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Becketts Fußzeug
(2003)
A close comparison of selected parts of the translation of the Venerable Bede's 'Historia Ecclesiastica gentis anglorum' into Old English and Old Irish reveals how selective the translators proceeded in their translation work and how they adapted the Latin original to the genre traditions of their vernacular styles of writing. By their omissions, their choices of lexis and syntax they clearly expressed their translation interests. Part of the differences also seems to have been motivated by the targeted written and the oral mode of communication. While the Irish translation is entirely written in character and hardly lends itself to reading out aloud ('prelecting'), the style and rhythm of the Old English translation suggests that it was to serve public reading purposes in front of illiterate or semi-literate listening audiences.
This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
Belonging in Music and the Music of Unbelonging in Richard Powers"s "The Time of Our Singing"
(2005)
This paper focuses on mysteries written by the Afro-American women authors Barbara Neely and Valerie Wilson Wesley. Both authors place a black woman in the role of the detective - an innovative feature not only in the realm of female detective literature of the past two decades but also with regard to the current discourse about race and class in US-American society. This discourse is important because detective novels are considered popular literature and thus a mass product designed to favor commercial instead of literary claims. Thus, the focus is placed on the development of the two protagonists, on their lives as detectives and as black women, in order to find out whether or not and how the genre influences the depiction of Afro-American experiences. It appears that both of these detective series represent Afro-American culture in different ways, which confirms a heterogenic development of this ethnic group. However, the protagonist's search for identity and their relationships to white people could be identified as a major unifying claim of Afro-American literature. With differing intensity, the authors Neely and Wesley provide the white or mainstream reader with insight into their culture and confront the reader's ignorance of black culture. In light of this, it is a great achievement that Neely and Wesley have reached not only a black audience but also a growing number of white readers.
Beyond humanitarianism
(2022)
From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles – biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription.
Bridehood revisited
(2008)
Brinton, L. J., Traugott, E. C., Lexicalization and Language Change; Cambridge, Univ.-Press, 2006
(2006)
Some of the most frequent questions surrounding business negotiations address not only the nature of such negotiations, but also how they should be conducted. The answers given by business people from different cultural backgrounds to these questions are likely to differ from the standard answers found in business manuals.
In her book, Milene Mendes de Oliveira investigates how Brazilian and German business people conceptualize and act out business negotiations using English as a Lingua Franca. The frameworks of Cultural Linguistics, English as a Lingua Franca, World Englishes, and Business Discourse offer the theoretical and methodological grounding for the analysis of interviews with high-ranking Brazilian and German business people. Moreover, a side study on e-mail exchanges between Brazilian and German employees of a healthcare company serves as a test case for the results arising from the interviews, and helps understand other facets of authentic intercultural business communication.
Offering new insights on English as a Lingua Franca in international business contexts, Business Negotiations in ELF from a Cultural Linguistic Perspective simultaneously provides a detailed cultural-conceptual account of business negotiations from the viewpoint of Brazilian and German business people and a secondary analysis of their pragmatic aspects.
Caryl Phillips
(2004)
Caryl Phillips
(2008)
Paul Mankin was one of three literature professors who taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the 1980s and who had attended Dylan Thomas' lecture tours at American universities thirty years earlier as students. They were particularly impressed by the power of Thomas' language and his forceful style of presentation. In this "Causerie" or interview recorded in 1985, Mankin speaks about the effect Thomas' performance at UCLA had on his own work. He also discusses the lasting value of Thomas' poetry and its impact on other poets.
Celtic and Afro-Asiatic
(2007)
Extract: [...]It is not remarkable that structural similarities between the Insular Celtic and some Afro-Asiatic1 languages continue to exert a fascination on many people. Research into any language may be enlightening with regard to the understanding of all languages, and languages that show similar features are particularly likely to provide useful information. It is remarkable that the structural similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages continue to be interpreted as diagnostic of some sort of special relationship between them; some sort of affinity or mutual affiliation that goes beyond the fact that they are two groups of human languages. This paper investigates again the fallacious nature of the arguments for the Afro-Asiatic/Insular Celtic contact theory (henceforth AA/IC contact theory). It takes its point of departure from Gensler (1993). That work is as yet unpublished, but has had considerable resonance. Such statements as the following indicate the importance that has been attached to the work: “After the studies of Morris-Jones, Pokorny, Wagner2 and Gensler it seems impossible to deny the special links between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic” (Jongeling 2000:64). And the ideas in question have been propagated in the popular scientific press,3 with the usual corollary that it is these ideas that are perceived by the interested but non-specialist public as being at the cutting edge of sound new research, when in fact they may simply be recycled ideas of a discredited theory. For these reasons it is appropriate to subject Gensler’s unpublished work to detailed critique.4 In particular, with regard to the twenty features of affinity between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic which Gensler investigated, it will be shown (yet again, in some cases): [...]
Berichtet wird über ein Projekt, das mit Lehramtsstudierenden in einem Hauptseminar zu Neuen Technologien im Englischunterricht vorbereitet und mit Englischlernenden auf der Sekundarstufe II durchgeführt wurde. Ausgangspunkt des Projekts war die Lektüre eines literarischen Textes, der mit Hilfe des Internets kontextualisiert werden sollte. Die praktischen Erfahrungen werden mit theoretischen Aussagen zum Thema in Beziehung gesetzt, was schließlich in eine fachdidaktische Positionsbestimmung mündet.
Despite their overt focus on inexplicable alien forces, cosmic horror stories are also determined by their human cast. Far from being merely fodder for horror, the characters significantly contribute to the generation of meaning, including that of the supernatural entity or phenomenon itself. The same holds for the narrators' (implicitly) political perspectives on the world of which they are part. Much of the perspective propounded in Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories partakes of myth, adopting in particular the latter's universal view and pronounced sidelining of humanity as a whole, which it intensifies to the point of horror. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this universal perspective is consistent with the racism permeating and structuring Lovecraft's writing. Though eschewing racism and universalism, the cosmic horror of Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" negotiates literary reflections of colonialism from an unreflective white perspective.
Deep into the second half of the twentieth century the traditionalist definition of India as a country of villages remained dominant in official political rhetoric as well as cultural production. In the past two decades or so, this ruralist paradigm has been effectively superseded by a metropolitan imaginary in which the modern, globalised megacity increasingly functions as representative of India as a whole. Has the village, then, entirely vanished from the cultural imaginary in contemporary India? Addressing economic practices from upper-class consumerism to working-class family support strategies, this paper attempts to trace how ‘the village’ resurfaces or survives as a cultural reference point in the midst of the urban.
The recent decades have witnessed the incorporation of new linguistic trends into lexicography. One of these trends is a usage-based approach, with the first major application of computer-corpus data in the Collins COBUILD English dictionary (1995) and successive adaptation in other L1-dictionaries. Another, concurrent innovation-inspired by Conceptual Metaphor Theory-is the provision of conceptual information in monolingual dictionaries of English. So far, however, only the Macmillan English dictionary for advanced learners (1st and 2nd edition) has paid tribute to the fact that understanding culturespecific metaphors and being aware of metaphoric usage are crucial for learning a foreign language. Given that most of the English as lingua franca interactions take place between L2-speakers of English (see Kachru, 1994), providing conceptual information is not only a desideratum for L1- and learner dictionaries, but especially for (L2-) variety dictionaries of English. In our paper, we follow earlier tentative proposals by Polzenhagen (2007) and Wolf (2012) and present examples from A dictionary of Hong Kong English (Cummings & Wolf, 2011), showing how culturally salient conceptual information can be made explicit and conceptual links between lexical items retrievable. The examples demonstrate that fixed expressions and idioms -a perennial problem for lexicographers are explicable by means of the proposed lexicographic design, too. Our approach is cognitive-sociolinguistic in that the Conceptual Metaphor approach is coupled with the study of regional varieties of English, more specifically Hong Kong English. Our analysis is empirically backed up by corpus-linguistic insights into this L2 variety.
This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories, even though they descended from a common ancestor language, the contributions present in-depth, empirically founded studies on the stages and directions of these changes combining historical comparative methods with grammaticalisation theory. This collection of papers provides the reader with an indispensable source of information on the early traces of distinct developments, thus laying the foundation for a broad-scale scenario of the grammaticalisation of verbal categories. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of language change, grammaticalisation, and diachronic sociolinguistics; it offers important new insights for typologists and for everybody interested in the make-up of verbal categories.
