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Our Winter 2023 issue is a contemplative one, filled with explorations of states of mind, of motivations, of cultural and social pressures, of human motivation, and of personal success. Rich in poetry, we’ve included a short story, many essays, some illustrations and some recipes. We hope you enjoy our work!, Diamonds in the Rough: A Literary Magazine, vol. 5, no. 01

This paper examines the linguistic realization of continuative discourse relations in British English written discourse comparing narrative and argumentative dyadically edited texts. The data comprise 18 co-edited texts and metadata documenting the editing process (keystroke logs and transcripts of the dyads negotiating discursive well-formedness). The focus of analysis lies on the linguistic realization of coordinating continuation and narration, which keep the discourse on the same level, and on the linguistic realization of subordinating elaboration and explanation, which introduce a deeper level in the discourse hierarchy. Special attention is paid to contexts in which the discourse relations are encoded in intra-clausal coherence strands, and to contexts in which they are additionally signalled in the peripheries. The quantitative analysis of the signalling of continuative discourse relations shows genre-specific preferences for the signalling of continuation and elaboration in the argumentative data, and continuation, narration and explanation in the narrative data. Both the products of the edited data, the co-edited texts, and the metadata show that the linguistic realization and interpretation of continuative discourse relations are – to varying degrees – subject to recontextualization. We suggest that this variation provides evidence for (1) discourse relations as constitutive parts of discourse grammar, and (2) genre as a blueprint which constrains their linguistic realization.

This paper examines the linguistic realization of continuative and contrastive discourse relations (DRs) in English argumentative discourse, focusing on both discourse as product and discourse as process. Based on a corpus of 25 argumentative texts with corresponding experimental data stemming from an editing-based task, this study aims to answer the questions of (i) how continuative and contrastive DRs are linguistically realized (i.e., encoded in coherence strands or additionally signaled) in English argumentative discourse, and (ii) how their signaling unfolds during the real-time process of discourse editing. The quantitative analysis of the edited texts shows that contrastive DRs are signaled throughout (e.g., through contrastive discourse connectives), whereas continuative DRs are more frequently encoded only. In addition, the qualitative analysis of the experimental data (i.e., keystroke logging data and corresponding metadata) reveals that while the signaling of contrastive DRs is made manifest right from the start of the editing process across the data, continuative DRs tend to be signaled only at a later stage. This can be explained by the semantic overlap between different types of continuative DRs, which requires that the participants (re-)negotiate the exact nature (and thus the appropriate linguistic signal) of a particular continuative DR more frequently than contrastive DRs, which are clearly interpreted and thus readily signaled as contrastive throughout.

Language change is an essential feature of human language, and it is therefore one of the focal areas of the scientific study of language. Language change is always tacitly at work in all languages of the world and at all levels of a given language, be it phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. It has been suggested that it is precisely the capacity to constantly change and adjust that allows language to keep serving the communicative goals of its users, from ancient to modern times (Fauconnier & Turner, 2003, p. 179). This thesis investigates an especially salient pattern of lexicogrammatical change, namely word-formation of verbs from animal nouns by zero-derivation, in the process of which such nouns as, for example, dog, horse, or beaver change their usage and meaning to produce animal verbs: to dog ‘to follow someone persistently and with a malicious intent’, to horse about/around ‘to make fun of, to ‘rag’, to ridicule someone’ and to beaver away ‘to work at working with great enthusiasm’ respectively. In the previous literature this pattern of language change has been termed verbal zoosemy (e.g. Kiełtyka, 2016), i.e. metaphorical construal of human actions by means of linguistic material from the domain of animals. The approach taken in this study is not to simply report on the objective changes in the morphology, syntactic distribution and meaning of such linguistic units before and after conversion, but to uncover the complexity of cognitive mechanisms which allow the speakers of English to reclassify such well-established nominal units as animal noun into verbs. It is assumed that the grammatical change in these lexical units is predicated on and triggered by preceding semantic change. Thus, the study is set in the framework of Cognitive Historical Semantics and employs the Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy Theory (CMMT) to untangle the intricacies of the semantic change making the grammatical change of animal nouns into verbs possible and acceptable in the minds of English speakers. To this end, this study employed the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) to compile a glossary of 96 denominal animal verbal forms tied to 209 verbal senses (most verbs in the dataset displayed polysemy). The data collected from the OED Online included not only the senses of the verbs, but also the date of the earliest recorded use of the verbal form with the given sense (regarded in the study as the date of conversion), the earliest usage examples for individual senses and morphologically or semantically related linguistic units from the lexical field of the respective parent noun which were amenable to explaining the observed instances of semantic change. Each instance of zoosemisation, i.e. of the creation of a separate metaphorical verbal sense, was then carefully analysed on the basis of the data collected and classified with the help of the CMMT. In the final stage, a comprehensive and systematic classification of the senses of animal verbs in accordance with the cognitive mechanisms of their creation (metaphor, metonymy, or a combination thereof) was produced together with a timeline of the first appearance of individual metaphorical senses of animal verbs recorded in the OED. The results show that animal verbs are produced through the interaction of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Specifically, it was established that two major patterns of metaphor-metonymy interaction underpinning the process of verbal zoosemisation are metaphor from metonymy and metonymy from metaphor. In the former pattern, either an already existing metonymic animal verb is expanded to include the target domain PEOPLE, or the animal noun itself acts as a metonymic vehicle to a certain element of the idealised cognitive model of the given animal, which is metaphorically projected onto people. In the latter mechanism, a metaphorical projection of an animal term initially enters the lexicon in the form of a metaphorical animal noun referring to a human entity, and later in the course of language development it comes to metonymically stand for the action, which the given entity either performs or is involved in. Secondarily, it was observed that individual animal nouns can undergo multiple rounds of zoosemic conversion over time depending on the semantic frame in which the given linguistic unit undergoes denominal conversion, and that results in the polysemy of most animal verbs. Die Masterarbeit untersucht das Phänomen der verbalen Zoosemie im Englischen. Der Begriff verbale Zoosemie steht für Nullableitung von substantivischen Tiernamen zu Verben, die sich metaphorisch auf hauptsächlich von Menschen (aber zum Teil auch von nicht belebten Entitäten oder Tieren) ausgeführte Handlungen beziehen, z.B. von beaver ‚Bieber‘ zu to beaver away ‚fieberhaft an etwas arbeiten‘ oder von horse ‚Pferd‘ zu to horse around ‚rumalbern, rumblöden‘. Das Ziel dieser Untersuchung ist es im Rahmen der kognitiven Linguistik, und insbesondere einer ihrer Tochterdisziplinen, nämlich historischer Semantik, zu bestimmen, welche kognitiven Mechanismen solche Phänomene des Sprachwandels für die Sprecher verständlich machen bzw. ermöglichen. Dafür wurden 96 zoosemische Verben, samt den vom Oxford English Dictionary Online angebotenen Definitionen und datierten Beispielsätzen, zusammengetragen und unter Anwendung der kognitiven Methapher- und Metonymietheorie analysiert. Im Anschluss wurde eine Klassifizierung der zoosemischen Verben im Englischen unternommen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Nullableitung von substantivischen Tiernamen zu Verben auf zwei grundsätzliche kognitive Mechanismen zurückzuführen ist, nämlich Metonymisierung gefolgt von Metaphorisierung oder Metaphorisierung gefolgt von Metonymisierung. Im ersten Fall wird entweder ein bereits lexikalisiertes metonymisches Verb oder der substantivische Tiername, der metonymisch für ein Attribut des Tieres steht, metaphorisch auf Menschenhandlungen projiziert, z.B. von to hound ‚etwas mithilfe eines Jagdhunds jagen’ zu to hound ‚wie ein Jagdhund verfolgen’ bzw. von rabbit ‚Karnickel’ zu to rabbit ‚sich wie Karnickel vermehren’. Im zweiten Fall wird der Tiername zunächst als metaphorisches Substantiv, das sich auf eine Person oder einen Gegenstand bezieht, lexikalisiert, z.B. rat ‚Verräter, Petze’ bzw. pony ‘Spickzettel’. Im weiteren Verlauf des Sprachwandels wird dieses Substantiv durch die Metonymie AGENT FOR ACTION oder OBJECT INVOLVED IN ACTION FOR ACTION zum Verben abgeleitet, z.B. to rat ‚verpetzen, verpfeifen’ bzw. to pony ‚spicken’. Zur Metaphorisierung gefolgt von Metonymisierung gehört eine weitere Subkategorie von zoosemischen Verben, nämlich die Verben die metonymisch für ganze metaphorische Redewendungen stehen, z.b. to wolf für to cry wolf ‚falschen Alarm geben’. Eine Erklärung zu dieser Art von metonymischer Verknüpfung zwischen der Semantik einer ganzen idiomatischen Redewendung und dem Bedeutungsinhalt eines ihrer substantivischen Elemente, das zum Verben konvertiert wird, konnte in der einschlägigen Literatur nicht gefunden werden. Daher bedarf dieser Mechanismus metonymischen Bedeutungstransfers weiterer Forschung. Die quantitative Analyse der identifizierten kognitiven Mechanismen im untersuchten Datensatz von 96 Tierverben hat ergeben, dass die metaphorische Projektion eines Tiernamens, der metonymisch für ein Attribut des Tieres steht, als der prototypische Mechanismus des Bedeutungstranfers der Englischen Zoosemie zu werten ist.

This issue of Diamonds in the Rough is concerned with social justice and the urgent need to speak one’s mind. Essays cover important political issues like abortion and women’s rights, gay rights, free speech and free thought when democracies are increasingly at risk. We also have some light-hearted writing—an essay on not being a duck—and a critique of a TV series, One Tree Hill. I’m happy to say we have some wonderful art work as well—a series on beer bottles with commentary: “Beer Stories,” and four paintings. As a last word, I’m reprinting a favorite “Coming Down with Covid” chicken soup; you don’t have to endure Covid to like it. Enjoy!, Diamonds in the Rough: A Literary Magazine, vol. 4, no. 02

The present study longitudinally explores regressive phonological cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in seven adolescents (aged 12–13) and seven adults (aged 21–39) by examining voice-onset time (VOT) of /p,t,k/ in their first, second, and third language (L1, L2, and L3, respectively). All participants had the same language combination (L1 German, L2 English, L3 Polish) and were recorded completing a range of production tasks in all three languages four times over the course of the first year of L3 learning. The scope of previous research on phonological CLI is thus broadened in two ways: (1) by tracing the development of all languages upon the arrival of a new language in a multilingual’s system longitudinally, and (2) by investigating CLI patterns in two age groups when input and learning environment are comparable. Previous L2 age studies have mostly only made retrospective assumptions about (target) language development, so that longitudinal data, including the entire language repertoire of multilingual speakers, are needed to substantiate claims made in that regard. For the adolescent group, significant changes to both their L1 and L2 over time were found, while the adults’ background languages remained relatively stable on the group level. However, for both groups, much individual variation was uncovered., Finanziert durch den Open-Access-Publikationsfonds der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU Münster).

Hongkong-Englisch ist eine in der Entstehung befindliche beziehungsweise neue Varietät der englischen Sprache, die ihre eigenen phonetischen und phonologischen Merkmale aufweist. Frühere Studien zu englischen Frikativen im Hongkong-Englisch deuteten auf einige spezielle Merkmale hin, wie beispielsweise das Fehlen stimmhafter Frikative, TH-Fronting und TH-Stopping. Jedoch gab es bisher keine groß angelegten Studien, die das phonologische System der Frikative und ihre Variabilität in Bezug auf verschiedene sprachinterne Faktoren untersuchten. Die vorliegende Studie soll diese Lücke schließen. Um die Nuancen der Frikative besser erfassen zu können, wurden zudem ihre akustischen Eigenschaften untersucht. Aus den Ergebnissen dieser Studie wurden gewichtete phonologische Regeln abgeleitet und in einem modernen Spracherkennungssystem zur Anwendung gebracht.

This paper presents a variational pragmatic analysis of multilingual question tags in Nigerian English, combining a corpus-pragmatic analysis of the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English with a survey study on the preferences and attitudes of Nigerian students toward different question tag forms. The corpus study highlights multilingual pragmatic variation in terms of form and function of variant as well as English and non-English (i.e., derived from indigenous Nigerian languages) invariant question tags in six text types: conversations, phonecalls, classroom lessons, broadcast discussions, broadcast interviews, and legal cross-examinations. Nigerian speakers combine a wide range of English and non-English invariant forms, whereas variant question tags only play a marginal role and are not characteristic of Nigerian English. Text type influences the overall frequency of question tags and – together with the pragmatic function – constrains the use of individual forms. The survey study shows diverging results as the participants generally prefer variant over invariant question tags and show a strong dispreference for indigenous Nigerian forms when speaking English. Nevertheless, their preferences for specific forms over others are guided by the communicative setting and requirements of a given situation. The students also hold most positive attitudes toward variant question tags, while non-English tags are rated less positively on items reflecting decency. However, all question tag forms are valued in terms expressiveness. Hence, Nigerian students’ dispositions toward multilingual question tag use are guided by a prescriptive ideology that is biased toward canonized English forms. While indigenous Nigerian forms are well integrated into question tag use, indicating a high degree of nativization of Nigerian English at a pragmatic level, acceptance for these local forms is lagging behind. In general methodological terms, the paper shows that question tags – or discourse-pragmatic-features in general – have high potential for studying multilingual variation in New Englishes. However, studies on the multilingual pragmatics of New Englishes need to consider the full range of multilingual forms, take into account variety-internal variation via text type, and should ideally also study the users’ perspectives.

In the present chapter, an attempt has been made to discuss the need to create Zambian English to address English language variations in Zambia. No language in the world can remain the same after interacting with other languages. The present chapter intends to propose and support the idea of using ‘Zambian English’ for both formal and informal business. Such a measure would create the communicative competence that the majority of the Zambians have always longed for. In Zambia, the purpose of using English language office is to deliberate day to day’s business. On the contrary, this has been found to be an obstacle to those who lack principles of command in the language usage, but are able to construct sentences for communicative purposes yet are deprived in international interactions. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the language experts who were engaged in a conver� sation with regard to the possibility of creating what would be known as Zambian English (ZamEnglish).

