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  - 
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  - 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  - 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  -