26.404, Review: Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Rosen (2014)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-404. Wed Jan 21 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.404, Review: Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Rosen (2014)

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Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 15:01:25
From: Jakob Leimgruber [jakob.leimgruber at googlemail.com]
Subject: Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2114.html

AUTHOR: Anna  Rosen
TITLE: Grammatical Variation and Change in Jersey English
SERIES TITLE: Varieties of English Around the World G48
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Jakob R. E. Leimgruber, Universität Freiburg

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Rosen's PhD dissertation, published here as a monograph in Benjamin's highly
regarded Varieties around the World (VEAW) series, attempts a comprehensive
grammatical description of the English spoken on the Channel Island of Jersey.
Situated within a variationist sociolinguistic framework, with considerable
input from contact linguistics, the book presents and analyses data collected
during fieldwork in the late 2000s. While continuously referring to previous
research on Channel Islands English, it positions itself as 'the first
comprehensive description of […] the variety of English spoken on Jersey', as
per the cover blurb.

The book boasts nine chapters, two appendices (the written questionnaire and
an excerpt from a transcript) and an index. Two maps in Chapters 1 and 3 give
useful geographic context. Several well-drawn figures illustrate points of
interest in the data. Chapter 1 'Introduction' situates this Jersey study in a
line of other studies on insular varieties, beginning with Martha's Vineyard
(Labov 1963). It briefly presents the Channel Islands' geopolitical context,
and gives a first short overview of the research done on the English and
French varieties spoken there. It also identifies the four main research
questions the book will address. Chapter 2 'Theoretical foundations' gives a
rich literature review of previous research on 'linguistic variation and
change' (section 2.1), 'morphological and syntactic variation' (2.2),
'linguistic change' (2.3), 'linguistic contact' (2.4), and 'identity and
attitudes' (2.5). Chapter 3 'Jersey English in context' details at greater
length the existing literature on Jersey English, including non-linguistic
sources such as historical and cultural publications. Information about the
island's demography, history, and sociolinguistics is given. Chapter 4
'Methods and data' explains in detail the study's research design and data
collection and analysis. We learn how the 40 informants were selected
(friend-of-a-friend network method, restricted to those born and bred in
Jersey, and corrected for age group, mono-/bilingualism, and gender), what the
data collection tools were (sociolinguistic interviews, written
questionnaires, and archival oral history recordings, among others), what the
resulting corpora were (the Jersey Interview Corpus with 267,845 tokens and
the Jersey Archive Corpus with 39,790 tokens), and which statistical analyses
were used on  the data.

In Chapter 5 'Discourse marker EH' Rosen begins presenting data, devoting the
entire chapter to a detailed description of the discourse particle EH. Its
syntactic and pragmatic properties are explained, before turning to its
distribution in the corpus. The particle's putative origin in Norman French is
explored, as is its behaviour as compared to the homophonous particle EH found
in Guernsey and British English. A final section considers the particle's high
level of salience and its status as an identity marker.

Chapter 6 'Features of the Jersey English verb phrase' is divided into three
sections. The first deals with the so-called FAP (First verb + And + Plain
infinitive) construction, as in 'I went and buy some pansy plants' (p. 104),
reviewing the literature, presenting its occurrence in the corpus, and
investigating its origin. The second considers agreement in existential
THERE-constructions (as in the section title 'There's a lot of Jersey cows'),
again speculating a Norman French origin. The third section lists 'further
observations on the verb phrase', i.e. tense and aspect (e.g. present tense
for future reference, WOULD in IF-clauses), agreement (e.g. WAS/WERE
generalisation), and verb morphology (e.g. levelling of past tense and past
participle).

The 16 sections of Chapter 7 'Other grammatical features: An overview'  are
followed by a comparison of Guernsey and Jersey English morphosyntax. They
cover relative clauses, emphatic markers (e.g. object personal pronouns,
pronominal adposition, demonstrative THEM, assertive YET, emphatic LÀ, BUT
YES), prepositional and article usage, negation, absence in 'S in local
genitive, male/female third person pronouns for inanimates, AFTER as a time
adverbial, IF-deletion in conditional clauses, analytic/synthetic
comparatives, AS WHAT/THAN WHAT in comparative sentences, absence of plural
marking, question formation, adverbs and adjectives having the same form,
pronominal usage, and LIKE as a focussing device, a discourse marker, and a
quotative. All of these are illustrated with ample examples from the corpus.

