Let's 'chew the fat' in ELF!

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is the English used by people who have different native languages and use English as a language of communication. It provides rich ground for research as its users are multilingual and are able to call on many different languages as they converse.

Marie-LuisePitzl decided to focus on the use of idioms in ELF. These are metaphorical phrases (e.g., too many cooks spoil the broth) which can’t be directly translated into other languages and keep the same meaning. She found that there are two main ways that idioms manifest themselves. Sometimes they seeped into conversation, without speakers or listeners being aware of them. At other times, however, they were explicitly mentioned by speakers; for example, at times a foreign idiom was directly translated into English and at others, the speaker used the language of the idiom to say it.

An example of the first type is don’t praise the day yet, said by a Polish speaker when in conversation with German speakers. It probably draws on the Polish expression Nie chwal dnia przed zachodem słońca ‘Don’t praise the day before the sunset’. As this saying is virtually identical in meaning to the German phrase: Du sollst den Tag nicht vor dem Abend loben ‘you should not praise the day before the evening’, it becomes part of a multilingual idiom ‘pool’ shared by German and Polish speakers via ELF. The participants in the conversation understand these ‘translated’ idioms even if they don’t have equivalents in English.

An example of when the idiom is explicitly discussed is in the following conversation involving Maltese, Serbian and Norwegian speakers:

Speaker (Serbian): “the point of the whole things about quotas it’s a very good idea but in the same time it’s … how to say it in English like knife with double blade?”

The speaker draws attention to the idiom immediately by introducing it with how to say it in English…, the pronoun it suggesting that she’s thinking of an idiom in her own language. Indeed, both German, Serbian and English have similar idioms (in English a double-edged sword) to express something that has both advantages and disadvantages. The speakers don’t worry about the accuracy in English and show no insecurity about using this un-English version in their multilingual context.

Sometimes Pitzl found idioms being used in their original language within ELF conversations. In the following example, Maltese and Serbian speakers discuss their different cultures, specifically smoking habits. The Serbian speaker says that Serbians smoke a lot and comments, ...we have a proverb like Italians...fuma come un turco (= smoke like a Turk). It is interesting that the language the speaker chooses for the idiom is not her own or her Maltese listeners’, but Italian. Through this choice, she communicates not only that she is multilingual but also that she’s aware that her listeners know Italian (Maltese contains about 50% vocabulary of Italian origin), signalling her closeness to her listeners and drawing on their multilingualism.

So, ELF is incredibly creative and tolerant; there’s no need to mind one’s, how do you say it, “Qs and Ps”?

--------------------------------------
Pitzl, Marie-Louise (2016). World Englishes and creative idioms in English as a lingua franca. World Englishes 35(2):293-309.

doi. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.qmul.ac.uk/10.1111/weng.12196



This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

‘Researches’, ‘informations’ and ‘knowledges’ in World Englishes

The spread of English across the world has been viewed in terms of three concentric circles, which are traditionally referred to as the Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles.  The Inner Circle (IC) refers to countries where English is viewed as a native language, often considered the ‘traditional’ bases of English: the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Outer Circle (OC) refers to countries to which English spread as a result of colonialism such as India and parts of Asia and Africa. Here, English has been institutionalised in educational, political and judicial systems and is a second language to many of its speakers.  The Expanding Circle (EC) is where English is a foreign language which is considered important to learn in its international, business and digital capacity. As English becomes more widely used in an international context, linguists have simultaneously become more interested in documenting what is happening to variation in its usage across the three circles.

One way of doing this is by studying the use of uncountable nouns.  These include advice, knowledge, milk and information and are traditionally described as nouns that we literally can’t count and therefore have no -s to make them plural, as opposed to the countable nouns chair(s), book(s), pen(s) or apple(s) for example. The ‘incorrect’ use of these uncountable nouns has long been cited as one of the main differences between native IC speakers of English and those in the OC and EC, who have more of a tendency to pluralize them (as advices and milks for example).  

Christopher Hall, Daniel Schmidtke and Jamie Vickers decided to study this assumed distinction more closely with a view to seeing whether there was any variation in uncountable noun usage between the outer and expanding circles. To do this they extracted their data from two main resources.  The first was the Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English, or VOICE, a spoken language database which contains just over one million words from non-native European English speakers.  The second was the World Wide Web, a fantastic resource for research into international varieties of English, especially as it’s full of ‘ill-formed’ language that prescriptive linguists really don’t like, just perfect for this study! By using the advanced settings of the Google search engine, Hall, Schmidtke and Vickers were able to search OC domains like Malta (.mt) and Hong Kong (.hk) and EC domains like Thailand (.th) and Iceland (.ic).  They scoured both VOICE and the WWW for examples of the ‘incorrect’ plural forms of uncountable nouns.