This paper examines how participants in mediated political discourse use short narratives strategically to account for discursive action by contextualising and re-contextualising their discursive selves, particular discursive acts and their intended and unintended perlocutionary effects. The data analysed are pre-election data (2017) and non-election data (2018), comprising online news reports from British broadsheets, parliamentary debates, political speeches from leading British politicians, and their web-based comments' sections. The research is based on the differentiation between the generalised pragmatic premise and second-order theoretical construct of accountability2 of communicative action and its discourse-community-based particularisation, the first-order participant construct of accountability1. The discursive value of the latter is negotiated in context and in the political-discourse data further distinguished as regards accountability of and accountability for discursive acts. The analysis focuses on how ordinary and not-so-ordinary participants contextualise and recontextualise interfacing ordinary-life experience anchored in private domains and not-so-ordinary political action anchored in public and institutional domains. It considers (1) the production format comparing not-so-ordinary and ordinary story tellers; (2) stories with (a) not-so-ordinary, (b) ordinary, and (c) ordinary and not-so-ordinary characters; (3) ordinary settings and institutional settings; and (4) explicit and implicit evaluations by characters and tellers. The analysis shows that there is not only variation in the formatting of the short narratives with more-prototypical small stories and monolithic characters, settings and plot, and less-prototypical small stories with more dimensional characters, fuzzy settings and negotiated evaluations. There is also variation in the discursive function of the small stories: not-so-ordinary tellers and characters account for their discursive acts through life-world-experience-based accounts while at the same time implicating their leadership skills. They present themselves as listening to ordinary people, voicing their concerns in the public arena, initiating political action and acting on their behalf. Ordinary tellers and their ordinary characters tell their ordinary-life based stories, distancing themselves from the not-so-ordinary agents. In the mediated data, not-so-ordinary participants' references to the private-public interface generally trigger conversational implicatures targeting sincerity, credibility and ideological coherence, while ordinary participants' references to the private-public interface are used to show the effects of political decision on their real-life experience.

No abstract available.

Surveys and teaching material for "Training Multilingual Writing Strategies in Higher Education - Multilingual Approaches to Writing-to-learn in Discipline-specific Courses", published with Peter Lang Group AG (https://www.peterlang.com/imprint/), series 'Textproduktion & Medium' (https://www.peterlang.com/series/6308)

Guessing meaning from context is a challenging strategy for Second Language Learners (SLLs). In using the strategy, research found that poor students or low proficiency learners struggled in their attempts to use it. Mainly, it was reported that it was due to their vocabulary knowledge was limited. In another aspect, retaining vocabulary learnt is also important. Such is essential since learning vocabulary does not mean knowing the definition only. Yet, learners must also be able to use the vocabulary as they engage in language skills such as reading, writing, speaking and listening. The study aims at finding the hindrances faced among poor students’ using contextual clues in retaining vocabulary. The study employed a case study to collect data from two basic students studying at a tertiary level. The study found that their hindrances in guessing meaning contexts were due to their being confused in guessing meaning when reading a sentence. Also, it was found that they were not able to find clues since they lacked vocabulary to guess correctly. The study implied that guessing meaning from context required sizeable vocabulary knowledge. Therefore, more training is necessary to assist basic learners in being successful in guessing from contexts.

This research paper concentrates on the analysis of the aphoristic potential of G. W. Bush’s presidential rhetoric. Aphorisms are the most ancient laconic forms of expressing original and completed thoughts which reveal the peculiarity of their authors’ world perception and worldview. From this perspective, these units can serve as the means of values codification. Repeatability and widespread use of aphorisms in various communications contribute to transmitting the values and ideas between the generations. Political aphorisms, which are a combination of aphoristic expressions from political communication and discourse, play an important role in this process. The authors of these expressions are not only politicians, but also philosophers, historians, writers, celebrities of different nationalities and generations. Presidential rhetoric is an integral and significant part of political discourse. The use of aphorisms as the means of codification of national and common human values in President G. W. Bush’s formal addresses and speeches is intentional. It makes them concise and original, influential and convincing. Aphoristic expressions denoting common human values show the ideas and beliefs of their authors, as well as the politician, about life, justice, equality, freedom, faith, family. Aphorisms defining national values become the means of updating concepts of democracy, unity and diversity, freedom and security, success, and opportunity to fulfill one’s potential in American society. The distinctive feature of G.W. Bush’s rhetoric is the frequent use of aphorisms whose authors are the Founding Fathers.

To reopen educational institutions and return to the classroom, we all need to modify how we act to successfully face the challenges of the new normal resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and entailing our insights into and the after-effects of the pandemic. More specifically, the new normal might encompass online education we are getting used to during the pandemic and the age-old onsite education as well. Thoughtfully integrated, online and onsite learning combine to create blended learning. However, the pertinent literature reveals that English as a foreign language (EFL) students and teachers differently perceive and react to blended learning in diverse contexts. This study was designed to explore student and teacher perceptions of and reactions to blended learning in the Department of English, Jahangirnagar University in the new normal. Fifty undergraduates of EFL and eight teachers of the department participated in the study. To collect data from them, the Student Questionnaire and the Teacher Questionnaire were used. And the data were processed by applying the SPSS programme module. The findings revealed that the majority of the students and the teachers had mostly positive perceptions of blended learning, although the former did not have sufficient exposure to online learning and the latter lacked adequate insights into online teaching. Further, both the students and the teachers expressed mostly positive reactions to blended learning in the new normal, though the former deemed online examinations inadequately smooth and reliable, and the latter had insufficient experience of online instruction and assessment. The study categorically recommends reforming the curriculum, adopting relevant instructional strategies, developing suitable materials, customizing the assessment, integrating and installing technology, training the teachers, upskilling the students for blended learning, improving the infrastructure, and adjusting the management.

The book "Studies in Modern English" interprets English-language communication in the humanitarian paradigm of knowledge within the linguistic and psycho-sociocultural study of speech activity prioritizing cognitive and communicative paradigms. Digital discourse as the formation of new semiotic phenomena has crowned the rapid scientific and technological progress. Researchers' scientific achievements represented in the book are systemic and valid in terms of evidence-based narratives, which reflect the transformational horizon of information theory, communication theory, and theory of linguodidactics in modern English verbal, creative and digital environments. The book represents an integrated approach to the study of modern English as an open synergetic system, which requires a description of the relationship between verbal and nonverbal notions in digital space. The book integrates such innovative perspectives as the interaction of natural English and programming languages, cyber aggression as a communicative pattern in English-language digital discourse, ethics, and democratization of modern English language, relevant developments in the field of English language as a Foreign Language, and other related issues. A complex focus of the book in the realm of modern English-language communication concerns verbal and nonverbal notions analyzed in the context of socio-cultural and digital communicative spaces.

The paper focuses on digital discourse. This is a speech-intellectual product of innovative information technologies, a phenomenon, which needs further interdisciplinary and linguistic interpretation. The English-language digital discourse shows how linguistic verbal communication is mediated by digits and to what extent these Signum and Verbum unity reigns over the world. The paper analyzes the ways and methods of integrated and differential use of verbal and non-verbal sign systems in the English language as compared to programming languages, considering the types of synchronous changes in the socio-cultural dimension of the sign. This research describes the processes of signs transformation during their functioning in programming languages and in the English language, common and distinctive features in the arrangement of grammatical, lexical-semantic, and graphic means of (natural) English and (artificial) programming languages in their projection on different modes of communication in the system Human ↔ Machine. Programming languages are constituted by verbal means of the English language with additional use of its own semiotic resources, which testifies to their integrative linguistic and mathematical nature. The specific representation of ElDD conveys its reciprocal nature when the English language using its own tools combines them with the elements of the programming languages thus creating an effective toolkit for self-process

