Kate Burridge

Monash University (Australia) · Faculty of Arts

An online survey of 654 Australians found that the NP seniors is associated with positive personal characteristics of health and well-being such as ‘like to travel’, ‘lead an involved and active life’, ‘are vibrant and full of purpose’. Older people is also associated with positive characteristics, but somewhat less so than seniors and more sociall...

This chapter discusses the extra-territorial influence of American English on Australian English, in comparison with other varieties within the spectrum of World Englishes. Its aim is to compare the different orientations to American English in Australia that can be observed using qualitative and quantitative methods, and so to illuminate the diffe...

We age from the moment we are born. This is a completely natural process, and yet ageing is now a matter of strong taboo. No one wants to evoke it too vividly, and the fall-out is a flourishing of verbal vanishing creams and linguistic makeovers in the form of euphemism. And yet, as baby boomers are reaching retirement age and wish to remain active...

This chapter investigates the euphemistic language use associated with disease—in particular, HIV/AIDS, cancer, and mental illness—and death. Fear and superstition have enjoyed a long attachment to our beliefs surrounding disease and death; the challenge of confronting the biological limits of our own bodies have brought forth a vast repository of...

One of the most evolving areas of euphemisms in present-day society is ageing. As baby boomers are reaching retirement age and wish to remain active for many more decades, they are redefining the concept of ageing considerably. This redefinition is all the more relevant in Australia, which has the third highest proportion of people aged over 65 in...

for presentation at ALAA2016/ALS2016 joint day.

A number of studies of clausal linkage in Modern English have suggested the causal marker because/cos is showing a change in progress from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (via the semantic bleaching of because and its phonological reduction to [kz]). In this paper, I dispute the idea that paratactic because/cos is innovative. Drawing...

A linguistic puzzle has always been the extent of the influence of Irish English on the shaping of postcolonial dialects such as Australian English (AusE). In order to investigate the presence/absence of ‘Irishisms’ in the formative years of AusE, this paper examines two sub-corpora of AusNC—COOEE (texts of Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk Island...

No matter which human group we look at, past or present, euphemism and its counterpart dysphemism are powerful forces and they are extremely important for the study of language change. They provide an emotive trigger for word addition, word loss, phonological distortion and semantic shift. Word taboo plays perpetual havoc with the methods of histor...

This paper explores popular perceptions of language, in particular linguistic prescription. It focuses not on formal acts of censorship such as might be carried out by a language academy, but on the attitudes and activities of ordinary people in, say, letters to newspapers or comments on radio. In these contexts, language users act as self-appointe...

Many words and expressions are viewed as 'taboo', such as those used to describe sex, our bodies and their functions, and those used to insult other people. This 2006 book provides a fascinating insight into taboo language and its role in everyday life. It looks at the ways we use language to be polite or impolite, politically correct or offensive,...

In this chapter, we provide an account of antipodean swearing patterns, drawing on examples from existing written and spoken data banks. As part of this investigation, we consider general questions to do with swearing: what it is, why speakers do it and how swearing patterns have changed over the years. We identify four overlapping functions of swe...

The following is an account of fieldwork experience in the Old Order Mennonite community of Waterloo County, Ontario. The language spoken here is Pennsylvania German and this paper focuses on methodological and ethical challenges that arise for any linguist wanting to study this language in its natural setting. This is a close-knit, ultra-conservat...

Kate Burridge completed her undergraduate training in linguistics and German at the University of Western Australia. This was followed by three years postgraduate study at the University of London. Kate completed her Ph.D. in 1983 on syntactic change in medieval Dutch. She also taught at the Polytechnic of Central London before joining the Departme...

Many words and expressions are viewed as 'taboo', such as those used to describe sex, our bodies and their functions, and those used to insult other people. This 2006 book provides a fascinating insight into taboo language and its role in everyday life. It looks at the ways we use language to be polite or impolite, politically correct or offensive,...

Kate Burridge follows the international success of Blooming English with another entertaining excursion into the ever-changing nature of the complex and captivating English language. If language is a glorious garden, filled with exotic hybrids as well as traditional heritage specimens, then weeds will also thrive on its fertile grounds. Linguistic...

Yeah-no in Australian English is a relatively new marker which serves a number of functions, including discourse cohesion, the pragmatic functions of hedging and face-saving, and assent and dissent. Drawing on a corpus of approximately 30 hours of both informal conversation and interviews, we analyse the interaction between intonation and turntakin...

KATE BURRIDGE places PC usage within the long tradition of euphemistic expression

We all use euphemisms every day - `nice' expressions that shield us from the offensive or frightening things they describe. Euphemisms have existed throughout recorded history; they are used even by preliterate peoples and have probably been around since recognizably human languages first developed. The same is true of offensive language, or 'dysph...

As a starting point, this paper takes what in Germanic linguistics has traditionally been dubbed the sentence (or sometimes personal) dative, and examines it in the light of certain syntactic features of early Dutch. Included here are a number of unusual medieval Dutch construction types which show exceptional uses of the dative. Far from being scr...

The early English-speaking settlements in Australia represented a dialectal "melting pot" of southeast England, Ireland and Scotland (in order of strength of input), with a hefty dollop of London English. The description "a peculiar language" comes from Edward Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney (1829). Wakefield describes how "terms of slang and flas...

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