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- PublicationAbout Time: Conceptualizing and Representing Temporality in German, Swiss and Austrian Culture. Introduction(Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland, 2013-09)
; 295 - PublicationThe Acquisition of Community Speech Norms by Asian Immigrants Learning English as a Second Language: a preliminary studyWe investigate Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants' acquisition of the variable (ing), which occurs in progressive tenses, participles, noun phrases, etc., and which can be pronounced [iŋ] or [In]. A VARBRUL 2 program analysis of native speaker speech shows that the production of (ing) is constrained by phonological, grammatical, stylistic, and social factors. An analysis of the nonnative speakers' acquisition of these norms shows that [In] is more frequent before anterior segments (reflecting ease of articulation), and that males use [In] more frequently than females, especially in monitored speech (perhaps reflecting their desire to accommodate to a male native speaker norm rather than to an overall native speaker norm). The analysis also shows evidence of grammatical constraints which are different from those in the native speakers' speech. This difference may reflect the fact that it is easier to acquire the [In] variant in “frozen forms,” such as prepositions, than in productive rules.
1598Scopus© Citations 142 - PublicationAssessing the Sociolinguistic Situation of the Maroon CreolesRecent anthropological and socio-historical research on Maroon populations suggests that Maroon communities have undergone significant social change since the 1960s spurred by processes of urbanization. However, to date very little is known about how these social changes are impacting on the Maroon Creoles as there is very little sociolinguistic research being carried out in the region. The aim of this paper is to examine the sociolinguistic context of the Maroon Creoles in the light of data from two recent sociolinguistic surveys carried out in Suriname and French Guiana. The findings demonstrate that the sociolinguistic status of Maroon languages has undergone various changes. Several of them are now well represented in French Guiana and, as additional languages, are gaining speakers both in Suriname and French Guiana. While their speakers increasingly practice them together with other languages, thus displaying their multilingual repertoire, there is little indication that their survival is threatened because their speakers predominantly hold positive attitudes towards them.
413Scopus© Citations 7 - PublicationBetween Resurrection and Insurrection: Jesus and the “Deconstruction of Monotheism” in “Von der Zärtlichkeit” by Navid Kermani and “ich, jesus von nazareth” by SAIDThe work of Navid Kermani and SAID frequently engages with religious themes and their respective oeuvres foreground the diversity within Islam and blur religious dividing lines. In spite of their differences, the short stories “Von der Zärtlichkeit” (Of Tenderness) by Kermani and “ich, jesus von nazareth” (i, jesus of nazareth) by SAID invite comparison because they share a deconstructive engagement with the figure of Jesus, conveying a spirituality felt in the material, rather than the metaphysical world. Whereas the former depicts a mystical experience in which Jesus’s presence is felt without him being glimpsed, implying an ambiguous sense of the divine in withdrawal and of empty sacred space, the latter is an at times angry monologue delivered by Jesus, in which holiness is located in righteous action against injustice. Hence the former evokes issues of spiritual absence and presence through Jesus’s resurrection, whereas the latter conveys a sense of insurrection, underlining Jesus’s role as a social radical. Both texts, however, shift meaning away from a transcendent God and toward the world, suggesting a religiosity beyond identity and ideology which can be illuminated by bringing Jean-Luc Nancy’s non-dualist concept of the “deconstruction of monotheism” into dialogue with the texts’ Christian and Sufi allusions.
174 - PublicationThe categories of Modern Irish verbal inflectionThis paper sets out to identify the categories underlying Irish verbal inflection and to explain why they have their observed morphological and semantic properties. Assuming that the semantic range of a tense is a function of the whole clause, it derives the tenses of Irish from three syntactic features. Their basic value and position in the clause, along with that of other independently justified formatives, determines the attested range of interpretations for each tense, while the way they are spelled out determines the observed morphological patterns. Since the analysis of verbal categories is based on their syntactic realization, the same explanation accounts for the paradigmatic structure of Irish conjugation and for various syntagmatic phenomena of contextual allomorphy. A language-specific investigation thus claims a broader theoretical significance as an exploration of the interconnected workings of syntax, morphology, and semantics.
1208Scopus© Citations 5 - PublicationCollaborative Learning: Increasing Students' Engagement Outside the ClassroomSeveral factors, including the Bologna process, the embargo on university posts and a larger student population pursuing degrees, have contributed to radical changes in teaching, learning and assessment in Irish higher education in the last few years. Challenges to academics have resulted in curriculum reform and, most importantly, in innovative practices in which the curriculum is delivered and assessed. It was in this context that a collaborative component has been introduced into Level 2 Spanish language modules at University College Dublin. A small action research project has been undertaken to explore the students’ views about this innovative way of learning. This article addresses the extent to which collaborative learning outside the classroom contributes to the enhancement of student learning and it examines the obstacles encountered by the students during the semester. The discussion of the findings focuses on feedback from the students and on group reflections submitted via Blackboard, the university’s VLE (virtual learning environment).
85 - PublicationConstraining inherent inflection: Number and Nominal AspectSince Booij (1994, 1996) it has become increasingly clear that inflectional morphology can take part in lexeme formation and compounding. Booij (1994) recognized the need for substantive constraints on the ways inflection can feed derivation, and restricted its derivational use to deictic categories, including Number. Pursuing this search for constraints, I propose that Number is a single morphological category covering two abstract functions (cf. Beard 1995), and that it can be inherent only when it expresses the more “lexical” of those functions, and thus means more than the grammatical feature would. This “lexical” Number expresses properties of the lexeme but stands halfway between the lexical core and the properly inflectional categories. It encodes mereological (part-whole) properties of the noun’s interpretation, thus paralleling the role of Aspect in the verbal domain, and like Aspect it can be integrated to different degrees in the grammatical system of a language. In some languages, this type of information has a specific morphological expression (so-called collective affixes). In others, it appears only as non-canonical semantics (and sometimes form) for Number inflection. Inherent Number, both as a component of lexemeformation and as fixed Number value on certain nouns, consists in the expression of Nominal Aspect through the morphology of Number. Morphology is not “split”, but its uses are. Inherent inflection, specifically Number, arises in certain languages as a by-product of the separation of (morphological) form and meaning. The article develops these views by presenting first a relatively detailed exemplification from several sources (section 1), followed by some critical reflections on the peculiarities of these constructions, to the effect that inherent Number must be qualitatively different from inflectional Number (section 2). Section 3 sets out in detail the hypothesis that inherent Number is the inflectional expression of Nominal Aspect, and section 4 concludes the argument by hypothesizing that Number not only can, but must have a distinct interpretation as a lexicalized property than as a regular inflectional one.
1273Scopus© Citations 3 - PublicationConstructions of Happiness / Konstruktionen des Glücks: IntroductionThe ideal of human happiness is doubtless as old as mankind itself and the history of this tradition is rich and varied. However, across the globe, particularly in the postindustrial ‘developed’ world, people are preoccupied, perhaps more than they have been at any other point in history, with the “unquestioning certainty” that they should be happy. This “duty to be happy” is reflected in the huge amount of research literature on the topic, carried out in diverse fields such as neurology, psychology, sociology and, particularly, in economics, where the number of scholarly articles has increased exponentially, especially in the early years of the twenty-first century. The heightened scientific interest in what makes happy individuals and happy societies, and in how such happiness is to be measured, certainly seems set to continue, as is indicated by international, longitudinal studies monitoring life satisfaction and ‘social well-being’.
198 - PublicationCreole learner varieties in the past and in the present: implications for creole developmentSecond language (L2) acquisition is widely assumed to have played a role in the emergence of creole genesis. However, the impact of L2 acquisition may not have been restricted to its genesis. In Surinam, newcomers outnumbered locally-born speakers of the Creole throughout the 18th century. To date we know little about the effects that this disproportion of non-native vs. native speakers may have had in the initial and subsequent stages of development of these Creoles. In this paper we combine historical and contemporary data in order to investigate the impact of L2 acquisition and use on developing creoles. We examine several linguistic features in contemporary native (L1) as well as non-native (L2) creole speech in order to reveal the differences in the underlying L1 and L2 systems. These are then compared with their equivalents in the available historical sources. The findings suggest that L2 acquisition affected the development of some linguistic subsystems while others appear little influenced. --- La contribution des processus d’acquisition d’une langue seconde (L2) à l’émergence des créoles est largement reconnue. Cependant, l’impact de la langue seconde ne pourrait se limiter à la genèse du créole. Au Suriname les nouveaux arrivés étaient plus nombreux que les locuteurs natifs du créole pendant tout le 18e siècle. À ce jour, les effets éventuels de la disproportion entre les locuteurs natifs et les non-natifs sur le créole, pendant sa genèse et ultérieurement, sont à peine connus. Dans cet article nous avons combiné des données historiques et contemporaines afin d’étudier l’impact de l’acquisition et de l’utilisation de la L2 sur l’évolution des créoles. Nous examinons plusieurs aspects linguistiques de discours contemporains dans le créole de locuteurs natifs et non-natifs afin d'éclairer les différences sous-jacentes du système de la langue première et seconde. Celles-ci sont ensuite comparées à leurs équivalents provenant de sources antérieures. Cette comparaison nous a permis de conclure que certains sous-systèmes du créole ont davantage été influencés par l’acquisition de la langue seconde que d’autres.
155 - PublicationCross-linguistic influence in language creation: Assessing the role of the Gbe languages in the formation of the Creoles of SurinameThe seven related Creole languages spoken in Suriname – Sranan Tongo, Aluku or Boni, Kwinti, Ndyuka or Okanisi, Pamaka, Matawai, and Saamaka – are a unique test case for exploration into the role of language contact and substrate influence in the formation of the Surinamese Creoles, as well as the issues they raise for theories of contact-induced change and Creole formation in particular. Sociohistorical (e.g. Arends, 2002, Hogbergen, 1990a, Hogbergen, 1990b and Thoden van Velzen and Hoogbergen, 2011) and linguistic evidence suggest that they all had their origins in the early Creole that emerged on the plantations of Suriname in the late 17th to early 18th century, that is, roughly between 1660 and 1720. Modern Sranan is a direct continuation of this early contact language while the other Creoles, generally referred to as Maroon Creoles, split off from it as a result of their founders’ flight from the Surinamese plantations at different periods of time. Their common origin is reflected in the similarities they manifest at all levels of linguistic structure, from phonology to morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics (see Winford and Migge, 2004 and Smith and Haabo, 2004 for an overview). Most of these similarities can be attributed to a shared input from the West African substrate languages that were part of the primary input to the formation of these Creoles.
432Scopus© Citations 7 - Publication'The Crossing of Love': The Inoperative Community and Romantic Love in Feridun Zaimoglu's 'Fünf klopfende Herzen, wenn die Liebe Springt' and HinterlandIn the short story ‘Fünf klopfende Herzen, wenn die Liebe springt’ (2004) and the novel Hinterland (2009), Feridun Zaimoglu engages with cosmopolitanism and German Romanticism – both characteristic themes of his more recent fiction. A dialogue between the ideas of love presented by Jean-Luc Nancy and the Romantics Fr. Schlegel, Novalis and Kleist can illuminate the non-identitarian nature of Zaimoglu's cosmopolitanism, suggesting a radical openness to the future and an ontological interrelatedness in line with Nancy's ‘communauté désœuvrée’ (‘inoperative community’), rather than a new cosmopolitan identity with its own moral code. Just as the Romantics invested in the power of love to create a harmonious world, love is equally important for Nancy in that it renders the inoperative community more accessible to us. This understanding of cosmopolitanism can be glimpsed in ‘Fünf klopfende Herzen’, in which falling in love presents the protagonist with the radical possibilities brought about by the interconnected nature of being. Similarly, in Hinterland, in which transnational sensibilities create a cosmopolitan web across Europe, it is implied that being-with is not subordinate to being-one. Zaimoglu's engagement with the Brothers Grimm and the more nationalist aspects of Romanticism also requires close scrutiny, and can be illuminated by an appeal to Nancy's concepts of ‘myth’ and ‘literature’.
320 - PublicationA Defence and Illustration of Marie de Gournay: Bayle’s Reception of ‘Cette Savante Demoiselle’The assassination of Henri IV by François Ravaillacin 1610 sparked an immediate pamphlet polemic regarding the Jesuits and their position in France. First in the fray was the Lettre déclamatoire by the assassinated king’s Jesuit confessor Pierre Coton, which triggered the anti-Jesuit satire L’Anti-Coton. Amongst other replies, Marie de Gournay’s pro-Jesuit text Adieu de l’ame du roy de France et de Navarre Henry le Grand à la Royne, avec la Defence des Peres Jesuistes appeared at this point, shortly followed by Le Remerciment des Beurrières de Paris, the latter of which treats of Gournay as a public woman.
71 - PublicationDes livres d’entrées? Vers une poétique de récit de voyage dans les relations d’entrées de Puget de la SerreDans les pages qui suivent, nous aimerions démontrer que les récits peu étudiés de La Serre se situent à un carrefour de genres entre le récit de voyage et la relation d’entrée. Loin de n’être « guère passionants », ils constituent, au contraire, un exemple fort intéressant de la nature polymorphe des récits de voyage à l’époque et illustrent la façon dont La Serre s’approprie divers discours pour glorifier la reine. Cet article ne vise pas à faire une analyse historique des entrées de Marie de Médicis, ni à analyser le décalage entre la version de La Serre et la ‘réalité’ des événements (dans la mesure où nous ne pouvons parler d’une seule ‘réalité’ à propos d’ un cérémonial aussi construit qu’une entrée royale peut l’être). L’approche adoptée est essentiellement littéraire : nous aimerions étudier comment plusieurs éléments communs aux trois textes de La Serre – certains assez typiques des livres d’entrées, d’au tres plutôt étrangers au genre – peuvent être perçus comme les traits d’une poétique du récit de voyage. C’est dans cette optique que nous espérons apporter une contribution nouvelle aux travaux de plus en plus nombreux sur les entrées royales
177 - PublicationDes noeuds que l'amour ne rompt point'? Sisters and friendship in seventeenth-century French tragedy and tragi-comedyThis article grew out of a desire to investigate the commonly held theory that female friendship is under-represented in literature. Notwithstanding recent research (chiefly on nineteenth and twentieth century English-language fiction) which has nuanced Virginia Woolf’s famous lamentation of the absence of literary representations of female friends,1 the idea that female friendship is a rare literary phenomenon appears to persist.2 My theory was that its would-be rarity was due in no small part to the rarity of research concerning it: were we just not looking? More specifically, my interest lay in the representation of blood sisters, having come to this subject through the work of seventeenth-century female dramatist Catherine Bernard, and the representation of the sisters in Laodamie. Despite growing interest in familial relations in the early modern period, it remains a relatively unexplored area: to the best of my knowledge, no historical or literary study of early modern (blood) sisters has appeared to date.3 Now, if female friendship has been dismembered as Janice Raymond maintains,4 it is clear that blood sisters have been given even worse press. Despite the fact that the blood sister relationship has provided the model for non-kinship bonds of mutual affection and / or solidarity between women (in the commonly evoked notion of sisterhood),5 the dominant image of sisters in the myths and fairytales of Western literature (such as Cinderella or Psyché) is one of jealous arch-rivals, often with homicidal tendencies. Discounting comedies, my quest led me to eighteen plays (eight tragedies and ten tragi-comedies), where the relationship between the sisters varies on the one hand from bitter jealousy (usually experienced by one sister, to the blithe ignorance of the other) to, on the other hand, selfless devotion, where one sister would sacrifice her life for the other. Leaving the more common representation of sisters as jealous rivals aside – the ‘simplified, conventionalised’ representations of female relationships which Woolf bemoaned6 – the aim of this article is to examine a number of other models of sisterhood and of female friendship with which the dramatists provide us, and hence to analyse how sisterhood is configured in this element of early modern literature.
118 - PublicationDictionnaires et Lexiques Bilingues: Langues de GuyaneLes États généraux du multilinguisme en Outremer, qui se sont tenus à Cayenne en décembre 2011, ont permis d’amorcer des projets concernant le plurilinguisme guyanais. Leurs recommandations ont insisté sur l’urgence d’équiper les langues de Guyane pour qu’elles puissent assumer un rôle plus actif dans la vie publique et dans les institutions guyanaises, notamment à l’école.
