published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

It is generally believed that when learning another language, students most commonly use their first language as the source of language influence. In the Basque region of Spain people are either Spanish monolinguals or Basque bilinguals and in this case study I set out to see whether students use Spanish or Basque as a reference when learning English. The three most common written errors of Spanish monolinguals and Basque bilinguals were analyzed by using Error Analysis as an analytical tool. The errors were not only described but also reasons were put forward as to why these errors were made. Even though Basque was the first language of half of the students, the results show that Spanish was the main source of influence when writing in English.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

This present study examines the structural impact of language contact on discourse information marking in narrative. It focuses on the surface patterns and underlying linguistic principles used to describe the foregrounding events in traditional and modem short stories, written in Indonesian (the official language of Indonesia) and Sundanese (the native language of West Java province). These two languages have been in an intensive contact since 1945.The data indicate that aspect sets apart background from foreground, whereas tense distinguishes ordinary from significant within the background and foreground levels. Cross-linguistically, the ordinary background information appears in existential, stative, and progressive constructions, marked by the underlying past-tense and imperfective aspect; the significant background and significant foreground types occur in a direct speech and/or direct quote, with the underlying Historical Present. Besides signaling a switch from the past-tense to the HP, the direct speech or direct quote also marks a shift in deixis, distal to proximal. The ordinary foreground information, containing events that advance the story, appears in the underlying past-tense and perfective aspect.The surface markings of the ordinary foreground events, however, are different. In the traditional and modern Indonesian data, these events are dominantly depicted in the active-voice structure. The traditional and modern Sundanese texts, on the other hand, show two different dominant surface marking patterns: the KA (particle) and the active-voice constructions respectively. This appears as a shift in the surface marking strategy attributed to the Indonesian structural influence. The KA- to active voice surface-marking strategy shift indicates the change from the KA + Topic – Comment pattern to the Subject – Predicate structure, suggesting the adoption of the SVX word-order pattern. This affects not only the pragmatic relations of the constituents in an utterance, but also the marking of given-new information distinction.The study demonstrates that the KA to active-voice marking shift in the modern Sundanese data is mitigated by the long-term language contact with Indonesian. Follow-up investigations with varied narrative themes and oral speech data are warranted. Since the shift also appears to indicate the authors' unbalanced bilingual skills, it raises an issue pertinent to the current teaching of Sundanese in the West-Javanese provincial curriculum. / Department of English

This dissertation analyses when, how and why Turkish loanwords became incorporated into Bosnian and Bulgarian, as seen in the writings of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bosnian and Bulgarian Franciscans. I analyse Bosnian works (religious and secular) by Matija Divkovic, Ivan Bandulavic, Pavo Posilovic Mošunjanin, Mihovil Radnic, Stjepan Margitic Markovac, Lovro Braculjevic, Filip Lastric, Nikola Marcinkušic Lašvanin, Marko Dobretic, Bono Benic, and Grgo Ilijic-Varešanin. As a Bulgarian counterpart, I analyse three eighteenth-century Bulgarian Franciscan manuscripts and the works of Petar Bogdan Bakšic and Filip Stanislavov. The dissertation consists of eight chapters. The first chapter gives background information on Turkish presence in Bosnia and Bulgaria, the history of the Franciscans in Bosnia and Bulgaria, short biographies of each of the writers whose works are analysed, phonology and orthography. The second chapter focuses on the complications regarding establishing earliest attestations for turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The third chapter discusses the nominal morphology of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. This chapter analyses why turkisms developed the gender that they did when borrowed from a language that does not have gender as a category. Chapter four addresses the verbal morphology of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. Verbal prefixes are discussed in detail, as are Turkish voiced suffixes in Bulgarian. The fifth chapter analyses adjectives and adverbs, with focus on gender and number agreement. The sixth chapter addresses the use of Turkish conjunctions. The seventh chapter looks at the motivation, semantics and setting of turkisms in Bosnian and Bulgarian. The conclusion addresses how morphology, semantics, motivation and setting of turkisms relate to their chronology in Bosnian and Bulgarian and how these areas differ from language to language.

Thesis (MDram (Drama))—University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / The spoken language usually consists of the formal and standardised component and an informal colloquial language. The colloquial language may include some language variants. These variants are forms of the language that show deviations when compared to the standardised form of the language and are usually spoken by a specific group of people. Sometimes these colloquial variants are used in writing. This study looks at the use of these colloquial variants in theatre scripts. The variants are implemented for various functions in these scripts, which include the metaphoric, the comic, the realistic, the poetical and the political uses as well as the documentation of specific variants. In this research project I discuss the use and functions of a few Afrikaans variants in plays. Other areas of interest include sociolinguistics, the influence of English on Afrikaans and its impact on the future of Afrikaans, as well as a brief discussion of the problematic term Standard Afrikaans.

This study investigated the morpheme acquisition order of Swedish students in grades 6 and 7, utilizing corpus texts drawn from the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC). It is an extension of Khor (2012) that focused on students in grades 9 and 12. Previous studies on morpheme acquisition order suggested that there was a natural sequence in acquiring morphemes, regardless of first language (L1). First language influence was said to be minimal or non-existing. Recently, studies have found evidence that L1 transfer is greater than first thought. This study examined three morphemes; articles, the preposition in, and plural form. The results showed that the errors that both groups made were consistent with the errors that were found in Khor (2012). The errors were of the same nature in all age groups, mainly in differences in (1) generic and specific usage of articles in Swedish and English, (2) the generic sense of regular plural nouns, (3) plural form of irregular nouns and nouns of Latin or Greek origin, (4) plural forms of countable and misuse of uncountable nouns, and (5) the usage of prepositions in Swedish and English. Current studies have also generated these results, which points towards strong L1 influence. The different usage and the errors suggest that the first language influence is stronger than first described, and consequently, that it influences the acquisition of morphemes. Therefore, the L1 seems to shape the order in which grammatical morphemes are acquired. Learners in one language group seem to learn the morphemes in a specific order, rather than a fixed universal order.

<p>The purpose of this essay was to see what mistakes Swedish university students make when writing English essays and to focus on one specific mistake, namely the use of capital letters. Fifty essays written by students of Swedish origin were taken from the SWICLE (the Swedish Component of the International Corpus of Learner English), corrected and the mistakes were subsequently analysed. Furthermore, six Swedish school book series were examined in order to find examples of how Swedish pupils are taught how to use capital letters in English. The results showed that mistakes concerning capital letters were very common compared to other mistakes and that the students in the study seemed to have grasped some grammatical rules on the matter, but not all. Other common mistakes made in the essays were spelling mistakes and choice of words. Most common among the mistakes concerning capital letters were overuse of capital lettering and the lack of initial capital letters when writing weekdays, months and holidays. Only one out of the six school book series went deeper into the matter of when to use capital letters in English, which suggests that one of the reasons why capital letter mistakes are so common might be that the students are not extensively taught on the matter.</p>

This dissertation is the product of research on the current usage of Kwalcwala, a language of the northern branch of the Wakashan language family spoken in British Columbia on the northern part of Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland. The focus of research is the context of indigenous language use and the importance of language as a marker of cultural identity. I also examine whether English has had any significant influence on the structure and vocabulary of Kwalcwala after prolonged contact between the two languages. I conclude that, although Kwalcwala is being replaced by English in most contexts of communication, it has been strategically maintained in certain contexts as a marker of cultural identity.

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