Book review of Danish Humour – SINK OR SWIM

Book review of Danish Humour – SINK OR SWIM by Lita Lundquist and Helen Dyrbye, Samfundslitteratur, 2022

Erratum: Two directions of change in one corpus

ORIGINAL ARTICLE 12 February 2015: Marie Møller Jensen Two directions of change in one corpus: Phonology vs morphosyntax in Tyneside English  -  DOI: https://doi.org/10.5278/ojs.globe.v1i0.698 References to Rowe (2009) have been added in the text and a footnote has been added noting the diverging findings of said study and the one reported in the paper at hand. Cheshire et al. (2005) argue that different levels of language do not necessarily follow the same patterns of change over time. In an attempt to test this prediction, this article reports on a comparison between two quantitative corpus studies of Tyneside English which are partly based on the same data. The first study was carried out by Watt and investigated levelling in the phonological variables in the FACE and GOAT lexical set (Watt 2002) based on data collected in 1994. Watt found that speakers were abandoning broad local vernacular variants in favour of more regional or generally Northern forms. The second study was a study of seven morphosyntactic variables based on data collected in the 1960s, 1994 and 2007-2009. This study found that the variables under investigation were either stable over time or used more frequently in the most recent data. Thus, the comparison of the two studies shows support for Cheshire et al. (2005). This difference in the direction of change is explained by socio-psychological processes linking linguistic forms, the local Tyneside area and speaker identity. More specifically, it is argued that speakers imbue local vernacular variants with social meaning (Podesva 2006). This means that speakers create a social index (Silverstein 2003) which links linguistic forms and additional non-denotational meanings through processes of enregisterment (Agha 2003). This allows speakers to express an affiliation with their local area and all that it represents to them at a time when this area is undergoing vast changes

What can Google Trends data tell us about dialect labels: An exploratory study

The aim of this article is twofold: firstly, it sets out to explore the usefulness of Google Trends to the study of language and the perception of variants and, secondly, it investigates the social realities of dialect labels as reflected in searches on the Internet search engine Google. Google Trends is an online tool which is freely available and allows you to map the search volume of search terms across time and space, and also see which other related searches Google users performed within the specified time period or area. In this way, Google Trends can perhaps help us shed light on what it is Google users are curious about or interested in when they search for words such as Geordie, Scouse and Cockney – is it the dialects which the labels denote or is it something else? The study thus takes as its primary interest the application of the Google Trends search tool to the study of folk perceptions of dialect labels and, as a secondary aim, if this can be used to uncover what these dialect labels denote to lay people. With regard to the first aim, the study found that using Google Trends data can be useful in the early stages of perceptual dialectology studies of dialects and dialect labels. With regard to the second aim, the main finding of the study was that there are vast differences between the three dialect labels investigated here, both in terms of sheer search volume over time  but also with regard to the collocates with which they are associated. Explanations for some of the patterns of search volume over time and the differences between the three dialect labels are sought by considering the impact of popular culture and TV shows

The Hunger Games’ grammatik: Integreret grammatikundervisning i praksis

This article examines the potential for integrated grammar teaching (IGT) based on stylistic analysis of the novel, The Hunger Games, in the Danish upper secondary educational system (HF). Since the 1990s, the importance of combining communication and grammar teaching has been emphasized; however, the Danish upper secondary schools have not embraced the scientific findings. This article exemplifies how to close the gap between research and reality with IGT through the following two perspectives: with an eye to developing teaching materials and through a stylistic analysis of chapter 11 of The Hunger Games, we firstly analyze how modality characterizes the narrator of The Hunger Games, Katniss. The stylistic analysis reveals that the homodiegetic narrator’s assessments of the hypothetical risks relating to the people and the world around her are expressed through epistemic modality in the form of modal verbs. Secondly, based on the stylistic analysis, we develop, test and discuss teaching materials for IGT for the English b-level[1] at HF. Our results demonstrate that IGT is challenging, motivating and educational: the pupils acquire the basic characteristics of modality to some degree and manage to use their linguistic findings to characterize the narrator. The evaluation shows that the learners could benefit from less concentrated IGT and more variation; this could possibly be achieved by mixing IGT with other aspects of the curriculum. The study also shows that, while it is possible to develop teaching material for IGT based on stylistic analysis, an in-depth stylistic analysis (like the one reported here) is not necessary for teaching at this level, an important factor which could reduce the teacher’s preparation time.   [1] English b unofficially corresponds to B2 (Undervisningsministeriet 2018a) at the CEFR, The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, put together by the Council of Europe (Exam English 2014)