Abstracts

Tuesday 10^th July 2018

Plenary talk: Linguistics for everybody: Communicating with the public about language
Lynne Murphy (University of Sussex)

First there were a few books, then came the linguistics blogs, then the podcasts. The internet age has allowed academic linguists to proselytize our subject—and its values—to a much broader audience than ever before. Is it a good thing? Is it too much? Why do some linguists do this kind of thing—and should all linguists do it? We’ll consider these questions as well as the relationship between what I call ‘public linguistics’ and the impact agenda in higher education today, before turning to the questions of what you can do and what you can expect if you join the ranks of public linguists.

Whose Spanish? Ethnolinguistic repertoires, code-switching practices, and identities within an international, London-based Spanish language group
Hannah King (Birkbeck, University of London)

There is a growing population of multilingual Spanish-speakers in London which is large, diverse, and understudied. This project investigates the everyday language practices and ethnolingustic repertoires of some of these Spanish speakers within the context of a Spanish language group. The study utilizes recorded conversations and semi-structured interview data to explore the ways in which various dialects, languages, and cultures interact locally and looks at the negotiation of multiple identities by these international participants.

Utilizing an ethnolinguistic repertoire framework (Benor, 2010), where a fluid set of linguistic resources can be used by group members to index identities, the work answers a call for further exploration of “a complex Latino ethnolinguistic repertoire – encompassing multiple languages, dialects, and discursive practices,” (Negrón, 2014, p. 155) and goes beyond ‘Latino,’ to explore a transnational group inclusive of any number of ethnicities, nationalities, and ideologies. The use of ethnolinguistic repertoire may be used to account for the linguistic features of this panethnic group, which could include features from multiple subgroups.

This work provides insight into the complexity of language and identity within international groups in London, while considering linguistic and cultural maintenance, and communication in transnational social spaces. The study uses interactional sociolinguistics to address research questions about conversational strategies and code-switching as well as identities and cultural hybridity. Initial recordings indicate a possible ‘we’ culture in which participants identify with a culture broader than their individual nations and show code-switching between Spanish and English as an unmarked choice within greater linguistic repertoires.

Sound Patterns in Male and Female First Names in Jordan
Bara’ah Alababneh (University of Sussex)

In the field of onomastics, names have been approached from different angles. Prior research sheds the light on topics like family names, nick names, first names and brand names from a sociolinguistic, morphological, phonetic and phonological, political and religious point of view. However, this study mainly aims at investigating male and female names in Jordan from a phonological point of view, relating such approach to the study of phoneasthetics and sound symbolism. Features that have been studied are: the frequency of particular sounds, beginning and ending sounds, length of names, type and number of syllables, positive phoneasthetic structure and the sound symbolism association with first names, mainly bouba-kiki effect. To this end, 20 male names and 20 female names have been chosen and transcribed using the IPA symbols. Names, then have been analysed relying on the linguistics features set earlier. It has been found that female names tend to contain more open syllables, tend to be disyllabic, end in vowels, contain more nasal and trills and contain more bouba sounds. On the other hand, the study reveals that male first names tend to have more obstruents, more glides and more emphatic sounds. Male names also tend to end in consonants and contain more closed syllables and contain kiki vowels.

Adjectives as a Distinct Category in Thai
Woraprat Manowang (King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology)

Previous work (e.g. Sookgasem 1996, Prasithrathsint 2000, Iwasaki & Ingkapirom 2005, Post 2008) proposes that Thai lacks a category of adjectives and expresses the properties of nouns through intransitive verbs instead of adjectives. What is seemingly adjectives is subsumed within a subclass of verbs as they syntactically behave the same way as intransitive verbs.

In this paper, I argue that a distinct category of adjectives does exist in Thai. To support the claim, I provide new evidence showing that adjectives and intransitive verbs exhibit different syntactic distributions. Firstly, a large class of predicate adjectives occurs as the copular complement while verbs can never do so. Secondly, in classifier spreading (Hundius & Kolver 1983), only adjective classes can modify head nouns in any number whereas verbs are not permitted to do so in the same structure. Further, Thai degree heads can co-occur with predicate adjectives while intransitive verbs with degree heads results in ungrammaticality. Finally, supporting evidence comes from comparison constructions and adverb derivation.

