{"title":"Modelling Spoken and Written Language","authors":"S. Leuckert, S. Buschfeld","doi":"10.33675/angl/2021/2/4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/angl/2021/2/4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72731175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eco and Evo","authors":"D. Vanderbeke, H. Müller","doi":"10.33675/angl/2021/3/12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/angl/2021/3/12","url":null,"abstract":"Introductions to interdisciplinary studies and programmatic papers usually stress the foundational requirement for all interdisciplinary work: an adequate knowledge about more than one academic discipline. Unless scholars are actually trained in two disciplines, the decision to engage in interdisciplinary research includes the necessity to access or acquire a sufficient understanding about the methods, epistemologies and paradigms of at least one more academic field. Of course, it cannot be expected that scholars who engage in interdisciplinary studies must be able to conduct research in each discipline. But a basic literacy in the respective area of inquiry is de rigueur. In disciplines that are close to home, that does not present a major problem, and every student or scholar of literature and culture has to be able to access the required knowledge in history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, or the arts, even though the paradigms and methods may differ considerably from those of our own academic environment. Interdisciplinary research between literature and the sciences, however, poses quite different demands, and even a very basic understanding of the respective concepts may require intensive work and a willingness to engage with unfamiliar and recalcitrant theories and practices. There are two ways in which sufficient knowledge in various disciplines can be achieved and provided. The first is cooperation. Once a question has been raised or a problem has been recognised, scholars from the different disciplines can put their heads and methodologies together to work on a solution. This, of course, requires that the problem is regarded as relevant in both disciplines and/or that the cooperation seems to be promising. Occasionally, the research will be asymmetric, with one dominant discipline in charge of the project while the other acts as an auxiliary discipline, providing necessary data, know-how, or technologies – such asymmetries should not be regarded as diminishing, and an auxiliary discipline of one project may well be dominant in a different context. Alternatively, the scholars will have to acquire interdisciplinary knowledge by an immersion into the specific theories and methods of the other discipline, which can be a very challenging and time-consuming process and, if conducted in splendid isolation without interdisciplinary interaction and some monitoring by scholars from the other discipline, it may easily lead to misunderstandings and erroneous conclusions. In literary and cultural studies, another phenomenon can occasionally be observed: Interdisciplinary studies may take place chiefly within the context of previous","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"129 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85760564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Analyzing Historical Changes in the Irish English Amplifier System","authors":"M. Schweinberger","doi":"10.33675/ANGL/2021/1/11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2021/1/11","url":null,"abstract":"From a language variation and change perspective, adjective amplification is particularly interesting, as this domain is prone to change (Brinton and Arnovik 2006, 441; Ito and Tagliamonte 2003, 257; Quirk et al. 1985, 590). The waxing and waning of forms, alongside invention and renewal (D'Arcy 2015, 450) in the domain of adjective amplification thus represents an area of grammar that undergoes \"fevered invention\" (Bolinger 1972, 18). The continuous change that is observable in the domain of adjective amplification is particularly intriguing because their changing nature predestines amplifier systems to be an ideal opportunity for testing assumptions about the underpinnings of language change. From the point of view of pragmatics, adjective amplifiers are intriguing because they play a crucial part in how speakers express themselves socially and emotionally (Labov 1985, 43; Ito and Tagliamonte 2003, 258). Thus, adjective amplifiers form part of an inventory on which speakers rely to create, index, and mark their social identity (Tagliamonte 2011, 30). Adjective amplification is a subtype of intensification and is related to the semantic category of degree. Accordingly, intensifying adverbs are also referred to as degree adverbs or adverbs of degree (Quirk et al. 1985, 589-590). Intensification ranges between very low intensity (downtoning) and very high intensity (amplification) (Quirk et al. 1985, 589-590). According to Quirk et al., amplifiers \"scale upwards from an assumed norm [while] downtoners have a lowering effect, usually scaling downwards from an assumed norm\" (1985, 590). The current paper focuses exclusively on adjective amplification (see (1) and (2)) while leaving aside downtoning (which encompasses approximators such as almost, compromisers such as more or less, diminishers such as partly, and minimizers such as hardly). Within the category of adjective amplifiers, Quirk et al. (1985, 589-590) differentiate between maximizers such as completely, which denote the upper extreme of the scale (Quirk et al. 1985, 590) and boosters such as very, which denote a high degree or a high point on the scale. Boosters, in particular, form an open class, which adopts new members to replace forms which have lost their expressiveness due to frequent use (Quirk et al. 1985, 590). In the present study, boosters and maximizers in both predicative and attributive contexts are considered. Differentiating between these two syntactic contexts is crucial because certain amplifier variants, for example so, are substantially less