This variationist sociolinguistic study investigates language change in the Francoprovençal speaking communities of les monts du Lyonnais in France, and the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. In Chapter 1 we give a brief overview of Francoprovençal, and outline the parameters of the study. Chapter 2 presents an overview of where Francoprovençal has come from and why it is so controversial. Beginning with its origins, we give a brief history of dialectalisation for our fieldwork areas, before discussing Francoprovençal as an exceptional case in the Romance linguistic literature. Case studies on language maintenance and shift are presented in Chapter 3, where we contextualise our study on Francoprovençal and the emergence of the 'Arpitan' revitalisation movement. We argue that Francoprovencal does not quite fit the mould of other multidialectal contexts such as Breton or Corsican. Chapter 4 outlines the methods employed in undertaking the empirical and ethnographic fieldwork for the study. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7 we examine each of the linguistic variables in the study in relation to a number of extra-linguistic factors. Our findings indicate that, while older traditional speakers produce localised dialectal variants in a more monitored speech style, there is variation. Conversely, the new speakers not only show substantial linguistic divergence from other speakers in the sample, but also from each other. We present evidence to suggest that the pan-regional norm is having some impact on language use. In Chapter 8 we focus specifically on the Arpitan movement and its effects, asking in what ways a commitment to the revitalisation cause is driving change for some participants in the study. A novel Arpitan Engagement Index is employed to assess the extent to which speakers are connected with the movement and how this correlates with language use: we focus on the social significance of a series of 'new' Arpitan forms. We terminate with our conclusions in Chapter 9, where we advance a number of hypotheses in relation to language change in the communities under investigation. In particular, we suggest that convergence is taking place in the direction of both national and regional norms. Lastly, we suggest avenues for future research trajectories.

Despite some excellent historical and contemporary research on the linguistic situation in the Shetland Islands, to date there have been no studies with an in-depth focus on a specific type of dialect-to-standard speech modification, known locally in Shetland as knappin. Specifically: as the speakers understand it, what is the precise definition of knappin and how might this feature be linked to dialect attrition? The concept of knappin is a widely debated and contentious issue within Shetland. Questions such as how, when and why does it occur, who does it, and whether its use is the final step to complete dialect levelling, have never been fully explored. This study addresses such questions by conducting a quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic analysis of perceptions on dialect modification across the islands; with the aid of data collected from many hundreds of Shetlanders, and dialect speakers no longer resident. My results show that all dialect speakers are modifying their speech more frequently, for many reasons and in many different linguistic situations. While this is of some concern, closer analysis of dialect perceptions and attitudes, and the exploration of areas where the use of dialect is seen to be increasing, indicate that, despite regular and extensive modification, the dialect might not be as at risk as previous research has indicated.

British-Asians have often been stereotyped in the media through their cultural and linguistic practices, and these have been exacerbated by ongoing anti-Islamic international media coverage. Such associations may necessarily impact on the identity of young Pakistani-Muslims living in the West, and by implication, their sociolinguistic choices. However, no systematic study to my knowledge has attempted to uncover the role fine-grained phonetic variation might play in indexing such associations. In addition, Scottish-Pakistanis who are the largest ethnic minority group in Scotland, have been neglected in prior research on ethnic accents of English. With the increasing acknowledgement that ethnic varieties may influence mainstream Englishes as well as contribute to regional and personal identity, Scotland is a prime site for such analysis with its strong sense of national as well as local identity. Moreover, young female identity in the Muslim context is heightened, and can advance the understanding of the role of age, gender and religion in language variation. This study is a sociophonetic analysis of the Glasgow-Asian accent, specifically examining the speech of British-born adolescent Pakistani girls, aged 16-18. It uses both linguistic ethnographic and variationist methods with auditory and acoustic phonetics to ascertain how social identity and ethnicity are reflected in specific accent features of their spoken English. From long-term fieldwork in a Glasgow high school, results show that distinct Communities of Practice (CofPs) emerge in the girls according to their social practices. The consonantal variable /t/, and six unchecked monophthongal vowels /i, e, a, O, o, 0/ were examined revealing fine-grained differences in realisation according to CofP membership. CofP effects were found: for /t/ for Tongue Shape gesture and Centre of Gravity (CoG), and for vowels in interaction effects with adjacent phonetic environment for FLEECE height (F1) and BOOT front-backness (F2). Findings reveal within-ethnic and cross-ethnic differences across the variables. The girls use a system of accent variation in subtle ways to simultaneously denote ethnicity, and personal, regional and social identity. This reflects hybridity at a fine phonetic level, similar to that of ‘Brasian’ (Harris 2006), but here embodied in the concept of ‘Glaswasian’.

