Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose formal experiments and revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of literary forms. The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists, comparative studies and interdisciplinary projects.

This volume brings together current research by international scholars on the varieties of English spoken in Ireland. The papers apply contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches and frameworks to a range of topics. A number of papers explore the distribution of linguistic features in Irish English, including the evolution of linguistic structures in Irish English and linguistic change in progress, employing broadly quantitative sociolinguistic approaches. Pragmatic features of Irish English are explored through corpus linguistics-based analysis. The construction of linguistic corpora using written and recorded material form the focus of other papers, extending and analyzing the growing range of corpus material available to researchers of varieties of English, including diaspora varieties. Issues of language and identity in contemporary Ireland are explored in several contributions using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The volume will be of interest to linguists generally, and to scholars with an interest in varieties of English.

Variationist work in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) began in the mid 1970s and steadily progressed during the 1980s. Much of it was reviewed along with newer approaches in Bayley and Preston 1996 (B&P), heavily devoted to VARBRUL analyses that exposed the variability in developing interlanguages and placed variationist work within the canon of SLA. This new volume features three developing trends. First, it widens the scope of L1s of learners (from 6 in B&P to 8) and L2 targets (2 in B&P to 7) and in each case has brought more careful demographic and variable considerations to bear, including heritage languages and study abroad. Second, it modernizes statistics by moving from VARBRUL to the more widely used log-odds probabilities that allow more detailed consideration of variables and their influences. Finally, it deepens consideration of variable sociolinguistic meaning in learner behaviors, a dominating feature of 3rd Wave variationist work.

Provides an overview of present trends in the study of adult additive multilingualism from formal, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, adding new insights into adult multilingual epistemology. This book includes critical reviews of L3/Ln morphosyntax, phonology, and the lexicon.

This book provides a linguistic and cultural profile of the Polish diasporic communities in three different European countries: Ireland, France and Austria. The eight contributing chapters present original research on the acquisition and use of the languages of the respective host communities and also explore related elements of cultural acquisition. A number of aspects of second language acquisition are considered, notably the acquisition of phonology, lexicon and discourse, as well as aspects of sociolinguistic competence. In addition, varying approaches and research methods are reported on, each of which was chosen in consideration of the particular research issue addressed and the particular circumstances under which the research was carried out. These range from psycholinguistic approaches to second language acquisition to variationist approaches, and include both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

Before the economic boom of the 1990s, Ireland was known as a nation of emigrants. The past fifteen years, however, have seen the transformation of Ireland from a country of net emigration to one of net immigration, on a scale and at a pace unprecedented in comparative context. As a result, Irish society has become more diverse in terms of nationality, language, ethnicity and religious affiliation; and these changes are now clearly reflected in the composition of both primary and secondary schools, presenting these with challenges as well as opportunities. Despite the increased number of ethnically-diverse immigrant children and young people in the Ireland, currently there is a paucity of information about aspects of their lives in Ireland. This book is aimed at contributing to this gap in knowledge. This edited collection will be of interest to researchers in the fields of migration studies, childhood studies, education studies, human geography, sociology, applied social studies, social work, health studies and psychology. It will also be a useful resource to educators, social workers, youth workers and community members working with (or preparing to work with) children with immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds in Ireland.

This state-of-the-art volume offers a comprehensive, accessible, and uniquely interdisciplinary examination of social factors’ role in second language acquisition (SLA) through different theoretical paradigms, methodological traditions, populations, contexts, and language groups. Top scholars from around the world synthesize current and past work, contextualize the central issues, and set the future research agenda on second language variation, including languages studied or taught less commonly. This will be an indispensable resource to scholars and advanced students of SLA, applied linguistics, education, and other fields interested in the social aspects of language learning in research practice and instruction.

Quotative marking in modern English is a highly dynamic domain which has been undergoing progressive expansion, with newcomer variants, notably quotative be like, entering the scene and restructuring the entire system. Given that this feature is being put foward by the younger generation in native-speaker communities, the crucial question is, How do younger speakers living in different parts of the non-Anglophone world appropriate this feature in their L2 English? This volume tackles this question by exploring the sociolinguistic mechanisms guiding the adoption of the newcomer be like by young adults speaking English as a second and as a foreign language. In so doing, it also explores the role of sociolinguistic salience and language attitudes in the process of adaptation of global linguistic innovations.

Inspired by a postgraduate French studies conference (University of Nottingham, 10 September 2008), this volume explores linguistic form and content in relation to a variety of contexts, considering language alongside music, images, theatre, human experience of the world, and another language. Each essay asks what it is to understand language in a given context, and how, in spite of divergent expressive possibilities, a linguistic situation interacts with other contexts, renegotiating boundaries and redefining understanding. The book lies at the intersection of linguistics and hermeneutics, seeking to (a) contextualise philosophical and linguistic discussions of communication across a range of media and (b) illustrate their intimate relations, despite differing strategies or emphases. Puisant son inspiration dans un colloque de French studies pour doctorants (Université de Nottingham, 10 septembre 2008), cet ouvrage étudie forme et contenu linguistiques en relation avec différents contextes, considérant le langage conjointement avec la musique, les images, le théâtre, l'expérience du monde et un autre langage. Chaque chapitre dissèque la compréhension du langage dans un contexte donné, et se demande comment, en dépit de possibilités expressives divergentes, une situation linguistique interagit avec d'autres contextes, redessinant leurs frontières et redéfinissant la compréhension. Ce livre, situé à l'intersection entre la linguistique et l'herméneutique, a pour but de (a) contextualiser les discussions philosophiques et linguistiques sur la communication dans une gamme de médias et (b) démontrer leur relation intime, malgré des stratégies ou intentions différentes.

The study of how linguistic variation is acquired is considered a nascent field in both psycho- and sociolinguistics. Within that research context, this book aims at two objectives. First, it wants to help bridging the gap between researchers working on acquisition from different theoretical backgrounds. The book therefore includes contributions by both psycho- and sociolinguists, and by representatives of further relevant sub-disciplines of linguistics, including historical linguistics and dialectology. Second, in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison, the book brings together research carried out in different sociolinguistic constellations, as most obviously found in different language areas or different countries.