Non-standard Spelling Research Articles

Humour and the creative powers of language, or when sentiments turn into centiments

Humour is part of human communication and can serve as an effective means for making contact, finding a way out of an embarrassing situation, or mitigating different political and social tensions. However, not all humans are born capable of generating and processing humour and it remains an open question whether it is possible to learn and develop this ability. Therefore, a sense of humour, but not an *ability of humour, would be a frequent collocation in many languages. Cognitive linguists claim that collocations are not accidental as combinability patterns point to certain conceptualisation processes in the expression of meaning. The cognitive linguistic viewpoint that humour is based on a mismatch, or incongruity, between ideas, otherwise referred to as frame shifting, is adopted as a prerequisite for producing humour in this paper.The focus of this paper is the expression of verbal humour dealing with the introduction of the euro in Lithuania in 2015. Verbal humour is created by employing different linguistic resources: sounds, spelling, word building models, homonymy and polysemy, word combinations and other syntactic structures and larger chunks of texts or discourse. The investigation is based on the main theories of humour: the Semantic Script Theory and the Superiority Theory developed by Attardo (1994) and Raskin (1985). The empirical material consists of 89 cases of verbal humour found in posts and comments in personal profiles and pages on Facebook and in reader comments following different articles in popular news portals written from September 2014 to February 2015. The paper attempts to describe linguistic means contributing to the construction of humour as well as to identify the shifts between frames involved in generating the humorous effect. The results of the investigation suggest that most humorous comments bear content-related political implications, shifting between the frames of the loss of national currency perceived either as the loss of stability or as the loss of national identity and the frame of positive expectations due to the greater integration into the EU. The techniques used to construct humour include wordplay based on sound combinations, similar spelling, non-standard spelling, and code-switching involving English and Russian. An especially productive technique was the construction of existing or non-existing words by code-mixing and the use of metaphor and metonymy. Larger chunks of text also employ intertextuality, parody, switching between registers and different types of echoing.

Pronunciation Errors of Letter “G” in English Language Made by Saudi Undergraduate Students

The primary goal of the present study is to identify the problematic areas in the pronunciation of the letter “g” in English written words made by Saudi female learners of English as a foreign language, and the reasons for the weakness associated with mispronunciation of English written words which contain this letter. The population of the study was the female students (90 students) and their English language teachers (12 teachers) at the Qassim University during the academic year (2014-2015). There were two types of instruments used in this study. The first was a pronunciation test for the student participants in order to investigate the problematic areas of pronouncing “g” in different environments in different words; and the second a questionnaire for the teacher participants to provide comprehensive data about the causes of these errors of pronouncing “g” committed by EFL female students at Qassim University. Ninety female students were included for the pronunciation test and 12 teachers were asked to answer the questionnaire. Simple percentage was used for analyzing the data of recording words (pronunciation test). Results of the students’ recording words revealed that the participants mispronounced “g” before nasals (68%). According to the results of the teachers’ responses to the questionnaire suggested many factors that can cause difficulties for students in terms of pronouncing “g” in English written words. According to them, these difficulties are concerned with reading difficulties, nonstandard spellings, letters that follow “g” (many of them may become combinations), loan words, orthography (no correspondence between the English alphabets and their sounds). The researcher offers recommendations that might help teachers and students to overcome and reduce these mispronunciations of this letter in English written words.

Literary Representation of Non-Standardness as a Marker of Dialect 'Voice' in "Mau Tempo no Canal": Some Considerations

Abstract: In Mau Tempo no Canal, a relationship between “direct speech” in dialogue and “regional language” is suggested by indicators of non-standard spelling in the text, which strongly supports a direct reference to Azorean speech. Nemésio’s interest in this speech is aptly manifested in the discourse by echoing the “idiolects” in accordance with the characters’ respective social strata. In this introductory study—part of a longer linguistic research project dealing with Nemésio’s novels—the use of “literary dialect” in the discourse of one of the characters provides a background upon which the marked linguistic registers connoting an Azorean linguistic identity are recognized. These indicators are then traced against existing linguistic data to form an expository analysis of the speech.

