eJournals

Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Inhaltsverzeichnis Vorwort des Herausgebers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Artikel: Steffen Hantke “We Are of Peace, Always”: ABC’s Remake of V, Alien Invasion Television, and American Paranoia after Bush . . . . . 143 Eva Duran Eppler “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch, aber was ist das für eine Sprache? ” Emigranto - a grammatical approach to code-switching . . . . . . . . . . 165 Hartmut Stöckl Metaphor - a conundrum revisited. Semantic, cognitive and textual perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Margit Reitbauer “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein”: Verbesserte Informationsverarbeitung durch Supertexte: Pilotstudie zur Anwendung des Prinzips der kognitiven Plausibilität . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Konferenzbericht: Mary Bamburg 3 rd International Conference “Modernism and the Orient” . . . . . . . . . 229 Inhalt 140 Rezensionen: Katja Giersemehl Matthias Hutz and Kathryn Khairi-Taraki, Praktische Grammatik der englischen Sprache . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Margit Reitbauer Veronica Smith, Tertiary Language Learning. Changing Perspectives and Practical Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Pia Resnik Pia Pichler and Eva Eppler, Gender & Spoken Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 35, 2010 ist nach Autoren alphabetisch geordnet abrufbar unter http: / / www-gewi.uni-graz.at/ staff/ kettemann This journal is abstracted in: ESSE (Norwich), MLA Bibliography (New York, NY), C doc du CNRS (Paris), CCL (Frankfurt), NCELL (Göttingen), JSJ (Philadelphia, PA), ERIC Clearinghouse on Lang and Ling (Washington, DC), LLBA (San Diego), ABELL (London). Gefördert vom Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung in Wien, der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung und der Stadt Graz Anfragen, Kommentare, Kritik, Mitteilungen und Manuskripte werden an den Herausgeber erbeten (Adresse siehe Umschlaginnenseite). Erscheint halbjährlich. Bezugspreis jährlich 78,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser 56,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft 44,-. Die Bezugsdauer verlängert sich jeweils um ein Jahr, wenn bis zum 15. November keine Abbestellung vorliegt. © 2011 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5, D-72070 Tübingen E-mail: info@narr.de Internet: www.narr.de Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Beiträge sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, sind vorbehalten: Kein Teil dieser Zeitschrift darf ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages in irgendeiner Form - durch Fotokopie, Mikrofilm oder andere Verfahren - reproduziert oder in eine von Maschinen, insbesondere von Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, verwendbare Sprache übertragen werden. Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Vorwort des Herausgebers Ich freue mich sehr, hiermit den 35. Band der 1976 von mir begründeten österreichischen anglistischen und amerikanistischen Zeitschrift AAA (Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik) dem Fachpublikum vorlegen zu können. Aus dem positiven Echo aus der Fachwelt schließe ich, dass diese Zeitschrift innerhalb der Anglistik/ Amerikanistik des deutschsprachigen Raums eine wichtige Kommunikationsfunktion übernommen hat. Ich bedanke mich bei unseren Leserinnen und Lesern, die die Zeitschrift so gut angenommen und mit so großem Interesse über diese 35 Jahre hin begleitet haben, aber auch bei den über 600 Autoren, die mehr als 400 Artikel und etwa 500 Rezensionen auf über 10.000 Seiten publiziert haben, und natürlich bei meinem Verleger Gunter Narr und seinen MitarbeiterInnen, die den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik immer mit sehr viel Wohlwollen begegnet sind. Mein Dank gilt auch Gerlinde Trinkl für die reibungslose Organisation, meinem Redaktionsassistenten Georg Marko für die wertvolle Korrekturarbeit und inhaltliche Kommentierung und meinen Mitherausgebern Walter Bernhart, Peter Bierbaumer, Alwin Fill, Gudrun Grabher, Arno Heller, Walter Hölbling, Allan James, Christian Mair, Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf, Werner Wolf und Wolfgang Zach für die qualitätsvolle Unterstützung bei der kritischen Auswahl der Beiträge und der motivierenden Betreuung der Autoren. Mit dem Heft 35: 2 (2010) nehmen wir Abschied von den langjährigen Mitherausgebern und Mitherausgeberinnen Walter Bernhart, Peter Bierbaumer, Gudrun Grabher, Arno Heller und Wolfgang Zach. Wir alle schulden ihnen Dank im Namen des Faches. Gleichzeitig werden Walter Grünzweig und Andreas Mahler als neue Mitherausgeber ihre Arbeit beginnen. Wir wünschen ihnen hierfür viel Erfolg und Freude. Vorwort des Herausgebers 142 Das Ergebnis der Redaktionsarbeit und der Peer-Review ist eine lebendige, interessante, qualitativ herausragende Zeitschrift, immer offen und vielfältig, oft überraschend mit neuen Ansätzen und doch auf die Kontinuität der Diskussion, die Qualität der Argumentation und die langfristige Wirkung unserer Schwerpunktsetzungen hin angelegt. Überzeugen Sie sich selbst durch einen Blick in unser alphabetisches Autorenverzeichnis aller Beiträge in den Bänden 1 bis 35 der Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik unter AAA auf der Seite http: / / www.uni-graz.at/ bernhard.kettemann/ . Bernhard Kettemann 1 I would like to express my gratitude to the Research Department of Sogang University, which, by providing a Special Research Grant in 2008, made work on this essay possible. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen “We Are of Peace, Always”: ABC’s Remake of V, Alien Invasion Television, and American Paranoia after Bush 1 Steffen Hantke Among the most commercially and critically successful television programs during the Bush presidency, paranoid narratives within the genres of the thriller and of science fiction became synonymous with the American zeitgeist. From Lost to 24, many of these multi-season series have ended during the transitional period between the Bush and the Obama administration. Superficially aligned with what was officially announced as a change in tone within American policy, both foreign and domestic, paranoid television did not decline, however. As ABC’s remake of the Reagan-era series V, starting in the fall of 2009, illustrates, cultural and political paranoia adjusted to a new set of themes. Acutely attuned to the cost of U.S. military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan on the one hand, and to intense anxieties surrounding race, gender, and class in response to the 2008 presidential elections on the other, V has revitalized the science fiction trope of alien invasion by investing it with renewed topical urgency. 1. The paranoid years: a fond farewell? After 9/ 11 and throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, American culture saw a massive resurgence of paranoia as the engine of popular fiction. To be sure, paranoia has never been entirely absent from ideological discourse, prompting Douglas Hofstaedter’s much-quoted dictum that the nation’s imagination, political and otherwise, is shaped by a mode of percep- Steffen Hantke 144 2 The political slant in Joel Surnow’s The Kennedys (in production, 2010), for example, suggests that the politics promoted by 24 are part of the producer’s larger, unapologetically partisan political agenda. For a more detailed account of the controversy surrounding the project, see Itzkoff 2010. 3 Case in point is the maneuvering of studios in regard to films already in production or close to release in the period immediately after 9/ 11, in contrast to television networks releasing shows which - accidentally or on purpose - featured scenes, imagery, or plot premises exactly of that nature that had studio executives halt production or release (e.g. the pilot episode of Enterprise, aired less than two weeks after the 9/ 11 attacks on September 26, 2001, which features a terrorist organization named the Suliban [! ] bent on destroying humanity). 4 With a film entitled Super 8, produced by Steven Spielberg, on the Area 51 mythology announced for 2011, Abrams shows little signs of changing his tune. If one were to take one’s cue from Lincoln Geraghty, who argues that the failure of The Lone Gunmen (2001), the last of the X-Files spin-offs, “signals a shift in attitudes at the end of television’s period tion and expression, a totalizing fantasy, based on paranoia. But the manner in which the Bush administration conducted the so-called war on terror brought paranoia to the forefront and even injected it into genres of popular entertainment, especially in the medium of television, where it had played a minor role or none at all. Given their origins in the Cold War, espionage shows like Fox’s 24 (2001-10) or Showtime’s Sleeper Cell (2005-) merely needed to increase the degree of paranoia already inherent in their generic conventions. But even crime shows like Fox’s Prison Break (2005-), action adventure like ABC’s Lost (2004-10), or science fiction like CBS’s Jericho (2007-08) and the SciFi Channel’s remake of Battlestar Galactica (2004-09) turned into object lessons in the duplicity of all human motivation, the unpredictability of those closest to us, and the barely glimpsed existence of grand master plans demoting all of us to the status of pawns in one impenetrable scheme or another. Serving not only as a space for the public debate and examination of anxieties revolving around domestic and global terrorism and uncertainty about the mission and standing of the U.S. within the international community, television also served as the space where such anxieties were formulated, reified, encouraged, disseminated, and instrumentalized. 