A Corpus·Based Investigation of Xhosa English In
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Influences on the Development of Early Modern English
Influences on the Development of Early Modern English Kyli Larson Wright This article covers the basic social, historical, and linguistic influences that have transformed the English language. Research first describes components of Early Modern English, then discusses how certain factors have altered the lexicon, phonology, and other components. Though there are many factors that have shaped English to what it is today, this article only discusses major factors in simple and straightforward terms. 72 Introduction The history of the English language is long and complicated. Our language has shifted, expanded, and has eventually transformed into the lingua franca of the modern world. During the Early Modern English period, from 1500 to 1700, countless factors influenced the development of English, transforming it into the language we recognize today. While the history of this language is complex, the purpose of this article is to determine and map out the major historical, social, and linguistic influences. Also, this article helps to explain the reasons for their influence through some examples and evidence of writings from the Early Modern period. Historical Factors One preliminary historical event that majorly influenced the development of the language was the establishment of the print- ing press. Created in 1476 by William Caxton at Westminster, London, the printing press revolutionized the current language form by creating a means for language maintenance, which helped English gravitate toward a general standard. Manuscripts could be reproduced quicker than ever before, and would be identical copies. Because of the printing press spelling variation would eventually decrease (it was fixed by 1650), especially in re- ligious and literary texts. -
Natural Phonetic Tendencies and Social Meaning: Exploring the Allophonic Raising Split of PRICE and MOUTH on the Isles of Scilly
This is a repository copy of Natural phonetic tendencies and social meaning: Exploring the allophonic raising split of PRICE and MOUTH on the Isles of Scilly. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/133952/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Moore, E.F. and Carter, P. (2018) Natural phonetic tendencies and social meaning: Exploring the allophonic raising split of PRICE and MOUTH on the Isles of Scilly. Language Variation and Change, 30 (3). pp. 337-360. ISSN 0954-3945 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394518000157 This article has been published in a revised form in Language Variation and Change [https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394518000157]. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University Press. Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. This licence only allows you to download this work and share it with others as long as you credit the authors, but you can’t change the article in any way or use it commercially. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Title: Natural phonetic tendencies -
A Study of Idiom Translation Strategies Between English and Chinese
ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 1691-1697, September 2013 © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.3.9.1691-1697 A Study of Idiom Translation Strategies between English and Chinese Lanchun Wang School of Foreign Languages, Qiongzhou University, Sanya 572022, China Shuo Wang School of Foreign Languages, Qiongzhou University, Sanya 572022, China Abstract—This paper, focusing on idiom translation methods and principles between English and Chinese, with the statement of different idiom definitions and the analysis of idiom characteristics and culture differences, studies the strategies on idiom translation, what kind of method should be used and what kind of principle should be followed as to get better idiom translations. Index Terms— idiom, translation, strategy, principle I. DEFINITIONS OF IDIOMS AND THEIR FUNCTIONS Idiom is a language in the formation of the unique and fixed expressions in the using process. As a language form, idioms has its own characteristic and patterns and used in high frequency whether in written language or oral language because idioms can convey a host of language and cultural information when people chat to each other. In some senses, idioms are the reflection of the environment, life, historical culture of the native speakers and are closely associated with their inner most spirit and feelings. They are commonly used in all types of languages, informal and formal. That is why the extent to which a person familiarizes himself with idioms is a mark of his or her command of language. Both English and Chinese are abundant in idioms. -
L Vocalisation As a Natural Phenomenon
