Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

Crystal (2004, pp. 279–81, 291–3) identifies very broad correspondences between text types and adverb use in historical, geographical, scientific, and instructional writing, and in courtroom language, sports commentary, and public speaking. For instance, historical writing is characterized by the use of temporal and space (place) adverbs (events have a time and a place); instructions by process adverbs (how and with what is “x” to be done). In their extensive quantitative analysis of adverbial behavior, Biber et al. (1999) explore four registers: conversation, fiction, news, and academic writing. Hasselgård (2010, pp. 7–10, 259–85) additionally covers sports commentary and social letters. Both conclude that, overall, adverbs (adjuncts) are more common in commentary and fiction. However, generalizations are not easy. As Crystal (2004, p. 279) remarks: “[Adverbial] choice and distribution will be influenced primarily by the subject‐matter of the discourse.” Indeed, their recruitment may be compelling:

So terrified was he . . . of being caught, by chance, in a false statement, that as a small boy he acquired the habit of adding “ perhaps ” to everything he said. “Is that you, Harry?” Mama might call from the drawing‐room. “Yes, Mama— perhaps .” “Are you going upstairs?” “Yes, perhaps .” “Will you see if I've left my bag in the bedroom?” “Yes, Mama, perhaps — p'r'haps — paps !” [italics added] (Toulmin, 2003, p. 41)

SEE ALSO:Formulaic Language and Collocation; Pragmatic Markers

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2 Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow, England: Pearson.

3 Crystal, D. (1980). Neglected grammatical factors in conversational English. In S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, & J. Svartvik (Eds.), Studies in English linguistics for Randolph Quirk (pp. 153–66). London, England: Longman.

4 Crystal, D. (2004). Making sense of grammar. London, England: Longman.

5 Crystal, D. (2008). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (6th ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell.

6 D'Agostino, R. (2009). The meaning of life: Wisdom, humor, and damn good advice from 64 extraordinary lives. London, England: Hearst UK.

7 Davies, M. (2004). BYU‐BNC: British National Corpus. Retrieved March 22, 2019 from https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

8 Davies, M. (2018). The 14 Billion Word iWeb Corpus. Retrieved March 22, 2019 from https://corpus.byu.edu/iWeb/

9 Furst, A. (2010). Spies of the Balkans. London, England: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

10 Goldberg, A., & Ackerman, F. (2001). The pragmatics of obligatory adjuncts. Language, 77(4), 798–814.

11 Hasselgård, H. (2010). Adjunct adverbials in English. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

12 Hemingway, E. (1952). The old man and the sea. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons.

13 Hori, M. (2002). Collocational patterns of ‐ly manner adverbs in Dickens. In T. Saito, J. Nakamura, & S. Yamazaki (Eds.), English corpus linguistics in Japan (Special issue). Language and Computers, 38, 148–63.

14 Hoye, L. (1997). Adverbs and modality in English. London, England: Longman.

15 Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. (2002). Adjectives and adverbs. In R. Huddleston & G. Pullum (Eds.), The Cambridge grammar of the English language (pp. 525–95). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

16 James, H. (1920). The letters of Henry James selected and edited by Percy Lubbock (Vol. 2). New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons. Retrieved March 22, 2019 from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38035/38035.txt

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20 Simon‐Vandenbergen, A.‐M., & Aijmer, K. (2007). The semantic field of modal certainty: A corpus based study of English adverbs. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.

21 Toulmin, S. E. (2003). The uses of argument (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

22 Twain, M. (1880). Reply to a Boston girl. The Atlantic Monthly, XLV, 850–1.

1 Aijmer, K. (2018). “That's well bad”: Some new intensifiers in spoken British English. In V. Brezina, R. Love, & K. Aijmer (Eds.), Corpus approaches to contemporary British speech: Sociolinguistic studies of the spoken BNC2014 (chap. 6). Abingdon, England: Taylor & Francis.

2 Hoye, L. F. (2012). Adverbs. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley‐Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0009

3 Simon‐Vandenbergen, A.‐M. (2013). REALITY and related concepts: Towards a semantic‐pragmatic map of English adverbs. In J. Marín‐Arrese, M. Carretero, J. Arús Hita, & J. van der Auwera (Eds.), English modality: Core, periphery and evidentiality (pp. 253–80). Topics in English linguistics, 81. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton.

NKONKO M. KAMWANGAMALU

The year 2010 marked a milestone for the majority of African nations, as most of them celebrated the 50th anniversary of political independence and liberation from former Western colonial powers. However, as Fishman (1996, p. 5) remarks, “although the lowering of one flag and the raising of another may indicate the end of colonial status, these acts do not necessarily indicate the end of imperialist privilege in neo‐colonial disguise.” In Africa, imperialist privilege is on display especially through former colonial languages such as English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, for they remain the chief if not exclusive medium through which African nations conduct official business in virtually all the institutions of the state, including the government and administration, the educational system, and the media. In this regard, Popham (1996) notes forcefully that while the engine of colonialism long ago ran out of steam the momentum of its languages remains formidable, and it is against their tyranny that smaller languages fight to survive. Colonialism, says London (2003), is a state of mind in colonizer and colonized alike. It does not end when the colonists go home. Instead, it remains an unfinished business and a footprint, impacting as it does all aspects of a postcolonial polity's life, including language policy.

This entry reviews the language policy statements that the African continent has made, through its institutions such as the African Union, to change the status quo and carve a place for indigenous African languages, especially in the educational system. This is done against the background of the ideologies that have informed language policies in Africa from the colonial era to the present, especially the ideology of development on the one hand, and the ideology of decolonization on the other. It argues that Africa's language policy statements remain symbolic at best, and that their only merit lies in the fact that they have helped to keep the debate on language policy in Africa alive. It argues further that language policy makers need to do more than merely make policy statements if Africa's indigenous languages are to break through and become free from the shackles of neocolonialism and former colonial languages. The entry concludes with suggestions as to how the breakthrough can be achieved, drawing on previous work on the role of African languages vis‐à‐vis former colonial languages in the educational system (Kamwangamalu, 1997, 2004, 2016).