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Institute
In its practical outlook, the interdisciplinary-driven colonial discourse theory is often criticized for its totalizing tendencies regarding the structure of the exam-ined discourse and the power relations prevailing in this framework. As a result of this structural totalization, the concerned subjects got disempowered and de-graded to mere passive objects incapable of raising their voices within the dis-course. Based on this justified criticism, this thesis investigates the role colonial subjects played in the emergence, the distribution, as well as in questioning and critiquing of the colonial discourse during the initial phase of British colonialism in West Africa. The focal point lies on three themes relevant to the period be-tween 1874 and 1914: The Ashanti-Wars, the creation of an educational system, and the issue of the so-called "Europeanized Africans." Newspapers published by the colonial elite serve as the central source material in order to reconstruct Afri-can perspectives on these subjects. First, the discursive trajectory of the first two themes will be reconstructed and then shown why the initial support of the elite gradually declined towards the end of the century. Eventually, the analyzed tendencies culminated in the emergence of the "African Regeneration" discourse, which was able to reverse the colonial discourse's basic assumptions, at least on a theoretical level. Consequently, the Africans were displayed as the "civilizer" of Europe. On the structural level, however, this discourse likewise employed a to-talizing picture of African and European societies, respectively.
It was not until the 1960s and 70s of the 20th century that researchers turned their special interest to colloquial Russian (hereafter CR) and its interaction with codified (normative) Russian. Colloquial Russian uses its grammatical constructions in deviation from the norms of the written language. Since codified language is the basis of colloquial language on the grammatical level, among others, the question arises, how the standard forms are used in oral speech. Lapteva (1976) has looked in particular at the syntax of CR and made a classification of CR constructions that differ from their standard forms. The present study deals with two constructions from this classification: an embedded temporal subordinate clause and a temporal subordinate clause with the meaningless conjunction kogda (as/if), which leaves its normative position in the sentence. In addition to the special forms of temporal adverbial clauses, the frequency of their standard implementation as preceding and the following constructions will be examined. Two hypotheses were formulated:
• The frequency of certain constructions classified by Lapteva (1976) as transitional constructions decreases over decades.
• The ratio between prefixed and suffixed temporal subordinate clauses will be in favor of the latter due to the spontaneity of oral speech. The corpus study was conducted with the oral language sub-corpus of the National'nyj Korpus Russkogo Jazyka (National Corpus of the Russian Language). No evidence of a correlation between the number of CR constructions and the year of recording was found either in the whole oral sub-corpus or in its largest section - the collection of private conversations. The proportion of prefixed temporal constructions was greatest in both public and non-public corpora compared to postfixed ones. The study did not provide evidence for the hypotheses put forward, due to the limitations of the corpus study, such as missing or incomplete context of the conversations, lack of punctuation and/or marking of intonation.