David Britain

Diffusion, Levelling, Simplification, and Reallocation in Past Tense BE in the English Fens.

In the dialect contact framework proposed by Trudgill (1986), relatively little research has investigated the consequences of the mixing of different grammatical systems of English. The apparent time survey of the Fenland dialect of eastern England reported here provides an example of a range of dialect contact processes reconfiguring variable patterns of past tense BE, resulting in a variety with analogical levelling to was in positive contexts –‘the farms was’– and to weren’t in negative clauses –‘the farm weren’t’. In focussing this was/weren’t pattern, a number of the processes typical of koine´isation can be observed –diffusion (the geographical and/or social spread of a linguistic form from another socio-geographical place), levelling (the eradication of marked or minority forms in situations of dialect competition, where the number of variants in the output is dramatically reduced from the number in the input), simplification (a relative diminution of grammatical irregularity and redundancy) and reallocation (where two (or more) ingredient variants of the dialect mix are refunctionalised to serve new social, stylistic, or, as here, grammatical roles).

Investigating the sociolinguistic gender paradox in a multilingual community: A case study from the Republic of Palau

The focus of this article is the supposed “Gender Paradox,” proposed by Labov(1990,2001), which suggests that women are both sometimes conservative and sometimes innovative in terms of linguistic variation and change. Here we explore the paradox from two perspectives: we in vestigate both its applicability to multilingual as opposed to multidialectal communities as well as question whether the paradox is methodological or real. Although much sociolinguistic research on the paradox has been on macro studies of men versus women in monolingual multidialectal communities, this paper presents quantitative analyses supplemented by in-depth ethnographic observation and data collection in a multilingual Japanese-Palauan community of the Western Pacific. What is more, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the “conservatism” and “innovation” of women in the community under scrutiny is represented by the use of the very same language—Japanese. For older Japanese-Palauan women, the greater use of Japanese represents adherence to their heritage language. Among younger Japanese-Palauan women(most of whom are bilingual in Palauan and English), however, the use of Japanese represents a change to wards a language highly valued in the economy as essential for the promotion of tourism and trade. Since our results demonstrate that the effects of gender on language behavior may appear in differences within sex groupings, we conclude that the paradox is methodological, rather than real, and is a result of the distillling of gender down to binary male-female categories of analysis, rather than investigating the complexity of gender more qualitatively. Our ethnographic analysis of multilingual data from Palau presented here demonstrates that function as well as form are important in understanding seemingly paradoxical examples of language shift, as well as highlighting the need both for further research on the effects of gender in multilingual communities and the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis in studies of language change.

Linguistics: Phonemes, syllables and phonological processes

We began section 2 by asking how many sounds there are in English, but we found there were various practical difficulties in responding to this question and never arrived at an answer. There is a further reason why the question cant be answered straightforwardly, and understanding this is our first concern in this section. In fact, speech sounds can differ from each other in a non-discrete, continuous fashion. We can see this particularly easily in the vowel system. One of the main differences between the [iː] of read [ɹiːd] and the [ɪ] of rid [ɹɪd] is length. But just how long is a long vowel? An emphatic pronunciation of read , say in a plaintive ‘Leave me alone – Im trying to READ’, has a much longer vowel than a non-emphatic pronunciation. The precise length of any vowel will depend on the rate of speaking, degree of emphasis and so on. A similar case is presented by the aspirated plosives. In any dialect, a [p h ] sound, as in the word pit , will be aspirated to a greater or lesser extent depending on the degree of emphasis. We see, therefore, that there is a sense in which sounds form a continuum; from this perspective, there is an infinite number of speech sounds in any language. Phonemes Fortunately, there is another perspective from which sounds are discrete units or segments , and we can come to terms with this by asking what is the difference between the words pit and bit ?

Lexical processing and the mental lexicon

An adult native speaker of English with a normal speech rate produces more than 150 words per minute – on average, more than one word every half second. Indeed, under time pressure, for example, when you are calling your friend in New Zealand from a public telephone in Britain or the United States, a native speaker can produce one word every 200 ms, which is less than a quarter of a second, and your friend can still understand what you are saying. The lexicon of an average native speaker of English contains about 30,000 words. This means that in fluent speech you have to choose continuously from these 30,000 alternatives, not just once, but two to five times per second, and there is no clear limit on how long you can indulge in this process. Furthermore, your friend is recognising your words at the same rate at the other end of the telephone line. If you wanted to, and had enough money, you could make the telephone companies happy by talking to your New Zealand friend for hours, with a decision rate of one word every 200–400 ms. Incredibly, despite the high speed of lexical processing, errors in the production and comprehension of words are very rare. Research has revealed that in a corpus of 200,000 words, getting on for twice the length of this book, only 86 lexical errors were found, i.e., fewer than 1 in every 2,000 words.