Is there a Zimbabwean variety of English? If so, who speaks it? Although Zimbabwe is a multilingual speech community, the Shona language, which is composed of dialects and sub-dialects, enjoys numerical dominance because it is spoken by the majority of the Zimbabweans. On the other hand, English, the official language, enjoys status dominance and it occupies a special position in the lives of many Zimbabweans. There is dispute, however, whether English in Zimbabwe is an interlanguage, and its speakers have adopted the native variety as a model, or whether it is better to observe that there are many varieties of English in Zimbabwe which are pragmatically identifiable as Zimbabwean, and that the vast majority of Zimbabweans appear to speak an English which reflects the linguistic characteristics of Shona.

Almost three decades have passed since Kachru (1985) proposed his three-circle model of World Englishes. Although this model is often challenged, few would deny its significance in opening the dialogue and raising awareness of issues related to World Englishes. The context of the project described in this paper is South Korea, one of what Kachru's model refers to as an ‘expanding circle country’. Reflecting on the idea of South Korea as an ‘expanding circle country’, this article briefly examines how Korea has expanded and continues to expand as a nation, juxtaposing it alongside the university speaking class I was teaching, as I look toward expanding both my own and my students' minds through exploring World Englishes within a university speaking course.

The study of meaning and changes in meaning has enjoyed varying levels of popularity within linguistics. There have been periods during which the exploration of meaning was of prime importance. For instance, in the late 19th century scholars considered the exploration of the etymology of words to be crucial in their quest to find the ‘true’ meaning of lexemes (Geeraerts, 2010; Malkiel, 1993). There have also been periods where semantic analysis was considered redundant to linguistic investigation (Hockett, 1954: 152). In the past 20–30 years semantics has enjoyed a period of revival. This has been mainly led by the advances in cognitive linguistics (and to some extent, historical linguistics) as well by the innovations associated with the development of electronic corpora and computational methods for extracting and tracing changes in the behaviour of the lexicon (cf. Geeraerts, 2010: 168ff, 261ff). However, there are still areas of linguistics which hardly involve lexis in their theoretical and epistemological considerations. One such area is sociolinguistics.

In social and linguistic terms, is England one nation or two?

The global expansion of the use of English throughout the last decade has had significant implications for its instruction around the world. Among the issues that have arisen as a result of this expansion has been the selection of appropriate phonological models in the English language classroom. Specifically this particular issue has hinged on the question of whether it is more appropriate to encourage English language learners to strive towards the goal of a particular native variety of English pronunciation, or to promote an alternative target. This question has provoked much discussion, and has been the subject of occasionally heated debate (e.g. Jenkins, 1998, 2000; Scheuer, 2005, 2008; Seidlhofer & Jenkins, 2003).

The beginning of this new century has witnessed two important events in English language education in China. The first is the expansion of English language education into the primary curriculum. In 2001, the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) required that primary schools located in cities and county seats start to offer English classes at Primary 3 from the autumn of 2001 and that the rest start to do so in the following year (MOE, 2001). The second is the increase of enrolment in various types of Chinese colleges and universities. For example, in 1999 the number of students enrolled in Chinese higher education was six million, but it rose to over 20 million in 2004 (Jin & Cortazzi, 2006). Such a rapid development of English language education has resulted in a number of difficulties and challenges for EFL teaching in China, but the most serious constraint comes from the lack of qualified teachers (Rao, 2010). To compensate for the shortage of English teachers, many Chinese schools are endeavoring to attract more native-English-speaking teachers (henceforth NESTs) to fill up EFL teaching vacancies. In 2006, for example, there were 150,000 foreign EFL teachers working in China (Jeon & Lee, 2006).

English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a means of communication in English between speakers who have different first languages. While some definitions (e.g. House, 2003) exclude native speakers of English (NSs) from ELF interactions, others allow NSs to take part in ELF interactions as long as they defer to ELF norms (Jenkins, 2009b). In order for an interaction to be classified as ELF, however, NS contributions are always expected to be minimal (Jenkins, 2009b: 41). ELF is therefore mainly, if not exclusively, used between non-native speakers of English (NNSs).

Is a vast new variety of the language emerging? As the learning of English becomes a hot issue in China, linguists there and elsewhere have become interested in ‘China English’ – a relatively new concept. However, whether English as used in China has yet acquired the status of a distinct new variety of the language remains an open question. This paper reviews the acceptability of such an English, both at home and abroad, which has the potential (it is argued) to be accepted as a standard variety.

In the present paper, I pursue a Construction Grammar (CxG) characterization of English modal auxiliaries (e.g., can-could, must, have (got) to, should, ought to, need to, will-would) that seeks to add to established lexical approaches. It is argued that Construction Grammar (e.g., Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Tomasello, 2003) can successfully account for underlying modality patterns, the understanding of which can lead to distinct gains for both linguistics and second language acquisition research. To that end, some of the tenets of CxG are invoked.

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).

In November 2009, Principal Thomas Murray banned the word meep from Danvers High School, located outside of Boston (Netter, 2009). Parents and students received automated e-mails and calls with a warning that saying or displaying the word meep would entail suspension. Students had ignored requests from teachers and administrators to stop, leading to the school-wide ban. This story contains entertaining elements: an overzealous principal who forwarded emails containing meep to the police; references to the meeping Muppet, Beaker; students sporting ‘FREE MEEP’ t-shirts; and Facebook-coordinated meepings. Referring to meep, Danvers High School student Mike Spiewak commented: ‘I think it's unfair that they banned a word that's not even a real word’ (Raz, 2009). According to Melanie Crane, another Danvers student, meep ‘doesn't mean anything in particular’ (Netter, 2009). As a result, its ambiguity allows for countless definitions. The authoritative source in defining the term throughout news coverage of the Danvers incident has been Urbandictionary.com, an online and open-source dictionary for slang and subculture terminology. For those of you who have never meeped, the primary Urban Dictionary (UD) entry deems it ‘the most versatile word in the English language [which] can mean whatever you want it to mean.’ UD lists 93 other definitions for the word, the most popular being.

