Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (23)
Year of publication
- 2002 (23) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (23) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (23)
Institute
- Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (23) (remove)
The continued linguistic contact in the islands of Britain and Ireland over the past two millenia has led to linguistic convergence processes between the Insular Celtic and West Germanic languages involved. While the Latin, Old Norse and Norman French contact scenarios were recognised and have been well studied since the 19c, the Celtic component received much less scholarly attention until the 1990s because of the continued linguistic bias, once fostered by 19c Anglo-Saxonisms and the idea of racial purity of the Egnlish population. It is only in the very recent past that the many different contact areas between English and the Insular Celtic languages have received recognition after New Labour's post-1997 introduction of "devolution" politics. The closest and longest interaction took of course place between English and Welsh. The present article looks at three major types of interaction which led to convergence in a number of important linguistic features: (1) mutual retention of shared archaic features, (2) mutual shared innovations, and (3) transfer from one language to another, either by unilateral or by bilateral transfer. The exemplary contact features discussed in this article relate to the retention of interdental fricatives, the shared innovation of analycity and multi-word verb formation, and clefting as feature transfer. Transfer is likely to have taken place under the following conditions: (a) earlier written documentation in the donor language, (b) higher frequency of occurrence in the donor language, (c) conformity with other structures in the donor language, and (d) grammaticalisation in the donor language. The conclusion endorses Salikoko Mufwene's claim that the making of English in the island of Britain was subject to the same contact processes which created the English based creoles from indigenised Englishes during the colonial period.
Romancing the condition of england : making the academic novel work in the literary market place
(2002)
Negotiating the global and the local : Leslie Marmon Silko's almanac of the dead as 'Glocal Fiction'
(2002)
This essay explores Leslie Marmon Silko's fictional negotiations of conflicting and overlapping discourses from Native American and Euroamerican cultures in the transnational contact spaces of the Americas. The dialogic juxtapositions of a variety of cultural practices, ranging from indigenous prophecies to the writings of Marx, are central aspects of the glocal formations in Silko's Almanac of the Dead. The novel furthermore functions as a cultural representation and projection of globalization-from-below, i.e., a transgressive social movement which counters the effects of neocolonial globalization by a critical inclusion of global and local forms of consciousness and agencies.