Workshop 3 - New approaches to variation in present-day Scottish Englishes

 

Convenors

Ulrike Gut (University of Münster), Ole Schützler (University of Bamberg) & Jennifer Smith (University of Glasgow)

 

Workshop description

Linguistic interest in Scottish Englishes (ScEs) – which encompass the (socio-)linguistic
continuum between the poles of Scottish Standard English (SSE) and Scots (McArthur 1979)
– is wide and varied. Research has been particularly strong in the areas of traditional
dialectology (e.g. Murray 1873; Mather & Speitel 1975–1986), historical linguistics (e.g.
Macafee & Macleod, eds. 1987; Jones, ed. 1997), and modern (urban) dialectology and
sociolinguistics (e.g. Stuart-Smith, Timmins & Tweedie 2007; Smith, Durham & Richards
2013; Stuart-Smith, Lawson & Scobbie 2014; Schützler 2015).

More recently, corpus-linguistic approaches have gained ground (Anderson, ed. 2013;Corbett & Stuart-Smith 2012; Schützler, Gut & Fuchs 2017). The increasing number of corpus-based studies results in both greater knowledge of the specific morphosyntactic, lexical and phonological/phonetic patterns of language use in ScEs, including rare linguistic phenomena, and also an increase in comparability with research on other varieties of English worldwide. Crucially, methodological innovations have arisen alongside these corpus-based approaches, providing tools for a rigorous examination of ScEs across time and space.

This workshop provides a platform for showcasing these new methodologies in investigating ScEs at both the local and more global level, and what they can reveal about ScEs in Scotland and in the context of World Englishes more generally. We thus invite papers dealing with any variety of present-day Scottish Englishes, at all linguistic levels. We particularly welcome papers which

  1. take corpus-based, questionnaire-based, or experimental approaches
  2. apply methodological triangulation,
  3. take a rigorously quantitative approach,
  4. make use of new resources and/or software, or
  5. go beyond the intra-varietal Scots-English continuum and inspect the role of ScEs in the framework of World Englishes.

In the spirit of the BICLCE conferences, papers should have a present-day, synchronic focus, which does not preclude historical contextualization, of course.

References

Anderson, Wendy (ed.). 2013. Language in Scotland. Corpus-based studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Corbett, John & Jane Stuart-Smith. 2012. Standard English in Scotland. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Standards of English: Codified standards around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 72–95.
Jones, Charles (ed.). 1997. The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Macafee, Caroline & Iseabail Macleod (eds.). 1987. The Nuttis Schell. Essays on the Scots Language presented to A. J. Aitken. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Mather, James Y. & Hans-Henning Speitel. 1975–1986. The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland. Scots Section. 3 vols. London: Croom Helm. [with maps by George W. Leslie]
McArthur, Tom. 1979. The status of English in and furth of Scotland. In: Adam J. Aitken & Tom McArthur (eds.), Languages of Scotland. Edinburgh: Chambers. 50–67.
Murray, James A. H. 1873. The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland. London: Asher.
Schützler, Ole, Ulrike Gut & Robert Fuchs. 2017. New perspectives on Scottish Standard English: Introducing the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English. In: Joan C. Beal & Sylvie Hancil (eds.), Perspectives on northern Englishes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [TiEL 96]. 273–302.
Schützler, Ole. 2015. A Sociophonetic Approach to Scottish Standard English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham & Hazel Richards. 2013. The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. Linguistics 51(2): 258–324.
Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins & Fiona Tweedie. 2007. ‘Talkin’ Jockney’? Variation and change in Glaswegian accent. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(2): 221–260.
Stuart-Smith, Jane, Eleanor Lawson & James M. Scobbie. 2014. Derhoticisation in Scottish English. A sociophonetic journey. In: Chiara Celata & Silvia Calamai (eds.), Advances in sociophonetics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 59–96.

 

Abstract submission

Please send your abstract (500 words including references) to ole.schuetzler(at)uni-bamberg.de before 31/01/2019.