Birkbeck at NWAV 43, Chicago 23-26 October 2014
Professor Penelope Gardner-Chloros presents at NWAV 43.
On 23-26 October, the annual NWAV (New Ways of Analysing Variation) conference was held in the Hilton Suites hotel on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago. The hotel, from which the photograph was taken, is situated very near Lake Michigan, which, at 307 miles long and 118 miles wide, is more like a sea than a lake by European standards. This conference, which has been running for 43 years, this year included a session celebrating the retirement of the originator of modern sociolinguistics, William Labov. In the late 60s and early 70s Labov was the first to apply scientific sampling methods to the study of language in use in New York City, and his methods have been followed and developed ever since.
Professor Penelope Gardner-Chloros, of the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, with her co-investigator Professor Jenny Cheshire of QMUL, presented a paper resulting from a 4 year ESRC project comparing young people's language in London and Paris. This paper focused on the use of the so-called 'new quotatives' in English and French (in English, examples would includes expressions such as 'I was like, 'Go away man!' Or the more recent London variation : 'This is me: 'Go away man!'). Equivalent ways of introducing reported speech have been found in the last decade or so in numerous languages round the world.
Click for more details and the full programme.