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Salience in Welsh English Grammar: a Usage-Based Approach

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Salience in Welsh English Grammar: a Usage-Based Approach Salience in Welsh English grammar: A usage-based approach Katja Roller Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg New Ideas in Human Interaction Universitätsbibliothek Salience in Welsh English grammar A usage-based approach Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philologischen Fakultät der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br. vorgelegt von Katja Martina Roller aus Alzenau Wintersemester 2015/16 Titel der eingereichten Dissertation: On the relation between frequency and salience in morphosyntax: The case of Welsh English Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Bernd Kortmann Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christian Mair Drittgutachter: Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder Vorsitzender des Promotionsausschusses der Gemeinsamen Kommission der Philologischen, Philosophischen und Wirtschafts- und Verhaltenswissenschaftlichen Fakultät: Prof. Dr. Christoph Huth Datum der Fachprüfung im Promotionsfach: 12.05.2016 Perception is of definite and probable things WILLIAM JAMES 1890 Acknowledgements Writing a PhD thesis reminds me of composing a piano piece. What we perceive in the end is the consonance of many notes, the melody. But in constructing and play- ing such a piece, a range of individual keys are involved, each of them contributing in its own way to the composition. In working on this book, there were many people functioning as “keys” for me, and I would like to give them my heartfelt thanks here. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors Bernd Kortmann and Chris- tian Mair for their continuous support, constructive feedback and valuable advice. My work benefited greatly from their comments and ideas, and I am grateful for having learnt a lot in the context of linguistic research from these inspiring teachers. My thanks also go to the other professors in our research training group GRK DFG 1624 “Frequency Effects in Language” for their very helpful critical comments from various perspectives. Many thanks to Stefan Pfänder in particular, who also was a great help in organisational GRK-related matters. Thank you ever so much to all my colleagues in the GRK: for your support insomany ways (e.g. comments on methods and statistical matters, helping distribute question- naires, reading through dissertation chapters – thank you so much, Stephanie, Luke and Laura!), but also for the wonderful time together in Freiburg! I’m looking forward to many more barbecues at Seepark, hikes in the Black Forest, quiz nights at O’Kellys and mini wok evenings to come! Many thanks go to various other researchers from inside and outside of Freiburg. Thank you to Jonnie Robinson and Rob Perks of the British Library in London forgrant- ing me access to the Millennium Memory Bank, and for your support when transcrib- ing parts of the collection for my Radio Wales Corpus. Thanks a lot to Paul Kerswill for granting me access to the corpus Linguistic Innovators: The English of Adolescents in v Acknowledgements London. Many thanks to Peter Garrett, Peredur Davies, Jakob Leimgruber, Lowri Wil- liams, Jonnie Robinson and all the others who helped me distribute my questionnaires in Wales and London. I would also like to thank our workshop guests in the GRK for their valuable feedback on my project at different stages: Peter Garrett, Marion Krause, Adriana Hanulíková, Chris Montgomery, Elissa Pustka, Josep Àngel Mas Castells and Paul Kerswill. Thank you to Christoph Wolk for your priceless assistance in statist- ical matters, and to the students of the University of Freiburg’s English Department (above all Marion Kwiatkowski) who helped me transcribe my corpus. Thank you to the coordinators of our research training group, Monika Schulz and Michael Schäfer, for your help with a myriad of things organisational in the context of the GRK. Thank you, Manfred Krug, for introducing me to linguistic research. Your enthusiasm for lin- guistics sparked my interest in carrying out such a research project myself. Last but not least, my heartfelt thanks go to many lovely people in my private life. To my parents, my sister Miriam, my brothers Christian and Jonas, my friends from Alzenau, Bamberg, Swansea and Freiburg: thanks for your support and for always be- lieving in me. And thanks for bringing me back down to earth at times and showing me what really matters in life. Finally, thank you, Frank! You helped me with somany PhD-related things, such as programming, and contributed inspirational thoughts on salience from a physicist’s point of view. Apart from that, thanks for being a keystone in my everyday life and for making me laugh so often. You gave me the balance and strength to attend to this project with passion! Katja Roller, Freiburg, November 2016 Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Introduction of the topic .......................... 