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Essex Research Repository L Vocalisation as a Natural Phenomenon Wyn Johnson and David Britain Essex University [email protected] [email protected] 1. Introduction The sound /l/ is generally characterised in the literature as a coronal lateral approximant. This standard description holds that the sounds involves contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, but instead of the air being blocked at the sides of the tongue, it is also allowed to pass down the sides. In many (but not all) dialects of English /l/ has two allophones – clear /l/ ([l]), roughly as described, and dark, or velarised, /l/ ([…]) involving a secondary articulation – the retraction of the back of the tongue towards the velum. In dialects which exhibit this allophony, the clear /l/ occurs in syllable onsets and the dark /l/ in syllable rhymes (leaf [li˘f] vs. feel [fi˘…] and table [te˘b…]). The focus of this paper is the phenomenon of l-vocalisation, that is to say the vocalisation of dark /l/ in syllable rhymes 1. feel [fi˘w] table [te˘bu] but leaf [li˘f] 1 This process is widespread in the varieties of English spoken in the South-Eastern part of Britain (Bower 1973; Hardcastle & Barry 1989; Hudson and Holloway 1977; Meuter 2002, Przedlacka 2001; Spero 1996; Tollfree 1999, Trudgill 1986; Wells 1982) (indeed, it appears to be categorical in some varieties there) and which extends to many other dialects including American English (Ash 1982; Hubbell 1950; Pederson 2001); Australian English (Borowsky 2001, Borowsky and Horvath 1997, Horvath and Horvath 1997, 2001, 2002), New Zealand English (Bauer 1986, 1994; Horvath and Horvath 2001, 2002) and Falkland Island English (Sudbury 2001). -
Dealing with Spelling Variation in Early Modern English Texts
Dealing with Spelling Variation in Early Modern English Texts Alistair Baron B.Sc. (Hons) School of Computing and Communications Lancaster University A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2011 Abstract Early English Books Online contains digital facsimiles of virtually every English work printed between 1473 and 1700; some 125,000 publications. In September 2009, the Text Creation Partnership released the second instalment of transcrip- tions of the EEBO collection, bringing the total number of transcribed works to 25,000. It has been estimated that this transcribed portion contains 1 billion words of running text. With such large datasets and the increasing variety of historical corpora available from the Early Modern English period, the opportunities for historical corpus linguistic research have never been greater. However, it has been observed in prior research, and quantified on a large-scale for the first time in this thesis, that texts from this period contain significant amounts of spelling variation until the eventual standardisation of orthography in the 18th century. The problems caused by this historical spelling variation are the focus of this thesis. It will be shown that the high levels of spelling variation found have a significant impact on the accuracy of two widely used automatic corpus linguistic methods { Part-of-Speech annotation and key word analysis. The development of historical spelling normalisation methods which can alleviate these issues will then be presented. Methods will be based on techniques used in modern spellchecking, with various analyses of Early Modern English spelling variation dictating how the techniques are applied. With the methods combined into a single procedure, automatic normalisation can be performed on an entire corpus of any size. -
Variation and Change in Past Tense Negation in African American English
University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English Sabriya Fisher University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Fisher, Sabriya, "Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2925. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2925 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2925 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Variation And Change In Past Tense Negation In African American English Abstract This dissertation investigates the use of ain’t for negation in past tense contexts in Philadelphia African American English [PhAAE]. This use of ain’t, which varies with didn’t, is a unique feature of AAE (Labov et al. 1968) and has implications for the expression of tense/aspect in the language. First, it further levels tense/aspect cues from auxiliaries in negative contexts. Second, whereas verbal complements of didn’t are uninflected (1a), complements of ain’t may either be uninflected or in preterit form (1b). This asymmetry indicates potential structural differences between ain’t and didn’t. (1) a. They didn’t play yesterday. b. They ain’t play(ed) yesterday. Consequently, this dissertation joins a quantitative study of the social and linguistic factors conditioning use of ain’t with a distributional investigation of its syntax and interaction with tense morphology. Toward that end, I analyze naturalistic speech data from 42 speakers in a corpus of casual conversations collected in the early 1980s from African American Philadelphians. -
English Language Learners: a Research Perspective