This essay sets out to theorize the "new" Arctic Ocean as a pivot from which our standard map of the world is currently being reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contact zone in its own right. I examine both functions of the Arctic via a reading of the dispute over the Northwest Passage (which emphasizes the Arctic as a space of transit) and the contemporary assessment of new models of sovereignty in the Arctic region (which concentrates on the circumpolar Arctic as an oceanic world). However, both of these debates frequently exclude indigenous positions on the Arctic. By reading Canadian Inuit theories on the Arctic alongside the more prominent debates, I argue for a decolonizing reading of the Arctic inspired by Inuit articulations of the "Inuit Sea." In such a reading, Inuit conceptions provide crucial interventions into theorizing the Arctic. They also, in turn, contribute to discussions on indigeneity, sovereignty, and archipelagic theory in Atlantic and Pacific studies.
Connecting worlds
(2020)
This chapter considers the benefits of working with linguistic landscapes for language education curriculum. It shows how introducing linguistic landscape exploration into the curriculum can support learners to read beyond words and to build critical understandings of intersections between words and worlds. The chapter explores data from two case studies in different educational contexts. The first study shows the effects of scaffolding in-service languages teachers to learn to read their worlds from multiple perspectives. The second study illustrates the types of insights that can emerge from school EFL learners when they explore the linguistic landscapes of worlds beyond their classrooms.
The parallel-opposition construction has not yet been widely described as an independent construction type. This article reports on its realization in everyday British-English conversation. In particular, it focusses on prosodic projection in the lexically and syntactically unmarked first component of this syntactic pattern, and thus adds to the body of research investigating the organization of turn-taking in the context of bi-clausal constructions with which the first part lacks explicit lexical hint, to their continuation. It is shown that the parallel-opposition construction, next to specific semantic-pragmatic, syntactic and lexical features, also exhibits a relatively fixed range of prosodic features in the first conjunct, among these narrow focus, continuing intonation and/or the avoidance of intonation-unit boundary signals. These are used to project continuation of an otherwise complete utterance and, thus, to secure the floor for the expression of contrast. In addition, the detailed analysis of apparently deviant cases, which takes into account the on-line production of syntax, shows that a lack of prosodically projective features in the first component of the parallel-opposition construction can be explained by the strategic, retrospective use of the construction to resolve problems in turn transition.
The objective of the present paper is to explore the potentials and challenges inherent in con- ceptualizations of global citizenship education (GCE) in the context of foreign language edu- cation. Specifically, we argue for a critical approach to GCE that emphasizes the significance of language as symbolic power by drawing on the concepts of critical literacy (e.g., Freire 1983; Janks 2014) and symbolic competence (Kramsch 2006; 2011; 2021). To illustrate the necessity of such a critical approach to GCE, we critically analyze teaching materials designed for the English language classroom as provided by the curriculum framework (KMK/ BMZ 2016). The analysis reveals how reliance on dominant Western liberal and neoliberal epistemologies, norms, and discourses might inadvertently reinforce the very inequalities that GCE actually seeks to address. By foregrounding the relationship between language, symbolic power, and GCE, we further redesign these teaching materials and incorporate pedagogical and methodological principles which are in line with a critical literacy and symbolic competence.
The present thesis looks at cultural conceptualisations in relation to DEATH in Irish English from a Cultural Linguistic perspective and puts a special focus on the diachronic development of these conceptualisations. For the study, a corpus consisting of 1,400 death notices from the Dublin-based national newspaper The Irish Times from 14 historical periods between 1859 and 2023 was compiled, resulting in a highly specialised 70,000-word corpus. First, the manual qualitative analysis of the death notices produced evidence for eight superordinate cultural conceptualisations surrounding DEATH, namely, in the order of their frequency THE DEAD ARE TO BE REMEMBERED OR REGRETTED, DEATH IS SOMETHING POSITIVE, DEATH IS REST, DEATH IS A JOURNEY, DYING IS THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER LIFE, DEATH IS (NOT) A TABOO, DEATH IS GOD’S WILL, and DEATH IS THE END. These conceptualisations were derived from linguistic expressions in the death notices that have these conceptualisations as a cognitive basis. Second, the quantitative comparison of the individual conceptualisations detected diachronic variation, which is interconnected with historical and social developments in Ireland. The thesis, therefore, illustrates the applicability of Cultural Linguistics as an adequate method for diachronic studies interested in culturally determined developments of conceptualisations.
