C Mair
Biographic Data
| ID | 44158 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Mair |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Mair |
| SIGNATURE | MAIR C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Freiburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6549-4951 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 118 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Greenbaum, Sidney
Sidney Greenbaum (1929–96) was born in London on December 31, 1929, a member of East London's orthodox Jewish community.
Quirk, Randolph
Randolph Quirk was born on the Isle of Man in 1920. In 1939 he enrolled at University College London (UCL), to read English under Albert Hugh Smith and Norse under Raymond Wilson Chambers. Having served in World War II from 1940, he resumed his studies in 1945. On his graduation in 1947 he joined UCL's English Department as a lecturer and was subsequently awarded the degrees of MA, PhD and DLitt, all solely in the fields of medieval English and N…
World Languages in Competition
This paper examines the evolving dynamics of global multilingualism in the digital age, focusing on the hierarchical structure of the World Language System (WLS) and the intensifying competition among languages online. Two major trends shaping linguistic diversity in the 21st century are identified: the ongoing decline of offline linguistic diversity and the selective, economically driven nature of online multilingualism. Drawing on recent data, …
Perceiving being single as inherently negative
The belief that every person has a strong desire to be in a committed relationship can lead to stereotyping of single people. The present study examined whether people judge another person's life satisfaction differently based solely on information about that person's relationship status. We conducted a cross-sectional study among 1,241 participants (M age = 40.3, SD = 13.0; 57.3% cisgender women, 40.8% cisgender men, and 1.9% gender minority ind…
The digital diffusion of pidgin/creoles
The study explores three factors in the digital spread of pidgins and creoles. The first is the writing boom on the Internet, which has led to prestige gains for pidgin/creoles. The second is the interplay of migration, culture and the media as boosters in the diffusion of pidgin/creoles. The third is the technologisation of pidgin/creoles, as measured by their presence in Large Language Models (LLMs) developed for text generation and machine tra…
Colloquialisation
Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to spoken usage, the chapter explores: the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and complications arising when colloquialisation is extended beyond its original domain of application, …
English in Germany as a foreign language and as a lingua franca
The massive expansion of English in Germany over the past few decades has not challenged a robustly exonormative orientation, which still by and large recognises standardised British and American English as the most authentic and prestigious representations of the language. Attitudes to the use of English in the national context are diverse, ranging from enthusiastic embracement via grudging acceptance to active resistance. This diversity of opin…
Nigerian English as a Lingua Franca
This paper investigates the use of Nigerian English in lingua-franca interaction in Germany, focussing on the perspective of the German listener. Fifty-eight German-speaking respondents were asked to transcribe short extracts from English interviews recorded with Nigerian immigrants and sojourners resident in Germany. In addition to testing comprehension, respondents were requested to rate samples along parameters designed to measure speaker lika…
Nigerian English in Germany
The study investigates language use and language attitudes among Nigerian immigrants in Germany, thus contributing to the study of World Englishes in mobility and migration. The data comprises ca. five hours of recorded interviews and is analysed both for the linguistic features it displays and the language attitudes expressed by interviewees. In the German environment, Nigerian Standard English has to be adapted to the needs of lingua‐franca int…
Migration, media, and the emergence of pidgin‐ and creole‐based informal epicentres
The paper makes a case for regarding Nigerian Pidgin (Naijá) and Jamaican Creole (Patois) as informal linguistic epicentres in the global English Language Complex. This requires a few modifications to current definitions of linguistic epicentres but leads to a sociolinguistically realistic and more comprehensive account of the profound influence that Jamaica and Nigeria have had on the development of Englishes in their regions and in the world at…
Brainfucked about Britain
