Gay Talk

According to the online British and World English Oxford Dictionaries, the word gay has four different meanings assigned to it. Two of those meanings, the use of gay to mean ‘light-hearted and carefree’ and the use of gay to mean ‘brightly coloured, showy’, are both said to be ‘dated’.  The primary meaning of gay in current usage appears to be its reference to a ‘homosexual, especially a man’. Interestingly, though, a fourth meaning of ‘foolish, stupid or unimpressive’ has been documented. In this latter case, the use of gay is said to be ‘informal, often offensive’.

Using sociolinguistic methods, researcher Justyna Robinson investigated the semantic changes-in-progress of the word gay to see whether such an analysis can provide further insights into the variation and change of this word. She traced the word across selected data from the British National Corpus and the Oxford English Corpus and found that the corpora data supports the perception that gay is undergoing semantic change. She found that the older sense of gay ‘happy’ is diminishing, balanced by an increase in the use of gay ‘homosexual’. She also found that the data provides evidence that gay can mean ‘lame’ (meanings similar to the dictionary definitions of ‘foolish, stupid’ or even ‘boring’) but also that it can mean ‘unmanly’ to refer to activities considered to be ‘effeminate’ or ‘not masculine enough’.

Robinson also analysed the speech of 72 speakers born and bred in South Yorkshire that she had interviewed as part of a larger project on semantic change. The speakers represented different age groups (age range: 11-94), genders and socio-economic groups. From these speakers, Robinson elicited all the different senses of gay that each participant knew and, once more, she found that the most salient senses of the word gay matched the meanings of ‘happy / bright’, ‘homosexual’, ‘lame’ and ‘unmanly’.   

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found that it was the older speakers who retained the most use of gay in the sense of ‘happy, bright’ and that the younger generations, most notably young males still in education, were the main users of the most recent sense of gay to mean ‘lame’. For the older speakers, their views about the shift in meaning of gay were often expressed in negative terms and Robinson reports comments such as ‘I really fight against the use of this word [as ‘homosexual’]. I object strongly to hijacking of the word’. In general, as is often the case with language change, a ‘common, nostalgic narrative’ emerges among the older speakers. The majority of younger speakers seem to be aware of the use of gay to mean ‘happy / bright’ but it has not been part of their usage. Their comments were more likely to be along the lines of ‘it used to mean’ or that ‘happy / bright’ was the ‘older meaning’. The younger speakers assigned meanings to gay ‘lame’ ranging from ‘boring’ (school, lessons, friends) to ‘not interesting’, ‘weird’, ‘annoying’, ‘bad’, ‘rubbish’ and ‘stupid’. None of the speakers in the study seemed to suggest that this usage projected homophobic undertones, a concern that has been raised in other academic literature.

While it seems that teenage boys use gay ‘lame’ the most, Robinson’s analysis showed that young adult males employ gay in a slightly different way, in the sense of ‘unmanly’ and that it is used to describe activities such as ‘eating salad’ or ‘carrying an umbrella’. Used in this way, Robinson argues that gay projects masculinity through distancing a speaker from anything considered ‘effeminate’ or ‘not masculine enough’. She suggests that men use gay in this way (note that no women in the study used gay in this sense) to challenge the masculinity of other men. Once more, though, these participants clearly indicated that they did not think this sense was used as a homophobic pejorative but that it applied to behaviour that goes against traditional notions of masculinity, particularly as they might pertain to local ‘northern’ English toughness.

Robinson concludes by tracking the different stages of change for the word gay and shows that older meanings often overlap with newer meanings, with the newest meaning of gay ‘lame’ emerging along with the meaning of gay ‘unmanly’.

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Robinson, J. (2012). A gay paper: why should sociolinguists bother with semantics? English Today 28: 38-54.

Doi: 10.1017/SO266078412000399

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Interesting, isn't it?

it's on the left, isn't it?

It’s on the left isn’t it is a typical English tag question: there’s a statement (it’s on the left) followed by a reduced question (isn’t it?). The form is sometimes linked to the characteristic dual functions of tag questions. They can show that we are less than certain about the statement we’ve just made: so, it’s on the left isn’t it can convey less confidence than it’s on the left. At the same time, tags can involve the listener: it’s on the left isn’t it is more likely to get a response than it’s on the left.