Following recents calls for the inclusion of conceptual aspects into world Englishes research, I report in this article on conceptualizations of business negotiations by Brazilian and German business people. I conducted semi‐structured interviews in English with nine participants from each country. Subsequently, I analyzed conceptualizations of respect, success, and conflict in business negotiations by looking at ‘conceptual scripts’ underlying interviewees’ answers. Results point to differences in how the Brazilian and the German interviewees conceptualize business negotiations.
Die fachdidaktischen Tagespraktika (FTP) bilden ein Kernelement im Potsdamer Modell der Lehrerbildung, weist man ihnen doch eine „studienleitende Funktion“ zu. Wie aber realisiert sich diese Funktion in den einzelnen Fächern an der Universität Potsdam und welche Folgen ergeben sich für die Ausbildung der Lehramtsstudierenden ? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage wurde eine Analyse der Verankerung der FTP in allen Studienordnungen hinsichtlich qualitativer (Inhalte und Ziele, Prüfungsformen, Belegungsvoraussetzungen) und quantitativer (Leistungspunkte, Semesterwochenstunden) Kriterien durchgeführt. Leitfadengestützte Interviews mit verantwortlichen Fachdidaktikerinnen und Fachdidaktikern dienten der Untersuchung der konkreten Umsetzung und der Relevanzzuschreibung. Ziel war es, durch das Zusammenführen beider Zugänge – der realiter existierenden Curricula, der individualisierten Praktiken sowie der subjektiven Überzeugungen – ein Verständnis eben jener „studienleitenden Funktion“ zu erlangen und anschließend Diskussions- und Handlungsfelder für die Weiterentwicklung des FTP herauszuarbeiten.
David Dabydeen
(2004)
Davis, A., Wells, S., Shakespeare and the moving image; Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994
(1996)
Death of the other
(2012)
Decomposing American History as Cultural Analysis: Rosmarie Waldrop's SHORTER AMERICAN MEMORY
(1999)
Defining britishhness from the margins : Peter Weir's gallipoli and hugh hudson's chariots of fire
(2003)
Deleuze and the digital
(2021)
In his short and often quoted essay 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', Gilles Deleuze famously describes the structures of power in the dawning twenty-first century as driven by 'machines of a third type, computers', as novel and predominantly digital infrastructures. In fact, from a Deleuzian perspective the entire ecosystem of the digital transformation can be described as a larger shift in modes of production and the political economy. This essay proposes to read this 'technological evolution' as the power of algorithms and their material substance - digital infrastructures that entail a different mode of interaction between humans and technology. In looking at these infrastructures from a materialist position, my essay reconceptualises the digital as the unfolding logic of assemblages that have been shaping a 'long now' of technological modernity. In bringing a Deleuzian reading of infrastructures to the study of technology and society, this essay seeks to shed a new light on the political function-and the increasing abstraction-of infrastructures in the realm of the digital.
