Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T02:27:37.717Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A multifactorial analysis of contact-induced change in speech reporting in written White South African English (WSAfE)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2019

HAIDEE KRUGER Open the ORCID record for HAIDEE KRUGER [Opens in a new window]  and
BERTUS VAN ROOY
HAIDEE KRUGER
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University / North-West University, Macquarie Walk, North Ryde NSW2109, Australia, [email protected]
BERTUS VAN ROOY
Affiliation:
UPSET Research Focus Area, North-West University, Hendrik van Eck Blvd, Vanderbijlpark 1911, South Africa, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article presents a corpus analysis of changes over a period of two centuries in speech-reporting constructions in written White South African English (WSAfE), a native variety of English that has been in contact with Afrikaans throughout its history. The analysis is based on register-differentiated comparable diachronic corpora of WSAfE, its parent variety, British English (BrE), and the contact language, Afrikaans. Three related reported-speech constructions are analysed, focusing on changes in the relative frequencies of variants of each construction. These constructions show ongoing change, with similar trajectories of change for WSAfE and BrE in some cases, but divergent trajectories in others. In the latter case, WSAfE and Afrikaans converge on similar frequency distributions, which follow from an accelerated rate of change or a slowing down of the rate of change for particular features in WSAfE in comparison to BrE. Descriptive findings are supported by conditional inference tree modelling. The effect of frequency on reinforcing similar patterns of change in WSAfE and Afrikaans, as well as simplification through the levelling of register differences in WSAfE and Afrikaans are proposed as explanations. The study highlights the importance of converging norms in a multilingual publication industry as a site of contact.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 179 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ARCHER-3.2 = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers version 3.2. 1990–2013. Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan at Northern Arizona University and University of Southern California; modified and expanded by subsequent members of a consortium of universities. Current member universities are Bamberg, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Helsinki, Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester, Michigan, Northern Arizona, Santiago de Compostela, Southern California, Trier, Uppsala, Zurich.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany. 2011. Grammar emerging in the noun phrase: The influence of written language use. English Language and Linguistics 15(2), 223–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany. 2013. Being specific about historical change: The influence of sub-register. Journal of English Linguistics 41(2), 104–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2010. Language, cognition and usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2012. The diachrony of quotation: Evidence from New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 24, 343–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2015. Quotation and advances in understanding syntactic systems. Annual Review of Linguistics 1, 43–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feinauer, Ilse. 1990. Skoon afhanklike sinne in Afrikaanse spreektaal. Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Taalkunde 8(3), 116–120.Google Scholar
Filppula, Markku, Klemola, Juhani & Sharma, Devyani (eds.). 2017. The Oxford handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fischer, Olga. 2013. The role of contact in English syntactic change in the Old and Middle English periods. In Schreier & Hundt (eds.), 18–40.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2005. Language contact and grammatical change. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2013. English as a contact language in Ireland and Scotland. In Schreier & Hundt (eds.), 88–105.Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond (ed.). 2017. The Cambridge handbook of areal linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten & Zeileis, Achim. 2016. Package ‘partykit’: CRAN, https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/partykit/partykit.pdf (20 June 2017)Google Scholar
Houston, Keith. 2013. Shady characters: The secret life of punctuation, symbols & other typographical marks. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Content clauses and reported speech. In Huddleston & Pullum (eds.), 947–1030.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K. (eds.). 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Mair, Christian. 1999. ‘Agile’ and ‘uptight’ genres: The corpus-based approach to language change in progress. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4(2), 221–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Schreier, Daniel. 2013. Introduction: Nothing but a contact language… In Schreier & Hundt (eds.), 1–17.Google Scholar
Jahn, Manfred. 1992. Contextualising represented speech and thought. Journal of Pragmatics 17, 347–367.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johanson, Lars. 2002. Structural factors in Turkic language contacts. London: Curzon.Google Scholar
Jullian, Paula M. 2011. Appraising through someone else’s words: The evaluative power of quotations in news reports. Discourse and Society 22(6), 766–780.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kachru, Braj B. 1985. Standards, codification, and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the Outer Circle. In Webster (ed.), 153–76.Google Scholar
Kantey, Mike. 1990. Publishing in South Africa. Africa Bibliography 1989, vi–xx. doi:10.1017/S0266673100005183 (20 June 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirsten, Johanita. 2016. Grammatikale verandering in Afrikaans van 1911–2010. PhD dissertation, North-West University.Google Scholar
Kruger, Haidee & van Rooy, Bertus. 2016. Syntactic and pragmatic transfer effects in reported-speech constructions in three contact varieties of English influenced by Afrikaans. Language Sciences 56, 118–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kruger, Haidee & van Rooy, Bertus. 2017. Editorial practice and the progressive in Black South African English. World Englishes 36(1), 20–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lass, Roger & Wright, Susan. 1986. Endogeny vs contact: ‘Afrikaans influence’ on South African English. English World-Wide 7(2), 201–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to do linguistics with R: Data exploration and statistical analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend. 1992. English in language shift: The history, structure and sociolinguistics of South African Indian English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend. 1996. Imagint excusations: Missionary English in the nineteenth century Cape Colony, South Africa. World Englishes 15(2), 139–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend. 2017. South Africa and areal linguistics. In Hickey (ed.), 527–50.Google Scholar
Mougeon, Raymond, Nadasdi, Terry & Rehner, Katherine. 2005. Contact-induced linguistic innovations on the continuum of language use: The case of French in Ontario. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 8(2), 99–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Dalene. 2003. Skryf Afrikaans van A tot Z. Cape Town: Pharos.Google Scholar
Nelson, Gerald, Wallis, Sean & Aarts, Bas. 2002. Exploring natural language: Working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sydney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Sayers, Dave. 2014. The mediated innovation model: A framework for researching media influence in language change. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2), 185–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Post-colonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schreier, Daniel & Hundt, Marianne (eds.). 2013. English as a contact language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Short, Mick. 2012. Discourse presentation and speech (and writing, but not thought) summary. Language and Literature 21(1), 18–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2016. About text frequencies in historical linguistics: Disentangling environmental and grammatical change. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12, 1153–1171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taalkommissie van die Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns. 2011. Taalkommissiekorpus 1.1. North-West University: CTexT.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Baayen, R. Harald. 2012. Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice. Language Variation and Change 24(2), 135–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomason, Sarah Grey. 2001. Language contact: An introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Kaufman, Terrence. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Walker, James A.. 2009. On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: A variationist study of that. Linguistics 47(1), 1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2004. Dialect contact and new-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Van Bogaert, Julie & Colleman, Timothy. 2013. On the grammaticalization of (’t) schijnt ‘it seems’ as an evidential particle in colloquial Belgian Dutch. Folia Linguistica 47(2), 481–520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Rooy, Bertus. 2017. South African English. In Filppula, Klemola & Sharma (eds.), 508–30.Google Scholar
Van Rooy, Bertus & Kruger, Haidee. 2016. Faktore wat die weglating van die Afrikaanse onderskikker dat bepaal. Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe / Journal of Humanities 56(1), 102–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wasserman, Ronel. 2014. Modality on trek: Diachronic changes in written South African English across text and context. PhD dissertation, North-West University.Google Scholar
Wasserman, Ronel & van Rooy, Bertus. 2014. The development of modals of obligation and necessity in White South African English through contact with Afrikaans. Journal of English Linguistics 42(1), 31–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webster, Jonathan J. (ed.). 2015. Collected works of Braj B. Kachru, vol. 3. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel. 1979. Languages in contact: Findings and problems. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar