Folklinguistics and Social Meaning in Australian English by Cara Penry Williams;

Author:Cara Penry Williams;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2020-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

5

Lexical variation

5.1 Overview of variation

This chapter addresses variation at the level of the word, the level on which folk-linguistic discussion is often said to focus. While English in Australia changed from very early on, in trying to describe the unfamiliar landscape and animals, often borrowing from local Indigenous languages (Moore, 2001a; Schneider, 2007), and it has developed specific uses and words out of the experiences since these times (Moore, 2008, 2010), the focus here is again on contemporary variation between forms. Lexical variations are not traditionally part of variationist research. The low recurrences of a particular noun, compared to a particular vowel for example, mean that studies of lexical items often rely on eliciting forms with corpus approaches also possible.

In terms of lexical variation within contemporary AusE, the variations studied in this chapter cover some of the main sources of variation that might be attributed social meaning in relation to the people who use them. They include some forms that are considered distinctively Australian and so of interest to those studying world Englishes with these interests in mind. Firstly, there is some regional lexical variation in Australia, although it relates to a small number of words by all accounts. Little work has actually systematically documented this variation. Most of this research has been completed in a large-scale study by Bryant (e.g., 1985, 1989b, 1997), much of which involved students who moved to Canberra for university, reporting on their (home city or town) use. She mapped the use of regional variations such as blood nose~bloody nose~bleeding nose “nosebleed”, cantaloupe~rockmelon “Cucumis melo var. cantalupensis: an orange-fleshed muskmelon” and (pork-beef) German sausage~Stras(burg)~polony~Belgium (sausage)~(beef) luncheon~Empire (sausage)~ Bolonga~Fritz~Devon “a large bland sliced sausage product, often put in sandwiches” (Bryant, 1989b). Putting it in its socio-historical context, Bryant’s work was completed at a time when there was a swell in interest in AusE and nationalistic pride surrounding the bicentenary. However, Schneider’s (2007) model suggests that, if anything, internal regional variation should have increased in years since this with a focus on more local identities, part of phase 5 of his model.

A more prominent type of lexical variation in AusE relates to conservative or British and innovative or American pairs (with this terminology of course a simplification). Görlach (1990) calls pairs such as trousers~pants, tin~can, biscuit~cookie and serviette~napkin heteronyms. As in many other English varieties, heteronyms have entered AusE at different stages. Many innovative forms have been linked to concerns about “Americanisation”. In such accounts, “Americanisms” are seen to be “usurping” “Australian” words. A lot of this negative attention may relate to the threat of borrowing generally (see the insightful discussion in Joseph, 2004). An alternative view is to see innovative forms as part of increasing convergence in Englishes rather than importing of US norms (Meyerhoff & Niedzielski, 2003; Schneider, 2010; Trudgill, 1998). This is a topic of common interest across varieties of English, and heteronyms have been the focus of several studies in NZE (Bayard, 1989; Leek & Bayard, 1995; Meyerhoff, 1993; Vine, 1999) and CanE

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