With the rise of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), range sensors and corresponding data processing methods are becoming more and more important. It plays a decisive role in one of the major future topics, autonomous driving. Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensors are attracting attention due to their unique advantages in terms of high radial distance resolution. Therein, Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD)-based direct Time-Of-Flight (TOF) LiDAR system shows a powerful ability regarding its simple measurement principle and extremely high energy detection efficiency. This system measures the distances based on the traveling time of laser photons to reach and return to an object. However, one of the greatest challenges of such a system is high background light, which causes a number of false triggers and interferes with the desired signals. Moreover, due to the large volume of LiDAR data, classical methods are only able to perform simple processing on low-level LiDAR data in applications with a high demand on timing performance, such as ADAS. In the subsequent high-level processing, only the depth information (i.e. point cloud) is utilized and the used LiDAR front-end is considered as a black box. In this case, most features in low-level LiDAR data are overlooked, resulting in low system robustness in harsh conditions, such as high background light and large distances. This work seeks a breakthrough on the distance determination performance of a SPAD-based direct TOF LiDAR system. In the scope of the work, a machine learning-based distance prediction approach, Multi-Peak Analysis (MPA), is proposed for LiDAR time-correlated histograms to improve timing performance and the system robustness against background light. First of all, the existing methods based on the LiDAR system are reviewed. Concepts and attempts are designed and carried out on the combination of machine learning and low-level LiDAR data. Two datasets are used to assess the performance of MPA. After theoretical and simulative evaluations, MPA is designed and includes three components: 1) a physics-guided feature extraction, 2) two distance prediction algorithms (fully-connected neural network and naive Bayes classifier), and 3) a correlation analysis in time and space. The evaluation results lead to the conclusion that MPA outperforms a widely-used classical digital processing in terms of timing performance and distance determination with a +-5% error bound with various background light intensities and distances. Finally, MPA is implemented on both a personal computer and a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) module for runtime verifications. Demonstrations show a high agreement with theoretical and simulative results and confirm the feasibility of MPA. Dissertation, Universität Duisburg-Essen, 2022

The paper analyses specific characteristics of language that influence the development of culture and societies. The problem of the connection between language and culture has occupied the minds of many famous scientists: some believe that language is a part of the culture as a whole; others think that language is only a form of cultural expression. Undoubtedly, language constitutes a vital component of the cultural background underlying social development. Language is an essential means of communication and interaction. However, language is at the same time sovereign about culture as a whole and can be separate from culture or compared to culture as an equal element (i.e., that language is neither a form nor a component of culture).

Postcolonial Surveillance investigates the long history of the European border regime, focusing on the colonial forerunners of today’s border technologies. The book takes a longue durée perspective to uncover how Europe’s colonial history continues to shape the high-tech political present and has morphed into EU border migration policies, border security, and surveillance apparatuses. It exposes the racial hierarchies and power relations that form these systems and highlights key moments when the past and present interact and collide, such as in panoptic surveillance, biopolitical registers, biometric sorting, and deterrent media infrastructure. The technological genealogies assembled in this book reveal the unacknowledged histories that had to be rejected for the seemingly clean, unbiased, and neutral technologies to emerge as such.

English language is being taught as a second foreign language in India. For most of the learners in India, English still a foreign language or target language. The study of this language is important to fulfill different kinds of academic and professional requirements. Still, there is a big gulf between demand and supply for which the failure of the system is largely responsible as its main emphasis on to adherence to the foreign curriculum. The government tries to impose this curriculum on English teachers, but, in fact, the curriculum is outdated.

No abstract available.

The article deals with the notion of internet aggression (cyber aggression). It considers the mentioned term from both psychological and communicative approaches. The paper also provides detailed analyses of the cyber aggression in political discourse. The provided ex-amples are taken from the speeches of politicians during the time of Covid pandemic. The author also identifies several types of cyber aggression.

Teaching comprises all types of disciplines and teachers need to look outside the confines of English as a Second Language. The acquisition of knowledge comes in a variety of the learners’ educational potential. English as a Second Language in teaching and learning, focuses on active learner’s involvement and reduction of coercion. Indeed, Gibran’s thoughts remain true that “wisdom leads one to discuss his or her potentials. To realize this, teachers in all educational levels have to portray a less dominant classroom role in accord with the importance of classroom interaction in the teaching learning process. N.A. Flaunders retorted that “in the average classroom someone is talking for two-thirds of the time, two-thirds of the task is direct influence.” What does this mean? Students’ participation or interaction in the classroom has a significant content to enhance their linguistic competence and its core basis is how to use the language as the most important factor in the classroom. Comprehending the information caters one to establish a fair and well-balanced condition that teachers are facilitators, and the learners are to stay in the frontline. In today’s classroom setting, the adoption-adaption of teaching strategies focuses on the learners’ ability to have a strong command or fluency of the language. ESL is learned around the globe and the learners’ interests are the primary goals in the teaching and learning pro� cess. Colin Blakemore once said that “True knowledge, as Plato argues, must be within us all, and learning consists of solely of discussing what we already know.” In an ESL classroom, discovery of knowledge is not a new game. Teachers do perform their tasks and the learners serve not as passive listeners but as active recipients in the transformation-sharing of all the five macro skills namely speaking, reading, writing, listening, and viewing. In fact, if commitment, knowledge of subject-matter for independent learning, and management of learning are packaged in one big box, both the teachers and the learners will operate a mutual process of generating a lively culture and quality of educational life. With the aforementioned views I had experienced in teaching ESL, the teacher’s passion for teaching and attitude in dealing with the learners create a strong impact on the learners cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains.

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees is a modernist ‘curiosity’ which remained largely unknown due to the peculiar conditions of its original publication. In recent years, however, it has regained its place within the field of modernist studies due to the efforts of Julia Briggs and Sandeep Parmar. Instead of approaching the poem through established categories of urban representation, such as flânerie, urban phantasmagoria or the urban palimpsest, this article focuses on Paris, then in the midst of the 1919 Peace Conference, as a liminal space and site of Bakhtinian carnival. This framework advances an understanding of the poem as a complete and complex work of art. The article argues that the peculiar structure and formal organization of the poem, and its relation to the reality of Paris in 1919 and beyond, turns the poem into a liminal space of its own, thus doubling the city it speaks of.

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Identifikation und der Klassifikation von evaluativer Lexis in den Werken von britischen Geschichtsschreibern der Spätneuzeit. Im Fokus stehen die von den Historikern im Verlauf von 200 Jahren (ca. 1700-1914) verwendeten sprachlichen Mittel, welche zur Bewertung von historischen Ereignissen und Akteuren eingesetzt werden, und die durch die Mittel realisierten Funktionen. Zentral ist die Betrachtung von Evaluation als linguistischem Mittel der Signifikanzherstellung in neuzeitlicher englischer Geschichtsschreibung. Die Arbeit stützt sich in ihren theoretische Ansätzen u.a. auf das Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005) und erweitert dieses, um es unter Einsatz von sowohl korpuslinguistisch-quantitativer als auch qualitativer Methoden auf ein großes Korpus historischer Primärwerke aus dem 18.-19. Jahrhundert anzuwenden. Sie verortet sich sowohl in der historischen/diachronen Diskursforschung als auch in der korpusunterstützten Diskursanalyse (Partington et al. 2013) und liefert eine erste linguistische Beschreibung des historiographischen Registers in der wichtigen Periode seiner allmählichen Verwissenschaftlichung und Institutionalisierung. Indem sie eine interdisziplinäre Perspektive einnimmt, vermittelt diese Arbeit zwischen historischer Theoriebildung und linguistischer Theorie und Methodik. This paper is concerned with the identification and classification of evaluative lexis in the works of British historians of the Late Modern period. The focus is on the linguistic resources used by historians over the course of 200 years (c. 1700-1914) to evaluate historical events and actors, and the functions realised through these resources. Central to the study is the consideration of evaluation as a linguistic means of signaling historical significance in Late Modern English historiography. The work draws on the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005) and extends it in order to apply it to a large corpus of primary historical works from the 18th-19th centuries using both corpus-linguistic-quantitative and qualitative methods. Situating itself in both historical/diachronic discourse research and corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Partington et al. 2013), it provides the first linguistic account of the historiographical register in the pivotal period of its gradual scientification and institutionalisation. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this work mediates between historiographic theorising and linguistic theory and methodology.

