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More than thirty years after the term was coined by David Rosewarne (1984), linguists have not come anywhere near to agreeing on a linguistically sound definition of the concept of 'Estuary English' (EE). Nevertheless, the term has come to stay. According to John Wells (2013), "we can now expect to be readily understood if we describe someone's speech as 'estuarial'". In this paper, I will argue that 'Estuary English' is the name for a heuristic conceived of and popularized by linguistic laypeople and therefore defying expert linguistic analysis in terms of Aristotelian categories, even sociolinguistically "enlightened" ones. Following Taylor (2003) and Kristiansen (2008), I will suggest describing the resulting folk-linguistic category in terms of the graded structure/prototype approach. In support of the prototype hypothesis, I will present data from an on-going project in perceptual dialectology. It includes judgements of gradience of membership of 171 speakers from the South East of England, the Midlands and Scotland. Asked to rate the recordings of three young middle-class speakers from three Southeastern towns, these speaker-listeners are remarkably consistent in their responses and sometimes remarkably at odds with the analysis of expert linguists
Analítica
analitica
Rebiun30758137
https://catalogo.rebiun.org/rebiun/record/Rebiun30758137
200221s2017 xx o 000 0 eng d
https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/CJES/article/view/54452
10.5209/CJES.54452
S9M
oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/54452
https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/index/oai CJES
DGCNT
S9M
S9M
OCLCO
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Caught between Aristotle and Miss Marple... - A Proposal for a Perceptual Prototype Approach to "Estuary English"
electronic resource]
Ediciones Complutense
2017-01-10
Ediciones Complutense
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Open access content.
Open access content
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More than thirty years after the term was coined by David Rosewarne (1984), linguists have not come anywhere near to agreeing on a linguistically sound definition of the concept of 'Estuary English' (EE). Nevertheless, the term has come to stay. According to John Wells (2013), "we can now expect to be readily understood if we describe someone's speech as 'estuarial'". In this paper, I will argue that 'Estuary English' is the name for a heuristic conceived of and popularized by linguistic laypeople and therefore defying expert linguistic analysis in terms of Aristotelian categories, even sociolinguistically "enlightened" ones. Following Taylor (2003) and Kristiansen (2008), I will suggest describing the resulting folk-linguistic category in terms of the graded structure/prototype approach. In support of the prototype hypothesis, I will present data from an on-going project in perceptual dialectology. It includes judgements of gradience of membership of 171 speakers from the South East of England, the Midlands and Scotland. Asked to rate the recordings of three young middle-class speakers from three Southeastern towns, these speaker-listeners are remarkably consistent in their responses and sometimes remarkably at odds with the analysis of expert linguists
English
Estuary English; variety; Aristotelian category; prototype category; perception
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Altendorf, Ulrike.
cre
Complutense Journal of English Studies; Vol 24 (2016); 131-154
Complutense Journal of English Studies; Vol 24 (2016); 131-154
Complutense Journal of English Studies; Vol 24 (2016); 131-154
Complutense Journal of English Studies; Vol. 24 (2016); 131-154
2386-3935
https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/CJES/article/view/54452/50279
/*ref*/Altendorf, Ulrike (2003). Estuary English: Levelling at the Interface of RP and South-Eastern British English. Tübingen: Narr
/*ref*/Altendorf, Ulrike (2004). Is English becoming more natural and more democratic? The role of language-internal and language-external factors in accounting for current trends in RP, South-eastern British English and beyond. In Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise, Lena Bergström, Gerd Eklund et al., eds., 85-98
/*ref*/Altendorf, Ulrike (2012). 122. Varieties of English: Estuary English. In Bergs, Alexander Bergs and Laurel Brinton, eds., 1913-1927
/*ref*/Altendorf, Ulrike (2013). Where does the notion of 'variety' start and end? -A proposal for a prototype approach to language variation. In Monika Reif, Justyna A. Robinson and Martin Pütz, eds., 299-326
/*ref*/Ammon, Ulrich, Norbert Dittmar and Klaus J. Mattheier, eds. (1987). An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Vol. 1, Sociolinguistics/ Sociolinguistik. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter
/*ref*/Aristoteles. Metaphyiscs. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Internet Classics Archive. 1994-2009. Web. 7th January 2015.