They found that the pluralisation of mass nouns was actually pretty uncommon, although obviously more frequent than native IC Englishes where it is almost entirely absent.  They also found that where uncountable nouns were used in the plural form, it was across a range of mainly OC settings.  This was a curious finding since we would expect speakers in countries where English is an official, widely-used  second language to use it more ‘correctly’ or at least more in line with native speakers of the IC.  

However, the researchers deduced that it may in fact be this notion of ‘correctness’ that is influencing the results.  In EC settings, English is formally taught and learnt as a foreign language and these speakers’ reliance on formal language and grammar rules, something the researchers describe as their ‘post-learner status’, could be directly influencing the results.

Hall, Schmidtke and Vickers are keen to point out that, although frequent when compared to IC Englishes, plural forms of uncountable nouns are unlikely to emerge as new forms in OC or EC Englishes as overall they are quite infrequent, and this usage probably doesn’t warrant as much ‘fuss’ and attention as prescriptive linguists have given it in the past. 

Nothing like some good researches to expand our knowledges, don’t you think?

Hall, Christopher J., Schmidtke, Daniel and Vickers, Jamie (2013) Countability in world Englishes. World Englishes 32 (1): 1-22.

doi: 10.1111/weng.12001

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

‘Throve’ and ‘dove’ or ‘thrived’ and ‘dived’? Let’s call the whole thing off!

At first, trying to explain the formation of the past tense in English may seem simple – you just add –-ed, don’t you? So that walk becomes walked and help becomes helped, right?  Correct! ... for ‘regular’ verbs.  Unfortunately, there are also many ‘irregular’ verbs like eat (ate) and stand (stood) that do not easily fit into this pattern.  In a logical world, we would expect language to regularize over time and this is true of some verbs – helped was hulpon in Old English. However, some regular past tense forms have actually become irregular – for example, mean > meant.

Lieselotte Anderwald investigated this phenomenon in British and American English.  These two varieties have developed their own national features and peculiarities over time and Anderwald was curious to see if this had happened with irregular past tense forms.  She concentrated on three verbs which have been recorded in both regular and irregular forms.  These are throve vs. thrived, dove vs. dived and plead vs. pled.  She searched a digital database or ‘corpus’ of 400 million American English words called Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) to find occurrences of these irregular past tense forms from as far back as 1810. She also searched the British National Corpus (BNC), containing over 100 million words from British English so that she could compare her findings. Then, she consulted her own Collection of Nineteenth-Century Grammars (CNG), containing 258 British and North American Grammar Books published during the 19^th century, to see if linguists were recommending a particular usage of these verb forms.

Although throve was the main past tense form used during the nineteeth century, it declined rapidly in use from 1910 onwards and seems to have regularized so that American users now only use thrived.  However, British English still uses throve at times.  American English appears to be leading British English by several decades in this regularization process.  In a completely opposite way, the irregular form dove is becoming more irregular in American English.  In fact, dove is used as much as dived in modern American usage today (50% of the time), unlike in British English where it is used just 1% of the time. The irregular form pled also seems to be a new form which has emerged during the twentieth century in American English, although in both varieties it is used very infrequently and mainly in legal contexts.

With this data in mind, Anderwald consulted the CNG.  In the case of thrived vs. throve the American  nineteenth century grammars permitted a lot of variation in usage and started to endorse thrived from the middle of the century, whereas the British Grammars appeared to strongly favour the use of throve. It is hard to know whether these American Grammars were just describing what they observed happening to this verb form or whether their recommendations were in some way influential in the change actually taking place.  Dove was rarely acknowledged as an irregular verb in any of the grammars consulted and dived was the only form accepted.  This is interesting considering how widely used it now is in American English and its lack of acknowledgment in grammars does not seem to have influenced the emergence of this irregular form.  Pled was only mentioned in twelve grammar books, ten of them from America and just two from Britain.  There was a rise in its inclusion in verb tables in  grammars of the 1860s, so that children would have learnt plead-pled-pled by heart.  Looking at her data from COHA, Anderwald noticed that there was a small rise in usage of pled in the 1870s which may have been caused by the generation of 1860 using it in their adult writing: a very small example of prescriptive influence maybe?  If this is so, it is probably because plead was (and is) so infrequent that users needed to consult a grammar book, whereas a more frequently used word is much better entrenched in the memory and therefore perhaps less influenced by grammarians. 

