With the growth of language variation it is becoming increasingly important to understand how monolingual speakers’ language processing can differ when responding to various speakers. This study investigated native English speakers’ structural alignment to different accents of English (American, Korean, and Indian speaker of English) using a picture description paradigm. More specifically, we explored the effect of accent type and familiarity with a speaker’s accent on syntactic alignment. American-English speaking participants were primed less for a PO construction when listening to a native American-English speaker than in response to English speakers with a non-American accent (Korean and Indian English). A similar pattern was observed in the analysis using perceived familiarity with accents. These results support the claim that social factors, (e. g., speakers’ accents or perceived familiarity with the accents) can automatically influence language processing, and should be taken into consideration for psycholinguistics theoretical accounts of syntactic priming.
The meeting of the kings of Britain and the Isles at Chester in 973 has usually been interpreted as a submission ritual. The object of this paper is to explore an alternative explanation, that the ritual involved was an egalitarian one of a type commonly used in the Roman world, and subsequently by parties desiring to make peace treaties. Such meetings often took place on rivers, especially those marking borders, as they were regarded as neutral. The location of the 973 meeting on the Dee is examined from this viewpoint. Finally the paper looks at whether the sources for the Dee‐rowing present the event as a display of overlordship by Edgar, and comes to the conclusion that this version of events developed among Benedictine writers from c.1000 onwards, to give lustre to the ruler who had done most to establish Benedictine monasticism in England.
The use of demonstrative behaviour in political communication in the tenth and eleventh centuries (for example, proskynesis to obtain pardon) has been examined extensively over the last two decades, especially with regard to Ottonian and Salian Germany. So far, however, there has been no attempt to study its operation in Anglo-Saxon England. This paper aims to do so, looking for examples in narrative sources of demonstrative piety, reactions to rebellion, arbitration, petition and so on, and exploring how far the Anglo-Saxons were influenced by their continental neighbours and how far narrative sources themselves might have transmitted ideas.
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