Content: 1. Survey of Foreign Influences on English in Cameroon 1.1. Early Foreign Influences in the Formation of English in Cameroon 1.2. Later Influences 2. Irish Linguistic Legacy 2.1. Language Policy 2.2. Structural Aspects of English

Content: 1. Introduction 2. Retention versus Transfer 3. The Universalist Approach: Basic Concepts 4. Empirical Basis 5. Two Case Studies 5.1. Medial Object Perfects 5.2. Nominative Subject Pronouns in Non-finite Clauses 6. Summary and Conclusion

Content: 1. Introduction 2. Getting to the Seen from the Unseen 2.1. The Theory of the Zones 2.2. Brief Comments on Mechanism 3. The Areal Evidence: Shared Features and Their Dialectal Provenance 4. Explaining the Evidence Seen 4.1. Why It Is Not Due to Mere Misleading Coincidence 4.2. Why It Is Not Due to French Influence 4.3. Why It Is Not Due to Norse Influence 4.4. Why It Is Not Due to English Influence over Brittonic 4.5. Why It Is Due to Brittonic Influence 5. Conclusion 5.1. The Areal Pattern and Its Explanation 5.2. Substrate versus Superstrate 5.3. Some Final Arguments, and Good Questions 6. Addenda

Inhalt: 1. Vorbemerkungen 2. Zu einigen philosophischen und theoretisch-linguistischen Grundlagen einer kommunikativ orientierten Betrachtung der Sprache 3. Sprache und menschliche Gesellschaft 4. Der Euphemismus 5. Euphemismen im Golfkrieg - Zur Analyse der Untersuchungsergebnisse 6. Zusammenfassung und Schlußfolgerungen 7. Perspektiven der kommunikativen Sprachforschung bezüglich 215der Untersuchung des politischen Euphemismus - Forschungsausblick und Schlußbemerkungen

What is "Celtic"and what is universal in the "Celtic Englishes"? This was the central concern of the fourth and final Colloquium of studies on language contact between English and the Celtic languages at the University of Potsdam in September 2004. The contributions to this volume discuss the "Celtic" peculiarities of Standard English in England and in Ireland (North and South). They also examine the perceived "Celticity" of personal names in the "Celtic" countries (Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany). Moreover, they put emphasis on specific grammatical features such as the expression of perfectivity, relativity, intensification and the typological shift of verbal word formation from syntheticity to analycity as well as the emergence of universal contact trends shared by Celtic, African and Indian Englishes. Thus, the choice of contributors and the scope of their articles makes Celtic Englishes IV an invaluable handbook for scholarly work in the field of the English - Celtic relations.

Content: 1. Introduction 2. English in South Africa 2.1. Transmission of English 2.2. The Language Shift 3. Features of South African Indian English 3.1. Discussion of Features 4. Further Shift-induced Varieties 4.1. Aboriginal English 4.2. Hebridean English 5. Conclusion

Content: 1. Celtic Syntax in English and the European Sprachbund 2. Unpredictable Self-forms across Varieties of English 2.2. The Development of himself 2.3. Itself in Irish and Indian English 3. Concluding Remarks

This dissertation presents readings across a series of disparate texts in which circumcision--as initiating Jewish rite or descendant metaphor--functions as an interpretive key. The mark of circumcision has served as the rhetorical ground upon which much negative stereotyping--especially anti-Judaic and/or anti-Semitic sentiment--has been fostered. The metaphor of circumcision, in seeming contrast, has designated an elect in both religious and secular modes of exegesis. Additionally, issues pertaining to sexuality and gender attend or subtend the representation of circumcision in any number of cultural or critical venues. Among the texts which serve to anchor discussion around these issues are portions of Genesis; anti-circumcision literature and documentary; George Eliots Daniel Deronda; Joan Micklin Silvers Crossing Delancey; Agnieszka Hollands Europa, Europa; Peter Greenaways Drowning By Numbers; and the opening chapter of Erich Auerbachs Mimesis. The polysemous character of this diacritical rite become sign determines in part the theoretical and critical writings called upon to illuminate the manner in which circumcision is and has been read. The primary informing bases are critical writings by Jewish historians and Hebrew scholars and psychoanalytic theory. The legacy of the rite of circumcision within the so-called Judeo-Christian history of Western art and literature speaks both to the tenacity of Judaisms particular embodied tradition and to the influence of Christianitys universal and disembodying rhetoric. This inmix of rhetoric, rite, and religion clusters at the interpretive edge of circumcision and informs as well its variant tropes. Metaphorically speaking, this means the best reading position is one at or near the wound. Textually speaking, this means tending to those sites where literal ruptures, or reading wounds appear.

The Digital Affect is an exploration of ways to improve the teaching of reading and writing using digital media and technology. This requires a fundamental reexamination of digital narratives, building on and updating Espen Aarseths seminal work in Cybertext and N. Katherine Hayles recent work in Writing Machines. It also requires a critical appraisal of the technology of the personal computer as an environment in which writers compose an environment that introduces possibilities while imposing constraints that materially influence the writers efforts. This exploration is best undertaken, I argue, from the perspective of literacy studies, not literary theory. Rather than assuming the literary nature of digital narratives, my examination of the literacy requirements and effects of digital media and digital environments allows for the construction of a more nuanced and precise typology and genealogy of digital narrative. Focusing on the hermeneutical demands of digital media and environments reveals a narrative tradition that extends back to the earliest days of oral storytelling and that manifests itself not as a generic or historical formation, but rather as a poetical and rhetorical mode in which the narrative material is fragmented and distributed across media and throughout the virtual space of the story. Probing the hermeneutical act of interpreting digital narratives suggests the operation of what I term the distributed mode of composing narrative, an authorial mode I examine in works as varied as Stuart Moulthrops hypermedia story Reagan Library, Italo Calvinos novel If on a winters night a traveler, Godfrey Reggios film Koyaanisqatsi, and Laurence Sternes novel Tristram Shandy. This attention to the hermeneutical requirements of works composed in the distributed mode reveals two important features: first, the inadequacy of the widely-used term digital literacy to describe the range of activities undertaken by the interpreter of such works; and second, the inextricability and simultaneity of reading and writing during the interpretation of digital and non-digital works alike. Throughout The Digital Affect, I argue that digital media disrupts and reconfigures our standard literacy practices, presenting an invaluable opportunity to make those practices visible and teachable in literature and composition classrooms.

This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. It is argued here that contemporary Indian films should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like 'modern' selves and 'traditional' moorings. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the 'free market', individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of 'cinema effects' across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. A discussion of a new age 'cinematic' in the present Indian context thus has to be informed by a general theory of contemporary planetary 'informatics.' The latter however is not a superstructural reflection of economic transformations; it is part of an overall capitalistic production of social life that is happening on a global scale in our times. This dissertation attempts to make two important contributions to the field: it opens out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India.