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This book provides a detailed introduction to the development of the German language from the earliest reconstructible prehistory to the present day. It is supported by a companion website and is suitable for language learners and teachers and students of linguistics, from undergraduate level upwards.
The discipline of German Studies in English-speaking countries is in crisis and the situation in British Higher Education can be seen as a paradigmatic example. Symptoms of the crisis are a dramatic decrease in the number of students, financial difficulties and the resulting closures of German Departments. Furthermore, the language skills which finally emerge from universities are not always satisfactory. The present book sheds light on key aspects of the institutionalised teaching and learning of German language in the UK. The first part - the macro-context - surveys the socio-political developments that have recently affected the sector of modern languages and specifically the discipline of German Studies. The second part - the micro-context -, zooms in to the teaching and learning as experienced from both students' and teachers' perspective. Ultimately, by linking the macro-analysis with the micro findings, the present book proposes a number of strategies which could contribute to the optimisation and enhancement of teaching and learning German in British Higher Education.
Offers a well-researched and highly readable survey of the language in all its historical, geographic, and social aspects
The book Identity Issues: Literary and Linguistic Landscapes is a collection of essays, set out to explore the notion of identity as a constantly relevant, very complex, multi-faceted phenomenon. Understanding identity in a very broad sense, the authors approach it from various angles, highlighting its various aspects. The first section includes literary explorations that discuss identity issues of class, race, nation and history, as depicted in several works of, mostly, contemporary Anglo-American literature. The second section brings various linguistic studies of identity, starting with the usual sociolinguistic issues, but also including a range of other research routes, which draw upon i...
Foreign accents in fiction are a common stylistic instrument of marking a character as the ‘Other’ and conveying national stereotypes in literature. This study investigates in a qualitative analysis the linguistic characteristics of non-native fictional speech, with a specific focus on the English Renaissance, the Victorian Age and the 20th-century war decades. After examining the concept of national identity and the image of the foreigner in these eras, the study undertakes an in-depth linguistic analysis of a literary corpus of drama and prose. Recurring patterns in non-native fictional speech are uncovered and set into relation with the socio-cultural background of the respective work, which leads to intriguing findings about the changing image of the foreigner and the phenomenon of linguistic stereotying in English literature.
This book examines how German-speaking Jews living in Berlin make sense and make use of their multilingual repertoire. With a focus on lexical variation, the book demonstrates how speakers integrate Yiddish and Hebrew elements into German for indexing belonging and for positioning themselves within the Jewish community. Linguistic choices are shaped by language ideologies (e.g., authenticity, prescriptivism, nostalgia). Speakers translanguage when using their multilingual repertoire, but do so in a diglossic way, using elements from different languages for specific domains.
This book offers the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property. It includes formal theoretical work alongside psycholinguistic and language acquisition studies, examines data from a range of languages, and shows that V2 phenomena are much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought.
"If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?" (Keith Jarrett) Taking Jarrett's thought one step further, one could ask: If you already have a sense of play, rhythm, or movement ingrained in your body, why would you not perform it? Drawing on the transdisciplinary and hybrid nature of human communication, this volume is based on the idea of a fruitful dialogue between languages, aesthetic education, and performing arts. Scholars from all continents have contributed to this anthology - a sign of the growing interest worldwide in promoting the vision of teaching and learning foreign languages with head, heart, hands and feet.
The volume focuses on the interaction between figurative language, embodiment, and society and culture from various theoretical and applied perspectives and methodologies. It bears wit-ness to the vibrancy of research into figurative language and the role of embodiment, with conceptualization motivated not just by our physical interaction with the external world, but also by social and cultural phenomena. The topics explored here include the impact of figura-tion on all levels of linguistic analysis, including grammar, discourse, and the relationship be-tween language and emotions.
Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - starts with the emergence of multilingual populations. Multilingualism involving plurilingualism can have various consequences beyond borrowing, interference, and code-mixing and -switching, including the emergence of lingua francas and new language varieties, as well as language endangerment and loss. Bringing together contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the second in a two-volume set - engages the reader with the manifold aspects of multilingualism and provides state-of-the-art research on the impact of population structure on language contact. It begins with an introduction that presents the history of the scholarship on the subject matter. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with multilingualism embedded in specific population structures worldwide as well as their outcomes. It is essential reading for anybody interested in how people behave linguistically in multilingual or multilectal settings.