I propose that Thai has a phonologically null copula which makes adjectives look akin to intransitive verbs. In the analysis, Thai roots like chàlàat ‘clever’ are inherently adjectives and they are merged with a copula to form a Pred which is then merged with a theme argument (see e.g. Bowers 1993, Baker 2003). I show that the presence of an overt copula yields inchoative readings while stative interpretations are given when the copula is null. This is in line with Richards’ (2009) account. Ultimately, the proposed analysis supports the claim that adjective classes are universal (Baker 2003; Dixon 2004).

Keywords: adjective, predication, lexical category, Thai syntax

Identifying the substrate languages of Cameroon Pidgin English
Sarah FitzGerald (University of Sussex)

This paper examines the history of Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), an extended pidgin spoken in Cameroon, in order to identify its substrate languages. CPE is closely related to other pidgin/creole (P/C) languages spoken in West Africa and the Caribbean, in particular Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) and Sierra Leonean Krio (Holm 1989: 409). There have been many explanations put forward by linguists in the last quarter century as to why geographically diverse P/C languages have similar morpho-syntactic features and vocabulary. These have included the idea that they reflect an innate bioprogram which emerges when children learn a pidgin as their first language (Bickerton 1984) and the idea that these languages result from processes of second language (L2) acquisition (Siegel 2003; Lefebvre et al. 2006).

The project from which this paper is drawn aims to test Interlanguage Theory, which hypothesises that the way in which learners process L2s can account for similarities between P/Cs (Plag 2008). To test this theory it is necessary to ascertain what other language(s) its originators may have spoken. In order to achieve this, this paper examines the history of CPE, establishing that the time frame in which the language developed is likely to have been the pre-colonial era between c.1650 and 1884; describing patterns of contact between the people of Cameroon and the English speakers active in the area during this time; and assessing the influence that other related West African P/Cs might have had on CPE.

References
Bickerton, Derek, 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbour: Karoma.
Holm, John, 1989. Pidgins and creoles Volume II reference survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lefebvre, Claire, Lydia White, & Christine Jourdan (eds.) 2006. L2 Acquisition and Creole Genesis: Dialogues. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Plag, Ingo, 2008. Creoles as interlanguages: Inflectional morphology. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 23 (1), 114-135.
Siegel, Jeff, 2003. Substrate influence in Creoles and the role of transfer in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 25 (2), 185-209.

Towards an Appropriate Cultural Content of EFL Textbooks:  The Case of Saudi Secondary School EFL Textbooks – A Mixed Method Approach 
Maryam Alrashidi (University of Essex)

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the cultural content of Saudi secondary school EFL textbooks towards EFL acquisition. The design of this study is a mixed methods design. Forty-five teachers and 151 students in Saudi secondary schools returned completed questionnaires whereas 11 teachers and 18 students of them participated in follow-up interviews, and only two teachers were observed. The process of EFL textbook evaluation was applied to six EFL Saudi secondary school textbooks for students. Means were used to analyze the participants’ answers on a 5-point Likert scale and inferential statistics were used to test the differences between the students’ and their teachers’ answers. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the obtained data from the open-ended questions, interviews, and observations whereas EFL textbooks were evaluated with the use of a checklist and a close analysis procedure.

The results showed that participants considered cultural items from the social life, semantic and pragmatic cultural categories of import however they had a neutral attitude towards cultural items from the arts. Moreover, they either considered the implementation of cultural items from specific suggested cultures to be neutral such as all the items concerned with the native speakers’ cultures or of less import such as the other cultures around the world. There were significant differences between the students’ and their teachers’ answers on one third of the items of the questionnaire. Aside from this, although the teachers and their students had high agreement on the suggested ways of implementing the cultural elements, it seems that many difficulties have reduced the effectiveness of the cultural content of Saudi EFL textbooks. For example, some of these difficulties were related to the students, teachers, and administration practices. The process of textbook evaluation showed that Saudi EFL textbooks lack the methods for improving the students’ intercultural communication skills.