Chapter 8 'Standardisation, levelling and identity in Jersey: A bird's eye
perspective' is a discussion of the extent to which identity factors have been
and will be relevant in shaping the variety. It begins with a theoretical
discussion of the concepts of standardisation, levelling, and identity, before
considering linguistic identity and language attitudes on Jersey in more
detail. It concludes with a discussion of what implications identity might
have for the future of the features described for the variety.

The book concludes with Chapter 9 'Conclusion', in which the main findings are
summarised and the four research questions from Chapter 1 are answered one by
one. A short reflection on the methodology and the questionnaire used follows,
and an outlook section on desired future research ends the book.

EVALUATION

Eminently readable, this book is a very valuable addition to the scant
research on Channel Islands English. The writing style is engaging and to the
point, the structure is easy to follow and very sensible, and the level of
data analysis is very high. The reader is left in no doubt about the
thoroughness of the data collection procedure. The rich theoretical discussion
and the extensive review of the literature similarly demonstrate the author's
firm grasp not only of the sociolinguistic situation on the island, but also
of the larger research context surrounding such thorny issues as the relevance
of identity factors to linguistic change, to name but one.

Criticism can only really be levelled at some minor points. Whereas the
misspelling of St. Ouen as 'St. Quen' on the map on p. 35 and the
non-italicised 'à' on p. 162 are mere editing flaws, the reader unfamiliar
with the islands (of which there may be quite a few) is left wanting for more
background information on their status: this includes very basic facts about
the islands' political status with regard, for instance, to their
non-membership in both the United Kingdom and the European Union, but also
further historical information on how they came to be under British rule, yet
without fully joining the nation-state. The discussion of this on pp. 1 and
33ff is a little sketchy. The episode of the German occupation (p. 38), and
its linguistic (non-)consequences, could also have been given more depth.
Personally, I would also have liked an explanation for the official term
'Bailiwick'.

Apart from these rather superficial comments, one can question other choices,
more directly concerned with the objective of the book. A footnote on p. 111
mentions previous research excluding sequences containing the copula from the
definition of FAPs , only to say that the current study includes them: a short
justification for this choice would have been desirable. Another point is
that, apart from a few mentions on pp. 58 and 198 and in the conclusion,
phonology is conspicuously absent from the entire study. Of course, the main
focus is on grammar (specifically morphology and syntax), but a brief section
on the main features of the Jersey accent would have made the volume truly
'comprehensive', whereas now, the reader is left wondering what Jerseys
actually sound like. A final point is that in the description of grammatical
features, Rosen (too?) often concedes that these features occur in Jersey
English 'as in many other English varieties' (p. 174), see pp. 148-149, 152,
154, 156, 158, 162-164, 167-168, and 170ff. This begs the question of the
extent to which the variety is distinct from others (a question addressed in
terms of frequencies and some unique features), and, more interestingly,
whether the theoretical unit 'variety' is suitable for the description of a
form of English that is spoken, after all, on a less than isolated island that
(as mentioned throughout the book) attracts substantial immigration from
various parts of the British Isles, Europe, and beyond.

That being said, the author does a fine job of reviewing the existing
literature on Channel Islands English and on the theoretical premises the
study is built on. Constant references to previous research (e.g. on EH in
Canadian English, and, throughout the book, on Quebec English, another variety
in contact with French) solidly anchor the book in the discipline, and thus
contribute to a better understanding of not just Jersey English, but of
general principles of variation and change.

In short, this is an excellent contribution to research in the field, a fine
book that will definitely make its mark in the small body of literature on
Channel Islands English. Scholars and students interested in the variety
spoken on Jersey will be as interested in the book as researchers concerned
with more general theoretical concerns of language contact, dialectology, and
variationist sociolinguistics. As a published PhD dissertation, this monograph
could also serve as inspiration to doctoral students faced with designing and
structuring a thesis.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jakob R. E. Leimgruber is a Marie Curie Fellow at the English Department,
University of Freiburg, Germany. His research interests include the use of
native English in global settings, English language policy in Quebec, and
Singapore English.








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