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This study examines compound stress in Igbo and Yoruba accents of Nigerian English and juxtaposes their patterns with Standard British English (SBE). Speech recorded from 60 educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of Nigerian English and three Britons served as data and control respectively. These recordings were analysed perceptually and acoustically. Using simple percentage and chi-square, occurrence of tokens and levels of significance were checked between the compound stress patterns of educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of English and SBE at 0.05 (p ≤ .05). Optimality theory serves as the theoretical framework. The findings indicate that educated Igbo and Yoruba speakers of Nigerian English, though share certain patterns with SBE, have significant patterns of variations in compound stress assignment. There was a systematic attempt by the Nigerian participants to align left, while SBE aligns right. This showed the propensity of the participants to analogically accentuate the constituent of the compounds that carry significant information. This pattern was supported by the higher pitch and durational values recorded by speakers of educated Igbo and Yoruba accents of Nigerian English. Even in cases where there were similarities in the patterns, the acoustic features vary. This is common to both accents of Nigerian English.

People usually express their feelings and emotions positively to others when they have happy occasions. However, the ways of expressing congratulation may vary because the expressive speech act “congratulations” is not the only way to express happiness and share others their happy news. The present study investigates the congratulation strategies of Pakistani English as second language (ESL) learners and British English speakers under the influence of social distance variable. A quantitative approach is applied in the analysis with the frequency of strategies (semantic formulas) being numerically analyzed. The current study recruited 120 participants, and who were further divided into four different groups: 30 British English speakers, 30 Pakistani ESL learners in the elite class, 30 Pakistani ESL learners of the middle class, and 30 Pakistani ESL learners in the lower class. For data collection, a discourse completion test (DCT) was used as a tool. The findings reveal that the most frequently used types of congratulation strategy are illocutionary force indicating device (IFID) followed by overlapped strategies (a combination of two), an offer of a good wish, expression of happiness, request for information, encouragement, expression of surprise, and suggestion of celebration , while other types of strategies are not used by the participants. The study reveals the existence of crosscultural differences in the use of congratulations by Pakistani ESL learners. The findings further show how the middle and lower class of Pakistani ESL learners use a more elaborated form of compliment responses (CRs) as compared to Pakistani ESL learners of elite and British English speakers. The findings may help in understanding the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of Pakistani ESL learners as compared to British English speakers.

Studies in modality comprise a complex canon of functional, formal, sociological and diachronic analyses of language. The current understanding of how English language speakers use modality is unclear; while some research argues that core modal auxiliaries are in decline, they are reported as increasing elsewhere. A lack of contemporary and representative spoken language data has rendered it difficult to reconcile such differing perspectives. To address this issue, this article presents a diachronic study of modality using the Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken component of the BNC1994. We investigate the frequency of core modal auxiliaries, semi-modals, and lexical modality-indicating devices (MIDs), as well as the modal functions of the core modal auxiliaries, in informal spoken British English, between the 1990s and 2010s. The results of the analysis are manifold. We find that core modal auxiliaries appear to be in decline, while semi-modals and lexical MIDs appear relatively stable. However, on a form-by-form basis, there is significant evidence of both increases and decreases in the use of individual expressions within each modal set. As a result, this study problematises form-based studies of change, and illustrates the value and coherence that functional analyses of modality can afford future work.

The present study investigated the production of British English (BrE) vowels by Yemeni-Arabic learners of English. Specifically, the most problematic BrE vowels for those learners were explored in relation to Lados’ (1957) contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) and Flege’s (1995) Speech Learning Model (SLM). Sixty-seven Yemeni EFL learners at different proficiency levels completed a questionnaire, which mainly explored how difficult the BrE vowels are for them, and a vowel production test, which measured the learners’ production accuracy of the BrE vowels. Overall, the results revealed that Yemeni EFL learners encountered some difficulties when pronouncing BrE vowels, but their production accuracy rates increased as their levels grow. It was found that the same vowels, /e/, /ɒ/, /eə/, /ɔ:/, /ʊ/ & /u:/, were found to be the most inaccurately produced sounds by learners at all levels. The subtle differences between vowels might have caused the learners’ production problems. Findings also showed that learners’ L1 vowels that are different from the BrE vowels were easier to produce, and this is congruent with the SLM.

