Linguistics

This article presents a list of (Creole) Dutch-origin words, or supposedly Dutch-origin words, in Virgin Islands Creole English, including an etymological analysis. Three of the Caribbean Virgin Islands were colonized by the Danish, but a Dutch-lexifier creole language was widely used on the islands, later replaced with English or an English-lexifier creole. The article deals specifically with the varieties traditional to the islands St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John, US Virgin Islands (formerly known as the Danish West Indies). The words to be discussed here are inspired by the work of a local amateur lexicographer, Rafael “Lito” Valls. The words came into Virgin Islands Creole English via the local Dutch-lexifiercreole, deriving primarily from Zealandic and West Flemish sources. The articlealso providesa broad overview of the state of lexicographical work on the Virgin Islandscreoles, placing this in the general historical and linguistic background of the Virgin Islands.

This article explores one aspect of scholarly work as a situated practice: the way that, in a conversation analysis group data session, scholars juggle their technical talk with personal value judgments ostensibly inappropriate to the practices of this particular branch of the social sciences. We see how value judgments are handled, and what visible part they play in proceeding with the formal, institutionally provided for, technical analysis. In the case we explore, some members of a routine data session (the authors) expressed negative evaluative views of the actions of a participant in the video they were analyzing, which at various points they characterized as ‘cynical’, ‘begging’, and ‘a shocker’. We show the data-session participants' orientation to these moral judgments, and their search for resolution in safely technical terms. Our interest is in bringing to light the workings of a routine piece of scholarly teamwork, not often subject to scrutiny; and to reveal how acco...

In a language identification task, native Belgian French and native Swiss French speakers identified French from France as their own variety. However, Canadian French was not subject to this bias. Canadian and French listeners didn't claim a different variety as their own. ''Which language variety do you perceive?'' This question, elicited to establish dialect categorization, boundaries, and continua (see Tamati, 2010 and Baker, Eddington, & Nay, 2009 and references cited there) is usually posed as a forced choice question: possible answers are already provided. The reason is obviously that open choice questions are felt to be too difficult (like in Baker et al., 2009, p. 50). An apparent caveat of this method is that a proportion of answers consist of a (wild) guess. So let us face the facts and see what respondents answer on the open question ''which language variety do you perceive?'' We conducted an online survey consisting of small excerpts of 20 to 25 s (two or three adjacent sentences) of read speech of French from France and Canadian French. The fragments were selected from the online corpus Phonologie du Franc¸ais Contemporain (Durand, Laks, & Lyche, 2002). The selected fragments consisted of recordings of 12 speakers from Canada (six from Quebec and six from Peace River [Alberta Province]) and 12 speakers from France (six from Paris and six from Dijon), equally balanced for gender and varied for age. We investigated the ability to identify French from France and Canadian French by native speakers of four different French nationalects (viz. French from France, Canadian French, Belgian French, and Swiss French). In addition, we asked the subjects to estimate the level of standardness of the speech fragments. Respondents were contacted via e-mail and social networks of the authors. In total, 70 responses were received, but eight respondents (all from France) did not complete the question about the geographic variety

This paper is written by a linguist who is working with language in interaction within the paradigm of Conversation Analysis. The topic of the paper was inspired by a seminar where the socalled Køge Project researchers, who investigate Turkish-Danish bilingual students in Denmark, invited researchers with different backgrounds and approaches to work on data from the Køge Project corpus (see Holmen & Jørgensen (eds.) 2000). The paper contains deliberations about how Conversation Analysis can contribute to the study of bilingual interaction, and focuses on methodological problems and advantages of doing Conversation Analysis on bilingual data. The first part of the article briefly outlines the fields of “Conversation Analysis” and “the study of bilingual interaction” and sums up the methodological lessons from my earlier analyses of the data from the Køge Project. Then the author proceeds to showing some aspects of conversation-analytical methodology through concrete analyses of extra...

In our paper, we give an overview over what is known about some of the most frequent interjections in Danish talk-in-interaction: ja (‘yes’), nej (‘no’), mm (‘mm’), nå (approximately ‘oh’), and okay (‘okay’). We review the CA/IL literature on these words, and we present our own exemplary analyses of single instances of these words in extracts from our corpus of recorded, naturally occurring Danish interactions. Based on this, we argue that sequential position, epistemics, and affiliation and alignment should be taken into account when describing and categorizing dialogue particles in talk-in-interaction. Prosody and other phonetic cues are important for the realization of the above dimensions and functions and we review what is known about prosodic and phonetic cues plus add some of our own observations, without launching a full phonetic and prosodic analysis.

The article introduces a new website, samtalegrammatik.dk ('grammar of talk-in-interaction'), it describes the methods used for constructing the website, and it provides descriptions of three new grammatical phenomena in Danish talk-in-interaction. The website is a result of investigations carried out by the research group DanTIN ('Danish talk-in-interaction') since 2009. Until 2013, the group has published analyses of quite diverse phenomena, such as different versions of the word hvad 'what' that seem to belong to different word classes and have different functions in talk-ininteraction, the distribution of the hesitation marker oh(m) 'uh(m)', or different word orders after the conjunction fordi ('because'). These phenomena were selected because they were clearly different from written Danish. By launching the website samtalegrammatik.dk the group takes a step towards building a comprehensive grammar of Danish talk-in-interaction. It offers ...