English

The practicality and limited space of SMS have become features encouraging the emergence of various forms of SMS language. An analysis of SMS from 20 Acehnese female students in the University of Syiah Kuala was therefore carried out to inspect the elements of language employed within the text messages. The data of 110 SMS gathered through a mobile device were thoroughly analyzed and later categorized into linguistics and discoursal features. The result showed that female students tend to write about their psychological conditions in SMS by employing logogram and pictogram. A number of findings on omitted letters and nonstandard spelling were also indicated in their SMS. They rarely used initialism and shortening in writing the text messages because it is believed that these features can diminish intelligibility. These females also wrote complex messages and employed various languages into their text messages, including the national language (Indonesian), the language of their religion (Arabic), the language from media influence (Japanese), and their mother tongue (Acehnese). Their circumstance of being multilingual has expanded their linguistic performance in employing, typing, and inventing lively SMS. It is also interesting to discover that these texters created new symbols that are not generally found in SMS to identify their reciprocal relationship of the same culture and belief. Keywords: linguistic features; discoursal features; short message service; females; multilingual DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2201-07

Toward a Description of African American Vernacular English Dialect Regions Using “Black Twitter”

Recent research has established that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is not monolithic. However, variation in AAVE has not been systematically described and mapped. This article uses new computational methods and social media to describe AAVE variation and to show AAVE dialect regions distinct from—and perpendicular to—the regions of other dialects of North American English. This study maps the geographic patterns of 30+ common nonstandard spellings on Twitter (e.g., sholl ‘sure’). It shows that nonstandard AAVE orthography delineates distinct dialect regions with shared phonological and lexical features. These regions are not coterminous with traditional North American dialect regions; rather, they align with patterns of movement during the Great Migrations.

The regularization of Old English weak verbs

This article deals with the regularization of non-standard spellings of the verbal forms extracted from a corpus. It addresses the question of what the limits of regularization are when lemmatizing Old English weak verbs. The purpose of such regularization, also known as normalization, is to carry out lexicological analysis or lexicographical work. The analysis concentrates on weak verbs from the second class and draws on the lexical database of Old English Nerthus, which has incorporated the texts of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. As regards the question of the limits of normalization, the solution adopted are, in the first place, that when it is necessary to regularize, normalization is restricted to correspondences based on dialectal and diachronic variation and, secondly, that normalization has to be unidirectional.

Graphies non-conventionnelles dans la correspondance privée au XVIe siècle

AbstractThe Balcarres Papers in the National Library of Scotland contain a collection of several hundred letters (in French) addressed to Marie de Guise while she was Regent of Scotland between 1542 and 1560. Most of these are written in the formal epistolary French of the time, but three in particular, written by women in the Queen’s personal entourage, are written in more intimate style and, among other interesting linguistic features, embody spellings which stray some distance from current orthographical norms. It is widely assumed that non-standard forms such as these reflect the author’s lack of education and lower-class origins. While this explanation may hold for one of the letters presented here, it does not work with the other two: in the first of these, the writer seems to have deliberately chosen to use vernacular forms, perhaps on the grounds of current fashion in the Paris Court, while in the second she seems to have evolved her own personal spelling system reflecting her regional (Lorraine) identity. At all events, before the tyrannie de la grammaire, non-standard spelling was evidently not heavily stigmatised and might even have been prized in some social contexts.

Indexing Bob Cranky: Social Meaning and the Voices of Pitmen and Keelmen in Early Nineteenth-Century Tyneside Song

This article examines the social meanings (indexical relations) of Tyneside dialect spoken by pitmen and keelmen in early nineteenth-century Tyneside dialect songs. I focus on the pitman Bob Cranky. Pieces about Bob and other pitmen and keelmen emerge from a song culture enjoyed by audiences of clerks, artisans, and shopkeepers. A debate emerged from the 1970s as to whether Bob is a subject of satire who could not appeal to a ‘working man’, or whether pitmen and keelmen derived self-celebration from him. Recently, the perspective of self-celebration has dominated. The songs, northern dialect literature more broadly, and dialect itself are said to promote communal values, regional, local, and ‘working-class’ solidarity, and populism. I show that pitmen and keelmen are most closely associated in the songs with non-standard spellings and with expletives. Employing a notion of dialogism, I argue that the meaning of the songs and the language attributed to pitmen or keelmen depends on the attitudes of audiences towards their behaviour, and towards nineteenth-century discourses of respectability and correct language. Bob and his speech may be the subjects of satirical mockery, resistance to ‘respectability’, or self-celebration. The material also has potential to convey labouring-class and regional solidarity.

Spelling errors and keywords in born-digital data: a case study using the Teenage Health Freak Corpus

The abundance of language data that is now available in digital form, and the rise of distinct language varieties that are used for digital communication, means that issues of non-standard spellings and spelling errors are, in future, likely to become more prominent for compilers of corpora. This paper examines the effect of spelling variation on keywords in a born-digital corpus in order to explore the extent and impact of this variation for future corpus studies. The corpus used in this study consists of e-mails about health concerns that were sent to a health website by adolescents. Keywords are generated using the original version of the corpus and a version with spelling errors corrected, and the British National Corpus (BNC) acts as the reference corpus. The ranks of the keywords are shown to be very similar and, therefore, suggest that, depending on the research goals, keywords could be generated reliably without any need for spelling correction.

