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Did you have a choccie bickie this arvo? A quantitative look at Australian hypocoristics
Abstract
This paper considers the use and representation of Australian hypocoristics (e.g., choccie→chocolate, arvo→afternoon). One-hundred-and-fifteen adult speakers of Australian English aged 17–84 years generated as many tokens of hypocoristics as they could in 10min. The resulting corpus was analysed along a number of dimensions in an attempt to identify (i) general age- and gender-related trends in hypocoristic knowledge and use, and (ii) linguistic properties of each hypocoristic class. Following Bybee’s (1985, 1995) lexical network approach, we conclude that Australian hypocoristics are the product of the same linguistic processes that capture other inflectional morphological processes.
... For instance, Sussex (2004) estimates that these forms make up approximately 4% of the types of Australian lexis. In an elicitation study, Kidd, Kemp, and Quinn (2011) asked 115 speakers of AusE to generate as many hypocoristic forms as they could in 10 min and reported more than 1,500 different forms. The category of hypocoristics is arguably the source of many of the innovations in AusE, as most forms have appeared in the language in the 20th century (Kidd et al., 2011;Moore, 2008). ...
... In an elicitation study, Kidd, Kemp, and Quinn (2011) asked 115 speakers of AusE to generate as many hypocoristic forms as they could in 10 min and reported more than 1,500 different forms. The category of hypocoristics is arguably the source of many of the innovations in AusE, as most forms have appeared in the language in the 20th century (Kidd et al., 2011;Moore, 2008). It is not uncommon to hear hypocoristics across a range of contexts; they are frequently used in everyday speech but are also used in more formal contexts, such as by politicians and by newsreaders. ...
... The pervasive use of hypocoristic forms in AusE has generally been interpreted to reflect the core traditional Australian cultural ideals of informality, mateship, and egalitarianism. Several linguists have hypothesized about the semantics of the different morpheme types (e.g., McAndrew, 1992;Wierzbicka, 1986), and there is a general (though empirically unconfirmed) agreement that the use of hypocoristics functions to promote greater social closeness between speakers (Kidd et al., 2011). That is, commensurate with their status as colloquial forms, hypocoristics acknowledge a shared cultural history between speakers and as such serve as a marker of in-group identity. ...
Languages are strong markers of social identity. Multiple features of language and speech, from accent to lexis to grammatical constructions, mark speakers as members of specific cultural groups. In the current article, we present two confederate-scripted studies that investigated the social effects of the Australian hypocoristic use (e.g., uggie, uni, derro)—a lexical category emblematic of Australian culture. Participants took turns with a confederate directing each other through locations on a map. In their directions, the confederate used either hypocoristic (e.g., uni) or standard forms (e.g., university). The confederate’s cultural group membership and member prototypicality were manipulated by ethnic background and accent: In a highly prototypical in-group condition, the confederate had an Anglo-Celtic background and Australian English (AusE) accent; in a low prototypical in-group condition, the confederate had an Asian background and AusE accent; and in the out-group condition, the confederate had an Asian background and non-AusE accent. Hypocoristic use resulted in significantly higher participant-rated perceived common ground with the confederate when the confederate was an in-group but not an out-group member, which in some instances was moderated by in-group identification. The results suggest that like accents, culturally significant lexical categories function as markers of in-group identity, which influence perceived social closeness during interaction.
... While all English language dialects have hypocorisms and diminutives (Jurafsky, 1996;Luu, 2018), Australian English is noted for its shortened versions of words, whereas other dialects of English are not. Australian slang is said to reflect and shape Australian cultural values of informality, friendliness and the concept of mateship, a term used to reference an emphasis on friendship, collegiality and harmony (Luu, 2018;Kidd et al., 2016;Kidd et al., 2011;Wierzbicka, 1986). The use of Australian slang is also a marker of a person's understanding of this mateship concept, in that when Australian-accented speakers use Australian slang, they are perceived as more likeable by other Australians, but that the same is not true when English speakers with non-Australian accents use that slang (Kidd et al., 2016). ...
Purpose
Despite its Australian birthplace, the ugg boot industry is now fully dominated by one American company, and the Australian ugg boot industry has been frozen out of global trade. This study aims to consider the impact on the competitive advantage of culturally distinctive but not new, intellectual property (IP) through the historic lens of the Australia–USA battle over the UGG boot trademark.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses trademark applications, court documents, annual reports and brand reports to trace the history of the change and growth of the ugg boot industry from a small cottage industry in Australia to a billion-dollar monopoly controlled by an American company.