Keywords: Cultural Content, EFL textbooks, Secondary School students in Saudi Arabia, EFL textbooks evaluation.

The 140 year journey of subtleties: tracing senses in idioms
Margarita Yagudaeva (University of Sussex)

In this presentation, I am going to talk about my research on the semantic stability or instability of English idioms. I will demonstrate the development of senses an idiom has gone through, starting from 1878 up to the present day. I will question whether each of them could be regarded as a separate sense, or if there has always been a single meaning, just vague enough to create controversy in definitions. In addition, I will discuss a third possibility, that is, that the idiom in focus did undergo semantic change, hypothesizing that there may have been different senses which have overlapped through certain periods of time, therefore generating the difficulties in clear division of meanings. To illustrate the possibilities mentioned above, I will review several instantiations of an idiom in actual use, using a corpus of English language, and discuss what linguistic means have been identified in each case for the idiom’s sense interpretation. I argue that corpus-based methods can be used to show how the use of the same idiom in distinct contexts can result in a change of meaning over time.

Sociolinguistic patterns of lexical variation in the Anglo-Cornish dialect
Rhys Sandow (University of Sussex)  

By triangulating language, ideology, and agency, I present a variationist sociolinguistic study of Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis. Elicited data from sociolinguistic interviews were complemented by a prolonged period of ethnographic participant-observation. From ethnographic observations, it became clear that a fundamental emic division within the community is ideological orientation and sense of place. Ideological frictions between factions of the Cornish population are a symptom of Cornwall’s post-industrial transition. Many feel that Cornwall is undergoing a process of ‘Disneyfication’, that is, making the county superficially appealing to outsiders and investors, while leaving the (cultural) foundations to rot. With a low-wage economy and precarious employment that is typical of the hospitality sector, some feel that an over-reliance on the tourist industry condemns Cornwall to further long-term deprivation. On the other hand, much of the Cornish population are excited by the lifestyle that the tourist industry creates for locals and visitors alike. Drawing on tools from the first and third-waves of variationist theory, I explore how these ideologies are indexed by distinct repertoires of Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis.

By employing a range of theoretical apparatus from a diverse palate of academic sources, including politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987), social capital theory (Bourdieu 1986), and social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979), I account for a seemingly surprising pattern of intra-speaker variation. Specifically, the data reveal an inverted pattern of style-shifting. That is, Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis is most often found in careful, as opposed to casual, speech styles. This quantitative pattern of lexical usage is best accounted for by considering strength of local identity as a social parameter and augmented by the qualitative perspective provided by a language ideology framework. From this pattern, I conclude that this stylised use of local dialect lexis is strategic performative social identity work.

References
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1986). The forms of capital. In John G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241—58. New York: Greenwood.
Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tajfel, Henri and Turner, John. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel (eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relation, 33—47. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Wednesday 11^th July 2018

Plenary talk: Methodology in Corpus Linguistics
Bas Aarts (UCL)

My talk will be an introduction to methodology in English corpus linguistics.

I will begin by answering questions such as ‘What is corpus linguistics?’, ‘How can we use a corpus to study language?’ and ‘How can we explore corpora to find research data?’

I will then take a close look at the ICECUP software (International Corpus of English Corpus Utility Program) that we developed at the Survey of English Usage (SEU) at University College London to explore the two corpora that we compiled, namely the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE). Both are fully tagged and parsed corpora of British English. I will demonstrate how the software can be used to find grammatical patterns.

In the second part of my talk I will look at a number of case studies, focusing on using corpora to study English syntax, and looking at the changes we have observed in the grammar of English using DCPSE, with special attention to the use of the progressive construction and the use of the core modal verbs in English.

Using Corpora to Investigate Information Packaging in Second Language Acquisition: Methodological Challenges
Adam Stewart (University of Sussex)

This presentation focuses on some methodological challenges arising from using corpora to investigate information packaging structures (topic and focus) in written second language acquisition data. Topics present information that is already active in the discourse, while focused constituents can be used to present new information or give an exhaustive list of possibilities. Green and Ozón (2017) explore corpus analysis as a method for investigating information structure in a spoken corpus. One benefit they identify is that when multiple constructions are available for expressing a discourse function, it can reveal which construction is preferred.  This suggests that corpus analysis is also an effective method for analysing written second language data, and the results from a pilot study show how corpora can give data on how topic and focus are expressed in a second language, as well as common ‘errors’ associated with these constructions.

