Edgar W. Schneider

A Handbook of Varieties of English

Compared with the regional synopses, it is in this chapter that we shall adopt a truly bird’s-eye, or even satellite, view at morphosyntactic variation across the non-standard varieties in the English-speaking world. Relevant questions that will be addressed include the following: Which are the least and, more interestingly, most frequent morphosyntactic features in non-standard varieties of Englishes worldwide, and thus true candidates for what Chambers (2001, 2003, 2004) has called vernacular universals (section 4)? What in this respect can be said and which distinctive patterns and correlations can be identifi ed for the seven world regions investigated in this Handbook (section 5), for fi rst (L1) and second (L2) language varieties and Pidgins/Creoles within and across the seven world regions (section 6), and for individual areas of morphosyntax (section 7)? It will turn out that the patterns identifi ed in section 6 are a crucial key to understanding the patterns in sections 5 and 7. The primary source for the answers to these and other questions addressed in this global synopsis is a catalogue of 76 morphosyntactic features from 11 domains of grammar which was sent to the authors of the morphosyntax chapters of this Handbook (see section 2). For each of these 76 features the authors were asked to specify into which of the following three categories the relevant feature in the relevant variety (or set of closely related varieties) falls:The Handbook is by far the most thorough reference work on phonology and the first-ever comprehensive overview of the morphology and syntax of varieties of English in the world. The Handbook consists of a two volume book accompanied by an interactive CD-ROM. The genuine speech samples and interactive maps of the CD-ROM not only supplement the printed articles by offering lively illustrations of the varieties of English around the world, but the material offered can also be used for linguistic research. The multimedia material is now also available online. Survey Articles The books feature descriptive survey articles that are authored by widely acclaimed specialists in the field and that cover all main national standard varieties, distinctive regional, ethnic, and social varieties, major contact varieties, as well as major ESL varieties; share a common core, which makes them invaluable research tools for cross-linguistic comparisons; provide information on the historical and cultural backgrounds as well as the current sociolinguistic situations in the respective regions; serve as state-of-the-art reports on major issues in current research. CD-ROM The CD-ROM not only supplements the printed volumes through interactive access to the varieties but also provides a comprehensive database with: a unique collection of speech recordings of English from around the world; sound samples that open new perspectives on the varieties of English, as speech recordings also constitute the central aspect of research - students as well as professional academics will feel encouraged to use the material for new investigations; interactive and synchronized maps that allow either phonological or morphosyntactic (grammatical) comparisons; extensive bibliographies on the relevant research literature; links to pertinent websites. Online Version The online version provides departments of English and Linguistics with the opportunity to make the multimedia tools simultaneously available to a wider number of faculty members and students. instructors can deploy the sound samples and interactive maps to enhance their classroom presentations and to highlight important language features; researchers are provided with a database of multimedia material for further study; students can employ the data when working on classroom assignments. Together, the books and the CD-ROM are an indispensable reference work and research tool for sociolinguists, dialectologists, phonologists, grammarians, typologists, and specialists in contact languages and varieties of English around the world. Given its accessible style and its rich auditory and visual support, this Handbook is also ideally suited not only for professional academics but also for undergraduate and graduate students. The editors are responsible for the following topics: Kate Burridge/ Bernd Kortmann: Australia / Pacific Archipelagos Bernd Kortmann: British Isles: Morphology and Syntax Rajend Mesthrie: Africa / South and Southeast Asia Edgar W. Schneider: The Americas / Caribbean Clive Upton: British Isles: Phonology System requirements for the CD-ROM:Hardware: Pentium 500 MHz or AMD K6-III+ 500 MHz, PowerPC G3, 64 MB RAM, 16-bit SoundcardOperating Systems: Windows 98, NT, Me, 2000, XP/ Mac OS 9.x, X 10.x/ Linux (any distribution with Kernel 2.0)Supported Browsers: Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6 (Mac OS: Internet Explorer 5.1)/ Netscape 7.x/ Mozilla 1.0/ Mozilla Firefox 0.8Plugins: Macromedia Flash Player 6/ Acrobat Reader

The British Isles

This volumegives a detailed overview of the varieties of English spoken on the British Isles, including lesser-known varieties such as those spoken in Orkney and Shetland and the Channel Islands. The chapters, written by widely acclaimed specialists, provide concise and comprehensive information on the phonological, morphological and syntactic characteristics of each variety discussed. The articles are followed by exercises and study questions. The exercises are geared towards students and can be used for classroom assignments as well as for self study in preparation for exams. Instructors can use the exercises, sound samples and interactive maps to enhance their classroom presentations and to highlight important language features. The accompanying CD-ROM contains interactive maps and speech samples that supplement the printed articles and offer material and data for further research. The rich detail found in the chapters as well as the valuable tools on the CD-Rom make this survey of English Varieties a mainstay for researchers and teachers. Key features indispensable textbook for students of English linguistics exercises and study questions interactive CD-ROM

Exploring the interface between World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition – and implications for English as a Lingua Franca

Abstract This paper explores and attempts to explain cognitively-based similarities between ELF uses and newly-emerged World Englishes, notably ESLs (stable second-language varieties) but also EFL forms, from a theoretical perspective, with an eye on earlier scholarship, and in an exemplary case study. Starting out from definitions of some core concepts, it is argued that the common ground underlying ESL, EFL and ELF is to be found in principles of Second Language Acquisition, such as preferences for simplicity, analogy, or isomorphism. A range of earlier studies which point out parallels between these categories is critically surveyed and supplemented by some new, pertinent data drawn from the VOICE corpus. In an extended case study of select structural features of finite vs. non-finite complement clause formation in ESL varieties, the hypothesis is tested that ESLs show traces of SLA effects by preferring relatively more isomorphic structures over less transparent ones, and implications of the findings for ELF are considered. It is suggested that ESLs and ELF are related via SLA effects and cognition and that sociolinguistically stable ELF settings may be hypothesized to represent initial stages in a trajectory towards ESL formation.

