Exploring contemporary English(es) using the BSLVC database

Conveners:

Manfred Krug (University of Bamberg) manfred [dot] krug [at] uni-bamberg [dot] de

Lukas Sönning (University of Bamberg) lukas [dot] soenning [at] uni-bamberg [dot] de

Fabian Vetter (University of Bamberg) fabian [dot] vetter [at] uni-bamberg [dot] de

Description:

In the past two decades, corpora have become a (if not the) primary source of evidence for research on contemporary English(es) (see Palacios Martínez 2020; Kortmann 2021). This is particularly true for the World Englishes paradigm (see Lange and Leuckert 2020), which has profited immensely from the growing family of the International Corpus of English (Greenbaum & Nelson 1996) and the release of the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE; Davies 2013). Apart from this, the Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE; Kortmann et al. 2020) has proved an invaluable source of information for a bird’s-eye perspective on the regional distribution of a wide range of features. The envisioned workshop taps into a new source of empirical evidence on contemporary English(es): the Bamberg Survey of Language Variation and Change (BSLVC; Krug & Sell 2013). This eWAVE-inspired, large-scale questionnaire database documents the use of lexical and grammatical structures in varieties of English. The project was initiated in 2008 with a focus on Romance-English language contact (Malta, Gibraltar, Channel Islands), and its scope has since widened to other sites, including England, Wales, Scotland, Australia, Puerto Rico and the US, and to regions where English is spoken as a foreign language (i.e. EFL varieties, including Germany, Slovenia and Sweden).

The proposed thematic workshop anticipates and publicizes the release of the BSLVC, which is scheduled for mid-2027. The aim is to bring together scholars working on a diverse set of varieties to explore the potential of the database for research on language variation and change (see Schützler et al. 2025). Contributors to this thematic session will be given exclusive early access to (parts of) the BSLVC. We envisage 9 individual papers (with the option of an in-workshop poster session), which will present empirical studies on different contemporary varieties of English that draw (in part) on the BSLVC. The overarching goals of the workshop are twofold. The first is to sound out and scrutinize the potential of the database as a complementary line of evidence in World Englishes research. This includes an explicit discussion of its strength and weaknesses, as well as an appreciation of the opportunities it creates for methodological triangulation. The second goal is for the designers of the database to obtain pre-release feedback on various issues, including the user-friendliness of its documentation and online interface, data format and availability, and statistical aspects relating to the analysis of ordinal, Likert-type response variables (see Sönning 2024).

SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT 

For the Thematic Sessions, we invite proposals for individual papers consisting of a 20-minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of discussion. The abstracts should conform to the template found HERE.

References:
Davies, Mark. 2013. The Corpus of Global Web-Based English. https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/
Greenbaum, Sidney & Gerald Nelson. 1996. The International Corpus of English (ICE) Project. World Englishes 15(1). 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00088.x
Kortmann, Bernd. 2021. Reflecting on the quantitative turn in linguistics. Linguistics 59(5). 1207–1226. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0046
Kortmann, Bernd, Kerstin Lunkenheimer & Katharina Ehret (eds.). 2020. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/record/3712132
Krug, Manfred & Katrin Sell. 2013. Designing and conducting interviews and questionnaires. In Manfred Krug & Julia Schlüter (eds.), Research methods in language variation and change, 69–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511792519
Lange, Claudia & Sven Leuckert (eds.). 2020. Corpus linguistics for World Englishes: A guide for research (Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides). New York: Taylor and Francis. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429489433
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio M. 2020. Methods of data collection in English empirical linguistics research: Results of a recent survey. Language Sciences 78. 101263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2019.101263
Schützler, Ole, Lukas Sönning, Fabian Vetter & Manfred Krug. (in review). The morpho-syntax of Scottish Standard English: Questionnaire-based insights. Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5381956
Sönning, Lukas. 2024. Ordinal response scales: Psychometric grounding for design and analysis. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 3(3). 100156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rmal.2024.100156