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English in Action I \M U \4 I CCNTAVCT A S | ILaVN€UaV € c V a r i a t i o n English in Action L a n g u a g e C c n t a g t AND L a n g u a g e V aibiiatiign E d i t e d b y E w a W iiil il iim Kraków 2011 Editorial Council of the Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University: Klemens Budzowski, Maria Kapiszewska, Zbigniew Maciąg, Jacek M. Majchrowski Reviewer: Dr hab. Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, prof. UJ Cover design: Oleg Aleksejp^it ; / Proof-reading: Ewa Willim ISBN 978-83-7571-170-7 Copyright© by Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University Kraków 2011 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication or its entirety may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in any manner that allows repeated use in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, copying, recording or other without the express written permission of copyright owners. Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University www.ka.edu.pl Publisher: Krakow Society for Education: AFM Publishing House / Krakowskie Towarzystwo Edukacyjne sp. z o.o. - Oficyna Wydawnicza AFM, Kraków 2011 Bookshop: U Frycza Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego 1, 30-705 Kraków phone/fax: (12) 252 45 93 e-mail: [email protected] Technical Lay-out Editor: Oleg Aleksejczuk Printed by Krakowskie Towarzystwo Edukacyjne sp. z o.o. CONTENTS P u r AC r ......................................................................................................................... 7 P a r t 1: L a n g u a g e c o n t a c t Marta Dąbrowska Hindi-English Code-Switching as a Community of Practice M arker.. 13 Iwona Krok Selected English Borrowings in Popular Contemporary Russian Press on the Example of O go n yo k..................................................... 43 Krzysztof Ozga Moya VayfYuzaet Vindozu. An Analysis of Selected English Borrowings in Standard and Slang Russian..................................................... 53 Marcin Zabawa Is Polish Really Being Flooded w ith English Borrowings? On the influence of English on W ritten and Spoken Polish (W ith Special Emphasis on the Polish Spoken by Poles Living in Great B rita in )....................................................................................................... 69 P a r t 2 : Language V ariation Jerzy Freundlich Americanization of British English: Aspects of Linguistic Change in the Speech of Educated British Speakers................................................. 89 Marta Ruda On the Interactions Between Core Grammar and the Periphery in Intralanguage Syntactic Variation. The Case of Missing Objects in English................................................................................................... 99 Ewa W illim Universal Grammar, Parameters of Variation and the Morphosyntax of World Englishes............................................ 117 N o t e s A r o u i A u t h o r s .........................................................................................135 The present monographic volume contains seven studies that deal with the ever-changing nature of language. Change and variation are so much at the heart of language that it could well be said that the story of language is the story of continuous invention and re-invention. The empirical base for the studies included in this monograph is English, which has become the world's leading language spoken around the globe and an essential tool for international economy, sciences, art, and interac­ tions across linguistic, cultural and national boundaries. As a result of its globalization, it is developing new dialects and varieties, and it is coming into contact with more and more languages and cultures all the time. While the lexical (and to a far lesser degree also grammatical) resources of English are readily drawn upon by the languages that English comes into contact with, also the benchmark reference varieties of English are prone to change both from within and as a result of language contact. The influence of social, situational, as well as regional varieties on benchmark varieties of English raise questions about the nature of linguistic variability as well as questions of linguistic norms or standards of nativeness. The studies included in this volume address some of these questions, focusing on two main themes: contact-induced language change and the nature of (morpho)syntactic vari­ ability in language. Most of them are based on naturalistic corpus data and/ or dictionary-based searches. The two broad research themes: how English enriches and invigorates the lexical resources of other languages and how it exerts influence on the conversational styles of speakers using English as their second or foreign lan­ guage, and how the standard or register-neutral varieties of English can be influenced by the contexts of use as well how language variants are born in language, are arranged here into two separate parts, Part 1 on language contact and Part 2 on intralinguistic variation. l i i i \< i The topic of language contact in Part 1 is undertaken in the studies by Marta