Abstract
The final issue of 2013 rounds out a year in which we have been able to feature a wide range of cutting-edge scholarship of various methodological and theoretical stripes within English linguistics. It is very fitting that the contributions in the journal issue at hand should be a reflection of the richness of approaches and methodological considerations highlighted throughout the year.
Revisiting the concept of “linguistic insecurity” (or people’s sense that the language variety they use is inferior or incorrect), Dennis Preston meticulously reviews the variable pronunciation of a number of lexical items (e.g., February, arctic, often, and diapers) and the attitude toward that variation among university students in Michigan. The study, which presents Michigan data from 2005, 2006, and 2007 and comparative results from previous research in New York and Winnipeg, Canada, reveals a complex picture of variation. Factors such as the individual lexical features, type of variation in pronunciation, and the presence or absence of strong local community norms for language use are found to play significant roles in the informants’ evaluation of alternative pronunciations and their confidence in the “correctness” of a particular pronunciation. On the basis of the findings, Preston suggests a reformulation of the concept of linguistic insecurity, proposing that “linguistic insecurity arises when one feels that they are not able to perform the linguistic job at hand.”
Rudy Loock and Kathleen Michele O’Connor explore the nature of verbless appositives (defined in the study as the juxtaposition of two entities of which the first is a noun phrase [U1] and the second a noun phrase, prepositional phrase, or adjective phrase [U2]). Their focus is on what type of information is provided by U2 in such appositional relationships. To investigate the informational load or discoursal function of U2s, they borrow a taxonomy from previous work on relative clauses, and reveal substantial overlap between the two structures. Both relative clauses and appositional structures can be used to add a subjective evaluation, and they may “optimize the relevance” of U1 or the antecedent by providing information crucial to language users’ understanding of its meaning or reference. However, the appositional structures also show patterns that are distinct from those of relative clauses, especially in performing a “descriptive filler” function where the U2 supplies descriptive detail that is not strictly required but expected in accordance with conventions within, for instance, fiction or newspaper text.
In this year’s interview with a leading scholar, Bethany Gray engages in an enlightening discussion with Douglas Biber. In the course of their conversation, Biber reflects on the beginnings of his interest in multidimensional analysis and in corpus-based research, and he proposes productive avenues to advance scholarship in English linguistics in the future and to hone our methodological approaches to corpus data.