Suchergebnisse

To what extent is citizen political participation, such as electronic or personal contact with members of Congress, stimulated by membership in organized interest groups? I use data from a nationwide survey conducted by Zogby in 2007 to assess the extent to which Americans contact congressional offices, and whether membership in more activist-oriented groups, such as citizen groups, stimulates greater rates of contact than membership in professional associations or no group membership at all. I also examine whether this group 'effect' on participation breaks down by the method used, low-effort electronic contact (mail, email, web-based contact pages, on-line petitions) versus high-effort contact such as personal meetings with lawmakers. I find that the role played by interest groups in facilitating communication can be substantial. In the case of members from lower socio-economic backgrounds in particular, membership in a citizen group helps compensate for lack of knowledge and resources regarding how to contact Congress.

To what extent is citizen political participation, such as electronic or personal contact with members of Congress, stimulated by membership in organized interest groups? I use data from a nationwide survey conducted by Zogby in 2007 to assess the extent to which Americans contact congressional offices, and whether membership in more activist-oriented groups, such as citizen groups, stimulates greater rates of contact than membership in professional associations or no group membership at all. I also examine whether this group 'effect' on participation breaks down by the method used, low-effort electronic contact (mail, email, web-based contact pages, on-line petitions) versus high-effort contact such as personal meetings with lawmakers. I find that the role played by interest groups in facilitating communication can be substantial. In the case of members from lower socio-economic backgrounds in particular, membership in a citizen group helps compensate for lack of knowledge and resources regarding how to contact Congress. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

In Cross River State, South-eastern Nigeria, languages incorporate a number of loanwords as personal names as a result of increasing contact with other languages and cultures. Such words are, therefore, borrowed wholesale or adapted phonologically into the onomasticon of the recipient languages, thus gaining wideranging acceptance, currency and usage. This paper examines the phenomenon of language contact and naming in three linguistic communities along the Cross River Basin – Agwagune, Ejagham and Lokaa – in relation to Efik, a dominant language and culture, which itself is in constant contact with English. The paper seeks to show the intricate interrelationship and direction of influence between personal names in the donor and recipient languages, taking into account ethnic hierarchies, and social formations that are found in the context where personal names are given and used. The study relied on Thomason and Kauffman's (1988) integrated theory of language contact as its theoretical plank, which maintains that there is a strong tendency for speakers of less powerful languages to borrow from the economically and politically powerful languages to enhance their internal resourcefulness. Since names are lexical items in a language, they are not immune to this contact influence. Audio-video data and text materials were elicited from sampled respondents who were contact names bearers and their community members through an ethnographic qualitative approach. The paper concludes with the claim that the interplay of forces like trade, religion and other socio-cultural factors are the main vectors of name borrowing, which are social praxis for negotiating cultural boundaries and relationships as well as indexing the notion of power, personhood and sociocentrism, given the effect of contact. The paper, therefore, sheds some light on ethnic mechanisms of shared social behaviour signalled by shared personal names, as it attempts to understand local settings in greater depth.

In language contact research, there is an interrelationship between language systems, social and communicative factors and psycholinguistic processing. Language contact can be associated with face-to-face communication among community members who use different language varieties, as well as with non-personal contact of people using the written medium. Language contact can contribute to the transfer of linguistic patterns and units from one system to another. Stable contact can result in both lexical and grammatical influences, the process being mutual rather than unidirectional. According to Braunmüller and House, language contact and contact-induced variation and change, which can result in convergence and divergence, are omnipresent characteristic features of languages in use.
1
Winford takes a similar view and argues that the degree and nature of structural convergence depend on an array of linguistic, social and historical factors. However, he remarks that it is problematic to differentiate between internally motivated changes and transmission from external sources.
2
The present research paper deals with the dynamics of the language systems in contact and observes how the languages of bilinguals develop similarities (convergence) and how they distinguish between the two languages in particular ways (divergence).
This research employs the corpus of written language samples sourced from the Australian-Hungarian community's newspaper, entitled Hungarian Life (Magyar Élet). Many of the immigrants who produce text for the newspaper retain the Hungarian language, but have become bilingual in English.