likely to occur in attributive contexts (although this tendency is quantitative rather than qualitative as can be seen from example 2c).","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83963652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Have We Forgotten How to Have Fun in ‘Literature and Science’?","authors":"Peter Stockwell","doi":"10.33675/angl/2021/3/11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/angl/2021/3/11","url":null,"abstract":"What follows is based on a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, Switzerland, which is an institute of exact sciences. In an institute better known for the Rosetta mission or the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, I was a lone literary researcher amongst astrophysicists and astronomers. The experience was illuminating, but also frustrating, and at my most hand-wringing moments I found myself asking: what is it, really, that the field of 'literature and science' is trying to achieve? This article will re-examine what the practice of reading literature as an interdisciplinary endeavour looks like (and what it might look like). In doing so, I will argue for the reinstatement of an attitude to literature and science that privileges the methodologies of literary studies as a discrete academic field.1 The aim of this argument will not be to undermine the rich fruits that interdisciplinarity brings to literary studies but rather to argue that it is the identity of literary studies that makes it such a valuable contributor to interdisciplinarity in the academy. My aim is to begin to combat a prevailing discourse in which literary studies is situated as 'in service' to the work of other disciplines. In the first part of this article, I will discuss what I see as potential problems with the status of literary studies as part of interdisciplinary work, namely in the field of literature and science. I also identify the symptoms of these problems as being particularly prevalent in regard to my own area of research, science fiction. In an effort to demonstrate a profitable role for a return to reading literary texts as text, I then turn to a few fictional pieces which, I believe, demonstrate both an insistence to be treated as fiction as well as the potential to make powerful contributions to the discourse of literature and science.","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89403805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"S Retraction in the South-East of England","authors":"U. Altendorf, R. MacDonald, N. Thielking","doi":"10.33675/ANGL/2021/1/7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2021/1/7","url":null,"abstract":"It is all very well for people to complain about the abuse hurled by fans at the England v Portugal match, but this is hardly surprising when one hears our spoken language under constant attack from the all-pervading virus of \"London lad\" speak – via the \"meeja\", including, alas, Radio 3. I am tired of hearing presenters – from weather girls to news readers – refer to \"Chewsday\" [Tuesday] [...] and to \"Alec Shtewart\" [Stewart] (who keeps wicket for England) [...] The insidious degradation of spoken English saddens me and someone ought to stand up and say \"enough\". ( The Daily Telegraph 17 June 2000, qtd. in Kerswill 2001, 57; our emphasis)","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77486966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Convergence and Divergence in Two Historical Varieties of English","authors":"C. Elsweiler","doi":"10.33675/ANGL/2021/1/10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2021/1/10","url":null,"abstract":"In the description of his divergence/convergence model of language change from IndoEuropean to Present-Day English, James Milroy states that the history of English is traditionally depicted as a continuous path leading from divergence in the earlier stages of English to convergence towards the emerging English standard variety in the 16th century (Milroy 1992, 50-51). This pathway is largely borne out by research on spelling, showing a gradual reduction of divergent orthographic variants in different earlier Middle English dialects in favour of \"colourless\" supraregional spellings in the late Middle English period (Smith 2000, 136; cf. also Schaefer 2012, 520-521; 524526). Even if one casts the net wider to include the relationship between the standardising Middle Scots1 variety, \"the only dialect that compares in development and uses to the standard dialect which was developing in England at the same time\" (Agutter 1990, 1), and the Southern English Standard,2 the directions of change remain the same. In the 16th century, Middle Scots and the developing Southern English Standard were perceived as two distinct varieties of English by contemporary observers (e.g. Horsbroch 1999, 5; McClure 1994, 37). Scots was not always clearly distinguished from English dialects, though. It has its origins in northern dialects of Old English3 and at the time of the first written attestations of Early Scots at the end of the 14th century, it is part of a \"common speech area\" with Northern Middle English varieties (Williamson 2002, 253), evincing many shared linguistic features with these (Agutter 1988, 1; Meurman-Solin 1997, 7). In the mid-15th century Middle Scots begins to diverge from Northern English, at a time when texts written in Northern Middle English dialects manifest the use of more and more supraregional features of the emerging Southern English Standard (Meurman-Solin 1997, 7; Williamson 2002, 253). Subsequently, in the middle of the 16th century, when Scots is maximally distinct from English, a gradual process of convergence of written Scots with the Southern English Standard begins, which is nearing completion by 1700 (Devitt 1989; Meurman-Solin 1993, 154-160; 1997, 16-19). The case for the divergence of Scots from Northern English and the following convergence with the Southern English Standard, which","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81879786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"All