Technologies are beginning to blend our experience of digital and physical realities. We exchange data (images, videos, messages, etc.), present ourselves to the rest of the world on social media, network, and even perform a larger number of tasks than in person. As our world and ways of life keep on changing, so do words. The aim of this article is to examine the coinage of blends (i.e. smog-type [<smoke + fog] words) as a response to the blended realities that have emerged from the use of new technologies.

An abstract is a brief summary of a research paper, review or conference proceeding, which can be considered as a sub-register of academic writing and is often used to help readers quickly ascertain the paper's purpose, thesis, main results and conclusions. With the development of international academic communication, English abstracts play an increasingly vital role in international publishing and academic papers, being the basis for international academic citation indexes. UNESCO prescribes that all published scientific articles, no matter in which language, require a succinct English abstract. Most literature database search engines, such as the EI index, only display abstracts rather than providing the full text of the paper. Since an unsuccessful English abstract would be detrimental to the whole paper as well as to the general quality of the journal, no academic authors would want to lower their guard. In this context, the study of linguistic features of academic abstracts has attracted more and more attention of EAP scholars. The studies on English abstracts in China mainly focus on the writing paradigm as well as such linguistic features as stylistics, textual coherence, grammatical patterns, tense, voice and usage of prepositions (Xiong, 2002; Li et al, 2004; Wang, 2005; Fan, 2006; Li, 2008; He & Cao, 2010).

The beginning of this new century has witnessed two important events in English language education in China. The first is the expansion of English language education into the primary curriculum. In 2001, the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) required that primary schools located in cities and county seats start to offer English classes at Primary 3 from the autumn of 2001 and that the rest start to do so in the following year (MOE, 2001). The second is the increase of enrolment in various types of Chinese colleges and universities. For example, in 1999 the number of students enrolled in Chinese higher education was six million, but it rose to over 20 million in 2004 (Jin & Cortazzi, 2006). Such a rapid development of English language education has resulted in a number of difficulties and challenges for EFL teaching in China, but the most serious constraint comes from the lack of qualified teachers (Rao, 2010). To compensate for the shortage of English teachers, many Chinese schools are endeavoring to attract more native-English-speaking teachers (henceforth NESTs) to fill up EFL teaching vacancies. In 2006, for example, there were 150,000 foreign EFL teachers working in China (Jeon & Lee, 2006).

The word however is an adverb and an adverb alone. The current online Oxford (Oxford English Dictionary Online, n.d.) and Cambridge (Cambridge English Dictionary Online, n.d. a) English dictionaries both have it listed solely as an adverb for British English. At the risk of awakening yet another descriptivist versus prescriptivist war, it must however be acknowledged that however is often used as a conjunction. This can, and frequently does, lead to confusion though, as the reader has to read on before realising that in fact that however was actually being used as a conjunction (or ‘connective’ in modern grammatical parlance). ‘However the cat walked down the street …’ surely has the reader thinking something along the lines of ‘In whatever manner the cat walked down the street …’ But a typical case of what I shall in this article call conjunctive howeveritis would reveal a complete (well, incomplete actually) sentence along the lines of, ‘However the cat walked down the street, even though it rarely ventured from the house.’ Not only are we now left with a sentence fragment, but in such an instance the reader would have to backtrack and subsequently assume the However was in fact being used as a coordinating conjunction. To me this is inefficient and an enemy of lucid writing. The Cambridge English Dictionary raises the warning flag high with the following example (Cambridge English Dictionary Online, n.d. b):

Warning:
We can't use however as a conjunction instead of but to connect words and phrases:
My teacher is very nice but a bit strict.
Not:
My teacher is very nice however a bit strict.

The term Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has been widely used since the 1990s to refer to a wide range of computer technology that facilitates human communication through the Internet, and applied linguists are increasingly concerning themselves with the influence of computer networks on language use (Crystal, 2006; Hassan & Hashim, 2009; Lewin & Donner, 2002). In the English as a foreign language (EFL) context, text-based CMC has been widely adopted as a learning tool as it provides learners with authentic input, as well as opportunities to communicate with native speakers of English and to participate in the target social and cultural contexts (Liaw & Master, 2010; Lin, 2015; Sasaki, 2010).

The ubiquitous spread of English is vividly observed in local linguistic landscapes and urban spaces around the world, and Turkey is no exception. Emerging as a bona fide line of inquiry at the nexus of sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology, geography and media studies (Sebba, 2010), linguistic landscaping examines the dynamic relationship of English vis-à-vis the local languages, and documents, analyzes and interprets the attributes, patterns, characteristics, meanings and the creative uses of English in such domains as advertising (Kelly-Holmes, 2005; Vettorel, 2013) and shop signs (MacGregor, 2003; Ong, Ghesquière & Serwe, 2013; Schlick, 2002). These studies provide contextualized accounts of language contact situated in local sociolinguistic contexts and contribute to the representation of reflections from various parts of the world (e.g. see Backhaus (2007) and MacGregor (2003) for Japan; McArthur (2000) for Switzerland and Sweden; Griffin (2004) and Ross (1997) for Italy; Schlick (2002) for Austria, Italy and Slovenia; Dimova (2007) for Macedonia; Hasanova (2010) for Uzbekistan; Ong, Ghesquière & Serwe (2013) for Singapore; El-Yasin & Mahadin (1996) for Jordan; Wang (2013) for China; Ben Said (2010) for Tunisia; Schlick (2003) for Slovenia, Austria, Italy, and the UK; Stewart & Fawcett (2004) for Portugal; Thonus (1991) for Brazil; and Baumgardner (2006) for Mexico).