Metapragmatic awareness (MPA) is the ability to explicitly reflect upon the pragmatic rules that govern conversation. There is a paucity of research on how MPA develops in childhood and whether it is impaired in children with pragmatic impairments. Despite this, MPA is often cited as an intervention tool for children with pragmatic language impairments (cwPLI) and children with specific language impairments (cwSLI). There are currently no published assessments of MPA ability and practice would benefit from application of a formalised assessment methodology. This thesis reports the phases of development of a novel clinical assessment of MPA for school-aged children called the Assessment of Metapragmatics (AMP). The AMP task is a set of 13 Video Items each depicting a conversation between pairs of school-aged children. Each Video Item portrays a different pragmatic rule violation. After viewing each AMP Video Item the participants were asked a set of Assessor Questions designed to measure MPA. The AMP Video Items were shown to 40 children with typical language development (cwTLD), 34 cwPLI and 14 cwSLI. Preliminary analyses revealed the AMP to be sensitive to age-related changes in MPA and to demonstrate good internal reliability. For the cwTLD there was a distinct developmental shift in MPA ability around seven years of age. At this age there was an increase in the child’s ability to use explicit metapragmatic vocabulary to describe a pragmatic rule violation. CwTLD demonstrated superior MPA ability in comparison to the cwPLI and the cwSLI. No differential impairment in MPA abilities was present between the cwPLI and cwSLI. Considerable variability in MPA abilities occurred for both the cwPLI and cwSLI and this was associated with language ability. This suggests that where MPA is found to be impaired, the child’s language ability should be taken into account and that language ability should be remediated before MPA is targeted in intervention. Where MPA is impaired, raising awareness of pragmatic rule may be the first step for intervention. Where MPA is age-appropriate, the child’s ability to monitor their use of the pragmatic rule, or their motivation to use the pragmatic rule, may be a more effective target of intervention in order to change behaviour. The relationship between MPA and social understanding for the pragmatic rule violation is also discussed and further studies of MPA are considered.

Code-switching is a language-contact phenomenon in which the juxtaposition of languages is intentional and purposeful. The Kuwaiti speech community has a distinctive code-switching mechanism because of the unique sociolinguistic and cultural setting; as they code-switch to English even though they are neither an immigrant community nor are/were colonised by an English speaking country. In Kuwait, code-switching between Kuwaiti Arabic and English is very common among the youth, even though English is considered to be a foreign language. It is observed that the code-switching behaviour of Kuwaiti bilinguals attending bilingual/multilingual schools differs from that of those attending monolingual schools. In this thesis, an ethnographic study has been conducted to corroborate this observation. Both bilingual/multilingual school students and bilingual students attending monolingual schools were interviewed in order to identify the motivations behind their code-switching behaviour. The interviews were analysed sequentially by adopting the conversational analysis framework. The sequential approach (Auer 1984) focuses on a turn-by-turn participant-oriented analysis (Li Wei 1994) to seek answers to the questions of how and why bilingual speakers code-switch. Here, the different code-switching behaviours of these young Kuwaitis were investigated in an attempt to analyse the conversational functions behind them. Without exception, bilinguals in monolingual schools preferred conversing in Kuwaiti Arabic with a few one-word English insertions here and there, even though free language choice was emphasised at the beginning of each conversation. On the other hand, the language choice of bilingual school students varied from choosing Kuwaiti Arabic or English as the language of conversation to code-switching between the two languages on a continuous basis. Code-switching ranged from English insertions into Kuwaiti Arabic speech or Kuwaiti Arabic insertions into English speech to alternating between the two languages. In addition to the different code-switching styles, various conversational functions behind code-switching were also recognised. In this thesis, code-switching was treated as a contextualisation cue (Gumperz 1982), highlighting the pragmatic functions and contributing to an understanding of the intended meaning. At least five motivations behind code-switching among bilingual school students were identified in our corpus: accommodation, repair, contrastiveness, filling linguistic gaps, and floor holding, among others.

The thesis investigates ways of communicating gratitude are perceived and realised in Jordan and England. It focuses on the impact of several variables on the expression of gratitude and examines the differences between the data elicited by pragmatic research instruments (DCT and role-play). Data were collected from native speakers: 46 Jordanian Arabic, 46 English natives using DCTs, role-plays and interviews. Slight similarities and significant cross-cultural differences were revealed in terms of gratitude expressions’ perception, number and strategy type. This cultural contrast reveals differences in the sociolinguistic patterns of conveying gratitude in verbal and nonverbal communication. The most important theoretical finding is that the data, while consistent with many views found in the existing literature, do not support Brown and Levinson’s (1987) claim that communicating gratitude intrinsically threatens the speaker’s negative face. Rather, it is argued that gratitude should be viewed as a means of establishing and sustaining social relationships. The findings suggest that cultural variation in expressing gratitude is due to the high degree of sensitivity to the interplay of several social and contextual variables. The findings provide worthwhile insights into theoretical issues concerning the nature of communicative acts, the relation between types of communicative acts and the general principles of human communication, especially rapport between people in social interaction, as well as the relation between culture-specific and universal features of communicative activity types. Differences were found between pragmatic research instruments. The outcomes indicate that using a mixture of methods is preferable as long as this serves the aim of the study as it merges their advantages by eliciting spontaneous data in controlled settings. The ramifications of this study for future multi-dimensional investigations of the contrasts between Arabic and English speaking cultures are expected to prove particularly significant in virtue of corroborating or refuting existing findings and in this way paving the way for new research.

