Completed Dissertations
| Dr. Martin Eberl - Linguistic creativity and linguistic innovation in the emergence of Tok Pisin (2019) |
| The project investigates the roles of linguistic creativity and linguistic innovation in the emergence of Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on theories of evolutionary linguistics, phenomena of variation and change are linked to the grammaticalization of various structural features in Tok Pisin. Different linguistic levels of innovation – i.e. lexical, morphological, phonetical and syntactical innovation – are contrasted in terms of the agency involved and the language-internal and language-external factors which impaired borrowing on the various levels from the various super- sub- and adstrated involved and benefitted the internal development and innovation of structure from materials existent in the emerging language system. A corpus built from various early sources such as travel reports and dictionaries, supplemented by a transcription of roughly 4600 recordings made by Jon Z’graggen during the 1970s and 1980s provides an empirical foundation against which the assumptions can be tested. Features of particular interest identified so far are the comitative/instrumental preposition wantaim and the nominal plural marker ol as well as the emerging relativization and complementization strategies. |
| Dr. Janina Kraus - A Sociophonetic Study of the Urban Bahamian Creole Vowel System (2017) |
| This thesis seeks to contribute to research in the fields of creolistics, sociolinguistics and phonetics by providing an in-depth acoustic description of the vowel system(s) of 33 Bahamian Creole speakers from Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, taking into account the social countenance of synchronic variation. Results are related to the historical development of Bahamian Creole and to its position at the linguistic crossroads of the Americas. |
| Dr. Matthias Klumm - Address in the Anglophone Caribbean: A Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Study of Nominal and Pronominal Address Patterns in Jamaica and Trinidad (2017) |
| In my doctoral dissertation, I examined the forms and use of nominal and pronominal address in the anglophone Caribbean (i.e. in present-day Jamaica and Trinidad) from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective. Based on different sources of data (i.e. postcolonial literary works, written questionnaires and semi-structured interviews), the analysis of the address behaviour of Jamaicans and Trinidadians reveals that while the forms of address identified are to a large extent the same in both islands (e.g. kinship terms for non-kin, titles plus first name etc.), their use varies considerably according to different social factors characterizing both the speaker and the addressee (e.g. sex, age, social class or ethnicity), as well as according to the relationship between the interlocutors and the situational context in which the interaction takes place. |
| Dr. Elisabeth Bruckmeier - Getting at GET: A Corpus-Based Semasiological-Syntactic Analysis of GET in World Englishes (2015) |
| The study is based on a corpus analysis of over 11,600 tokens and demonstrates how a semasiological approach with a focus on one highly frequent and versatile verb, and a methodology based on a meticulous analysis of all of the patterns and meanings in which GET can be used, can contribute to the understanding of the working and strength of factors such as prescriptivism and colloquialism, substrate effects, effects of Second Language Acquisition, and the influence of the two major standard varieties British and American English on other varieties of English. The dissertation has been turned into a book entitled Getting at GET in World Englishes and has been published by De Gruyter. |