Full Description
This book provides a collection of articles that reflect the current state of affairs in the blossoming field of World Englishes by bringing together several innovative synchronic and diachronic approaches. It contributes to the ongoing theoretical discussion concerning the criteria that make a low-frequency item represent an incipient change and examines the suitability of the sociolinguistics of globalisation theory for the study of non-traditional avenues for the spread of vernacular varieties of English (recent migrations, the entertainment industry, the web). It explores crucial aspects of language change and dialect evolution through the study of grammatical phenomena and the particular linguistic and socio-historical factors conditioning them. Together with theoretical questions, the volume shows a concern for methodological issues, such as sociolinguistic interviews, map-task experiments, metalinguistic comments, acceptability judgments and corpus-based methods. This volume represents the latest trends in the field and will undoubtedly set the agenda for the years ahead.
Contents
1. Acknowledgments (by Seoane, Elena); 2. World Englishes Today (by Seoane, Elena); 3. Englishes beyond and between the three circles: World Englishes research in the age of globalization (by Mair, Christian); 4. Error, feature, (incipient) change - or something else altogether? On the role of low-frequency deviant patterns for the description of Englishes (by Hundt, Marianne); 5. He don't like football, does he? A corpus-based study of third person singular don't in the language of British teenagers (by Palacios Martinez, Ignacio M.); 6. Standards of English in the Caribbean: History, attitudes, functions, features (by Hackert, Stephanie); 7. Overlap and divergence - aspects of the present perfect in World Englishes (by Werner, Valentin); 8. (Semi-)modals of necessity in Hong Kong and Indian Englishes (by Loureiro-Porto, Lucia); 9. Indian English quotatives in a diachronic perspective (by Davydova, Julia); 10. English in San Francisco Chinatown: Indexing identity with speech rhythm? (by Zipp, Lena); 11. On the globalization of English: Observations of subjective progressives in present-day Englishes (by Laitinen, Mikko); 12. World Englishes on YouTube: Treasure trove or nightmare? (by Schneider, Edgar W.); 13. Index
