Metapragmatic Evaluation of Verbal Irony by Speakers of Russian and American English

The paper discusses metapragmatic assessment of verbal irony by speakers of Russian and American English. The research combines ideas from metapragmatics, folk linguistics and corpus linguistics. Empirical data are drawn from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Spontaneous evaluation of linguistic behavior is an important function of both explicit and implicit metapragmatic uses of language. Distributional adjectival patterns of the Russian word ирония and English irony are treated as implicit indicators of folk metapragmatic awareness. Connotations of the adjectives reflect our everyday linguistic practices and contribute to the vagueness of the notion and the definition of irony in scholarly theorizing

Coalescent Assimilation Across Wordboundaries in American English and in Polish English

Coalescent assimilation (CA), where alveolar obstruents /t, d, s, z/ in word-final position merge with word-initial /j/ to produce postalveolar /tʃ, dʒ, ʃ, ʒ/, is one of the most wellknown connected speech processes in English. Due to its commonness, CA has been discussed in numerous textbook descriptions of English pronunciation, and yet, upon comparing them it is difficult to get a clear picture of what factors make its application likely. This paper aims to investigate the application of CA in American English to see a) what factors increase the likelihood of its application for each of the four alveolar obstruents, and b) what is the allophonic realization of plosives /t, d/ if the CA does not apply. To do so, the Buckeye Corpus (Pitt et al. 2007) of spoken American English is analyzed quantitatively. As a second step, these results are compared with Polish English; statistics analogous to the ones listed above for American English are gathered for Polish English based on the PLEC corpus (Pęzik 2012). The last section focuses on what consequences for teaching based on a native speaker model the findings have. It is argued that a description of the phenomenon that reflects the behavior of speakers of American English more accurately than extant textbook accounts could be beneficial to the acquisition of these patterns

British and American English: a Comparative Study in Relation to Teaching English at Stain Purwokerto

Materi dan pembelajaran bahasa Inggris di Indonesia pada umumnya tidak terlalu memperhatikan perbedaan antara bahasaInggris model British dan America, bahkan ia merupakan campuran antara keduanya. Memang kedua bahasa tersebut pada umumnyahampir sama, namun beberapa hal yang agak prinsip, perbedaan yang ada antara lain terletak pada sedikit tata bahasa, ucapan, dan yangpaling banyak pada kosa kata. Dengan adanya perbedaan tersebut diharapkan bagi para pengajar di perguruan tinggi (STAIN) dapatmemberikan penjelasan secukupnya kepada mahasiswa terhadap perbedaan tersebut sehingga dapat mengurangi kebingungan mereka

American English

Playbill insert for the January 24, 2004 performance by American English.https://opus.govst.edu/cpa_memorabilia/1230/thumbnail.jp

Complex systems in the history of American English

Kretzschmar 2009 has demonstrated that language in use, speech as opposed to linguistic systems as usually described by linguists, satisfies the conditions for complex systems as defined in sciences such as physics, evolutionary biology, and economics. This finding has strong methodological consequences for study of the history of American English. This paper discusses implications for the initial formation of American English and its varieties, with reference to Schneider 2007, as the product of random interactions between speakers of different input varieties of English. It also considers westward expansion of American dialects, with reference to Kretzschmar 1996, as an effect of proximity, especially along settlement routes. Finally, it describes how sociolinguistic discussions of more recent change should also be understood as occurring within the different intersecting scales of complex systems of speech in America

From demonstratives to degree words: on the origin of the intensifying function of this/that in american english

The intensifying function of this/that can be traced back to the 14th century, when they acquired their adverbial status as a result of a grammaticalization process that turned them from deictic demonstratives into degree adverbs with the meaning of ‘to this/that extent, so much, so’ (OED s.v. this/that adv.). These intensifiers have had different ups and downs in the history of English. In spite of their origin in Late Middle English, they are practically not attested from the 16th to the 18th centuries, starting to appear again from the beginning of the 19th century onwards. The actual rise of the construction, however, takes place at the beginning of the following century, even though the intensifier this is usually found to lag behind its counterpart that, both in terms of occurrence and collocational use. The present paper investigates the use and distribution of the intensifying function of this/that in American English with the following objectives: (a) to trace their origin and grammaticalization as degree words in English; (b) to evaluate their quantitative dimension from a historical perspective; and (c) to assess their distribution across speech, writing and text types; and (d) to cast light on the lexico-semantic structure of the right-hand collocates in terms of their mode of construal. The source of evidence comes from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech