It's difficult to imagine the relatively civilised, slightly worn corridors of London's old Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC, as being the frontline in a war. No trenches; no barbed wire; not a sign of battle-fatigue to be seen … Yet here whizz-bangs are almost as frequent as they were at the Somme. For frontline this indeed is; a place where battle-royal is pitched between the opposing camps of linguistic orthodoxy and originality. The spot where, like a pair of weirdly-named opponents from Gulliver's Travels, the Descriptivists do battle with the Prescriptivists.

In February 2015, Catherine Bennett published a piece called “Modern Tribes: the grammar pedant” in The Guardian Online. The article focused on so-called usage problems – instances of divided usage concerning grammar, vocabulary or spelling that many people have strong opinions about. (The previous sentence is a good example of such a usage problem: can you indeed end a sentence with a preposition, for instance?) The article itself was not very interesting in its own right: it dealt with all the “old chestnuts”, like less/fewer, disinterested/uninterested and of course the split infinitive. What was interesting, though, was that within a little over ten hours, 84 comments had come in. In the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, we are interested in new usage problems rather than the ones we have been reading about for around two hundred years. So I scoured the comments with great interest. I've already written about what I found in a post on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog: there were not many new or any very striking complaints, but what I do find of interest is that no-one mentioned the flat adverb. Does this mean that flat adverbs are no longer considered problematical today?

Over the last century or so, English has become a global lingua franca. Today, English is the first language of 400 million people and the second language of as many as 1.4 billion (Millward & Hayes, 2012: 342). In addition, it is the language that is predominantly used on the Internet; 80% of homepages on the Web are in English, followed by German (4.5%) and Japanese (3.1%) (Millward & Hayes, 2012: 343). Needless to say, English serves as a medium of communication regardless of the speaker's first language. As English spreads globally, fragments of its lexicon also permeate native languages, enriching their lexicons. This paper is concerned with the use of English and its elements, including English-derived words, in contemporary Japan, especially within the discourse of ‘Manners Posters’, posters which promote good manners in public spaces, and advertising texts. These types of media display creative and innovative uses of English that interact with Japanese at various linguistic levels in the form of wordplay, communicating messages, sometimes even in the form of puns, to achieve particular ends in a given context. We will look at this phenomenon from the ‘glocal’ point of view – i.e., the mechanisms and effects of a fusion between ‘global English’ and local culture that create a localised or nativised taste of the global.

This paper seeks to rationalize the attitude-acquisition conundrum which is witnessed with Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), an English-based pidgin spoken in Cameroon. According to Baker (1992: 10), ‘attitude’ refers to a hypothetical construct used to explain the direction and persistence of human behavior. In second-language acquisition literature, the use of the term ‘attitude’ has very often conjured up associated notions such as behavior, motivation, prestige and importance, which are seen to be important determinants of levels of success in L2 learning/acquisition. A positive attitude is said to fortify the motivation to learn a language; to be a successful learner, a positive attitude towards the target language is necessary. However, as McKenzie (2008: 4) notes, the relationship between attitude and L2 learning/acquisition is a rather complex one, which varies according to social context. Among other things, a positive attitude towards an L2 is also driven by factors such as (1) the socioeconomic value of the L2, (2) the L2's status-raising potential and (3) its perceived instrumental value.

This paper looks at English language use in law discourse and particularly in university classrooms in Togo. Togo makes extensive use of the English language despite the fact that it is a francophone country. English is taught in almost all public institutions, except for primary schools. Financial institutions, such as banks, make extensive use of English. This is evidenced at first glance at the large computer screens positioned at the entrances to these institutions. At the Université de Lomé alone, there are several ESP (English for Specific Purposes) programs. Each of the five faculties (with several departments) and ten schools and institutes have an ESP program. The ESP course is applicable to first-year students on BA programs and to those on MA programs. However, despite this extensive presence of English, traditional language norms and the influence of French on English in Togo in general are still very strong.

In the Arab world, English is having substantial effects on the region's educational systems, language policies and patterns of language use (Nunan, 2003; Bolton, 2008; Kirkpatrick, 2008). Having realized the importance of English in all domains of life, Arab countries have encouraged the acquisition of English by their people. Most Arab countries have introduced English as a main subject in the school curriculum. In most government and private sectors, most business organizations ask for proof of English proficiency before hiring people for employment.

The attitudes of Slavic speakers towards English accents have been under-researched. The only language and accent attitude research in the Slavic context with the involvement of Polish speakers was conducted by Jenkins in her questionnaire study (Jenkins, 2007). The study, whose interest lay in assessing native and non-native English accents, showed a strong attachment of non-native speakers toward native varieties and accents of English, although non-native speakers mostly used English for communication with other non-native speakers of English.

The university-level poetry writing workshops in English taught in a Chinese context are characterized chiefly by bilingual creativity. Based on the practical task of creating ‘contact literature’ (Kachru, 1992: 317), to be more exact, ‘contact poetry’, they transcend the limits of any one single language and culture so as to make points of contact between Chinese and English languages and cultures in terms of verbal images, sound devices, and thematic concerns.

The central issue of the present article is the analysis of phrasal verbs (hereafter termed multiword verbs [MWVs]) from the perspective of construction grammars (Goldberg, 1995; Suttle and Goldberg, 2011). As is well known, English MWVs present special challenges to L2 learners due, among other things, to the shapelessness of their conceptual components and the ensuing impossibility to arrive at equivalent word-meaning correspondences (mappings) in the learners’ mother language (see Gillette et al., 1999). This brings us to the first theoretical claim of this paper – namely, that MWVs (also termed phrasal verbs, verb-particle collocations, verb-particle combinations etc.) are lexical chunks that can be retrieved by speakers either as wholes, without special recourse to syntactic parsing, or as verb-particle semantic associations (Cappelle et al., 2010). This idea is combined with the notion that MWVs inherit their syntax-semantics from prototypical Argument Structure Constructions (Goldberg, 2013a) within Verb Argument Constructions (VACs) frames. VACs are thus associated with prototype verbs like ‘go‘, ‘come’, ‘get’, ‘put’, etc., to project their meaning upon less-frequent verbs occupying a V-slot frame (a verbal position). It follows that MWVs function as hyponyms that express specific semantic nuances not available in prototype verbs. For example, in the sentence ‘Arya scooped up a rock and hurled it at Joffrey's head’ (George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones [1996]), the verb scoop up suggests a caused motion usually conveyed by the verb LIFT, i.e. the prototype of the simple transitive Verb Argument Construction. From this vantage, it is suggested that a way to activate the weak verb-object interface is through its assignation to specific prototypes bootstrapping (providing an initial basis for) both the conceptualisation of the MWVs and their potential mapping to specific words (which I term inherited surface forms).

The book is an edited collection of 18 chapters written by a total of 21 authors from around the world. Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, outlines the book's structure and scope. The editors, Ken Hyland and Lillian L. C. Wong, define the book's purpose as ‘to offer readers a range of different ways of thinking about innovation in English language education, and different methods of investigating the impact of innovation’ (p. 2). The remaining 17 chapters, which are divided into four sections, discuss a range of topics including theoretical frameworks for education, teacher training, curriculum development, and teaching practice.

This introductory text successfully achieves its ambitious goal of demonstrating how the Construction Grammar framework can be applied in a systematic fashion to a range of sub-disciplines within Linguistics. Construction Grammar (CG) is a unified theory of knowledge of language modelled on knowledge of constructions. Each chapter illustrates the application of CG to a different sub-discipline, from those that are more well-established in the literature, such as argument structure and information packaging, to areas that have been addressed in depth more recently from this perspective, such as morphology, language variation and language change.