Fwd: doctoral thesis

[kathryn Woolard]

Sorry for the length of this message, but can anyone offer this
student suggestions? Please respond to Adrian Pable directly. Thank
you .
Kit Woolard

>
>From: Adrian Pable <adrian.pable at ens.unibe.ch>
>Subject: doctoral thesis
>
>
>  > > I am a Swiss Phd student in historical linguistics (University of Bern).
>>  Knowing that you have specialised on language ideology, I have
>>  thought fit to contact you and tell you briefly about my research, hoping
>that you can give some suggestions or refer me to some other scholars engaging
>in a similar subject
>>  >
>>  >
>>  > I'd like to look at how 19th-century and 20th century American dramatists
>>  > represent 17th-century Colonial American English (as spoken by the New
>>  England settlers).
>>  >
>I will focus primarily on the written texts (although the aspect of
>>  performance should also be included marginally), thus I  am going
>>to focus on
>>
>>  the lexical choices, syntactic constructions and verb morphology.
>>Moreover, I
>>
>>  will only consider those authors who have made a real effort in making their
>>
>>  characters sound 'authentic'.
>>  >
>>  > Thus the (general) questions that I would like to look at in depth are the
>>
>>  > following:
>>  >
>>  > -what are the linguistic factors that an author representing an archaic
>>  > variety
>>  > of a living language (early modern English in my case) needs to take into
>>  account when conceiving a historical play?
>>  >
>>  > -how much is such an archaic literary dialect determined by the period in
>>  > which
>>  > an author lives/lived (e.g. Mary Wilkins, 1892 vs Arthur Miller, 1953)?
>>  >
>>  > -what are our (the author's) ideas of how our ancestors spoke? Do we start
>>  > with
>>  > false presumptions when it comes to describing early American
>>English? what
>>
>>  > kind of stereotypes do we have in mind? To what extent is
>>language ideology
>>
>>  > involved? Are non-specialists subject to similar fallacies as
>>linguists are
>>
>>  > with respect to how people spoke so-called 'text languages'?
>>
>>  Is there something like a 'HISTORICAL PERCEPTUAL DIALECTOLOGY' within the
>>  field
>>  of linguistics?
>>  >
>>  > -what are the connections of 17th century American English and today's (or
>>
>>  > respectively 19th century) dialects/folk speech etc.?
>>  >
>>  > -to what extent can the author burden the reader (or audience)
>>with archaic
>>
>>  > language and still let his artificial language pass as 'realistic'?
>>  > (intelligibilty vs credibility)
>>  >
>>  > do you think you can help me in any way (references to other studies,
>>  > articles,
>>  > contact addresses of scholars interested in this kind of interdisciplinary
>>
>  > > approach)? I would really appreciate that!!
>
>========================================
>Adrian Pable
>University of Berne
>adrian.pable at ens.unibe.ch
>
>--------------------------------------------------
>This mail sent through IMP at http://mail.unibe.ch


--
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Kathryn A. Woolard		kwoolard at ucsd.edu
Department of Anthropology, 0532
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0532

Office phone: 858/534--4639                Fax:
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