In spite of ample research evidence indicating the need for a paradigm shift in language education, there is still a great discrepancy between the principles of plurilingual and intercultural education promoted by the applied linguistics literature and the reality of everyday language teaching and learning in schools. These research findings point especially towards the need for investigating the knowledge gaps that need to be addressed in pre- and in-service language teacher education. This paper presents findings of a classroom-based investigation into the professional development paths of five pre-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, as they learned how to translate concepts of plurilingualism and plurilingual education studied at University into their situated practice in schools. Five case studies were carried out in four primary schools and one secondary school in Germany. Research data were collected via the following ethnographic research instruments: classroom observations and field notes, video recording of school lessons, in-depth interviews with pre- and in-service teachers, pre-service teachers’ reflective journals, anonymous questionnaires, and focus group interviews with learners. The study has produced findings that reveal important aspects of the development of teacher cognition in connection to the integration of plurilingual-inspired pedagogies into the EFL curriculum, the challenges associated with adopting an innovative approach to language education and the new competencies that are needed in this context. Zahlreiche Forschungsergebnisse wiesen bereits auf die Notwendigkeit eines Paradigmenwechsels im Sprachunterricht hin. Dennoch besteht immer noch eine große Diskrepanz zwischen den Prinzipien des mehrsprachigen und interkulturellen Unterrichts, die in der Fachliteratur der Angewandten Linguistik empfohlen werden, und der Realität im alltäglichen Sprachunterricht an Schulen. Die Ergebnisse weisen im Besonderen auf die Notwendigkeit hin, die pädagogischen Lücken zu untersuchen, die bei der Aus- und Weiterbildung von Sprachlehrern/innen adressiert werden müssen. In diesem Artikel werden die Ergebnisse einer empirischen Studie mit fünf Lehramtsstudenten/innen für Englisch als Fremdsprache (EFL) vorgestellt, die im Rahmen des Studiums gelernte Konzepte der Mehrsprachigkeit und des mehrsprachigen Unterrichts in ihre Praxis im Schulunterricht umgesetzt haben. Fünf Fallstudien wurden in vier Grundschulen und einer weiterführenden Schule in Deutschland durchgeführt. Die Forschungsdaten wurden mit Hilfe der folgenden ethnografischen Forschungsinstrumente gesammelt: Beobachtungen und Feldnotizen im Klassenzimmer, Videoaufzeichnung des Schulunterrichts, Interviews mit Lehrern und Lehramtsstudenten/innen, reflektierende Tagebücher von Lehramtsstudenten/innen, anonyme Fragebögen sowie Fokusgruppen mit den Lernenden. Die Studie hat Ergebnisse erzielt, die wichtige Aspekte hinsichtlich (a) der Erkenntnisentwicklung von Lehrern im Zusammenhang der Umsetzung eines mehrsprachigkeits¬sensiblen Englischunterrichts, (b) der Herausforderungen bei der Einführung eines innovativen Ansatzes im Sprachunterricht, sowie (c) der neu benötigten Kompetenzen in diesem Zusammenhang aufzeigen.

This dissertation explores intertextuality in the writing processes and products of English-language academic writing. Using a mixed-methods approach, it investigates how German university students use the source text when writing in their foreign language (L2) English. Intertextual strategies are analysed in a corpus of reading reports, i.e. disciplinary assignments based on a single source text. Furthermore, six L2 writers’ processes of writing a reading report are studied using screen recordings and stimulated recall data. Intertextual links such as paraphrases as well as strategies of attribution, referencing, reporting, and (strategic) textual borrowing are analysed in order to shed light on how students create and combine intertextual manifestations in L2 academic writing. By combining a corpus and a process study in an innovative study design, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how novice writers create and conceptualise intertextuality. The study adopts a positive perspective by focusing on proficient source use. It examines students’ strategies and identifies patterns of intertextuality in the writing process and the product. Its results bear important implications for foreign-language writing research and the teaching of source use in academic contexts.

Diese Dissertation untersucht die Faktoren, die den Erwerb der Rhotizität (d.h. die Realisation des /r/ in der Silbencoda) im Englischen von Mandarin Chinesisch sprechenden jungen Erwachsenen beeinflussen. Durch die Einbeziehung von Produktion und Perzeption, einem longitudinalen Studiendesign und der Verwendung neuester statistischer Methoden leistet sie damit einen innovativen und bedeutenden wissenschaftlichen Beitrag zur Erforschung des Erwerbs einer soziolinguistischen Variable durch Zweitsprachenlernende. In dieser Dissertation wird ein neues Modell entwickelt, das L2 Sociophonological Development Model (SPDM), das Vorhersagen zum Zweitspracherwerb von soziolinguistisch variierenden phonologischen Variablen macht.

The nature of crosslinguistic influence in real-time L2 processing has been explored with various methods and language combinations and so far, the findings have shown differences between lexicon and syntax. For instance, current research on the mental lexicon shows evidence for nonselective activation of languages (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). Yet, there is less evidence for crosslinguistic influence when it comes to morphosyntax, which has been found mostly for verb subcategorization properties (Frenck-Mestre & Pynte, 1997), subject-object ambiguities (Hopp, 2006) and attachment preferences (Frenck-Mestre, 1997, 2002). The current thesis aims at investigating the extent of crosslinguistic influence in L2 sentence comprehension among highly advanced L2 English learners by focusing on the differences in the realization of grammatical gender, tense and grammatical aspect in the learners L1. Therefore, the thesis focuses on crosslinguistic influence in L2 processing and it investigates if L1 lexical-grammatical information gets activated in L2 comprehension and which factors modulate it. There are three separate studies on online comprehension of anaphoric pronouns, coreference violations and temporarily ambiguous sentences with different L1 groups (i.e., L1 German, L1 Croatian and L1 Spanish). The results show limited support for crosslinguistic influence in the case of grammatical gender and no support for crosslinguistic evidence in grammatical aspect and tense. Thus, the results replicate the findings of the studies so far that there is less clear evidence of L1 activation during L2 sentence reading compared to L1 activation in the bilingual lexicon. Some of the possible factors for the lack of crosslinguistic influence in L2 processing might be the language context, L1-L2 differences and the choice of items. Additionally, the results cannot be fully explained by leading L2 processing and acquisition theories. Yet, the study on grammatical aspect does give support for the target-like use of grammatical information in L2 sentence comprehension, which is contrary to the predictions of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006)., Die Art des Einflusses der L1 bei der L2-Verarbeitung in Echtzeit wurde bereits mit verschiedenen Methoden und Sprachkombinationen untersucht. Bisher zeigen die Ergebnisse Unterschiede zwischen Lexikon und Syntax. Beispielsweise zeigen aktuelle Forschungen zur lexikalischen Verarbeitung Hinweise auf eine nichtselektive Aktivierung von Sprachen (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). Es gibt jedoch weniger Hinweise auf einen Einfluss der L1 auf die Morphosyntax, die hauptsächlich für Eigenschaften der Verbunterkategorisierung (Frenck-Mestre & Pynte, 1997), Subjekt-Objekt-Ambiguitäten (Hopp, 2006) und Bindungspräferenzen (Frenck-Mestre, 1997, 2002) gefunden wurde. Die aktuelle Doktorarbeit zielt darauf ab, das Ausmaß der L1 Einflusses auf das L2- Satzverständnis unter hochentwickelten L2-Englischlernenden zu untersuchen, indem die Unterschiede in der Realisierung des grammatikalischen Geschlechts, der Zeitform und des grammatikalischen Aspekts im L1 der Lernenden manipuliert werden. Daher konzentriert sich die Doktorarbeit auf den Einfluss der L1 auf das L2 Verarbeitung und untersucht, ob lexikalisch-grammatische L1-Informationen im L2 Verständnis aktiviert werden und welche Faktoren sie modulieren. Es gibt drei separate Studien zum Online-Verständnis von Anaphorikpronomen, Verstößen gegen die Koreferenzvereinbarung und vorübergehend mehrdeutigen Sätzen mit verschiedenen L1-Gruppen (d.h. L1-Deutsch, L1-Kroatisch und L1-Spanisch). Die Ergebnisse sind eine begrenzte Unterstützung für den Einflusses der L1 im Fall des grammatikalischen Geschlechts. Für den Einfluss der L1 auf grammatikalische Aspekt und Zeitform werden keine Beweise gefunden. Somit zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass es weniger eindeutige Hinweise auf eine L1-Aktivierung während des Lesens des L2-Satzes gibt als auf eine L1-Aktivierung im zweisprachigen Lexikon. Einige der möglichen Faktoren für das Fehlen eines Spracheneinflusses bei der L2-Verarbeitung könnten der Sprachkontext, die Unterschiede zwischen L1 und L2 und die Auswahl der Elemente sein. Außerdem können die Ergebnisse nicht vollständig durch führende L2-Verarbeitungs- und Erwerbstheorien erklärt werden. Die Studie zum grammatikalischen Aspekt unterstützt jedoch die zielgerichtete Verwendung grammatikalischer Informationen beim Verständnis von L2-Sätzen, was den Vorhersagen der Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006) widerspricht.

