Regional Varieties Of English Research Articles

Critically Examining Perceptions of Different Englishes in the IELTS Speaking Section: Who Decides What is Acceptable?

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) has become the worldwide benchmark for evaluating English language proficiency. However, the IELTS exam is not without its critics. It has been accused of being elitist and unaccommodating of test-takers who are not users of the prestige varieties of English, even though these people may need to take the exam for employment or immigration purposes. This study involved a focus group of experienced IELTS examiners who were given a number of listenings from non-standard yet still ‘native speakers’ of English to evaluate using the IELTS speaking bands. The focus group found that the IELTS speaking descriptors are not fit for purpose when dealing with non-standard or regional varieties of English. This study makes a case for the creators of the IELTS exam to adjust their grading criteria and examiner training to be more inclusive of all English varieties.

Lexical Hedging in English Abstracts of Russian Research Articles on Economics: A Corpus-Based Study

An important area of academic English competence, the use of hedges in various regional varieties of English, has been the subject of numerous cross-cultural studies worldwide. However, hedging in the Russian variety of English as an academic lingua franca remains largely under-researched. This paper reports the results of a corpus-based study of lexical hedges in English abstracts of 200 Russian research articles published over the past few years in the leading national Journals of Economics. The data obtained in this research are compared to the findings of an earlier similarly designed study of British and American abstracts, shedding light on the peculiarities of lexical hedging use by Russian authors. Quantitative corpus linguistics methods are used, notably statistical analysis of corpus frequency data based on Dunning's log-likelihood test. Our analysis shows that although Russian economics research writers employ quite a wide range of lexical hedging devices – largely over 70% – coinciding with those used by native English writers, they use most categories of lexical hedges (modal verbs, adverbials, quantifiers and full verbs) less frequently while employing hedging nouns more frequently than their British and American counterparts. The findings can be useful for further research into hedging in the abstracts of scientific articles on other disciplines as well as for teaching English research abstract writing to Russian speakers.

Too early to say: The Englishtoo ADJ to Vconstruction and models of cross-cultural communications styles

AbstractThis paper studies the Englishtoo ADJ to Vconstruction. It starts with a (multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis (as one of the subtypes of collostructional analysis) of theADJ-Vpairs appearing in the given construction in three regional varieties of English (American, British and Indian English) based on the GloWbE corpus. This analysis establishes the most distinctive and most strongly repelledADJ-Vpairs in the respective varieties. These results are then interpreted from the perspective of three models of inter-cultural and cross-cultural communication styles. The paper demonstrates that the most distinctive and the most repelledADJ-Vpairs do differ across the three varieties and that this may reflect subtle differences in the underlying cultural conceptualizations. The paper also introduces the notion of ‘(multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis of co-varying collexemes’, as an extension of the existing notion of the given type of collostructional analysis.

Too Early to Say: The English Too ADJ to V Construction and Models of Cross-Cultural Communications Styles – A Collostructional Approach

This paper studies the English too ADJ to V construction. It starts with a (multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis (as one of the subtypes of collostructional analysis) of the ADJ-V pairs appearing in the given construction in three regional varieties of English (American, British and Indian English) based on the GloWbE corpus. This analysis establishes the most distinctive and most strongly repelled ADJ-V pairs in the respective varieties. These results are then interpreted from the perspective of three models of inter-cultural and cross-cultural communication styles. The paper demonstrates that the most distinctive and the most repelled ADJ-V pairs do differ across the three varieties and that this may reflect subtle differences in the underlying cultural conceptualizations. The paper also introduces the notion of ‘(multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis of co-varying collexemes’, as an extension of the existing notion of the given type of collostructional analysis.