In 2019, Sibylle Berg’s novel GRM Brainfuck was published to considerable acclaim. Berg, a German writer based in Switzerland, uses a contemporary British setting for a satirical speculation on the future of Western societies. The novel represents the UK as a social constellation that combines a tradition of class privilege with the worst excesses of global capitalism, technological surveillance, and mass manipulation. One force of resistance is …
Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English
Comparing early and current corpus-based work on ongoing grammatical change in English, the present study argues that progress tends to manifest itself in the more comprehensive and systematic coverage of changes known to be under way rather than in the discovery of genuinely new diachronic processes. As will be shown in two case studies on modal/semi-modal verbs and the progressive, there are three reasons for this. First, corpus research on ong…
John H. McWhorter. 2018. The Creole Debate
Brexitiness
The 2016 EU referendum has already left a lasting imprint on the English language. Building on previous research (e.g. Lalić-Krstin & Silaški 2018, Buckledee 2018), the present article integrates discourse-analytical and corpus-based methods to explore current developments and place them in the historical context of the past 70 years. Using the News on the Web (NoW) corpus, which covers the years from the run-up to the referendum to the present, …
Corpusurile paralele. O modalitate de cercetare în timp real a schimbării lingvistice în curs de realizare
Lucrarea valorifică date din patru corpusuri corespondente de cîte un milion de cuvinte, Brown (Engleză americană, 1961), LOB (Engleză britanică, 1961), Frown (Engleză americană, 1992) și FLOB (Engleză britanică, 1991) pentru a oferi o descriere integrată a variației sincronice (regionale și stilistice) și a schimbărilor diacronice pe termen scurt din engleza literară scrisă. Analiza unui număr relativ mare de variabile morfosintactice arată că s…
Parallel corpora. A real-time approach to the study of language change in progress
The paper draws data from four matching one-million word corpora, namely Brown (US, 1961), LOB (GB, 1961), Frown (US, 1992) and FLOB (GB, 1991), in order to provide an integrated description of synchronic (regional and stylistic) variation and short-term diachronic change in written Standard English. The analysis of a fairly large number of morphosyntactic variables shows that instances of direct structural change are rather rare in the period un…
Response to Davies and Fuchs
Commentary to: Davies, Mark, and Robert Fuchs. 2015. "Expanding horizons in the study of World Englishes with the 1.9 billion word Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE)". English World-Wide 36:1–28 (This issue). DOI:10.1075/eww.36.1.01dav
The World System of Englishes
Contact between and mutual influences among varieties of standard and non-standard English have always been a central concern in research on World Englishes. In a mobile and globalising world such contacts are by no means restricted to diffusion of features in face-to-face interaction, across contiguous territories in space or up and down the sociolinguistic scale. In order to better represent and understand the complex relationships obtaining be…
Change in Contemporary English
Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, often in unexpected and previously undocumented ways. The study is based on a group of matching corpora, known as the 'Brown family' of corpora, supplemented by a range of other corpus materials, both written and spoken, drawn mainly from the later twentieth century. Among the matters receivin…
Twentieth-Century English
Standard English has evolved and developed in many ways over the past hundred years. From pronunciation to vocabulary to grammar, this concise survey clearly documents the recent history of Standard English. Drawing on large amounts of authentic corpus data, it shows how we can track ongoing changes to the language, and demonstrates each of the major developments that have taken place. As well as taking insights from a vast body of literature, Ch…
Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English
The Politics of English as a World Language
The complex politics of English as a world language provides the backdrop both for linguistic studies of varieties of English around the world and for postcolonial literary criticism. The present volume offers contributions from linguists and literary scholars that explore this common ground in a spirit of open interdisciplinary dialogue. Leading authorities assess the state of the art to suggest directions for further research, with substantial …
Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies
The paper presents a comparison of tag frequencies in two matching one-million word reference corpora of British standard English, the 1961 LOB-corpus and its 1991 “clone” produced at Freiburg. Both corpora were tagged using a version of the CLAWS part-of-speech-tagger developed at Lancaster, and part of the material was post-edited manually in Freiburg to assess the accuracy of the automatic procedure. The comparison of tag frequencies is an ess…
