Projects
DFG-Project "Standardization and Language Change in Postcolonioal Speech Communities: The Bahamas" (DFG-Projekt HA 3514/3-1, 2016-2019)
Whereas the creoles of the anglophone Caribbean have received a fair amount of attention in the past fifty years or so, much less is known about standards of English in the region. The proposed project aims to describe and explain the restructuring processes which have been taking place in educated Bahamian English in the postcolonial era. Two main research questions are to be answered: (1) Is the variety becoming Americanized? (2) What is the extent of the influence of the locally coexisting creole? In order to answer these questions, a representative database has been compiled using the International Corpus of English framework; this database will be supplemented by diachronic and attitude data, all of which will be subjected to rigorous quantitative (as well as qualitative) analysis.
Compilation of a Bahamian subcomponent of the International Corpus of English (in cooperation with the University of the Bahamas) http://ice-corpora.net/ice/
The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought. Language and Social Processes 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012.
At least since Chomsky (1965: 3) famously defined linguistic theory as "concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community," the native speaker has been conceived of as "a common reference point for all branches of linguistics" (Coulmas 1981: 1). Over the past twenty-five years, however, dissatisfaction with the concept has grown, particularly in connection with the study of the so-called "World Englishes," which are often divided into "native" (e.g., British, American, or Australian Englishes) and "non-native" varieties, the latter often also summarized under the label "New Englishes" and denoting the increasingly autonomous forms of the language spoken especially in non-Western settings such as India, Singapore, or Nigeria. A number of researchers (cf. Singh 1998) have pointed out in this context that, while there may be linguistic differences between native and non-native speakers of English, these differences are not what matters, as the native speaker is really a political construct carrying a particular ideological baggage.
The present study maintains that many of the associations that burden the native speaker and make the concept's application in the World Englishes context problematic have a long history. Employing a corpus of texts that extends from the mid-nineteenth century to just after World War I and includes not only the classics of the linguistic literature but also collections of lesser known periodical articles such as Harris (1995), it analyzes some of the discourses surrounding the emergence of the English native speaker. What this analysis shows is that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period in which people started to think differently about languages and their speakers. As a new term characterizing particular language users and setting them off from other groups, the native speaker provided an important way of conceptualizing and labeling a particular linguistic identity and drawing boundaries between some speakers and others. In sum, if we are to understand the ideology of the English native speaker today, we need to understand, as fully as possible, the historical origins of the assumptions and beliefs upon which it rests.
Urban Bahamian Creole: System and Variation. Varieties of English Around the World G32. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004.
This volume, a detailed empirical study of the creole English spoken in the Bahamian capital, Nassau, contributes to our understanding of both urban creoles and tense-aspect marking in creoles. The first part traces the development of a creole in the Bahamas via socio-demographic data and outlines its current status and functions vis-à-vis the standard in politics, the media, and education. The linguistic chapters combine typological and variationist methods to describe exhaustively a comprehensive grammatical subsystem, past temporal reference, offering a discourse-based approach to such controversial categories as the preverbal past marker. The quantitative analysis of variable past inflection, finally, tests not only well-known constraints, such as stativity or social class, but also ethnographically determined ones, such as narrative type. Its results are relevant not only to the study of Caribbean English-lexifier creoles and related varieties, such as African American English, but also to variation and change in urban dialects generally.