This doctoral thesis is an investigation into the process of translation performed by “natural” translators in comparison to MA Translation Studies students, hereon after will be termed trainee translators. “natural” translators were defined following Harris and Sherwood understanding of “natural” translation as: “the translation done in everyday circumstances by people who have had no special training for it” (1978: 155). The research examines bilinguality and diglossia in the context of Kuwait and how these two factors influence the translation process. The research examines the participants’ working units as well as the most commonly used strategies in the translation of culture-specific items and in the translation of English passive voice into Arabic. The study also explores the cohorts’ perceptions of translation and of the role of the translator drawing from Tymoczko’s call to look beyond Western conceptualisations of translation. The study uses think-aloud protocols (TAPs) to monitor and understand the process of translation. Different levels of working translation units were identified among the cohorts which further highlights the importance of translator training. Trainee translators worked on larger segments, mixing different levels of translation units. On the other hand, natural translators worked primarily on smaller units, although some worked on larger units. In terms of strategies, the research explores how time restrictions and the observational method might influence the strategies applied in a translation task. In terms of strategies there were general similarities in the types used, trainee participants and “natural” participants used global and local strategies to complete the task within the time frame. The participants were observed to advocate for an active role of the translator in some instances, however, the authority of the text was also an important aspect that was taken into consideration during the task. This project aims to contribute to existing literature in process-oriented research by comparing the process of translation with that of “natural” translators to academically instructed translators. This research also sets out to make an empirical contribution to the research in translation from English to Arabic.

How are beliefs about the nature of knowledge reflected and reproduced in language use? It is clear that some linguistic resources, e.g. the modal verbs may and must, indicate one’s epistemic stance with respect to a proposition, i.e. one’s judgement of how likely it is to be true. What is less clear is how the use of such resources relates to speakers’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge per se, i.e. their epistemic policies (Teller 2004). To investigate the putative relationship between epistemological variation and linguistic variation, I examine samples of written and spoken English from a community that is particularly epistemologically diverse: academia. I synthesize research on social epistemology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and Academic English (AE) to propose an explanatory model of variability in the expression of epistemic stance. Then, using AE as a case study, I evaluate the predictions of this model both quantitatively via corpus analysis of research articles and regression modelling of interview data, as well as qualitatively via analysis of discursive practices in terms of experience-organizing frames (Goffman 1974) and the semiotic notion of indexicality (e.g. Irvine 2001), whereby ideological differences produce, and are reproduced by, linguistic differences. This research makes contributions to a number of fields. It questions the analytic validity of disciplinarity, providing support for a unifying theory of variation in AE based instead on an epistemologically principled analysis of institutional language use. The indexical basis of sociolinguistic research on language and belief/identity is problematized by attending to epistemological context; the ramifications of this will be explored in future research. I develop a linguistic metric of epistemic belief, offering a means of developing a quantitative social epistemology to complement that field’s highly articulated theoretical work. Applications beyond academia are possible in areas concerned with knowledge management and transfer, such as public health.

The idea that Canada consists of “two solitudes” (MacLennan, 1945), according to which the two dominant (English and French) linguistic groups live in separate worlds with little interaction or communication, has also received attention in sociolinguistic circles (e.g. Heller, 1999). This thesis examines this claim further, by comparing the content of English and French Canadian newspapers. More specifically, the thesis compares how English and French serve different purposes in three coexisting conceptualisations of national identity in Canada: Quebec national identity, English Canadian national identity, and pan-Canadian national identity. In each corresponding national identity discourse, the nation and its language(s) are imagined differently. With a corpus of 7.5 million words in English and 3.5 million words in French, the thesis employs corpus linguistics and discourse analysis tools to test the salience of these ideologies and discourses, as well as to compare and contrast findings across languages. Adopting the theoretical framework of language ideologies (e.g. Woolard, 1998; Milani and Johnson, 2008), it seeks to contextualise languages with regard to discourses of national identity. In other words, the thesis compares and contrasts language ideology findings within the three discourses examined. More specifically, three research questions are addressed: (1) How do the French and English Canadian media discursively represent languages and language issues in the news? (2) How do these representations differ? (3) How do the different representations relate to understandings of national identity in Canada? The findings indicate that French and English serve predominantly different purposes, thus helping to reinforce the image of a Canada comprising “two solitudes”.

Thesis (M.A. (African Languages )) --University of Limpopo, 2008 / This research study is divided into five chapters and they are as follows: Chapter one is the introductory chapter of this study and it covers the background of this study problem, aim of the study, rational of the study, significance of the study, study methodology, and literature review. Chapter two covers the analytic study of discourse at mošate looking at the use of figurative speech patterns such as idioms, proverbial utterances as gestures of speech in control by the domain, purpose, and setting. Chapter three covers politeness and related gestures of speech as used by Northern Sotho language speakers during gatherings at mošate and other discourse conventions. Chapter four covers the study of Sešate as a restricted code as opposed to elaborate code and its appropriateness, discourse theories and the purposefulness of Sešate. Chapter five is the concluding chapter of this study.