Newfoundland English has long been considered autonomous within the North American context. Sociolinguistic studies conducted over the past three decades, however, typically suggest cross-generational change in phonetic feature use, motivated by greater alignment with mainland Canadian English norms. The present study uses data spanning the past…

This paper examines print advertisements in Malaysia to determine how advertisers seek to achieve their primary goal of persuading or influencing an audience by the use of both language and visuals. It describes the main component moves and rhetorical strategies used by writers to articulate the communicative purpose of the genre and the language…

This paper reports on a comprehensive corpus-based study of regional and stylistic variation in the distribution of the English present perfect. The data represents ten English varieties of both the Inner Circle and Outer Circle, covering four major text types: conversation, news reportage, academic and fictional writing. The results are discussed…

This paper explores how contact between English and Chinese has resulted in the incorporation of Chinese borrowings into the lexicon of Malaysian English (ME). Using a corpus-based approach, this study analyses a comprehensive range of borrowed features extracted from the Malaysian English Newspaper Corpus (MEN Corpus). Based on the contexts of…

Code-switching research has focused on spontaneous conversation, and code-switching has often been seen as a consequence of bilinguals attending to and extending the "macro" status and functions of the two languages in society, attitudes towards these languages, and their cultural connotations, for instance, the "we-code" vs.…

Scholars tend to explain or predict China English's rhetorical strategies on the basis of Chinese discourse and cultural preferences. This inference model, I argue, falls short in studying the Chinese variety of English because, first, it essentializes both China English and Chinese, treating their discursive strategies as two easily…

Investigates the real and potential functions of English media in the milieu of social openness in post-Mao China. The unique position of China's English media reflects key characteristics of a "hybridized discourse" and a style of reporting that seems both keen to control and eager to please. (Author/VWL)

The roles played by English borrowings in modern Japanese literary works are examined. After a brief summary of previous studies, this paper describes the style repertoire and the kinds of stylistic effects produced in Japanese literature by English borrowings, such as attention attractors and in-group-identity markers. (23 references) (Author/LB)

Questions the validity of two assumptions behind the search for the "best" pedagogical (English as a second language) grammar: (1) that there is one ideal pedagogical grammar; and (2) that the success of a pedagogical grammar depends primarily on the linguistic theoretical assumptions incorporated in it. (Author/CB)

Discusses the pros and cons of grammatical consciousness raising in (English as a second language) pedagogy, arguing that meaningful research on the effectiveness of formal instruction must abandon notions of language learning as the accumulation of language entities and consider consciousness raising with regard to grammatical processes and the…

Tests claims regarding "get"-passives in English via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora. The data suggest that "get"-passives are often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of three types of variation with 'get'-passives: regional, stylistic, and diachronic.…

One can ask four questions about genre validity across cultures. Does a certain form or configuration occur in the culture in question? Is it acceptable? If acceptable, is it in practice preferred? Is it recommended by prescriptive authorities? This paper reports the results of an attempt to answer these questions empirically by testing the…

Focuses on generic discourse practices by tracing the persuasive heterogeneity and the distributed nature of discourse genres in use. Three examples from research are explored: a father and his two daughters playing a family-created verbal game; a family's engagement with their 2-year-old's creative retellings of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit"; and a…

Examines a particular "style of speech" used by a farming community in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, which is characterized by code-switching with Xhosa and by prevalent terms of address. The social significance of the speech style in terms of the identity communicated is explored and discourse features are discussed. (Author/JL)

Explores verbal strategies involving code-switching (English terms used in Chinese-based interactions) in the speech community of a Taiwanese teacher's college. Code-switching is described in terms of the fulfillment of language functions and is shown to express a linguistic style concerned with communicative appropriateness and social identity.…