Findings
Court documents and trademark applications from 1979 to 2019 indicate that Australian firms underestimated the cultural differences between the USA and Australia and thus failed to adequately protect the generic word “ugg” in foreign markets where it was considered to be distinctive, rather than generic.
Practical implications
The paper highlights the importance of the first-mover advantage that can be conferred upon a firm by IP that is not new. Trademarks must be distinctive, rather than new, but properly used, they can offer substantial global competitive advantages to firms.
Originality/value
The in-depth analysis of the development of the UGG brand highlights the importance of intangible barriers in global business. The impact on the competitive advantage these intangible barriers gave US firms over Australian firms in the worldwide sheepskin boot market is discussed.
... Notes 1 All glosses for gestures are reported in small capitals following a convention adopted in many studies on children's gestures. 2 Colloquial forms (e.g., hypocoristics) in adults are largely used by the Australian adults (e.g., Kidd, Kemp, & Quinn, 2011), but are not typically used in speech conversations with children. 3 Data available at http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/2033.0.55. 0012011?OpenDocument (accessed 9 July 2018); the 2011 data were used because the Australian children's data were collected in 2010. ...
We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2‐year‐old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments. Eighty‐seven monolingual children aged 24–30 months completed an experimental task measuring their comprehension and production of nouns and predicates. The Italian children scored significantly higher than the other groups on all lexical measures. With regard to gestures, British children produced significantly fewer pointing and speech combinations compared to Italian and Australian children, who did not differ from each other. In contrast, Italian children produced significantly more representational gestures than the other two groups. We conclude that spoken language development is primarily influenced by the input language over gesture production, whereas the combination of cultural and language environments affects gesture production.
... If accent stylisations and other clippings were viewed as one category, specific textisms used by students in the current investigation would more closely reflect specific textisms identified by Grace et al., with the exception of number/letter homophones Given the similarity of research samples (i.e., Australian university students), it may be that age, culture and education level are related to patterns of use of specific textisms in text messaging. Indeed, Australian English is characterised by shortenings of words (e.g., choccie bickie rather than chocolate biscuit; Kidd, Kemp, & Quinn, 2011). Since most texting is likely to occur within the same geographical area, it seems reasonable to assume that texting dialects would develop. ...
Clipping and truncation are terms referring to non‐concatenative word‐formation processes by which a word (the base) is truncated down to a predictable form (the truncatum) describable with the help of the categories of prosodic structure. The term clipping is usually used for processes where the base is a common noun, adjective, verb or phrase, while truncation is often used irrespective of the syntactic status of the base. A very productive type of truncations are name truncations such as exemplified by the name Patrícia , which can be shortened to the hypocoristic Pat . In phonological theory, truncation processes have encountered much interest because of the templatic shape often realized by the truncatum, most typically a mono‐ or disyllabic foot. Truncation patterns can be classified by the type of template that they realize and by their anchoring properties, in other words by the position of the base preserved in the truncatum, usually its initial or stressed, sometimes its final syllable. In this entry, the most salient properties of truncation patterns are presented, such as the emergence of unmarked structures in the truncatum and phenomena of gradience in anchoring. Recent typological analyses of the phenomenon in the framework of Optimality Theory are discussed, as well as the hesitancy of some morphological theories to recognize truncation processes as part of grammar proper. It is concluded that truncation processes are predictable with respect to the prosodic shape of their outputs and that their meaning can be related to that of other processes of evaluative morphology. However, there is still a certain lack of research when it comes to define the meaning and function of single patterns.
The writing of 38 9–10-year-old children was used to investigate their use of ludic (playful) punctuation in the composition of two kinds of writing, imaginative narrative and persuasive description. Framed within a consideration of language play in general, and children’s use of punctuation in particular, the investigation revealed the ways in which primary children, without being prompted to do so, use playful punctuation in order to achieve their communicative aims. An in-depth analysis was made of 145 scripts to identify and categorise the playful punctuation used by the children in both kinds of writing. The findings revealed clear differences between the two kinds of writing in how children used playful punctuation. The study illustrates how playful punctuation, as well as being an integral part of the transcriptional aspects of a text, can contribute to its composition; young writers use playful punctuation to contribute to the meaning, purpose and appropriateness of the text for its intended audience. The findings also suggest that such uses—like language play as a whole—warrant further attention in educational research. Future work needs to identify the writing tasks that enable the use of playful punctuation to flourish.