Many English tags, though, are just single words: think, for example, of right, eh, huh or innit. Marianne Mithun set out to discover whether all tags, whatever their form, are united by having some core function. She examined the way people use tags not only in English but also in a language with a very different structure: Mohawk, an Iroquoian language spoken in Northeast America. She found some striking initial similarities in the functions of tags in the two languages, but beyond these were some interesting differences. These, she claims, can be understood in terms of some of the deeper characteristics of human language.

In Mohawk tags are very frequent, but unlike English there is just one form, the single word wáhi’. Mohawk speakers use the tag to show how certain they are about what they have just said and to appeal to their audience for confirmation, in just the same way as speakers of English.

However Mohawk speakers can also use the same tag form to achieve the opposite effect. The example in the box illustrates this. Here speaker B first uses the particle ki’ to show that the contribution is relevant to what A has just said, then uses wáhi’ to confirm A’s statement. Rather than indicating a lack of certainty, then, the tag shows confidence, albeit in a polite consensual way. Speaker C’s contribution serves the same function.

A:  That’s the reason there’s a lot of cancer nowadays. It’s the food.

      They mix in all kinds of stuff.

B:  Ki’ wáhi’.

      ‘That’s right, isn’t it.’

C:  Ki’ wáhi’.

      ‘Isn’t that so.’

Note: A’s utterance, though uttered in Mohawk, is given in English by Mithun for ease of interpretation

A further difference lies in the type of discourse where tags occur. Speakers of English use tags more frequently in the discussion parts of a conversation rather than in the narrative sections. In Mohawk, though, the division between narrative and discussion is less clearcut. Mithun found that narratives of varying length were typically embedded throughout conversations, especially where there were many speakers. In these narratives the tag was used very frequently, with a range of important discourse-structuring functions. It could highlight the topic or the setting of a story, draw attention to key points, and emphasise background information, explanations, evaluations or other kinds of commentary. In these contexts tags do not directly solicit a response, but their function is still interactive, checking that listeners are following the story. In English these kinds of functions tend to filled not by tags but by other discourse pragmatic features such as y’know, right or are you with me.

Mithun concludes that English and Mohawk tag constructions share a functional core, mingling interactive functions with an indication of the speaker’s degree of certainty about what they have just said. These overlapping meanings lie at the root of the cross-linguistic similarities and differences between the two languages, allowing speakers to sometimes privilege one meaning and sometimes another. The contexts in which tags are used, Mithun claims, are ultimately constrained by both universal and language specific factors. These include the grammatical structure of the tag form, the presence in the language of competing forms like English y’know, the social relationships among speakers, and culturally-specific styles of interaction such as the greater use of narrative in Mohawk. The differences reflect a deeper characteristic common to speakers of all languages: the propensity to exploit available linguistic resources for creative acts of communication.

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Mithun, Marianne (2012) Tags: Cross-linguistic diversity and commonality. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 2165- 2182.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.09.010

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

R u tryin to b formal?

Nowadays, it’s hard for us to imagine a life without mobile phones.  Texting and instant messaging are as much, if not more, a part of our daily life as phone calls and emails.  For example, since 2008 in the USA there has been a huge increase in the amount of texts sent, with teenagers using their phones to text much more than to talk and half of them able to do so blindfolded!

Over the past fifteen years or so a language of texting has evolved and continues to develop.  The types of ‘textisms’ that people might use include shortened words (e.g., tues instead of Tuesday); missing letters (e.g., & instead of and); missing apostrophes (e.g., dont for don’t); ‘emoticons’ (e.g., ;-)); capital letters to express strong emotions (e.g., I AM ANGRY) and surrounding words with special symbols to intensify feeling (e.g., I **love** you).

There has been a mixed reception to the rise of texting and instant messaging with some educators, and particularly the media, advocating that it is causing young people to lose the ability to write in acceptable English prose and even destroying the English language itself.  Most linguists, like David Crystal in his book Txting: The Gr8 Db8 (2008, Oxford University Press) are more measured in their approach.  Crystal himself feels that texting may actually help children’s writing and that it actually requires ‘sophisticated abilities in reading and writing’ (p.157). 