The differences Anderwald found between these changing irregular forms shows how two varieties of the same language can grow, develop and change in different ways. This is what makes language an integral part of a national character and grammarians may only minimally affect this.  Language will develop in its own way and won’t be restrained by rules…in fact sometimes it will even break them – obviously what throve throve to do!

Anderwald, Lieselotte (2013) Natural language change or prescriptive influence? Throve, dove, pled, drug and snuck in 19th-century American English. English World-Wide 34:2 (2013), 146–176.

doi 10.1075/eww.34.2.02

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Quoting then and now

I was like “they’re coming at eleven o’clock “

I said “they’re coming at eleven o’clock” 

Do you use BE LIKE to report what someone said? Thirty years ago few people had heard be like used this way. For young English speakers today, though, BE LIKE has taken over from SAY as the most frequent quotative form. This means that researchers interested in how language changes spread through a language can compare its use by different generations of speakers.

Mercedes Durham and her colleagues note that the most detailed research of this kind comes from Canada. Researchers there have found a strong sex difference emerging as the frequency of BE LIKE increases, with younger generations of female speakers using the new form more often than male speakers. They also found that the kind of quote that BE LIKE introduces changes over the generations:  the first uses of quotative BE LIKE were with a sound indicating the speaker’s state of mind, as in I was like “ugh”, but it was soon also used to introduce reported thought (what someone was thinking), as in I was like “never again”. Only with later generations of speakers is BE LIKE used more often to introduce what someone said (direct speech) than what someone was thinking. 

Durham and her research team analysed the quotative forms used by different generations of undergraduates at the University of York in the UK, to see whether BE LIKE has followed the same pathways of change in York as in Canada. As in Canada, in York the frequency of BE LIKE had soared in just one generation of speakers. In Canada BE LIKE represented 13 per cent of the different quotative forms used by students in 1995; by 2003, the proportion had soared to 63 per cent. In York, too, there was a dramatic increase in the frequency of BE LIKE across the generations, from 19 per cent in 1996 to 68 per cent in 2006. In both locations, then, BE LIKE had taken over from SAY and other quotative verbs to become the most popular quotative form.

However, these figures hide different trajectories of language change. Unlike Canada, in York the difference in the use of BE LIKE by female and male speakers had decreased between 1996 and 2006 rather than increased.  And in York, students in both 1996 and 2006 used BE LIKE the same way – slightly more often to introduce reported thought than direct speech. Across the generations they also continued to use BE LIKE more often with first person subjects and more often in the present tense. In both 1996 and 2006 students in York used SAY and other quotative verbs more often in the past tense.

The researchers point out that the sex differences between Canada and the UK, though interesting, are unremarkable.  They fit with previous research showing that as BE LIKE spreads around the English-speaking world it acquires different social meanings that reflect local social contexts. This results in different social and stylistic patterns in the use of the form from one community to another.

The differences between Canada and the UK in the linguistic effects on the use of BE LIKE are important, though, for our understanding of how changes spread through a language. What has happened in York is consistent with the findings of many researchers working on other kinds of syntactic change in the history of English: successive generations may use a new form more frequently, but they continue to use it in the same linguistic contexts. This is known as the constant rate effect: in other words, as different generations of children acquire the form BE LIKE they also learn the linguistic contexts associated with its use.

Durham and her colleagues suggest, then, that what has happened to BE LIKE in Canada is an exception. They predict that as BE LIKE evolves and spreads in other English-speaking communities around the world it will follow similar pathways of change to what was observed in York: people will use it with increasing frequency but the linguistic effects that constrain its use will remain the same.

This sets an intriguing challenge, then, for researchers elsewhere in the English-speaking world – we’re like “we want to know what happens to BE LIKE”!

To listen to sound clips featuring BE LIKE and other quotatives go to our English Language Teaching Resources website http://linguistics.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/english-language-teaching/language-materials  

------------------

 Durham, Mercedes, Haddican, Bill, Zweig, Eytan, Johnson, Daniel Ezra, Baker, Zipporah, Cockeram, David, Danks, Esther and Tyler, Louise (2012) Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of Be Like. Journal of English Linguistics 40 (4): 316-337.

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire