Anne Schröder Book order

Language, literature, and culture evolve under distinct rules, and linguistics, literary studies, and cultural studies aim to describe their regularities and changes. This exploration reveals standardization mechanisms that affect language use and aesthetic production. While these disciplines generally avoid normative statements, they still play a role in standardization by defining 'correct' language usage and 'good' aesthetic design through reference materials and institutions. Their influence extends to shaping school and university curricula, perpetuating established standards. This volume investigates the developments and functions of prescriptive and descriptive tendencies by comparing the philological sub-disciplines—linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, and didactics—and their subject matters. Specialists from various fields present theoretical approaches, models, and methods, offering new perspectives for inter- and transdisciplinary research and insights into educational curricula.

One of the most far-reaching changes that has been observed for the English language was its progressive transformation from a highly inflectional language to a more analytic one. As a case in point, the postposition of the particle in particle verbs, as in to go out, has been interpreted to have triggered the unproductivity of the synthetic verbal prefix system, i. e. of verbs such as the now obsolete to outgo. Nevertheless, neologisms such as to upskill seemingly suggest a revival of this morphological pattern. Some of the questions which arise are thus: Is prefixation really an unproductive pattern of English verb-formation? Do the recent creations therefore indicate a revival of this pattern? Why has this type of verb-formation possibly been revived lately? To answer these questions, this study investigates the morphological productivity of prefix verbs by using different methods of measurement: on the basis of the OED, on the basis of various diachronic and synchronic corpora, and on the basis of elicitation tests.

This book shows new approaches to the African continent and its various cultures, explores different facets of African cultures as they exist or undergo changes, and illustrates how and where African and European cultures come or have come into contact, interact, and create something new. The contributors are social, cultural and literary scientists, linguists, and artists of various cultural backgrounds who investigate topics on an African country and who use novel and often interdisciplinary methods. Their joint interest is a better understanding of the multifaceted character of the African continent, which is still often depicted as a cultural monolith, by exploring contemporary African literature, theatre, film, music and the use of linguistic methods as well as the experience of Africans in diasporas.

A sociolinguistic study of Pidgin English in Cameroon This sociolinguistic study on the Cameroonian variety of West African Pidgin English seeks to explain the apparent discrepancy between the widespread use of this Language, as documented in the linguistic literature, and its ongoing official neglect by governmental authorities. In contrast to previous studies, which often stress the heterogeneity of this Language, the present study assesses the degree of variability that exists in terms of speakers' perceptions and mutual intelligibility. In addition, this study introduces a methodological approach to sociolinguistic research which conforms to the rules of empirical research and which is particularly suited to the African context because of its multimethodological, interactive and flexible design. It combines qualitative research methods with quantitative analytic tools, and consists of more than 50 qualitative interviews in combination with a quantitative questionnaire survey of almost 2000 questionnaires administered in 13 educational institutions in various urban centres located in Euro out of the 10 Cameroonian provinces. The study thus provides new and extensive empirical data on the sociolinguistic context of Cameroon Pidgin use and on the sociolinguistic situation in Cameroon in general.