Introduction to the study of Varieties of Present-Day English

Lecture 7 Further Notes and Concluding Remarks about Present-day English(es)

Back to Standard English Grammar

Each sentence contains a mistake. Identify the error and rewrite the sentence in the correct way. 1. A good sentence in English is one that is brief, short, and easy to understand. 2. The first things an international student must do include renting an apartment, registering for classes, and to get to know the city. 3. Professor Jameson is extreme well liked by his colleagues. 4. Beside two houses in the city, he owns a house in the country. 5. After finishing dinner, the telephone rang.

6. They agreed tomorrow to make a decision. 7. Antique furniture sells well even though is expensive. 8. Benjamin Franklin, the famous American statesman, author, and scientist, he was born in 1709 and lived to the age of eighty-four. 9. Some of the citys swimming-pools were closed since the end of last summer. 10. The city council is for some time now considering widening the street.

Tips concerning ERROR TYPES

double subject or no subject; unnecessary repetition (i.e., semantic redundancy); structural parallelism not observed; lexical confusion; spelling; verb forms; adj./adv.; singular /plural; two and more than two; wrong prepositions; lack of logic; misrelated constructions (dangling modifiers), wrong word order; wrong pronoun form, agreement and reference.

In-class work Read these sentences carefully, and then rewrite them in as few words as possible (between two and ten) without really changing the meaning:
1. If I were asked to give an accurate description of my physical condition at the present moment, the only possible honest reply would be that I am greatly in need of liquid refreshment. 2. People whose professional activity lies in the field of politics are not, on the whole, conspicuous for their respect for factual accuracy. 3. I must confess to a feeling of very considerable affection for the young female person with whom I spend the greater part of my spare time. 4. Failure to assimilate an adequate quantity of solid food over an extended period of time is absolutely certain to lead, in due course, to a fatal conclusion.

 5. It is by no means easy to achieve an accurate understanding of that subject of study which is concerned with the relationship between numbers. 6. It is my fervent wish that the creator of the universe will do his utmost to preserve and protect the royal lady who graciously occupies the position of head of state. 7. I should be greatly obliged if you would have the kindness to bring me, at your convenience, a written statement of the indebtedness I have incurred in connection with the meal which you have just finished serving to me. 8. I should be grateful if you would be so good as to stop the uninterrupted flow of endless remarks with which you are currently straining my patience to breaking point.

Architecture of a language
If a language is taken as a historical object, i.e., a way of communicating by language bound to the coordinates of a particular speech community (rather than as a self-contained system), its use varies along a set of dimensions that has been called the architecture of a language (Flydal 1951). The following set of four dimensions is proposed in Coseriu 1981:

Architecture of a language: dimensions of variation

(Dimension + explanation + examples) DIAPHASIC, i.e., in different communicative settings, different levels of style/register are used, e.g., oral vs. written language, foreigner talk, vulgar style DIASTRATIC, i.e, in different social groups (according to age, sex, profession ...), different sociolects are used, e.g., youth language, hunters' language

DIATOPIC + in different places and regions of the linguistic area, different dialects are spoken, e.g., English English > Northern English English (>including Scouse, Geordie, Yorkshire dialect etc.) DIACHRONIC, i.e., variants and even historical stages follow each other on the diachronic axis, e.g. (from the present perspective), extinct, obsolete, oldfashioned, current, fashionable expressions Note: to discuss the status of Old English

Compare:
SYNCHRONIC VARIETIES DIATOPIC (COSERIU, RONA) local-regional geographic dialect (GREGORY) Region (QUIRK ET AL) DIASTRATIC (COSERIU, RONA) social-cultural; sociolect social dialect (GREGORY) Education and Social Standing (QUIRK ET AL DIATYPIC (RONA) diaphasic (COSERIU) functional-stylistic

(according to)
(HALLIDAY:) (QUIRK ET AL:) (HALLIDAY:) Content/ Subject matter/ Field spoken "the language of ....." Channel/ Medium/ Mode written (See STYLES below) Participants/ Attitude/ Tenor

The set of properties that characterize a variety and distinguish it from the others does not exhaust a whole language system. This is clearest in the case of a professional special language, which may be characterized only by some additional vocabulary. Similarly, a dialect may share its syntax with the other dialects or with the standard while differing from them in phonological and lexical aspects.