2 In contrast to the U.S. film industry, which by and large responded more slowly and with greater caution because it “viewed 9/ 11 as a kind of box office poison” (Prince 2009: 80), television proved its ability of taking on the issues of the day with speed, acuity, and daring. 3 Careers straddling the fence between television and cinema took shape in this arena: producer J.J. Abrams, for example, who had started with the politically inconspicuous teenage drama Felicity (1998-2002), turned - with films like Mission Impossible 3 (2006) and with shows like Alias (2001-06), Lost, and, more recently, Fringe (2008-) - into the Bush years’ equivalent of what Chris Carter had been to the Clinton administration: a powerhouse of high-profile franchises unpacking the considerable narrative and dramatic potential of paranoia. 4 “We Are of Peace, Always” 145 of paranoia” (2009: 150), then Carter passes the torch almost directly to Abrams, whose Alias initiates Abrams’ “paranoid period” the same year Carter’s ends. 5 “On NBC, a young female biologist, on a show called Surface, was hot on the trail of a new marine species erupting into the Earth’s waters from the deep trenches at the bottom of the ocean, challenging humanity’s evolutionary primacy as it landed on America’s beaches, [while, on CBS’s Threshold] a young female risk analyst, with a specialty in contingency planning for major national disasters, was called up to head a team of experts trying to contain an outbreak of sinister mutation, which had been caused by the encoded signal from an alien probe sighted off the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. […] All that time, next door at ABC at a show called Invasion, aliens had dropped out of the sky and into the waters (or vice versa? ) off the Florida Keys during a hurricane” (Hantke 2010: 1). 6 Due to constraints on budgets and graphic violence, adapting the genre of the war film to television has, with very few exceptions, never been a successful endeavor. Though CGI has brought down the cost of visual effects required for this genre, just as boundaries of the depiction of violence on television have expanded in recent years, the preferred version of alien invasion is still that of silent subversion over military assault - Invasion of the Body Snatchers over War of the Worlds. Hence, Quinn Martin’s The Invaders (ABC, 1967-68, unsuccessfully remade as a made-for-TV movie by Fox in 1995), with its contemporary setting and emphasis on human drama over special effects, still provides the blueprint for alien invasion shows on television today. A significant aspect of this paranoid television culture during the Bush years was defined by a return to genre types, themes, and narrative patterns derived from pulp science fiction, most prominently those associated in the collective cultural imagination with the 1950s and early 1960s, the heyday of the Cold War. With a parallel development in mainstream cinema (with remakes of such period classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still [Scott Derrickson, 2008], Invasion of the Body Snatchers [as The Invasion, Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007], or War of the Worlds [Steven Spielberg, 2005]), television returned with new sincerity and seriousness to old chestnuts of the genre hitherto palatable to audiences merely as camp or parody. As part of this return to Fifties science fiction, all three major networks launched, in the fall season of 2003, a show that revolved around one of the truest and most tried tropes of pulp science fiction - alien invasion: Threshold (CBS), Invasion (ABC), and Surface (NBC). 5 Though all three shows were cancelled by their respective network at the end of their first season, their reworking and updating of 1950s invasion tropes succeeded in overcoming or circumventing the most serious historical discrepancy between the 1950s and the latter half of the Bush presidency - that the morphology of current invasion anxieties had shifted, after the end of the Cold War, from military visions of massive territorial incursions by a superior army wielding fierce weapons on the battlefield, to paranoid visions of omnipresent covert infiltration and subversion, sleeper cells and fifth columns, highly localized terrorist attacks against targets chosen for their symbolic functions occurring in and legitimized by an expanded mediasphere. 6 Though the larger threat of full-scale military invasion remained strategically suspended, and thus perpetually available, in the background of these shows, postponed as a Steffen Hantke 146 7 For a full analysis of the three shows, see Hantke 2010. 8 The most significant film in this context - both for the Reagan years, but also in regard to ABC’s remake of V and its “borrow[ing] heavily from American mythology and folklore” narrative option until a later season that never materialized, all three shows ultimately served the political agenda of the Bush years by taking a centrist position that neither offended the administration’s left-leaning critics nor discredited its right-wing apologists - a timidity that might have contributed to each one’s premature cancellation. 7 What all three shows did demonstrate successfully, however, was the urgency of an internally inconsistent, yet none the less compelling agenda which amalgamated in complex ways anxieties about viral infection and pandemics in the wake of social panics triggered by SARS, avian bird flu, and swine flu and which then translated these anxieties into the thematic register of, on the one hand, class anxieties in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing debate on illegal immigration in the wake of the Clinton administration’s NAFTA agreement, and, on the other hand, into that of informational panic associated with the global spread of computer viruses, cyberwar scenarios against nations like China or North Korea, and privacy issues within the newly empowered security state created by the Patriot Act. To the degree that this thematic agenda put forward by Threshold, Invasion, and Surface aligned itself with paranoid television in other genres (spy thrillers like 24 or adventure narratives like Lost), the science fiction trope of alien invasion seemed to have lost its grip on the issues of the day. Especially in light of the fact that all three shows were cancelled by their respective network after only one season, it must, therefore, come as a surprise that, by 2009, ABC made the decision to give it another try and invest in yet another alien invasion show - the remake of NBC’s miniseries V, originally aired in 1983 and 1984. The newly remade V started its run on November 3, 2009, and is, at the time of writing, completing its first season on May 18, 2010 with a total of twelve one-hour episodes. Despite the inbuilt commercial safeguards of inheriting the “massive following outside of regular sf circles” the original show had garnered (Geraghty 2009: 146), several aspects of the historical context and the specific genealogy of the alien invasion trope made ABC’s commitment to V all the more perplexing. When NBC broadcast its miniseries V in 1983, the United States was, thanks to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, in the midst of its final ‘hot’ phase of the Cold War, with the result that “Cold War filmmaking polarized to a greater extent during the 1980s than in any previous period of the conflict” (Shaw 2007: 269). Scenarios of full-scale military Soviet invasion featured strongly within the national imagination, providing fodder for the literary and cinematic genres of science fiction, espionage fiction, and the action film. 8 To a surprising extent, which far exceeds any “We Are of Peace, Always” 147 (Shaw 2007: 273) - is John Milius’ Red Dawn (1984), “one of only two Hollywood films made throughout the Cold War (Alfred E. Green’s Invasion USA, released in 1952, being the other) that depicted World War Three in terms of a direct military invasion of the United States, as opposed to those that used aliens or that focused on Soviet subversion” (Shaw 2007: 273). 