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Part of
Earlier North American Englishes
Edited by Merja Kytö and Lucia Siebers
[Varieties of English Around the World G66] 2022
► pp. 149–182

Enregisterment processes of American English in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers

| University of Kiel

The question of when and how American English emerged as a distinct variety of English has recently been addressed again within more general discussions of the emergence and evolution of new varieties of English (Schneider 2007; Kretzschmar 2014, 2015). I argue in this chapter that these discussions would benefit from a clear and consistent differentiation between the emergence of varieties as discourse constructs (‘discursive varieties’) and as distinct structural systems (‘structural varieties’). I propose using the theoretical framework of ‘enregisterment’ (Agha 2003, 2007) to investigate the discursive dimension and I show how enregisterment processes can be studied systematically by providing a case study of metadiscursive activities linking five linguistic forms to stereotypic indexical values in nineteenth-century U.S. newspaper articles.

Keywords: emergence of American English, enregisterment, indexicality, discursive variety, nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Enregisterment as a theoretical framework for studying the emergence of American English
  • 3.Aims and methodology
    • 3.1Nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers as a source for enregisterment processes
    • 3.2Linguistic forms, search terms and databases
    • 3.3Research questions and methodological approach
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Frequency and temporal and regional distribution of articles
    • 4.2The establishment and transmission of indexical links
      • 4.2.1/h/-dropping and ‑insertion
      • 4.2.2 bath-vowel, non-rhoticity, /r/-realization and twousers
    • 4.3Frequency of articles linking forms to social personae and characterological figures
  • 5.Interpretation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g66.07pau
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