68 - PublicationThe displacement of disorder: gynæcocracy and friendship in Catherine Bernard’s Laodamie (1689)It should come as no surprise that the world of Catherine Bernard’s tragedies is one of disorder: theatre is after all, as d’Aubignac tells us, ‘[là] où règne le Démon de l’inquiétude, du trouble et du désordre’. Disorder is a characteristic of the genre; it is a state of affairs rectified by the dénouement , ensuring that the spectators depart, in the words of Corneille, ‘l’esprit en repos’. Bernard’s play Lao damie might appear at first glance, within the framework of a traditional patriarchal paradigm, to provide the perfect recipe for disorder: firstly the sovereign ruler is a woman, and secondly both she and her sister are in love with the same man. However, it soon becomes apparent that the focus of that disorder is displaced away from where we might expect to see it. The aim of this article is to analyse this displacement of disorder as it manifests itself in the inextricably linked public and private spher es. Such an analysis will enable us to evaluate the innovations central to this neglected, once highly successful, tragedy.
236 - PublicationDistributing roots: Listemes across components in Distributed MorphologyOne of the merits of the target article is to bring into sharp focus some of the fundamental issues that a syntax-based approach raises about knowledge of language and knowledge of the primitive elements in the various linguistic interfaces. Questions about roots, then, amount to questions on what a syntax-based model of grammar like DM has to say about lexical knowledge. The comments that follow centre on two such issues: the relations between the lists into which DM distributes lexical knowledge, and the nature of roots as morphological objects.
405Scopus© Citations 4 - PublicationDoes continuous assessment in higher education support student learning?A distinction is often made in the literature about “assessment of learning” and “assessment for learning” attributing a formative function to the latter while the former takes a summative function. While there may be disagreements among researchers and educators about such categorical distinctions there is consensus that both types of assessment are often used concurrently in higher education institutions. A question that often arises when formative and summative assessment practices are used in continuous assessment is the extent to which student learning can be facilitated through feedback. The views and perceptions of students and academics from a discipline in the Humanities across seven higher education institutions were sought to examine the above question. A postal survey was completed by academics, along with a survey administered to a sample of undergraduate students and a semi-structured interview was conducted with key academics in each of the seven institutions. This comparative study highlights issues that concern both groups about the extent to which continuous assessment practices facilitate student learning and the challenges faced. The findings illustrate the need to consider more effective and efficient ways in which feedback can be better used to facilitate student learning.
768Scopus© Citations 117 - Publication'El cazador-cazador' As Green Hunter and Renovator of Poetics in the Work of Miguel DelibesThe novelist Miguel Delibes (1920-2010) was both a passionate small-game hunter, who wrote several books on the subject during his lifetime, and a staunch ecologist. This article gives an analysis which reconciles hunting and biocentrism in his work and further probes the relation between the author's hunting books and his fiction. Beginning with a review of the history and culture of hunting in Spain, it emerges that Delibes applies an extremely strict definition to real hunting (la caza-caza), which he regards as a form of low-impact subsistence or self-provisioning and therefore ethically superior to stock farming. Additionally, the hunter identifies with animality and thereby overcomes the modern sense of apartness from nature. The article notes the stylistic affinities between Delibes' hunting books and his novels, beginning with Diario de un cazador (1955) - particularly their non-standard literary representations of nature - and suggests that the author renovated his fiction from the 1950s onwards by redeploying techniques he had first developed in the hunting books. Unconventional literary techniques figure prominently in this crossover.
622 - PublicationEveryday Life and Death: Mortality and Community in Navid Kermani's KurzmitteilungNavid Kermani (born 1967 in Siegen of Iranian parents) is a writer, Islam scholar and public intellectual of rising prominence, as evidenced by speech in the Reichstag marking the 65th anniversary of the Grundgesetz and by his connection to the Green Party’s 2017 presidential candidacy. It is for his essays and articles on Islam and the West that Kermani is most well-known and he continues to provide an authoritative counterbalance to the increasingly xenophobic and divisive rhetoric of organisations such as the movement Pegida (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) and the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland. Despite the variety of Kermani’s essayistic writing, which also deals with German literature, the current refugee crisis, and the politics of the Middle East and of India, questions of community and belonging remain its central focus. He repeatedly argues for an understanding of the complexity of identity and for a cosmopolitan idea of coexistence that involves concern for the other and the acceptance of difference, earning him the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (2015) and the Marion Dönhoff Preis für internationale Verständigung (2016), to name two examples.
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