Abstract This paper analyses a number of constructions with a reflexive marker on the verb and a dative argument, using the framework of Construction Grammar. In these constructions the predication is ascribed in various modes to the experiencer argument. We focus on these constructions in the South Slavic languages in which they have a wide distribution, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). The following basic types are identified: Emotional processes and states, Accidental, Perception/Cognition and Stative Reflexive-Dative Construction (SRDC). The specific clusters of features in each one are due to the inheritance properties from a reflexive construction, indicating a valence reduction, in combination with the features of affectedness and lack of control, characteristic of a dative argument. This results in varied but multiply linked patterns that create a complex network of constructions. The study aims at defining the relations between these constructions and in particular at determining the place of SRDC in this network.
{"title":"The network of reflexive dative constructions in South Slavic","authors":"Liljana Mitkovska","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2021-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2021-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper analyses a number of constructions with a reflexive marker on the verb and a dative argument, using the framework of Construction Grammar. In these constructions the predication is ascribed in various modes to the experiencer argument. We focus on these constructions in the South Slavic languages in which they have a wide distribution, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). The following basic types are identified: Emotional processes and states, Accidental, Perception/Cognition and Stative Reflexive-Dative Construction (SRDC). The specific clusters of features in each one are due to the inheritance properties from a reflexive construction, indicating a valence reduction, in combination with the features of affectedness and lack of control, characteristic of a dative argument. This results in varied but multiply linked patterns that create a complex network of constructions. The study aims at defining the relations between these constructions and in particular at determining the place of SRDC in this network.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"81 1","pages":"59 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80983138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The paper discusses two Polish exclamative constructions as instances of the Abstract Exclamative Construction (AEC) proposed by Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996). It is argued that while the Co-za Exclamative Construction is motivated straightforwardly by the identifying Co-za Question Construction as well as AEC, the Ale Exclamative Construction involves not only AEC but also a more complex process called “incoordination”, whereby a second coordinate clause with its coordinating conjunction ale becomes an autonomous monoclausal construction. The process involves a change in the information structure and in illocutionary force, which becomes increasingly expressive. In addition, it is accompanied by a shift of the sentence stress from the focal element in the second coordinate clause to the initial Ale.
{"title":"On motivation and incoordination in grammar – The case of two Polish exclamative constructions","authors":"Bogusław Bierwiaczonek","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2021-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2021-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper discusses two Polish exclamative constructions as instances of the Abstract Exclamative Construction (AEC) proposed by Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996). It is argued that while the Co-za Exclamative Construction is motivated straightforwardly by the identifying Co-za Question Construction as well as AEC, the Ale Exclamative Construction involves not only AEC but also a more complex process called “incoordination”, whereby a second coordinate clause with its coordinating conjunction ale becomes an autonomous monoclausal construction. The process involves a change in the information structure and in illocutionary force, which becomes increasingly expressive. In addition, it is accompanied by a shift of the sentence stress from the focal element in the second coordinate clause to the initial Ale.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"1 1","pages":"85 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86439187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The aim of this study is to examine the usage of adjunct-based prepositional passives of intransitive verbs. The occurrence of this highly atypical construction, referred to as the pseudo-passive, is motivated by a variety of factors related to its individual components as well as the discourse context. The pseudo-passive is first characterized in terms of its most characteristic verbs and prepositions. Then three main types of the construction are distinguished on the basis of their subject semantics and discourse function, which correlate with specific syntactic and semantic features observed in the data. The study relies on statistical tools for the analysis of the corpus data: collostructional analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and logistic regression.
