Cover not available

In:New Approaches to English Linguistics: Building bridges
Edited by Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja and Sarah Chevalier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 177] 2016
► pp. 13–33

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Accommodation, dialect contact and grammatical variation

Verbs of obligation in the Anglophone community in Japan

 | University of Kitakyushu
 | University of Bern
Published online: 1 November 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.177.02hir
The present study investigates dialect contact and linguistic accommodation in the use of verbs expressing obligation (such as MUST, HAVE GOT TO, HAVE TO and GOT TO) among native speakers of English resident in Japan, using a social network approach. Approximately 500 tokens were extracted from conversations between 39 native speakers of English from England, the US and New Zealand, recorded in single-nationality dyads, both immediately upon arrival in Japan and after a period of one year. Statistical analysis revealed that the informants from England actually diverged from the forms typically used by the Americans. The results, however, demonstrate the importance of social network strength in accounting for the consequences of dialect contact and short to medium-term linguistic accommodation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Accommodation and contact
  • 2.Aims of the study
  • 3.The Anglophone community in Japan
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Informants and data
    • 4.2Tokens and analysis
    • 4.3Social networks
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Overall distribution of variants of verbs of obligation
    • 5.2Linguistic constraint analysis: Types of obligation
    • 5.3Impact of the speaker’s social networks on variation
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
References (26)
References
Bortoni-Ricardo, Stella Maris. 1985. The Urbanization of Rural Dialect Speakers. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Britain, David. In press. Dialect contact and new dialect formation. In Handbook of Dialectology, John Nerbonne, Dominic Watt & Charles Boberg (eds). Oxford: Wiley.
Chambers, Jack K. 1992. Dialect acquisition. Language 68: 673–705. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coates, Jennifer. 1983. The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Council of Local Authorities for International Relations [CLAIR]. 2014. JET Programme. <[URL]> (24 February 2015).
Coupland, Nikolas. 1984. Accommodation at work: Some phonological data and their implications. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 46: 49–70.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hirano, Keiko. 2013. Dialect Contact and Social Networks: Language Change in an Anglophone Community in Japan. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Honna, Nobuyuki. 2009. East Asian Englishes. In The Handbook of World Englishes, Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru & Cecil L. Nelson (eds), 114–129. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krug, Manfred. 2000. Emerging English Modals: A Corpus-based Study of Grammaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam. 1998. Accommodating your data: The use and abuse of accommodation theory in sociolinguistics. Language and Communication 18 (3): 205–225. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Milroy, James & Milroy, Lesley. 1985. Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21: 339–384. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Milroy, Lesley. 1980. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Milroy, Lesley & Llamas, Carmen. 2013. Social networks. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd edn, Jack K. Chambers & Natalie Schilling (eds), 409–427. Oxford: Wiley. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
National Statistics Center. 2015. 14 nen 12 gatsu kokuseki chiiki betsu zairyu shikaku (zairyu mokuteki) betsu zairyu gaikokujin (Foreign residents by nationality, area and qualification (purpose of stay) in December 2014). Portal Site of Official Statistics of Japan. <[URL]> (10 August 2015).
Okuno, Hisashi. 2007. Nihon no Gengo Seisaku to Eigo Kyoiku. ‘Eigo ga Tsukaeru Nihonjin’ ha Ikusei Sarerunoka? (Japan’s Language Policy and English Education. Can Japanese People be Trained to Use English?). Tokyo: Sanyusha.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sankoff, Gillian. 2005. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies in sociolinguistics. In Sociolinguistics: International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Vol. 2(2), Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier & Peter Trudgill (eds), 1003–1013. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar. 2007. Postcolonial English. Varieties Around the World. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas. 2003. Changes in the modals and semi-modals of strong obligation and epistemic necessity in recent British English. In Modality in Contemporary English, Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug & Frank Palmer (eds), 241–266. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali. 2004. Have to, gotta, must: Grammaticalisation, variation and specialization in English deontic modality. In Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 13], Hans Lindquist & Christian Mair (eds), 33–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. Roots of English. Exploring the History of Dialects. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali & D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2007. The modals of obligation/necessity in Canadian perspective. English World-Wide 28(1): 47–87. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Kaufman, Terrence. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. New Dialect Formation. The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: EUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue