ENG39579 5

ENG39110.1177/0075424210395795Curzan and QueenJournal of English Linguistics

Editorial

Editors Note
Anne Curzan and Robin Queen

Journal of English Linguistics 39(1) 3 2011 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0075424210395795 http://jengl.sagepub.com

The three articles in this issue bring together different approaches to explore issues of pragmatics and language change. We find that all three papers provide particular methodological insights into new ways of approaching questions related to aspects of pragmatics, including views that incorporate different corpus-based methods on the one hand and the careful analysis of grammaticalization and conventionalization on the other. In the first paper of the issue, The Expression of Negation in British Teenagers Language: A Preliminary Study, Ignacio Palacios Martnez examines negative polarity as produced by teenagers included in the COLT corpus. The paper shows that teenagers differ from adults in ways linked to pragmatic differences and to innovation. Teenagers are more likely both to use negative elements in their utterances and to use innovative forms of negation. Palacios Martnez argues that these differences may be linked to both language play and particular developmental and societal variables. In The Meaning of Utterance-Final Even, Min-Joo Kim and Nathan Jahnke explore the changing implicatures associated with the occurrence of even after rather than before the focal element. They show that such cases of even differ semantically and pragmatically from even when it occurs before the focal element and suggest that these differences are linked to one another, with final even deriving its newer meanings from initial even precisely because of the scalar meanings already embedded in initial even. The article offers a new approach to applying theories of grammaticalization and conventionalization to more traditional modes of semantic analysis. In the final essay of the issue, Paul Baker also explores new modes of analyzing data involved in language change and focuses particularly on methods for investigating language change within large linguistic corpora. In his article, Times May Change, but We Will Always Have Money: Diachronic Variation in Recent British English, Baker provides new analytic tools for considering patterns of lexical change. In particular, he shows that concordance and collocational analysis provide robust mechanisms of inductive analysis. Further, the article demonstrates how high-frequency lexical items offer an on-going, dynamic snapshot of language variation and change. Our recent In the Profession columns have focused on reflections by linguists who left academia to work in various related areas, such as freelance writing and professional lexicography. In this issues column, Colleen Cotter gives us a view from the opposite vantage, namely that of a journalist who leaves journalism to pursue the career of an academic linguist. In relating her personal journey, she provides important advice for making such large transitions.