349 research outputs found
The concept of identity in the East Midlands of England
Investigating feelings of identity in East Midlands adolescent
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'I'm not a fanatic Scot, but I love Glasgow'. Concepts of local and national identity in Glasgow
In this article, a grounded theory approach is used to explore notions of national and local identity held by two groups of Glaswegians: those residing in Glasgow and those living in England (sample size = 17). The data suggest that both groups have a strong sense of Glaswegian as well as Scottish identity, but there appear to be some differences between participants. Some Glasgow participants seem to identify more strongly with the negative prestige of Glasgow. For those living in England, a sense of being Scottish is more important being than Glaswegian as it allows a clear differentiation from being English. Neither group felt that a sense of Britishness forms a strong part of their identity as this has English connotations
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Representation of domestic violence in two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Sun, 2009-2011
This article contains an analysis of the representation of domestic violence in two British newspapers between 2009-2011. This is a somewhat overlooked subject compared to research into media reports on rape and sexual assault. This study examine s whether similar linguistic devices are used in domestic violence reports as in rape reports. The analysis uses a grounded theory approach to investigate common themes in reporting of domestic violence and the linguistic devices that are used in newspaper reports. This study draws on a corpus collected by the author to examine the similarities and differences between The Guardian, a broadsheet, and The Sun, a tabloid newspaper. It concludes that there are significant similarities between the reporting of domestic violence and that of rape and sexual violence
What underlies the neuropsychological pattern of irregular>regular past-tense verb production?
The disadvantage in producing the past tense of regular relative to irregular verbs shown by some patients with non-fluent aphasia has been alternatively attributed (a) to the failure of a specific rule-based morphological mechanism, or (b) to a more generalised phonological impairment that penalises regular verbs more than irregular owing to the on-average greater phonological complexity of regular past-tense forms. Guided by the second of these two accounts, the current study was designed to identify more specific aspects of phonological deficit that might be associated with the pattern of irregular > regular past-tense production. Non-fluent aphasic patients (N = 8) were tested on past-tense verb production tasks and assessed with regard to the impact of three main manipulations in other word-production tasks: (i) insertion of a delay between stimulus and response in repetition; (ii) presence/ number of consonant clusters in a target word in repetition; (iii) position of stress within a bi-syllabic word in repetition and picture naming. The performance of all patients deteriorated in delayed repetition; but the patients with the largest discrepancy between regular and irregular past-tense production showed greater sensitivity to the other two manipulations. The phonological nature of the factors that correlated with verb-inflection performance emphasises the role of a phonological deficit in the observed pattern of irregular > regular
The relationship between phonological and morphological deficits in Broca's aphasia: further evidence from errors in verb inflection
A previous study of 10 patients with Broca’s aphasia demonstrated that the advantage for producing the past tense of irregular over regular verbs exhibited by these patients was eliminated when the two sets of past-tense forms were matched for phonological complexity (Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003). The interpretation given was that a generalised phonological impairment was central to the patients’ language deficits, including their poor performance on regular past tense verbs. The current paper provides further evidence in favour of this hypothesis, on the basis of a detailed analysis of the errors produced by these same 10 patients in reading, repetition, and sentence completion for a large number of regular, irregular, and nonce verbs. The patients’ predominant error types in all tasks and for all verb types were close and distant phonologically related responses. The balance between close and distant errors varied along three continua: the severity of the patient (more distant errors produced by the more severely impaired patients); the difficulty of the task (more distant errors in sentence completion > reading > repetition); the difficulty of the item (more distant errors for novel word forms than real verbs). A position analysis for these phonologically related errors revealed that vowels were most likely to be preserved and that consonant onsets and offsets were equally likely to be incorrect. Critically, the patients’ errors exhibited a strong tendency to simplify the phonological form of the target. These results are consistent with the notion that the patients’ relatively greater difficulty with regular past tenses reflects a phonological impairment that is sensitive to the complexity of spoken forms
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Using and creating oral history in dialect research
This article considers the use of recorded oral history and how existing collections can be used and supplemented in regional dialect research. We consider what was learned from one joint and two independent sociolinguistic projects carried out by the authors in the East Midlands region of England. The joint study used mainly archival oral history, while the others collected data in part from oral history interviews undertaken with local community groups. We explore the strengths and limitations of oral history collections within sociolinguistic research and discuss how some of the methodological challenges (including ethical issues in secondary use of archival data) were met in our own studies. We argue that closer collaboration between oral historians and sociolinguists, particularly in the sharing of data collection and analysis methods, would benefit both fields
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FOOT-fronting and FOOT–STRUT splitting: vowel variation in the East Midlands
This article investigates the status of the FOOT–STRUT split in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the East Midlands of England. The East Midlands area is a linguistic transition zone between northern English varieties with a phoneme inventory of five short vowels, where FOOT and STRUT are represented by the same phoneme, and southern English varieties which have the FOOT–STRUT split and therefore six short vowels. However, a lack of research on the distribution of the FOOT and STRUT vowels in the East Midlands exists and to fill that gap, this article examines the possible diffusion of the split northwards as predicted by Trudgill (1986). Reading-passage data, stratified by age group, sex and location is used to provide an apparent time, multilocal view on the distribution of the two vowel categories. Surprisingly, the changes that we notice do not concern the increasing distance between FOOT and STRUT but mainly FOOT-fronting in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and STRUT-retraction in Derbyshire which leads to an increase in overlap between FOOT and STRUT in all three counties
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Performing identity on screen: language, identity, and humour in Scottish television comedy
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Safeguarding language as intangible cultural heritage
The UK currently lacks a national framework for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (ICH). ICH represents ‘living cultural expressions and practices, which are recognised by communities as distinct aspects of identity’ (Alivizatou-Barakou et al. 2017, 129). We argue that language, including dialects, accents and lexicons of UK communities, must be included within approaches which aim to safeguard ICH. As a ‘repository’(Bialostocka 2017) of community practices, language is central to individual and shared identities and feelings of ‘belonging’(Sarma 2015). This paper challenges perceptions that the UK has no ICH (see Waterton and Smith 2009) through a case study of ‘pit talk’ in the East Midlands. It draws on approaches being taken on local or regional levels to preserve and revitalise language heritage (e.g. Howell 2013; ICH Scotland n.d.). We explore the potential benefits, disadvantages and limitations of the UK ratifying UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003. Although we argue that this would be a positive step towards protecting ICH in the UK, we propose that a UK-wide framework, which places community needs at its heart, is key to safeguarding language heritage for future generations
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How “U” are “U” words?: exploring variation in the usage and perception of class-based lexical shibboleths in British English
That U (upper-class) speakers and non-U (non-upper class) speakers are identifiable through the use of vocabulary is something of an axiom in England. These claims are repeated in books, magazine and newspaper articles, on social media, and in conversations regarding social class. However, such claims are seldom subject to empirical investigation. In order to redress this, we consider the production and perception of U and non-U lexis through two studies. In the first study, we identify the social and stylistic variation of three variables which are purported to be indicators of socioeconomic status, namely, LOO, NAPKIN, and SOFA. The second study employs the matched-guise technique to investigate the perception of lexical variants of these three variables. The production results reveal that all three variables exhibit change in apparent-time with some, but limited, evidence of class-based variation. In the perception study, we find no systematic class-based indexicalities across the three variables. Ultimately, our findings challenge the belief that U words are shibboleths of upper-classness
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