EYE DIALECT IN LITERATURE A ST LUCIAN POEM

A Noble Prize
Mooma what a fete! Dem St. Looshans dance an prance till the back door tumble down De boys say, Charlie, have you heard the news? He turn on the radio an ah hear a Looshan win a Nobel prize You hear how he say Nobel Speakey-spokey like the Queen? All the pickney know dat de word is Noble

He say is de second Nobel a Looshan win Dey say he win it for potery and play Me never know dem uses to give prize for dat (Min you, me doesn play much) but me got nuff potery in my yard Mus can give dis Walcott competition Ah goin aks de boss to write up my petition All you tink dis is fete? When ah get de tird Noble Mama it go be pure bacchanal till nex year carnival. Hazel Simmons McDonald

ST. LUCIA
Like many of the Caribbean Islands present-day inhabitants, the majority of St Lucians are descended from Africans imported as slaves in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Carib people, the original inhabitants of the island, are now extinct. St Lucia, in the Caribbeans Lesser Antilles, is a mountainous, forested island of extinct volcanoes. It became a permanent British possession in the late 18th century, having been fought over by Great Britain and France. French patois, a creole dialect, is spoken by many islanders, although the official language is English. St Lucia gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1979. The high proportion of Roman Catholics in St Lucia reflects the historical influence of the French, who began to colonize the island in the mid-17th century. Even the nations name pays tribute to a Catholic saintaccording to tradition, Christopher Columbus discovered the island on 13 December 1502, the feast day of Saint Lucy. Lucy lived in the 3rd century in Sicily, where she was called Santa Lucia.

Further examples of non-standard varieties illustrated in literature

1. "I knowed you wasn't Oklahoma folks."

(John Steinbeck, The Graphes of Wrath, 1940)

2. "Womenfolks, mostly. All the grown women around my way look just the same. They all bigstout. They got big bosoms and big hips and fat legs, and they always wearing runover house shoes and them shapeless, flowered numbers with the buttons down the front. 'Cept on Sunday. Sunday morning they all turn into glamour girls, in them big hats and long gloves, with they skinny high heels and they skinny selves in them tight girdles-wouldn't nobody ever know what they look like the rest of the time."

(Becky Birtha, Johnnieruth, in BreakingIce. An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction, Penguin Books, 1990)

3. "He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man."
(Alice Walker, The Color Purple, New York, 1982)

4. "Lunch at the Camelot; Noddy me mando (& that's the word, son) a que fuera a look over a deal; Noddy se quiere deshacer de la agencia de carros y el buyer wants (has) to use the bank's money for said purpose. A eso se le llama barrer pa' dentro. Fue cosa de dos horas; no tenia qu ya que los abogados se encargaran - still, two hours away from the bank are two hours away from the bank y lo que se oye en el Camelot no se oye en cualquier lugar."
(Rolando Hinojosa, Mi Querido Rafa, Houston, 1981)

5. Papa bilong mifala, yu yu stap antap long heven, Mifala i wantem we nem bilong yu i tabu. Mifala i wantem we kingdom bilong yu i kam, Mo we olgeta man long wol oli wokem olgeta samting we yu yu wantem, olsem olgeta long heven oli stap wokem. Mifala i askem yu bilong tedei yu givem kakai long mifala, i stret bilong tedei nomo. Mifala i askem yu bilong yu fogivem mifala from ol samting nogud bilong mifala,

Olsem we mifala i stap fogivem ol man we oli stap mekem i nogud long mifala. Mifala i askem yu bilong yu no tekem mifala i go long sam samting we bambae oli traem mifala tumas, Mo bilong yu blokem Setan i no kam kasem mifala.
[The Lord's Prayer from the New Testament (St Matthew's Gospel, chapter 6, verses 9 to 13) in Bislama] Note: Bislama, a creole language, is one of the three official languages of Vanuatu.

STOP AND THINK!

What about the following? Does it look closer to Standard English, to some non-standard dialect, to a hybrid (pidgin/creole) variety, or to none of these?

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendered is the flour; [...]

