Racial Conflict in the United States of America : A Deconstructive Perspective on Native Speaker by Changrae Lee

Written about the time of the Golden Venture incident, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker makes a particular reference to that incident, whereby implying that particular immigrants, on the grounds of their racial identities, are mistreated and considered as aliens by some Americas. While some whites discriminate against immigrants, there is widespread ethnic tension between Korean Americans and African Americans. Significantly, racial conflict between Koreans and blacks and the racist attitude of some whites toward immigrants are mirrored in the relationship between the Korean-American protagonist Henry and his American wife Lelia. That is, due to their different racial identities they do not understand each other and they always argue. However, toward the end of the novel, Henry and Lelia come to understand each other. While ethnic conflict between Koreans and blacks and certain whites’ discriminatory attitudes toward immigrants is serious one, the novel suggests the unimportance of racial identity. In other words, the novel concludes that there is no discriminatory treatment of immigrants and, in fact, every one is a native Speaker in America. In the novel there is no message of how racial conflict could be resolved. However, this essay suggests that by investigating how the tension between Henry and Lelia is resolved, one could suggest a solution for the ethnicity problem in America and in real life.

Hesitations and repair in German

The occurrence of pauses and hesitations in spontaneous speech has been shown to occur systematically, for example, "between sentences, after discourse markers and conjunctions and before accented content words." (Hansson [15]) This is certainly plausible in English, where pauses and hesitations can and often do occur before content words such as nominals, for example, "uh, there's a … man." (Chafe [8]) However, if hesitations are, in fact, evidence of "deciding what to talk about next," (Chafe [8]) then the complex grammatical system of German should render this pausing position precarious, since pre-modifiers must account for the gender of the nominals they modify.In this paper, I present data to test the hypothesis that pre-nominal hesitation patterns in German are dissimilar to those in English. Hesitations in German will be shown, in fact, to occur within noun phrase units. Nevertheless, native speakers most often succeed in supplying a nominal which conforms to the gender indicated by the determiner or pre-modifier. Corrections, or repairs, of infelicitous pre-modifiers indicate that the speaker was unable to supply a nominal of the same gender which the choice of pre-modifier had committed him/her to. The frequency of such repairs is shown to vary according to task, with fewest repairs occurring in elicited speech which allows for linguistic freedom and therefore is most like spontaneous speech. The data sets indicate that among German native speakers, hesitations occurring before noun phrase units (pre-NPU hesitations) indicate deliberation of what to say, while hesitations within or before the head of the noun phrase (pre-NPH hesitations) indicate deliberation of how to say what has already been decided (cf. Chafe [8]).

Acoustic Variability in the Production of English Vowels by Native and Non-Native Speakers

The features of non-native speech which distinguish it from native speech are often difficult to pin down. It is possible to be a native speaker of any of a vast number of varieties of English. These varieties each have their phonetic characteristics which allow them to be identified by speakers of the varieties in question and by others. The phonetic differences between the accents represented by these varieties are very great. It is impossible to indicate any particular configuration of vowels in the acoustic vowel space or set of consonant articulations which all native-speaker varieties of English have in common and which non-native speakers do not share. This study considers the vowel quality in a single word by native and non-native speakers.

Language Dominance in Early and Late Bilinguals

The proposed presentation is a progress report from a project which is aimed at establishing some phonetic correlates of language dominance in various kinds of bilingual situations. The current object of study is Swedish students starting in classes which prepare for the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme. The IB classes in Sweden are taught in English, except for classes in Swedish and foreign languages. This means that after they enter the programme the students are exposed to and speak a good deal more English than previously.The assumption made by many students that they will, on the one hand not “damage” their Swedish, and on the other will dramatically improve their English simply by attending an English-medium school will be tested. The linguistic background of the students studied and their reasons for choosing the IB programme will be established. Their English and Swedish proficiency will be tested according to various parameters (native-like syntax, perceived foreign accent, the timing of vowels and consonants in VC sequences, vocabulary mobilisation) on arrival at the school, and again after one and three years at the school. The initial recordings are now underway.In a preliminary study involving just three young people who were bilingual in Swedish and English, the timing of the pronunciation of (C)VC syllables in Swedish and English was studied. The results of this investigation indicate that it may be possible to establish language dominance in bilingual speakers using timing data. It was found that the three subjects differed systematically in their pronunciation of the target words. One subject (15 years old), who was apparently native-like in both languages, had the V-C timing of both Swedish and English words of a native speaker of English. His brother (17 years old), who had a noticeable Swedish accent in English, pronounced both Swedish and English words in this respect like a native speaker of Swedish. The boys’ sister (9 years old) apparently had native-like timing in both languages.

