Authors
Costas Gabrielatos, Eivind Nessa Torgersen, Sebastian Hoffmann, Susan Fox
Publication date
2010
Journal
Journal of English Linguistics
Volume
38
Issue
4
Pages
297-334
Publisher
Sage Publications
Description
This article reports on work carried out as part of the project Analysis of Spoken London English Using Corpus Tools, namely, an analysis of the use of indefinite article forms in spoken London English in a corpus of transcribed interviews, combining methodologies from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.The authors find a relatively high frequency of a before words beginning with a vowel, where Standard English will have an. Social factors, in particular speakers’ age, ethnicity, and place of residence, are more important than linguistic factors affecting the use of a before vowels. The authors argue that the indefinite article a before vowels forms part of Multicultural London English, along with other phonological and grammatical features that have previously been documented. The indefinite article a before vowels seems to have undergone a process of reallocation in which its status has been realigned, possibly …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
C Gabrielatos, EN Torgersen, S Hoffmann, S Fox - Journal of English Linguistics, 2010