26.29, Review: Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Zipp (2014)

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Subject: 26.29, Review: Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Zipp (2014)

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Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 21:05:29
From: Gabriela Brozba [brozba.anydora at gmail.com]
Subject: Educated Fiji English

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-1095.html

AUTHOR: Lena  Zipp
TITLE: Educated Fiji English
SUBTITLE: Lexico-grammar and variety status
SERIES TITLE: Varieties of English Around the World   G47
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Gabriela Anidora Brozba, University of Bucharest

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The book at issue is part of the Varieties of English around the World series
published by John Benjamins. It is the 47th volume in a monograph series whose
aim is to conduct sociolinguistic research so as to document varieties of
English around the world, both native and non-native. The book is made up of
seven chapters (an introduction, a background setting description,
methodological considerations, three main chapters, and conclusions), preceded
by a list of abbreviations, a list of tables, and a list of figures, plus a
round of acknowledgements; the text is followed by the bibliography,
appendices and an index.

In Chapter 1, “Introduction” (pp. 1-3), the author presents the aims and the
scope of the book at issue, as well as a brief outline of the chapters to
follow.

The second chapter, “Fiji: History and sociolinguistic setting” (pp. 5-19),
describes, as the title indicates, the historical, social and political
background of the country, without which the sociolinguistic realities of this
multilingual setting could not be fully understood. With a relatively small
land area, scattered over some 320 islands, Fiji is nonetheless the fourth
Oceanic state and the most influential one in the South Pacific economically
and politically. Additionally, its demographic profile is what makes it
interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view: its population is made up of
a majority of Fijian ethnos (57%) but a significant group is of Indian descent
(38%), which results in a unique socio-demographic situation in the Pacific.
The brief outline of the troubled colonial and postcolonial political and
inter-ethnic history of the country is the key to understanding why “the
Indo-Fijian community remains in a position of relative social and linguistic
volatility” (p. 19). In as much as the situation and the status of English in
Fiji is concerned, the last section of this chapter skims through the previous
studies conducted on this variety so as to provide a much needed clarification
on the research carried out so far and a starting point for the present
endeavor. 

Chapter 3, “Theory, methodology and data” (pp. 21-54), reviews the theoretical
framework within which this study is placed, namely Schneider’s 2007 dynamic
model (initially proposed in a 2003 article, and revised in his 2011 book) for
the emergence and development of New Englishes, and the sociolinguistic
situation of Fiji English in terms of the developmental cycle described by it,
the methodological aspects related to data collection and corpus design, as
well as some challenges raised by the difficult task of compiling data in an
ESL setting. Finally, some statistics-related clarifications are provided in
the last section of the chapter so as to make available information on which
type of statistical significance and dispersion tests are employed throughout
the analyses. 

Chapter 4, “Word level: Prepositions” (pp. 55-90), is an analysis of
preposition frequencies on the word level, which also includes a discussion of
some semantic effects that these frequency counts result in. In light of
Schneider’s developmental model, the quantitative data regarding the
prepositional system in Fiji English (henceforth FijiE) are discussed as
potential exonormative or endonormative tendencies in Subsection 4.2.3 (pp.
70-72): the two sister sub-varieties (Fijian and Indo-Fijian) display the
smallest number of differences (10 out of 35), thus supporting at this stage
in the development of this non-native variety the claim in favor of the
emergence and development of an endogenous norm system. Additionally,
Indo-Fijian comes quite close to Indian English, suggesting a potential
substrate influence or an external norm epicenter, while both Fijian varieties
display the greatest number of dissimilarities when compared to New Zealand
English (thus eliminating it as a probable exonormative prestige variety).
Section 4.3 includes two qualitative analyses of “through” and “within” which
reveal significant differences between the sister varieties in terms of
semantic effects, whereas the last section of this chapter combines the
qualitative approach with the quantitative one in order to assess some cases
of stylistic variation, i.e. “towards” vs. “toward” (p. 84), “until” vs.
“till” (pp. 84-85), “despite” vs. “in spite of” (pp. 85-86), “under” vs.
“underneath” (p. 86), “below” vs. “beneath” (p. 87), and “outside” vs.
“outside of”  (p. 87). The analysis in the last section yields a slightly
different picture than the one in the preceding section: the two Fijian
sub-varieties are not quite similar to each other, no clear structural
resemblance was found between Indo-Fijian English and Indian English, and
Fijian English came quite close to New Zealand English, thus allowing the
author not to discard it as an alternative regional norm-providing epicenter.