However, this method presents some challenges, in particular the necessity of looking at the context beyond a given sentence to identify pragmatic import. Although software exists for pragmatic annotation of corpora, this requires the analysis of large amounts of data, which imposes practical constraints. Additionally, some syntactic constructions can encode topic and focus, while in spoken language, phonology plays a role in disambiguation, in written language these cues are absent. Looking at the phrasal category of the topic or focus constituent might be a way of addressing this issues and this will also be explored.

 

Chinese borrowings in English before 1900: A study of orthographic changes
Zhen Wu (UCL)

Chinese and its various dialects are hardly among those languages which had a significant impact on English vocabulary, as only hundreds of Chinese borrowings, most of them occurring in low frequency, are found in English dictionaries. Previous studies of Chinese borrowings focus heavily on source dialects and lexical semantics (e.g. Cannon 1988, Moody 1996), with little attention given to orthographic features. In reality, however, the spelling of many words seems chaotic, and may suffer dramatic changes over time. This is because of the large phonological discrepancies among different source dialects, as well as the systems of transcription used in different periods – the latter is often overlooked.

This study, based on a 127-word corpus of Chinese words that first appeared in English before 1900, extracted from Oxford English Dictionary, emphasises how transcription practices help shape and change the orthography of Chinese borrowings in the past two hundred years. It is found that the spelling of Chinese borrowings is extremely vulnerable to external influence, i.e. the adopted transcription systems. Early borrowed words, subject to some spontaneous, intuitive patterns based on well-established pronunciation rules in English, are often altered by newly developed transcription systems in which distinctive symbolic rules are created. This alteration could happen multiple times, causing inconsistency in orthography. The phenomenon that Chinese borrowings in English consist of words spelled in conformity with different, sometimes contrastive transcription systems leads to the conclusion (similar to Cannon 1990) that the systems of transcription, invented to regulate the lexical transmission from Chinese to English, cause trouble to the recognition of Chinese borrowings instead and complicate the study of etymology of certain words like mah-jong.

References
Anderson, Olov Bertil. 1970. A concordance to five systems of transcription for standard Chinese. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Cannon, Garland. 1988. Chinese borrowings in English. American Speech 63: 3-33.
Cannon, Garland. 1990. Sociolinguistics implication in Chinese-language borrowings in English. International Journal of Society and Language 86: 41-55.
Chan, Mimi & Helen Kwok. 1985. A study of lexical borrowing from Chinese into English with special reference to Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong.
Moody, Andrew J. 1996. Transmission language and source languages of Chinese borrowings in English. American Speech 71: 405-20.
Oxford English Dictionary. 2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.oed.com . Accessed April 9, 2018.

Saudi Women Social Identity: An Exploration of Twitter Discourse
Fatmah Alhejab Alhazmi (University of Sussex)

In recent sociolinguistics studies, there is an increased interest in understanding discourse created through microblogging websites such as Twitter. Twitter has been a major platform for Saudi women to advocate pro-women changes since many changes have already started to take place after major campaigns and movements led mainly by Saudi women across Social Media. To understand the discourse behind these movements, it is crucial to analyse the used language by which women represent their social identity on Twitter.

This paper is part of an ongoing research that examines the representation of Saudi women’s social identity on Twitter. The research question is what are the most prominent sociolinguistic features of Saudi women’s discourse on Twitter? To answer this question, Critical Discourse Analysis approach was adopted to study the discursive linguistics practices and their social context. The underlying assumption of this study is that tweets are not empty texts but rather products of discourse in the social context. the collected data set are tweets from of both Saudi men and women in trending women related topics. The study consists of two levels of analysis: thematic analysis and linguistics analysis. The thematic analysis gives the general view of the context and the general manifestation of the discourse while the linguistic analysis shows aspects of language features such as agency, metaphor and lexical choice. The study found that the identity of Saudi women on Twitter has been formed by various intertwined aspects linguistically indexed such as traditional masculine culture, social power, religious ideology and nationalism.

