Stephanie Lindemann

“It’s just real messy”: the occurrence and function of just in a corpus of academic speech

Abstract This study investigates the roles of just, a lexical item that is among the most frequent in distinguishing academic speech data from roughly comparable written data, in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Concordance analysis showed that just frequently co-occurs with metadiscourse and hedging; a closer functional analysis in selected speech events showed that these collocations were often used with a mitigating function. Minimizers, including limiters as well as mitigators, together made up the overwhelming majority of tokens, while the more frequently taught “temporal” function was much less common, especially in the more formal speech events. Analysis of the phonetic forms of the various functions of just suggest that the mitigating use involves a very reduced token, whereas other functions such as that paraphrasable by “exactly” are more likely to use a full vowel and to be stressed. This suggests that materials for teaching non-native speakers academic English would benefit from greater attention to issues of phonetic detail, as an inappropriately stressed mitigating just may be misinterpreted by native listeners.

Stereotypes of Cantonese English, apparent native/non-native status, and their effect on non-native English speakers’ perception

Abstract This study examined the effect of information about native/non-native speaker status on non-native listeners’ perception of English words with word-final stops. A survey study conducted with 38 Chinese learners of English in Guangzhou, China examined their stereotypes about Cantonese English. They described it negatively and named features including flat intonation and deleted/incomplete word-final sounds. Fifty-two learners from the same university participated in the listening study. These participants listened to recordings by a native American-English speaker. Half of the participants were told that the speaker was American, whereas the other half were told that she was Cantonese. When the speaker was said to be American, listeners tended to hear words as produced with a fully released stop, including aspiration and/or an epenthetic vowel, although aspiration/an epenthetic vowel was often not present. When the speaker was said to be Cantonese, listeners tended to hear stops as actually produced, whether fully released or not. The results reveal that non-native listeners do not necessarily judge the pronunciation of non-native speakers according to stereotypes, such as the stereotype that Cantonese-accented English does not release word-final stops. However, their idealised perception of native English results in more negative perception of the same features in non-native speech.

What the Other Half Gives: the Interlocutor’s Role in Non-native Speaker Performance

Research on non-native speaker performance in the target language has, unsurprisingly, tended to focus on the non-native alone. Such a focus seems especially logical if we are investigating a speaker’s basic language skills such as pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammar, which are relatively easy to assess in a rather artificial situation in which both the material to be tested and the amount of natural interaction are limited. Likewise, the behaviour of the ‘interlocutor’ is of lesser importance when we consider non-native writing, although it is not completely irrelevant, as for example Donald Rubin and Melanie Williams-James (1997) have shown that mainstream teachers’ beliefs about writers’ nationalities may influence their evaluation of the writing.

The role of the descriptor ‘broken English’ in ideologies about nonnative speech

This study investigates how the descriptor ‘broken English’ is used to construct speakers as nonnative within standard language ideology. In-depth analysis of examples found through WebCorp, used to search US websites, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English found that the term was largely used to refer to comprehensible English identified as nonnative. Users of such English were constructed as Other, usually highly negatively. The rarer cases of more positive descriptions referred to encounters outside English-speaking countries, consistent with monolingualist ideology, and when used for a more distantly superior person, made them more attractive through greater apparent accessibility. Four mechanisms are discussed by which use of the term naturalizes ideologies. Crucially, its ambiguity promotes slippage between ‘neutral’ and negative uses, allowing any English identified as nonnative to be characterized as ‘broken’, slipping into ‘not English’, with such descriptions treated as an acceptable way to identify nonnative speakers as public menace. (Standard language ideology, ideology of nativeness, monolingualist ideology, Othering, corpus-informed research)*

Listener variability and multiple perception processes

The relationship between the perception of individual phonemes and the perception of words is investigated to determine if these are similar tasks for listeners. Since listeners may be able to use top‐down processes in full words, it is argued that, at least for some, the task of identifying isolated phonemes may be very different from the task of identifying a full word. Because greater variability in performance is expected from non‐native speakers, 15 native speakers of Sudanese Arabic (as well as a control group of 12 native speakers of American English) were tested on identification of American English phonemes in word context and the same instance of these phonemes extracted from the words. The overall agreement between corresponding items on the two tests was significantly better than chance, but scores of individual subjects varied substantially, with phoneme‐word test agreement falling below chance for many subjects. Additionally, not all non‐native subjects performed better on the full word task...