Processing costs when reading short message service shortcuts: An eye-tracking study

Short Message Service (SMS) messaging is associated with a variety of ‘textisms’, shortened words and other nonstandard spellings. Two such shortcuts, orthographic (e.g., deleting vowels) and phonological (e.g., sound-based respellings) abbreviations, have been associated with negative effects on reading in adults. The current study used eye tracking to investigate reading of English SMS messages with and without such shortcuts. Thirty young adults read sentences containing phonological, orthographic or mixed textisms, along with standard English sentences. Reading time, average fixation duration and total fixation count were measured. Sentences in standard English were associated with significantly faster reading times compared to the three textism conditions, with no difference between the textism types. Fewer fixations were made on standard English sentences and on sentences with phonological textisms. There was no association between the reading measures and participants' use of textisms, texting freq...

Hybridité et variation dans les SMS : Le corpus Texto4Science et l’oralité en français montréalais

AbstractThis article presents an analysis of a Montreal French corpus of text messages and considers the link between text messaging, and both spoken and written language. This corpus is part of a larger corpus of text messages sent by mobile phone (Texto4-Science). Our study focuses on two morphosyntactic variables for which an important sociostylistic variation has been reported in Montreal French: the alternation between the strong pronounsnous/nous autres ‘we/us’ (as non clitics), and between the subject cliticson/nous ‘we’. Their comparison in the text messages corpus and in spoken corpora shows that while text messages tend to approximate spoken language, they are not a perfect reflection of it. Generally, the hybridity of text messages can be conceived in the following manner: text messages obey a double standard (spoken and orthographic) and allow for occasional transgressions (formal markers associated with the written language and nonstandard spelling reflecting the spoken language).

An Analysis of Language in University Students' Text Messages

Concerns over effects of ‘textisms’ on literacy have been reinforced by research identifying processing costs associated with reading textisms. But to what extent do such studies reflect actual textism use? This study examined the textual characteristics of 936 text messages in English (13391 words). Message length, nonstandard spelling, sender and message characteristics and word frequency were analyzed. The data showed that 25% of word content used nonstandard spelling, the most frequently occurring category involving omission of capital letters. Types of nonstandard spelling varied only slightly depending on the purpose of the text message, while the overall proportion of nonstandard spelling did not differ significantly. Less than 0.2% of content was ‘semantically unrecoverable.’ Implications for experimental studies of textisms are discussed.

Salience and the sociolinguistics of Scouse spelling

In this article we investigate a phenomenon in which non-standard spelling is normal in professionally produced, published English. Specifically, we discuss the literary genre of Contemporary Humorous Localised Dialect Literature (CHLDL), in which semi-phonological spellings are used to represent aspects of non-standard varieties. Our aims are twofold: 1) we provide, by example, a framework for the quantitative analysis of such types of dialect orthography, which treats respellings as linguistic variables, and 2) we argue that this type of quantitative analysis of CHLDL can shed light on which phonological features are sociolinguistically salient in a given variety, as long as we bear in mind both what is possible orthographically and the phonological status of the dialect features involved. We explore these issues by investigating a corpus of ‘folk phrasebooks’ which represent the variety of English spoken in Liverpool (Scouse), in the north-west of England.

Non-verbal signalling in digital discourse: The case of letter repetition

This study focuses on the interactional functions of non-standard spelling, in particular letter repetition, used in text-based computer-mediated communication as a means of non-verbal signalling. The aim of this paper is to assess the current state of non-verbal cue research in computer-mediated discourse and demonstrate the need for a more comprehensive and methodologically rigorous exploration of written non-verbal signalling. The study proposes a contextual and usage-centered view of written paralanguage. Through illustrative, close linguistic analyses the study proves that previous approaches to non-standard spelling based on their relation to the spoken word might not account for the complexities of this CMC cue, and in order to further our understanding of their interactional functions it is more fruitful to describe the role they play during the contextualisation of the verbal messages. The interactional sociolinguistic approach taken in the analysis demonstrates the range of interactional functions letter repetition can achieve, including contribution to the inscription of socio-emotional information into writing, to the evoking of auditory cues or to a display of informality through using a relaxed writing style.

