This thesis is a presentation of the naturalistic speech of Polish migrants living in the United Kingdom and pays particular attention to the linguistic phenomena which r~sult from Polish-English language contact, with code-switching being the chief focus of this thesis. In this study I first present the phenomena in accordance . with Muysken's (2000) typology of code-switching and. then analyse them from syntactic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Specifically,· I explain why insertional switching is the predominant in the Polish community in the U K. I also track correlations between the occurrence and frequency of particular forms of codeswitching and (extra)1ingusitc variables such as length of stay and native/foreign language dominance and conclude that both language dominance and length of stay are important for the character of Polish-English code switching. A separate chapter of th is work is devoted to the switching of English disfluency markers on the example of the marker urn used by Polish speakers. Using pragmatic, auditory and acoustic analysis I prove that more frequent users of code-switching also tend to use English disfluency markers in their Polish and that the use of disfluency markers and other language contact phenomena occurring in the speech of Polish migrants living in the UK often overlap - particularly in the case of long-term migrants and second generation migrants.

No description available.

The work selected for this portfolio comprises two language-specific case studies (‘Russian and Soviet loanwords and calques in the Czech lexicon since the beginning of the twentieth century’ and ‘Češi a slovenština’ [The Czechs and the Slovak language]), two publications on the critical reception of foreign vocabulary in Czech (‘The legacy and limitations of Czech purism’ and Attitudes to lexical borrowing in the Czech Republic), and a detailed article on the implications of naming practices for perceptions of the self and others (‘The Czech-speaking lands, their peoples and contact communities: titles, names and ethnonyms’). Extensive use is made of original material, including two nationwide quantitative surveys conducted on my behalf by the Public Opinion Research Centre of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (CVVM), and two small-scale questionnaires carried out for me by Dr Miroslav Růžička of the Czech University of Life Sciences (Prague), as well as a range of other empirical data, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, electronic corpora, and additional sources of lexical and historical information. My commentary employs a thematic approach, which aims both to acquaint the reader with the main findings of each of my publications, and to indicate the broad direction of my output. Supplementary information is provided in the commentary, where required, to contextualize and synthesize my arguments, to shed light on recent scholarship in cognate fields, and to ensure narrative continuity. The ‘new’ knowledge thus complements and frames the discussion of my selected publications, thereby helping to guide the reader through the exposition of my writings. The principal unifying themes of the chosen pieces are their emphasis on (1) the role of language in the national consciousness and self-perception, (2) the influence of external forces on the shaping of the Czech lexicon, and people’s reactions to those forces, (3) public perceptions of lexical borrowing, and (4) changing attitudes to the notion of ‘foreign’, as reflected in the national idiom. The commentary is divided into eight chapters, as listed in the Table of Contents. My study begins with a general introduction to my academic background, and to the content and themes of this thesis, as summarized above. Chapter 2 is based principally on my article ‘The legacy and limitations of Czech purism’, and provides a combination of historical setting and statistical analysis. The next chapter presents a résumé of the overall impact of foreign languages and cultures on the historical development of Czech, with the aim of contextualizing the findings of subsequent chapters. Chapter 4, which draws mainly on ‘Russian and Soviet loanwords and calques in the Czech lexicon since the beginning of the twentieth century’, reevaluates the impact of Russian and ‘Soviet speak’ on the Czech lexicon. In chapter 5, I consider in detail the asymmetrical nature of Czech–Slovak language relations, with reference to the views of over 1,400 informants interviewed for ‘Češi a slovenština’ and Attitudes to lexical borrowing in the Czech Republic. Chapter 6 compares the results of my survey for the latter publication, referred to as ‘Perceptions’, with a series of other questionnaires, including Tejnor’s groundbreaking 1970 study of foreign words. ‘The Czech-speaking lands, their peoples and contact communities: titles, names and ethnonyms’ provides the substance of much of chapter 7, which focuses on the Czechs’ tendency to see themselves in terms of opposition to outsiders, and on the depiction of ‘foreignness’ in the Czech lexicon. The commentary concludes with a summary of my principal observations relating to aspects of language contact and lexical borrowing in Czech, and to their implications for the self and others. Taken collectively, the eight chapters provide a framework for the discussion of my published work and for the thematic and conceptual links that validate their consideration as a corpus of cognate research activity.

Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons aux trois types d’expressions dont la structure s’écarte du modèle de la proposition transitive canonique, à savoir les constructions : anticausatives, à causalité interne, et impersonnelles en polonais et en russe. Leur point commun est que l’écart par rapport à une phrase transitive porte sur la référence du sujet de la proposition. Dans tous les cas, le référent du sujet est non-agentif. Dans certains cas, le marquage morphologique reflète cette absence, tant sur le prédicat qui est marqué à la troisième personne du singulier neutre que par l’absence d’un sujet nominatif. Ailleurs, la morphologie ne laisse rien, ou presque rien apparaître, le prédicat s’accordant avec l’argument Thème ou le Patient. Ces expressions feront l’objet d’une étude comparative, dans laquelle seront étudiées : la nature de chaque participant non-canonique qui apparaît dans la proposition, les caractéris¬tiques de chaque prédicat présent, et enfin, les propriétés combinatoires entre les participants et les prédicats. Il sera montré que la nature et la structure et enfin la manière dont sont légi¬timés les sujets non-canoniques ne sont pas seulement liées aux propriétés du réfé¬rent de sujet, mais aussi dépendent de la nature du prédicat. Tout comme cela a été proposé pour les constructions anticausatives et à causalité interne (cf. Alexiadou & Anagnostopou¬lou (2003), Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer (2006), Schäfer (2008)), nous avancerons que les constructions impersonnelles comportent un prédicat Cause qui est responsable de la légitimation thématique des caus(at)eurs nominatifs et obliques. Les différences entre ces structures sont dues à la présence ou à l’absence de la tête Voice. Vues sous cet angle, les constructions impersonnelles sont une sorte de causativisation. Le caus(at)eur indéfini (cf. Kibort (2004)) présent dans les constructions impersonnelles d’une part, et la possible présence des causeurs obliques d’autre part, sont des preuves qui étaient cette hypothèse. / In this dissertation we study three kinds of expressions that deviate from the model of canonical transitive sentences, namely anticausative, internal causation and impersonal constructions in Polish and in Russian. The common point is that the deviation from a transitive sentence has to do with the subject’s reference. In all cases, the referent of the subject is non-agentive. In some cases, the morphological marking reflects this absence, both on the predicates which is frozen in the third person singular (neuter), and by the absence of a nominative subject. In the other two cases, the non-canonicity is not morpologically revealed because the inflected verb agrees with the nominative argument whose referent is the Theme or the Patient.A comparative study of these expressions will be given, in so far as the nature of the non-canonical participants that appear in the sentence, the characteristics of each predicate, and finally, the combinatorial properties between participants and predicates are concerned.It will be shown that the nature, the structure and ultimately the way that non-canonical subjects are licensed are not only related to the properties of the subject’s reference, but also depend on the nature of the predicate. Just as it was proposed for anticausatives and internal causal constructions (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou (2003), Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer (2006), Schäfer (2008)), it will be shown that impersonal constructions include a Cause predicate that is responsible for the thematical licensing of nominative and oblique causers. The differences between these structures are due to the presence or absence of a Voice head. From this perspective, impersonal constructions encode a kind of causativisation. The indefinite causer (analysed in Kibort (2004)), which is present in impersonal constructions on the one hand, and the possible presence of other oblique causer, are thus deemed to be evidence that supports this hypothesis.