9 In an article entitled “Hillary Clinton vows to end paranoia of George Bush era,” Alex Spillius (2009) quotes Clinton, newly appointed to Secretary of State by Obama, as declaring the break with the principles of the Bush administration. “In a clear reference to George W thing in its three predecessors from 2003, the remake of V preserves the Cold War premise of large-scale military invasion. The historical obsolescence of this premise and its resulting topical irrelevance stem not only from the fact that tactics and strategies of terrorism have reshaped the culturally prevalent iconography of violent conflict; more significantly, they stem from the profoundly asymmetrical distribution of power between the U.S. and its enemies. However prolonged or costly those wars - if war is, in fact, the correct word for conflicts this asymmetrical - might turn out to be, no American anywhere would seriously consider the possibility of foreign troops landing on the shores of Virginia or California. The likelihood of such a scenario notwithstanding, America’s enemy in the Cold War at least had the military capacity to launch such an attack. Regardless of historical discrepancy, however, the two emblematic images of V, both of NBC’s original and ABC’s remake - one featuring the giant alien ships hovering menacingly over major cities worldwide, the other showing a vast invasion fleet crossing outer space on its way to Earth - thematize exactly that scenario. To understand the function of these emblematic images and resolve their ostensible historical irrelevance within the changed ideological and political context of ABC’s release of its version of V is one of the goals of this discussion. The second goal is to examine those elements within ABC’s remake of V which align the show with what I have been calling paranoid television, and to determine whether V represents a continuation of seven years of post- 9/ 11 paranoia, or whether its paranoid sensibility interacts with a political climate specific to the U.S. after the change of administrations in 2008. In other words, does V mark a political default position, the ghostly afterlife of a cultural preoccupation that should have run its course with the presidential elections and the change of administrations in 2008/ 9, but which is taking its time to wind down, wearing out its momentum with painfully embarrassing slowness in a commercial mediascape devoted to squeezing every last ounce of profit from an idea before embracing risky change (a suspicion given fuel by the fact that ABC’s show, unlike its 2003 predecessors, is a remake)? Or does the show mark a new kind of paranoia, driven by a new political agenda, unique to the U.S. under an administration that came into office under the slogan “Change we can believe in” and advertises its agenda online at an address called change.gov? 9 Though V is, of course, a Steffen Hantke 148 Bush’s obsession with national security after the September 11 attacks, Mrs Clinton said: ‘I don’t get up every morning just thinking about the threats and dangers, as real as they are. I also get up thinking about who we are and what we can do.’ Addressing staff members of the 18,000-strong state department on her first day at work, she proclaimed a ‘new era for America’.” (Telegraph, January 22, 2009). As to whether this declaration of intent is more about style than substance - a critique of the Obama administration voiced most poignantly by its strongest erstwhile supporters - see Greenwald 2009. tiny, singular instance of popular culture within a vast, complex, and constantly changing arena of cultural production, its symptomatic value might be to provide an insight into disruptions and/ or continuities between the two administrations in regard to their varying degrees of commitment to Hofstaedter’s “paranoid style” in American politics and culture. Before I turn to V itself, however, two prefatory comments are necessary. To the degree that V is still a series in progress at the time of writing, the narrative may take unexpected twists and turns, which are likely to modify some of the argument I am about to make. However, for a reading like this one, which traces the series’ politics in the placement and configuration of allegorical links to its immediate political context, the thematic premises on which all further narrative developments are based, and by which they are constrained (given the realist aesthetic the series applies to plot, character, and action), is more significant than the narrative ‘unpacking’ of these premises through its plot. Political allegory in science fiction and/ or allegorical readings of science fiction are closely tied to the text’s pursuit of ‘world building’; to the extent that all narrative developments are constrained by the rules of the fictional world and the imperative of its ontological coherence, they are subjugated to the premises from which they are extrapolated. Hence, my reading will - by necessity but also by conscious choice - focus more on an analysis of the fictional world of V, of the thematic premises that determine the diegesis, than on tracking its narrative arc from its first to its (projected) final episode. Furthermore, the alignments of, or correspondences between, motifs and themes in V and the show’s historical and political context I am about to trace are not, properly speaking, to the empirical reality of this context. This is not to assert that there is no empirical reality, or that this empirical reality is beyond the reach of critical analysis; it is beyond dispute, for example, that Obama did sign the Health Care Reform Act on March 24, 2010. Instead, I want to distinguish between this indisputable fact and its reflection within popular discourse, which interprets, filters, reworks, distorts, and represents it - which, in other words, recognizes it as embedded within processes driven by fear and desire. To some measure, these processes are also driven by the Obama administration itself, as it generates representations which may or may not correspond to its supporters’ or detractors’ expectations and perceptions. To the extent that empirical reality is reflected “We Are of Peace, Always” 149 10 It is in details like these that the emphasis of allegory over verisimilitude in V becomes palpable. Not only does the Visitors’ humanoid appearance fail to raise suspicion among the human population; their physical attractiveness, coded in relatively narrow cultural terms, and the racial variety they display do not seem to raise any eyebrows. in the public debate, historical events and agents are inevitably products of representational politics - someone’s idea of the person or the event rather than that person or event. Ontologically speaking, this discursive reflection of history might be a phenomenon of secondary significance; to the extent, however, that the public sphere is trafficking in symbol and metaphor rather than fact, the subjective, or even polemic or propagandist nature of ‘events’ and ‘characters’ circulating through this sphere does not diminish their power but merely defines its ontological status. 2. Meet the Visitors: iron fists in velvet gloves Much more than the trope of external mind control - the technological version, so to speak, of demonic possession - that has dominated invasion narratives from Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the three network shows launched in 2003, V mobilizes anxieties about the body as an inauthentic construct (V links the issue of external mind control, though still present, to propaganda instead of possession, which drags it from the shadows of uncanny psychology into the light of political strategizing). As the Visitors arrive upon Earth, their nefarious goals, the revelation of which is strategically parceled out over several episodes, are announced by the fact that their human bodies are biological constructs concealing their ‘true’ reptilian identity. 10 Since the medical examination of such a body and its display in the media would uncover their invasion strategy, all Visitors carry a suicide pill, the effect of which is the instantaneous combustion of the body. Reduced to a pile of ash, the alien body leaves no evidence for those intent on penetrating its secrets. This bodily combustion, as well as its paranoia inducing possibilities of discrediting enemies by eradicating incriminating evidence - borrowed, incidentally, from The Invaders (1967-68), a show in which alien bodies automatically burn upon death - links the materiality of bodies with the uncanny latencies of paranoia. However, the fact that the alien invasion comes with a human face is less significant - after all, the fact that ‘they’ look just like ‘us’ is the enabling mechanism of paranoia - than the fact that this face is that of a woman, which also happens to be coded in terms of ethnic ambiguity and class resentment. Played as a cool noir-ish femme fatale by actress Morena Baccarin, Anna, the leader of the alien invasion, reifies post-feminist anxi- Steffen Hantke 150 11 In the downplaying of gender attributes familiar from genres like film noir - overt sexual availability signaled, for example, by long hair - the show moves beyond previous alien invasion narratives in which the invaders are coded as female: the most notable example might be films like Species (Roger Donaldson, 1995) and its sequels, its key moment in cinema Miles Bennell’s sexual horror upon realizing that his beloved Becky has been turned into a pod overnight at the end of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 12 A scene in episode 2 in which Anna conducts a conversation while quickly running through a variety of costumes coded both in social and in national/ ethnic terms clarifies her role as a screen for shifting projections, while, at the same time, marking this very lack of personal identity as a social pathology, a symptom of ‘what’s wrong with her’ - a quality notoriously difficult to put into words. What remain stable throughout these prosthetic alterations are Anna’s stylish page boy haircut and her unflappable calm. 13 For a fictional exploitation of this specific scenario, see Graham Baker’s Alien Nation (1988), which was also adapted to television (Fox, 1989-90), as well as Neill Blomkamp’s more recent District 9 (2009). eties on both ends of the political spectrum. 