Der Begriff der Literatur
(2006)
Derek Walcott
(2004)
Mit der Entwicklung des Social Web, also einem Internet, in dem sich immer mehr Nutzer untereinander auf Kommunikationsplattformen wie Facebook, in Foren und Bewertungsplattformen und auf Microblogging-Diensten wie Twitter austauschen, überschlagen sich Kommunikationsspezialisten mit Ratschlägen für Unternehmen, wie sie die Kommunikation im Internet insbesondere in kritischen Situationen zu gestalten hätten, und diverse Dienstleister bieten die Beobachtung (Monitoring) der Kommunikation über Unternehmen im Internet an. Dieser Entwicklung folgend beschäftigt sich diese Arbeit mit der Beschreibung und Analyse der Kommunikationssituation am Beispiel der „Locationgate“- Affäre (Apple-iPhone-Tracking): Schwerpunkt dieser Arbeit ist die Betrachtung der Kommunikation über Apple in einer für das Unternehmen zumindest äußerlich kritisch erscheinenden Situation. Untersucht wird die Diskussion des medienwirksamen Ereignisses durch Leser1 in Online-Foren zu Artikeln über den Vorfall. Bei anfänglicher Brisanz, die bei dem Thema iPhone-Tracking zu erwarten war, zeigte sich recht schnell, dass zwar in den Leserkommentaren sehr viel und auch sehr kontrovers diskutiert wurde – jedoch für die Marke Apple keine echte Gefahr zu drohen schien, denn die Diskussionen schienen vor allem unter den Nutzern als Fans oder Gegner (Hater) der Marke Apple geführt zu werden. Eine erste quantitative Untersuchung war von einer Auseinandersetzung mit den Möglichkeiten des Monitoring der (Social-Media-)Internetkommunikation über eine Marke/ein Unternehmen, das – meist automatisiert, auf quantitativen Analysen basierend – angeboten wird, motiviert. Diese ergab, dass sich relativ geringe Reaktionen zum Positiven oder Negativen hin auf die Unternehmenskommunikation feststellen ließen. Eine erste qualitative Datensichtung ergab, dass negative Lexeme in den Kommentaren sich nicht unbedingt auf die Marke Apple oder das iPhone beziehen, sondern gegen andere Kommentatoren gerichtet sind, und dass unter den Schreibern ein reger Dialog stattzufinden scheint, der auf starken Gegenpositionen basiert. Somit war eine kritische Situation für die Marke Apple in den Foren nicht gegeben. Aus diesen Betrachtungen ergibt sich die Fragestellung, warum die Unternehmenskommunikation in den Foren kaum auf Interesse stößt bzw. was dort stattdessen stattfindet. Hierzu wird analysiert, wer wie oft und mit wem kommuniziert, indem Dialogparameter wie Länge und Häufigkeit per Schreiber im Gesamtkorpus statistisch betrachtet und die Dialogstrukturen detailliert herausgearbeitet und visualisiert werden. Aufbauend darauf wird auf inhaltlicher Ebene qualitativ beleuchtet, worüber sich die Schreiber insbesondere bezogen auf das Markenimage von Apple austauschen. Darauf aufbauend wird beleuchtet, inwieweit sich eine Markenidentifikation und damit eine Verteidigung der Marke Apple in den Kommentaren ausmachen lässt.
Inhalt: 1. Vorbemerkungen 2. Zu einigen philosophischen und theoretisch-linguistischen Grundlagen einer kommunikativ orientierten Betrachtung der Sprache 3. Sprache und menschliche Gesellschaft 4. Der Euphemismus 5. Euphemismen im Golfkrieg - Zur Analyse der Untersuchungsergebnisse 6. Zusammenfassung und Schlußfolgerungen 7. Perspektiven der kommunikativen Sprachforschung bezüglich 215der Untersuchung des politischen Euphemismus - Forschungsausblick und Schlußbemerkungen
Digital surveillance fiction
(2021)
This paper argues that the texts surviving from the Old English period do not reflect the spoken language of the bulk of the population under Anglo-Saxon elite domination. While the Old English written documents suggest that the language was kept remarkably unchanged, i.e. was strongly monitored during the long OE period (some 500 years!), the spoken and "real Old English" is likely to have been very different and much more of the type of Middle English than the written texts. "Real Old Engish", i.e. of course only appeared in writing after the Norman Conquest. Middle English is therefore claimed to have begun with the 'late British' speaking shifters to Old English. The shift patterns must have differed in the various part of the island of Britain, as the shifters became exposed to further language contact with the Old Norse adstrate in the Danelaw areas and the Norman superstrate particularly in the South East, the South West having been least exposed to language contact after the original shift from 'Late British' to Old English. This explains why the North was historically the most innovative zone. This also explains the conservatism of the present day dialects in the South West. It is high time that historical linguists acknowledge the arcane character of the Old English written texts.
This paper argues that the texts surviving from the Old English period do not reflect the spoken language of the bulk of the population under Anglo-Saxon elite domination. While the Old English written documents suggest that the language was kept remarkably unchanged, i.e. was strongly monitored during the long OE period (some 500 years!), the spoken and "real Old English" is likely to have been very different and much more of the type of Middle English than the written texts. "Real Old Engish", i.e. of course only appeared in writing after the Norman Conquest. Middle English is therefore claimed to have begun with the 'late British' speaking shifters to Old English. The shift patterns must have differed in the various part of the island of Britain, as the shifters became exposed to further language contact with the Old Norse adstrate in the Danelaw areas and the Norman superstrate particularly in the South East, the South West having been least exposed to language contact after the original shift from 'Late British' to Old English. This explains why the North was historically the most innovative zone. This also explains the conservatism of the present day dialects in the South West. It is high time that historical linguists acknowledge the arcane character of the Old English written texts.
