Archives par étiquette : sociolinguistics

Séminaire “Cultural contact and New Dialect Emergence in Large Cities: From Ethnolects to Multiethnolects” avec Lars Hinrichs (The University of Texas, Austin), organisé par Virginie Iché. 

mardi 18 mars 2025 18h, salle 126, site de Saint-Charles 1

Lien zoom du séminaire : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/97293747730

Lars Hinrichs is a linguist interested in varieties of English. He is an Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at UT Austin. For his dissertation work at the University of Freiburg, he studied the use of English and Creole in online communication by Jamaicans. He has also researched syntactic differences between British and American written English from a statistical perspective. Since joining the UT English department in 2007, he has been directing the Texas English Project, which researches the different kinds of English spoken in Texas.

“Cultural contact and New Dialect Emergence in Large Cities: From Ethnolects to Multiethnolects”

In at least two different locations, London and Toronto, diasporic Jamaican Creole has developed through four successive sociolinguistic stages (described in Hinrichs 2024): from (1) the L1 of first-generation immigrants via (2) a second dialect of second-generation speakers and (3) a localized repertoire that indexes minoritized racial identities (as opposed to Jamaican ethnicity) to (4) a tributary to a highly diverse, local “feature pool” (Mufwene 2001) from which a multiethnolect (or “contemporary urban vernacular”, Rampton 2015) emerges. Given how widely multiethnolects are spoken and how broad their linguistic input is, advancement to stage (4) is the most remarkable for any diasporic repertoire in an urban contact setting. Drawing on findings from my research on Toronto Jamaican English (TJE, Hinrichs forthcoming), this paper asks which sociolinguistic prerequisites must be met for a diasporic creole to advance to Stage 4. The analysis attends to aspects of phonetics/phonology, lexis, and metadiscourse and draws comparisons between TJS (representing Stages 2 and 3) and Multicultural Toronto English (MTE, Denis et al. 2023), two relatively new urban contact varieties. The conclusion offers a discussion of similarities and differences between the feature pools of TJE and MTE and the various selection processes at play. 

References

Denis, D., Elango, V., Kamal, N. S. N., Prashar, S., & Velasco, M. (2023). Exploring the vowel space of Multicultural Toronto English. Journal of English Linguistics, 51(1), 30–65.

Hinrichs, L. (forthcoming). Language contact in the Toronto Jamaican community: Culture, mobility and the renegotiation of identity. Cambridge University Press.

Hinrichs, L. (2024). Caribbean Englishes on the move: The formation of diaspora communities. In S. Hackert (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of Caribbean Englishes. Oxford University Press.

Mufwene, S. S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge University Press.

Rampton, B. (2015). Contemporary urban vernaculars. In J. Nortier & B. Svendsen (Eds.), Language, youth and identity in the 21st century (pp. 24–44). Cambridge University Press.

Workshop “Language change and variation in English: Methods and frameworks”  – 11 avril 2024

Journée organisée par Ann Coady, Eric Mélac et Florence Floquet

Site St Charles 1 salle 126

L’entrée est libre. Il est également possible d’y assister à distance via le lien zoom suivant : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/99339242289?pwd=dzlCaE9UcnQycDV2NnlEMUdZWDdCQT09

9:30 AM Welcome drinks and opening 

9:45 Eric Mélac (Uni. Paul Valéry), The development of English evidential markers: A case of grammaticalization or constructionalization?

10:45 Debra Ziegeler (Uni. Sorbonne Nouvelle, Uni. Paul Valéry), Can co-optation be replicated in contact? English final discourse particles in New Englishes

12PM Lunch pause

2:00 PM Alessandro Basile (Uni. Sorbonne Nouvelle), What a “pan-stratist” model tells us about modality in contact: A case study from Singapore English 

3:00 Cameron Morin (ENS Lyon), Double modal constructions in Australian and New Zealand English: A computational sociolinguistic survey.

4:00 Marc-Philippe Brunet (Uni. Savoie Mont Blanc), Investigating the social meaning of language variation in the US South: Epistemological elements of sociolinguistic research

5:00 Discussion and conclusion

Séminaire EMMA/(Inter)Agir – mardi 26 septembre 2023 18h, site St Charles.

Jeroen Vandaele (Univ. Ghent) nous invitera à réfléchir aux conditions dans lesquelles l’humour grinçant peut être reçu et traduit. Sa présentation est intitulée : « Cringe Across Communities. Understanding and Translating The Office with Erving Goffman ».

 

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Cringe Across Communities. Understanding and Translating The Office with Erving Goffman 

Erving Goffman provides a brilliant ‘micro-sociological’ analysis of how individuals manage their image in front of others. In public, individuals intend to promote what they think is a positive self-image and therefore conceal image-incompatible information and supply image-enhancing information. Moreover, image enhancement is most effective when it seems a natural and unconscious expression that individuals give off, not a conscious effort to make an impression on others. When these mechanisms fail, there is face loss, the individual may experience embarrassment, and become the object of comedy. If there is antagonism between the embarrassed and the audience, the felt comedy is usually a form of Schadenfreude. However, the embarrassment may also carry over on the audience, which leads to second-hand embarrassment—cringe— and the mixed emotion called cringe comedy. In this paper, I show that both Schadenfreude and cringe are dominant emotive effects in the sitcom The Office (British and American versions), I investigate how these two distinct emotions come about, and how they fare in translation. 

Jeroen Vandaele teaches courses in literary translation and Hispanic literatures at Ghent University. Earlier he was professor of Spanish at the University of Oslo, teaching courses in poetics, translation studies, and discourse analysis. In Fall 2023 he is a Mare Balticum Fellow at the University of Rostock (Germany), for the domain of translation studies. He is the author of Estados de Gracia, which is a monograph on the censorship, translation, and influence of Billy Wilder in Francoist Spain (published by Brill in 2015) and, more recently, of Translation and Big Details, a monograph in press at Routledge New York. Among the volumes he edited or co-edited are Cognitive Poetics (Mouton de Gruyter) and Translating Humour (a special issue of The Translator). In the domain of humor research, one of his biggest efforts is the double essay “Narrative Humor,” published in Poetics Today