Creolisms in an emerging standard
After showing that standardisation processes in spoken and written usage in Jamaica must be seen as distinct from each other, the paper focuses on the role of the creole substrate in the formation of the emergent written standard in Jamaica. The approach is corpus-based, using material from the Caribbean component of the International Corpus of English and, occasionally, from other digitised text data-bases. Jamaican Creole lexicon and grammar ar…
Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English
The article looks at three instances of grammatical variation in present-day standard English: the use of bare and to -infinitives with the verb help , the presence or absence of the preposition/complementizer from before - ing -complements depending on prevent , and the choice between - ing - and infinitival complements after the verbs begin and start . In all three instances, current British and American usage will be shown to differ, and these…
The World System of Englishes
Contact between and mutual influences among varieties of standard and non-standard English have always been a central concern in research on World Englishes. In a mobile and globalising world such contacts are by no means restricted to diffusion of features in face-to-face interaction, across contiguous territories in space or up and down the sociolinguistic scale. In order to better represent and understand the complex relationships obtaining be…
Agile" and "Uptight" Genres
This paper is a follow-up study to previous investigations based on the analysis of parallel British and American corpora from the early 1960s and 1990s. It focuses on variables that are suspected to contribute to the growing "colloquicdisation " of the norms of written English, that is, a narrowing of the gap between spoken and written norms. Such a shift in stylistic preferences has been observed in both socio-cultural approaches to language an…
Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English
The article looks at three instances of grammatical variation in present-day standard English: the use of bare and to -infinitives with the verb help , the presence or absence of the preposition/complementizer from before - ing -complements depending on prevent , and the choice between - ing - and infinitival complements after the verbs begin and start . In all three instances, current British and American usage will be shown to differ, and these…
Response to Davies and Fuchs
Commentary to: Davies, Mark, and Robert Fuchs. 2015. "Expanding horizons in the study of World Englishes with the 1.9 billion word Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE)". English World-Wide 36:1–28 (This issue). DOI:10.1075/eww.36.1.01dav
Creolisms in an emerging standard
After showing that standardisation processes in spoken and written usage in Jamaica must be seen as distinct from each other, the paper focuses on the role of the creole substrate in the formation of the emergent written standard in Jamaica. The approach is corpus-based, using material from the Caribbean component of the International Corpus of English and, occasionally, from other digitised text data-bases. Jamaican Creole lexicon and grammar ar…
Infinitival complement clauses in English. A study of syntax in discourse
English in Germany as a foreign language and as a lingua franca
The massive expansion of English in Germany over the past few decades has not challenged a robustly exonormative orientation, which still by and large recognises standardised British and American English as the most authentic and prestigious representations of the language. Attitudes to the use of English in the national context are diverse, ranging from enthusiastic embracement via grudging acceptance to active resistance. This diversity of opin…
Critical Discourse Analysis
Nigerian English as a Lingua Franca
This paper investigates the use of Nigerian English in lingua-franca interaction in Germany, focussing on the perspective of the German listener. Fifty-eight German-speaking respondents were asked to transcribe short extracts from English interviews recorded with Nigerian immigrants and sojourners resident in Germany. In addition to testing comprehension, respondents were requested to rate samples along parameters designed to measure speaker lika…
Brexitiness
The 2016 EU referendum has already left a lasting imprint on the English language. Building on previous research (e.g. Lalić-Krstin & Silaški 2018, Buckledee 2018), the present article integrates discourse-analytical and corpus-based methods to explore current developments and place them in the historical context of the past 70 years. Using the News on the Web (NoW) corpus, which covers the years from the run-up to the referendum to the present, …
Naipaul's Miguel Street and Selvon's Lonely Londoners- Two Approaches to the Use of Caribbean Creole in Fiction
Naipaul's Miguel Street and Selvon's Lonely Londoners- Two Approaches to the Use of Caribbean Creole in Fiction
