Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T12:52:56.086Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 9 - Gender, Writing and Editing in South African Englishes

A Case Study of the Genitive Alternation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2020

Tobias Bernaisch
Affiliation:
Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany
Get access

Summary

This chapter investigates the intersection between gender, writing and editing of published written texts and endonormativity in South African English. We focus on three sub-varieties within the South African context: two indigenous strands, Afrikaans English (AfrE) and Black South African English (BSAfE), and the settler strand, White South African English (WSAfE). We use multifactorial methods to analyse the effects of gender amongst a set of linguistic and extra-linguistic variables conditioning the genitive alternation across unedited and edited texts produced by AfrE, BSAfE and WSAfE authors. The results show that gender plays a minor role in conditioning the genitive alternation for both authors and editors, demonstrating that the genitive choices of men and women are conditioned in similar ways. As expected, linguistic factors play the greatest role in conditioning the genitive alternation. Our findings confirm recent investigations into cross-varietal and register differences and show that while the direction of the effect of linguistic factors is the same across sub-varieties and registers, the strength of these factors differs in certain sub-varieties and registers. Our findings also confirm recent findings regarding the genitive alternation in second-language varieties and suggest a possible substrate transfer effect, in especially BSAfE writing. Although editorial intervention introduces subtle shifts in preferences for the two constructions, this intervention mostly reinforces the choices of authors.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bresnan, Joan, Rosenbach, Anette, Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Simon, Todd. 2017. ‘Syntactic alternations data: datives and genitives in four varieties of English’ (Manuscript). Retrieved from http://purl.stanford.edu/qj187zs3852.Google Scholar
De Klerk, Vivian. 2003. ‘Towards a norm in South African Englishes: the case for Xhosa English’, World Englishes 22(4): 463–81.Google Scholar
Fokkema, Marjolein, Smits, Niels, Zeileis, Achim, Hothorn, Torsten and Kelderman, Henk. 2018. ‘Detecting treatment-subgroup interactions in clustered data with generalized linear mixed-effects model trees’, Behavior Research Methods (50): 2016–34.Google Scholar
Ford, Marilyn and Bresnan, Joan. 2015. ‘Generating data as a proxy for unavailable corpus data: the contextualized sentence completion task’, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 11(1): 187224.Google Scholar
Grafmiller, Jason. 2014. ‘Variation in English genitives across modality and genres’, English Language and Linguistics 18(3): 471–96.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2015. ‘The most under-used statistical method in corpus linguistics: multi-level (and mixed-effects) models’, Corpora 10: 95125.Google Scholar
Heller, Benedikt, Bernaisch, Tobias and Gries, Stefan Th. 2017a. ‘Empirical perspectives on two potential epicentres: the genitive alternation in Asian Englishes’, ICAME Journal 41: 111–44.Google Scholar
Heller, Benedikt, Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Grafmiller, Jason. 2017b. ‘Stability and fluidity in syntactic variation world-wide: the genitive alternation across varieties of English’, Journal of English Linguistics 45(1): 327.Google Scholar
Hinrichs, Lars and Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2007. ‘Recent changes in the function and frequency of Standard English genitive constructions: a multivariate analysis of tagged corpora’, English Language and Linguistics 11(3): 437–74.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1997. ‘Setting new standards: sound changes and gender in New Zealand English’, English World-Wide 18(1): 107–42.Google Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten and Zeileis, Achim. 2015. ‘partykit: a modular toolkit for recursive partitioning in R’, Journal of Machine Learning Research 16: 3905–9.Google Scholar
Kotze, Haidee. 2020. ‘Does editing matter? Editorial work, endonormativity and convergence in written Englishes in South Africa’. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. English in Multilingual South Africa: The Linguistics of Contact and Change. Cambridge University Press, 101–28.Google Scholar
Kruger, Haidee and Van Rooy, Bertus. 2017. ‘Editorial practice and the progressive in Black South African English’, World Englishes 36: 2041.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Max. 2017. Contributions from Jed Wing, Steve Weston, Andre Williams, Chris Keefer, Allan Engelhardt, Tony Cooper, Zachary Mayer, Brenton Kenkel, the R Core Team, Michael Benesty, Reynald Lescarbeau, Andrew Ziem, Luca Scrucca, Yuan Tang, Can Candan and Tyler Hunt. caret: classification and regression training [R package version 6.0-81]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=caret.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1990. ‘The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change’, Language Variation and Change 2: 205–54.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lakoff, Robin T. 1977. ‘You say what you are: acceptability and gender-related language’. In Greenbaum, Sidney, ed. Acceptability in Language. The Hague: Mouton, 7387.Google Scholar
Law, Melanie A. 2019. The Role of Editorial Intervention in Ongoing Language Variation and Change in South African and Australian English (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa.Google Scholar
Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to Do Linguistics with R: Data Exploration and Statistical Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend. 2017. ‘Class, gender, and substrate erasure in in sociolinguistic change: a sociophonetic study of schwa in deracializing South African English’, Language 93(2): 314–46.Google Scholar
Milliot, Jim. 2018. ‘The PW Publishing Industry Salary Survey, 2018’ (Manuscript). Retrieved from www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/78554-the-pw-publishing-industry-salary-survey-2018.html.Google Scholar
Milroy, James and Milroy, Lesley. 1993. ‘Mechanisms of change in urban dialects: the role of class, social network and gender’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics 3(1): 5777.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2000. ‘Gender differences in the evolution of Standard English: evidence from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence’, Journal of English Linguistics 28(1): 3859.Google Scholar
Romaine, Suzanne. 1999. Communicating Gender. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2002. Genitive Variation in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2014. ‘English genitive variation – the state of the art’, English Language and Linguistics 18(2): 215–62.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2017. ‘Constraints in contact: animacy in English and Afrikaans genitive variation – a cross-linguistic perspective’, Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1): 121.Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
StatsSA. 2019. ‘General Household Survey: 2018 (P0318)’ (Manuscript). Retrieved from www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0318/P03182018.pdf.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Hinrichs, Lars. 2008. ‘Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: a multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres’. In Nevalainen, Terttu, Taavitsainen, Irma, Pahta, Päivi and Korhonen, Minna, eds. The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 291309.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Grafmiller, Jason, Bresnan, Joan, Rosenbach, Anette, Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Todd, Simon. 2017. ‘Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: the dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English’, Glossa 2(1): 86: 127.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Grafmiller, Jason, Heller, Benedikt and Röthlisberger, Melanie. 2016. ‘Around the world in three alternations: modelling syntactic variation in varieties of English’, English World Wide 37(2): 109–37.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2012. Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 1972. ‘Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich’, Language in Society 1: 179–95.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 1983. On Dialect. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Van der Walt, Johann L. and Van Rooy, Bertus. 2002. ‘Towards a norm in South African Englishes’, World Englishes 21(1): 113–28.Google Scholar
Van Rooy, Bertus. 2014. ‘Convergence and endonormativity at phase 4 of the Dynamic Model’. In Buschfeld, Sarah, Hoffmann, Thomas, Huber, Magnus and Kautzsch, Alexander, eds. The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2138.Google Scholar
Van Rooy, Bertus and Kruger, Haidee. 2016. ‘The innovative progressive aspect of Black South African English: the role of language proficiency and normative pressures’, International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 2: 205–28.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×