1 1.2 Research aims ................................ 3 1.3 Structure of the book ............................ 5 2 Salience 8 2.1 Salience in science .............................. 8 2.2 Salience in linguistics ............................ 9 2.3 Salience in sociolinguistics and dialectology . 11 2.3.1 Definitions and concepts of salience . 12 2.3.2 Causes of salience ......................... 17 2.3.3 Effects of salience .......................... 23 2.4 Salience in the present study ........................ 25 2.5 Summary ................................... 25 3 Welsh English 28 3.1 General information ............................. 28 3.1.1 Historical background: The anglicisation of Wales . 28 3.1.2 Varieties of Welsh English ..................... 31 3.2 Welsh English morphosyntax ........................ 33 3.2.1 The features under investigation . 34 3.2.2 Research on Welsh English morphosyntax . 43 3.2.3 Beyond morphosyntax: Characteristics of Welsh English phon- ology, intonation and lexis ..................... 50 3.3 English in London .............................. 52 3.3.1 General information ........................ 53 vii Contents 3.3.2 London English grammar ..................... 55 3.4 Summary ................................... 58 4 Research questions and hypotheses 60 5 Methodology 64 5.1 General research design ........................... 64 5.2 Salience survey ............................... 66 5.2.1 Conceiving the survey ....................... 66 5.2.2 Conducting the survey ....................... 76 5.3 Corpus analyses ............................... 78 5.3.1 Radio Wales Corpus ........................ 78 5.3.2 Linguistic Innovators corpus .................... 87 5.4 Further studies ................................ 88 5.4.1 Analyses of TV clips ........................ 88 5.4.2 eWAVE study ............................ 90 5.4.3 Questionnaire: Perception of deviations from Standard English 91 5.5 Statistical methods .............................. 93 5.6 Summary ................................... 95 6 Results 97 6.1 Salience in Welsh English grammar .................... 97 6.2 Salience and frequency . 101 6.2.1 Frequency in Welsh English . 102 6.2.2 Frequency in Welsh English vs. London English . 108 6.2.3 Frequency in Welsh English vs. Standard English . 113 6.2.4 Frequency in the media . 118 6.2.5 Variation of frequency in Welsh English . 120 6.2.6 Interim summary: Frequency . 125 6.3 Salience and pervasiveness in the British Isles . 126 6.4 Salience and perceived deviation from the standard language . 138 6.5 Salience and social factors . 147 6.5.1 Subjects from Wales vs. subjects from London . 148 6.5.2 Subjects from Wales: Native language, region in Wales . 151 6.5.3 Subjects from London: Contact with Welsh English . 153 Contents viii 6.5.4 The role of incomers . 158 6.6 Summary and discussion . 161 7 Conclusion and outlook 168 7.1 Relating the results to the hypotheses . 168 7.2 General gains and implications for future research . 171 7.2.1 Usage-based linguistics . 171 7.2.2 Perceptual dialectology . 175 7.2.3 Welsh English ............................176 7.2.4 Outlook: Towards a usage-based dialectology . 177 Bibliography 179 Appendix 194 German summary 211 Welsh summary 214 List of figures 1 Main dialect areas of Wales ......................... 31 2 Overview of methods employed in the present study . 66 3 Exemplary sentence from salience test I . 70 4 Map showing the places of residence of the Welsh informants in the salience survey ................................ 78 5 Numbers of speakers in the RWC according to their decades of birth . 85 6 Map showing the places where the interviews in the RWC were con- ducted .................................... 86 7 Welsh presenters and comedians named by the London subjects in the salience questionnaire ............................ 90 8 Salience values of Welsh English features, obtained in the first test of the questionnaire-based survey ...................... 99 9 Degrees to which the invariant tag question isn’t it was assigned to different regions in the British Isles by subjects from London . 100 10 Token frequencies of features in the RWC, ordered by the features’ salience ....................................105 11 Percentages of subjects who recognised Welsh English features with mean frequencies higher than or equal to/lower than the mean fre- quency of 1.37 per 10,000 words . 107 12 Token frequencies of morphosyntactic features in the LI and the RWC . 110 13 Percentages of subjects from London who recognised Welsh English features with mean frequency differences higher than or equal to/lower than the average value of 0.2 per 10,000 words . 112 14 Invariant tag questions and concord tag questions involving isn’t it or innit in the RWC and the LI
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