When the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in South London were opened to the general public in the 1840s, they were presented as a ‘world text’: a collection of flora from all over the world, with the spectacular tropical (read: colonial) specimens taking centre stage as indexes of Britain’s imperial supremacy. However, the one exotic plant species that preoccupied the British cultural imagination more than any other remained conspicuously absent from the collection: the banyan tree, whose non-transferability left a significant gap in the ‘text’ of the garden, thereby effectively puncturing the illusion of comprehensive global command that underpins the biopolitical designs of what Richard Grove has aptly dubbed ‘green imperialism’. This article demonstrates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the banyan tree became an object of fascination and admiration for British scientists, painters, writers and photographers precisely because of its obstinate non-availability to colonial control and visual or even conceptual representability.

The debate on possible cognitive advantages bilinguals have over monolinguals continues to occupy the research community. There is an ever-growing research body focusing on adjudicating whether there is, in fact, an effect of using two or more languages regularly on cognition. In this paper, we briefly review some of the more pertinent literature that has attempted to identify attenuating, modulating, and confounding factors in research comparing monolingual and bilingual populations, and we highlight issues that should be taken into account in future research to move forward as a research community. At the same time, we argue for a change in perspective concerning what is deemed an advantage and what is not and argue for more ecologically valid research that investigates real-life advantages.

This corpus-based Master Thesis explores linguistic politeness and gratitude in Indian and Sri Lankan English. First, the theory section displays the historical development of the Indian and Sri Lankan English varieties, as well as the current status and characteristics of South Asian English. Since this thesis focuses on South Asian English varieties, Schneider's Dynamic Model and Kachru's Three Circles Model are also discussed. In the last parts of the theoretical framework, approaches to linguistic politeness are defined and previous research on gratitude is presented. In the methodology section, details about the extracted data set from the International Corpus of English (ICE) are explained. The results are then presented and discussed in terms of previously formulated research questions.

