Current Dissertations
| Laura Hahn - Clausal Verb Complementation in English and German |
| Over the past decades, typological as well as language-specific investigations of clausal complementation have flourished (see Horie 2001 for an overview of the typological research), while contrastive studies on the topic remain comparatively rare. By providing an in-depth analysis of finite and non-finite complementation patterns in English and German, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the existing research on clausal complementation and to contrastive research on the two languages in general. In a corpus-based study, the structural and distributional properties of German and English complementation constructions will be compared with a particular focus on variation between complement types with the same complement-taking predicates. In doing so, this project aims to identify synchronic trends as well as recent diachronic developments in the complementation systems of the two languages. |
| Melanie Keller - From Learner Language to Nativization: the Case of Korean English |
| In World Englishes (WE) studies, the nativization phase of a variety's development, according to Schneider’s (2003, 2007) Dynamic Model, is the most linguistically interesting and thus, most researched. The circumstances allowing for and leading up to nativization, however, are relatively mysterious. The need for more research on emerging varieties is clear, and “the most promising road to a possible detection of early traces of distinctive features is a principled comparison of performance data collected along similar lines, i.e. systematically elicited corpora” (Schneider 2004: 227). This dissertation will address this need via corpus-based research on the emerging variety of Korean English as a recent study places it in the stabilization phase, just prior to nativization (Rüdiger 2017: 59). Gut (2011: 102) is one of many linguists who claim that "structural features originally produced by language learners came to be adopted by later generation speakers and have developed into stable features of the newly emerged variety of English". Since no evidence, to my knowledge, has been produced to support this widely-accepted claim, I will approach my investigation of Korean English from a Second Language Acquisition (SLA) perspective and compare the English as a Second Language (ESL) of Korean American immigrants to English spoken by Koreans living in South Korea. |
| Catherine Laliberté - English in Panama City: the linguistic legacy of the Panama Canal builders |
| 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). |
| Alexander Laube - Style and Variation in Bahamian English |
| This dissertation investigates stylistic variation in the speech of Bahamians and aims at addressing issues like the relevance and nature of the creole continuum, inter- and intraspeaker variation and the factors that govern this variation. The study builds on a corpus of mesolectal creole data (cf. Hackert 2004) as well as a range of conversational data from the Bahamas subcomponent of the International Corpus of English (cf. Greenbaum 1996), including for example personal conversations and broadcast discussions/interviews, which (to varying degrees) represent the acrolectal end of the continuum. It is in fact the first study to examine creole data in conjunction with educated English in order to look into “the gradual transitions generally assumed” (Deuber 2009: 29) to exist in creole speaking countries like the Bahamas. The study will primarily provide an in-depth analysis of a range of non-standard morphosyntactic features, including copula deletion, be leveling and TMA marking, and will trace their distribution across the entire stylistic continuum. |
| Diana Wengler - Bahamian Voices |
| 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 contemporary 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 Craton & 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. |
| Cheryl Yeo - Rhoticity in Singapore English |
| The variable realisation of coda /r/ has been accounted for by the traditional phonological distinction of English varieties into rhotic and non-rhotic types (Wells 1982:218–220), and has been a hallmark area of study in sociolinguistic research (e.g. Labov 1966; Nagy and Irwin 2010; Blaxter et al. 2019). Over the last three decades, this phenomenon has been described in notable studies on Singapore English (Tan and Gupta 1992; Poedjosoedarmo 2000; Tan 2012), albeit only influences by language-external variables have typically been reported. This dissertation will investigate the rhoticity patterns in Singapore English as spoken by speakers from the three major ethnic groups, and examine how both language-internal and language-external variables condition /r/ realisation in Singapore English. This study will also uncover the motivational forces behind the patterns governing /r/ realisation, in particular how globalisation affects language use. These outcomes will be interpreted and contextualised within the larger framework of World Englishes and the wider context of rhotacisation in English varieties in the United Kingdom, United States of America, Asia, the Caribbean, and countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Recent speech data, obtained between 2019 and 2020, from two corpora will form the objects of study for this present project. |