Unfortunately, as yet there has been a limited amount of research into this area and what does exist is conflicting, with some studies finding that texting aids and others that it hinders literacy.  Five researchers in the USA (Rosen, Chang, Erwin, Carrier and Cheever) were keen to investigate whether texting affects young people’s ability to write.  They examined the writing of young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who, despite having varying educational backgrounds, were all experienced texters.  Rosen and his colleagues were keen to discover whether females or males used textisms more often in their writing and whether their educational background had any bearing on this use.  They examined the use of textisms in both formal and informal writing, asking the participants to write a formal letter of complaint and an informal description of what it feels like to be unhappy, as well as surveying them on how often they used different types of textisms.

They found that the female participants sent more texts and used more textisms than the males. This could be for a psychological reason as it has been found that girls tend to mainly use texts to establish and maintain relationships.  This takes longer and uses more words than just conveying concrete information, which is the reason males have generally been found to text.

An interesting result was that a more frequent use of texting and instant messaging, and particularly of using shortened words when texting, seemed to relate to a worse standard of formal writing amongst the participants. This suggests that daily texting may well be carrying over into the participants’ formal writing. However, these results seemed to reverse when it came to informal writing, as a more frequent use of texting and instant messaging related to a better standard of informal writing amongst the participants in the study. 

So, texting seems to have a negative impact on formal writing but a positive impact on informal writing.  It seems that daily texting serves as good ‘practice’ for writing in an informal style.  This may be especially true for those participants with a less formal educational background for whom writing texts and instant messaging may be the only writing practice they are engaged in on a daily basis.  This could indicate that young people in general are able to express more thoughts by using the shortcuts that textisms give them and this is especially beneficial when they are asked to write about their feelings and emotions.  Whatever the reasons may be, it is clear that a complicated relationship exists between texting/instant messaging and writing, one that certainly deserves further investigation.

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Larry D. Rosen, Jennifer Chang, Lynne Erwin, L. Mark Carrier and Nancy A. Cheever (2010). The Relationship Between “Textisms” and Formal and Informal writing Among Young Adults. Communication Research 37:420- 440.

doi: 10.  1177/0093650210362465

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Are regional dialects dying out?

is increasing mobility the cause?

It’s often thought that local dialect forms are withering away as people adopt more widespread ‘supralocal’ forms. In England, for example, glottal stop pronunciations are now widely used for /t/ in words like butter, in rural and urban areas alike.

David Britain’s review of recent research, though, sounds a note of caution. He accepts that in areas where traditional dialects are spoken, there is evidence of increasing use of language forms with a wider geographical currency.  But he points to three aspects of dialect studies where researchers need to think more carefully about the processes involved.

First, although supralocal forms may be arriving in areas where rural dialects are spoken, traditional local forms have by no means all disappeared. What is more, the supralocal forms are arriving at different speeds, to different extents, in different places and are used by different social classes (for one example, see the box). We should reflect more, then, on what the robust variation that still exists can tell us about the delocalization process.

Joanna Przedlacka investigated the use of 14 supralocal forms in four counties to the north and south of London: Buckinghamshire, Essex, Kent and Surrey. She found differences of between 18 and 55 per cent between uses of the 14 forms in the different locations. For example, people in Buckinghamshire used the glottal stop pronunciation of /t/ the most and people in Essex the least, with their rates of use differing by 35 per cent.  The pronunciation of words like tooth and mother as toof and muvver varied by about 30 per cent between the county where it was used most and the one where it was used least, but this time it was Kent where people used the supralocal /f/ and /v/ pronunciations the most, and Surrey where people used these forms the least.

Przedlacka, Joanna (2002). Estuary English? A sociophonetic study of teenage speech in the Home Counties. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Secondly, although forms with wider currency may be replacing more localized dialect forms, how wide is wider? Supralocal forms become used as people become more mobile, but we still spend a good deal of time moving around our own local neighbourhoods. It is not surprising, then, that people in a particular neighbourhood sometimes adopt local forms and sometimes supralocal forms, with the supralocal forms coming from the local area, the wider local region, or beyond (see the example in the second box). Local dialect forms, then, still compete strongly with their supralocal competitors.

Carmen Llamas’ study in Middlesbrough, in North East England, even found three different pronunciations for three related features, /p, t, k/: a local North Eastern form for /p/, the supralocal glottal stop for /t/ and the standard pronunciation for /k/.

Llamas, Carmen (2007). “A place between places”: Language and identities in a border town. Language in Society 36: 579-604.

