Standards of English

Standards of English
Author: Raymond Hickey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1139851217

The notion of a 'standard' variety of English has been the subject of a considerable body of research. Studies have tended to focus on the standard features of British and American English. However, more recently interest has turned to the other varieties of English that have developed around the world and the ways in which these have also been standardised. This volume provides the first book-length exploration of 'standard Englishes', with chapters on areas as diverse as Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. This is a timely and important topic, edited by a well-known scholar in the field, with contributions by the leading experts on each major variety of English discussed. The book presents in full the criteria for defining a standard variety, and each chapter compares standards in both spoken and written English and explores the notion of register within standard varieties.

Singapore English

Singapore English
Author: Lisa Lim
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2004
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027248930

Singapore English: A grammatical description provides a vivid account of current, contemporary Singapore English, complementing older seminal accounts of this variety. Drawing primarily on the Grammar of Spoken Singapore English Corpus, which comprises naturally-occurring conversational speech, the contributions in this volume not only provide comprehensive and systematic descriptions of the structural features characterising colloquial Singapore English of the young, native speaker of today, but also propose the likely substrate sources of these features through insightful linguistic and historical examination. Clearly illustrating the particular rules of grammar that characterise Singapore English as a variety in its own right, this volume presents its evolution as a perfectly natural linguistic phenomenon which is best understood within the multiethnic and multilingual society that Singapore is and has been for the past two centuries. Theoretical linguists, sociolinguists, dialectologists, variationists, typologists and creolists, as well as those involved in education and policy-making, should find this description relevant and vital.

Corpora Galore

Corpora Galore
Author: John M. Kirk
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2000
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9789042004191

Text in Education and Society

Text in Education and Society
Author: Desmond Allison
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1998
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9789971692223

The central place of ?text? as a means of organising language in order to construct what people come to think of as ?knowledge? is a phenomenon affecting all educators, students, and citizens of modern societies. This volume offers various voices and perspectives including those of Ron Carter and Michael Halliday on the role of text in education and society. The chapters on text in education explore some ways in which texts can create bonds or raise barriers between educational knowledge and common-sense knowledge, while the chapters on text in society focus on how personalities and societies are themselves constructed through texts. Learning to unpack texts, and to consider alternatives, is a crucial goal for education and growth, especially so in the context of fast-changing contemporary societies.This book should be of special interest to educators, students of language, and readers interested in the dynamic relationship between text, education and society.

Getting at GET in World Englishes

Getting at GET in World Englishes
Author: Elisabeth Bruckmaier
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2017-02-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 311049731X

Despite its exceptional frequency and versatility, GET has never been a focus of research in its entire variability, which goes from lexical to grammatical uses, nor in large amounts of data from different varieties of English. The present corpus-based study deals with over 11,600 tokens of GET in written and spoken language from three varieties of English and thus provides new insights for variationist linguistics. Firstly, it offers a comprehensive semasiological-syntactic analysis of GET, i.e. an analysis of all its meanings and all the constructions into which it enters, suggesting ten categories as being necessary for its complete description. Secondly, it contributes to the understanding of factors that are at work in variation in World Englishes and lead to quantitative differences between regional standard varieties. Thus, the present study demonstrates that the use of GET in the New Englishes analysed is less affected by substrate effects than by the effects of Second Language Acquisition and the varying influence of British and American English norms. Moreover, it can be shown that the New Englishes display more grammatical uses of GET than does British English.

Exploring the Language of Drama

Exploring the Language of Drama
Author: Jonathan Culpeper
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2002-01-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134774311

Exploring the Language of Drama introduces students to the stylistic analysis of drama. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the contributors use techniques of language analysis, particularly from discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, to explore the language of plays. The contributors demonstrate the validity of analysing the text of a play, as opposed to focusing on performance. Divided into four broad, yet interconnecting groups, the chapters: open up some of the basic mechanisms of conversation and show how they are used in dramatic dialogue look at how discourse analysis and pragmatic theories can be used to help us understand characterization in dialogue consider some of the cognitive patterns underlying dramatic discourse focus on the notion of speech as action there is also a chapter on how to analyse an extract from a play and write up an assignment

Ideological Stylistics and Fictional Discourse

Ideological Stylistics and Fictional Discourse
Author: Ganakumaran Subramaniam
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2009-01-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443803782

This book focuses on ideology and its function in fictional discourse, exploring the link between textual ideologies and real ideologies in text-production environments. It attempts this through a specific focus on the social and linguistic elements that control the presence, the use, and the presentation of ideology, and also the way in which linguistic elements are controlled and manipulated by the collective consciousness of the text producer. This correlation between fictional discourse and ideology is revealed through a series of chapters that cover four closely interrelated areas, focusing specifically on Malaysian and Singaporean fiction. Firstly, the positioning of Malaysian and Singaporean literatures in English as individual literary traditions. This is to counter the non-recognition of Malaysian and Singaporean literatures as individual traditions in spite of five decades of independence. Secondly, establishing a contextual (socio-cultural and political) framework as a basis for discussion on real ideology, arguing that Malaysian and Singaporean writers have moved beyond the anti-western nationalistic stage and on to more personal and communal concerns such as race relations, identity and a sense of belonging. Thirdly, rationalising the social structures of ideology that are likely to be found in the Malaysian and Singaporean social milieus, especially location and text-specific social variables of ideology. Lastly, it seeks to reveal a linguistic-oriented approach for the study of textual ideologies and for linking textual ideologies to ideologies in the overall text production environment. The book ultimately shows the significant possibilities of systematic links between textual ideology, and the real ideology in the text production environment, through what can best be termed as ideological stylistics. In doing so, it aims to contribute significantly to studies of ideology in general and more specifically on ideology on Malaysian and Singaporean literatures in English.