Complutense Journal of English Studies

Victoria Guillén-Nieto (2024). The Language of Harassment: Pragmatic Perspectives on Language as Evidence. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield. 147 pp. ISBN 9781793619075 (cloth), 9781793619082 (ebook).

2026-02-23T09:32:15+00:00

Bineolingual upbringing or bilingual upbringing in non-native families: linguistic habits and strategies

2026-03-16T09:41:35+00:00

The knowledge of additional languages is a desirable value nowadays. Raising a bilingual child yields numerous advantages (Baker, 2014; Bialystok, 2001; Romaine, 1995). In order to help their children acquire and learn a foreign language (FL), mainly English, most parents decide to raise their children in a FL that is also foreign to them and that is not the language of the community. However, strategies and linguistic practices in BiNeoLingual (BNL) Upbringing (or bilingual upbringing by non-native parents) have not yet been studied using a statistically significant sample size to draw generalizable conclusions. There is a need to adequately portray and analyse this emerging sociolinguistic phenomenon (Lozano-Martínez 2019). In this quantitative study, through a simple random sampling, 571 families out of the 2010 that participated in a questionnaire were identified as using English as a FL with their children. Nevertheless, “family linguistic planning is crucial to children’s linguistic development” (Lozano-Martínez 2019, 235). Dealing with strategies, One Parent-One Language (OPOL) is the most well-known but, according to the results, OPOL is not the most followed strategy by BNL families. Statistical tests also show that strategies depend on different factors and are often mixed in the BNL family.

Assertiveness and Crisis Communication: A Multidimensional Analysis of English Varieties during COVID-19

2026-03-09T08:24:34+00:00

This paper investigates the linguistic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on different varieties of English, focusing on assertive and non-assertive linguistic markers in crisis communication. Motivated by the convergence of socio-cultural shifts and linguistic change, the study explores variations across Inner Circle (GB, US, NZ) and Outer Circle (SG, ZA) varieties within the Coronavirus Corpus (Davies 2019-). The central hypothesis posits an increased use of assertive markers and decreased use of non-assertive markers during crises. Such markers are taken from Biber’s (1988) multidimensional analysis, specifically from Dimension 4 and Factor 7. Thus, analyzing suasive verbs, conditional subordination, necessity modals, hedging strategies, downtoners, and concessive subordination, the findings reveal distinct patterns influenced by the timing and intensity of COVID-19 waves and the socio-political measures adopted. The results challenge the conventional Inner and Outer Circle dichotomy, emphasizing localized strategies in crisis communication over geographical distinctions, and they also confirm the validity of Biber’s multidimensional analysis nearly 40 years after its publication.