Suchergebnisse

The 2016 EU referendum has already left a lasting imprint on the English language. Building on previous research (e.g. Lalić-Krstin & Silaški 2018, Buckledee 2018), the present article integrates discourse-analytical and corpus-based methods to explore current developments and place them in the historical context of the past 70 years. Using the News on the Web (NoW) corpus, which covers the years from the run-up to the referendum to the present, I will show that Brexit discourse comprises not only the neologisms inspired by the event itself, but also a number of tropes such as 'take/want (one's) country back', 'take back control', '(a truly) global Britain', and more, most of which have developed from discourses of long historical standing. This history will be explored using the Hansard Corpus, which – despite caveats articulated by Mollin (2007) – has proved a valuable resource for the purpose at hand. The analysis will show that at various stages since 1945, Euroscepticism has meshed both with the rhetoric of the political left and the political right and that, ultimately, the UK's position vis à vis Europe has been negotiated in the context of massive sociocultural transformations such as the dissolution of the British Empire and the European postwar economic boom. Pro-European sentiment, which reached its peak in the 1975 referendum endorsing membership in the European Economic Community, shows Britain having overcome the collective 'phantom pain' following the dissolution of the British Empire and the erosion of its position as a major world power. The break-up of this pro-European consensus has revealed cultural rifts in the UK which go deeper than the immediate political and economic context of the Brexit vote.

The present contribution reports on research carried out since November 2011 in the framework of the project 'Cyber-Creole' funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG MA 1652/9). The Cyber-Creole project is complemented by 'RomWeb' (DFG PF 699/4), which is headed by Stefan Pfänder of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Freiburg, Germany. The two projects both use data downloaded from web-based forums, employ identical strategies of data collection and mark-up and have developed a shared search and analysis interface, NCAT (= Net Corpora Administration Tool). The two projects also share a similar general theoretical orientation, being motivated by an interest in how the new media impact on the spread of standard and non-standard varieties of European ex-colonial languages in conditions of economic, political, cultural and media globalisation. In this regard, their work is intended to make a substantial contribution to the emerging research paradigm of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Blommaert 2010, Coupland, ed. 2010, Mair 2013, Mair and Pfänder (forthcoming)). The present brief survey will introduce the theoretical stance the "English" branch of the project takes in the context of contemporary World Englishes research (section 1). Building on this, I will introduce the analytical tool-kit which we have developed to study computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the diasporasat the centre of our attention (section 2) and describe the sociolinguistic profile of the "Cyber -Jamaican" and "CyberNigerian" developed by two such groups (sections 3 and 4). The conclusion (section 5) will summarise the most important insights and outline perspectives for further work.

"To understand the role of machine-readable text corpora in linguistics it is necessary to consider the four possible sources of data for the linguist, viz. (1) the analyst's own introspection/ intuition, (2) more or less systematically conducted elicitation experiments with groups of native speakers of the language studied, (3) collections of authentic spoken or written citations gathered unsystematically, and (4) evidence extracted systematically from a well-defined corpus of texts. After a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the various sources of data, I will briefly exemplify recent advances made in the corpus-based description of languages that have become possible as a result of the application of computer technology to linguistics and then go on to present the major databases currently available for the study of English and German." (author's abstract)