{"title":"Real-life pseudo-passives: The usage and discourse functions of adjunct-based passive constructions","authors":"Joanna Podhorodecka","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2021-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2021-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of this study is to examine the usage of adjunct-based prepositional passives of intransitive verbs. The occurrence of this highly atypical construction, referred to as the pseudo-passive, is motivated by a variety of factors related to its individual components as well as the discourse context. The pseudo-passive is first characterized in terms of its most characteristic verbs and prepositions. Then three main types of the construction are distinguished on the basis of their subject semantics and discourse function, which correlate with specific syntactic and semantic features observed in the data. The study relies on statistical tools for the analysis of the corpus data: collostructional analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and logistic regression.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"49 1","pages":"33 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86591401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The focus of the present study is the relation between metaphor and aspect: are certain grammatical forms more prone to be used metaphorically? We approach this issue through a puzzling case of Russian aspectual triplets. The study is based on the distributions of the unprefixed imperfective verb gruzit’ (IPFV1) ‘load’, its perfective counterparts (PFVs) and prefixed secondary imperfectives (IPFV2s) with the prefixes na-, za-, and po-. The data collected from the Russian National Corpus offers support for the Telicity Hypothesis according to which IPFV2s become more “oriented towards a result” due to the presence of a prefix. We show that, although characterized by similar semantics, all verbs in a triplet have different distributions among constructions and metaphorical patterns. The difference is particularly noticeable in metaphorical contexts, where IPFV2s have a higher frequency of metaphorical uses. The prefix seems to play a more crucial role than aspect as metaphorical patterns of IPFV2s are more similar to the patterns attested for the perfective counterparts. Based on this study, we can assume that the resultative state more often serves as a source for conventional verbal metaphors than the process itself, which results in IPFV2s being more often used metaphorically than IPFV1.
{"title":"When three is company: The relation between aspect and metaphor in Russian aspectual triplets","authors":"S. Sokolova","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2021-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2021-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The focus of the present study is the relation between metaphor and aspect: are certain grammatical forms more prone to be used metaphorically? We approach this issue through a puzzling case of Russian aspectual triplets. The study is based on the distributions of the unprefixed imperfective verb gruzit’ (IPFV1) ‘load’, its perfective counterparts (PFVs) and prefixed secondary imperfectives (IPFV2s) with the prefixes na-, za-, and po-. The data collected from the Russian National Corpus offers support for the Telicity Hypothesis according to which IPFV2s become more “oriented towards a result” due to the presence of a prefix. We show that, although characterized by similar semantics, all verbs in a triplet have different distributions among constructions and metaphorical patterns. The difference is particularly noticeable in metaphorical contexts, where IPFV2s have a higher frequency of metaphorical uses. The prefix seems to play a more crucial role than aspect as metaphorical patterns of IPFV2s are more similar to the patterns attested for the perfective counterparts. Based on this study, we can assume that the resultative state more often serves as a source for conventional verbal metaphors than the process itself, which results in IPFV2s being more often used metaphorically than IPFV1.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"19 1","pages":"107 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74241249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The aim of the paper is to consider the pragmatic effects of the Polish (Proszę) ‘request1 SG. NON-PAST.’ + VINF construction in different contexts. The specific research problem is how these effects are related to the conceptual make-up of the construction. The framework for the analysis is the theory of cognitive grammar (cf. e. g. Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008, 2009). The analysis starts with an account of the conceptual make-up of the construction. Then, its selected uses are considered, with emphasis on the pragmatic effects in the relevant contexts. The study offers a qualitative analysis of two kinds of data: a sample of hand-picked utterances and a corpus of utterances extracted from the National Corpus of Polish (NCP). The claim made in the study is that the construction profiles a process figuring in a directive scenario in the role of the process the speaker wishes the hearer to engage in. At the same time, it involves defocusing of the trajector of the profiled process, identified with the hearer. The construction’s pragmatic effects in specific contexts are claimed to follow from how this trajector defocusing is put in correspondence with specific aspects of the actual ground.
