In this study, we present the results of the investigation of diachronic stylistic changes in 20th century religious texts in two major English language varieties – British and American. We examined a total of 146 stylistic features, divided into three main feature sets: (average sentence length, Automated readability index, lexical density and lexical richness), part-of-speech frequencies and ...

Cricket has been historically significant in defining notions of English national identity and continues to feature in debates over the inclusion/exclusion of immigrants in British society. British-African-Caribbean players are well represented in the English game but participation appears mediated by ethnic group membership. This contemporary pattern can only be understood when contextualized ...

This article investigates the acoustic and articulatory correlates of vowel contrasts in bilingual speakers. We analyse data from bilingual speakers of Twi (Akan) and Ghanaian English, with the aim of examining how the production of the advanced tongue root vowel contrast in Twi relates to the production of the tense/lax vowel contrast in Ghanaian English. These data are compared to tense/lax v...

This paper investigates some of the phonetic characteristics of the High Rising Terminal (HRT), a major intonational innovation now attested in numerous dialects of English worldwide. Based on a corpus containing recordings of different geographical varieties of contemporary English, it presents an inventory of the intonation patterns used to realize the HRT. It also suggests that late rising c...

One of the fundamental aims of prosodic analysis is to provide a reliable means of extracting functional information (what prosody contributes to meaning) directly from prosodic form (i.e. what prosody is – in this case intonation). This paper addresses the development of an automatic functional annotation system for British English. It is based on the study of a large corpus of British English...

There are several possible situations in which perpetrators might want to disguise their voices in order to avoid identification and to deflect the search for them to another person or group of individuals. One possible manner that can be used for voice disguise is the adoption of another accent. This paper examines the mimicking of the British-English Swedish accent, that is mimicking of the S...

Standard or prestige accents (e.g., southern British RP, General American) are highly intelligible to a range of native speakers, which may be caused by listener experience (e.g., the accents are frequently heard in the media). The present study investigated the role of experience by testing Mandarin speakers with intermediate English proficiency in terms of their speech-in-noise recognition fo...

This study from the area of language variation and change is based on exploitation of the comparable diachronic and synchronic corpora of 20th century British and American English language (the ‘Brown family’ of corpora). We investigate recent changes of lexical density and lexical richness in two consecutive thirty-year time gaps in British English (1931–1961 and 1961–1991) and in 1961–1992 in...