Search

The purpose of this study is to analyse the frequency of use of the progressive aspect in three varieties of Asian Englishes, namely Hong Kong, India and Singapore, considering British English as a point of departure. The use of the progressive will be researched in comparable corpora (International Corpus of English) considering its distribution in the English verbal paradigm and subject person, both in the written and spoken components. Main results indicate that IndE has the highest frequency of the progressive, and Hong Kong English the lowest, when non-native varieties are compared. In all cases, the progressive is more frequent in the spoken than in the written section, and it preferably occurs in the present simple tense. English varieties present significant differences regarding the distribution of the progressive by tense and subject person. Several factors are discussed as possible reasons for such variation.

The current study examines the use of American English (AmE) pronunciation features among 68 English and English Language/English Education majors at an university in Hong Kong, a former British colony where British English has long been held in prestige. The AmE features examined included rhoticity, flapping, and the lack of a low back vowel distinction in the first syllable of the words such as ‘father’ vs. ‘bother’. The participants’ phonological data were analyzed in reference to their linguistic and educational backgrounds, accent preference(s), and factors impacting their linguistic choices. Findings show that while almost all the participants had some features associated with AmE, the degree to which they used AmE markers was related to their preference for AmE, which may in turn be related to the degree to which they were influenced by the American media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports on a 2015 follow-up to a survey on attitudes towards Hong Kong English which was released to students at a major university in Hong Kong in late September 2014 on the eve of the Umbrella Movement, a largely student-led protest to demand universal suffrage in Hong Kong. While the movement ultimately failed to gain full democracy for Hong Kong, the past year has seen increased political activism among Hong Kong’s youth, and a strengthening of a local identity. In order to investigate whether attitudes towards Hong Kong English have also shifted in the past year, the author re-released the same survey one year after the original study was conducted; this article compares the findings from these two surveys in order to investigate how and why attitudes towards Hong Kong English have shifted and how identity impacts attitudes towards Hong Kong English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing second language acquisition research converges on a picture where learners of English exhibit marked divergence from native speakers in their use of information-packaging constructions, even at advanced stages of acquisition. This study extends the investigation of these constructions to an emerging institutionalised second language variety, Hong Kong English. Based on the Hong Kong and British components of the International Corpus of English, the study examines the formal and functional properties of it-clefts and wh-clefts, revealing regional variation in a number of areas, particularly in the use of that's why constructions. Importantly, the grammar of the contact variety is found to be shaped by the transfer of gradient grammatical rules from the substrate language, and by stratification along stylistic parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines coronal stop deletion (CSD), the deletion of word-final /-t, -d/ in consonant clusters, in three new varieties of Asian English: China English, Hong Kong English, and Viet Nam English. The study seeks to determine to which extent the linguistic and extralinguistic constraints found to govern CSD in other varieties of English also impact CSD in emerging Englishes such as those examined in the current study. A total of 60 tertiary students, 20 from each variety of English, participated in the study. Results indicate that, while new Englishes such as China English, Hong Kong English, and Viet Nam English are affected by constraints such as linguistic environment and morphological conditioning, the proficiency level of speakers impacts CSD rates and the effects of the various constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely held belief that Hong Kong as a community is suffering from an ongoing decline in its standard of English. A very cursory search in the Internet directs readers to many articles lamenting the purportedly poor English standard of Hong Kong people. Appeals for Hong Kongers to improve their English are easy to find. These often originate out of concerns over the unwelcoming possibility of losing out to their close economic competitors such as Singaporeans and their compatriots from China, owing to the importance of English in international trade and communication. However, through reviewing publicly available data, this article reveals that the critique directed at Hong Kong people’s English standard does not always hold up against scrutiny. This article aims to demythologise the issue and points readers’ attention to the possibility of the emergence of a new standard which helps perform important sociolinguistic functions in Hong Kong society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current article builds upon and expands the previous research on attitudes to Hong Kong English (HKE) by speakers of English in Hong Kong via a survey with both closed- and open-ended questions given to 307 tertiary students in Hong Kong. Specifically, the study focuses on attitudes towards the legitimacy of HKE and use of HKE as well as why respondents have these attitudes. The study also probes whether cultural identity (Hong Konger, Hong Kong Chinese, Chinese) as well as self-reported use of HKE impacts attitudes towards HKE. Findings from the current study, and particularly from the open-ended questions, provide important insight into how speakers of English in Hong Kong view and use HKE. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A recent special issue of the Journal of English Linguistics has highlighted the paucity of empirical research into the evolutionary dynamics of Outer Circle varieties of English. This article seeks to narrow this conspicuous research gap by presenting the findings of a corpus-based study of the evolution of the Hong Kong English (HKE) lexicon. The investigation was inspired by Schneider’s innovative theoretical framework, the Dynamic Model, which claims that a uniform process involving a sequence of five phases underlies the emergence of postcolonial Englishes. The study was based on the principle that such phases should emerge from the analysis of a uniform set of diachronic data, which in this case consists of a ninety-one-million-word corpus of Legislative Council proceedings (1858-2012). By tracking the use of HKE words in the corpus, the study is able to identify distinct phases in the evolution of the lexicon and thereby provide evidence of the developmental cycle of HKE as a variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of the first dictionary of Hong Kong English (HKE) marks a major milestone in the legitimisation of HKE as an autonomous variety of English. This article examines the emergence and current prevalence of the vocabulary of HKE using five recently compiled corpora of English in Hong Kong. The diachronic perspective is provided by a 91-million-word corpus of Legislative Council proceedings (1858–2012) and a collection of 1379 letters published in the city’s leading English-language newspapers (1842–2010). The synchronic perspective is derived from a three-million-word corpus of lifestyle-magazine articles (2005–2012), a database containing 2820 letters published in theSouth China Morning Postin 2012 and the well-known Corpus of Global Web-based English. These corpora are used to assess the representativeness of the HKE lexicon compiled by the authors of the dictionary, to identify the principal processes of word-formation and to determine phases in the evolution of the HKE vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Intelligibility, usually defined as the ability of the listener to recognize words and utterances, is an important consideration for international communication in English. Most research studies have focused on international intelligibility, involving speakers from different language backgrounds. However, there have been few studies of intranational intelligibility, and little is known about how well speakers from ‘the same’ language background understand one another. This study investigated the relationship between accent features and intranational intelligibility by providing 91 listeners in Hong Kong with a range of speech samples taken from Hong Kong media broadcasts in English. These samples contained different combinations of accent features, reflecting different kinds of Hong Kong English accents. Listeners were required to produce orthographic transcripts of the speech samples. Transcript analysis produced a list of words that were frequently mistranscribed, and identification of the accent features involved showed that consonantal modifications were often associated with intelligibility problems. The findings suggest that certain L1-related accent features are capable of reducing intranational intelligibility, as are other accent features and speech processes used by both L1 and L2 English speakers. The study has implications for pronunciation pedagogy, and for those involved with intranational and international communication in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Miscelánea: A Journal of English & American Studies is the property of Miscelanea: A Journal of English & American Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Studies on prepositions in Hong Kong English have focused on syntactic issues, most notably on the constituent structures of different prepositions with five transitive verbs (i.e., enter into, discuss about, return back, stress on and list out). As a result, they have neglected the role of meaning in the choice of prepositions that are associated with these verbs. This paper attempts to provide a convincing semantic explanation of the phenomenon from the theoretical framework of Cognitive Grammar. I will argue that the cooccurrence of particular prepositions with these verbs in Hong Kong English is not completely arbitrary, but is in fact semantically motivated to a considerable degree. All corpus uses of these structures evoke some kind of conceptual overlap between the lexical verb and the preposition. More specifically, a certain facet of the verb's conceptual content corresponds in some evident way to an active zone of the associated preposition. The conclusion considers the implications of a highly schematic constructional schema instantiated