The Survival of Traditional Dialect Lexis on the Participatory Web

ABSTRACT This article examines the extent to which “traditional” dialect lexis (TDL) attested in the Survey of English Dialects can be found in a contemporary online context virtually located in the North East of England, one of the most dialectally distinct parts of the country. The findings suggest that the rate of survival is perhaps higher than might be imagined, given the conclusions of previous research on lexical attrition in regional varieties of English in the UK. The article also shows the affordances of corpus-based dialect study, illustrating how access to the discursive contexts in which TDL occurs can offer insights into meaning and usage, and give access to the metalinguistic reflections of dialect users.

The NP in academic Maltese English

Abstract Despite recent advances, Maltese English remains under-researched as a regional variety of English. This study employs an error analysis approach to identify its nominal characteristics based on the assumption that fossilized learner competences shared by a speech community eventually develop into new dialects and that transfer phenomena play a pivotal role. The study analyses article usage, singular and plural forms and noncount nouns and finds that overuse of the definite article is a likely candidate as a feature of Maltese English.

World Englishes: Changing the Paradigm of Linguistic Diversity in Global Academia

This paper discusses the ways that the publications of multilingual and non-native speakers of English are treated in academic publications. Using the World Englishes theory as a framework, it attempts to enumerate which overt and hidden advantages native speakers may have over non-native speakers in academic writing communities, and how these can be deconstructed. It also explores possible solutions to this problem, both to improve non-native students' written scholarly work and to restructure global perceptions and biases towards different regional varieties of English. The paper focuses on certain gatekeeping behaviors performed by institutions of knowledge production, and on how the World Englishes theory can be applied to help improve parity in international academia.

Indigenous Toponyms in the Antipodes: A Gazetteer-Based Study

During the centuries of Britain’s colonial expansion, English was transplanted to the four corners of the globe, and became an extensive and prolific borrower of general lexical items and toponyms from indigenous languages. The Englishes of Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji are three typical examples. Indigenous loanwords and toponyms comprise one of the most distinctive features of these Englishes, and are regularly used to express national identity. Although these nations share a common colonial language, they differ markedly in their indigenous cultures and languages, the way they were occupied, and the colonizers’ attitudes towards indigenous peoples. These factors significantly influenced relationships between the two groups, and resulted in distinct patterns and degrees of indigenous borrowings into the three regional varieties of English. This gazetteer-based study provides evidence of these patterns and degrees of borrowing through an analysis of the number and distribution of indigenous toponyms in the three jurisdictions. It also considers the various linguistic, sociocultural, attitudinal, and historical factors that shaped place naming.

The acquisition of Spanish pronunciation by Welsh learners: transfer from a regional variety of English into SpanishThe acquisition of Spanish pronunciation by Welsh learners: transfer from a regional variety of English into Spanish

Language teachers agree that the phonetic/phonological distance between a learner’s L1 and L2 is of vital importance in mastering the sounds of the L2; however, no attention is given to the phonetic/phonological distance between the regional variety of the speaker’s L1 and the L2. After comparing linguistic peculiarities of English, and of Welsh English in particular, with Castilian Spanish, the author proceeds to study the interlanguage of advanced students of Spanish from Wales. This helps to explain positive and negative transfer from this variety of English into Spanish and assists in producing a catalogue of the interferences to be corrected. Finally, using coarticulatory processes, the author presents a list of exercises to eliminate some of the interferences found in Welsh learners of Spanish. A descriptive analysis of the learners’ interlanguage shows that the phonetic/phonological distance between the regional variety of the speaker’s L1 and the L2 is what will influence this learning process the most.

“Subliminal accent”: Reactions to the rise of Wisconsin English

Distinctive regional varieties of English have only recently emerged in parts of North America, including Wisconsin, where differences appear to be increasing today. We present an experiment in which listeners heard two short samples each from three Wisconsin regions and three other dialect areas. For each area, one sample was recorded pre-1970 and another recorded post-2010. Regional stereotypes were excluded. In a situation of new and still-emerging regional varieties, we expected listeners to be able to more accurately identify recent speech samples versus old samples from Wisconsin. Listeners proved better at recognizing speakers from Wisconsin in newer over older recordings. This complicates previous discussions of dialect awareness, in particular ‘enregisterment,’ with our listeners able to identify Wisconsin speech even in the absence of salient, known dialect features.

