Studying the history of the world language: my motives for the investigation (original) (raw)
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Journal of Pragmatics, 2009
This volume makes novel contributions to the historical archaeology of the Caribbean in three areas. Topically, it addresses change within a free-black community that existed separate from, although socially and economically intertwined within, the Caribbean slave-based plantation system. Theoretically, it uses the concept of "cultural transformation" to analyze the process of creolization in the Caribbean from the early 18th through the 20th centuries. Finally, methodologically it combines GPS surveying techniques with more traditional archaeological mapping and excavation methods and uses functional rather than formal analysis in examining the activities that took place within households.
O'Regan, J. P. (2021). Capital and the hegemony of English in a capitalist world-system
World Englishes (Ideologies Vol III). London: Bloomsbury, 2021
The modern world-system is a capitalist world-system which has its origins in the long sixteenth century (1450-1640). I believe with Andre Gunder Frank (1969), Paul Sweezy (1972) and Immanuel Wallerstein (2011c) that the indispensable rationale of the capitalist world-system is “the endless accumulation of capital” (Wallerstein ibid., xiv), and of the accumulation of capital in order to accumulate more capital. From this vantage point, I wish to propose that the present-day global dominance of an ideologized standard English in the modern world-system – that is, an English in form and use which appears indistinguishable to that which is to be found in formal Inner-Circle contexts (Kachru 1990) – is best explained by the relationship which has existed since the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries between capital accumulation and English, particularly as encapsulated by the consecutive hegemonic world-economies of Britain and the United States. Historiographies of English as a global language, as opposed to histories of the English language, have tended to look to the territorial British empire in the nineteenth century and then, more specifically, to the expansion of US structural power since 1945 in order to explain the present-day global dominance of English and its normative Inner-Circle forms (Phillipson 2008; Saxena and Omoniyi 2010; Park and Wee 2012; Chowdhury and Phan 2014; Lemberg 2018). In such interpretations, nineteenth-century British colonialism and post-1945 processes of US-led globalization are usually conjoined in order to explain the present-day global dominance of English, often with an emphasis on the post-1945 US hegemony and still more recent globalization processes since the 1980s and 90s (Blommaert 2010: 16). But in the present chapter, I wish to suggest that even the inclusion of the nineteenth century might yet be considered a foreshortened view, while the emphasis on the colonial empire as often occurs could also be seen as a simplification of the capitalist world-system’s true extent. The unifying element that is absent, and which this discussion presents, is the accumulation of capital in a capitalist world-system since the sixteenth century, and the relationship of English to this.
Introduction_English Version_The argument
2022
Grammar has conventionally sought to describe artefacts, namely languages as they appear already constructed by speakers and when relevant by official bodies of regulation (schools, academies, etc.). In this frame, language therefore designates standardised wholes associated with conventional communities of speakers. When we talk about "man in language", it is thus essentially through the stabilised markers that indicate his place (classically, the deictics). It is true that empiricist semiotics sees languages as sums of idiolects (Saussure asserted that language is only as a whole in the "mass"), but most often it does not go beyond this statement of principle, which meanwhile runs up against the classic aporias of emergence. How, in this case, do we go from the idiolect to the common language? From individual representation to meaning? The historicity of individuals, their "aperceptive mass" in Herbart's terminology, remains generally disconnected from the history of structures. "Language" has remained the horizon of diachrony, whether in the long term (the history of languages) or in micro-diachrony (called "discourse", "enunciation", etc.). This disjunction was not historically specific to the language sciences. Much of early sociology was similarly built for the most part on the priority given to structures, and on the corollary thesis that groups have emergent properties, distinct from the characteristics attributed to individuals. These conceptual frameworks have tended to assume that subjects are subordinated to structures. The figure of the external descriptor contrasts with speaking subjects who are heirs to, or even prisoners of, a language that transcends them, or against social subjects enclosed in structures, or even doomed to a fundamental misunderstanding of their own actions. This "ideology of structure" has long been the subject of numerous criticisms, often from the sidelines of the academic field devoted to language, which were more sensitive to actual language practices and their anthropological or social entanglements. Structures, or rather linguistic conventions, are then viewed as a semiotic resource that is certainly central but by no means exclusive within an always multimodal interaction. 3 The traditional perspective is reversed in favour of a bottom-up and emergentist perspective, as seen for more than a decade in approaches to both empirical descriptions of language contact 4 and their theoretical * Our thanks go to Richard Ryan for his assistance with the translation of this text.
