Contact, Mobility and Authenticity: Language Ideologies in Koineisation and Creolisation

Part II - Christoph Neuenschwander: Language ideologies in the legitimisation of Tok Pisin as a lingua franca Pidgins and Creoles all over the world seem to share common aspects in the historical circumstances of their genesis and evolution. They all emerged in the context of colonialism, in which not only colonisers and colonised, but also the various groups of the colonised population spoke different languages. Pidgins and Creoles, quite simply, resulted from the need to communicate.¬¬ Yet, the degree to which they became accepted as a lingua franca or in fact even as a linguistic variety in its own right, strikingly differs from variety to variety. The current research project focuses on two Pacific Creoles: Tok Pisin, spoken on Papua New Guinea, and Hawai'i Creole English (HCE). Whereas Tok Pisin is a highly stabilised and legitimised variety, used as a lingua franca in one of the most linguistically diverse countries on Earth, HCE seems to be regarded as nothing more than broken English by a vast majority of the Hawai'ian population. The aim of this project is to examine the metalinguistic comments about both varieties and to analyse the public discourses, in which the status of Tok Pisin and HCE were and still are negotiated. More precisely, language ideologies shall be identified and compared in the two contexts. Ultimately, this might help us understand the mechanisms that underlie the processes of legitimisation or stigmatisation. As Laura Tresch will run a parallel research project on language ideologies on new dialects (New Zealand English and Estuary English), a comparison between the findings of both projects may produce even more insights into those mechanisms. The next months of the project will be dedicated to investigating the metalinguistic discourse in Papua New Guinea. In order to collect a wide range of manifestations of language ideologies, i.e. instances of (lay and academic) commentary on Tok Pisin, it makes sense to look at a relatively large period of time and to single out events that are likely to have stimulated such manifestations. In the history of Papua New Guinea - and in the history of Tok Pisin, in particular - several important social and political events concerning the use and the status of the language can be detected. One example might be public debates on education policy. The presentation at the CSLS Winter School 2014 will provide a brief introduction to the history of Tok Pisin and raise the methodological question of how to spot potential sites of language-ideological production.

International Regulation of Emerging Technologies: Global Ideologies and Local Headaches

This paper begins to address the international regulation of emerging technologies taking an approach that includes the co-production of technologies and the nature of wicked problems. Both the development of technologies over time, the role of science in regulation, and results from case studies in the regulation of biotechnologies are discusses. Biotechnology, nanotechnology and synthetic biology receive the most attention.

The Trail of No Tears: Traditional Masculinity Ideologies and The Cycle of Dismissing-Avoidant Attachment

Raising boys in accordance with traditional masculinity ideologies is creating a mental health crisis among men. Socialization in accordance with traditional male gender roles causes boys to develop dismissing-avoidant attachments with their primary caregivers. Approaching subsequent relationships with a dismissing-attachment style creates disconnection between men and male peers, female partners, and their children. Many researchers advocate clinical interventions that perpetuate men's traditional fears of intimacy, however attachment theory provides an alternative lens through which clinicians may approach therapy with men. By engaging men in therapeutic attachment relationships, clinicians can inspire implicit and explicit learning of new attachment patterns. This experience by nature challenges traditional definitions of masculinity, and men may develop more congruent, adaptive, and healthy definitions of masculinity.

Myth, Language, and Complex Ideologies

Ideologies use for their conservation and propagation persuasive methods of communication: rhetoric. Rhetoric is analyzed from the semiotic and logical-mathematical points of view. The following hypotheses are established: (1) language L is a self-explanatory system, mediated by a successive series of systems of cultural conventions, (2) connotative significances of an ideological advertising rhetoric must be known, and (3) the notion of ideological information is a neutral notion that does not imply the valuation of ideology or its conditions of veracity or falsification. Rhetorical figures like metonymy, metaphor, parable analogy, and allegory are defined as relations. Metaphor and parable are order relations. Operations of metonymic and metaphoric substitution are defined and several theorems derived from these operations have been deduced.