have been mistaken for extra-linguistic effects of an utterance situation on meaning. The linguistic account of context developed in this book sheds a new light on the nature of linguistic content, and the interaction between content and context. At the same time, it provides a novel model of context that should constrain and help evaluate debates across many sub-fields of philosophy where appeal to context has been common, often leading to surprising conclusions: for example, in epistemology, ethics, value theory, metaphysics, metaethics, and logic, among others.

Interlude: Context and Common Ground

An influential alternative account of context that likewise models context as a body of information that changes with an evolving discourse is Stalnakerian common ground model. On this model, however, the context is projected from a body of information mutually accepted by the interlocutors for the purposes of a conversation—a common ground. While the context constantly changes, these changes simply reflect the agents’ rational and cooperative response to manifest evidence. Might one attempt to assimilate the kinds of effects on prominence simply to such rational responses to manifest evidence? Might we then do without the rich discourse structure posited in this chapter? It is argued here that this account would be empirically inadequate, failing to capture the special status linguistic conventions have when weighed against our overall evidence.

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

We present empirical evidence of the communicative utility of conventionalization, i.e., convergence in linguistic usage over time, and diversification, i.e., linguistic items acquiring different, more specific usages/meanings. From a diachronic perspective, conventionalization plays a crucial role in language change as a condition for innovation and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010; Schmid, 2015) and diversification is a cornerstone in the formation of sublanguages/registers, i.e., functional linguistic varieties (Halliday, 1988; Harris, 1991). While it is widely acknowledged that change in language use is primarily socio-culturally determined pushing towards greater linguistic expressivity, we here highlight the limiting function of communicative factors on diachronic linguistic variation showing that conventionalization and diversification are associated with a reduction of linguistic variability. To be able to observe effects of linguistic variability reduction, we first need a well-defined notion of choice in context. Linguistically, this implies the paradigmatic axis of linguistic organization, i.e., the sets of linguistic options available in a given or similar syntagmatic contexts. Here, we draw on word embeddings, weakly neural distributional language models that have recently been employed to model lexical-semantic change and allow us to approximate the notion of paradigm by neighbourhood in vector space. Second, we need to capture changes in paradigmatic variability, i.e. reduction/expansion of linguistic options in a given context. As a formal index of paradigmatic variability we use entropy, which measures the contribution of linguistic units (e.g., words) in predicting linguistic choice in bits of information. Using entropy provides us with a link to a communicative interpretation, as it is a well-established measure of communicative efficiency with implications for cognitive processing (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016; Venhuizen et al., 2019); also, entropy is negatively correlated with distance in (word embedding) spaces which in turn shows cognitive reflexes in certain language processing tasks (Mitchel et al., 2008; Auguste et al., 2017). In terms of domain we focus on science, looking at the diachronic development of scientific English from the 17th century to modern time. This provides us with a fairly constrained yet dynamic domain of discourse that has witnessed a powerful systematization throughout the centuries and developed specific linguistic conventions geared towards efficient communication. Overall, our study confirms the assumed trends of conventionalization and diversification shown by diachronically decreasing entropy, interspersed with local, temporary entropy highs pointing to phases of linguistic expansion pertaining primarily to introduction of new technical terminology.

A Constructional Perspective on the Rise of Metatextual Discourse Markers

Cognitive linguistics seeks to account for “a speaker’s knowledge of the full range of linguistic conventions” (LANGACKER, 1987; also GOLDBERG, 2006). It is surprising therefore that little attention has been paid in cognitive linguistics to the linguistic conventions called “discourse markers” (SCHIFFRIN, 1987) or “pragmatic markers” (FRASER, 2009, et passim). Pragmatic markers include signals of attention to social relationships (well, please), beliefs (I think, in fact), and discourse management (after all, anyway). Members of the third subtype are metatextual connectors of discourse segments (“discourse markers” in Fraser’s taxonomy). I argue that because pragmatic markers in general play a major role in negotiating meaning, they are an important part of speakers’ knowledge of language. Pragmatic markers are well-known not to have truth-conditional meaning, and not to be syntactically integrated with the host clause. However, they have conventional pragmatic meanings (HANSEN, 2012; FINKBEINER, 2019). I exemplify my recent research on the historical development in English of metatextual discourse markers with a diachronic construction grammar perspective on by the way (TRAUGOTT, 2020). Focus will be on the importance of routinized, replicated contexts in change (CROFT, 2001; BYBEE, 2010).