Thirdly, supralocal dialects are the result of mobility, but it is middle class English people who are the more mobile. Middle class people are more likely to commute long distances to work, to choose to leave the city and live in the countryside, to leave home when they go to university rather than attend their local institution, and to buy basic goods in an out of town shopping centre rather than the local grocery store. This kind of mobility affects rural areas the most, bringing relatively traditional nonstandard rural accents into contact with middle class urban, possibly standard-influenced accents. No wonder then if, overall, rural accents are in decline. Britain points out, however, that we know little about the sociolinguistics of this interplay of dialects at the local level.

Britain concludes that we need to socialise studies of the supralocalisation process, to find out how and why individuals begin to use forms with a wider currency, and why some traditional forms survive longer than others.

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Britain, David (2011) The heterogeneous homogenisation of dialects in England. Taal & Tongval 63: 43-60.

http://www.taalentongval.eu/index.php/TenT/article/view/4/23

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Coming to the end

Speaker A:            “Let’s discuss the use of final particles in conversational English”

Speaker B:            “Ok … What does that mean though?”

Alexander Haselow was interested in the fact that, during the past few decades, the words actually, even, though, then, and anyway have become more and more present towards the end of an utterance in spoken English.  So, for example, speakers will often say things like I’ll have to do it quickly though or I never liked it anyway. In this position these words are called ‘final particles’ and Haselow wanted to investigate further what their function in conversations might be. He analysed data taken from the British component of the International Corpus of English, focusing only on speech in private, more intimate contexts, as this is unplanned and exactly where final particles occur most frequently.

Although when used in other parts of a sentence (or ‘utterance’ in speech) these words can be labelled grammatically as various things, including ‘adverbs’ or ‘connectives’, Haselow argues that in a final position it is hard to determine what their grammatical function is. It seems that when they are used in this position, they take on a different meaning to that which they have mid-utterance. They seem to provide a type of subjective ‘comment’ on something that has been said earlier in the conversation. For example, then in You’re not coming then suggests that the speaker has understood or ‘inferred’ this from something that has been said earlier or, in the case of I’m not coming actually, the actually suggests that the speaker is going against expectations that may have arisen from what has previously been said. In both of the above examples the main clause itself makes sense without the final particle, so it is not dependent on it. However, this is not the case for the final particle as it cannot stand alone and needs some speech to latch onto, even if it is just one word as in Alright then.

Haselow felt that the main function of final particles is to link its utterance to a previous part of the conversation whilst, at the same time, showing how the speaker wants their utterance to be understood.  It is this second function that determines the final particle that the speaker will use, as can be seen below:

Speaker A:            Bill’s going to the party

Speaker B:            I wouldn’t go then/though/anyway/actually/even

The choice of final particle here determines how Speaker B’s utterance relates to Speaker A’s. Final particles therefore appear to link their utterance to a previous one, either from a different or the same speaker. Because of this, conversations cannot be started with an utterance ending with a final particle. For example, I can’t collect you though isn’t just stating a fact (‘I can’t collect you’) but is also somehow contradicting something that has previously been said. 

So final particles allow speakers to manipulate conversations, as they signal to other participants how they want them to understand what they are saying. They are vital elements of interactive spoken language where utterances need to be linked in order to create a meaningful conversation. It is because speech is unplanned and unrehearsed that this linking often has to be done in retrospect during the conversation itself and this is where final particles play such a vital role. For example, having these words at your disposal during a conversation means that you can use them to correct a preceding utterance, as in I didn’t do it though or maybe ask for the validity of something, as in You didn’t see it then? The end of an utterance is the easiest and most convenient place to slot these words in and the reason that they are most frequently found in this final position.

Who would have thought that having a conversation required such constant negotiation of meaning from its speakers? I never said it was simple though!

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Haselow, Alexander  (2012) Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and the negotiation of common ground in spoken discourse: Final particles in English. Language and Communication 32: 182-204.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2012.04.008

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Growing up bilingually

one language or two: does it make a difference?

Do bilingual children develop language more slowly than children acquiring only one language? This is the question that a team of researchers from Florida Atlantic University set out to answer.

Erika Hoff and her colleagues measured the language skills of 103 children, both boys and girls, when they were aged 1 year and 10 months, 2 years and 1 month, and finally at the age of 2 years and 6 months. 47 children were bilingual, acquiring both Spanish and English, and 56 were monolingual, acquiring only English. All the children were from families with a high socioeconomic status.

