Lehrende/r: PD Dr. habil. Martina Lampert
Veranstaltungsart: Proseminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: PS Eng Ling
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 45
Anmeldegruppe: PS Engl. Ling.
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007. Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches: As an introduction to the diversity of American English(es), basic in-class reading and discussion will provide a solid overview, followed by (group) presentations that are meant to provide an impression of the many various linguistic realities in the U.S. of today. To obtain credit, participants are required to carry out their own small-scale (group) research project on a selected aspect of American English, e.g., do a survey with test persons, a text or discourse-based analysis, or a corpus study, and present their initial findings (via PowerPoint or poster) in class, which will then be their exploratory work for their term papers.
Inhalt: American English or American Englishes? This debate over English as either a unified ‘national’ language or a diversity of ‘dialects’ has always characterized and still significantly shapes the study of the language encountered in the U.S. Taking a pronounced sociolinguistic stance, the proseminar will focus on recent findings of American sociolinguistics and dialectology portraying the variation in and variability of the language data found in use throughout the North American continent: Variation across geographical space (from east to west, from north to south), variation in the social stratification (class, ethnicity, gender), variation across historical periods, and variation across linguistic domains (colloquial speech and educated language, personal styles and situational registers). In the course of the semester we will discuss both specifics and commonalities in the sound system and the grammatical system as well as in the lexicon and in discourse; we will have a look at how speakers ‘perform’ (various) American identities and ask why they are (or are not) speakers of English.