by these five verbpreposition constructions as a unit entrenched by nonnative speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singaporean English and Hong Kong English have many similarities and differences, which are most obvious in lexicon. The major means of word formation in Singaporean English include loanwords, loan translations, hybrids, innovations and idioms. In contrast, Hong Kong English seldom uses hybrids, and the loanwords are often limited in type. The similarities and differences between Singaporean English and Hong Kong English lexicon not only embody the contact between English and local languages, but also reflect the influences of such factors as sociocultural aspects, language policies, and identity marking, on the use of English in the two regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generative linguistics has long been concerned with the linguistic competence of the 'ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly' (Chomsky 1965: 3). Research in formal-linguistics-based second language acquisition takes as its starting point the second language (L2) speaker's underlying mental representation. Here the factors of interest are influence of the learner's native language and, in generative SLA, the operation of innate linguistic mechanisms (Universal Grammar). Similar to methodology in formal syntax, lxSLA adopts techniques such as grammaticality judgment, comprehension and perception tasks supplementing spontaneously produced oral data. While there may be individual differences in oral production, tasks that tap learners' mental representations reveal commonalities across learners from a given native language background with the same amount/ type of exposure and age of initial L2 exposure. When it comes to phonology, age has long been a central factor with numerous comparative studies showing younger learners far outperforming older learners (see Piske et al. 2001). This paper discusses a case of possible non-acquisition by L2 children who had had considerable exposure to the L2. Children's non-acquisition is only apparent, and this allows us to consider the value of lxSLA methodology on the one hand, and and raises issues about what might be lacking in the current socio-SLA paradigm, on the other. We argue that only when we return to the cooperation that marked its birth in the 1960s will we have a comprehensive picture of SLA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at variation in the expression of perfect meaning in Asian Englishes (Hong Kong, India, Singapore and the Philippines) as represented in the spoken component of the International Corpus of English. Findings confirm the existence of levelling between the present perfect and simple past in these varieties, and that the tendency of the present perfect to lose ground to the preterite is more pronounced in these New Englishes than in British English, especially in the expression of recent past. The occurrence of other variants in the corpus is accounted for in terms of the influence of the respective substrate languages, cognitive constraints characteristic of language-contact situations, pragmatic contextual factors such as the scant use of adverbial support, and, especially, diffusion from the input language, which is an earlier variety of spoken, non-standard English. Relevant intravarietal differences are also discussed and attributed to the different phases of development in which the four varieties currently find themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent decades have witnessed the incorporation of new linguistic trends into lexicography. One of these trends is a usage-based approach, with the first major application of computer-corpus data in the Collins COBUILD English dictionary (1995) and successive adaptation in other LI-dictionaries. Another, concurrent innovation -- inspired by Conceptual Metaphor Theory -- is the provision of conceptual information in monolingual dictionaries of English. So far, however, only the Macmillan English dictionary for advanced learners (1st and 2nd edition) has paid tribute to the fact that understanding culture-specific metaphors and being aware of metaphoric usage are crucial for learning a foreign language. Given that most Of the English as lingua franca interactions take place between L2-speakers of English (see Kachru, 1994), providing conceptual information is not only a desideratum for LI- and learner dictionaries, but especially for (L2-)variety dictionaries of English. In our paper, we follow earlier tentative proposals by Polzenhagen (2007) and Wolf (2012) and present examples from A dictionary of Hong Kong English (Cummings & Wolf, 2011), showing how culturally salient conceptual information can be made explicit and conceptual links between lexical items retrievable. The examples demonstrate that fixed expressions and idioms -- a perennial problem for lexicographers -- are explicable by means of the proposed lexicographic design, too. Our approach is cognitive-sociolinguistic in that the Conceptual Metaphor approach is coupled with the study of regional varieties of English, more specifically Hong Kong English. Our analysis is empirically backed up by corpus-linguistic insights into this L2 variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of attitudes towards the Hong Kong English accent have concluded that Hong Kong has a strongly exonormative orientation, with no sign of endonormative stabilisation (see, for example, Luk, 2010). This paper contends that these