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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 976

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

NEG and AUX contractions in ELF: social, contextual, and functional variation

Authors: Schekulin, Claudio
Submitted by: Schekulin, Claudio (University of Vienna, Austria)

The general theme of this year’s Sociolinguistic Symposium is Language and the City, and one ‘language’ that one is likely to overhear in urban settings virtually the world over is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). ELF is defined functionally, as “any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice” (Seidlhofer 2011: 7). Whether it is business people or tourists, international students or representatives to international organizations – or indeed, the delegates to this very symposium – they all make use of the resources of the English language to communicate within their specific domains. There is thus great diversity in both the settings that ELF is employed in, as well as in the regional and social backgrounds of its speakers. From a sociolinguistic point of view, diversity entails variability, and it is this variability which this paper seeks to address.

The features under investigation in the reported study are negative (NEG) and auxiliary (AUX) contractions in VOICE (2011), the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, with some comparative data extracted from MICASE (2002), the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. The initial results of this work in progress demonstrate that both NEG and AUX contractions show clear patterns with regard to such factors as domain and speech event type. Interestingly, this ordered heterogeneity is even more pronounced in VOICE, owing to the near categorical use of the respective contracted forms in spoken American English, even within rather formal domains. In addition to this analysis of contextual variation, some initial analyses of social and co-textual conditioning factors will be presented.

Expanding on the data from a functional perspective, various explanations from the literature (e.g. Yaeger-Dror 1997 on contraction strategies; Seidlhofer 2011 on ELF) are put forward for the patterns observed, which throw into relief the dynamic dialectic between functional, contextual, and social variation. Ultimately, it is argued that ELF data is not only very much amenable to (variationist) sociolinguistic research, but indeed has the scope to provide particular insights into the interrelationships identified above, as speakers of English as a Lingua Franca have to actively negotiate potentially disparate forces with regard to communicative function and social significance, highlighting processes which are likely to be less overt in more traditional ‘dialectal’ settings.

References:

MICASE. 2002. The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Simpson, Rita, Sarah Briggs, Janine Ovens and John Swales. Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan.

Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2011. Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

VOICE. 2011. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version 1.0 XML). Seidlhofer, Barbara, Angelika Breiteneder, Theresa Klimpfinger, Stefan Majewski and Marie-Luise Pitzl. University of Vienna.

Yaeger-Dror, Malcah. 1997. Contraction of negatives as evidence of variance in register-specific interactive rules. Language Variation and Change 9(1), 1-36.