Gateways for English Language Learners: A Research Perspective Program Authors Action Learning Systems, Inc. Robin Scarcella, Ph.D., Hector Rivera, Ph.D., and Mabel Rivera, Ph.D. English Language Development Isabel L. Beck, Ph.D. and Margaret G. McKeown, Ph.D. Vocabulary Penny Chiappe-Collins, Ph.D. Decoding NNLG_ELH_FM_ƒ.inddLG_ELH_FM_ƒ.indd 1 99/27/08/27/08 111:00:441:00:44 AAMM Welcome to Gateways from our English Language Experts As educators today we know more about developing effective materials to teach English to English language learners (ELLs) than ever before. More specifically, we are able to address the critical needs of these students in ways that are grounded in proven practices and responsible research. We choose to be affiliated with Gateways because these grade-appropriate materials are tailored to meet the needs of English language learners. This program was tested with diverse groups of English language learners— those who have just arrived in the United States, those with educational gaps, those highly literate in their first languages, those not literate in any language, and those who have ceased to make much improvement in learning English over many years. Throughout the testing, these materials appealed to teachers and students alike. Most importantly, Gateways, based on research and proven effective teaching practices, helps to accelerate learners’ development of English in real classrooms with real students. This program helps to get English language learners into core-curricular instruction quickly, where they can continue to acquire the academic, content-specific language skills needed to succeed in life and, if students so choose, in higher education. -
English Language
ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1. The History of English English is not only the first language for more than 400 million native speakers, but also a lingua franca1 for 1,5 billion speakers overall. It is the official language in almost 60 countries around the world. The shaping2 of the English language was a complicated process connected with the historical and social experience of the people living on the British Isles and elsewhere. It is not incorrect to say that the evolution of English resembles3 the evolution of the British nation as we know it today. Through various eras and in specific situations, the social life of the British has had an immense4 influence on the language the people spoke and speak today. From a linguistic perspective, English is traditionally described as a West-Germanic language. Its roots lie deep in the past before the beginning of the first millennium. “The Proto- Germanic5 parent language gave rise6 to three branches of descendant7 languages, namely8, eastern, northern, and western. … The eastern branch was represented by Gothic, Burgundian and Vandal languages, all the three of them dead now. The northern branch comprises9 idioms10 spoken on the territory of today’s Denmark and Scandinavia.”11 Thus12 we have two groups of Germanic languages in existence today: the western group (English, German, Dutch) and the northern group (Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and some minor languages). Traditionally, the history of English is divided into three major stages: Old English, Middle English, and New English with Modern English as part of it. Let us discuss the individual stages in more detail now. -
A Typological Approach to VP Ellipsis in Tag Questions
Tagged for Deletion: A Typological Approach to VP Ellipsis in Tag Questions Craig Sailor [email protected] UCLA Master’s thesis 14 October 2009 Note to the reader: Apart from a few organizational and typographical changes made in 2011, the version of the thesis you are reading here is largely unchanged from the original (as dated above). As a result, please note that this version does not fully reflect my current thinking on the topic, which differs in a few noteworthy, but relatively minor, ways. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................4 Abstract .....................................................................................................................................5 Section 1: Introduction .............................................................................................................7 1.1. Background and definition ...........................................................................................8 Section 2: Prior approaches to the syntax of tag questions ......................................................10 2.1. Tags as pronounced traces of movement (den Dikken 1995) ......................................11 2.2. Tags as complex anaphors (Culicover 1992) ...............................................................13 2.2.1. A theoretical problem with the anaphoric approach .........................................15 2.3. Summary ......................................................................................................................15 -
132202039 Diploma Iii English Study Program