findings are partly a result of a varieties-based approach to Hong Kong English, which tends to neglect the considerable variation in feature use that exists between speakers. As a complementary perspective, this paper outlines a features-based approach which acknowledges this variation. The results of an accent survey involving 12 local accents and 52 local listeners are presented, and the findings are discussed with reference to variational patterns in the use of features. The results indicate that the phonological features of accents are important determinants of listener responses, and suggest that Hong Kong English accents may be acceptable for pedagogical purposes if they do not contain certain salient features. An apparent correspondence between the acceptability and intelligibility characteristics of features is noted and tentatively explained using the concept of salience. The implications of the study's findings for issues such as variety status, the distinction between ?variants? and ?errors,? and pedagogy, are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics (De Gruyter) is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: Expressions of gratitude often occur as functional lexical chunks such as thanks and thank you (). In this paper, I will focus on the use of such units and longer formulaic sequences of gratitude such as thanks a lot and thank you very much, relying on data from the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-HK). The results show that Hong Kong speakers of English do not employ the wide variety of thanking strategies that has been investigated in previous literature. Their expressions of gratitude are usually brief, with thanks and thank you being the commonest forms of gratitude expression. These forms are frequently used as closing signals; they often constitute a complete turn. Repetitive gratitude formulae and expressions of appreciation of the interlocutors (both in a single turn and across turns) are exceedingly rare, which suggests that the Chinese may be too reserved to express their gratitude openly and explicitly. Responses to an act of thanking seem to be infrequent in ICE-HK and only a few strategies are represented. The paper also considers the pedagogical implications of the way this function can be acquired in a second/foreign language with the help of the corpus findings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines inter-speaker phonological variation within a mini-corpus of spoken Hong Kong English. The study focuses on consonantal features, and indicates that variation in the use of these features follows patterns that are implicational or hierarchical in nature. The findings are presented in the form of an implicational scale, in which the use of a particular feature by a speaker implies the use of other features by that speaker. The implicational patterns are discussed with reference to the intelligibility characteristics of the features and possible developmental pathways among L2 users. The possible relevance of the findings for areas of study such as the description of new varieties of English is also considered, with particular regard to pedagogical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This monograph provides an overview of the language situation in Hong Kong from a historical perspective. Hong Kong has evolved in the past 167 years from a small fishing port to an international financial centre which forms part of a financial network hailed by Time Magazine as Ny.Lon.Kong (i.e. New York-London-Hong Kong). Hong Kong has gone through changes of sovereignty twice, once in 1842 as a Chinese territory ceded to Britain after the first Opium War, and a second time in 1997 as a British colony returned to China. It is a micro polity with no natural resources except its deep harbour. Economically, Hong Kong has gradually developed from a fishing port when British settlement began in 1841, to an entrepot during 1945-1950s, to a manufacturing hub during 1960-1970s, to an international financial centre since the 1980s. The historical, political and economic development has had a great impact on the language situation in Hong Kong. Its language community started with two separate monolingual groups: one consisting of local Chinese speaking Cantonese and other Chinese dialects, and the other composed of British colonists speaking English. Because of language spread and language shift as a result of political, economic and social changes, the monolingual group of Chinese speakers has become trilingual, speaking Cantonese, English and Putonghua, whereas the monolingual group of English speakers has expanded to include native speakers of such other English varieties as American English, Australian English, Canadian English, Indian English and Singaporean English. In addition, there is a large group of minorities composed of bilingual speakers of English and a south Asian language. Although the development of language use is a natural process, it can be influenced by the government's language policy and planning. In 1997 there was a major political change, and Hong Kong, a capitalist city that practised a free economy for 155 years, was handed back to a socialist regime in China and now functions as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC) under the 'One Country Two Systems' policy. Hong Kong's prospects for a changing language situation depend on its political and economic development as well as PRC's policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]