Completed Dissertations
| Dr. des. Diana Wengler - Dialect on Air: Grammatical and Phonological Variation in a Bahamian Radio Soap from the Early 19070s (fc.) |
| In the past few years, linguistic interest in historical audio material has risen as such data are supposed to "help unearth new information on phonetic, phonological and prosodic developments in the recent history of varieties" (Hickey 2017:1). In this dissertation project, recordings of Bahamian dialect will be analysed not just from a synchronic, but also diachronic perspective. Fairly newly discovered audio broadcasts from the 1970s will be used and compared to contemprary data. Historically, the Bahamas' early 1970s are of particular interest: while still a British colony, the nation was heading towards political independence, which also brought about substantial changes in the identity constructions of the overwhelmingly black population. In short, the era can be described as politically turbulent, characterised by a rhetoric of "Black Power" and "Bahamianisation", or, as Caton & Saunders (1998:316) put it: "No other ten-year period [...] saw so much economic, political, and social change". Apart from variationist analyses, it will also be assessed in how far and on which stylistic levels the recordings represent the dialect of that time. Despite the limited amount of data available, this dissertation thus seeks to gain first insights into recent linguistic, especially phonetic changes on the Bahamas. |
| Dr. Catherine Laliberté - English in Panama City: The Linguistic Legacy of the Panama Canal Builders (2023) |
| The construction of the Panama Railroad and the Panama Canal during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century was made possible by the labor of Caribbean migrant workers. It is estimated that between 1904 and 1914, over 150,000 West Indian laborers worked on the American canal project (Conniff 1985:3), a great proportion of whom permanently settled in Panama. Their descendants proudly uphold their cultural and linguistic legacy, as demonstrated by previous work on Panamanian Creole English in Panama City (Thomas-Brereton 1992, 1993; Lamy 2012). This dissertation primarily aims at documenting the variety (or varieties) of English used by Panamanians of West Indian descent, and providing quantitative and qualitative descriptions of grammatical aspects such as verbal agreement, tense marking and modality, which highlight the community’s Caribbean roots. The project also endeavors to present a detailed sociolinguistic description of the community, specifically by empirically examining the shift to Spanish monolingualism currently underway. Data was collected in 2018 and 2019 in Panama City and consists in over 28 hours of recorded material with 30 speakers, as well as 119 language choice questionnaires (cf. Gal 1979). |
| 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. |