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Identity, Twitter, Saudi women

Why did nobody reply to my post? A keyword analysis between lone posts and initiating posts in MOOC discussions
Shi Min Chua (Open University)

It is a common phenomenon that online discussion spaces are overabundant with lone posts(Cavanagh, 2007; Collins & Nerlich, 2015). Lone posts are isolated posts that do not receive any reply, in comparison to initiating posts that attract replies. The time of postings and content of the posts could affect whether a post receives a reply. However, it is also possible that discourse of the lone posts may be contracting dialogic space, compared to that of the initiating posts which may be expanding dialogic space and inviting replies (Martin & White (2005). To examine this hypothesis, I investigated the linguistic features of lone posts and initiating posts by using keyword analysis in this paper.

The corpus are discussion postings from 12 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on FutureLearn platform, where learners could post their comments on almost every learning steps in a course, analogous to users’ comments that appears below the news articles published online. The corpus consisted of 221823 postings: 53% lone posts, 15% initiating posts, 32% replies, where replies were not included in the analysis at this stage. The analysis revealed 80 keywords in lone posts and 73 keywords in the initiating posts. Preliminary grouping of these keywords showed that initiating posts contain significantly more hedges and questions, whereas lone posts contain more emotional and evaluative words. These findings could inform MOOC learners how they could frame and structure their posts in the discussions.

Methodological challenges in studying identity and its construction in discourses of Erasmus exchange students
Dina Strong (Birkbeck, University of London)

Student mobility has increased tremendously over the last twenty years, turning into a norm for a university graduate. It is believed to be a powerful transformative experience, affecting the way mobile students perceive themselves and others. The subject of identity and its construction is important in the context of student mobility, as students confront many different “others” and often base their representations on these encounters, reflected in their discourse.  Although the experiences of student mobility have been studied by researchers from other disciplines, in Applied Linguistics the European student mobility remains relatively unexplored, and a number of scholars point to the need for further research into the phenomenon (Coleman, 2012; 2015; Van Mol, 2014).

The present paper questions the most suitable methodology for studying identity construction in discourses of Erasmus students. It addresses the challenges faced in applying the quantitative methods of Corpus Linguistic analysis (Baker et  al., 2008), supported by WordSmith software, as opposed to using qualitative methods of Wodak’s Discourse Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on my own empirical data (interviews with Erasmus exchange students), I outline the experience and observations with both quantitative and qualitative approaches to data analysis, illustrated by examples from my own study. I’ve opted for a more qualitative approach to the data processing and analysis, as the aim of my study was to gain insight into personal experiences and identity construction by individuals, rather than draw broad general assumptions about Erasmus students as a social group/social phenomenon. However, the paper opens to the possible ways the study could benefit from the Corpus Linguistic approach.

The perpetuation of rape myths in UK news media: a corpus-led discourse analysis
Harriet Massing (University of Sussex alum)

Rape myths can be described as widely held beliefs regarding the typical victim or perpetrator of rape, as well as the act of rape itself. These beliefs have been shown to effect attitudes towards rape throughout society, as they create stereotypes, effecting the levels at which incidents are reported to the police and the viability of taking rape cases to trial. The present study investigates to what extent rape myths are perpetuated in the media and looks at how linguistic techniques are used to achieve this in a covert manner.

The study includes a thorough literature review into the development of rape myths, in order to define what would and would not count as a rape myth for this particular research. A corpus, compiled using articles from UK national newspapers which perpetuate rape myths, and corpus analysis techniques were used in combination with critical discourse analysis. AntConc software was used to identify patterns and trends, and to guide the subsequent discourse analysis. Once overall trends were established, critical discourse analysis and social actor analysis was used to further understand how these myths were perpetuated in closer detail.

The study shows that many articles perpetuate myths which serve to blame the victim in covert ways and mitigate the role of the perpetrator. In articles which did focus on the perpetrator as a criminal, the perpetrators were dehumanised. The study concludes with a brief discussion of the Just World Phenomenon as a potential explanation for the proliferation of rape myths.