American English

Patterns of Age-Based Linguistic Variation In American English.

by Federica Barbieri

Published in Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(1), pp. 58-88.

In prior sociolinguistic research, speaker age has been considered the principal correlate of language change, but it... more In prior sociolinguistic research, speaker age has been considered the principal correlate of language change, but it ‘has not yet been explicitly studied as a sociolinguistic variable’ (Eckert 1997: 167). Consequently, little is knows about how language varies across the life span. The present study employs key word analysis on a large corpus of casual conversation in American English to explore age-based linguistic variation in spontaneous conversation. Analyses of the key words point to two major patterns of age-based lexico-grammatical variation: use of slang, and use of stance and involvement markers. Younger speakers’ talk is characterized by an unusually frequent use of slang and swear words, and by a marked use of features indexing speaker’s stance and emotional involvement, including intensifiers, stance adverbs, discourse markers, personal pronouns, and attitudinal adjectives; older speakers favor modals. These patterns are suggestive of functional differences in the discourse of youth and adults. It is argued that the expression of personal stance is more explicit and plays a key role in younger speakers’ discourse.

Dialect Literature and English in the USA: Standardization and National Linguistic Identity

by Lisa Minnick

In Varieties in Writing in English: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, ed. Raymond Hickey. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010.

This chapter analyzes the role of literary dialect in attempts to establish a distinctly American language and... more This chapter analyzes the role of literary dialect in attempts to establish a distinctly American language and especially to authorize and enforce a preferred standard. The roles of gender, race, and linguistic diversity are key considerations to the analysis in light of popular nineteenth-century assumptions that conflated ideas about a preferred national language variety with developing ideologies about national identity. This chapter outlines the ways that these assumptions found voice in the national discourse, including via the deployment of literary dialect, which both documented and participated in that discourse.

Divided by a Common Language: A Comparison of Nigerian, American and British English

by Farooq Kperogi, Ph.D.

In Michael O. Afolayan (ed.) Multiculturalism in the Age of the Mosaic, 53-63. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010.

2nd Person Pronoun Use in Southern American and NYC English

by Gordon Hemsley

American English language; en-US

Queens College (CUNY)
Spring 2010
LCD 205: Sociolinguistics
Instructor: Rocío Raña Risso (Adjunct Lecturer, Ph.D. Graduate Student)

Multiple Modals in Modern English: Use, History, and Structure of Periphrastic Modal Verbs

by Heather Marie Kosur

unpublished draft

Modal verbs are auxiliary verbs that express modality—the expression of possibility, necessity, permissibility, and... more Modal verbs are auxiliary verbs that express modality—the expression of possibility, necessity, permissibility, and contingency—in English. Multiple modals (double modals, triple modals) are periphrastic verb constructions characterized by the use of two or more modal verbs within a single verb phrase as in might could and used to could. Native speakers of many varieties of English including South Midland and Southern American Englishes, Northern British Englishes, Scottish Englishes, Irish Englishes, and Caribbean Englishes regularly use at least one multiple modal occasionally, particularly in facesaving contexts. First appearing in the English language approximately eight hundred years ago, multiple modals in Modern English most likely developed from Old English and subsequently Middle English modal constructions. Immigrants from Scotland and Northern England, in particular, influenced the spread of multiple modals to North America and the Caribbean during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although traditional linguistic analyses including the phrase-structure rule approach and the subcategorization approach allow for multiple modals provided that one modal is a full verb with a base form, multiple modals are not phrases generated by a syntactic rule but rather periphrastic verb forms similar to phrasal verbs, noun compounds, and other periphrastic idioms. The argument for multiple modals as single lexical items is supported by the syntactic and semantic restrictions on multiple modal constructions including the limited number of naturally occurring combinations.