Current Dissertations
| Laura Hahn - Anticausatives in English Technical Language |
| Many languages including English offer the possibility of using certain verbs both transitively and intransitively. The causative alternation (e.g. He opened the door vs. The door opened) describes a particular type of intransitivization, in which the transitive patient becomes the grammatical subject of the intransitive while the transitive agent is deleted. As a result, the event described by the verb is conceptualized as happening spontaneously, without any external agent or cause. The intransitive member of the pair is hence called anticausative. While the phenomenon has received considerable attention in the tradition of generative grammar, corpus based investigations, both synchronic and diachronic, are rare. The little work that has been done, however, suggests some interesting diachronic trends. The anticausative appears to be on the rise (Lemmens 1998), as has been claimed by Halliday (1994). Davidse (1991) offers one possible explanation for this: the spread of modern technology and automation has caused an increase in situation types to which the particular semantics of the anticausative is well-suited. The present study aims to provide a corpus-based description of the construction focusing on an area of English that has not yet been investigated, namely technical language. Using data from the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, the study will investigate current usage patterns as well as the construction’s development in the most recent history of English. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Elizabeth Kaufmann - Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered Are We: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Bodily Autonomy, Power and ‘The Witch’ in Popular Television |
| On January 22nd, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States established that the right to an abortion was constitutionally protected under the due process clause of the 14th amendment with their landmark decision in the case Roe v. Wade. Despite this, the 1990s and early 2000s would see increased political pressure from the right to limit access to abortion, and in June of 2022, less than 50 years after it was put before the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade was overturned. Interestingly, during each of these three phases of legislation, popular television shows about witches — their powers, and their struggles to keep them — aired to great commercial success in the United States. This dissertation uses critical discourse studies to examine the language of the programs Bewitched (1964-1972), Charmed (1998-2006) and A Discovery of Witches (2018-2022), contending that contemporary discourses of women’s power, bodily autonomy, fear and (lack of) independence is reflected in the language of each series. The dissertation will explore how the archetype of the witch in each program acts as a discursive representation of everywoman during each of the three phases of abortion legislation examined. The dissertation explores how sociocognitive mental models of epistemic memory (see van Dijk 2014) triangulate (1) the fictitious struggles the main characters face while integrating their identities as witches into their sociopolitical time period, (2) the audience and (3) the political landscape. In this way each cultural-discursive communicative situation of the timeframes under investigation can be illuminated and linguistically investigated. |
| 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. |