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Negation in the History of English

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Relativization strategies in Earlier African American Vernacular English

This article, which examines the system of relative markers in Early African American English as documented in the Ex-Slave Recordings (Bailey et al., 1991), is intended as a contribution to two areas of research: African American Vernacular English and the system of relativization in English. We found a significantly higher incidence of zero marking in adverbial relatives than in non-adverbial relatives. Among non-adverbial relatives, a variable rule analysis showed that non-humanness of the head as well as the function of the head as subject complement or subject in an existential sentence strongly favored zero relatives, and that prepositional complement heads disfavored zeroes. The lack of wh-relatives aswell as the frequency of zero subject relatives is interpreted as evidence that African American Vernacular English is a dialect of English

As and other relativizers after same in present-day standard English

This is a large-scale corpus study of relative constructions containing same in the antecedent. These differ from other relative constructions in that they permit the use of as as a relativizer and thus offer different possibilities of variation than other relative constructions, something that has not been well described in handbooks. We found that same-constructions occur much more frequently with relativizers having adverbial function, and that they also show a different semantic patterning than other adverbial relative constructions. The most common relativizer in speech is as with over 50%; in writing, as and that each account for about a third. A variable rule analysis showed that the factors independently favouring the choice of as were the function of same as antecedent head, the functions of as as adverbial or subject complement, and occurrence in speech. There are also some differences between speech and writing when as is the relative marker in adverbial function, in that the ranking is manner-temporal-locative in speech and temporal-manner-locative in writing. We discuss our findings in the light of the pragmatics of same-constructions and consider the history of as as a relative marker in English.

From pause to word: uh, um and er in written American English

This article describes and discusses the appearance and increasing frequency of uh , um and er in American English journalistic prose from the 1960s to the early 2000s as part of the colloquialization of the language. The three variants uh , um and er are shown to have different uses in writing than in speech; in writing they can be shown to qualify as words, while their status in speech appears to be on a cline of wordhood. In writing, they belong to the class of stance adverbs, serving metalinguistic purposes. Two types are distinguished, depending on sentence placement: in initial position, uh , um and er are attitude adverbs and in medial position, they are style adverbs. Although er is dispreferred in initial position and preferred for correction of previously used words, every variant can be used for all discourse-pragmatic functions, which supports classifying them as one lexeme.

Introduction: Seven types of continuity in discourse

This issue of Language Variation and Change brings together seven articles from four continents, North and South America, Europe, and Australia, dealing with Quebec French, Brazilian Portuguese, British and Australian English, respectively. Although the geographical spread is great, the articles have in common a focus on how various discourse strategies and devices (punctors, pragmatic expressions, extension particles) maintain coherence or continuity in spoken discourse, and all subscribe to the importance of a rigorous quantitative methodology. They thus bear testimony to the important development in linguistics in recent years that regards discourse processes found mainly in unedited oral speech as crucial data offering a key to the functioning of human language (Ducrot, 1980; Roulet et al., 1985; Schegloff et al., 1977; Schiffrin, 1987; Stenstrom, 1990).