Overall, the English language skills of the monolingual English-learning children were more advanced and improved more rapidly during this period than the English language skills of the bilingual children, though in all cases the scores were within the normal range of variation for monolingual children. The bilingual children lagged behind the monolingual children by about three months.

Importantly, though, this was only the case when the children’s skills in English were measured. When both English and Spanish words were included, the total vocabulary size for the bilingual children was no different from that of the monolingual children.

In other words, the bilingually developing children were learning words at the same rate as monolingual children, but their word learning was, like their language exposure, divided between two languages. Previous research had also shown that the size of a child’s vocabulary depended on the amount and type of language to which they were exposed, but what was new about this study was that similar results were obtained for grammar. Measurements of the grammatical complexity of the children’s speech, such as whether they produced combinations of words rather than single word utterances, also showed that the bilingual children lagged behind the monolingual children, but only when their skills in English were tested – not when their abilities in both English and Spanish were taken into account. As the researchers point out, this contradicts the idea that children’s vocabulary depends on what they hear, whereas children’s grammar develops as their cognitive processes become more mature. The findings suggest, instead, a link between vocabulary and grammar that could be either direct or indirect.

An important further finding was that the pace of language development reflected the amount of exposure to the two languages. The researchers divided the bilingual children into three groups: those who heard Spanish more often than English, those who heard English more often, and those whose exposure to the two languages was roughly equal. The size of the difference in the language skills of the monolingual and the bilingual children depended on the extent of the bilingual children’s exposure to each of their two languages. Thus, across all measures of English language skills, the bilingual children who heard English more often than Spanish scored most like the monolingual English-speaking children, followed by the balanced bilingual children (those who heard English and Spanish more or less equally).

The researchers point out that their findings have implications for education, as bilingual children may be more cognitively able than their scores indicate if they are tested in only one of their languages. Skill level in a single language, in other words, is not the same indicator of ability for bilingual children as it is for monolingual children.

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Hoff, Erika, Core, Cynthia, Place, Silvia, Rumiche, Rosario, Señor, Melissa and Parra, Marisol (2012). Dual language exposure and earlybilingual development. Journal of Child Language 39: 1-27.

doi:10.1017/S0305000910000759

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

All the lads and lasses!

There are still lots of lads and lasses in the northeast of England

In data collected in the 1950s for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) it was found that there was a ‘north-south’ divide in the use of the terms lad and lass, with lad being the main term used in the north to mean BOY whereas boy itself was the main variant in the south. Lass competed with other terms (such as girl, wench, maiden, missy) but it was still mainly confined to the north. When words for SON or DAUGHTER were elicited, the term lad competed with son in the north and, to a lesser degree, the term lass competed with daughter, but also only in the north. Research in the 1980s predicted that because lass was more variable than lad then it was likely that the term lass would be lost before lad.

Researchers Joan Beal and Lourdes Burbano-Elizondo set out to investigate patterns of variation and change in the use of these terms by comparing the 1950s data to data collected between 1994 and 2005 for two sociolinguistic studies in the northeast of England, the first in Newcastle and the second in Sunderland.

The Newcastle data revealed that both lad and lass is still used by all age groups and among all social classes, although lad is more widespread than lass. The results also showed (with the exception of middle class males) that males use both lad and lass more than females, so there appears to be variation according to gender. Like the SED data, the Newcastle data revealed that lad could be used to mean BOY or SON (though the latter was rare) but, unlike the SED data, it could also be used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER (in this case more often than boyfriend but less often than husband). Overall, though, lad was used in the vast majority of cases to mean YOUNG MAN. In the case of lass, girl was a much stronger rival than boy was for lad and the most frequent meaning for lass was YOUNG WOMAN. The use of lass to mean DAUGHTER was as rare as lad was to mean SON. However, lass could also be used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER, both in the sense of GIRLFRIEND and WIFE (whereas lad to mean HUSBAND was rare). Although there was a tendency for lower social groups to use more lad and lass, there was no firm correlation between social class and variable use of the terms; the researchers suggest that style or stance may be a greater predictor of their use but further research would be needed to shed light on this.