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2018
Reviewed by JACQUELINE URLA Where does language figure in the production and reproduction of social difference and inequality? This question has been approached in many different waysby authors working on gate-keeping and conversational interaction, work on language ideologies, in critical discourse analysis, in education, and the abundant work on language in relation to gender, race, and class hierarchiesto name just a few. If the question is not new, it is nevertheless put before us in an acute way in the contemporary moment in which the gap in income inequality has grown astronomically, and where intolerance and xenophobic political discourse are disturbingly normalized. 'Once again, not for the first time in history, language is coming to the fore in struggles for power' (p. xv). Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny understand the project of their collaborative book to be a response to this historical moment and animated by a passion 'to develop an approach to linguistic analysis in which political economy, social difference, and social inequality are at the centre' (p. xxii). Towards this end, the book follows two interrelated questions: How does language figure in the workings of two of the main economic and political orders of the modern era: capitalism and colonialism? And, in turn, how have those forces shaped the development and questions pursued in the study of language? The latter issue in particular is one that they believe has too often been sidelined by conventional intellectual histories of the various branches of linguistics, philology, and sociolinguistics. This book, by contrast, seeks to model for readers a historically oriented political economy of knowledge production about language by focusing on how material conditions and interests have shaped how scholars have studied and conceptualized language. The scope is large; capitalism and colonialism are multifaceted and mutating behemoths and the time frame is longthey start in the sixteenth century. The outcome is a daring road map for what a twenty-first century history of language studiesfrom early comparative philology, missionary linguistics, and dialectology, to contemporary sociolinguistics and generative
2021
This book is an introduction into English linguistics, aimed primarily at students who are just beginning their studies as well as those more advanced, who can use it to revise some of the more basic linguistic concepts, not only pertaining to English linguistics, but also linguistics in general. The book is divided into 14 chapters, dealing in turn with the most important topics in English linguistics: the history of linguistics, the levels of language and their description, phonetics and phonology, spelling and orthography, morphology, syntax, lexicology and lexicography, text linguistics, pragmatics, standard and varieties, history of the English language, historical (diachronic) linguistics, and, finally, the last chapter introduces the contrastive approach to language, focusing on English and German specifically. These chapters are followed by suggestions for further reading, as well as by some useful appendices and indices. After a brief introduction, the book begins with an overview of the most important figures and movements in the history of linguistics. The chapter starts in antiquity, mentioning Plato, the naturalists and conventionalists, as well as the Romans. It moves on to the Middle Ages, at which point the narrative begins to focus on Britain. The next section describes the situation in the Early Modern period, characterised by the publication of the first grammars as well as monolingual dictionaries (of the socalled "hard words"). The nineteenth century, the age of comparative and historical linguistics, is discussed next. Finally, the chapter provides a summary of the more recent movements in linguistics, i.e. in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It describes the innovations brought by Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism and transformational-generative grammar in more detail, mentioning other movements and areas of linguistics only briefly. The chapter is very easy to read and is clearly meant to ease the reader into the topic. All the crucial concepts and terms are written in bold, something that is maintained throughout the rest of the book as well. Many of them appear again in later chapters and are explained in more detail there. The following chapters aim to introduce the basic areas of linguistic analysis, dedicating a chapter to each. They are more generally linguistic, though the majority of examples are provided from English. Chapter 3 explains the concept of the levels of language. The authors list phonology, orthography and morphology as the three basic levels and provide definitions of the most fundamental terms, such as the word, phoneme, morpheme and grapheme. The chapter is very short, but provides a good basis for the following three chapters, which deal with each area in turn. Chapter 4 is concerned with phonetics and phonology. It firstly provides more detailed definitions of the basic terms, and then moves on to transcription, the production of sounds, phonotactics, suprasegmental phenomena, and, finally, the English syllable. Chapter 5 tackles spelling and orthography in English, discussing the issue of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, which seems very unreliable in English. The authors, however, provide many examples which show that, frequently, that is not the case. The next chapter focuses on morphology,
English is unquestionably the current prevailing global language, spoken the world over and understood by the majority of the world population. In fact, it is the one used for international and intranational communication and to allow a successful mutual communication between non- native speakers. When speaking about UK’s language, it is evident that it is considered as something daily and common, enough to be the second language for almost every non-native. Travelers are guided by English signs and advertisement; Politicians are able to understand each other even when from different countries thanks to English as a mutual language; Students and Academics can collaborate and share papers and research studies between them thanks to the implication of English. It is possible to individuate two major positions regarding the feelings people have about learning and using this common language (and this feeling, often, is the same if taken another language instead of English). The first one is a positive motivation to reach a good proficiency in the language, understanding that having a unique global language it is indispensable to put you in touch with the entire world population, no matter if for pleasure or work necessities. On the other hand, as we will see in the following paragraph, it is not an easy language to learn, and this could easily generate in the learner/user a strong feeling of resistance or reluctance to make this effort. Moreover, as it will be demonstrated later, the supremacy of a unique world language represents a treat for many minor languages and populations. The aim of this paper is to analyze the process that made possible the achievement of English to reach the dominant position of global language and maintain it, through the mention of some necessary historical background and other more strictly practical reasons. Most importantly, a focus on what is happening to English language nowadays will be shown, to offer to the reader the chance to build his own idea about the issue.