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Part of
New Approaches to English Linguistics: Building bridges
Edited by Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja and Sarah Chevalier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 177] 2016
► pp. 13–33

Accommodation, dialect contact and grammatical variation

Verbs of obligation in the Anglophone community in Japan

| University of Kitakyushu
| University of Bern
The present study investigates dialect contact and linguistic accommodation in the use of verbs expressing obligation (such as MUST, HAVE GOT TO, HAVE TO and GOT TO) among native speakers of English resident in Japan, using a social network approach. Approximately 500 tokens were extracted from conversations between 39 native speakers of English from England, the US and New Zealand, recorded in single-nationality dyads, both immediately upon arrival in Japan and after a period of one year. Statistical analysis revealed that the informants from England actually diverged from the forms typically used by the Americans. The results, however, demonstrate the importance of social network strength in accounting for the consequences of dialect contact and short to medium-term linguistic accommodation.
Keywords: dialect contact, linguistic accommodation, social network approach, verbs of obligation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Accommodation and contact
  • 2.Aims of the study
  • 3.The Anglophone community in Japan
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Informants and data
    • 4.2Tokens and analysis
    • 4.3Social networks
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Overall distribution of variants of verbs of obligation
    • 5.2Linguistic constraint analysis: Types of obligation
    • 5.3Impact of the speaker’s social networks on variation
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.177.02hir
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