The fifth chapter, “Phrase level: Verb-particle combinations” (pp. 91-145),
looks into the verb-particle combinations for five of the most frequent
prepositions in verb phrases in order to identify potential “teddy bear
effects” (p. 101), i.e. possible statistically significant tendencies to
overuse any of the investigated combinations, and it offers a detailed
qualitative analysis of the five top frequent particles, namely “up” (section
5.3.1, pp. 105-112), “out” (section 5.3.3, pp. 113-118), “down” (section
5.3.5, pp. 120-121), “off” (section 5.3.6, pp. 121-123) and “away” (section
5.3.7, pp. 123-127). The following two sections, 5.3.8 (pp. 127-135) and 5.3.9
(pp. 135-139), review the combinations with “into” and “about”, which prove to
be quite productive, given their “high semantic loads” (p. 127). The overall
picture shows that in terms of productivity and creative uses of unrecorded
verb-particle combination the younger second language varieties are somewhere
in-between the younger first language variety (New Zealand English) and the
older second language variety (Indian English), which are quite consistent,
while British English is at the other end of the continuum, with the lowest
count of such instances. Most of the tokens of novel constructions reflect
cases of analogous structural formations to other existing, semantically
related verbs or instances of semantic redundancies.

The last substantial, core chapter, “Pattern level: Prepositions and -ing
clauses” (pp. 149-185), focuses on colligations of propositions and -ing
participle clauses at the pattern level. After conceptually delimiting 
pattern grammar, and separating verbal from adjectival -ing forms by means of
syntactic and semantic criteria, the structural patterns for four prepositions
are investigated: “in”, ”by”, ”at” and ”from”. While the latter two display no
statistically significant differences, the former reveal some idiosyncratic
distribution patterns, with “by –ing” bringing Indo-Fijian close to Indian
English and “in –ing” bringing it close British English and New Zealand
English. These results reflect a mixed bag of exonormative influences for this
sub-variety in its ongoing process of structural nativization, while choosing
from the wide pool of features (Mufwene 2001). The second and the third
sections of this chapter constitute in-depth qualitative and quantitative
analyses of the distribution patterns in complement and adjunct clauses. The
investigation of derivationally related words across speech classes (verbs,
nouns, adjectives) proved to be a worthwhile endeavor, as “-ing
complementation was discovered to be one of the elements that contributed to
the semantics of the respective patterns” (p. 185). The frequency analysis of
non-finite adverbial -ing clauses brings forth the unique behavior of Fijian
English which seems to be having a “structural teddy bear” (p. 185), i.e. an
overuse of the “in -ing” pattern, for which no clear or systematic underlying
semantic grounds could be uncovered. 

The last part, “Conclusions” (pp. 187-193), is subdivided into two parts: in
the first section the author draws together some of the threads running
through the previous chapters and connects them to the theoretical framework
and the research hypotheses put forth in the third chapter, while the second
section discusses the limitations of this study and some potential areas /
points which might prove fertile for further research.

The “Appendices” (pp. 219-225) include the first search query list of
prepositions and the adjusted set of prepositional variables, respectively. 

EVALUATION

The book is an invaluable addition to the field of New Englishes, and Pacific
Englishes in particular, as it offers a corpus-driven and corpus-based
in-depth analysis of the lexico-grammatical patterns involving prepositions in
the written register of an under-researched variety. 

This study is a pioneering and successful attempt to fill an empty space in
the existing literature on New Englishes, not only because of its novelty and
originality but also because of the strenuous efforts of its author to enrich
existing corpora (she is by part of the team which has compiled the Fiji
component of the International Corpus of English). Such efforts are even more
laudable given the challenges raised by such a task in ESL countries. 

The fact that the author looks only into one aspect of FijiE, i.e. patterns
involving prepositions, does not minimize the usefulness of the book; and it
sets out an invitation for future similar endeavors. It is worth mentioning
that the analyses (both quantitative and qualitative) yield some interesting
and unexpected results, which come to support the claim that FijiE should be
treated as a variety in its own right. Additionally, some of the results
confirm and reinforce the role prepositions as semantic encoders which further
specify and make the meaning of verbs more transparent, as shown by the cases
of “completive up” (section 5.3.1), “continuous away” (section 5.3.7) or
“into-causative” (section 5.3.8).

Also, lines of caution appear multiple times throughout the book, which can be
very well illustrated by the discussion on stylistic variation in Chapter 5:
when the Indo-Fijian and Indian second language varieties overshoot for
“despite” but underuse “in spite of”, the author elegantly attempts to explain
this effect by combining a typological explanation with a sociolinguistic one:
“We might thus be witnessing either substrate influence or endonormative
orientation in Indian English, an established second language variety. On the
other hand, the reluctance of speakers of Fiji Hindi to use multi-word
prepositions might be due to hypercorrection, as sociolinguistically upwardly
mobile Indo-Fijians might be aware of these parallels and try to avoid them” 
(p. 86).

Equally laudable is the author’s eagerness to “substantiate hunches about
semantic extensions and frequencies of minority usage patterns” (p.145) by
using a rather recent type of field / data investigation: using the Internet
as a “large and dirty” corpus, additionally to the “small and tidy” ICE
corpora (e.g. performing Google searches on the main country domains, i.e.
.fj, .in, .nz, .au, .uk). The web-based hits show that in the cases of
“dispose off” (rather than “dispose of”), “contribute into” (not “to”) and
“arrive into” (not “in”), the formations which might seem at first glance
novel and variety-specific are actually relatively common and geographically
widespread.

The book is written in a beautiful academic British English; it is carefully
edited and almost typo-free, with the exception of an extra “as” (“as as”, p.
29, first paragraph) and one extra definite article (“in the light of”, p.
170, second paragraph). Personally, I have two other editorial minor issues to
mention. First of all, I do not understand nor see any underlying editorial
explanation for why the author always starts with capitals after columns
(proper names do not count, of course). Secondly, I fail to comprehend why
throughout Chapter 5 examples are quoted under so-called tables, when they do
not have either the visual appearance or the layout of a table as such.
Moreover, the chapter does include a series of actual tables (quite a
considerable number, i.e. 17 out of 47: 1, 2, 4, 6, 11, 13, 17, 21, 24, 26,
31, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41, 47), which might be a little confusing for the reader.
However, these are truly minor issues that one cannot even consider faults but
rather a matter of preference and they were mentioned here only as a personal
observation on something that breaks to a certain extent the overall balanced
and unitary presentation of the volume. In conclusion, Lena Zipp’s book
constitutes an original and valuable contribution to the field of non-native
Englishes in general, and Pacific Englishes in particular. 

REFERENCES

Mufwene, S. S. (2001) The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Schneider, E. W. (2003) The dynamics of New Englishes: From identity
construction to dialect birth. Language 79 (1): 233-281. 

Schneider, E. W. (2007) Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schneider, E. W. (2011) English around the World: An Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Gabriela Brozbă is a Junior Lecturer in phonetics and phonology, as well as
pragmatics at University of Bucharest with a PhD degree in Philology, namely
Applied English Linguistics. Her main research interests include phonetics and
phonology, non-native Englishes, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and dialectal
variation, among others. She has attended various national and international
conferences, colloquia, workshops and summer schools. She is the author of two
published books: Between Reality and Myth: A Corpus-based Analysis of the
Stereotypic Image of Some Romanian Ethnic Minorities (2010), and The Phonology
of New Englishes (2012).



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