Temporal indicators of language dominance in bilingual children

In the field of bilingualism it is of particular interest to stablish which, if any, of a speaker’s languages is dominant. Earlier research has shown that immigrants who acquire a new language tend to use elements of the timing patterns of the new language in their native language. It is shown here that measurements of timing in the two languages spoken by bilingual children can give information about the relative dominance of the languages for the individual speaker.

How do neighbouring populations affect local population change over time?

This study covers a period when society changed from a pre-industrial agricultural society to a post-industrial service-producing society. Parallel with this social transformation, major population changes took place. In this study, we analyse how local population changes are affected by neighbouring populations. To do so we use the last 200 years of local population change that redistributed population in Sweden. We use literature to identify several different processes and spatial dependencies in the redistribution between a parish and its surrounding parishes. The analysis is based on a unique unchanged historical parish division, and we use an index of local spatial correlation to describe different kinds of spatial dependencies that have influenced the redistribution of the population. To control inherent time dependencies, we introduce a non-separable spatial temporal correlation model into the analysis of population redistribution. Hereby, several different spatial dependencies can be observed simultaneously over time. The main conclusions are that while local population changes have been highly dependent on the neighbouring populations in the 19th century, this spatial dependence have become insignificant already when two parishes is separated by 5 kilometres in the late 20th century. Another conclusion is that the time dependency in the population change is higher when the population redistribution is weak, as it currently is and as it was during the 19th century until the start of industrial revolution.

Representations of culture in EIL : Cultural representation in Swedish EFL textbooks

The English language has become an international language and is globally used as a lingua franca. Therefore, there has been a shift in English-language education toward teaching English as an interna-tional language (EIL). Teaching from the EIL paradigm means that English is seen as an international language used in communication by people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. As the approach to English-language education changes from the traditional native-speaker, target country context, so does the role of culture within English-language teaching. The aim of this thesis is to in-vestigate and analyse cultural representations in two Swedish EFL textbooks used in upper-secondary school to see how they correspond with the EIL paradigm. This is done by focusing on the geograph-ical origin of the cultural content as well as looking at what kinds of culture are represented in the textbooks. A content analysis of the textbooks is conducted, using Kachru’s Concentric Circles of English as the model for the analysis of the geographical origin. Horibe’s model of the three different kinds of culture in EIL is the model used for coding the second part of the analysis. The results of the analysis show that culture of target countries and "Culture as social custom" dominate the cultural content of the textbook. Thus, although there are some indications that the EIL paradigm has influ-enced the textbooks, the traditional approach to culture in language teaching still prevails in the ana-lysed textbooks. Because of the relatively small sample included in the thesis, further studies need to be conducted in order to make conclusions regarding the Swedish context as a whole.

Ne videt, ne znat – det direkta objektets kasus vid två negerade ryska verb

This essay examines the case of the direct object in Russian sentences with the negated verbs не видеть and не знать. For each verb, 50 contexts were downloaded from the newspaper corpus of the Russian National Corpus and analysed with respect to the semantic properties of the direct object and the negated verb. The theories and concepts used for the analysis have been outlined in Padutjeva, 2006. The analysis of не видеть suggests that the main difference between the genitive and the ac-cusative case is to be found in the notion of non-existence or absence implicated by the verb’s semantics. In utterances with не видеть as a predicate, this notion is always present and is expressed by the genitive case. The speaker may also choose to ignore it by using the accusa-tive and thus emphasize some other aspect of the described situation. The examined properties of reference, definiteness and denotative status of the direct object seem to play a secondary role for how case is used. Their influence is to delimit the meaning of the objective genitive to either non-existence or absence. No similar conclusions could be drawn from the examination of не знать. The reason for this is that the concept of private sphere, used by Padutjeva to explain the use of objective geni-tive with this verb, could not be properly established during the analysis. Just as the notion of absence is crucial for the understanding of the objective genitive when it occurs with не видеть, the concept private sphere seems to be the key to understand it when it occurs with не знать.