The core of this work is a sociophonetic examination of the vowel system of Black South African English (BSAE), the most spoken English variety in South Africa. BSAE is defined as the second language variety of speakers whose mother tongue is one of the Bantu languages indigenous to South Africa. It is characterised by a five-vowel system as a result of the transfer of linguistic properties from the indigenous languages. Apart from that, the effects of racial segregation formed a relatively homogeneous variety. In the early 1990s, a political transformation took place, which led to the abolishment of apartheid. In a more liberal sociopolitical climate allowing interactions between people of different ethnicities, an English sub-variety within BSAE has emerged whose phonology differs markedly from older forms. The present work documents the phonology of stressed monophthongs of post-apartheid BSAE as realised by a socially stratified sample of 44 speakers of different age groups. It was assumed that young speakers would differ significantly in their pronunciation from other participants. Data collection took place in South Africa in 2013. The sample consisted of 21 females and 23 males. The participants were divided into three age groups named young N=20), middle (N=17) and older (N=7). They were audio-recorded in three speech styles with different degrees of formality: interview style (IN), reading style (ReP) and wordlist/citation style (WL). This setup was employed to determine the number of distinct vowels of BSAE, to determine durational differences between prescriptively tense and lax vowels and to investigate the possible influence of linguistic and social factors on the variation in BSAE. Around 14,000 tokens of Lobanov-normalised formant values were extracted and subjected to descriptive and analytical statistics. Each vowel cluster was analysed for the frequency of the formants F1 and F2 and for vowel duration. Vowel overlap was calculated with the Bhattacharyya coefficient and the Pillai score. Vowel length was compared by normalised vowel duration. The regression analysis was carried out with linear mixed effects models. Random factors in each regression run were speaker and word label. The fixed factors, i.e. the variables examined, were phoneme/lexical set, phonological context, spelling, speech style, vowels in L1 language family, gender and age group. The fixed factors can be divided into linguistic factors (phoneme, phonological context, spelling, speech style and number of vowels in L1) and social factors (gender and age group). Regarding vowel quality, the fixed factors were phoneme (selection according to the vowel cluster), spelling (for the analysis of NURSE, STRUT and FOOT), speech style (IN, ReP, WL), number of vowels in L1 (5, 7), gender (male, female), age group (young, middle, older) and phonological context. The factor phonological context was divided into prevocalic context and adjacent context. The prevocalic context included the variants coronals and non-coronals. For the analysis of GOOSE, the variant J-words was added. The analysis of KIT contained the variable adjacent context with the variants high front and centralised. Regarding vowel duration, the fixed factors were those above. Again, of the preceding context, the variants coronals and non-coronals were always included as well as J-words for the analysis of goose. Apart from that, following voicing (voiced, voiceless, pause/gap) and following manner (fricative, plosive, affricate, pause/gap) were added. The variable number of vowels in L1 was excluded. Across all variables, the results show a general presence of the tense/lax distinction. Of the linguistic variables, speech style was the most decisive, showing that most participants differentiated between formal style (WL) on the one hand and less formal (ReP) and casual style (IN) on the other. The number of vowels in L1 showed no significant results whatsoever. The social variable age group had the biggest influence on both vowel quality and quantity. The young age group differed significantly from the middle and older group. The young speakers showed also the greatest variation ranging from complete vowel overlap to clear vowel distinction. The social variable gender rarely yielded significant results. The KIT split, mainly reported for White South African English (WSAE), was performed by speakers of all age groups and genders. Young speakers and females, however, showed a higher degree of KIT split compared to the middle and older age group and males. The same applies to GOOSE fronting. Formerly an exclusive feature of WSAE, it could be observed in all age groups and genders but with the young and females ahead of their counterparts. A closer look at the young group, however, showed that there were only six speakers responsible for this outcome. They employed an acrolectal inventory of eleven vowels. The remaining 14 young speakers along with all speakers of the middle and older age group formed the subsample of mesolectal speakers and exhibited a five-vowel system plus one emerging vowel. It can be concluded that in the mesolect, where all three age groups are represented, the phonemes are stable in apparent time. It can also be concluded that educated BSAE is majorly mesolectal. Finally, although only a small number of young speakers differed from all other participants, it is proposed that the emergence of a new form of BSAE is due to the new political order of an unsegregated South African society., Diese Arbeit beschreibt eine soziophonetische Untersuchung des Black South African English (BSAE), der meistgesprochenen Englischvarietät in Südafrika. BSAE ist eine Zweitsprachenvarietät gesprochen von Südafrikanern, deren Muttersprache eine der Bantusprachen Südafrikas ist. Diese Varietät ist charakterisiert durch ein reduziertes Vokalsystem, das aus dem Transfer von Sprachmerkmalen aus den Bantu-Muttersprachen resultiert. Darüber hinaus führte die jahrzehntelange Apartheidpolitik zu einer weitgehend homogenen Sprechergruppe. Die politische Transformation in den frühen 1990er Jahren führte zur Abschaffung der Rassentrennung. Das neue soziopolitische Klima ermöglichte die Interaktion von Menschen unterschiedlicher Ethnien, wodurch sich eine Sprechergruppe innerhalb des BSAE herausbildete, deren Phonologie sich deutlich von der traditionellen Form unterscheidet. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Phonologie betonter Vokale des BSAE. Die Datenerhebung erfolgte 2013 in Südafrika. Die Stichprobe umfasste 44 Probanden bestehend aus 21 Frauen und 23 Männern, die in drei Altersgruppen (jung (N=20), mittel (N=17), älter (N=7)) eingeteilt wurden. Die Probanden wurden nach der bewährten Methode des soziophonetischen Interviews nach Labov in drei Sprechstilen akustisch aufgezeichnet: Interviewstil (IN), Lesestil (ReP) und Wortlistenstil (WL). Dieses Vorgehen hatte zum Ziel, a) die Anzahl der Vokale des BSAE zu bestimmen, b) Unterschiede in der Vokallänge zwischen präskriptiv langen und kurzen Vokalen zu ermitteln und c) den möglichen Einfluss linguistischer und sozialer Faktoren auf die Variation im BSAE zu untersuchen. Die deskriptive und analytische Statistik umfasste die Frequenzwerte von ca. 14.000 Vokalmessungen. Für jedes Vokalcluster wurden die Lobanov-normalisierten Frequenzen der Formanten F1 und F2 (Vokalqualität) sowie die Vokaldauer (Vokalquantität) gemessen. Die Vokalüberlappung wurde mittels Bhattacharyya-Koeffizienten und Pillai-Score ermittelt. Für die Vokaldauer wurden ebenfalls normalisierte Werte verwendet. Zur Regressionsanalyse dienten gemischte Modelle, wobei Sprecher und Wort als zufällige Effekte fungierten. Die unabhängigen Variablen waren Phonem/Lexical Set, phonologischer Kontext, Orthografie, Sprechstil, Anzahl der Vokale in der L1-Sprachfamilie sowie Geschlecht und Altersgruppe. Diese Variablen lassen sich in soziale Faktoren (Geschlecht und Altersgruppe) und in linguistische Faktoren (alle anderen) unterteilen. Über alle Variablen hinweg zeigen die Ergebnisse ein generelles Vorhandensein von langen und kurzen Vokalen. Von den linguistischen Variablen war der Sprechstil am entscheidendsten. Es zeigte sich, dass die meisten Teilnehmer zwischen formellem Stil (WL) einerseits und weniger formellem (ReP) und informellem Stil (IN) andererseits unterschieden. Die Anzahl der Vokale in der L1-Sprachfamilie zeigte keinerlei signifikante Ergebnisse. Die soziale Variable Altersgruppe hatte den größten Einfluss sowohl auf die Vokalqualität als auch auf die Vokalquantität. Die junge Altersgruppe unterschied sich signifikant von den Sprechern der mittleren und älteren Gruppe, während sich die Sprecher der mittleren und älteren Gruppe sehr oft ähnlich verhielten. Die jungen Sprecher zeigten auch die größte Variation, die von vollständiger Vokalüberlappung bis zu deutlicher Vokalunterscheidung reichte. Die soziale Variable Geschlecht lieferte selten signifikante Ergebnisse. Der KIT-Split, ein Sprachmerkmal, das bisher hauptsächlich für White South African English (WSAE) beschrieben wurde, trat bei Sprechern aller Altersgruppen und beiderlei Geschlechts auf. Jedoch zeigten junge Sprecher und Frauen einen höheren Grad dieser Merkmalsausprägung als die mittlere und ältere Altersgruppe sowie Männer. Das Gleiche gilt für das GOOSE-Fronting: Ursprünglich ein exklusives Merkmal des WSAE, konnte es in allen Altersgruppen sowie bei Männern und Frauen beobachtet werden, wobei wiederum die jungen und die weiblichen Sprecher einen höheren Umfang am GOOSE-Fronting aufwiesen. Bei genauerer Untersuchung der jungen Gruppe zeigte sich jedoch, dass nur sechs Sprecher für diesen Ergebnis verantwortlich waren. Ihr Vokalumfang umfasst 11 Vokale, womit sie als akrolektale Sprecher charakterisiert werden können. Demnach ähneln sie hinsichtlich ihrer Aussprache dem Englisch südafrikanischer Muttersprachler. Die verbleibenden 14 jungen Sprecher bilden zusammen mit allen Sprechern der mittleren und älteren Altersgruppe die Gruppe der mesolektalen Sprecher. Für diese wird ein Fünfvokalsystem definiert sowie ein Vokal identifiziert, der noch nicht vollständig etabliert scheint. Methodisch liegt dieser Arbeit eine synchrone Sprachanalyse zugrunde (apparent-time study), da Sprecher verschiedenen Alters untersucht wurden. Die Ergebnisse lassen daher die Schlussfolgerung zu, dass im Mesolekt, der von Sprechern aller drei Altersgruppen gesprochen wird, die Phoneme sehr stabil sind. Ebenso kann gefolgert werden, dass das BSAE gebildeter Sprecher überwiegend mesolektal ist. Obwohl sich nur eine kleine Anzahl junger Sprecher von allen anderen Probanden unterscheidet, wird schließlich die These aufgestellt, dass die Entstehung einer neuen Form des BSAE auf die neue politische Ordnung einer südafrikanischen Gesellschaft ohne Rassenschranken zurückgeführt werden kann.

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 is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference.