THE DESCRIPTION OF QUESTION-TAGS IN ENGLISH A PAPER BY ANTO NERA MANURUNG REG. NO.: 132202039 DIPLOMA III ENGLISH STUDY PROGRAM FACULTY OF CULTURAL STUDY UNIVERSITY OF SUMATERA UTARA MEDAN 2017 UNIVERSITAS SUMATERA UTARA Approved by Supervisor, Dr. Matius C.A. sembiring, M.A. NIP. 19521126198112 1 001 Submitted to Faculty of Cultural Study University of Sumatera Utara In partial fulfillment of the requirements for DIPLOMA (D-III) in English. Approved by Head of English Study Program, Dr. Matius C.A Sembiring, M.A NIP. 19521126198112 1 001 Approved by the Diploma III of English Study Program Faculty of Cultural Study, University of Sumatera Utara As a Paper for the Diploma (D-III) Examination UNIVERSITAS SUMATERA UTARA Accepted by the Board of Examiners in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the D-III Examination of the Diploma III of English Study Program, Faculty of Letters, University of Sumatera Utara. The examination is held on the Faculty of Letters, University of North Sumatera on February 2017 Faculty of Letters, University of Sumatera Utara Dean, Dr. Budi Agustono, M.Si. NIP. 19511013197603 1 001 Board of Examiners 1. Dr. Matius C.A. Sembiring, M.A. (Head of ESP) ( ) 2. Dr. Matius C.A. Sembiring, M.A. (Supervisor) ( ) 3. Drs. Siamir Marulafau, M.Hum. (Reader) ( ) UNIVERSITAS SUMATERA UTARA AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I’m, Anto Nera Manurung, declare that I am the sole author of this paper. Except where reference is made in the text of this paper, this paper contains no material published elsewhere or extracted in whole or in part from a paper by which I have qualified for awarded another degree. -
Yes-No Questions, Negative Yes-No Questions, and Tag Questions: Implications for Teaching Japanese Students of English
札幌大学総合論叢 第 49 号(2020 年3月) 〈論文〉 Yes-No Questions, Negative Yes-No Questions, and Tag Questions: Implications for Teaching Japanese Students of English Michael V. Mielke Introduction Learning English as a second language or foreign language poses many challenges for Japanese students, particularly in the use of correct English grammar. Various authors have shown that Japanese students make similar errors with many parts of English grammar( Barker 2008, Izzo 1999). Some errors can be relatively benign in their consequences such as forgetting the "s" at the end of third person singular verbs, or mistaking subject or object pronouns in constructions such as, "Me and her are going to the park." In these two common error examples, the meaning is still quite clear from the context. One area of grammar that can have more serious consequences is in what Huddleston and Pullum( 2016, 853-855) refer to as closed interrogatives but more commonly known as yes-no questions, where the answers are either a yes or no( also referred to as polar questions( 868)). The choice of answers is limited. Variations of closed interrogatives include tag questions, negative yes-no questions, and declarative statements, both positive and negative that serve as questions when they have rising intonation. These types of questions, especially closed negative interrogatives, require "an affirmative or negative reply - often just 'yes' or 'no'( Crystal 1995, 218) and thus if there is a misunderstanding about how to answer this seemingly simple question form, there is a high probability of a miscommunication. This paper will first describe the formation of regular yes-no questions and then describe three variational forms and their respective usages:negative yes-no questions, 73 Michael V. -
The Limits of Questioning: Negative Interrogatives and Hostile Question Content
Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 1427–1446 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma The limits of questioning: negative interrogatives and hostile question content John Heritage* Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA Abstract This paper considers negative interrogatives—questions beginning with such frames as ‘Isn’t it’, ‘Don’t you’, ‘Shouldn’t you’ etc. –– as limiting cases of ‘questioning’. Using data from news interviews, where questioning is mandatory and the boundary between questions and assertions can be highly sensitive and contested, it suggests that this form of interrogative is recurrently produced as, and treated as, a vehicle for assertions. Further while negative interrogatives are contested as ‘assertions’, statements accompanied by negative tags are not. This suggests that Bolinger’s (Bolinger, Dwight, 1957. Interrogative Structures of American English. University of Alabama Press, Alabama.) claim that the two formats are equivalent is incorrect. Some suggestions are offered as to why the two formats should be differentially treated in terms of their assertiveness. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. Keywords: Questions; Interaction; Preference; Institutional; News interviews 1. Introduction In its most elementary form, a ‘question’ is a form of social action, designed to seek information and accomplished in a turn at talk by means of interrogative syn- tax. ‘Do you have the time?’ embodies this fusion of grammar and social action, and so does ‘What time is it?’ Interrogative syntax is the standard means of accom- plishing the kind of social action –– henceforth ‘questioning’—that seeks informa- tion, and it embodies a kind of social normativity that is frozen in grammar—a grammaticalized normativity.