Abstract This study examines the use of English grammatical elements in fashion magazines targeting young women published in Japan. A total of 48 tables of contents from three different magazine series were analysed using a list of categories created on the basis of pre‑analysis. These categories include the following: functional words (prepositions, auxiliaries, conjunctions and pronouns), determiners (articles, possessive apostrophe ‑’s and pronouns), inflectional attachments (the plural morpheme ‑s and third‑person singular present morpheme ‑s ), and complete sentences. The analysis also found locally constructed forms that comprise an extra plural s , such as gaaruzuguruupu ‘girls group’, in addition to all the listed items. Additionally, the analysis observed approximations to the English system through the attachment of inflectional morphemes and the non‑attachment of Japanese adjective morphemes (e.g. HAPPY NEW ME 1 ). This voluntary incorporation of morphosyntactic elements from English, despite the absence of any linguistic obligation in Japanese, is characteristic of this expanding‑circle context. The nativised forms comprising the distinctive use of s (e.g. gaaruzuguruupu ‘girls group’) indicate more than simple lexical borrowing, as they emerged from the systematic application of an L2 grammar rule. This not only indicates highly advanced code‑mixing but also morphosyntactic transfer from English to Japanese. People’s orientations towards hybrid mixes, exposure to external equivalents, negotiation between exnormative and endonormative forms upon use, actual usages and the subsequent processes of nativisation/stabilisation could be interrelated and require further research.
Drawing data from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and employing 14 quantitative syntactic complexity metrics, this study investigates the relationships between British English (BrE), Canadian English (CanE), American English (AmE), Northern Ireland English (IreNE), Southern Ireland English (IreSE), Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE). The study found that: 1) Compared with BrE, the other six varieties demonstrate a measurable trend towards structural simplification, primarily characterized by a lower proportion of subordinate clauses (DC/T, DC/C, CT/T, C/T), fewer verb and complex noun phrases (VP/T, CN/T), shorter mean length of sentence and T-unit (MLS, MLT), and simpler sentence structure (C/S). Meanwhile, they exhibit complexification features in coordination structures (CP/C, T/S) and clause length (MLC). 2) CanE, AmE, IreNE, IreSE, AusE and NZE show similar syntactic complexity patterns, which differ from BrE. Language history and language contact resulting from population mobility are important factors influencing CanE, AmE, IreNE, IreSE, AusE and NZE to present more similar syntactic complexity patterns. The insight provided by this study is that although these English varieties all belong to the Inner Circle in Kachru's Three Circles Model, they still show differences in syntactic complexity. This finding once again shows that language is a human-driven complex adaptive system.
Abstract Research has shown that when ‘xxx English’ is used in reference to an English variety, the attribute ‘xxx’ is more likely to be an adjective than a noun. This is true of traditional ENL and ESL varieties, whose speakers can legitimately claim that ‘English is our language’. EFL varieties tend to follow the same trend, with ‘China English’ being a glaring exception to date. Corpus analysis shows that the pre-head attribute of a noun phrase may be filled by a noun (e.g., Belgium, Canada) or an adjective derived from it (e.g., Belgian, Canadian). A pre-head nominal attribute expresses the meaning ‘a type of’ (e.g., ‘communication skill’, ‘generation gap’), while a pre-head adjective signals either a quality (e.g., ‘smart city’ – with quality of being smart) or membership of a class (e.g., ‘smart card’, distinct from other cards). A pre-head nominal attribute and its adjectival counterpart signaling ‘class membership’ thus share a classificatory function. This helps explain stylistic variation such as free alternation between ‘Scottish flag’ and ‘Scotland flag’ in the same text; nor is there anything unusual using names of countries in sports reporting (e.g., ‘Brazil national football team’). But such a stylistic shift is semantically nuanced and not always licensed (consider, e.g., ‘Ukrainian security’ and ‘Ukraine war’, where the pre-head attributes ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘Ukraine’ are not interchangeable). The adjectival form of a toponym is usually longer in speech and writing than the toponym itself. Apparently, phonology matters when naming an English variety, witness the rarity of ‘Guamanian English’ and ‘Peruvian English’.