the Monoliths Are Fluid Now","authors":"D. Becker","doi":"10.33675/angl/2021/3/17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/angl/2021/3/17","url":null,"abstract":"Metaphors are omnipresent. Far from just being stylistic devices in literary texts, they are an integral part of human communication and cognition and play a most important role in how individuals and collectives constitute a meaningful relationship to the world (cf. Gibbons and Whiteley 2018, 205). As such, metaphors can be found in all kinds of communicative contexts, ranging from more colloquial everyday conversations to \"the most serious of academic texts\" (Littlemore and Low 2006, 5). An example of the latter can be found in the field of English language education, where, in recent years, a growing number of studies have argued for the necessity of transcultural learning in the EFL classroom. In doing so, these academic texts make use of a recurring metaphor: they conceptualise transcultural learning and transculturality – a concept used in English language education1 to describe the dynamic and hybrid conditions of contemporary cultures – via the metaphor of liquidity. Thus, in the spirit of Bauman (2007) and his 'liquid times,' Guest sees contemporary cultures as inherently \"fluid\" (2006, 14), Freitag-Hild remarks that current cultural spheres are \"always in a flux\" (2018, 168), and Schachtner speaks of \"cultural flows\" (2014, 228) constantly intersecting. In contrast to the more traditional image of cultures as \"monolithic and static construct[s]\" (cf. Blell and Doff 2014, 79), Hannerz refers to a \"pool of culture\" (1998, 49) in which, according to Grünewald, Küster and Lüning, \"floating identities\" exist (2011, 69), and Volkmann speaks of the \"Auflösung\" (dissolution; 2014, 38) of fixed cultural boundaries. Much like liquids being brought together, therefore, in English language education, contemporary cultures are seen as \"mixing and fusing\" (Viebrock 2019, 79), thus clearly showing that, indeed, metaphors find their way into the most serious of academic debates. The present paper will take a closer look at this 'liquid-metaphor' in the context of teacher education. More specifically, this paper provides a theoretical exploration of the learning potential that this metaphor might offer to student teachers2 of English: it will be argued that by analysing this dominant metaphor in current studies on transcultural learning, student teachers can gain a profound understanding of","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87559050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transformations","authors":"R. Rohleder","doi":"10.33675/angl/2021/1/12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/angl/2021/1/12","url":null,"abstract":"In the frame narrative of Mary Shelley's story \"The Invisible Girl\" (1832) a remarkable thing happens. The narrator describes a picture – one which the story's readers can immediately compare with its own description, since this picture is (almost) identical with the engraving which accompanies the story and which was, at its first publication in an annual, The Keepsake, placed on the opposite page. What is remarkable in the narrator's account of the picture is his sudden self-consciousness:","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86318289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constructing Immediacy at a Distance","authors":"Maren Luthringshauser, Cornelia Gerhardt","doi":"10.33675/angl/2021/2/6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33675/angl/2021/2/6","url":null,"abstract":"Differences between written and spoken language represent a long-standing topic in linguistics (e.g., Biber 1988; Koch and Oesterreicher 2012; Tannen 1982). This paper1 investigates the comments section of blogs with regard to their nature as involved and expressive, but graphically coded and public discourse type. This type of digital interaction between users and bloggers allows for immediacy at a distance. Hence, blogs and their comments sections represent a fine choice to discuss ComputerMediated Communication (CMC) from the perspective of orality and literacy. Conversely, the comments sections of online blogs allow revisiting the notions of 'orality' and 'literacy' from the vantage point of a present-day internet genre. The focus on a narrowly defined sub-genre, the comments sections of vegan food blogs, will allow zooming in on very specific linguistic characteristics allowing for a comparison of genres according to different situational parameters. This paper embraces the view that differences between 'written' and 'spoken' are non-binary and non-linear, but also multi-dimensional. The non-binary nature of 'spoken' and 'written' has been noted since the late 1960s, also with the advent of genre descriptions. Biber's seminal, emic Variation across Speech and Writing (1988) stresses the multidimensional nature of this textual variation. Biber proposes an analysis of 67 linguistic features that group into seven dimensions such as \"informational vs involved\" or \"narrative vs non-narrative.\" In the framework of an additive multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) (Berber Sardinha et al. 2019), this paper locates the comments sections of blogs in Biber's dimensions for spoken and written English (1988). To give a concrete example, the comments sections studied in this paper have a similar degree of involvement as the spoken genre 'interview' through the high frequency of subordinator that deletion and the use of emphatics and demonstrative pronouns. Blogs represent a mass phenomenon in CMC with a specific organization of its discourse (Frobenius and Gerhardt 2017). After having focused on the construction of veganism in food blogs (Gerhardt and Schul 2019; Gerhardt 2020b) and the use of no-X constructions such as gluten free or no artificial flavours in their comments section","PeriodicalId":42547,"journal":{"name":"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79108180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}