Dionne Brand
(2008)
The author examines the cultural identity development of Oromo-Americans in Minnesota, an ethnic group originally located within the national borders of Ethiopia. Earlier studies on language and cultural identity have shown that the degree of ethnic orientation of minorities commonly decreases from generation to generation. Yet oppression and a visible minority status were identified as factors delaying the process of de-ethnicization. Given that Oromos fled persecution in Ethiopia and are confronted with the ramifications of a visible minority status in the U.S., it can be expected that they have retained strong ties to their ethnic culture. This study, however, came to a more complex and theory-building result.
DO in Contact?
(1997)
Periphrastic English constructions involving the verbs BE/HAVE + a nominalised verb form expressing [+imperfectivity] and [+perfectivity] have close analogues in the Insular Celtic languages, where Celtic analogues of the English verb BE + a prepositional construction marker + Verbal Noun are used. The two constructions in English and teh Celtic languages are not identical and cannot be so, because the Celtic languages do not feature present and past participles and English has no verbal nouns. But the two types of the periphrastic mode of expressing aspect are close enough to suggest either a shift scenario, a borrowing scenario and/or an areal spread by diffusion over a long period of time. Since Old English did not mark aspect, neither morphologically nor syntactically, but Old Welsh and Old Irish already did so syntactically, it is suggested here that a unilateral transfer process was involved here, which proceeded from the Celtic languages to the English language. Aspectual transfer is even more pronounced in the so-called 'Celtic Englishes,' where in addition to the periphrastic marking of [+ imperfectivity] and [+perfectivity] the marking of [+habituality] is a grammaticalised feature and is periphrastically expressed.
DO-Periphrasis in Irish
(2002)
Periphrastic DO constructions are very common both in English and in the Neo-Brittonic languages and are used for various functional purposes. These form part of a larger linguistic area in western and northern Europe. The literature does not mention comparable constructions for Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Irish informants, however, confirm orally that they are in common use among present day Gaeltacht speakers. They appear also to have been common in late spoken Manx. This study is based on the "Caint Chonamara" electronic corpus, the field work for which was first untertaken by Hans Hartmann (Hamburg) and Tomás de Bhaldraithe (Dublin) in the early 1960s und brought to a close by Arndt Wigger (Wuppertal) in the 1990s. The file for the Ros Muc dialogues yielded a very low return of potential DO constructions, i.e. 14 tokens of DÉAN + VN out of 494 DÉAN tokens altogether in the file. This shows that the DÉAN + VN construction was grammatically correct and acceptable to the native speakers, but was not grammaticalised and had a very low frequency. This result is interesting, but not surprising, since the informants chosen for this file conformed to the NORMS category (non-mobile old rural males. They were born around the turn of the 19c/20c and acquired their language now more than 100 years ago. This was well before the independence of the Republic. They would have acquired their Irish orally from native speakers and underwent very little formal training in Irish, or none. This small sample confirms that Irish did not belong to the broad linguistic area in Western Europe which makes use of periphrastic DO constructions, at least not until very recently.
