23.3567, Diss: Socioling/ Text/Corpus Ling/ English/ German: Garley: 'Crossing the Lexicon...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-23-3567. Sun Aug 26 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.3567, Diss: Socioling/ Text/Corpus Ling/ English/ German: Garley: 'Crossing the Lexicon...'

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Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2012 22:57:31
From: Matthew Garley [mattgarley at gmail.com]
Subject: Crossing the Lexicon: Anglicisms in the German Hip Hop Community

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Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2012 

Author: Matthew E Garley

Dissertation Title: Crossing the Lexicon: Anglicisms in the German Hip Hop
Community 

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     German (deu)


Dissertation Director(s):
Marina Terkourafi
Julia Hockenmaier
Jannis Androutsopoulos
Rakesh Bhatt
Hans Henrich Hock

Dissertation Abstract:

The influence of English on German has been an ongoing subject of 
intense popular and academic interest in the German sphere. In order 
to better understand this language contact situation, this research 
project investigates anglicisms—instances of English language material 
in a German language context—in the German hip hop community, 
where the use of novel anglicisms is especially frequent. This 
investigation takes a methodologically diverse approach, including 
complementary corpus, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic analyses. In 
this dissertation, I focus primarily on an original 12.5-million-word 
German-language corpus of hip hop discussions from the Internet 
forums at MZEE.com which includes 11 years of computer-mediated 
discourse. I supplement these data with an English-language hip hop 
discussion corpus and a set of ethnographic interviews conducted with 
hip hop fans and artists in Hamburg in the summer of 2010. 


I first detail the development of a computational classifier which 
identifies novel anglicisms in the MZEE.com corpus with high accuracy, 
yielding a list of 850 frequent anglicisms which is in turn used to identify 
unexpected wordforms—those which have a non-canonical 
morphological or orthographic nativization. Through an exploration of 
the linguistic properties, frequency, and distribution of these forms, I 
demonstrate the close link between orthographic, morphological, and 
phonological expressions of these anglicisms and argue that these 
forms are the result of extraordinary interaction of German and English 
linguistic-orthographic rules. The next analysis investigates the 
diachronic fate of anglicisms in the MZEE corpus, finding that 
frequency in an initial time window is significantly, and negatively, 
correlated with change in frequency for the set of 850 anglicisms—and 
this correlation is much stronger for anglicisms than for native German 
words, indicating the limited shelf life of anglicisms' stylistic utility, a 
situation corroborated by the subsequent analysis of ethnographic 
interviews with linguistic actors in the German hip hop community. That 
analysis reveals systematic and enduring constellations of attitudes 
toward German, English, and the use of anglicisms which interact with 
what I term the standard language ideology complex for German 
(including the related ideologies of the standard language, language 
purism, and Herderian ideology)—finding a surprising basis of linguistic 
conservatism which, even when opposed by individual actors, seems to 
reliably frame metalinguistic discourses.


In combination, these findings, 1) that the nativization of anglicism 
wordforms is rule-governed, even when it appears haphazard or 
disruptive; 2) that many novel anglicisms seem to have a limited 
timeframe of popularity; and 3) that the standard language ideology 
complex and other related ideological stances toward anglicisms are 
dominant, even in a subcultural community where English material is 
ubiquitous and linguistic 'resistance' is hypothesized; suggest that 
concerns about the imminent decline or loss of the German language 
are a gross exaggeration, simultaneously shedding light on the 
processes behind lexical borrowing and adaptation. 






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