The legitimate and illegitimate offspring of English

Mufwene, Salikoko S.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511612862.005

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Indeed, any study of varieties of English elsewhere in the world must be attentive to what the source dialects in Britain may have been like during the early founder period of the colonial setting (Mufwene, 1996(Mufwene, , 1997(Mufwene, , 1999(Mufwene, , 2001. In this context, the varieties under investigation figure among those that are particularly germane.…”

Section: The Sociohistorical Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

No taming the vernacular! Insights from the relatives in northern Britain

2005

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article we conduct a quantitative analysis of the markers used to introduce relative clauses in three vernacular varieties of English in Britain. In each variety there is a surprisingly low frequency of WH words in subject relatives and negligible use in nonsubject relatives, suggesting that the WH forms have not yet penetrated the respective vernaculars. Variable rule analyses of the multiple factors conditioning that and zero relative markers reveal that the varieties pattern quite similarly with respect to significance of factors. For the zero variant, there is a favoring effect of (1) sentence structure and (2) indefinite antecedents; however there are dialect specific differences in some nuances of the constraint ranking of factors. On the other hand, the use of zero is also highly correlated with contextual constraints relating to surface level processing, that is, clause length, as well as clause complexity, across all communities. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for both dialect specific and universal constraints on relative marker use, which can be used to further elucidate the task of conducting broad cross-community comparisons. The results also provide support for an important distinction in linguistic change -those changes that are imposed from the outside (like the WH relative markers) and those that arise from within (like that and zero relative markers) proceed very differently in mainstream as compared to peripheral varieties.Relative clauses exhibit a variety of different introductory markers in English. 1 These include wh-(WH) forms such as whose, whom, who, and which as in (1a) and (1b), that, as in (1c), and no marker or zero, as in (1d), as well as a number of dialectal variants such as what and as, as in (1e-f ).

show abstract

Section: The Sociohistorical Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

No taming the vernacular! Insights from the relatives in northern Britain

2005

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, when Salikoko Mufwene, in an article entitled "New Englishes and the Criteria for Naming Them" (1994), turned his critical attention to that sort of structuring of pluralism he found implicit ideological exclusions underlying the apparent inclusiveness. The argument, which he developed further thereafter (especially in Mufwene, 1997Mufwene, , 2001, went as follows. The manner in which Kachru and others had characterized World Englishes (in terms of nationalities and standards) allowed no space for the so-called "creoles," which are the primary and everyday languages of considerable postcolonial populations.…”

Section: Toward Global Englishes and English Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philology and Global English Studies

Gupta¹

2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Being a relatively new domain of research, this approach to new Englishes was and is still relevant to setting the foundation on which further comparative typological analyses could be built. These typological analyses seem to have taken too long to explain that new Englishes evolve like other normal varieties -however, some such studies are already available (e.g., Simo Bobda 1994b;Mufwene 1997;Schneider 2000;Anchimbe 2006a).…”

Section: The Macro-approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the notion of maturation in new Englishes

Anchimbe¹

2009

World Englishes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For the past thirty years or so, research on new Englishes has been predominantly based on identifying at what point and to what extent these varieties of English deviate from the native or older varieties (typically British and American). Often considered and treated as outcomes of deficient or inadequate acquisition of the native and/or as heavily influenced by co-existing indigenous languages, these Englishes have been conceptually interpreted as growing or advancing or maturing in a progressive manner towards (rather than away from) the native or older Englishes. This paper refutes this notion of maturation and rather proposes that new Englishes are evolving according to the ecological realities of their present contexts.

show abstract

The legitimate and illegitimate offspring of English

Cited by 12 publications

References 11 publications

No taming the vernacular! Insights from the relatives in northern Britain

No taming the vernacular! Insights from the relatives in northern Britain

Philology and Global English Studies

Revisiting the notion of maturation in new Englishes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About