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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Academic Paper

Title:	<i>Was/were</i> variation: A perspective from London
Author:	Jenny Cheshire
Email:	click here to access email
Institution:	Queen Mary, University of London
Author:	Susan Fox
Institution:	Queen Mary, University of London
Linguistic Field:	Morphology; Sociolinguistics; Syntax
Abstract:	This article presents a systematic analysis of morphosyntactic variation in London English, investigating was/were variation in the speech of adolescents and elderly speakers in a multicultural inner London area and a less diverse outer London area. In outer London, dialect leveling to a mixed was/weren't system is well underway, as in many other areas of the U.K. Negative weren't is frequent and a grammaticalized invariant weren't it tag is developing. In inner London, variation in adolescent speech is strongly influenced by ethnicity, resulting in a lower overall frequency of was leveling and, in negative contexts, a mixed pattern of leveling to both wasn't and weren't. The patterns of variation of Anglo “heritage” inner London adolescents differ both from elderly speakers in the same area and from their peers in outer London. Our analysis confirms the need for socially realistic models of language change that take account of the social diversity of large multicultural urban cities.

	This article appears in Language Variation and Change Vol. 21, Issue 1, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .

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