Volume 24, Issue 4

Through a corpus-based analysis of the development of the inflectional subjunctive and double periphrastic comparison in Modern English, this paper sets out to investigate the real impact that prescriptive forces may have had on the contemporary language. The implications of the analysis are twofold: on a methodological level, the results point to precept and data corpora combinations as reliable indicators of language use in any given period; on a theoretical level, they challenge the overall importance that prescriptivism has been traditionally granted as a key factor in language change.

The acceleration and growth of consumerism that has accompanied globalisation has led a number of theorists to argue that social life is becoming increasingly commodified, with many social objects and processes taking on new values and significances. Taking our evidence from a 150-year sample of consumer ads from a North American Welsh community newspaper, Y Drych [The Mirror], we explore the shifting values attached to the Welsh language and to the general category of ‘Welshness’, and their semiotic and economic potential within the Welsh diaspora of North America. We examine the changing content of ads and their use of English and Welsh, and comment critically on particular ad texts. Our analysis shows how the Welsh language, in contrast to its earlier usage as the normative code within adverts in Y Drych , has become a display resource, as well as a marketable commodity in its own right. Along with other semiotically potent icons of ‘traditional’ Welsh life and Welshness, Welsh is able to evoke a marketable and increasingly marketised ‘old Wales’, suggesting that a retraditionalising gaze is privileged in the North American diaspora.

The linguistic climate in northern Belgium (Flanders) has been changing in recent years. A new corpus of spoken Dutch meets the need for data reflecting actual and present-day language use in this part of the Dutch language area. The ‘Spoken Dutch Corpus’ allows us to uncover and analyse the present state of colloquial Belgian Dutch and the changes which mark this condition. This paper discusses the realization of two morphosyntactic variables, the variants of which are markers of Belgian Dutch versus Netherlandic Dutch. In spite of more than half a century of official language policy promoting convergence with northern Netherlandic Dutch, the results reveal a growing divergence from the northern norm: the younger generations show a greater preference for the endogenous, Brabantic, variants than the older generations. The northern Dutch variants have not been integrated in colloquial Belgian Dutch. Apparently they are still considered to be a ‘Hollandic import’.

The paper first reviews previous analyses of the English tag and everything , which have shown the tag to function at both the semantic and pragmatic levels. A comparison is made between English and everything and the Arabic tag u-kulši , and it is pointed out that, while both English and Arabic versions mark the preceding conjunct as a member of a set, the Arabic tag can be used in such a way that the set being alluded to is not specified but is clear from the context. It is argued that such usage indicates that the tag is being used exclusively as a device of intensification. In an attempt to marry the idea of u-kulši   as being a degree-based intensifier and a quantity-based set marker, evidence is presented showing that degree and quantity may swap roles in Arabic intensification. The speaker’s affective state in relation to the situation in hand is also seen to be important in analysing the tag and a detailed discussion is presented of how supra-segmentals operate on the tag and what comes before it to convey different meanings.

The paper discusses several phenomena in contemporary Estonian–Russian language contacts with a focus on attitudes, code-switching, convergence and the emergence of new varieties. The contact situation is recent and provides a good opportunity for microsociolinguistic research. The article describes some instances of bilingual linguistic creativity (derivation of new words from Estonian stems with Russian derivational suffixes, use of bilingual homophones, jocular relexification), as well as code-switching as a means of in- and out-group communication. Code-switching may sometimes result in what is called here ‘paradoxical politeness’ when a dominant speaker of language A uses language B and vice versa. Possibly, a new variety (‘market discourse’) with limited use between salespersons and their customers is emerging. The variety is used in a Russian-to-Estonian communication when a Russian speaker has a limited command of Estonian. The main features of the ‘market discourse’ are as follows: Estonian nouns appear in the nominative singular, seldom in the plural, sometimes Estonian adjectives, numerals and discourse markers are inserted into the Russian matrix.

Britt Marie Apelgren Investigating Language Attitudes: Social Meanings of Dialect, Ethnicity and Performance , by Peter Garrett, Nikolas Coupland and Angie Williams   Yasumi Murata How Different Are We? Spoken Discourse in Intercultural Communication , by Helen Gay FitzGerald   Susy Macqueen Literacy in the New Media Age , by Gunther Kress