Ethics, for Emerson, begins in perceiving the “wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world” such that ethics, in thinking and in living, is a matter of being “allied to all.” In this view, the “infinitude of the private man” – often yoked to the concept of “self-reliance” – names a metaphysical and ontological fact at the heart of Emerson’s ethics: human existence within a web of interconnections. This chapter draws widely from Emerson’s oeuvre to show how he unites “severe science with a poetic vision,” seeing and seeking to express how “Our life is consentaneous and far-related.” His work teaches us to see kinships between ethics, aesthetics, religion, science, and politics, and to consider ethics a practice of observing the intimacies in which we exist and in which the ethical question “How shall I live?” begins living in us.

The standard model of the historical formation of South African English posits that anglophone SAfE is an early-to-mid nineteenth-century overseas variety of English. In this chapter an alternative, three-stage koinéisation model is advanced which places emphasis on the role played by a koinéisation process in the greater-Johannesburg area spanning the first half of the twentieth century. As such, the first half of the current chapter will be focused on outlining the history of the development of this variety, with a particular focus on the Johannesburg period. The second half is focused on providing evidence from sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-six (26) L1-Broad WSAE speakers born in the first half of the twentieth century, one-half of whom are first-generation speakers from Johannesburg, one-half of whom are (non-first-generation) speakers born in the Eastern Cape. More specifically, the degree of inter- and intra-speaker variability in relation to two sociolinguistic variables (the quality of BATH and (-in/-ing)) is investigated. The results indicate that while there is no clear difference between the two regions in terms of BATH, the presence of substantial -ing/-in variation in the speech of Johannesburg-born speakers points to koinéisation in this area, thus providing support for the three-stage model.

New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the most well-researched varieties of English in the world. This is largely due to the existence of several high-quality spoken corpora, including the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) corpus. This corpus has provided the foundation for work on new dialect formation, sociolinguistic variation and sound change. However, published descriptions of the emergence of NZ English are based on data from only a sub-set of speakers from the ONZE corpus. More recent work has begun to utilise data from the full ONZE corpus, and other spoken and written corpora of NZ English. This chapter will first provide an overview of the existing received wisdom on the development of New Zealand English, before focussing on several recent studies showing how much further we have now come in our understanding of the history and development of this variety.

English in Liberia consists of two distinct but overlapping varieties, Kolokwa and Liberian Settler English (LSE), with a third, Standard Liberian English, superposed upon them. Kolokwa (< colloquial) is widely spoken. The Liberian descendant of a more general West African Pidgin English, it has been heavily influenced by LSE. The latter is the language of the descendants of the 16,000 African Americans who immigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century. This study first presents a political history of English-lexifier varieties in Liberia. Drawing on data collected in the late 1980s, just prior to the outbreak of civil war, it then considers aspects first of LSE and then Kolokwa grammar. It examines LSE vis-à-vis African American English. It frames Kolokwa within the continuum model. A distinctive aspect of LSE and, especially, Kolokwa is the extent of coda consonant deletion; its impact on inflectional morphology is also addressed.

This chapter claims that Emerson’s consideration of slavery occurs in terms that are by definition contradictory, as he both emphasizes and tries to reconcile a series of oppositions within transcendentalist principles. These oppositions include conflicts between self-reliance and social reform; between labor as a means of self-development and of economic development; between absolute moral law and temporal statute law; between teleological history and evolutionary history; and, finally, between the refusal of violence and the use of violence as a political expedient. The chapter examines the complexities of Emerson’s formulations of these transcendentalist oppositions, showing how his commentaries on slavery can play out in counterintuitive ways, such that Emerson’s idiosyncratic version of antislavery “free labor” ideology supports his expressed resistance to a career as an abolitionist, his argument that slavery contravenes a “higher” law than statute law equivocally denounces slavery, and his defense of abolitionist violence transforms physical force into moral force.

Driven originally by colonization and more recently by globalization, for more than four centuries the English language has been spreading to all corners of the globe, producing distinct and stable young varieties as well as the young discipline of ‘World Englishes’ to describe and analyze them. The present paper surveys and discusses several models that have been developed to explain the bewildering variety of forms and contexts which characterize these varieties. Early classifying approaches include categorizations and visualizations of varieties and variety types based on some of their properties, most importantly Kachru’s ‘Three Circles’ model. An evolutionary perspective is at the center of the ‘Dynamic Model’ of postcolonial Englishes. More recent trends at theorizing capture the ongoing dynamism and diversification of English by highlighting ‘forces’ which drive this process; in general, boundaries between nations are seen as diminishing also through the unbounded spread of linguistic forms in cyberspace. A few more suggestions at and reflections on modelling, most importantly Hundt’s comparison of theoretical and statistical modelling, are summarized and assessed.

This chapter explores how Emerson’s essays are tantamount to a new kind of distinctively American art. It suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and contemporary periods. Whether in the experimental writing of Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, or John Ashbery, or in the experimental music of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, and Elliot Carter, it prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art that tests out new independences, opens to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, atomizes, and swings.

This chapter reviews the history and development of Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand, focusing on both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of their phonetics/phonology. We review evidence that Māori English has higher pitch and more syllable-timed rhythm than Pākehā English, and suggest that a distinctive Māori English voice quality is not yet well understood. L1-type and L2-type varieties of Pasifika English are distinguished, highlighting the role of transfer in the formation of these varieties. The differences between Pākehā, Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand are a matter of frequency of use, rather than of absolutes, both in terms of the linguistic features and the social variables with which they co-occur. We problematise any straight-forward description of these varieties as revolving solely around ethnicity, given the interconnectedness of ethnic identities in New Zealand.

Concerned with Emerson’s aging and the authorial integrity of his later works, critics traditionally discounted the compositions Emerson delivered or published after 1860. Important editorial scholarship, however, has opened new prospects for reconsidering the intellectual vitality of late Emerson, now accessible in The Later Lectures and in the publication of the final volumes of the Collected Works, including Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875). Building upon the critical reconsideration of Emerson’s considerable engagement in aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical matters beyond the 1850s, this chapter identifies Emerson’s rhetoric as a significant concept in, and creative context for, the sometimes collaborative and often iterative “recomposition” of the later work. Three rhetorical figurations of Emerson’s late styles – metonymy, analogy, and translation – are traced across works such as “Eloquence,” “Poetry and Imagination,” “Quotation and Originality,” and the unfinished Natural History of Intellect.

This chapter outlines the development of pidgin and creole varieties of English worldwide. The foundational assumption is that creole languages emerge from pidginized varieties or at least ones strongly shaped by second-language acquisition. As such, the Australian and Oceanic languages such as Tok Pisin and Australian Aboriginal English will be treated as creolizations of initial pidgins (rather than as “pidgins” themselves, as they often have been), as will the West African languages often called “pidgins” such as Nigerian and Cameroonian “Pidgin” English. The chapter will also treat the creoles of the Caribbean and surrounding area along with the aforementioned West African varieties as sister languages born of an ancestral pidgin. Hawaiian “Pidgin” English, including controversy over its origins, will also be covered, as well as Chinese Pidgin English and Pitkern/Norf’k.