Oil palm plantations are known for their adverse effects on biodiversity and human well-being. Such industrial agricultural landscapes are homogeneous and oversimplify biodiversity and convey little or no human well-being. Yet, an oil palm plantation design implementing land sharing and land sparing simultaneously can provide a place for biodiversity conservation, generate social landscape values and provide human well-being. Also, local biodiversity controls agricultural pests. An Integration of nature in an oil palm plantation can foresee benefits and risks to the oil palm and workers. First, a heterogeneous agricultural landscape can provide habitat to local species, which can act as a biological control in agricultural systems. Second, it can provide social landscape values and change and shape humans’ perception of the plantation. Third, workers are positively or negatively affected by interacting with nature inside the plantation. Intensive large-scale agricultural landscapes such as plantations are often considered and designed as sole production areas. They can also exhibit a complex spatial pattern of vegetation types, implementing land sparing and land sharing approaches. The company, Poligrow Colombia SAS, has implemented these approaches in the Macondo plantation for a decade. The company followed the principles and criteria of the RSPO and the Rainforest Alliance plus the national laws to design the oil palm plantation. As a result, the plantation has different vegetation types besides oil palms, namely compositional and configuration heterogeneity. The Macondo plantation has gained a nature-enhanced agricultural landscape that can create different habitats for local flora and fauna and provide ecological and social values. For instance, biological control service for oil palms pests of Opsiphanes cassina and Rhynchophorus palmarum. Also, workers can perceive social landscape values such as shade and water provision. A nature-enhanced plantation design is possible to implement and maintain, though it generates costs. Yet, implementing both approaches provides a framework to make large-scale farming systems more sustainable. It is possible to argue that nature-enhanced plantation design is more sustainable as compared to monocultures. Other oil palm plantations and other large-agricultural systems can see the Macondo plantation design as viable. Production areas and conservation areas, with native flora and fauna, are intertwined. However, it is still unknown whether implementing both approaches simultaneously in an oil palm plantation can bring any benefits to the agricultural landscape structure, provision of social landscape values and human wellbeing. This interdisciplinary study explores the role of nature in oil palm plantations. Specifically, to analyze the landscape characteristics of the Macondo plantation for two purposes: a) ecologically, the landscape composition and configuration of the plantation enhance landscape connectivity and pest control service, 2) socially, owing to the landscape characteristics, plantation workers perceive social landscape values, well-being and better working conditions in the plantation. Chapter 1 is the general introduction describing the oil palm plantations worldwide. Chapter 1 summarizes the ecological and social effects of rapid oil palm expansion in tropical regions. Chapter 2 is a description of the study area. The chapter begins with a description of the Meta department and the municipality of Mapiripán to understand the general context of the eastern region. Following is a description of the company Poligrow Colombia SAS and the Macondo plantation where the case study was performed. Chapter 3 is the theoretical framework of the project. Chapter 4 is the research design and research questions. In Chapter 5, the landscape analysis of the Macondo plantation is related to pest occurrence. To show relationships among the landscape structural types, land cover, and pest occurrence, a landscape analysis by multivariate cluster analysis and an NMDS ordination were performed. The results show that a heterogeneous plantation improves landscape connectivity and control pest populations. In Chapter 6, the specific nature-enhanced plantation design can provide social landscape values, SLV, to workers is examined. The results on the structural landscape analysis of the plantation, in Chapter 5, were analyzed jointly with the results from the participatory mapping with plantation workers. The correspondence between landscape analysis and the location of the perceived values is analyzed, revealing socio-ecological hotspots (e.g., epiphytarium). It highlights the relationship between the landscape characteristics of the plantation and the social landscape values perceived by workers. Workers perceive most social landscape values in the prevalence of landscape connectivity and heterogeneity. Chapter 7 addresses whether plantation workers relate to and perceive nature (e.g., gallery and riparian forests) and non-natural areas (e.g., crops such as oil palm) in the plantation. Using qualitative content analysis from focus group discussion and in-depth interviews with workers, I infer they derive a great variety of values and also experience ambivalent relationships towards nature in the plantation. Through the perceived benefits to humans and other species, a possible naturalization process might happen on such a nature-enhanced plantation. Finally, Chapter 8 is the general discussion and conclusions.

To indicate emphasis, auxiliary do is used in affirmative contexts (do+) when no other auxiliary is present. It is thus rooted in the grammatical system of do‐support; however, do+ does not always bear stress and can fulfil various discourse‐marking functions (Nevalainen & Rissanen, 1986). Positioned at the intersection of grammar and discourse, do+ constitutes an interesting study for its use in ‘non‐native’ varieties of English since it can be assumed that the more salient grammatical functions are easier to master for learners. Focusing on Asian Englishes in contrast to Inner Circle varieties, this exploratory paper assesses the frequency and distribution of do+ in the spoken and written parts of eight ICE components.

The present study investigated the production of prosody of 135 learners of English with the aim of identifying the acoustic properties of f0 in advanced Czech, German, and Spanish Learner English (n=45 each). Their performance was compared to that of monolingual native speakers of British (n=45) and American English (n=45). The main focus of the study concerns prosodic features of declarative utterances elicited from the second language (L2) and native spontaneous English speech (dialogic and monologic), as well as the influence of interviewer questions on some of the declarative utterances. Thus, it is essential to examine entrainment at the phonetic level within spontaneous interactions between interlocutors from the different first languages (L1s) and dialect backgrounds in the case of the native speakers. Within the framework of the autosegmental-metrical approach (Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986), production of prosody was examined in different tonal events: pitch accents, boundary tones, and their tone heights (f0 measures). In order to achieve a phonetic and phonological description of these tonal events, it is important to investigate the domain of intonational phrasing (i.e. intonation phrases (IPs) and intermediate phrases (ips)) and the patterning of these tones into tunes. Additionally, the study seeks to clarify the relationship between prosodic form and socio-pragmatic meaning, necessitating the analysis of form-function correlations. The present study is one of the first to discuss the findings within a theoretical framework specifically designed for intonation, i.e. the L2 Intonational Learning Theory (LILt, cf. Mennen 2015). The findings are discussed in light of all extralinguistic variables known about all native and non-native speakers (n=225 in total), while the different interlanguages are compared to and with each other and to the two native varieties of English, thus, applying a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger 1996, 2015). Results reveal a marked contrast between native and non-native speech production of nearly all prosodic events. Compared to the native speakers of English, most of the L2 speakers tend to produce longer ips in seconds, a slower speech rate within intonation units (IUs), more high edge tones, a narrower f0 span for high-low tunes, and a wider and higher f0 for high edge tunes. The only native-like prosodic features are tone frequency, the f0 level of high-low tunes, and IU frequency (for Spanish English learners only). In order to better explain these results, a multifactorial regression analysis of learning and recording context variables was performed, e.g. speaking style, age, gender, stays abroad, pragmatic functions (continuation, listing, etc.), speech acts (statements vs. answers), etc.. Main effects that explain the variation in L2 prosody are found in speaker gender and certain fluency variables, while minor effects were found for proficiency level, age, speaking style, and stay abroad. The results seem to support some predictions made by the LILt model (Mennen 2015). While the learners were found to differ on nearly all intonational dimensions of the LILt model and all prosodic variables investigated, the analyses of individual differences by learner-variety revealed specific trends. For instance, while the Spanish English speakers deviate mostly on the realizational level, i.e. speech rate per IU and f0 range in the different tunes, Czech and German English learners differ the most on the distributional and functional level with the choice of tonal categories (same trend), the variety of pragmatic functions chosen for these tonal categories (similar trends), and IU frequency (opposite trend). Based on these results, mostly proficiency-related explanations were given rather than L1-based influences, since all learners exhibited similarly deviant prosody. In sum, this study presents a quantitative mixed-method analysis of f0 in spontaneous native and non-native speech by identifying patterns of variation and universals in the phonological and phonetic form of f0, as conditioned by extralinguistic and contextual factors. Such an analysis informs our understanding of prosodic variation in native and non-native speech, as well as which factors can predict such variation. The study has implications for theoretical and applied linguistics. The results of the present study can fruitfully inform areas of relevance, such as theoretical second language acquisition processes, language assessment, language teaching, development of computer-based language teaching materials, and speech technology.