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"English language 19th century Usage."
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The Emergence of the English Native Speaker
The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called \"New Englishes,\" where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly important linguistic ideology.
eBook
May I Quote You on That?
We all use language in different ways, depending on the situations we find ourselves in. In formal contexts we are usually expected to use a formal level of Standard English-the English codified in grammars, usage guides, and dictionaries. In May I Quote You on That? Stephen Spector offers a new approach to learning Standard English grammar and usage. The product of Spector's forty years of teaching courses on the English language, this book makes the conventions of formal writing and speech easier and more enjoyable to learn than traditional approaches usually do. Each lesson begins with humorous, interesting, or instructive illustrative quotations from writers, celebrities, and historical figures. Mark Twain appears alongside Winston Churchill, Yogi Berra, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Stephen Colbert, Oprah, Lady Gaga, and many others. These quotations allow readers to infer the rules and word meanings from context. And if they stick in readers' memory, they can serve as models for the rules they exemplify. The lessons then offer short essays, written in a conversational style, on the history of the rules or the words being discussed. But because English is constantly changing, the essays offer not only the traditional rules of Standard English, but also the current opinions of usage panelists, stylists, and language specialists. When rules are controversial, Spector offers advice about stylistic choices. A companion website features a workbook with practice drills. This book will appeal to anyone who wants to write well. It's aimed at those who are applying to college, taking the SAT, or writing a job application, an essay, or anything else that requires clear and effective communication.
eBook
Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English
The present paper is a corpus-based study which examines social roles as constructed in British nineteenth-century children's literature. Both gender roles overall as well as the more specific roles of mother and father are investigated. The main approach is to systematically study adjectival descriptions of characters both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to find recurring patterns of description that function as part of defining a social role. The method of classification is primarily through semantic domains. The study shows that the female social role is defined as involving few mental qualities, whereas a pleasant appearance is important. In contrast, social status and positive mental characteristics are important defining factors for the male social role.
eBook
A Parallel Corpus Analysis of the Pragmatic Marker “I Think”
This paper aims to explore the meanings and functions of the pragmatic marker, \"I think\", in 19th century English literature. Through a contrastive corpus analysis, we will investigate its uses in character development, narrativity, and the interplay between language and culture, using a corpus of fiction as a tool. The translation of \"I think\" into Arabic will provide valuable insight into how meanings transfer between different language cultures. The analysis reveals that \"I think\" has nuanced meanings distinct from logical markers like \"but\", and that these meanings are inherently pragmatic, relating to structural or modal discourse functions rather than propositional content. These meanings can be conceptualized as part of a radial category or semantic network, shedding light on their role in 19th-century English literature.
Journal Article
AN INVESTIGATION INTO STUDENTS' PERCEPTION OF TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING: A SURVEY-BASED STUDY
English language has become the lingua franca throughout the world since the colonial rule. However, in India, the introduction of National Education Policy 2020 has revived the usage of native, indigenous and regional languages along with the link language English. Contextualizing the same idea, this paper explores the multifaceted role translation plays in the learning of English Language in the Higher Education Institute classrooms. This research investigates the future of translation in language learning, enhancement of cultural understanding and practical communicational competence by addressing the challenges that students face while learning the English language. The paper also aims to give a deep insight into the relevance of translation in English language teaching today by amalgamating the traditional as well as modern translation techniques with the help of a survey conducted on the undergraduate students. In this regard, a questionnaire was circulated amongst the students to bring out their perception about the role of translation in enhancing their language competence. The data received from the respondents will be used for analysis to establish the relevance of translation in today’s language learning scenario. The study also highlights that if used meticulously, translation can enhance communicative practices by supporting comprehension and learner confidence. The findings clearly indicate that many students look at the practice of translation positively, reflecting its usefulness in enriching vocabulary building, clarifying grammatical concepts and bridging cultural understanding.
Journal Article
Assessing English language sentences readability using machine learning models
Readability is an active field of research in the late nineteenth century and vigorously persuaded to date. The recent boom in data-driven machine learning has created a viable path forward for readability classification and ranking. The evaluation of text readability is a time-honoured issue with even more relevance in today’s information-rich world. This paper addresses the task of readability assessment for the English language. Given the input sentences, the objective is to predict its level of readability, which corresponds to the level of literacy anticipated from the target readers. This readability aspect plays a crucial role in drafting and comprehending processes of English language learning. Selecting and presenting a suitable collection of sentences for English Language Learners may play a vital role in enhancing their learning curve. In this research, we have used 30,000 English sentences for experimentation. Additionally, they have been annotated into seven different readability levels using Flesch Kincaid. Later, various experiments were conducted using five Machine Learning algorithms, i.e ., KNN, SVM, LR, NB, and ANN. The classification models render excellent and stable results. The ANN model obtained an F-score of 0.95% on the test set. The developed model may be used in education setup for tasks such as language learning, assessing the reading and writing abilities of a learner.
Journal Article
Vocative Che in Falkland Islands English: Identity, Contact, and Enregisterment
Falkland Islands English (FIE) began its development in the first half of the 19th century. In part, as a consequence of its youth, FIE is an understudied variety. It shares some morphosyntactic features with other anglophone countries in the Southern Hemisphere, but it also shares lexical features with regional varieties of Spanish, including Rioplatense Spanish. Che is one of many South American words that have entered FIE through Spanish, with its spelling ranging from “chay” and “chey” to “ché”. The word has received some marginal attention in terms of its meaning. It is said to be used in a similar way to the British dear or love and the Australian mate, and it has been compared to chum or pal, and is taken as an equivalent of the River Plate, hey!, hi!, or I say!. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that che entered FIE through historical contact with Rioplatense Spanish, drawing on both linguistic and sociohistorical evidence, and presenting survey, corpus, and ethnographic data that illustrate its current vitality, usage, and social meanings among FIE speakers. In situ observations, fieldwork, and an online survey were used to look into the vitality of che. Concomitantly, by crawling social media and the local press, enough data was gathered to build a small corpus to further study its vitality. A thorough literature review was conducted to hypothesise about the borrowing process involving its entry into FIE. The findings confirm that the word is primarily a vocative, it is commonly used, and it is indicative of a sense of belonging to the Falklands community. Although there is no consensus on the origin of che in the River Plate region, it seems to be the case that it entered FIE during the intense Spanish–English contact that took place during the second half of the 19th century.
Journal Article
Stability and Change in the C-Domain in American Swedish
This article introduces American Swedish (AmSw) into the discussion of the C-domain in heritage Scandinavian. The study is based on spontaneous speech data from the Swedish part of the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS), compared to a baseline of homeland Swedish dialect speakers. We show that the C-domain in AmSw is primarily characterized by stability; this is evidenced by a relatively robust V2 syntax and left dislocation patterns that resemble the homeland baseline. However, we also show that AmSw diverges in some respects: there are some V2 violations and a stronger preference for SV clauses (subject-initial main clauses) at the expense of XVS clauses (non-subject-initial main clauses). These results are similar to previous findings from American Norwegian. We argue that the diverging patterns exhibited by AmSw speakers are not indicative of any fundamental change in their Swedish grammar. The occasional V2 violations are attributed to parallel activation of English and Swedish, and speakers sometimes failing to inhibit English, which is their dominant language. The increase of SV clauses is analyzed as a preference for the canonical word order of the dominant language, but within the limits of what the heritage grammar permits. The patterns in AmSw can be described as cases of attrition and cross-linguistic influence; however, we argue for a nuanced use of these terms.
Journal Article