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Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to spoken usage, the chapter explores: the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and complications arising when colloquialisation is extended beyond its original domain of application, standard written English of the ENL type. There are two major findings. Colloquialisation works less well in the study of ESL varieties than ENL ones. In addition, recent real-time analyses of change in spoken English suggest that the supposedly homogeneous baseline style of informal conversational English is more internally variable than is assumed in current work on colloquialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

But there is ambition and an innovative thrust at a higher level, because the presentation of the corpus findings is complemented with much theoretical discussion that addresses some of the fundamental theoretical issues in historical linguistics and contains deep and original methodological reflections on the role of corpus data in modelling grammatical change. At this point, readers with less respect for the philological tradition in corpus linguistics might become somewhat impatient and point out that problems with such outliers would not have arisen in a large corpus. As regards the methodology, Smitterberg defines the conditions in which corpus data can be used to support an idiolect-based analysis of language change. [Extracted from the article]

The therapeutic potential of minigastrin (MG) analogs for the treatment of cholecystokinin-2 receptor (CCK2R)-expressing cancers is limited by poor in vivo stability or unfavorable accumulation in non-target tissues. Increased stability against metabolic degradation was achieved by modifying the C-terminal receptor-specific region. This modification led to significantly improved tumor targeting properties. In this study, further N-terminal peptide modifications were investigated. Two novel MG analogs were designed starting from the amino acid sequence of DOTA-MGS5 (DOTA-DGlu-Ala-Tyr-Gly-Trp-(N-Me)Nle-Asp-1Nal-NH2). Introduction of a penta-DGlu moiety and replacement of the four N-terminal amino acids by a non-charged hydrophilic linker was investigated. Retained receptor binding was confirmed using two CCK2R-expressing cell lines. The effect on metabolic degradation of the new 177Lu-labeled peptides was studied in human serum in vitro, as well as in BALB/c mice in vivo. The tumor targeting properties of the radiolabeled peptides were assessed using BALB/c nude mice bearing receptor-positive and receptor-negative tumor xenografts. Both novel MG analogs were found to have strong receptor binding, enhanced stability, and high tumor uptake. Replacement of the four N-terminal amino acids by a non-charged hydrophilic linker lowered the absorption in the dose-limiting organs, whereas introduction of the penta-DGlu moiety increased uptake in renal tissue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of Nigerian English in lingua-franca interaction in Germany, focussing on the perspective of the German listener. Fifty-eight German-speaking respondents were asked to transcribe short extracts from English interviews recorded with Nigerian immigrants and sojourners resident in Germany. In addition to testing comprehension, respondents were requested to rate samples along parameters designed to measure speaker likability and competence. The study's two major findings are that, in spite of the absence of contextual clues, respondents perform better than expected in the comprehension task, but that the single greatest obstacle to comprehension is the presence of German-language material in the stimulus. As realistic English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interaction in Germany necessarily involves a level of English-German mixing, the experiment thus points to a major practical problem in ELF interaction. The study also yields provisional findings on gender (with male voices being understood better than female ones) and interactions between assumptions about speakers and transcription performance that should be revisited in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]