Eye dialect and casual speech spelling: Orthographic variation in OT

Abstract Nonstandard spelling of certain words in English, French and other languages is quite a widespread phenomenon, commonly referred to as Eye Dialect. Typical examples are instead of in English and instead of in French. Eye Dialect, despite using nonstandard spelling, maintains grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences that reflect standard pronunciation, unlike Casual Speech Spelling, which aims to transcribe substandard forms (e.g., ). In this paper I attempt to account for both phenomena in a framework couched in Optimality Theory, partly drawing on a set of constraints already proposed in existing literature (Song & Wiese, 2010), at the same time as proposing new ones justified on phonetic, cognitive or system-internal grounds. It is shown how Eye Dialect and Casual Speech Spelling, instead of creating new sound-to-letter relationships, promote the more general ones, at the expense of very specific or idiosyncratic phoneme-to-grapheme map...

Une histoire épistolaire de la Louisiane ed. by Sylvie Dubois

Linguistics edited by Stacey Katz Bourns DUBOIS, SYLVIE, éd. Une histoire épistolaire de la Louisiane. Québec: PU de Laval, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7637-9004-6. Pp. 110. $19,95 Can. Due to its brevity, its main focus, and the fact that primary documents other than letters sometimes figure prominently in the analysis, this collection would be more accurately described as a manuscript-based prolegomena to Louisiana’s French dialectal history rather than as what its title implies. Regardless, there can be no detracting from the inherent value of the insightful and readable commentary provided by such a group of highly-regarded researchers. Having gathered for a symposium bearing the same name at Louisiana State University in 2009, they applied their expertise to the task of locating written indices about earlier features of French in Louisiana (the former French territory, not just the presentday state) based on what can be gleaned from primary sources, especially (but not exclusively) a selection of one hundred letters and other documents (1729–1877) archived at LSU’s Hill Memorial Library. Thanks to this project and its sponsors, these documents are now available to the general public in both digitized and transcribed form at . Dubois’s preface and introduction, followed by Carole Salmon’s synopsis of the genesis of the corpus and explanation for the selection criteria, set the stage for the contributions of seven veteran researchers of North American French. With perspicacity and ingenuity, these researchers hone in on various observable elements in the set of documents provided (in some cases using a sub-set, in other cases a supplemented set) and extrapolate the implications in relation either to specific variable linguistic features or to more general phenomena. Concerning variation among features, France Martineau addresses the expression of causality (à cause de/parce que/car); Philip Comeau and Ruth King address the suppression of the negative particle ne and variation in the expression of the pronominal first person plural (je [an Acadianism]/nous/on); Terry Nadasdi addresses the expression of the future tense (simple future/periphrastic future); and Hélène Blondeau looks at terms of address during the Revolutionary period (Monsieur/ Citoyen) as well as pronominal variation (especially, on/l’on). Concerning more general phenomena, Chantal Lyche considers implications for the autonomy of the word (as opposed to the prosodic word) based on non-standard spellings corresponding to bonding (ladépense, ilseroit), segmentation (pour lui de mander), and agglutination (je vous zassure, mon nécriture); and Annette Boudreau looks for evidence of linguistic ideologies (for example, the value of maintaining French) based on metalinguistic commentary contained in the letters. Much caution is expressed to qualify the raw percentages, when used, as being strictly suggestive. This hesitancy is due not only to the small sample size and to the fact that the written code is subject to prescriptive tendencies masking the vernacular, but also to the difficulty of ensuring sufficiently broad representation of existent social strata. Indeed, a sizable percentage of the founding colonial population and the subsequent plantation-based population—the two populations existed in profoundly different social circumstances—were not literate and left precious little written documentation of their speech features. Somewhat paradoxically then, a single pastiche directly reveals more about vernacular oral features, for at Reviews 803 least one segment of the population, than any of the ordinary letters. The pastiche, dated 1828 and attributed to Jean Bapt[iste] Pistach (an obvious pseudonym using metathesized vowel qualities as a humorous device; note that pistache means ‘peanut’ in Louisiana French), confirms the presence of a variety of oral speech features that are underrepresented or absent altogether in the letters: plural je, à cause que, icitte, -ont inflection for third person plural, stila (= celui-là), and so on. Though introductory in nature, this volume constitutes highly compelling reading for anyone interested in the dialectal history of Louisiana and its relation to earlier profiles of French in North America. LSU collaborators for this project and publication were Albert Camp, Aaron Emmitte, Jane Richardson, and Kathryn Watson. University of Alabama Michael D. Picone GARNIER, SYLVIE, et ALAN D. SAVAGE. Rédiger un texte académique en français. Paris: Ophrys, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7080-1300...