Infinitival complement clauses in English. A study of syntax in discourse
Using Large Corpora
Introduction to the special issue on computational linguistics using large corpora, Kenneth W. Church and Robert L. Mercer generalized probabilistic LR parsing of natural language (corpora) with unification-based grammars, Ted Briscoe and John Carroll accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence, Ted Dunning a program for aligning sentences in bilingual corpora, William A. Gale and Kenneth W. Church structural ambiguity and lex…
Critical Discourse Analysis
Agile" and "Uptight" Genres
This paper is a follow-up study to previous investigations based on the analysis of parallel British and American corpora from the early 1960s and 1990s. It focuses on variables that are suspected to contribute to the growing "colloquicdisation " of the norms of written English, that is, a narrowing of the gap between spoken and written norms. Such a shift in stylistic preferences has been observed in both socio-cultural approaches to language an…
Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies
The paper presents a comparison of tag frequencies in two matching one-million word reference corpora of British standard English, the 1961 LOB-corpus and its 1991 “clone” produced at Freiburg. Both corpora were tagged using a version of the CLAWS part-of-speech-tagger developed at Lancaster, and part of the material was post-edited manually in Freiburg to assess the accuracy of the automatic procedure. The comparison of tag frequencies is an ess…
Creolisms in an emerging standard
After showing that standardisation processes in spoken and written usage in Jamaica must be seen as distinct from each other, the paper focuses on the role of the creole substrate in the formation of the emergent written standard in Jamaica. The approach is corpus-based, using material from the Caribbean component of the International Corpus of English and, occasionally, from other digitised text data-bases. Jamaican Creole lexicon and grammar ar…
Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern English
The article looks at three instances of grammatical variation in present-day standard English: the use of bare and to -infinitives with the verb help , the presence or absence of the preposition/complementizer from before - ing -complements depending on prevent , and the choice between - ing - and infinitival complements after the verbs begin and start . In all three instances, current British and American usage will be shown to differ, and these…
The Politics of English as a World Language
The complex politics of English as a world language provides the backdrop both for linguistic studies of varieties of English around the world and for postcolonial literary criticism. The present volume offers contributions from linguists and literary scholars that explore this common ground in a spirit of open interdisciplinary dialogue. Leading authorities assess the state of the art to suggest directions for further research, with substantial …
Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English
Twentieth-Century English
Standard English has evolved and developed in many ways over the past hundred years. From pronunciation to vocabulary to grammar, this concise survey clearly documents the recent history of Standard English. Drawing on large amounts of authentic corpus data, it shows how we can track ongoing changes to the language, and demonstrates each of the major developments that have taken place. As well as taking insights from a vast body of literature, Ch…
Change in Contemporary English
Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, often in unexpected and previously undocumented ways. The study is based on a group of matching corpora, known as the 'Brown family' of corpora, supplemented by a range of other corpus materials, both written and spoken, drawn mainly from the later twentieth century. Among the matters receivin…
The World System of Englishes
Contact between and mutual influences among varieties of standard and non-standard English have always been a central concern in research on World Englishes. In a mobile and globalising world such contacts are by no means restricted to diffusion of features in face-to-face interaction, across contiguous territories in space or up and down the sociolinguistic scale. In order to better represent and understand the complex relationships obtaining be…
Corpusurile paralele. O modalitate de cercetare în timp real a schimbării lingvistice în curs de realizare
Lucrarea valorifică date din patru corpusuri corespondente de cîte un milion de cuvinte, Brown (Engleză americană, 1961), LOB (Engleză britanică, 1961), Frown (Engleză americană, 1992) și FLOB (Engleză britanică, 1991) pentru a oferi o descriere integrată a variației sincronice (regionale și stilistice) și a schimbărilor diacronice pe termen scurt din engleza literară scrisă. Analiza unui număr relativ mare de variabile morfosintactice arată că s…