In contrast to the stereotypical overuse of /v/ in English by German speakers, as in ve vill vait (‘we will wait’), the reverse pattern, wisiting Wienna (‘visiting Vienna’), is the more commonly encountered feature among younger, more experienced and more proficient speakers of English. In simple terms, /w/ for /v/ usage (henceforth: w for v) can be understood as the result of overgeneralization and hypercorrection. That is, the ‘English sound’ /w/ is successfully acquired but used beyond its standard scope, replacing /v/ in syllable-initial position. Thus, the contrast in pairs such as vary/wary, vine/wine and vicar/wicker is neutralized, with both <w> and <v> realized as /w/. Instances of overgeneralization and hypercorrection are, unsurprisingly, also found in other areas of German speakers' English. Most such instances tend to be dynamic and subject to change as proficiency increases. W for v, however, is a firmly established feature that, in light of its frequency and distribution, has arguably attained ‘preferred’ sociolinguistic status, i.e. as a marker of (assumed) English competence.

Probably my favourite study of American/British linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson's (2002) paper on no. The research was inspired by a Dutch colleague's suggestion that no can be used as an acknowledgement token for a negative statement – that is, no can be used instead of ‘positive’ indicators like mm-hmm or yeah to indicate that the listener has heard and understood a negative sentence like I didn't see her. Jefferson's first response to this suggestion was: but English no can't be an emotionally neutral acknowledgement token. And it turned out that she was right – but only for (her native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87% of the tokens in response to negative statements were negative (usually no). In the American data, that number was 27%. Americans use negative response tokens less because for them a no response signals not just acknowledgement (‘I received your message and understood it’), but affiliation – communicating ‘I'd do the same thing’ or ‘I'm with you on that’. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commit themselves less often than they simply acknowledge what's been said. Here's a slightly simplified version of an example from Jefferson's British data.

One of the things we discovered in the course of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project is that usage guides are predominantly produced by non-specialists. There are linguists, too, who wrote usage guides – David Crystal, for instance, Pam Peters and most recently Stephen Pinker – but authors are very often journalists and novelists. Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), whose The King's English was published posthumously in 1997, is a good example, and so is Rebecca Gowers, who revised and updated her great-grandfather's Plain Words in 2014. Examples of journalists-turned-usage-guide-writers are Simon Heffer (Strictly English, 2010) and Oliver Kamm (Accidence Will Happen, 2015). Writing is their job, so it is not surprising that novelists and journalists are drawn to language prescription as well. They may not be linguists in the strict sense, but they should be considered language specialists all the same.

One of the major achievements of Braj Kachru's (1991) ‘liberation linguistics’ is that it has squarely placed Outer Circle varieties such as Indian English, Nigerian English and Singaporean English on a par with Inner Circle varieties such as American English and British English – in the face of negative attitudes, ranging ‘from amused condescension to racist stereotyping’ (Bruthiaux, 2003: 160). Following in Kachru's footsteps, many scholars have demonstrated that these Outer Circle Englishes are legitimate varieties of English, with distinct characteristics and with growing numbers of native speakers (e.g. Deterding, 2007; Jowitt, 1991; Sailaja, 2009). Indeed these Outer Circle English varieties are increasingly used, in respective countries, not only as the major or default medium of communication but also in the context of important domains such as education, media, government, literature and popular culture. The Kachruvian perspective has also given rise to the ‘egalitarian’ view that Inner Circle English speakers are no longer the only ones who can lay claim to the ownership of English. Outer Circle English speakers are now thought to be as much custodians of English as Inner Circle English speakers are.

According to the Institute of International Education, China has become a major receiving country of international students, like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The rapid development of international education in China evidences a major progress in the infrastructure of Chinese higher education. While internationalization creates unprecedented opportunities for the knowledge economy in China, it simultaneously poses unparalleled challenges for Chinese higher education (An & Chiang, 2015) and one of these challenges is the medium of instruction (MOI). While English has been widely taught in China since 1978 (McArthur, 2005), it was not until the turn of the century that English was endorsed as the medium of instruction for the so-called Chinese-English bilingual education.

Writing in Slang To-day and Yesterday (1933), his pioneering history of the lexical subset that would become his life's work, Eric Partridge, who in time would become the 20th century's leading expert in its lexis, pondered the etymology of the word ‘slang’. It was, he confessed, a ‘prize-problem word’. 82 years on, and 36 since the death at 85 of the man whose many fans would nickname him ‘The Word King’, it is hard to avoid feeling that in terms of his work and the reputation it brought him, it was Partridge too who represents a ‘prize problem.’

The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English (WAVE), edited by Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer, is an impressive and significant achievement. Consisting of almost 1,000 pages of detailed accounts of morphosyntactic patterns in 55 varieties of English from around the world (with some analysis of a further 19) by an international range of experts (many of whom are native speakers of the varieties they describe), WAVE represents a major step forward in our understanding of dialect variation in English and illustrates in fine detail a vast array of linguistic systems that fall under the umbrella ‘English’ across the world today. Using a list of 235 morphosyntactic features, WAVE explores diatopic variation in L1, L2 and pidgin/creole varieties across the globe, illustrating the results in 96 full-colour maps, and investigates the deeper relationships between the varieties in 23 colour-coded phenetic networks. It is a veritable feast for the eyes, but there is so much detail in it that it is much more than that; it is, in fact, a huge database echoing in many ways The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005) in its depth and breadth.