11 The show’s production design articulates her sexuality as interplay between erotic signifiers and their (ostensible) repression: she is dressed in designer clothes that are conservative in cut and austere in color, yet so tightly form-fitting as to draw attention to the anatomy they pretend to conceal. Similarly, Baccarin’s hair is cut short in a boyish bob, emphasizing the actress’s high cheek bones and large eyes. The constant references to how ‘hot’ she is, voiced primarily by the human teenagers allowed into her company, align her with the rhetoric encoding recent high-profile female politicians on the left and the right. In the interplay between her physicality and her role as a political leader, she encodes a figure like Sarah Palin as seen through the lens of left-wing paranoia. Insistent references to Anna’s deviousness and her enacting a covert agenda detrimental to humanity, which stand in opposition to the claims to transparency and folksy authenticity that define Palin’s public persona, also align Anna with Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton as seen, conversely, through an equally paranoid lens on the political right. 12 Aside from these post-feminist anxieties, the fact that Baccarin’s physical appearance signals a carefully modulated ethnic otherness, which gestures at a variety of concrete ethnic origins without committing itself to any specific one - an ambiguity so profound that it moves her toward the very post-racial identity often brought up in discussions of Obama’s symbolic status within the American cultural economy - also plays to anxieties about a post-racial America. For recent examples of this anxiety one must look no further than the ‘reverse racism’ debate surrounding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in the summer of 2009, or to the critique during the 2008 presidential elections about Barack Obama not being ‘black enough.’ In framing racial issues, the writers of V deliberately forego a strategy of dramatic racial othering, in which the security of the ‘homeland,’ coded as white, is under attack by waves of dark-skinned immigrants. 13 Instead, they opt for a vision that, superficially, acknowledges multi-ethnicity as an estab- “We Are of Peace, Always” 151 14 It is interesting to note that the original series constructed the Visitors’ otherness around fascist imagery borrowed primarily from Nazi Germany, featuring, for example, an elderly Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, growing suspicious at the Visitors’ conspicuously and stereotypically Aryan features. ABC’s remake of the series has erased this specific ethnic iconography, just as its production design has muted some of the historical analogies accompanying it (e.g. between the Visitors’ youth program and the Hitler Youth). 15 Repeated references to Anna as the alien species’ queen complicate this reptile metaphor by adding an insectoid spin. Though reptiles and insects might be considered equally coldblooded/ hearted, acting out amoral, biologically mechanistic imperatives, the insect metaphor ties V in with anti-Communist rhetoric, which, during the Cold War, cast alien invaders invariably as ants (Them! [Gordon Douglas, 1954]) or grasshoppers (The Beginning of the End [Bert I. Gordon, 1957]). lished, defining feature of American society, yet, in its construction of a character like Anna, who seems to exist beyond the determining binaries of race, reneges on this acceptance by framing its destabilizing effects on the authenticity and legibility of identity at large. It is no coincidence that the second most notable character of color in V is a renegade alien sleeper agent named Ryan Nichols (Morris Chestnut), a male character positioned primarily as a moral opposite to Baccarin’s Anna; their opposition is structured around both of them being non-human but pursuing morally and politically opposed goals. Chestnut’s conspicuous blackness plays on a more easily legible idea of American-ness; encoded as ‘African’-American, his blackness registers conspicuously against Baccarin’s indeterminate ethnic otherness. The interplay between the two characters and the racial registers they engage distances a positively connoted authentic Americanness, whether black or white (i.e. a concept within an obsolete yet clearly legible racial politics), which also happens to be male, from a threatening inauthentic female post-racial otherness which is hard, if not impossible, to read because of its emergent status. 14 Aside from the angles of, respectively, race and gender, V also interpellates its audience in a class-specific manner - perhaps the most significant of the three vectors running through the show. Let me illustrate this point in reference to the complex articulations of bodies, human and/ or alien, especially in their relationship to a spirituality the show portrays as striving toward the extreme opposite of embodiment. Fundamentally, the Visitors are reptiles encased in a genetically designed ‘human suit,’ which, once it is ripped open, provides revealing glimpses of the true alien form underneath the skin. 15 Bodily abjection hides beneath an inconspicuous or, more frequently, erotically or sexually attractive surface. As their beautiful bodies conceal their ugly true selves, their calm, controlled, serene demeanor conceals their aggressive, exploitive agenda. The Visitors’ serenity is a far cry from the muted affect displayed by all those alien invaders in Cold War science fiction functioning as embodiments of the evils of communism. In contrast to their robotic calm, the Visitors command a range of affects, all of them expressed Steffen Hantke 152 16 The visualization of this practice beautifully balances the sublime (on Anna’s end as she broadcasts serenity) with the uncanny (on the receivers’ end, as individuals stare enraptured into empty space). The show also goes to great lengths to distinguish the inauthenticity of this new-age religiosity of the Visitors from the practice of established religions; after all, one of the positive main characters of the show is a priest. New age religiosity is framed as a class-specific deviation from social norms defined by Christianity. in a manner signaling a control of the self by the self, not by an external agent. But this serene self-possession is merely a cover for mercenary efficiency, all the more so since its practice is enforced in a yoga-like collective practice called Bliss with which Anna broadcasts collective serenity to her troops; only in this specific practice of re-affirmation do the horrors of external mind control enter the show in their most paranoid form. 16 Since the show recruits its viewers into this paranoid logic from the very beginning, they are encouraged to distrust this serenity regardless of specific external circumstances. Semiotically speaking, serenity serves as an emblem of otherness; diegetically speaking, it serves as its symptom. Accompanied by impeccably accent-free articulations of the English language, which parallels their elegantly austere designer couture, the Visitors immediately register as social elite; viewers would be hard pressed to miss the fact that their physical appearance, as well as their demeanor, is coded in terms of social class. All of these markers collude in the marking of the Visitors as upper-class, or, more precisely, as members of a uniquely American early 21st century upper-class. To be clear, there is no 19th century anxiety here about the subversion of American democracy by way of residual or resurgent European aristocratic sensibilities. The Visitors are not the foreignaccented, cruel, sexually perverse autocrats that haunt late-20th century fantasies about serial killers (e.g. Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter or Brett Easton Ellis’ Jason Bateman). Though both types of fictional monsters share that deceptive serenity, V’s aliens are not singular social outsiders. Discussions about their status as immigrants illustrate that they function specifically as a group, a demographic. Hence, the target of the narrative’s othering is what popular political and social discourse in the U.S. frames as the liberal elite: a college educated, left leaning, professional middle class, environmentally conscious, open to non-traditional religions and philosophies, tolerant (i.e. ‘politically correct’) in matters of race and gender - it is this demographic, or its caricature, that serves as the negation of all things American in V. Configurations among other characters within the show confirm this handling of social class as a consistent strategy - an approach based less on absolute class identity and more on a shifting network of class markers operating in relation to each other. Erica Evans (Elizabeth Mitchell), for example, the female character at the center of the narrative, is an FBI agent, “We Are of Peace, Always” 153 17 Since parts of the Visitors’ plan involve contaminating the public health care system with R6, the show also harks back to a long tradition of conspiracy theories (e.g. the fluoridation of drinking water in the 1950s or, more recently, theories about so-called chemtrails). a branch within the network of law enforcement agencies conventionally associated with upper-class elitism. However, the show omits any character whose presence would re-enforce this conventional assumption about her profession’s class allegiance; at its most conventional, this missing character would be a street cop or lower-ranked detective whose working-class authenticity serves to offset the FBI agent’s class pretensions. In the absence of such a contrasting character, however, Erica’s affiliation with the FBI is stripped of its conventional class component, which makes her available as a figure of positive viewer identification. Within the logic of class relations in the show, her moral integrity, vigilance, and sense of moral and political fairness now stand in contrast to the conspicuous class superiority of the Visitors. Superimposed upon this broad ideological foundation, V adds a textual layer of more specific topicality, recasting in fictional terms selected themes within the debate on domestic policy, especially since the change of administrations in 2009. In contrast to the larger ideological positions articulated within the show, these are references planted with such specific deliberation that the audience is likely to respond with amusement at how thinly veiled they are. The Visitors’ plan, for example, to tag human beings like animals with the help of an injection, ominously referred to as R6, plays not only to broad pandemic anxieties, from SARS to avian flu, but, more specifically in the form of conspiracy theories surrounding public health policy responses to the perceived threat of a swine flu epidemic, to right-wing anxieties of a federal government expanding its surveillance to every private citizen. 