Disasters occasion ways of speaking and writing in the societies in which they take place. Now, due to climate change, events such as wildfires, floods and heatwaves are becoming more severe and more frequent. Therefore, the climate crisis poses a challenge, not only materially, but discursively. Habitual vocabulary may no longer be appropriate, and there is a pull between these turns of phrase and newer ones informed by climate change. The article takes the case of Australia whose public discourse in English about ‘bushfires’ has been characterized by traditional vocabulary, focused on battling the elements. Through three examples, the study treats tensions between the habitual and the climate-informed in event names (e.g. Black Summer), a social category (volunteer firefighters) and a construction of political critique (I don’t hold a hose). The frame taken is semantically-enhanced discourse studies, inspired by natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) and other cultural takes. A transtextual approach is used, along with research from humanities and social science. The study finds that through the interplay between habitual and climate-informed vocabulary about ‘bushfires’, one can view conceptions of events, cultures, social relations, identities and relationships to places in Australia. Extreme weather formations and climate change formations cannot be easily separated.
The book is a research monograph that reviews and revises the concept of linguistic pejoration, and explores the role of 15 suffixes and combining forms, such as -ie, -o, -ard, -holic, -rrhea, -itis, -porn, -ish, in the formation of English pejoratives. The examination of the inner structure of the resulting derivatives is based on an innovative methodology that encompasses the theories and approaches of Construction Morphology, Componential Analysis, and Morphopragmatics. Following the principles of this methodology, pejorative words collected from dictionaries and corpora (a total of approximately 950 words) are abstracted into generalizations (or constructional schemas) where structural and functional similarities are used to cognitively trace the ways in which negative (or derisive) meaning is connected with a specific form. Through this multifaceted methodology, my analysis showcases the fact that the universal properties of ‘diminution’, ‘excess’, ‘resemblance’, and ‘metonymization’ are what underlie the making of pejorative meaning. These generalizations, along with the schematic representations of formatives, can help linguists, or linguistics enthusiasts in general, to understand the conventions and intricacy of lexical pejoration.
This paper discusses clipping in a few Germanic languages, English, Dutch, Swedish and German. It deals with older monosyllabic clipped forms as well as with recently borrowed disyllabic clipping patterns with final-o. Attention is also given to a more traditional pattern in which clipping goes hand in hand with diminutive or hypocoristic suffixation. The data discussed in this paper show on the one hand how output resemblances influence possible innovations and on the other hand how prosodic preferences may reinforce such innovations. It is also shown how crucial the role of the naive language user is when it comes to innovation. This language user borrows a coherent set of lexemes from a foreign language, subsequently finds out what possible system governs this set and introduces this pattern into his own language, where it becomes productive.
A ‘quintessentially Australian’ feature of English, vocative Mate has been said to carry a special connection with Australian identity and culture. However, precisely how this can be measured is yet to be established. This paper analyses the reported use of vocative Mate by Australians of a Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) and its relation to self-perceived ethnic identity. Data collected from 101 participants demonstrate that overall, usage patterns for NESB Australians are similar to those reported for Australians from an English-speaking background, with males claiming to use the term more overall, but females claiming to use it with a wider range of addressees (and thus, appearing to move away from the traditional masculine and Anglo-Australian associations of Mate). The present study also reveals that use of vocative Mate correlates with perceived ethnic orientation as determined by an ‘Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire’. A positive correlation was found between orientation towards ethnic heritage and a lesser use of vocative mate, suggesting that, for these speakers, use of mate is related to affiliation with Australian society, or as one participant put it, ‘gives a sense of an Australian identity despite skin colour’.
Although there is a growing literature on grammatical, lexical and phonological aspects of Australian English, there are comparatively few studies of attitudes towards this variety of English. What literature there is tends to be either anecdotal or based on media language or on findings from experimental, subjective reaction tests where samples of speech are matched against those produced by speakers of other varieties of English. This study aims to add to existing research through an examination of responses of Australian adolescents to the following question: ‘When you think about “Australian English”, tell me the first three things that come into your mind’. The findings fall into three broad overlapping categories: (i) comments about language features; (ii) comments about attitudes towards those features; and (iii) comments about culture. All three categories contain responses which suggest that young Australians associate Australian English with rural and informal lifestyles. Those who provide attitudinal judgments either describe the variety in neutral terms or give it evaluations typical of those reported for broad and vernacular varieties of English. Of particular interest is the frequency with which categories overlap and intersect, and the mythscapes they construct of Australian language and identity.