A Variationist Approach to Text: What Role-Players Can Teach Us about Form and Meaning

The purpose of my essay is twofold: (1) I demonstrate how analytical techniques from the variationist research paradigm in sociolinguistics provide the scholar with additional tools to understand the relationship between form and meaning, and (2) through this kind of analysis, I present an example of how real-world notions of gendered speech are extended to the dialogue in texts that emerge from virtual interactions. I use the term form in the linguistic sense to represent a meaningful unit of language. In this sense, go and going are two distinct linguistic forms. By contrast, literary form, as it is typically construed, represents the assembly of linguistic forms into a literary composition. For example, poets utilize the syllabic structure of particular linguistic forms in the creation of systematically metered verses. In this case, aspects of the linguistic form (i.e., syllable structure) are integral to the development of the literary (i.e., poetic) form. For authors who leverage dialogue as a means of characterization (e.g., William Faulkner), vernacular linguistic forms are used to create a sense of authenticity, which contributes to the plausibility of their fiction. While distinct, the meanings associated with linguistic forms help to shape the meaning that readers associate with particular literary forms. Through quantitative analysis, I describe how social meaning—those ideologically grounded notions that emerge from the social experiences and understandings of a particular group—becomes associated with particular linguistic forms and how these meanings serve to characterize a particular text. I examine collaboratively authored texts that emerge from interactions in an online role-playing game to demonstrate that authors’ use of nonstandard spellings helps create stereotypically male characters who are linguistically positioned in opposition to non-male characters in their dialogue. In order to understand why a variationist approach can be useful to literary scholars, I will begin by exploring why previous quantitative approaches have had little success in contributing to literary theorization and will then describe how the variationist approach differs.

Phonetic Spellings of the Subordinating Particle d(y) in the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Magic Bowls

The Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls date to the late Sasanian and very early Islamic periods. They are for the most part written in an archaic literary dialect (or dialects) that appears to have significantly differed from the spoken language of Babylonian Jews at that time. Occasional non-standard phonetic spellings, however, cast light on the spoken language of the practitioners who wrote the bowls. This article deals with phonetic spellings of the subordinating (or relative) particle (י)ד as either ת or ט. It is difficult to discern a uniform phonetic condition for all occurrences of ת, but the examples suffice to prove that it is a genuine form. In the presently available documentation the form ט occurs solely before words beginning with ʾaleph (< historical ʾ or ʿ). The latter form also occurs in Classical Mandaic as ṭ. These spellings suggest that the realizations of the subordinating particle as t and ṱ later attested in many Neo-Aramaic dialects go back at least as far as late Sasanian times.

"Turn Right or Left": Literary Use of Dialect in 2 Samuel 14:19?

This article investigates non-standard spelling in two verses in the Succession Narrative, 2 Sam 14:19 and 2 Sam 11:24, and introduces the idea that the author makes literary use of dialect to portray character. Three consecutive words with unusual spelling in 2 Sam 14:19 are tested against linguistic data and identified as a possible depiction of spoken non-standard dialect. Such use of dialect is literary and intentional, as distinct from dialect that occurs in narrative as an unwitting reflection of the writer's own language. Through the use of dialect, the speaking character, the wise woman of Tekoa, can emphasize her own unimportance to protect herself, to avoid being perceived as a threat by the king. By contrast, the possible dialect spoken by Joab's messenger (2 Sam 11:24) carries a different meaning. In that case, the literary use of an awkward hypercorrection of dialect instead illustrates the ineptness of the messenger in conveying Joab's message to the king.

La morphosyntaxe dans les SMS suisse francophones: Le marquage de l'accord sujet – verbe conjugué

The overall aim of this article is to show the stability of graphically marking morphosyntactic structures in French text messages. It presents a manual analysis of the first 400 French messages of the new corpus sms4science.ch, an analysis which focuses on subject-verb-agreement and its graphical marking in a form of communication commonly assumed to show a considerable amount of non-standard spelling. The overall results show two things: First, the marking of subject-verb agreement is closer to standard orthography when occurring with lexical subjects, which, however, are very infrequent in text messages, a hint at their variationist character as texts of 'communicative immediacy' ('oral discourse'). Second, this type of agreement, central both for typological and theoretical approaches to human language(s), is marked in almost 90% of the occurrences according to standard graphic regularities or by other devices, which leads to the conclusion that core syntax (grammar) is completely unaltered also in apparently 'non-standard' texts.