17 Though these anxieties could have been inherited from the Bush administration’s systematic expansion of the security state legitimized by the Patriot Act - just as the social panics triggered by SARS, avian flu, and swine flu, predate the Obama administration - the discourse on medical technology in V aims at something more up to date. The plot hinges on the willingness of the Visitors to hand over their superior medical technology, ostensibly free of charge, to the entire human population - a plan repeatedly referred to by characters in the show as universal health care. For a U.S. audience in the first half of 2010, the term cannot but resonate with the public debate about the plans for the Obama administration’s Heath Care Reform Bill, plans met with considerable resistance from the health care industry and its representatives in politics and the media. The sinister overtones of the Visitors’ ‘universal health care’ initiative reify the anxieties circulating throughout this policy debate; for example, ominous references to incalculable waiting periods, which may or may not decide over one character’s survival, insinu- Steffen Hantke 154 ate that it is not just the Visitors’ covert agenda that renders their generosity suspect, but that, more importantly, it is the centralized origins and distribution of technology that make it susceptible to covert machinations. To a minor extent, the show itself recognizes that this situation comes with a pre-history. There is mention of sleeper agents having been embedded deeply within humanity for the last twenty years - i.e. back through a series of U.S. administrations both Republican and Democrat - and that, thanks to their tireless subversive activities, the world has come to the brink of crisis, making it ripe for the alien plucking. However, this long-term chronology of the invasion does little to divert allegorical recognition beyond the present U.S. administration. To the extent that previous alien invasion shows, like Threshold, Invasion, or Surface, were undeniably products of America under the Bush administration, V is a product of America under Obama. Given the confluence of these basic thematic elements of the show on the one hand, and the political climate at the time of its release, starting in September of 2009, on the other hand, it is clear that V embodies a politics aligning itself most comfortably with the political right. The specific forms of paranoia its fictional world indulges, the shape they take, and the origins they purport to uncover are allegorically encoded in details unique to the Obama administration. The discourse from which V draws its topicality might be most potent on the fringe, but what the show’s writers understand all too well is that its paranoid logic has become widely available in the mainstream as well. Regardless of the veracity or even just plausibility of fringe positions on the far right, mainstream conservatism, demoted to the opposition since the 2008 elections in both the White House and the Congress, has done little to repudiate them, presumably in pursuit of hitherto untapped voter potential for the 2011 midterm elections. Moreover, left-leaning media in support of Democrat agenda - from pundits like Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews to Jon Stewart and Bill Maher - has exploited fringe positions on the right, discrediting them by letting them air out their grievances in all their paranoid glory. As a result of this unprecedented visibility granted both from the right and the left, right-wing paranoia has moved from fringe to mainstream providing fertile grounds for the paranoid imagination in V. The degree to which V so obviously wants to be topical also suggests ways of resolving what I have identified earlier as the puzzling lack of relevance of the motif of alien invasion to the show’s immediate historical context. Though the U.S. is not likely to be the target of large-scale military invasion, it nonetheless is the prime agent in exactly this activity. Even after the change of administrations, and even with a series of financial crises and scandals dominating recent news cycles, images of military invasion still form a staple of media reporting, with U.S. troops playing the role of the invader. Hence, it would seem that only by reversing the show’s literal “We Are of Peace, Always” 155 18 Another, albeit more complex example, would be the fictional Borg within the Star Trek universe, which according to Lynette Russell and Nathan Wolski, constituted “Star Trek’s first attempt at questioning its own narrative […], ‘a post-colonial mirror held up to reflect the nature of colonization and assimilation’ and in which the Federation’s colonialist mission was ‘reflected and intensified’” (Geraghty 2009: 147). distribution of narrative agency it is possible to achieve proper viewer identification. The imagery V mobilizes most strikingly applies to conditions which the U.S. has created elsewhere in its role as a military and, more significantly, cultural and ideological invader and, subsequently, as an occupying force laying claim to the invaded territory’s resources within a larger ideological framework that stridently denies any claim to empire. A number of examples should suffice to illustrate this point. For one, there is the Visitors’ technological superiority. Though much of it technology remains carefully concealed - from humanity in the show as much as from the audience of the show - the very fact that the Visitors are far advanced of the human civilization they are preparing to conquer is obvious. In fact, as human resistance to the invasion is forming, it needs to assemble itself in ways that evade the enemy’s technological superiority: guerilla warfare, insurgency, and, most notably, terrorist tactics. Though the imagery of desperate low-tech warfare against a superior imperialist power has consistently been coded in terms of the American Revolutionary War in the past (e.g. the Empire versus the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, or the ‘shock and awe’ attack of the Cylons against humanity in Battlestar Galactica), the immediate historical context of V makes such associations difficult, if not impossible. 18 The remaining interpretive option is the one that would, by all measures, need to be repressed - that human resistance against the Visitors is, in fact, that of insurgencies against U.S. occupation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Another revealing example is the ‘Live Aboard Program’ introduced in episode 5. Designed as a ruse by which humans are to be corrupted and instrumentalized for propaganda purposes (and other, more sinister ones to be revealed later), the program extends an invitation to a broad array of humans to come aboard the alien mothership and stay there permanently. Ostensibly intended as a good-will gesture to further inter-species communication, even the immediate effects of the program, as illustrated by Erica’s son and his growing estrangement from his mother, are devastating to human cultural identity. It is not difficult to recognize in this program the allure that emigration to the U.S. holds for citizens of those nations brought to the brink of economic and cultural collapse by U.S. military intervention. Even the human characters on V acknowledge that the world is in bad shape and that the Visitors arrived just in time to rescue humanity from itself. Steffen Hantke 156 19 It is interesting to note that the original series still conceptualizes such sleeper cells as a fifth column, a term harking back to Cold War paranoia geared ultimately toward a military invasion aided by such internal forces of destabilization. The war on terror has replaced the older term with that of the sleeper cell, drawing on an updated biological discourse of infection and immunity. Yet another, more specific example are the military-style home invasions featured prominently on V. While the image of a military or paramilitary force conducting a carefully planned and meticulously executed home invasion is a clichéd element in the contemporary action thriller - black-clad SWAT team members in infrared goggles yelling, “Clear! Clear! ” as flashlights flicker through darkened rooms - the execution of such raids against nonmilitary conspiratorial groups takes on an eerie double meaning in the context of an invasion narrative like V. In the context of domestic policy, it still registers as an image of state power mobilized against internal threats, e.g. against the terrorist sleeper cell planning attacks from within the ‘homeland.’ Nonetheless, the same motif has recently been recoded in a manner that reaches back to the 1992 FBI siege of Randy Weaver’s Idaho compound at Ruby Ridge or the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, both of which, in the wake of the Tea Party and ‘Birther’ movements, as well as public debate about ‘socialist’ government takeovers of private enterprise in the wake of the 2010 Health Care Reform Bill, figure as targets of right-wing anxiety. Simultaneously, in the context of foreign policy, this same imagery also aligns itself with American troops raiding private homes in Iraq and Afghanistan - raids which have sparked controversy for their legitimacy as well as for the blowback they create among the civilian population. One final example would be the significance of sleeper cells: in order to infuse the original series with a higher degree of paranoia, in keeping with the Bush years’ predominant thematic, the arrival of the Visitors’ ships, as the visible manifestation of invasion fears, is preceded by the covert implanting of sleeper cells within state institutions and the general population; the plotline in the first few episodes revolving around FBI agent Erica Evans investigating a terrorist plot allows V to explore this territory planted firmly within the popular imagination by shows like the eponymous Sleeper Cell or 24. 19 While the current discourse on terrorism conceptualizes the sleeper cell as an indigenous phenomenon, a broader view of the same phenomenon would include the covert preparation of an all-out military invasion as a strategy pursued by the extensive and complicated network of organizations within the U.S. security apparatus. From the CIA to the NSA, American sleeper cells have aided in the preparations for recent military invasions, not to mention a long-standing heritage of those same organizations of “We Are of Peace, Always” 157 destabilizing democratically elected governments elsewhere. An emphasis on the insidious nature of such covert operations serves as a disavowal of the same strategies from the American playbook. Even the absence of what qualifies as a full military invasion in V is ultimately more reminiscent of American agency than that of its enemies. While America’s two ongoing wars have undoubtedly acclimatized the public imagination to images of open military hostility, the larger global strategy into which these activities are embedded - at great cost to American credibility and strain to general logic, one might add - is that of ‘bringing peace and stability to the region,’ advancing the cause of democracy and freedom, and engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges of resources and technologies with those nations America considers vital to its national interests. As if to confirm this agenda of ‘winning hearts and minds,’ the arrival of the Visitors’ giant space ships above all major cities - like U.S. aircraft carriers appearing on the coast of Somalia or Haiti - does not signal the commencement of a military invasion. Though undeniably menacing by their sheer size and, presumably, superior firepower, the Visitors’ ships, instead of opening fire on the White House (as in Independence Days, a film relegated by V to the status of a less subtle antecedent), are capable of converting their bottoms into giant television screens broadcasting messages of free trade, declarations of good intentions, and visual signals of goodness through beauty. Again, it is Morena Baccarin’s face beaming down benevolently onto scared and huddled masses of New Yorkers - a face that prompts one journalist to pose the question, “Is there such a thing as an ugly Visitor? ” In accord with the paranoid logic of the genre the show operates in, these declared intentions are eventually revealed as a front for a more mercenary agenda of exploitation and occupation, a pack of lies intended to safeguard the smooth installment of a power structure aiding the occupying force in successfully exploiting those it dominates, infiltrating indigenous political and economic structures, recruiting indigenous power elites by promises of sharing profit margins with them, corroding social structures like family, neighborhood communities, and friendships, and thus corrupting the native population. Imagine yourself, however, a patriotic Iraqi or Afghani watching a show like V, or one of the millions of protesters around the globe who took to the streets before, respectively, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: given your lived experience of the last ten years, who would you immediately peg as the equivalent of the alien Visitors? 3. Interpretive options: alien invaders at home and abroad Those inclined to speculate about the reason for ABC’s repeated changes of the air date for its newly updated version of V might suspect that the Steffen Hantke 158 20 For a detailed account of the production and release schedule and its numerous delays, see, for example, Anders 2009. network feared it had a problematic property on its hands. 20 Commissioned and developed in the political and cultural slipstream of the Bush administration’s final two years in office, V was clearly paranoid television of the type that had thrived during the period that was about to end. There would have been reason to suspect that change would not arrive as promptly as the Obama presidential campaign seemed to promise. In fact, writing in 2009 about U.S. cinema during the Bush administration - “upon the conclusion of that administration” - Stephen Prince suggests that “the historical period that engulfs all of us,” which is defined by paranoia as one of its characteristic features, “has not ended, and […] shows no signs of ending any time soon” (2009: 15). Prince cites former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who “has written that henceforth American presidential administrations will be ‘Terror Presidencies’, that is, they will be motivated by fear and will be occupied ceaselessly with efforts to prevent the next [terrorist] attack” (Prince 2009: 306). If so, V would likely be greeted by an audience primed for more paranoia. However, there was the possibility that, by the time the series made it onto the 2009 fall schedule, the political climate might have changed. Aside from the banking crisis edging out war, terrorism, torture, forcible rendition, black sites, and all other paranoia-inducing manifestations of the ‘war on terror,’ the Obama administration’s declared commitment to replace secrecy, subterfuge, and unilateral policy-making with accountability, transparency, and bipartisanship would have had a full year to drain the reservoir of collective paranoid anxiety. With a new president in the White House sounding a more conciliatory note in the national debate - especially on the policing of the American empire after the end of the American century - the success of paranoid entertainment like V suddenly seemed less assured. Whereas shows, from ABC’s own Lost to Fox’s 24, had had been mining public sentiment for years to the approval of prime ratings and critical recognition as symptomatic of the American condition, the new tone of American foreign politics seemed to call into question the continuation of this zeitgeist. The SciFi’s Channel’s final episode, after four seasons, of Battlestar Galactica’s in March 2009, Fox’s cancellation, after eight seasons, of 24 in May of 2010, and Lost entering its fifth and final season at the same time might have been taken as symptoms that Bush-style paranoia was about to run its course. Was this the reason, one wonders, why ABC seemed wary about finding the right moment for releasing the show? If that was the case, then the network can lean back and relax: audience responses to V have, by and large, been positive. By all appearances, the network has a success on its hands. Given the historically specific frame of “We Are of Peace, Always” 159 21 For the full explanation of the term, see Charles Krauthammer’s column, “Bush Derangement Syndrome” (2003). 22 One example of this would be Wheeler Winston Dixon. We “are living in the 1950s right now,” Dixon argues in his book Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (2005): repressed, obsessed with ‘terror alerts’, eagerly seeking phantom security in everincreasing hypersurveillance, reverting to the patriarchal order for a measure of safety and reassurance, retreating to our digital home entertainment centers to experience the world as filtered through a variety of ‘news’ filters rather than experiencing the joys and sorrows of the human community firsthand. (2005: 184) the show’s topical references, V provides a textbook example of how easily paranoia has traveled from left-wing opposition to the Bush administration to right-wing opposition to its current successor. Case in point, as David Aaronovitch points out in his book on conspiracy theories, Voodoo Theories (2010), is that, in “some polls, up to 58 per cent of Republicans were skeptical about Obama’s right to be president,” while a 2006 Scripps Survey Research Poll indicated that “54 per cent of Democrats had agreed with the proposition that people in the federal government had either assisted the 9/ 11 attacks or taken no action to stop them because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East” (2010: 330). Paranoia on the right about the Obama administrations would, thus, appear as merely the equivalent of what Charles Krauthammer (2003), famously yet somewhat tongue-in-cheek, called Bush Derangement Syndrome. 