Review of Hughes, Trudgill & Watt (2012): English Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles

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Language perception in the East Midlands in England

Previous research by the author has examined the concept of identity in the East Midlands and how this can be relatively problematic in the region (Braber, 2014). This paper aims to extend this topic by investigating views of young people living in the East Midlands using a folk linguistic approach. Preston (1989, 1999b) claims that perceptual dialectology looks at non-linguists' beliefs and perceptions about the similarities of their own speech to, and differences from, the speech of others. This involves examining where participants believe dialect areas to be and what the characteristics of local speech are. This paper examines dialect identification and investigates the abilities of a sample group of adolescents to place correctly local and regional varieties of English.

Face-Enhancing Strategies in Compliment Responses by Canadian University Students

This study examines strategies employed by students at Cape Breton University (Canada) in performing the speech act of responding to compliments in eight different situations. The data were collected by means of a Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. The findings suggest that the 25 participants exclusively use verbal responses and display a very strong preference for complex responses (e.g. thanking + commenting, shifting credit + offering) to boost the face of the compliment giver. Contrary to several studies that found appreciation tokens (e.g. ‘thank you`) to be the most preferred responses in many English-speaking regions, the respondents in our study most commonly combine appreciation tokens with comments. Overall, the participants do not use negative compliment responses and they generally employ appreciation tokens in the construction of complex responses. The present study is a contribution to research on speech acts in Canadian English and it offers a basis for comparison with other regional varieties of English or other languages.

La función del dialecto de Walter Morel en "Sons and Lovers" y claves de su traducción al español

The purpose of this essay is to examine and identify the functions of the East Midlands dialect in 5011s and Lovers in order to explore the possibilities of its translation into Spanish. The fact that this regional variety of English also expresses a deep conflict of the working and the u pper classes in this novel, makes it possible for the linguistic contrast, if not conflict, between Gertrude and Walter Morel to become patent in the target text, too. lndeed, by replacing the East Midlands dialect with a nonstandard variety of Spanish, not identified with the world of crime and marginalisation, one may find a way to partially translate a local dialect that, per se, is always an untranslatable one.

Canadian and Cameroonian English-Speaking University Students’ Compliment Strategies

This paper addressees compliment strategies in two regional varieties of English, namely Cameroon English and Canadian English. Data were collected through written Discourse Completion Tasks with 25 Canadian and 25 Cameroonian University students. The study examines similarities and differences between the two groups with regards to move structure and the head act strategies, the use of lexical and syntactic / stylistic devices and the use of supportive moves in six different situations. It was found that the Cameroonians show a very strong preference for single heads whereas the Canadians mostly favor multiple heads and that the Cameroonians use indirect compliments much more than the Canadians. The results reveal that the Canadians employ more lexical elements (adjectives, adverbs, verbs) than the Cameroonians. With regard to external modification of the core compliments, the findings suggest that the Canadians use much more supportive moves, i.e. pre-compliments and post-compliments, than the Cameroonians. Some differences were also found with regard to the situational distribution and types of internal and external modification devices.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics in L2-variety dictionaries of English

