Attitudes to English Usage is the title of a book published in 1970 by W. H. Mittins, Mary Salu, Mary Edminson and Sheila Coyne from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne that reported on an enquiry held among some 450 informants concerning the acceptability of 55 usage items. These items had been selected because they were at the time ‘subject to variation in practice and dispute in theory’ (Mittins et al., 1970: 4), and they include sentences like He refused to even think about it, It looked like it will rain and Everyone has their off-days. In each case the offensive feature had been highlighted so that informants would know what they had to comment on: to even think (a split infinitive), the use of like for as if, and of their with a singular antecedent (everyone). For fifty sentences the informants had to indicate acceptability in informal speech, informal writing, formal speech and formal writing, and for the remaining five only for informal and formal writing, since usage of these items was believed to be restricted to writing (1970: 4). The sentences were subsequently ranged from highest general acceptability (did not do as well as) to lowest (veryunique), and correlations were calculated with the occupation of the informants (students, teachers, lecturers, examiners and non-educationists), while the items were also classified as colloquial (pretty reliable), etymological (data is), grammatical (did it quicker) and lexical/semantic (inferred/implied), or as language myths, ‘where the censorious tend to invoke a prescription of dubious authority’ (dangling participles) (1970: 15). The main part of the book dealt with the individual constructions, analysing the reasons for their status as debated usage items and providing further historical context in the process.

The emergence of Student Pidgin in Ghana is estimated to have started fairly recently: between 1965 and the early 1970s (Huber, 1999; Dako, 2002). Male students in high prestige senior secondary schools and universities have been credited with leading in the development of Student Pidgin. The use of Student Pidgin has since been spreading among some girls and is currently found in an increasing number of contexts, including the home. The fact that students use Student Pidgin seems unexpected, considering the fact that they are competent speakers of Standard English.2 In this context, the question to consider is what underlies this behavior? This has been the subject of recurrent debate. Educational authorities typically feel that Student Pidgin reflects the fact that the standard of English in Ghanaian senior secondary schools and universities has fallen. An example of this comes from a speech given by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, on 28 October 2002:

This study investigates a number of non-interference sources of some Cameroon English (CamE) prepositional usages. It is based on the observation that the investigation of causes or sources of post-colonial Englishisms (peculiarities of newer varieties of English spoken in former English and American colonies) has so far favoured the interference factor. More clearly, post-colonial English (PCE) specificities have generally been attributed to the influence of the speakers' other tongues on their (English) production (see, for example, Platt et al., 1984; Mbangwana, 1989; Bokamba, 1992; Gramley & Pätzold, 1992; Asante, 1995). Although the interference factor is indeed easily perceptible in CamE, it is interesting to note that other factors might have played a major role in the emergence of English in Cameroon. In reality, there are several non-contrastive causes that could underlie some grammatical constructions of PCE in general and CamE in particular. Many such causes are being studied, especially at the phonological level. However, few studies have been devoted to the non-interference sources of CamE grammatical usages in general and preposition use in particular. This paper will thus examine how CamE speakers use prepositions to express direction and location. From the analysis, non-interference sources of a good number of CamE specificities such as the colonial factor, logicalization, analogy and tacit national norm seem to be some of the autonomous routes unconsciously used by CamE speakers to yield a variety of English that markedly differs from the standardized varieties of British English (StE), officially the target of national education.

As China continues to increase diplomatic and trade relations with about 53 African countries, the position of China becoming the largest trading partner of Africa cannot be over-emphasized, as numerous academic studies and journalistic reports have documented (e.g. Bodomo & Ma, 2010; Laribee, 2008; Mohan & Tan-Mullins, 2008; Mung-Kuang, 2008; Beijing Xinhua, 2005). By the end of 2008, about 1,600 Chinese companies had invested in African countries with a direct investment stock of US$7.8 billion (Wen Jiabao, November 7, 2009, the Opening Ceremony of the China-Africa Business Conference).

Children's literature is an important resource for knowledge construction among young children. As they read the stories or have the stories read to them, children are presented with multiple ideologies and belief systems and this includes notions of masculinity and femininity (Taylor, 2003: 301). These ideologies are absorbed by young children and go on to influence their attitudes and behaviour as they participate in society. Perhaps for this reason, the reading of gender in children's literature has been an area that has drawn the interest of numerous researchers over the decades (Bender and Lach, 1990; Collins, Ingoldsby & Dellman, 1984; Crabb & Bielawski, 1994; Dellmann-Jenkins, Florjancic & Swadener, 1993; Desai, 2001; Dutro, 2002; Gooden & Gooden, 2001; Kortenhaus & Demarest, 1993; Oskamp, Kaufman & Wolterbeck, 1996; Poarch & Monk-Turner, 2001; Turner-Bowker, 1996; Weitzman et al., 1972). These studies have generally pointed to evidence of sexism, that is, the denigration of females realised in tandem with the exaltation of males (Ivy & Backlund, 1994: 72).

This paper, a spin-off from a larger-scale research project, advances a novel perspective on recent introducers to quotations in interactive communicative settings, with the (current reporting) speaker and addressee(s) co-present: be like, quote, quote unquote, and the air-quotes are all ‘newcomers’ to the quotative system in English; they are constrained in usage to face-to-face contexts, and they foreground through animating the quote, resorting to the various modalities available in such situations: verbal, vocal, and gestural.

The BBC Voices website will probably already be familiar to those involved in English Language teaching and research. Along with local and national radio programmes about English that were broadcast in the UK in 2005, this site is one of the outputs of Voices, a large collaborative multi-platform project undertaken by the BBC and the University of Leeds in 2004 and 2005. Members of the public were asked to submit to the site the different words they use for a range of concepts, and to air their views on English and language use around the UK. In parallel, regional radio journalists who had been trained by Leeds linguists conducted over 300 sociolinguistic interviews with small groups of speakers, discussing the same set of concepts as the online questionnaire, and similarly eliciting opinions on English and language use.

Arguably, anaphora is one of the most interesting linguistic phenomena. Broadly speaking, the term refers to a relation between two linguistic elements. In this relation, the interpretation of one element, the anaphor, is determined by the interpretation of another: the antecedent. Thus, in the sentence Cordelia said she loved Manet, the pronoun ‘she’ is the anaphor, which refers back (the word ‘anaphor’ is derived from a Greek term which translates as ‘to carry back’), while Cordelia is its antecedent. Anaphora is closely linked to deixis, the phenomenon in language whereby the meaning of certain elements requires contextual and/or co-textual information.

This wide-ranging book, focused on the use of English as a lingua franca in intranational and international contexts, explores the ecologies in which interactions in English occur and the phonological, grammatical, lexical and pragmatic processes that take place when speakers of different varieties of L2 English come into contact. For Meierkord, a key difference between intranational and international contexts is that in the former interactions tend to take place in relatively stable communities, circumstances which are more propitious for the adoption of new features and the eventual emergence of new L2 varieties; for example, the nativised varieties of post–colonial societies. In international contexts, by contrast, lingua franca encounters tend to be more short-term, and there is therefore less opportunity for the emergence, adoption and stabilisation of new features. Accommodation, rather, is one of the more common pragmatic responses. These, however, are rough generalisations, for throughout the book an important motif is heterogeneity: heterogeneity in the varieties of English entering into contact, heterogeneity in speaker characteristics such as their level of English proficiency, and heterogeneity in the purposes and contexts of the encounters.