Dąbrowska, Iwona Krok, Krzysztof Ozga and Marcin Zabawa, w ho address the influence of English on selected aspects of language mixing and language borrowing. In her richly supported, detailed study of language mixing that can be observed in the posts that native speakers of Hindi, fans of Hindi films and a famous Hindi movie star put on his Facebook walls, Marta Dąbrowska not only takes the reader on a journey through time to explain the complicated linguistic situation of present-day India and the status of English in this multi­ cultural and multi-linguistic community, but also overviews the debate over code-switching in recent sociolinguistic literature, introduces a formal clas­ sification of switches, and looks at their pragmatic values. The main conclu­ sion that she reaches on the basis of a careful, comprehensive analysis of a wealth of data gathered from the Facebook posts addressed to Shah Rukh Khan, is that these switches function mainly as discourse markers, facilitat­ ing person-to-person linguistic interaction, especially in its phatic commu­ nion aspects, and reflect the communicative strategies characteristic of the com m unity of practice of Indian Facebook users. The other studies included in this part deal not with language mixing, but with borrowing as a source of greater wealth and a means of invigorating the lexical resources of the languages under scrutiny: Russian and Polish. Iwona Krok's and Krzysztof Ozga's contributions are concerned with the impact that the English language has on contem porary Russian, analyzed on the basis of data gathered from a popular magazine in the case of Iwona Krok's study and (mostly) on a dictionary search in Krzysztof Ozga's inquiry. Both these contributions point out the surprising ease with which the lexical resources of English are used to enrich and invigorate Russian, both stan­ dard and non-standard (slang), to fit new ideas and developments as well as to meet the Russian speakers' need for linguistic novelty and expressive­ ness. In addition, both studies show that borrowing as a process exceeds simple importation of ready-made lexical items into the target language. Once domesticated, English morphemes are recycled over and over again in the Russian lexical morphological com ponent to produce many related native formations, both words and expressions. Marcin Zabawa's study deals with the influence of English on contempo­ rary Polish. W hile data from both w ritten and spoken Polish gathered in an Internet-based search are taken into account, the focus is on the types and frequency of English loanwords in the written posts that appear on the Inter­ net message boards used both by Poles living at home and by recent Polish immigrants to Great Britain. As his study shows, English loanwords are used more often in informal w ritten Polish than in spoken Polish, w hether the context of use is Poland or Great Britain, w ith Poles living in Great Britian re­ I l l I A t I sorting to English words more often than Poles living at home. Marcin Zaba­ wa links this fact to a greater influence of the English vocabulary in a native English setting of language use, Great Britain being the case under study. The three studies gathered in Part 2 deal with some of the factors that may be responsible for intralinguistic variation within English. In contrast to traditional dialectologicaI and sociolinguistic variationist studies on English varieties and situational variants, which have mainly concerned themselves with phonological and lexical differences, the three studies included here all deal with (morpho)syntactic variation. Jerzy Freundlich looks at some selected grammatical changes in the lan­ guage used by educated native speakers of English that have taken place over the past several decades and traces their origins to the influence of the American variety of English on standard British English. According to him, these influences can be linked to complex socio-cultural factors and the im­ portance of the American variety of English not only on unrelated languages, but also on m odern British English. Interestingly, the American signatures on British English are currently exceeding beyond the boundaries of the lexical stock of English, influencing some grammatical resources of educated native speakers of British English. Marta Ruda looks into the intralinguistic syntactic variation that can be observed with respect to the phenomenon of object drop in the neutral and situationally-bound registers of (British) English, which she investigates in reference mainly to the recipe register. While the observed variation in the availability of the verb's implicit object with specific reference to be left un­ articulated has been argued in the theoretical literature to reveal differences in the syntactic systems of the neutral and the recipe registers, Marta Ruda argues for a performance-based view of non-overt objects in such contexts and relates object drop to the general conditions of the economy of linguis­ tic computation that dictate that implicit arguments be pronounced only if necessary for interpretation in their contexts of use.
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