The recent decades have witnessed the incorporation of new linguistic trends into lexicography. One of these trends is a usage-based approach, with the first major application of computer-corpus data in the Collins COBUILD English dictionary (1995) and successive adaptation in other L1-dictionaries. Another, concurrent innovation — inspired by Conceptual Metaphor Theory — is the provision of conceptual information in monolingual dictionaries of English. So far, however, only the Macmillan English dictionary for advanced learners (1st and 2nd edition) has paid tribute to the fact that understanding culture-specific metaphors and being aware of metaphoric usage are crucial for learning a foreign language. Given that most of the English as lingua franca interactions take place between L2-speakers of English (see Kachru, 1994), providing conceptual information is not only a desideratum for L1- and learner dictionaries, but especially for (L2-)variety dictionaries of English. In our paper, we follow earlier tentative proposals by Polzenhagen (2007) and Wolf (2012) and present examples from A dictionary of Hong Kong English (Cummings &amp; Wolf, 2011), showing how culturally salient conceptual information can be made explicit and conceptual links between lexical items retrievable. The examples demonstrate that fixed expressions and idioms — a perennial problem for lexicographers — are explicable by means of the proposed lexicographic design, too. Our approach is cognitive-sociolinguistic in that the Conceptual Metaphor approach is coupled with the study of regional varieties of English, more specifically Hong Kong English. Our analysis is empirically backed up by corpus-linguistic insights into this L2 variety.

The Problem of Mutual Understanding across Regional Varieties of English

Recently, linguists have been concerned about the fact that the regional varieties of English are gradually drifting apart from each other. There will come a time when English speakers will have to turn to translators for making communication over everyday topics possible. The article aims to illustrate certain peculiarities observed in the word stock of the regional varieties of English in terms of the development of word meaning. The analysis of the factual material reveals that they are largely conditioned by the certain culture belonging of the given nation.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Corpus Linguistics in the UK: Resources for Sociolinguistic Research

Linguistics has drawn on the large quantities of authentic data contained in language corpora for several decades now. While debates continue regarding the nature and interpretation of such data, it is generally accepted that corpus methodologies offer a valuable perspective on language, one that complements the introspective and elicited data used in different sub-fields of linguistics. Increasingly, language corpora can be searched or downloaded over the Internet, and are now therefore very readily accessible. Many also include demographic or textual metadata that make them invaluable as data for sociolinguistics. While existing corpora may have some drawbacks (e.g. where the corpus design is not ideally suited to the study in hand, or available corpora do not have appropriate mark-up), they offer great savings in time and effort compared to creating a new corpus. Moreover, especially given the increasing availability of spoken texts in corpora, they constitute excellent resources for students of different levels, for teachers looking for a quick way to demonstrate a feature of language, and for researchers testing linguistic hypotheses.

A study of backchannels in regional varieties of English, using corpus mark-up as the means of identification

Backchannels are a linguistic phenomenon that remains poorly defined. Borrowing of terminology and a reliance on axiomatic definitions has resulted in a diverse nomenclature and an indeterminate inventory of forms. Further, research concentration on backchannels produced in northern hemisphere English has led to the assumption of a common repertoire across all varieties, without supporting empirical investigation. This investigation analysed transcriptions of telephone conversations drawn from the Australian and New Zealand sub-corpora of the International Corpus of English (ICE), and used the ICE corpus mark-up scheme to select potential targets. Chi-square analyses found listeners used single word backchannels more often than more elaborate forms; and Australian listeners produced more backchannels and more single forms. These findings were compared with reported usage by US English listeners, showing that while listeners worldwide draw from a common repertoire of backchannel forms, they differ in the complexity of the structures they use.

ARTHUR HUGHES, PETER TRUDGILL AND DOMINIC WATT, English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles

Arthur Hughes, Peter Trudgill and Dominic Watt, English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles. 4th ed. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. Pp. xiii, 159. Pb and accompanying CD £24.99.English accents and dialects has been the standard introductory textbook on varieties of English in the British Isles since it first appeared in 1979. It is well known and widely used as the only compact and affordable textbook providing detailed descriptions of a range of accents and dialects, as well as introductory chapters dealing with issues of social and regional variation and change. Although successive editions have expanded the range of varieties included and updated references, this fourth edition has undergone a more thorough overhaul, with a new co-author on board in the sociophonetician Dominic Watt. The new edition is accompanied by a digitally remastered CD with recordings of the transcribed interviews and word lists, and it includes new sections on the varieties spoken in Aberdeen, Galway, and “Leicester,” along with exercises on these.