{"title":"A grammatical construction in the service of interpersonal distance regulation. The case of the Polish directive infinitive construction","authors":"Agata Kochańska","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2021-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2021-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of the paper is to consider the pragmatic effects of the Polish (Proszę) ‘request1 SG. NON-PAST.’ + VINF construction in different contexts. The specific research problem is how these effects are related to the conceptual make-up of the construction. The framework for the analysis is the theory of cognitive grammar (cf. e. g. Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008, 2009). The analysis starts with an account of the conceptual make-up of the construction. Then, its selected uses are considered, with emphasis on the pragmatic effects in the relevant contexts. The study offers a qualitative analysis of two kinds of data: a sample of hand-picked utterances and a corpus of utterances extracted from the National Corpus of Polish (NCP). The claim made in the study is that the construction profiles a process figuring in a directive scenario in the role of the process the speaker wishes the hearer to engage in. At the same time, it involves defocusing of the trajector of the profiled process, identified with the hearer. The construction’s pragmatic effects in specific contexts are claimed to follow from how this trajector defocusing is put in correspondence with specific aspects of the actual ground.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"6 1","pages":"1 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79863635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In English, the internal constituency of an event is obligatorily expressed by means of non-progressive versus progressive aspect. It is also represented linguistically by means of lexical aspect, and thus verb semantics. The two types of distinctions are shown to lie at two different levels of schematicity in the Integrated Model of Aspect (IMA, Kokorniak 2018). Although particles constitute only an additional tool in aspectual profiling in English, they are very productive at the level of lexical aspect in profiling minor aspectual differences that main verb semantics and inflection cannot reflect. The particles that the verb think can be combined with include out, over, through and up. Monolingual learners’ dictionaries suggest that think out, think over and think through can be used interchangeably. Their definitions indicate that in all three cases the particles designate a careful and thorough mental process. The study presents an aspectual contour of think and the particles that the verb can be combined with, and displays that each particle constitutes an elaboration of the mental path in a slightly different way. Their semantic contribution to the aspectual verb profile is shown and located in the IMA continuum, while corpus examples depict their use.
{"title":"An aspectual contour of phrasal verb constructions with English think","authors":"Iwona Kokorniak","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2021-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2021-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In English, the internal constituency of an event is obligatorily expressed by means of non-progressive versus progressive aspect. It is also represented linguistically by means of lexical aspect, and thus verb semantics. The two types of distinctions are shown to lie at two different levels of schematicity in the Integrated Model of Aspect (IMA, Kokorniak 2018). Although particles constitute only an additional tool in aspectual profiling in English, they are very productive at the level of lexical aspect in profiling minor aspectual differences that main verb semantics and inflection cannot reflect. The particles that the verb think can be combined with include out, over, through and up. Monolingual learners’ dictionaries suggest that think out, think over and think through can be used interchangeably. Their definitions indicate that in all three cases the particles designate a careful and thorough mental process. The study presents an aspectual contour of think and the particles that the verb can be combined with, and displays that each particle constitutes an elaboration of the mental path in a slightly different way. Their semantic contribution to the aspectual verb profile is shown and located in the IMA continuum, while corpus examples depict their use.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"21 1","pages":"165 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82280787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The paper describes a method for finding diachronic spelling variants in a corpus that consists of historical and modern Polish texts. The procedure applies the Levenshtein distance and the similarity measure determined with a Word2vec model. The method was applied for both words and sub-word units. A sample of spelling variants was manually evaluated and compared against an existing morphological analyser for Polish historical texts. The resulting lists of spelling variants and spelling modernisation rules were used in a text modernisation tool and their contribution was evaluated. The paper also presents an analogous method for finding spelling variants that result from erroneous OCR. The obtained lists of OCR variants and rules may serve for the correction of OCR output.