Ever since the 1980s, when research interest in the field of ‘World Englishes’ began to gather speed, the view of the English language around the world has been largely dominated by the construct of so-called ‘varieties’ of English. These varieties are usually given a geographical label (‘Singapore English’, ‘Welsh English’, ‘South African English’, ‘Fiji English’, etc), and are described in terms of their pronunciation, their grammar, and their vocabulary. The resulting anthologies (see e.g. Wells, 1982; Trudgill & Hannah, 1982; Kortmann et al., 2004) have contributed a lot to our understanding of how English varies globally, as well as to raising the profile of non-inner circle (Kachru, 1985) varieties, which had previously not benefited from as much attention.

As Voloshinov has famously argued, ‘the word is the most sensitive index of social changes, and what is more, of changes still in the process of growth’ (Voloshinov, 1986: 19). Scrutiny of young people's discourses on language together with their language practices offers us a window into a society in transition, such as present-day South Africa. This article examines the language ideologies and language practices of Black youth attending previously White, now desegregated, suburban schools in South African cities, important spaces for the production of an expanding Black middle class (Soudien, 2004). Due to their resourcing during apartheid (both financial and human) previously White schools are aligned with quality education and perceived as strategic sites for the acquisition and maintenance of a prestige variety of South African English. This article looks at how mainly African girls (15–16 years) position themselves in relation to English, drawing on data collected using ethnographic approaches in four desegregated schools in South African cities: three in Johannesburg, Gauteng and one in Cape Town, Western Cape. The discussion focuses on two significant themes: English and the [re]production of race; and the place of English in young people's linguistic repertoires. My aim is to show how African youth in desegregated schools orient themselves to English and what their language ideologies and language practices might tell us about macro social processes, including the (re)constitution of race in South Africa. Schooling, as Bourdieu points out, is one of the most important sites for social reproduction and is thus also one of the key sites, ‘which imposes the legitimate forms of discourse and the idea that discourse should be recognised if and only if it conforms to the legitimate norms’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 650). However, co-present with processes of reproduction are practices that work to subvert and unsettle dominant discourses. Suburban desegregated schools are thus productive sites for the re-making of cultural practices (including language) and identities.

An analysis of ‘public English’ and (not) learning the language in Japan.

Visitors to Japan, whether linguists or laymen, frequently come back with their own collection of quaint uses of English, gathered from public signs, advertising and so on, which vary from the odd to the simply incorrect. This may provide complacent amusement for the native speaker, but is not surprising or unique: Budapest airport until relatively recently sported a large sign reading Welcome in Hungary. What is especially interesting in Japan is not the mistakes but the puzzling function of many such signs. English words and messages are often combined with Japanese, so that, as a non-Japanese speaker, your eye is at first attracted then baffled, until you realise that the English is not aimed at you, a native speaker, but at native speakers of Japanese. But who among the Japanese is it aimed at, and why?

In different parts of the English-speaking world various vowel changes have been taking place in recent years, perhaps the most noticeable of which is the vowel lowering in words like DRESS and TRAP. This lowering would seem to have its origins some few decades ago in North America, probably in California and perhaps simultaneously in Canada. The shift, labelled here short front vowel lowering (SFVL), has spread quickly across the anglophone world and is found in locations as far apart as Ireland, South Africa and Australia. In each case where the change has been adopted there has been an adaptation of the change to local circumstances within the borrowing variety. The transmission of the change is also significant as the spread would seem not to be by direct speaker contact.

This paper attempts to show the important role that ideology (‘meaning in the service of power’) plays in the nurturing and proliferation of metaphors and metaphoric themes, a psychological and linguistic role that is just as important as bodily experience. It discusses such themes as power is high, sex is violence, disease is invasion, and race is colour, attempting to show how they drive social practices. It also explores how the themes activity is game and quality is quantity (along with such subthemes as time is money and human quality is wealth) have been implicated in the emergence of both capitalist economic philosophy and the Darwinism and neo-Darwinism which developed from it (as represented successively in Hobbes, Smith, Hume, Malthus and Darwin himself).

A discussion of recent developments in the speech of millions in and around London and the lower Thames

With a rapid increase of electronic communication and online social media, the English language has become a ubiquitous element in global communication. Although change is an inevitable phenomenon in any living language, an infiltration of a foreign language is often resisted by those who fear that a foreign influence would disintegrate the purity of their language, sabotaging its integrity and distinctiveness.

Institutional and learners' discourses about English and the implications for ‘China English’. China's politics and international relations with Western powers have historically determined the role and status of the English language in China (Adamson, 2004). Following the country's Open Door Policy in the 1970s, the entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Beijing Olympics, English, once considered a barbaric language, has been enjoying unprecedented popularity. The seven years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics saw a series of foreign language campaigns in different sectors of Chinese society. The Beijing Olympics provided China with an opportunity to improve its world position and to ‘reclaim’ – and show the world – its glorious past. Since 2001, when China won the bid to host the Olympics in 2008, English learning campaigns have promoted both so-called ‘standard’ and ‘authentic’ English. The purpose of these campaigns was not only to ensure a successful Olympics, but also to equip the people with a tool essential for modernising and integrating China into the global community.