21 If critics saw the Bush years as an uncanny return of the Cold War, this larger paradigm of cultural production and consumption has - all assurances by the Obama administration to the contrary aside - continued unabated. 22 Aaronovich also provides a valuable insight into what drives conspiracy theories, an insight that dovetails with V’s definition of otherness in terms of race, gender and, most prominently, of social class. In reference to Timothy Melley’s (2010) concept of agency panic - i.e. the “intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self-control” or “conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been ‘constructed’ by powerful external agents” (Melley 2010: 12) - Aaronovich points to the nexus between one’s degree of powerlessness, perceived or real, and one’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories (328-31). “There is a more than plausible argument to be made,” he suggests in a section entitled “History for Losers,” “that, very often, conspiracy theories take root among the casualties of political, social, or economic change” (340). It is in this specific context that V’s right-wing paranoia feeds so efficiently off class-based anxieties, expressed through a resentment directed at what it frames as a social class whose elitism is defined by its endorsement of a post-feminist and postracial agenda. The fact that the most outraged, most hysterical, and most paranoid protesters against the evils of the Obama administration are recruited from exactly that same upper-middle class which provides the profile Steffen Hantke 160 for their projected enemy - the profile which V translates so efficiently into the cultural vocabulary of the alien invasion narrative - is an indication that a mechanism of displacement and disavowal is at work here. As cleverly as V exploits the binaries of self and other, this exploitation is merely a matter of genre conventions, a surface phenomenon. Underneath runs a stronger current of bourgeois class anxiety, which, in a society that prides itself on being essentially ‘classless,’ requires an other, even if its author is demonstrably the self, onto which it can project itself. Given the fact that U.S. television programs, like Hollywood films, are designed to circulate smoothly, and thus profitably, throughout foreign markets, the question I raised earlier - how an Iraqi or Afghani viewer would read and respond to V - is far from facetious. Though network executives are not sworn in on the administration’s official foreign policy agenda, it is likely to assume that their products are not designed to erode attitudes toward the U.S. which would sustain interest in imported American television series abroad. This would hold true even for programs satirizing American manners and mores - after all, there is satire, and then there is satire! Consequently, V’s peculiar demand for the viewer’s cross-cultural identification - i.e. to recognize yourself in the characters whose lived experience is diametrically opposed to your own, and ignore the ones whose lived experience aligns itself precisely with yours - still serves a political agenda that leaves basic ‘truths’ about the U.S. untouched. In the broadest sense, this means that, given the commercial imperatives of network television as well as the collaborative nature of scripting a dramatic program over a projected narrative arch of several seasons, V does not represent a single, coherent ideological perspective. Instead of advocating a ‘position,’ the show plays on narrative options which, in turn, offer viewers a variety of subject positions. Though V’s authors make specific concessions to assumptions about its domestic audience, which were undoubtedly supported by meticulous demographic research, the show, like much of contemporary fictional narratives in popular culture, tries to be everything to everybody. What appears to be its consistent ideology project is, thus, either the central axis around which various subject positions are organized formally, or the central ideology that asserts the primacy of multiplicity itself as a principle for the narrative organization of experience. For a domestic audience, viewer interpellation is channeled into recognizing oneself in the American characters who represent humanity in jeopardy. Conventionally, this is accomplished in the form of a historical displacement of fictional events into a canonical nationalist iconography: i.e. resistance against the alien invaders is projected upon, for example, the American Revolutionary War. Cold War culture - from Byron Haskins’ War of the Worlds to the original V miniseries to Star Wars or Red Dawn - provides the blueprint for this strategy. The dominance of this interpretive option sup- “We Are of Peace, Always” 161 23 A possible though far more subversive reading would resist cross-cultural identification and thus forego the disavowal of the U.S. as an imperialist invader of sovereign nations. 24 I am indebted, for the term engagement diplomacy, to Patrick Joseph Linehan, Minister- Counselor for Public Affairs with the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. 25 The point of reference for Booker is, specifically, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day. presses alternative readings, but it does not erase them altogether. Fueled by right-wing paranoia, it is one of those secondary options which V capitalizes upon when it frames the central conflict as that between individualistic, patriotic, ‘true’ Americans, taking up arms to ‘take back their country,’ and a sinister socialist government headed by a tyrant with no legitimate claim to his position, polite and soft-spoken yet intent on destroying ‘their’ America. 23 Having explored the show’s ideological potential for its domestic audience, I would like to close my discussion by taking a look at the interpellative opportunities V offers to an audience abroad. Of course, there is the possibility that this audience might read V exactly the way a domestic audience would: as a commentary on patriotic resistance against governmental ‘tyranny’ - a favorite catchphrase of current right-wing extremism. However, given the improvement of international relations between the U.S. and its allies and enemies alike - thanks in part to Obama’s shift away from Bush’s aggressive, unilateral foreign policy toward ‘engagement diplomacy’ - foreign viewers are, I believe, not very likely to read V this way. 24 In fact, given the controversial manner in which the Bush administration took office in 2000 and the consistent domestic criticism of the Bush’s administration’s confrontational policy style, it is more likely that viewers abroad are going to perceive the show’s governmental paranoia as a delayed comment on the Bush rather than the Obama administration. Though the puzzlement abroad about the Obama administration’s domestic struggles would make this reading more likely, it would still have to contend with the fact that the alien invaders in V do not pursue their nefarious goals with Bush’s and Cheney’s blunt aggressiveness but with a demeanor, in a tone and style, more reminiscent of Obama’s ‘engagement diplomacy.’ Lacking the same degree of familiarity as its domestic equivalent with the patriotic iconography that casts the U.S., by default, as a scruffy bunch of idealistic freedom fighters going up against an ‘evil empire,’ an audience abroad would most likely be more predisposed toward the ‘subversive interpretation’ that would cast a show like V “as anti-American and pro-Third World” (Booker 2006: 244-45). 25 Only citizens of a global superpower have the privilege of imagining themselves as the underdog; everyone else’s wellbeing depends on a more pragmatic take on geopolitical reality. Of course, this is not to say that V is “in any way intended as an allegory of anticolonial resistance to American or other Western domination, even if it can be read that way” (Booker 2006: 245); the fact that the text includes this interpretive Steffen Hantke 162 option is, as I suggested earlier, a side effect of the need on the part of its domestic audience for mechanisms of displacement and disavowal. However, if these mechanisms happen to produce such ‘subversive interpretations’ in the context of a different audience, it might help to explain why American cultural exports are popular even in countries that have reasons not to be favorably predisposed toward American influence. In the final instance, viewer identification in V, as in any other piece of popular culture that claims to ‘represent America,’ is set up in a way that does not depend on the final choice the audience makes between heroes and villains - a final choice that is determined from the outset by the “simple good vs. evil oppositions such as those around which [alien invasion narratives are] structured” (Booker 245) - but on the process the audience undergoes as it enacts the plot’s narrative choices to arrive, eventually, on the side of heroes. Like this hermeneutical process itself, America’s identity in the arena of global politics - under Bush as much as under Obama - is the discursive product of assertiveness exonerated by hand-wringing, exploitation exonerated by guilt, imperialism exonerated by post-colonial critique. Within the genealogy of alien invasion on film and in television, V has gone, perhaps, to the greatest lengths to make this process compelling for an audience which, by way of media and genre expertise, knows that its final outcome - the exoneration of the U.S. and the celebration of its political ideals - is a foregone conclusion. References Aaronovitch, David (2010). Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. New York: Riverhead/ Penguin. Anders, Charlie Jane (2009). “V Is Not Doomed, and You Should Still Watch” io9.com. November 3, 2009. http: / / io9.com/ 5396219/ v-is-not-doomed-and-you-should-stillwatch (October 2010). Booker, Keith M. (2006). Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Films and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2005). Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Geraghty, Lincoln (2009). “Television since 1980.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Eds. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sheryl Vint. London & New York: Routledge. 144-153. Greenwald, Glenn (2009). “Obama and Transparency: judge for yourself.” Salon.com. 17 June 2009. http: / / www.salon.com/ news/ opinion/ glenn_greenwald/ 2009/ 06/ 17/ transparency (October 2010). Hantke, Steffen (2010). “Bush’s America and the Return of Cold War Science Fiction: Alien Invasion in Invasion, Threshold, and Surface.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 38/ 3. 143-151. “We Are of Peace, Always” 163 Itzkoff, Dave (2010). “Even Before Filming, Kennedy Series Stirs Anger.” New York Times, February 16, 2010. http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2010/ 02/ 17/ arts/ television/ 17kennedy.html (October 2010). Krauthammer, Charles (2003). “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” Townhall.com. December 5, 2003. http: / / townhall.com/ columnists/ CharlesKrauthammer/ 2003/ 12/ 05/ bush_ derangement_syndrome (October 2010). Linehan, Patrick Joseph (2010). “The First Year of the Obama Administration.” Public Presentation. Sogang University, Seoul. May 11. Melley, Timothy (2000). Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Prince, Stephen (2009). Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press. Shaw, Tony (2007). Hollywood’s Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Spillius, Alex (2009). “Hillary Clinton vows to end paranoia of George Bush era.” Telegraph.co.uk February 22, 2009. http: / / www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/ worldnews/ northamerica/ usa/ barackobama/ 4316996/ Hillary-Clinton-vows-to-end-paranoia-of- George-Bush-era.html (October 2010). Steffen Hantke English Department Sogang University Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de The English language is the medium of globalisation and it is itself deeply affected by globalisation. As a result, the function of English as an international tool for communication needs rethinking in the English language classroom. The articles of this volume represent different, sometimes controversial perspectives. The contributions cover five domains: 1. Political and Sociocultural Dimensions, 2. Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Exemplification, 3. Teaching and Learning English in a Global Context: ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Standards, 4. Learners in Primary, Secondary and Higher Education: Focus on Europe and 5. Teacher Education. The sections provide different focuses and use different approaches to the globalisation of English and its possible consequences for the language classroom. Claus Gnutzmann / Frauke Intemann (eds.) The Globalisation of English and the English Language Classroom 2., durchges. Auflage 2008 287 Seiten €[D] 58,00/ SFr 98,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6388-0 086408 Auslieferung August 2008.7 7 15.08.2008 11: 33: 08 Uhr AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch, aber was ist das für eine Sprache? ” Emigranto - a grammatical approach to code-switching Eva Duran Eppler This paper presents the first grammar of Emigranto, the German/ English mixed code spoken by Jewish refugees residing in London, UK. It goes back to Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ (2004) paper by showing that the German/ English bilinguals possess two identifiable linguistic systems or languages, each with its grammatical rules and lexicon, and that the mixed variety results from the interaction between lexical elements and grammatical rules from these languages. It supports Gardner-Chloros and Edwards’ argument that grammar is distinct from the processes driving language production, but shows that knowledge about both can be derived from an analysis that combines syntactic relations with processing features. The results of this analysis are captured in the Distance Hypothesis, which states that greater dependency distance increases the chances of code-mixing (Duran Eppler 2010). The paper concludes that there is more variation in bilingual than in monolingual data, but it argues that (a.) this does not preclude grammatical approaches to code-switching - they just have to be probabilistic - and (b.) variation has to be tackled if we want to identify grammatical regularities in natural speech. 1. Introduction The title quote is taken from a recording of a seventy-four-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee who has been living in London, UK, since 1939. In this extract DOR describes how she and her friends speak. *DOR: and # natuerlich wir sprechen alle Deutsch . *DOR: wir sprechen ein bisschen Englisch ein bisschen Deutsch . *DOR: wir waren [/ / ] in Spanien waren wir vor zwei jahren . *DOR: und wir haben gesprochen so a [: ein] bissl Englisch # so gemischt" nicht ? Eva Duran Eppler 166 *DOR: and ist neben uns ein Wiener gesessen . *DOR: sagt er “ich spreche Englisch # ich spreche Deutsch # aber was ist das fuer eine sprache? ” IBron line 134-160 The quote raises two main issues that will be dealt with in this paper. One is whether Emigranto is a ‘Sprache’, i.e. a language with a grammar. The second one is whether the bilingual or code-switched speech results from the interaction between lexical elements and grammatical rules from the contributing languages; in other words, whether the syntax of Emigranto is based on the two monolingual grammars. These are the same questions Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004) deal with when they attend to grammatical approaches to code-switching. Code-switching is the use of lexical items and grammatical features from two languages in one utterance or sentence. Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004: 103) identify the following assumptions as underlying grammars of code-switching: 1. informal speech can be adequately and appropriately described in terms of grammar 2. deep, rather than surface, structures are involved in code-switching 3. one language is the base or “matrix” 4. constraints derived from existing data are universal and predictive They question these suppositions on several grounds: i. grammar is distinct from the processes driving speech production ii. the role of grammar is mediated by the variable, poly-idiolectal repertories of bilingual speakers iii. the notion of base system is either irrelevant or fails to explain the facts iv. no principles proposed to date account for all the facts, i.e. are absolute Not all researchers working on structural aspects of bilingual speech and code-switching share assumptions 1.-4. In the introduction I will provide background information on the issues raised in these suppositions and outline the position I take on them. Regarding the first assumption, that informal speech cannot be adequately and appropriately described in terms of grammar, Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004) quote Alvarez-Caccamo’s (1998: 36) ‘challenge’ that “[i]n order to argue convincingly for or against the existence of code-switching constraints and code-switching grammars based on the two monolingual ones […] research should first convincingly prove that a) speakers who code-switch possess two identifiable linguistic systems or languages, each with its identifiable grammatical rules and lexicon; and b) code-switched speech results from the predictable interaction between lexical elements and “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 167 grammatical rules from these languages.” The present study, like several others before it (Backus 1996, Boumans 1998, Sankoff & Poplack 1982, Treffers-Daller 1994) will show that (a.) and (b.) are valid assumptions. As regards (a.) the present study adopts the position that approaches to codeswitching which posit specific mechanisms and principles which cannot be independently motivated in the analysis of monolingual speech are conceptually flawed (cf. McSwan 2009). As regards (b.) the present study will show that code-switched speech does indeed result from the interaction between lexical elements and grammatical rules from the contributing languages. Syntactic approaches to code-switching conducted in a Government & Binding framework had to assume that deep structures are involved in codeswitching (cf. assumption (2.); see McSwann 2009 for a survey). Romaine, on the other hand, already argued in 1986 that CS is a surface phenomenon. The present study uses a grammatical framework that allows a complete surface analysis, viz. Word Grammar (Hudson 2007, 2010). Studies based on data where language contact has led to insertional patterns of code-switching (Muysken 2000, