Christian Mair

University of Freiburg | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to spoken usage, the chapter explores: the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and...

The massive expansion of English in Germany over the past few decades has not challenged a robustly exonormative orientation, which still by and large recognises standardised British and American English as the most authentic and prestigious representations of the language. Attitudes to the use of English in the national context are diverse, rangin...

As the legislative bodies of democratic nations, parliaments play a fundamental role in society. Consequently the linguistic practices observed in parliamentary discourse are of importance to everyone. This volume brings together leading researchers in areas of corpus linguistics, big data, parliamentary discourse, and historical linguistics in a t...

The paper argues that, in view of the current boom in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and related developments of globalisation, research on English as a World Language should pay more attention to economic factors. Sociolinguistic models of postcolonial English which emphasise speakers' desires to express new local identities as the driving force...

Contrasts between British and American usage were an important topic in computer-aided corpus linguistics from the very start. The present contribution shows how from these beginnings the scope of corpus-based research was successively extended to cover standard varieties of the New Englishes (e.g. in the International Corpus of English) and eventu...

This paper investigates the use of Nigerian English in lingua-franca interaction in Germany, focussing on the perspective of the German listener. Fifty-eight German-speaking respondents were asked to transcribe short extracts from English interviews recorded with Nigerian immigrants and sojourners resident in Germany. In addition to testing compreh...

The paper makes a case for regarding Nigerian Pidgin (Naijá) and Jamaican Creole (Patois) as informal linguistic epicentres in the global English Language Complex. This requires a few modifications to current definitions of linguistic epicentres but leads to a sociolinguistically realistic and more comprehensive account of the profound influence th...

This paper, coauthored by specialists in literature/cultural studies and linguistics, focuses on two recent German novels, "GRM Brainfuck" by Sibylle Berg and "Adas Raum" by Sharon Dodua Otoo, pointing out innovative ways in which these two works of fiction cross and transgress boundaries between languages, genres and traditions, with their authors...

This volume compares the evolution and current status of two of the world's major languages, English and Spanish. Parallel chapters trace the emergence of Global English and Spanish and their current status, covering aspects such as language and dialect contact, language typology, norm development in pluricentric languages, and identity constructio...

Comparing early and current corpus-based work on ongoing grammatical change in English, the present study argues that progress tends to manifest itself in the more comprehensive and systematic coverage of changes known to be under way rather than in the discovery of genuinely new diachronic processes. As will be shown in two case studies on modal/s...

This paper takes as its theoretical framework an approach to corpus-aided discovery learning in which the central role of corpora is seen as that of providing rich sources of autonomous learning activities of a serendipitous kind. Here the suggestion is put forward that availability of different corpora and software tools and the ability to combine...

In 2019, Sibylle Berg’s novel GRM Brainfuck was published to considerable acclaim. Berg, a German writer based in Switzerland, uses a contemporary British setting for a satirical speculation on the future of Western societies. The novel represents the UK as a social constellation that combines a tradition of class privilege with the worst excesses...

Bloomsbury World Englishes offers a comprehensive and rigorous description of the facts, implications and contentious issues regarding the forms and functions of English in the world. International experts cover a diverse range of varieties and topics, offering a more accurate understanding of English across the globe and the various social context...

The present survey reviews previous work on current change in English syntax. Focussing on British and American Standard English, and on contrasts between the written and the spoken language, it uses data from a wide range of digital corpora to illustrate ongoing change in the verb phrase (mood, modality, aspect), in the noun phrase (relative claus...

The study investigates language use and language attitudes among Nigerian immigrants in Germany, thus contributing to the study of World Englishes in mobility and migration. The data comprises ca. five hours of recorded interviews and is analysed both for the linguistic features it displays and the language attitudes expressed by interviewees. In t...

The present survey reviews previous work on current change in English syntax. Focusing on British and American Standard English, and on contrasts between the written and the spoken language, it uses data from a wide range of digital corpora to illustrate ongoing change in the verb phrase (mood, modality, aspect), in the noun phrase (relative clause...

Introduction Informal beginnings: contrastive linguistics avant la lettre American structuralism and the professionalization of the contrastive approach: 1945 to c. 1970 Contrastive linguistics in Europe: 1970 to c. 1990 Refocussing contrastive studies Typological comparison of language pairs Contrastive analysis and corpora Prospects for the futur...

Christian Mair, " World Englishes in cyberspace " [first submission: to appear in Daniel Schreier, Marianne Hundt and Edgar Schneider, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes, Cambridge: CUP, [2018]] Before mobile phones became a thing, there was a very clear distinction between " online " and " offline ". You went on the Internet to go and...

English in the German-Speaking World - edited by Raymond Hickey December 2019

Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax - edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza October 2019

The 2016 EU referendum has already left a lasting imprint on the English language. Building on previous research (e.g. Lalić-Krstin & Silaški 2018, Buckledee 2018), the present article integrates discourse-analytical and corpus-based methods to explore current developments and place them in the historical context of the past 70 years. Using the New...

The growing impact of English in Germany since World War II has largely been dealt with in terms of lexical borrowing. In contrast to this, the present contribution will focus on emerging domains of regular use of English, be it as a lingua franca or as part of multilingual repertoires. Two of these domains, English as Medium of Instruction (EMI) i...

From the late Middle English period catenative constructions have seen a considerable increase, both in frequency and in structural diversity. The present study charts this increase for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the basis of the Corpus of Historical American English (and, for one case study, the Corpus of Contemporary American Engli...

In its core sense, contrastive linguistics can be defined as the theoretically grounded, systematic and synchronic comparison of usually two languages, or at most no more than a small number of languages. In the early stages of the development of the field, comparisons were usually carried out with a view to applying the findings for the benefit of...

Bringing together experts from both historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors in language change from the perspectives of both fields. It explores the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach, covering the following factors: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acqui...

The study of " varieties of English around the world " , the " New Englishes " or " World Englishes " emerged at the intersection of dialectology, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics in the early 1980s and has been among the most vibrant sub-fields of English linguistics in recent years. Work in this tradition has made an important contribu...

The study of " varieties of English around the world, " the " New Englishes " or " World Englishes " emerged at the intersection of dialectology, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics in the early 1980s and has become one of the most vibrant sub-fields of English linguistics. Work in this tradition has made an enormous contribution to our und...

The author, a professor of English linguistics at Freiburg University, was a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) from 2006 to 2012 and, in this capacity, was involved in this advisory body’s rating and assessment activities. The present contribution focusses on issues arising in the rating of research output in...

Taking the cue from the widespread metaphorical use of economic concepts such as resources or markets in both sociolinguistics and cultural studies, the present introduction sets out to discuss more literal aspects of the financial value of languages and the economy of the literary marketplace in the - mostly 'Anglophone' - Caribbean. Globalization...

Commentary to: Davies, Mark, and Robert Fuchs. 2015. "Expanding horizons in the study of World Englishes with the 1.9 billion word Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE)". English World-Wide 36:1–28 (This issue). DOI:10.1075/eww.36.1.01dav

Lucrarea valorifică date din patru corpusuri corespondente de cîte un milion de cuvinte, Brown (Engleză americană, 1961), LOB (Engleză britanică, 1961), Frown (Engleză americană, 1992) și FLOB (Engleză britanică, 1991) pentru a oferi o descriere integrată a variației sincronice (regionale și stilistice) și a schimbărilor diacronice pe termen scurt...

The paper draws data from four matching one-million word corpora, namely Brown (US, 1961), LOB (GB, 1961), Frown (US, 1992) and FLOB (GB, 1991), in order to provide an integrated description of synchronic (regional and stylistic) variation and short-term diachronic change in written Standard English. The analysis of a fairly large number of morphos...

This chapter is concerned with phenomena of grammatical change in the English language, and with the question of how these phenomena can be studied in corpus-based analyses. To start out, we clarify briefly what we mean by the terms grammar, grammatical change, and corpus-based analyses. In the words of Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 3), the term gra...

The present study offers the first analysis of modals and semi-modals which is based on all six completed Brown family corpora (B-Brown, BLOB , Brown, LOB, Frown, F-LOB) and shows that the dynamics of diachronic change have prevented the emergence and preservation of stable regional contrasts between British and American English. The significance o...

