Paper 021: A corpus-based analysis of ongoing change in the adjective amplifier systems of Hong Kong, Indian, and Philippine English
Martin Schweinberger, The University of Queensland, Australia
Keywords: Adjective Amplification, Hong Kong English Philippine English, Indian English, Conditional Inference Trees, Variationist Sociolinguistics, Language Change
Abstract
This study focuses on one of ongoing change in adjective amplifiers (very, really, so, etc.) in Hong Kong (HKE), Indian (IndE), and Philippine English (PhiE)based on data from the International Corpus of English.
While previous research on changes in amplifier systems has successfully applied multivariate methods and unearthed intricate interdependencies and highly systematic trajectories of change in inner circle varieties of English (e.g. D’Arcy 2015; Tagliamonte & Denis 2014), only few studies (e.g. Fuchs & Gut 2016) have analysed ongoing change in adjective amplification in Asian varieties of English. The current study adds to existing research in focusing on change in adjective amplification in HKE, IndE, and PhiE.
One of the most consistent findings in previous research on changes in adjective amplification in informal spoken discourse has been the replacement of very by really. The present study uses Conditional Inference Trees to assess if this trend holds true for HKE, IndE, and PhiE and if the underlying factors that drive this change in inner circle varieties are also at work in these Asian English varieties.
The analysis shows that the amplifier systems of HKE and IndE are very stable and amplifier choice in these varieties is determined predominately by intra-linguistics factors (adjective type, syntactic context, semantic category). In contrast, the amplifier system of PhiE shows notable signs of ongoing change which is driven predominately by social factors (age and gender of speakers).
The results indicate that during stasis and initial stages of change, language-internal factors determine amplifier choice while social factors become more important once changes have reached mid-range. The paper argues that once certain variants (really and so) gain social meaning, it is this social meaning (the association with specific social groups) drives and accelerates change as speakers want to associate with social groups that carry covert prestige.
References
D’Arcy, Alexandra F. 2015. Stability, stasis and change – the longue duree of intensification. Diachronica 32(4): 449–493.
Fuchs, Robert & Ulrike Gut. 2016. Register variation in intensifier usage across Asian Englishes. In Heike Pichler (ed.), Discourse-pragmatic variation and change: Insights from English, 185-210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tagliamonte, Sali. A. & Derek Denis. 2014. Expanding the transmission/diffusion dichotomy: Evidence from Canada. Language 90(1): 90–136.
Presentation video
Supplementary Information
Q&A live (Zoom) session
No longer available.
This looks to be a very interesting paper. I hope you enjoy the conference! – Organizing committee
Thank you taking the time to watch my video presentation. You can find the slides of thsi persentation here: http://www.martinschweinberger.de/docs/ppt/schweinberger-ppt-jaecs2020-2020-10-3-4.pdf.
I will be available for any questions and feedback on October 4, between 11 and 1pm (Tokyo time) on Zoom ( https://uqz.zoom.us/j/83959599537).
If you have any other questions or would like to provide personal feedback, please feel free to contact me via m.schweinberger@uq.edu.au
It would be really good to look at disciplinary variation in these forms using the BAWE or MICUSP. Up for another co-paper Martin?
Hi drprc80 ;),
I am always open for collaboration but I am absolutely swamped with projects at the moment – maybe sometime around mid-2021? Just shoot me a mail and I will get back to you!
Thank you for your informative talk. The gap between PhE and Hk/IndE is quite interesting. What do you think about the recent change in HkE, which seems to be gradually farther and farther from BrE? (Shin Ishikawa, Kobe U)
Thank you very much for thsi question! It is very relevant and allows me state some things that I could not mention during my talk: the ICE corpora are great because they share a common design BUT tehy are rather outdated as the data that is represented in the ICE corpora was ollected between 1990 and 2005! I think that if the analysis was done again based on more recent data that the results would change substantially. I think that the change in PhiE will be more advanced and IndE and HKE will display patternings that are similar to what I observed for PhiE – although this is speculative and requires further research.
Thank you for your clarifying comment. Actually I have the same feeling about the ICE. I hope someone updates the ICE. A fantastic work!