Después de usted: Variation and Change in a Spanish Tripartite Politeness System

This study focuses on the address paradigm in the Spanish spoken in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a Latin American variety which presents speakers with three options—one polite (usted), and two familiar (pan-Hispanic tú and regional vos). Recent quantitative studies have shown that the range of polite usted is shrinking in the dialect, as younger respondents reserve it for hierarchical contexts or for much older addressees. Indeed, speakers are uncertain about appropriate address choice to convey deference without distance. The present analysis supplements the previous quantitative data with responses of Montevideo speakers to an attitudinal interview (n = 12) analyzed qualitatively for themes with Atlas.ti. It finds that while speakers reject usted, they have adopted a range of strategies to maintain distinctions in politeness, including address avoidance, mirroring, and the repurposing of tú as an intermediate polite form.

Michelle Granshaw, Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre

Irish on the Move examines how nineteenth-century attitudes about the mobility of migrant bodies were manifested in Irish characterizations in variety theatre. A careful historiographical approach to often overlooked subject matter reveals the development of early American attitudes about immigration and nationalism.

Principales rasgos gramaticales del español de Honduras

This work offers an in-depth description of the main morphosyntactic (and lexical) features found in present Honduran Spanish, a lesser-known Central American variety. Text corpora and sociolinguistic surveys help us to provide an updated grammatical overview, which takes into account most categories: nouns and adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and locutions, and illustrates with examples taken both from formal and informal settings. By comparing these features with previous grammatical descriptions, this study helps in identifying some common American features ―such as the use of con todo y and the pluralization of impersonal haber― as well as some specific patterns ―such as the prominence of -ada and -eco suffixes, algotro pronoun and expletive lo― in present-day Honduran Spanish, some of which remain to be incorporated in the Academy grammar.

Sobre la llamada oposición aspectual entre «he cantado» y «canté» en el español de América

On the so-called aspectual opposition between «he cantado» and «canté» in Latin American Spanish. According to the majority of linguists, the opposition between the forms «he cantado» and «canté» in the American variety of Spanish is related to aspect, which may raise doubts if it is assumed that aspect is a grammatical category typical of Slavic languages and absent in Romance languages. Based on this assumption and on a precise distinction between aspect and Aktionsart, the author attempts to prove that aspect did not exist in Latin, nor does it exist in contemporary Spanish. Therefore the claim that the tenses antepresente («he cantado») and pretérito («canté») are carriers of aspectual features is hard to accept. Keywords: aspect, Aktionsart, Spanish tense system, expressing the past O tak zwanej opozycji aspektowej pomiędzy «he cantado» a «canté» w hiszpańskim w Ameryce. Streszczenie: Według większości lingwistów opozycja pomiędzy formami «he cantado» a «canté» w amerykańskiej odmianie języka hiszpańskiego ma charakter aspektowy, co może wzbudzać wątpliwości, jeśli uzna się aspekt za kategorię gramatyczną typową dla języków słowiańskich i nieobecną w językach romańskich. W oparciu o to założenie oraz precyzyjne rozróżnienie pomiędzy aspektem a Aktionsartem autor próbuje udowodnić, że aspekt nie istniał ani w łacinie, ani nie istnieje we współczesnym języku hiszpańskim i w związku z tym trudne do zaakceptowania wydaje się stwierdzenie, że czasy antepresente («he cantado ») i pretérito («canté») są nośnikami treści aspektowych. Słowa klucze: aspekt, Aktionsart, hiszpański system czasowy, wyrażanie przeszłości

Lose one's life and lose one's job with singular they: two constructions, two regional varieties, many practical aspects of working with mega-corpora

The paper compares the usage of singular they with two morphologically similar constructions in British and American English. The constructions in question are lose one’s life and lose one’s job. The results obtained suggest that singular they, at least used with the two constructions in focus of this work, seems to be more widely used in the American variety of English than in the British variety. An additional aim of this work is to present and discuss some practical aspects of working with mega-corpora. The work shows how and where quantitative language studies need to be accompanied by manual and qualitative investigations. The corpora used in this work are the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

Perceptions of Pakistani Learners of English about Standard British and American English: An Exploratory Approach

Pakistani learners of English are exposed to the same degree to both the British and the American variety of English language. There is no state policy or direction regarding the preference of one variety over the other in being used for getting education. Overall society and educational institutes are free to adopt or promote any variety that they deem proper. Both the varieties are used extensively, are quite popular, and enjoy sufficient means and reasons to be effective in society. The lack of uniformity in adopting a particular variety leads to multiple problems, including an English variety having features of both American and British English in different degrees, depending on each user’s different degree of exposure to both the varieties. For ensuring uniformity and avoiding confusion, the researcher thought it compulsory to make a recommendation for the adoption of a single variety out of the two, based on its suitability and utility. However, the researcher feels it urgent that before making recommendations to the government for the adoption of a single variety, the wishes and predilections of the people of Pakistan have to be considered and the reasons why some prefer British variety and some the American variety have to be identified and assessed. If they preferred a feature of English, then did they know which variety it belonged to and if they knew then why did they like it. In the process, the researcher also strove to find out as to what extent the knowledge of literature and history of the country of the variety, contributed to affecting the preference of the Pakistani people. Data was gathered from sixty-six participants from two universities of Pakistan, namely Kohat University of Science and Technology (KUST) Kohat from the KP Province on the provincial level, and National University of Modern Languages (NUML) Islamabad from the Federal capital, Islamabad, on the federal level; participants were enquired about their approaches, attitudes, and feelings towards the variety of English they preferred and to explain reasons and motives behind the selection/rejection of one or other of the two varieties, through a questionnaire having seven close-ended and three open-ended items.

Dative Alternation in Nigerian English: A Corpus-based Approach

Dative alternation is that sort of construction which requires a choice from two available choices; the double object (DOC) (i. e. Please give Mary the book) and the preposition construction (TOC) (i. e. Please give the book to Mary). Empirical evidence detailing the characteristics and motivations of dative choices in different varieties have been put forward in the literature. Albeit, nothing is known about the nature and motivations of this phenomenon in Nigerian variety of English, an important source of empirical evidence in the English-world-wide paradigm. With 739 sentences extracted from International Corpus of English, we examined the effects of 16 predictors on this construction in the Nigerian variety; showing how the behavior of these predictors compares with findings reported in other varieties. Among other findings, we found that overall Nigerian variety is closer to American variety than Indian variety, and pronominality as the strongest predictor, outweighing register as a reputable predictor.