TY - JOUR A1 - Coetzee-Van Rooy, Susan A1 - Peters, Arne T1 - A portrait-corpus study of language attitudes towards Afrikaans and English JF - Language matters : studies in the languages of Africa N2 - Language portraits are useful instruments to elicit speakers' reflections on the languages in their repertoires. In this study, we implement a "portrait-corpus approach" (Peters and Coetzee-Van Rooy 2020) to investigate the conceptualisations of the languages Afrikaans and English in 105 language portraits. In this approach, we use participants' reflections about their placement of the two languages on a human silhouette as a linguistic corpus. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analyses using WordSmith, Statistica and Atlas.ti, our study shows that Afrikaans is mainly conceptualised as a language that is located in more peripheral areas of the body (for example, the hands and feet) and, hence, is perceived as less important in participants' repertoires. The central location of English in the head reveals its status as an important language in the participants' multilingual repertoires. We argue that these conceptualisations of Afrikaans and English provide additional insight into the attitudes towards these languages in South Africa. KW - language attitudes KW - language portraits KW - portrait-corpus approach KW - multilingualism KW - South Africa KW - Afrikaans KW - English Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10228195.2021.1942167 SN - 1022-8195 SN - 1753-5395 VL - 52 IS - 2 SP - 3 EP - 28 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Peters, Arne A1 - Coetzee-Van Rooy, Susan T1 - Exploring the interplay of language and body in South African youth BT - a portrait-corpus study JF - Cognitive linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of cognitive science N2 - Elicitation materials like language portraits are useful to investigate people's perceptions about the languages that they know. This study uses portraits to analyse the underlying conceptualisations people exhibit when reflecting on their language repertoires. Conceptualisations as manifestations of cultural cognition are the purview of cognitive sociolinguistics. The present study advances portrait methodology as it analyses data from structured language portraits of 105 South African youth as a linguistic corpus from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. The approach enables the uncovering of (a) prominent underlying conceptualisations of African language(s) and the body, and (b) the differences and similarities of these conceptualisations vis-a-vis previous cognitive (socio) linguistic studies of embodied language experiences. In our analysis, African home languages emerged both as 'languages of the heart' linked to cultural identity and as 'languages of the head' linked to cognitive strength and control. Moreover, the notion of 'degrees of proficiency' or 'magnitude' of language knowledge emerged more prominently than in previous studies of embodied language experience. KW - language portraits KW - embodiment KW - corpus linguistics KW - cognitive KW - sociolinguistics KW - cultural conceptualisations Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2019-0101 SN - 0936-5907 SN - 1613-3641 SN - 1861-048X VL - 31 IS - 4 SP - 579 EP - 608 PB - Mouton de Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - THES A1 - Peters, Arne T1 - Linguistic Change in Galway City English BT - A Variationist Sociolinguistic Study of (th) and (dh) in Urban Western Irish English T2 - Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft / Duisburg Papers on Research in Language and Culture ; 116 N2 - This volume is a novel approach to the corpus-based variationist sociolinguistic study of contemporary urban western Irish English. Based on qualitative data as well as on linguistic features extracted from the Corpus of Galway City Spoken English, this study approaches the major sociolinguistic characteristics of (th) and (dh) variability in Galway City English. It demonstrates the diverse local patterns of variability and change in the phonetic realisation of the dental fricatives and establishes a considerable degree of divergence from traditional accounts on Irish English. This volume suggests that the linguistic stratification of variants of (th) and (dh) in Galway correlates both with the social stratification of the city itself and with the stratification of speakers by social status, sex/gender and age group. Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-3-631-67178-8 PB - Lang CY - Frankfurt am Main ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Peters, Arne T1 - Linguistic change in Galway City English : a study of phonological features in the district of Bóthar Mór Y1 - 2012 SN - 978-90-272-4904-3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Peters, Arne A1 - van Hattum, Marije T1 - Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices JF - English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English N2 - This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener's identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted. KW - pseudonyms KW - threatening communication KW - Irish English KW - persona KW - construction KW - sociocultural cognition KW - context-specificity KW - post-positioned semantic frame setters Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00059.pet SN - 0172-8865 SN - 1569-9730 VL - 42 IS - 1 SP - 29 EP - 53 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER -