Introduction: Seven types of continuity in discourse

This issue of Language Variation and Change brings together seven articles from four continents, North and South America, Europe, and Australia, dealing with Québec French, Brazilian Portuguese, British and Australian English, respectively. Although the geographical spread is great, the articles have in common a focus on how various discourse strategies and devices (punctors, pragmatic expressions, extension particles) maintain coherence or continuity in spoken discourse, and all subscribe to the importance of a rigorous quantitative methodology. They thus bear testimony to the important development in linguistics in recent years that regards discourse processes found mainly in unedited oral speech as crucial data offering a key to the functioning of human language (Ducrot, 1980; Roulet et al., 1985; Schegloff et al., 1977; Schiffrin, 1987; Stenström, 1990

Not-negation revisited: variation between a and any in verb complements in contemporary spoken American English

In not-negated English sentences with indefinite expressions following the verb, there is variation between the indefinite article and any as determiners of nouns. The standard view is that singular count nouns take the indefinite article and singular non-count and plural nouns take any. However, it is possible to encounter examples like it isn't any threat, there isn't any lock or I don't have any problem.The article studies variation between the indefinite article and any as post-verbal determiners of singular nouns in 21,084 not-negated sentences in the spoken component of The Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA SPOK. The indefinite article is dominant with 90 per cent of the tokens. Variation is extremely rare in sentences with copular be and much more frequent in sentences with existential be and have. Among the reasons for variation between verb types is the use of do-support with have (but not with be). Expressions such as have a job/car/home or there's not a/an with uncontracted not may also prevent the use of any. Variation occurs mostly with abstract nouns such as problem, choice, way, place, reason. This finding is surprising as abstract nouns have rarely been discussed in the literature on varying countability of nouns

Relativization strategies in Earlier African American Vernacular English

This article, which examines the system of relative markers in Early African American English as documented in the Ex-Slave Recordings (Bailey et al., 1991), is intended as a contribution to two areas of research: African American Vernacular English and the system of relativization in English. We found a significantly higher incidence of zero marking in adverbial relatives than in non-adverbial relatives. Among non-adverbial relatives, a variable rule analysis showed that non-humanness of the head as well as the function of the head as subject complement or subject in an existential sentence strongly favored zero relatives, and that prepositional complement heads disfavored zeroes. The lack of wh-relatives aswell as the frequency of zero subject relatives is interpreted as evidence that African American Vernacular English is a dialect of Englis

Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study

One area in language and gender research that has so far received only little attention is the extent to which the sexes make use of what recent corpus research has termed “conversational grammar.” The author’s initial findings have suggested that the majority of features distinctive of conversational grammar may be used predominantly by female speakers. This article reports on a study designed to test the hypothesis that conversational grammar is “feminine grammar” in the sense that women’s conversational language is more adapted to the conversational situation than men’s. Based on data from the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus and following the situational framework for the description of conversational features elaborated in the author’s previous research, features distinctive of conversational grammar are grouped into five functional categories and their normed frequencies compared across the sexes. The functional categories distinguish features that can be seen as adaptations to constraints set by the situational factors of (1) Shared Context, (2) Co-Construction, (3) Real-Time Processing, (4) Discourse Management, and (5) Relation Management. The study’s results, described in detail in relation to the biological category of speaker sex and cultural notions of gender, suggest that the feminine grammar hypothesis is valid

Introduction: Seven types of continuity in discourse

This issue of Language Variation and Change brings together seven articles from four continents, North and South America, Europe, and Australia, dealing with Québec French, Brazilian Portuguese, British and Australian English, respectively. Although the geographical spread is great, the articles have in common a focus on how various discourse strategies and devices (punctors, pragmatic expressions, extension particles) maintain coherence or continuity in spoken discourse, and all subscribe to the importance of a rigorous quantitative methodology. They thus bear testimony to the important development in linguistics in recent years that regards discourse processes found mainly in unedited oral speech as crucial data offering a key to the functioning of human language (Ducrot, 1980; Roulet et al., 1985; Schegloff et al., 1977; Schiffrin, 1987; Stenström, 1990