In her lifetime, Dymphna Cusack continually launched social critiques on the basis of her feminism, humanism, pacificism and anti-fascist/pro-Soviet stance. Recalling her experi-ences teaching urban and country schoolchildren in A Window in the Dark, she was particularly scathing of the Australian education system. Cusack agitated for educational reforms in the belief that Australian schools had failed to cultivate the desired liberal humanist subject: 'Neither their minds, their souls, nor their bodies were developed to make the Whole Man or the Whole Woman - especially the latter. For girls were encouraged to regard their place as German girls once did: Kinder, Küche, Kirche - Children, Kitchen and Church.' I suggest that postwar liberal humanism, with its goals of equality among the sexes and self-realisation or 'becoming Whole', created a popular demand for the romantic realism found in Cusack′s texts. This twentieth century form of humanism, evident in new ideas of the subject found in psychoanalysis, Western economic theory and Modernism, informed each of the global lobbies for peace and freedom that followed the destruction of World War II. Liberal ideas of the individual in society became synonymous with the humanist representations of gender in much of postwar, realistic literature in English-speaking countries. The individual, a free agent whose aim was to 'improve the life of human beings', was usually given the masculine gender. He was shown to achieve self-realisation through a commitment to the development of “mankind”, either materially or spiritually. Significantly, the majority of Cusack′s texts diverge from this norm by portraying women as social agents of change and indeed, as the central protagonists. Although the humanist goal of self-realisation seems to be best adapted to social realism, the generic conventions of popular romance also have humanist precepts, as Catherine Belsey has argued. The Happy End is contrived through the heroine′s mental submission to her physical desire for the previously rejected or criticised lover. As Belsey has noted, desire might be considered a deconstructive force which momentarily prevents the harmonious, permanent unification of mind and body because the body, at the moment of seduction, does not act in accord with the mind. In popular romance, however, desire usually leads to a relationship or proper union of the protagonists. In Cusack′s words, the heroine and hero become “whole men and women” through the “realistic” love story. Thus romance, like realism, seeks to stabilise gender relations, even though female desire is temporarily disruptive in the narrative. In the end, women and men become fully realised characters according to the generic conventions of the love story or the consummation of potentially subversive desire. It stayed anxieties associated with women seeking independence and self-realisation rather than traditional romance which signalled a threat to existing gender relations. I proposed that an analysis of gender in Cusack′s fiction is warranted, since these apparently unified, humanist representations of romantic realism belie the conflicting aims and actions of the gendered subjects in this historical period. For instance, when we examine women′s lives immediately after the war, we can identify in both East and West efforts initiated by women and men to reconstruct private/public roles. In order to understand how women were caught between “realism and romance”, I plan to deconstruct gender within the paradigm of this hybrid genre. By adopting a femininist methodology, new insights may be gained into the conflictual subjectivity of both genders in the periods of the interwar years, the Pacific and World Wars, the Cold War, the Australian Aboriginal Movement at the time of the Vietnam War, as well as the moment of second wave Western feminism in the seventies. My definition of romantic realism and the discourses that inform it are examined in chapters two and three. A deconstruction of femininity and the female subject is pursued in chapter four, when I argue that Cusack′s romantic narratives interact in different ways with social realism: romance variously fails, succeeds, is parodic or idealised. Applying Judith Butler′s philosophical ideas to literary criticism, I argue that this hybridisation of genre prevents the fictional subject from performing his or her gender. Like the “real” subject - actual women in society - the fictional protagonist acts in an unintelligible fashion due to the multifarious demands and constraints on her gender. Consequently, the gendering of the sexed subject produces a multiplicity of genders: Cusack′s women and men are constituted by differing and conflicting demands of the dichotomously opposed genres. Thus gender and sex become indefinite through their complex, inconsistent expression in the romantic realistic text. In other words, the popular combination of romance and realism leads to an explosion of the gender binary presupposed by both genres. Furthermore, a consideration of sexuality and race in chapter five leads to a more differentiated analysis of the humanist representations of gender in postwar fiction. The need to deconstruct these representations in popular and canonical literature is recapitulated in the final chapter of this Dissertation.
Dyslexien und Dysgraphien
(2003)
Earl Lovelace
(2004)
A close comparison of the use of language, style and method of composition of the sizable corpus of Old English and Old Irish vernacular sermons (10c and 11c) show that both cultures make use of a preaching rhetoric which is deeply indebted to oral styles of preaching and geared towards the aural reception of the spoken word. Both tend to resort to a flamboyant pastoralism and excel in elaborate verbal artistry. While received scholarship claims that the English were subject to Irish influence in this respect because of the existence Hiberno-Latin analogues, this short monograph argues that this is very unlikely. Rather both traditions are independently indebted to 7c to 9c Continental preaching styles, the evidence of which shows that there was both a plain preaching mode (the "fisherman's" mode) and an elaborate (or "Asian") one. The use of both was advocated,depending on the occasion, by St. Augustin's "De doctrina christiana." In the Insular context of vernacular preaching, the latter seems to have been functioned as a favoured art form.