Introduction to quantitative analysis of linguistic survey data : an atlas by the numbers

The Research Design of a Linguistic Atlas The Application of Statistical Tests to LAMSAS From Atlas to Database Structure The Statistical Analysis of LAMSAS Data Model Analyses of LAMSAS Data

Accommodation versus identity? A response to Trudgill

Peter Trudgills essay raises important issues, some of which are uncontroversial while others are less convincing, partly because of a narrow concept of identity and partly because of an infelicitous choice of case studies. For him, the denial of identity seems axiomatic, while I suggest that what his criticism boils down to is the relationship between accommodation and identity, and the question of when and how identity as a social concept is effective, specifically in processes of colonial and postcolonial dialect formation.

Evolutionary Patterns of New Englishes and the Special Case of Malaysian English

Abstract This article presents a model which argues that a fundamentally uniform developmental process, shaped by consistent historical, sociolinguistic and language-contact conditions, has operated in the emergence of New Englishes, and it applies this framework to a discussion of the evolution and some present-day features and usage characteristics of Malaysian English. The Dynamic Model of the evolution of New Englishes, which builds upon the mutual identity definitions by the parties involved in a colonization process and describes five consecutive phases of evolution, is sketched briefly. It is shown that the early history of English in Malaysia, from the establishment of the colony of Penang to independence, conforms nicely to the generalizations made for the first two phases, called “foundation” and “exonormative stabilization” and marked by gradually expanding elite bilingualism and slight linguistic transfer. Malaysia’s nationalist language policy of the 1960s and after impeded the further expansion and development of English in the country; nevertheless, it is shown that Malaysian English has progressed deeply into the third phase of “nativization”, being widely used in the country in various domains and employed as a carrier of a local identity having developed distinctive features of its own. Recent redirections of educational policy have given new weight and impetus to English in Malaysia in a complex sociolinguistic setting.

The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An Introduction

1. Introduction Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar W. Schneider and Jeffrey Williams Part I. The British Isles: 2. Shetlands and Orkney Gunnel Melchers and Peter Sundkvist 3. Channel Islands Mari C. Jones Part II. The Americas and the Caribbean: 4. Canadian maritimes Michael Kiefte 5. Newfoundland and Labrador Sandra Clarke 6. Honduras/Bay Islands Ross Graham 7. White Caribbean Jeffrey P. Williams 8. Bahamas Jeff Reaser, 9. Dominican Kokoy Michael Aceto 10. Anglo-Argentinian English Julian Jefferies Part III. South Atlantic Ocean: 11. Falkland Islands David Britain and Andrea Sudbury 12. St Helena Daniel Schreier 13. Tristan da Cunha Daniel Schreier Part IV. Africa: 14. White Zimbabwean English Susan Fitzmaurice 15. White Kenyan English Thomas Hoffmann Part V. Australasia and Pacific: 16. Eurasian English in Singapore Lionel Wee 17. Peranakans English in Malaysia and Singapore Lisa Lim 18. Norfolk Island and Pitcairn Peter Muhlhausler.

The Diachronic Development of the Black English Perfective Auxiliary Phrase

The perfective auxiliary structures used by lower-class Black speakers in the United States of America have certainly been one of the most prominent and most intensely discussed areas of the grammar of the dialect commonly referred to as Black English. 1 The central question of this debate has been whether the Black English system is basically identical in its underlying structure with the English one, with tense as its preeminent category, or whether, owing to a Creole origin, it is closely related to African language systems, which are characterized by monosyllabic constituents inserted between subject and predicate to denote aspectual rather than tense distinctions. It has been suggested repeatedly that done and been are relexifications of such aspect markers, the former used for perfective and the latter for remote aspect. Irrespective of the synchronic status of these forms, the question of the diachronic origin of the Black English perfectives can only be solved by a detailed analysis of a large body of valid historical data, which, however, is practically impossible to obtain for the early centuries of slavery. The best possible source is most likely the so-called Slave Narrative Collection compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project in the mid-1930’s at the instigation of John Lomax and published in 1972 by George Rawick. This collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with very old Blacks who had been

A new bibliography of writings on varieties of English 1984-1992/93

The continuing expansion of research in dialectology, sociolinguistics and English as a world language has made the field increasingly difficult to survey. This bibliography is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the relevant publications of the past few years. Like its predecessor, it will prove an indispensable reference book. The collection is in four parts, dealing respectively with general studies, Britain and Ireland, the United States and Canada, and the rest of the world. There is a joint index in which the 2800 entries are classified according to specific areas, ethnic groups and major linguistic categories, thus making the bibliography easy to use with the greatest profit. The present bibliography complements the one compiled by W. Viereck, E.W. Schneider and M. Gorlach, which covered the period from 1965 to 1983 and was published in the same series in 1984.

LAMSAS goes SASsy: Statistical Methods and Linguistic Atlas Data

This paper provides a brief overview of our recent consideration of the applicability of statistical testing procedures to Linguistic Atlas data in general and to LAMSAS in particular, and will present some preliminary results of our work. Before going into practical details, however, we feel it is important to discuss very briefly some general and theoretical problems in applying statistical machinery to Linguistic Atlas data, some restrictions that the nature of the data may impose upon possible analyses. We can then provide an account of the state of the computerization of LAMSAS, and finally offer a few examples of submitting LAMSAS data to analytical procedures in the R:Base database program and the SAS statistical package. Linguistic atlas data are revealing only insofar as they are representative of the speech of individuals beyond the immediate sample. The same assumption is required in applying statistical methods: a sample is analyzed not for its