David Britain

This is the first book length account of the history and structure of the English of the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic. The book begins with a sociolinguistic history, considering the Anglophone period since 1833, settlement history, present-day mobility, language policy, esp. in the education system, language attitudes, and language in the media. The central core of the volume examines the structure of Falkland Island English. We first examine the phonetics of the variety, the vowel and consonant systems, as well as suprasegmentals (hiatus resolution, stress, rhythm, timing and intonation). We then describe and exemplify the major distinctive characteristics of the grammar of the variety, as well as noticeable discourse-pragmatic phenomena. The chapter on lexis looks at the distinctive vocabulary – e.g. loan words from Spanish, local terms for flora and fauna, local terms associated with the military presence. To conclude, the volume considers what is distinctive about Falkland English, evidence of geographical variability, and of settler dialect contact. It also considers how the variety patterns in relation to other Englishes, especially those of Australia and New Zealand. Finally, we consider what our analyses of Falkland English can tell us about lesser-known varieties of English more generally.

This book investigates –s marking in English verbs, specifically its manifestations in main verbs, in the past tense of BE, and in existential constructions. It embraces the many ways in which –s marking varies across the English speaking world, and considers both how it arose in these places historically and the ways in which it has since developed. The authors propose a story which holistically accounts for these different manifestations of –s, drawing upon evidence from a wide range of subdisciplines in linguistics, including sociolinguistics, generative syntax, historical linguistics, dialectology, and discourse-pragmatics. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in these and related fields.

Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students' understanding of the subject. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three main sections: sounds, words, and sentences. In each, the foundational concepts are introduced, along with their application to the fields of child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language disorders, and sociolinguistics, giving the book a unique yet simple structure that helps students to engage with the subject more easily than other textbooks on the market. This edition includes a completely new section on sentence use, including an introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis; coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.