{"title":"Mining historical texts for diachronic spelling variants","authors":"F. Gralinski, K. Jassem","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2020-0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2020-0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper describes a method for finding diachronic spelling variants in a corpus that consists of historical and modern Polish texts. The procedure applies the Levenshtein distance and the similarity measure determined with a Word2vec model. The method was applied for both words and sub-word units. A sample of spelling variants was manually evaluated and compared against an existing morphological analyser for Polish historical texts. The resulting lists of spelling variants and spelling modernisation rules were used in a text modernisation tool and their contribution was evaluated. The paper also presents an analogous method for finding spelling variants that result from erroneous OCR. The obtained lists of OCR variants and rules may serve for the correction of OCR output.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"12 1","pages":"629 - 650"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81927969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper explores the semantic motivation of English phrasal verbs with the particle out whose constituent verb refers to processes and activities performed by or to plants and their prefixed Serbian counterparts with the prefixes iz-, s- and raz-. The cognitive approach to the semantics of phrasal verbs and prefixes is employed, which entails observing their meaning through the notions of conceptualisation, image-schematic structuring and spatial schematisation. It is shown that there is a high degree of correspondence in the concrete and abstract senses of the contrasted English and Serbian lexemes owing to the same spatial configurations which structure the constituent English and Serbian satellites (the particle out and the prefixes iz-, s- and raz-, respectively). Additionally, various conceptual metaphors stemming from the domain of PLANTS, inherent in the constituent verb, play a prominent role in the extension of the phrasal and prefixed verb meaning in both languages. The conclusion underlines the benefits of using the cognitive semantic approach in the contrastive studies of particles and prefixes.
{"title":"A cognitive semantic exploration of English plant phrasal verbs with the particle out and their Serbian counterparts","authors":"I. Milošević, T. V. Pavlović","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2020-0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2020-0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper explores the semantic motivation of English phrasal verbs with the particle out whose constituent verb refers to processes and activities performed by or to plants and their prefixed Serbian counterparts with the prefixes iz-, s- and raz-. The cognitive approach to the semantics of phrasal verbs and prefixes is employed, which entails observing their meaning through the notions of conceptualisation, image-schematic structuring and spatial schematisation. It is shown that there is a high degree of correspondence in the concrete and abstract senses of the contrasted English and Serbian lexemes owing to the same spatial configurations which structure the constituent English and Serbian satellites (the particle out and the prefixes iz-, s- and raz-, respectively). Additionally, various conceptual metaphors stemming from the domain of PLANTS, inherent in the constituent verb, play a prominent role in the extension of the phrasal and prefixed verb meaning in both languages. The conclusion underlines the benefits of using the cognitive semantic approach in the contrastive studies of particles and prefixes.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"44 1","pages":"681 - 709"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88261881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Level of proficiency (LoP), unlike other factors, such as L2 status (Cenoz 2001) or linguistic proximity (Westergaard et al. 2016), has not been widely investigated in terms of third language acquisition (TLA). However, it is possible that LoP in L2 (Tremblay 2006), L3 (Wrembel 2010) and the interaction between these factors (Sypiańska and Cal in press) might play an important role in TLA. This study, thus, aims to further examine the aforesaid possibilities by analysing the influence of L2 and L3 LoP and their interaction on the production of L3 vowels in a group of L1 Polish/L2 English/L3 Spanish speakers who differ in terms of LoP in their foreign languages. A MANOVA was conducted to compare the main effects of L2LoP, L3LoP and vowel as well as the interaction effect between these factors on the production of L3 Spanish vowels. The results indicate an influential role of L2LoP and L3LoP and their interaction depending on the vowel being analysed. Low proficiency in one of the languages allowed the other, more proficient one, to impact the production of the L3 Spanish vowels. This interplay of factors expands the understanding of how the L2 and L3 proficiency condition the developing L3.