This unique collection fills a ten-year gap in studies on the nature of Australian English, and it is the first to deal exclusively with varieties of English on the Australian continent. The book contains chapters on the phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon of the dialect, and chapters on variation within the dialect that include Aboriginal and ethnic varieties as well as regional and generational differences with a focus on questions of Australian identity and intercultural relations. With selected contributions by Australia’s leading linguists this volume records the most recent developments in the study of English within Australia.
New Zealand and Australia share a propensity to create new words and hypocoristic forms of existing words by adding - ie and - o suffixes (among others) to a base which is usually monosyllabic. While the creation of new words is driven by the need to refer quickly to new things, the creation of hypocoristic alternatives is driven partly by the desire to identify with a group’s particular way of talking. The distribution of hypocoristic forms is similar across both countries, except for the greater use of the - o ending in Australia, especially in naming occupations and in fishing. Across different semantic domains there is a greater range of suffixes to be found in proper names (personal, geographic and institutional) than in common nouns.
This unique collection fills a ten-year gap in studies on the nature of Australian English, and it is the first to deal exclusively with varieties of English on the Australian continent. The book contains chapters on the phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon of the dialect, and chapters on variation within the dialect that include Aboriginal and ethnic varieties as well as regional and generational differences with a focus on questions of Australian identity and intercultural relations. With selected contributions by Australia’s leading linguists this volume records the most recent developments in the study of English within Australia.
This paper attempts to demonstrate direct links between Australian language and other aspects of Australian culture. The existence of such links – intuitively obvious and yet notoriously hard to prove – is often rejected in the name of scientific rigor (“if they can't be proved then it is better either to assume that they don't exist or at least not to talk about them”). Nonetheless, the problem continues to exercise fascination over scholars, as it does over the general public. The author proposes ways in which the linguist's methodological tools can be sharpened so that the apparently untractable and yet fundamental issues of “language as a guide to social reality” can be studied in ways which are both linguistically precise and culturally revealing. Linguistic phenomena such as expressive derivation, illocutionary devices, and speech act verbs are related to the literature on the Australian society, “national character,” history, and culture. (Ethnolinguistics, Whorfian hypothesis, Australian English, speech acts, expressive derivation, names)
Three models of morphological storage and processing are compared: the dual-processing model of Pinker, Marcus and colleagues, the connectionist model of Marchman, Plunkett, Seidenberg and others, and the network model of Bybee and Langacker. In line with predictions made in the latter two frameworks, type frequency of a morphological pattern is shown to be important in determining productivity. In addition, the paper considers the nature of lexical schemas in the network model, which are of two types: source-oriented and product-oriented. The interaction of phonological properties of lexical patterns with frequency and the interaction of type and token frequency are shown to influence degree of productivity. Data are drawn from English, German, Arabic and Hausa.
The social history of a language or variety, and its emergence, consolidation and stabiliza tion, allow us to combine the formal data of the language (principally its sound structure, grammar and lexis) with the external conditions in which they have evolved. The advance of Australian English in terms of its differentiation (Kloss's abstand) and elaboration of roles (Kloss's ausbau) pose problems of chronology, periodization, description and expla nation. This paper extends the conventional scope of abstand and ausbau to the analysis of the social history of Australian English. It argues that two factors are central to the emerging identification of Australian English: creativity, in the sense of morphological innovation, especially here in diminutives like reffo ('refugee') and pollie ('politician'); and in ludicity, defined as a deep-rooted playfulness with language. While these character istics are only part of the overall dynamics of the social history of Australian English, the evidence is sufficiently extensive to warrant further investigation. An earlier version of this paper was given at the Mitchell Symposium at Macquarie University on 26 April 2002 under the title ‘E pluribus plures? Diversity and integrity in Australian English’. I am grateful to members of the Symposium, and to two anonymous reviewers, for valuable comments and criticism
The formation of the past tense of verbs in English has been the focus of the debate concerning connectionist vs. symbolic accounts of language. Brain-injured patients differ with respect to whether they are more impaired in generating irregular past tenses (TAKE-TOOK) or past tenses for nonce verbs (WUG-WUGGED). Such dissociations have been taken as evidence for distinct "rule" and "associative" memory systems in morphology and against the connectionist approach in which a single system is used for all forms. We describe a simulation model in which these impairments arise from damage to phonological or semantic information, which have different effects on generalization and irregular forms, respectively. The results provide an account of the bases of impairments in verb morphology and show that these impairments can be explained within connectionist models that do not use rules or a separate mechanism for exceptions.
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