Things move slowly in academia. We first started working on this research project in the summer of 2011. Now, finally, almost exactly three years later, we have a publication out! Many thanks to the assistants and especially to the native speakers of Finnish who participated in the study — all 417 of them!

https://www.academia.edu/7659433/Kiitos_and_pliis_the_relationship_of_native_and_borrowed_politeness_markers_in_Finnish

Contact me if you are interested in participating! Abstract deadline is 15 October 2014. The conference is 26-31 July 2015 in Antwerp, Belgium.

Here is the panel proposal:
Linguistic and pragmatic outcomes of contact with English as foreign language

Much of the work on language contact and change has dealt with populations that came to simultaneously share the same environs – due to migration, exploitation, conquest, or other forms of human mobility. Although contact with a non-native language is not unprecedented (note the lexification in certain domains of English from Latin and Greek, for example), the widespread use of English as a lingua franca and foreign language creates ample opportunities for contact with other languages in the current era. In this panel we focus on the widely-reported influence of English. We do not specifically discuss other languages, though the same approach could well be adapted to other languages in future research.

Given its status, it is hardly surprising that English would serve as a lexifier in certain domains: international trade, diplomacy, tourism and travelling, media, information technology, and academia, to name a few. A robust collection of work attests to the incorporation of English terminology within these domains in many of the world’s languages (Hoffman 2011; see also Leppänen and Nikula 2007).

What remains less vigorously studied is the incorporation of non-native elements that are not domain specific. These elements include, for example, in Finnish discourse the use of about as a preposition and the use of jees ‘yes’ as an adjective. Other examples of languages incorporating English elements include expletives, discourse markers such as like and anyway, or politeness particles such as please. An interesting point about many of these features is the pragmatic function they carry and how this is carried over into the receiving language.

With this panel, we propose to investigate more fully the dynamics of language contact with English, a non-native language widely used around the world. In doing so, a particular aim is to focus on non-domain specific elements, especially those that contribute to the pragmatic and social order of a language. This could mean exploring data from any native context and from any variety of sources, including on-line, spoken, or metalingustic data. We also explore theoretical questions concerning contact with English, including transmission of and motivation for borrowing, social meanings, indexicality, and possible grammatical influence.