In the Sunderland data the results revealed that, in line with Newcastle, there was variation according to gender, with males using both lad and lass a lot more than females, especially in the sense of CHILD (male/female). Lad and lass could also be used to mean BROTHER/SISTER (although these were rare variants). When the meaning was CHILD or BROTHER/SISTER, lad and lass appeared at equal levels but lass was used much more frequently than lad (both by males and females) when used to mean SEXUAL PARTNER.   

Taking the results from both studies, the researchers state that both words are still used in the northeast of England but that their use may be declining. Generally speaking, both terms are more likely to be used by males than females but lass is used less often than lad. The exception is that lass is used more often than lad in the sense of SEXUAL PARTNER, with lass being the most commonly-used term for FEMALE SEXUAL PARTNER, especially by males. This leads the researchers to conclude that lass may not be dying out (as predicted in the 1980s research) but that it is undergoing semantic shift (a change in meaning) in northeast dialects whereby its primary meaning is SEXUAL PARTNER.

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Beal, J. and Burbano-Elizondo, L. (2012). ‘All the Lads and Lasses’: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear. English Today 28 (4): 10-22.

doi: 10.1017/S0266078412000351

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Throwing light on language variation

Which sounds more natural to you?

(1) she turned on the light or (2) she turned the light on;

(3) he cut open the melon or (4) he cut the melon open

If you find (2) and (4) more natural, the chances are you’re from the UK or Ireland; if (1) and (3) sound better, you’re more likely to be from North America. This was the unexpected finding of Bill Haddican and Daniel Ezra Johnson’s recent research. They tested the judgments of 297 native speakers of English. Almost half of these people were from the UK or Ireland; the other half were from the US and Canada. They were asked to rate sentences like the ones above on an 11-point scale, where 0 was ‘bad’ and 10 was ‘good’. People from the UK and Ireland judged ‘discontinuous’ sentences as ‘good’ more often than those from Canada and the US (discontinuous sentences are those where the verb and its particle are separated, like cut and open in he cut the melon open).

Haddican and Johnson then looked at how people in the UK and the US produce sentences containing a verb and a particle: are they more likely to use continuous forms (he cut open the melon) or discontinuous forms (he cut the melon open)? They collected a Twitter corpus from two areas in the USA – within a 150 mile radius of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and of Concord, New Hampshire – and two areas in the UK – within a 150 mile radius of Oxford, England and of Glasgow, Scotland. They searched for tweets in this corpus that contained either turn on the light or turn the light on, finding more than 2000. Although there were no significant differences between the use of turn on the light and turn the light on between the two regions of the USA or the two regions of the UK, the results from the US and the UK overall mirrored the results of the judgment tests: the discontinuous form (turn the light on) was used more often in tweets from the UK, and the continuous form (turn on the light) occurred more often in tweets from the US.  

Why should these differences exist between UK English and US English? Haddican and Johnson could see three possible explanations. First, English in the UK could be changing, with speakers of British English moving towards the use of the discontinuous order, but only after the period of North American colonization. Second, it could be English in the US that is changing, with American speakers of English moving towards the use of the continuous order (turn on the light). A third possibility is that both varieties of English are changing, but at different rates; for example, varieties could be moving toward the discontinuous order, but UK dialects have moved further and/or faster.

Haddican and Johnson point out that we would need to analyse verb-particle combinations in earlier periods of English to find out which of these possibilities was most likely to be right. They make a start by analyzing 5 different verb particle combinations in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). They analysed the frequency of put out a hand/put a hand out; put out the fire/put the fire out; put out the light/put the light out; bring up the subject/bring the subject up; and the past form brought up the subject/brought the subject up. They found a steady increase since 1850 in the frequency of the discontinuous forms suggesting, they claim, that the third explanation is the most plausible one: both UK and US English are moving towards the use of the discontinuous structure, but the change has progressed more quickly in the British Isles.

What is needed now, they point out, is historical research on the use of these two structures in UK English, to confirm that here too speakers have been moving over time towards an increased use of discontinuous forms.

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Haddican, Bill and Johnson, Daniel Ezra Johnson (2012) Effects on the Particle Verb Alternation across English Dialects. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18 (2): 31-40

Available at http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol18/iss2/5

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

 

Season's Greetings to all our readers.

We look forward to your continued interest in 2013.

Best wishes from the Linguistics Research Digest team.