Speech and writing

time-bound, dynamic, transient vs. space-bound, static, permanent; usu. interactive (speaker usu. has a particular addressee in mind) vague knowledge of the reader if any spontaneity and speed little planning if any looser construction, repetition, rephrasing, comment clauses allows repeated reading and close analysis promotes development of careful organization and compact expression, with intricate SS

 intonation and pause divide long utterances into manageable chunks, yet sentence boundaries often unclear punctuation and layout typically face-to face interaction facial expression and gestures (body language) aid meaning; (often) vague lexicon, deictic expressions (this one here, right now...) avoidance of decitic elements, careful selection of lexical items. Note that certain lexical items (e.g., the longer names of chemical compounds) are never spoken.

 words and constructions (typically) characteristic of informal speech more instances of subordination, elaborately balanced syntactic patterns suited to social and phatic functions suited to recording of facts, communication of ideas, tasks of memory and learning; written records easier to keep and scan

 there is an opportunity to rethink an utterance while it is in progress errors, interruptions, overlapping. (however, sound engineers may perform some auditory plastic surgery on recorded speech...) errors and other inadequacies can be eliminated in later drafts; interruptions are invisible

 prosody elements v. important nuances of intonation, contrasts of loudness, tempo, rhythm... unique features of writing: pages, lines, capitalisation,, spatial organization, several aspects of punctuation. Few graphic conventions relate to prosody: question marks, underlining for emphasis, dots... Timetables, graphs, complex formulae cannot be read aloud efficiently (but have to be assimilated visually)

Mixed medium texts:

Speech:
-to be heard (a) now (norm) (b) later -to be written down (a) as if spoken (b) as if written

Medium mixing
-to self (shopping list, memoranda) -to single other (co-authoring sessions, sharing a letter, with commentaries) -to many others (commentary on blackboard, handout, slides)

Writing

-to be read (norm) -to be read aloud (a) as if spoken (radio TV, drama, teleprompting); (b) as if written (radio TV newsreading, teleprompter) -to be partly read aloud (broadcasting continuity summaries)

(Based on David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1995, pp. 291-2)

Summing up
1. English todays global language and most popular foreign language. 2. In its spoken form many shapes in private conversation; but public spoken forms are widely intercomprehensible and written forms are remarkably homogeneous.

3. For the expanding circle the recommended variety should be one of the inner circle (a wide range of purposes). 4. Speakers of the expanding circle should not worry too much about acquiring a native accent; instead they should focus on acquiring a large vocabulary, good near-native quality of their command of the use of E and a pronunciation that is widely understood.

5. Convergence or divergence? Two scenarios two catastrophes: the Americanization catasptrophe; the disintegration catastrophe.

Lexis
Words have crossed the Atlantic. Americanisms have become British too: (car) battery, briefcase, dessert, junk, peanut, radio, raincoat, soft drink, sweater But no sign of change in hood/bonnet, trunk/boot etc. + False friends, e.g., nervy USE courageous, full of nerve; BE nervous, full of nerves (England) In GB and Australia, Lorry is giving way to truck homogenization in the direction of American usage

Grammar:
Have the Am. pattern is stronger Have you any money old-fashioned in the South; still OK in Scotland and Ireland Used they to? same Am. style: We ought to go, shouldnt we?

Phonology
Divergence to be continued

VARIETIES OF ENGLISH Topics

1. Language as a system. 2. The revelatory aspects of speech. 3. Define the following: - core English, potential English; - accent, dialect, idiolect; - historical language, national language. [4. What are the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle?] 5. What is hypercorrection? 6. Explain what pidgins and creoles (=creole languages) are. [What is decreolisation? What are acrolect, mesolect and basilect?]

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

Demarcating the history of English. The spread of English. A (tentative) classification of synchronic varieties of English: diatopic, diastratic and diatypic/diaphasic varieties; dialect continuum, code shifing; sociolect; register, sublanguage; styles along the formality scale; accommodation Variation in pronunciation (language change, regional variation, stylistic variation, unconditioned variation; the relationship between accent and social scale) Grammatical and lexical variation (the same aspects as above) Standard vs. non-standard English. Negation in non-standard dialects. Past-tense forms in non-standard English. Other features of non-standard varieties. Etc.

15. What are the five styles according to Joos? Labels, explanations; examples. 16. Channels of communication. Written vs. spoken English. 17. American English pronunciation. 18. American English spelling. 19. American English: grammatical features (compare the American standard to the British standard). American English vocabulary. 20. Black English (politically correct: African-American English) pronunciation. 21. Black English grammar. 22. Caribbean English. A St Lucian poem 23. The future of English (?)

This has been only the beginning