Abstract In this paper, I address the question of whether British and American web data pattern in the same way when it comes to attributive freak being used as an adjective or whether one variety is more tolerant towards the item crossing the nominal word class boundary than the other. In order to test this research question, I present a corpus-based analysis of 1,000 random tokens of attributive freak in the British and American sections of the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Contrary to my hypothesis that American English (AmE) favours noun to adjective transitions of freak over British English (BrE), the findings suggest that BrE is more open to freak crossing the nominal word class boundary than AmE. Further, the study reveals that nominal freak is almost restricted to the use of one to two frequent bigrams, both in BrE and AmE. In all other cases, freak is underdetermined for word-class status but leans towards an adjective interpretation.

Abstract Registers reflect the constraints of systematically recurring situational contexts and are therefore embedded in the lingua-culture in which these situations occur. Consequently, when a language – such as English – is used in widely differing cultural contexts, the question arises whether registers in different varieties of the language might not actually reflect cultural differences between similar types of situations. Previous studies have shown that varieties of English fall into different clusters and that informal spoken texts in particular reflect differences between the varieties. With a focus on register variation across varieties of English, Neumann & Evert (2021) suggest that register-related patterns of variation are much more pronounced than differences between varieties. However, they also observe divergence between texts in the same register from different varieties. The generality of both findings is limited, though, because their analysis was based on only three varieties of English. Our paper aims at exploring these questions more thoroughly by drawing on a larger set of nine components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) preprocessed for comparability (Lehmann & Schneider 2012) and by focusing the interpretation on registers that are expected to be more strongly affected by cultural differences. To this end, we extract the same set of 41 lexico-grammatical features from the ICE components as Neumann & Evert (2021), building on the corpus queries made available in their online supplement. In three steps, we first reproduce the geometric multivariate analysis (GMA) of Neumann & Evert (2021) and then replicate it in two increasingly different approaches. These methodological variations allow us to explore to what extent the results of Neumann & Evert (2021) depended on their specific choice of three ICE components and how stable the results of the exploratory analysis with the chosen multivariate approach are.

Abstract [(If the) truth BE told] is an idiomatic construction in English with a number of pragmatic purposes. It can suggest that a proposition is generally known but rarely admitted, or that a proposition is a previously unknown personal admission. It can also act as a pragmatically weaker discourse marker. This study initially looks for early uses in the Early English Books Online (EEBO) corpus, finding examples from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Diachronic changes in the use and form of the construction in American English are then examined using the Corpus of Historical American (Davies 2010), which contains texts written between 1810 and 2020. In COHA the [(if the) truth BE told] construction becomes considerably more frequent after 1980. Coinciding with this increase in frequency the construction becomes more lexically fixed and reduced in length. It also becomes more likely to appear at the left periphery of a clause. In addition, it appears to be moving towards ‘extended intersubjectivity’ (Tantucci 2017). As such, it is increasingly losing its pragmatic purposes of marking a rarely admitted truth or a personal admission, and behaving more like a simple discourse marker, connecting clauses.

Abstract The modal verbs of necessity and obligation, a testing ground of grammatical change, have been shown to exhibit change and variation in world Englishes. Previous studies have primarily concentrated on English as a native language (ENL) and English as a second language (ESL) varieties. The present study extends this line of research and explores variation in modal verbs of necessity and obligation in English use as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Descriptive statistics indicate that ELF resembles American English and also shares similarities with ESL varieties. In addition, ELF further exhibits divergence from both ENL and ESL varieties that arises in multilingual interactions. The multivariate analysis of this study employs mixed-effects logistic regression on the use of must and have to. Integrating social and linguistic factors, this analysis exploits metadata gathered from the VOICE corpus, which has thus far been underused. The results of the inferential statistics indicate that the same sociolinguistic factors that influence the variation in ENL and ESL varieties also shape ELF grammar. These findings not only bring ELF closer to other English varieties but also demonstrate the advantage of studying ELF from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective.

Abstract Previous studies have identified frequent lexical bundles associated with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research paradigms. These paradigmatic investigations of lexical bundles conducted thus far seem to have two limitations. One is that they have primarily concentrated on distinctive lexical bundles, without much analysis of the shared bundles in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research paradigms. Another shortcoming is that they tend not to explore in which contexts lexical bundles are likely to occur. These two problems deserve attention, as shared bundles are also frequently used to facilitate fluent linguistic production and analysing lexical bundles in their surrounding contexts can help reveal their specific textual meanings. To address these two limitations, this study seeks to link shared lexical bundles with rhetorical moves based on a corpus consisting of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods nursing research articles. The findings of this study show that in certain move-steps, shared lexical bundles have distinctive discourse functions in mixed methods research. Meanwhile, the findings also show that there are move-steps where shared lexical bundles have similar discourse functions in two or three research paradigms. Revealing shared lexical bundles’ discourse functions in specific contexts may enable learners to know where to use the bundles in a text.

Turn-taking is a central topic in the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA).However, the analysis has mainly been based on British and American English, and differences can be expected if turn-taking is studied in varieties of English as suggested by anecdotal evidence.The present book, Conversation in World Englishes: Turn-taking and cultural variation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English by Theresa Neumaier, sets out to fill this research gap by conducting an empirical analysis with the aim to describe, analyse, and compare turn-taking patterns in Caribbean and Southeast-Asian English face-to-face interactions.The major research questions are whether the turn-taking conventions in these two varieties correspond to those that have been established in previous work on turn-taking and whether there are differences between the varieties in terms of culture.The book contains eight chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction where the author describes the aim of the book and states the research questions.In Chapter 2 the author provides an overview of Conversational Analysis (CA) and of the field of World Englishes catering for the needs of scholars in both traditions.Following Sacks et al.'s seminal article (1974), turn-taking is described as a two-part mechanism consisting of a turn-constructional and a turn-allocation component.The former deals with the construction of turn-constructional units (TUs) defined on the basis of syntactic completion and a variety of prosodic and lexico-semantic devices.The allocational component is split up into three hierarchically ordered rules describing how turn-taking is locally managed through techniques such as next-speaker selection, self-selection, and current speaker selection.Although there is some evidence that turn-taking strategies differ across languages, research on turn-holding and turn-claiming has only been carried out on few languages and "the question whether the turn-taking system might be culturally sensitive is still unanswered."(p.10).World Englishes are chosen as the ideal candidates to display if "the turn-taking system is fine-tuned to local cultural preferences" (p.12).If there are differences in the patterns between the varieties, they will be explained as culturally conditioned, and the patterns will be compared with regard to the cluster of context-sensitive features associated with each variety.One reason why CA and World Englishes have not been merged before has to do with "differences in their respective epistemologies" (p.15).The CA approach calls for 'theoretical indifference' based on the observation that "anybody who looks for differences hard enough will eventually find them in the data" (p.16).Combining "CA's fine-grained bottom-up analysis of interaction" with the study of World Englishes means that "only those contextual factors that show to be locally relevant for the interactants will be considered for the interpretation" (p.17).Studies of World Englishes, on the other hand, are based

Abstract This article investigates semantic prosody in a diachronic perspective. Although prosodies have been shown to change over time, there is no consensus regarding the source of such changes. The present study explores this further through a corpus study of the development of the lemmas fabric, fabricate and fabrication from the late 15th century to the late 20th century, drawing on material from Early English Books Online, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and the British National Corpus. The results of the study show that prosodic changes coincide with the emergence of new senses and indicate that these processes are related to and possibly caused by semantic transfer induced by persistent prosodies over time.