In the present paper I investigate, from a Minimalist perspective and using data from the Freiburg English Dialect corpus, the patterns of Negative Concord (NC) attested in different Traditional Dialects of British English. By arguing that lexical variation exists in the negative operator used to express sentential negation, which is truly semantic in Standard English but carries an interpretable negative feature in Traditional Dialects of British English, I explain why NC, understood as syntactic Agree between [iNeg] and [uNeg] features, is attested in the latter but not in the former. In the same vein, by arguing that in Traditional Dialects of British English two lexical entries are possible for n-words which contrast in the interpretability of the negative feature they carry ([iNeg] vs. [uNeg]), the optionality of NC in the studied Non-Standard dialects of English as well as the different patterns observed in the data can be accounted for.

Explores the acoustic nature of Singapore English. In directly comparable samples of British and Singapore English, two types of acoustic measurements were taken--calculation of a variability index reflecting changes in vowel length over utterances, and measurements reflecting vowel quality. Findings provide acoustic data that support the hypothesized cross-varietal difference in rhythmic patterning. (Author/VWL)

The evolution of pronunciations in mainly British English dictionaries is traced from their beginnings, with accounts of certain neglected figures in the field. In the paper we discuss how representations of pronunciations have developed from being indicated by means of conventional spelling with the addition of marks and numbers to more sophisticated systems of phonetic notation. A significant feature of the twenty-first century is the addition of spoken pronunciations of the items.

The emergence and development of the Way construction was famously examined by Israel (1996) in a study which traced the modern form of the construction to three senses or subschemas, namely manner of motion (He stumbled his way to the front door), means of motion (He dug his way out of the prison) and incidental activity (He whistled his way out of the room). The present article moves beyond the late Middle English period – the starting point of Israel's research – and looks at the precursors of the Way construction since Old English times, as well as its interaction with the Intransitive Motion construction (IMC) (He walked into the room). By approaching the data in terms of Goldberg's typology (1997) of verb-construction relationships, which is finer-grained than Israel's tripartite division, the analysis identifies the areas of conceptual and constructional overlap that have existed between the Way construction and the IMC in the course of history, and shows that the Way construction has gradually specialised in the expression of those relations which could not be readily coded in the IMC, such as means of motion and incidental activity. The study thus seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how the constructicon, the repertory of constructions making up the grammar of a language, may change over time.

The expansion of English worldwide tends to be both seen and marketed uncritically, as a universally relevant lingua franca and medium of education. The post-1945 expansion of English was a deliberate policy of the US and UK governments, foreseen in a speech by Churchill. Elsewhere Churchill endorsed university academic freedom and autonomy, which neoliberal forces currently constrain. Imperial languages are promoted by means of linguicism, which many contemporary policies exemplify. Increased use of English results in a macro-sociolinguistic tension between national linguistic capital accumulation or dispossession. European colonisation was legitimated by the fraudulent myth of terra nullius . Americanisation worldwide is furthered by projecting US norms and lifestyle as a cultura nullius for all. English is marketed as a lingua nullius , for instance in British promotion of English worldwide, as though English is a universal ‘basic skill’. This is false argumentation that echoes colonial discourse. Privileging English intensifies the gaps between the world’s haves and have-nots. This is also now in effect in the countries of the European Union. Critical scholarship is needed to connect macro-level analysis with micro-level conceptual myth-making promoting global English.

We present a new database of lexical decision times for English words and nonwords, for which two groups of British participants each responded to 14,365 monosyllabic and disyllabic words and the same number of nonwords for a total duration of 16 h (divided over multiple sessions). This database, called the British Lexicon Project (BLP), fills an important gap between the Dutch Lexicon Project (DLP; Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, Frontiers in Language Sciences . Psychology, 1, 174, 2010 ) and the English Lexicon Project (ELP; Balota et al., 2007 ), because it applies the repeated measures design of the DLP to the English language. The high correlation between the BLP and ELP data indicates that a high percentage of variance in lexical decision data sets is systematic variance, rather than noise, and that the results of megastudies are rather robust with respect to the selection and presentation of the stimuli. Because of its design, the BLP makes the same analyses possible as the DLP, offering researchers with a new interesting data set of word-processing times for mixed effects analyses and mathematical modeling. The BLP data are available at http://crr.ugent.be/blp and as Electronic Supplementary Materials .