Unlike grammatical subsystems such as nominal inflection, which - after undergoing dramatic changes in late Old English and early Middle English - settled into a new stable state which has lasted for around 800 years, modal verbs and related expressions have been ‘on the move’ (Leech 2003: 223) throughout the recorded history of the English languag...

Globalisation has helped the spread and further entrenchment of Standard English in many obvious ways. What is discussed less often is the fact that globalisation has also helped the spread of other languages, and of selected non-standard varieties of English, including some English-lexifier pidgins and creoles. After a brief introduction, in which...

The rise of English to its present position of the world's undisputed lingua franca and the role of Global English in a multilingual world are core topics of World Englishes research. However, this does not mean that they have not been of interest to researchers in other disciplines, as well – for example in history, sociology and economics. The pr...

The present chapter asserts the continuing relevance of a methodology which has gone out of fashion with some segments of the corpus-linguistic community: the careful and - dare we use the dreaded word: philological - analysis of small corpora with a balanced mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. This mix of methods reflects the twin advanta...

Contact between and mutual influences among varieties of standard and non-standard English have always been a central concern in research on World Englishes. In a mobile and globalising world such contacts are by no means restricted to diffusion of features in face-to-face interaction, across contiguous territories in space or up and down the socio...

Frequency is defined in terms of number of occurrences of a given linguistic structure in a particular linguistic system or sub-system (as approximated by a suitable corpus). Frequency is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. While the default assumption is that...

Frequency is defi ned in terms of number of occurrences of a given linguistic structure in a particular linguistic system or sub-system (as approximated by a suitable corpus). Frequency is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. While the default assumption is that...

Recent developments in contact linguistics suggest considerable overlap of branches such as historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, pidgin/creole linguistics, language acquisition, etc. This book highlights the complexity of contact-induced language change throughout the history of English by bringing together cutting-edge research f...

The past two decades have seen considerable advances in the corpus-based “real-time” investigation of linguistic change in English, both in older stages of the language and in progress now. Inevitably, given our present resources, most claims about changes in the language as a whole have been based on written data. Against this backdrop, the presen...

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...

Sidney Greenbaum (1929–96) was born in London on December 31, 1929, a member of East London's orthodox Jewish community.

Randolph Quirk was born on the Isle of Man in 1920. In 1939 he enrolled at University College London (UCL), to read English under Albert Hugh Smith and Norse under Raymond Wilson Chambers. Having served in World War II from 1940, he resumed his studies in 1945. On his graduation in 1947 he joined UCL's English Department as a lecturer and was subse...

This book presents research on grammaticalization, the process by which lexical items acquire grammatical function, grammatical items get additional functions, and grammars are created. Scholars from around the world introduce and discuss the core theoretical and methodological bases of grammaticalization, report on work in the field, and point to...

In spite of a long history of mobility among its speakers, Jamaican Creole (JC) maintained strong and stable 'place' and 'class' associations for most of its history - in line with the principles of what Blommaert (2010) has recently referred to as the "sociolinguistics of distribution." Its speakers comprised the masses of the poor in Britain's mo...

Auf dem nordamerikanischen Kontinent und in der anglophonen Karibik haben sich im Laufe der letzten beiden Jahrhunderte mehrere neue Standardvarietäten des Englischen entwickelt. Der US-amerikanische Standard repräsentiert beispielhaft den vollen mög-lichen Entwicklungszyklus ursprünglich kolonialer Varietäten-von einer marginalen und überregional...

All natural languages-whether or not they have a designated grammatical category conventionally referred to as "progressive" or "continuous"-can convey the idea that an event is progressing dynamically over a timeframe opened up by an utterance. This timeframe is variously known as the "event frame," the "contextual occasion," the "focalization poi...

As the preceding entry on historical linguistics and language change has shown, the structure of present-day English—its sound system, its grammar and its vocabulary—is the result of almost 1,500 years of historical evolution. Many factors—both internal to the linguistic system and external (historical, social, cultural)—have influenced this proces...

Complementation by means of nonfinite verbal constructions is an area of grammar which has been characterized by fundamental and rapid changes in the Late Modern English period, many of which have not been carried to completion yet. As is not surprising, this is reflected in a fair amount of synchronic variability. Using the variable occurrence of...