与其他因素(如第二语言地位(Cenoz 2001)或语言接近度(Westergaard et al. 2016))不同，熟练程度(LoP)在第三语言习得(TLA)方面尚未得到广泛研究。然而，L2中的LoP (Tremblay 2006)、L3中的LoP (Wrembel 2010)以及这些因素(Sypiańska和press中的Cal)之间的相互作用可能在TLA中发挥重要作用。因此，本研究旨在通过分析L2和L3 LoP及其相互作用对母语波兰语/L2英语/L3西班牙语人群中L3元音产生的影响来进一步检验上述可能性，这些人群在外语中LoP方面存在差异。采用方差分析方法比较了L2LoP、L3LoP和元音对西班牙语L3元音生成的主要影响以及三者之间的交互作用。结果表明，L2LoP和L3LoP的影响作用及其相互作用取决于所分析的元音。其中一种语言的低熟练程度允许另一种更熟练的语言影响L3西班牙语元音的产生。这种因素的相互作用扩展了对二语和三语熟练程度如何影响三语发展的理解。
{"title":"The interaction of L2 and L3 levels of proficiency in third language acquisition","authors":"Zuzanna Cal, Jolanta Sypiańska","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2020-0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2020-0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Level of proficiency (LoP), unlike other factors, such as L2 status (Cenoz 2001) or linguistic proximity (Westergaard et al. 2016), has not been widely investigated in terms of third language acquisition (TLA). However, it is possible that LoP in L2 (Tremblay 2006), L3 (Wrembel 2010) and the interaction between these factors (Sypiańska and Cal in press) might play an important role in TLA. This study, thus, aims to further examine the aforesaid possibilities by analysing the influence of L2 and L3 LoP and their interaction on the production of L3 vowels in a group of L1 Polish/L2 English/L3 Spanish speakers who differ in terms of LoP in their foreign languages. A MANOVA was conducted to compare the main effects of L2LoP, L3LoP and vowel as well as the interaction effect between these factors on the production of L3 Spanish vowels. The results indicate an influential role of L2LoP and L3LoP and their interaction depending on the vowel being analysed. Low proficiency in one of the languages allowed the other, more proficient one, to impact the production of the L3 Spanish vowels. This interplay of factors expands the understanding of how the L2 and L3 proficiency condition the developing L3.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"11 1","pages":"577 - 603"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84035584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The aim of this study is to investigate whether the form of English spoken by Nigerian newscasters enjoys the status of a standard in Nigeria. The study employs a verbal guise test and a questionnaire to measure the attitudes of 137 Nigerian participants towards the variety of English used by Nigerian newscasters. The findings show that an exonormative orientation is still present in Nigeria: both British and American English accents are preferred over a Nigerian one for Nigerian newscasters, and a British accent is perceived to be more prevalent than a Nigerian one in Nigerian newscasting. However, the results of the verbal guise test demonstrate that there are very positive attitudes towards all Nigerian newscasters’ accents. The results also show that neither gender nor a stay abroad has a significant effect on Nigerians’ attitudes towards newscasters’ English, but that the age group of the participants significantly influences their evaluations: the older participants rated the newscasters’ English accents higher than the younger ones. Overall, the findings of the study suggest a limited potential of Nigerian newscasters’ English becoming a model of English in Nigeria, as British English as an exonormative norm seems to continue to play a major role.
{"title":"Nigerian newscasters’ English as a model of standard Nigerian English?","authors":"Folajimi Oyebola, Ulrike Gut","doi":"10.1515/psicl-2020-0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2020-0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of this study is to investigate whether the form of English spoken by Nigerian newscasters enjoys the status of a standard in Nigeria. The study employs a verbal guise test and a questionnaire to measure the attitudes of 137 Nigerian participants towards the variety of English used by Nigerian newscasters. The findings show that an exonormative orientation is still present in Nigeria: both British and American English accents are preferred over a Nigerian one for Nigerian newscasters, and a British accent is perceived to be more prevalent than a Nigerian one in Nigerian newscasting. However, the results of the verbal guise test demonstrate that there are very positive attitudes towards all Nigerian newscasters’ accents. The results also show that neither gender nor a stay abroad has a significant effect on Nigerians’ attitudes towards newscasters’ English, but that the age group of the participants significantly influences their evaluations: the older participants rated the newscasters’ English accents higher than the younger ones. Overall, the findings of the study suggest a limited potential of Nigerian newscasters’ English becoming a model of English in Nigeria, as British English as an exonormative norm seems to continue to play a major role.","PeriodicalId":43804,"journal":{"name":"Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics","volume":"1 1","pages":"651 - 680"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84355903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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