Fwd: Diss on The Integration of English-Origin Verbs in Welsh (LinguistList)

[ejp10]

FYI - Saw an announcement for a completed dissertation analyzing English origin verbs in Welsh. It is available for download.

Elizabeth

P.S. I saw this completely by accident. So I remind members once again...please do not hesitate to publicize Celtic oriented material on this list. 

> 
> -------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
> Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:53:13
> From: Jonathan Stammers [j.stammers at bangor.ac.uk]
> Subject: The Integration of English-Origin Verbs in Welsh
> 
> E-mail this message to a friend:
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> 
> 
> 
> Institution: Bangor University 
> Program: PhD in Linguistics 
> Dissertation Status: Completed 
> Degree Date: 2009 
> 
> Author: Jonathan Roy Stammers
> 
> Dissertation Title: The Integration of English-Origin Verbs in Welsh 
> 
> Dissertation URL:  http://sites.google.com/site/jonstammers/phdthesis/
> 
> Linguistic Field(s): Morphology
>                     Text/Corpus Linguistics
> 
> Subject Language(s): English (eng)
>                     Welsh (cym)
> 
> 
> Dissertation Director(s):
> Margaret Deuchar
> 
> Dissertation Abstract:
> 
> This thesis addresses the controversy over distinguishing between 
> code-switching and borrowing.  Many criteria have been suggested for 
> making the distinction, but none are without difficulties.  A   theory-
> independent analysis is carried out on English verbs inserted into 
> Welsh, based on a new 40 hour, half-million-word corpus of informal 
> spoken Welsh/English, the 'Siarad' corpus.  English verbs are 
> incorporated into Welsh by means of a highly productive routine 
> involving the Welsh verbaliser suffix '-(i)o'.  For some researchers 
> (e.g. Poplack & Meechan 1998), this would be sufficient to count the 
> entire class as borrowings, but their integration is investigated further, 
> largely because other researchers, such as Myers-Scotton (1993; 
> 2002), would disagree with this interpretation, interpreting the same 
> results as evidence for Welsh as the matrix language of the clause.  
> 
> Analysis of distribution between two alternative types of Welsh verbal 
> construction (periphrastic and synthetic) appears to show differences 
> between the patterning of native Welsh and English-origin verbs, but 
> further investigation shows the differences can be put down to 
> frequency effects, with synthetic constructions largely restricted to the 
> highest frequency verbs.  Analysis of the occurrence of soft mutation 
> on the verb compares native Welsh verbs with two groups of English-
> origin verbs throughout the corpus, defined according to a dictionary 
> criterion, but is also complicated by effects of overall word frequency of 
> verbs.  Statistical testing shows that frequency is a strong predictor of 
> mutation rate when logarithmic values are used, but also that English-
> origin verbs not listed in a dictionary are significantly less likely to be 
> mutated in expected environments than native Welsh verbs or listed 
> English-origin verbs, so could be labelled switches despite their Welsh 
> suffixes.  This evidence goes against the nonce borrowing hypothesis 
> proposed by Poplack, whose 'distinct phenomena' approach to the 
> issue is problematised through this study. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer/Lecturer in Linguistics
Penn State University
ejp10 at psu.edu
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/

Got Unicode Blog
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