Parallel corpora. A real-time approach to the study of language change in progress
The paper draws data from four matching one-million word corpora, namely Brown (US, 1961), LOB (GB, 1961), Frown (US, 1992) and FLOB (GB, 1991), in order to provide an integrated description of synchronic (regional and stylistic) variation and short-term diachronic change in written Standard English. The analysis of a fairly large number of morphosyntactic variables shows that instances of direct structural change are rather rare in the period un…
Response to Davies and Fuchs
Commentary to: Davies, Mark, and Robert Fuchs. 2015. "Expanding horizons in the study of World Englishes with the 1.9 billion word Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE)". English World-Wide 36:1–28 (This issue). DOI:10.1075/eww.36.1.01dav
John H. McWhorter. 2018. The Creole Debate
Brexitiness
The 2016 EU referendum has already left a lasting imprint on the English language. Building on previous research (e.g. Lalić-Krstin & Silaški 2018, Buckledee 2018), the present article integrates discourse-analytical and corpus-based methods to explore current developments and place them in the historical context of the past 70 years. Using the News on the Web (NoW) corpus, which covers the years from the run-up to the referendum to the present, …
Brainfucked about Britain
In 2019, Sibylle Berg’s novel GRM Brainfuck was published to considerable acclaim. Berg, a German writer based in Switzerland, uses a contemporary British setting for a satirical speculation on the future of Western societies. The novel represents the UK as a social constellation that combines a tradition of class privilege with the worst excesses of global capitalism, technological surveillance, and mass manipulation. One force of resistance is …
Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English
Comparing early and current corpus-based work on ongoing grammatical change in English, the present study argues that progress tends to manifest itself in the more comprehensive and systematic coverage of changes known to be under way rather than in the discovery of genuinely new diachronic processes. As will be shown in two case studies on modal/semi-modal verbs and the progressive, there are three reasons for this. First, corpus research on ong…
Nigerian English in Germany
The study investigates language use and language attitudes among Nigerian immigrants in Germany, thus contributing to the study of World Englishes in mobility and migration. The data comprises ca. five hours of recorded interviews and is analysed both for the linguistic features it displays and the language attitudes expressed by interviewees. In the German environment, Nigerian Standard English has to be adapted to the needs of lingua‐franca int…
Migration, media, and the emergence of pidgin‐ and creole‐based informal epicentres
The paper makes a case for regarding Nigerian Pidgin (Naijá) and Jamaican Creole (Patois) as informal linguistic epicentres in the global English Language Complex. This requires a few modifications to current definitions of linguistic epicentres but leads to a sociolinguistically realistic and more comprehensive account of the profound influence that Jamaica and Nigeria have had on the development of Englishes in their regions and in the world at…
Nigerian English as a Lingua Franca
This paper investigates the use of Nigerian English in lingua-franca interaction in Germany, focussing on the perspective of the German listener. Fifty-eight German-speaking respondents were asked to transcribe short extracts from English interviews recorded with Nigerian immigrants and sojourners resident in Germany. In addition to testing comprehension, respondents were requested to rate samples along parameters designed to measure speaker lika…
Colloquialisation
Surveying a representative sample of studies of colloquialisation, a tendency for written norms to move closer to spoken usage, the chapter explores: the relationship between colloquialisation, operationalised in exclusively linguistic terms, and informalisation and democratisation, two processes primarily targeting wider sociocultural change, and complications arising when colloquialisation is extended beyond its original domain of application, …
English in Germany as a foreign language and as a lingua franca
The massive expansion of English in Germany over the past few decades has not challenged a robustly exonormative orientation, which still by and large recognises standardised British and American English as the most authentic and prestigious representations of the language. Attitudes to the use of English in the national context are diverse, ranging from enthusiastic embracement via grudging acceptance to active resistance. This diversity of opin…
Linguistics (22 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (20 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · History (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity (9 works) · Philosophy (7 works)