12.2482, Disc: Review of Wolf, English in Cameroon

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-2482. Sat Oct 6 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.2482, Disc: Review of Wolf, English in Cameroon

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1)
Date:  Thu, 4 Oct 2001 20:37:57 +0200 (CEST)
From:  Gerhard Leitner <leitner at philologie.fu-berlin.de>
Subject:  Re: Review of Wolf, English in Cameroon

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Thu, 4 Oct 2001 20:37:57 +0200 (CEST)
From:  Gerhard Leitner <leitner at philologie.fu-berlin.de>
Subject:  Re: Review of Wolf, English in Cameroon

Re: Linguist 12.2422


 Hans-Georg Wolf, the author of "English in Cameroon" feels I treated him
 unfairly in my review in three respects:

 1. I misrepresented his insistence on what he calls cultural model and
 ignore the many efforts of defining and characterizing it.

 2. I misunderstood his points on empirical  (quantitative) evidence,
 though he agrees that he should have used other types of comparative
 evidence. (He uses the AmE Brown corpus.)

 3. A missing reference is indeed in his bibliography. (My error!)

 As for 1., I thought I had been clear enough when I noted that chapters 4
 and 5, the one dealing with CamE as "A national variety" and the one on
 "The cultural model of 'community realized in .... CamE in particular",
 stand side by side and do not emanate clearly and convincingly from the
 cultural-model approach that he advocated in ch. 1. To argue, as he does
 in his rejoinder, that 'higher frequencies are related or due to cultural
 differences' is hard to see when he talks about spelling influences from
 French, loans from Frenc, etc. Equally, the role of WAfr or CtrlAfr
 languages is hard to assess -- in the absence of a debate that relates
 these findings to the cultural model concept. What are the specific
 cultural aspects that lead to these phenomena? I would find it hard to
 argue such points regarding spelling and many other matters, but would
 think that the nature of the contact (material culture, social practices
 that mix and may be cultivated) would provide steps towards an answer.
 Hence my inistence on (Firth's notion of) contextualization as a bridge to
 ch. 5. Incidentally, ch. 5 contains rather a lot of unclarities as to what
 his model purports to be. The pervasive collocation of 'conepts' and
 'metaphors', as if the two were synonymous, and many quotes (evidence?)
 that are supposed to illustrate them makes his arguments hard to see.
 Aren't many of these 'metaphors' just opinions that one may, but does not
 need to, agree with? Van dijk's discussion of ideologies in Allan Bell,
 Peter Garrett ("Approaches to media discourse", 1998) would be pertinent
 here.

 As for quantitative methods, he does make the questionable point of relating
 empirical evidence to the rhetorics of convincing an  audience. In the
 absence of a better argument, I cannot see how empirical data fit into his
 culural model approach. Cognitive linguistics along the lines of Langacker
 and others would have provided useful arguments in support of such data.
 He now says that he should have used a more contemporary BrE corpus (The
 "Freiburg (Germany) Lancaste Oslo Bergen" update. But even here he cannot
 escape the necessity of arguing how FLOB compares with Josef Schmied's
 collection of CamE data. All that shows a weakness in argumentation and
 design.

 Yet, my final statement stands: Wolf's book will remain a good and
 informative source for all who are interested in CamE for some time to
 come.

 So much.
 Gerhard Leitner

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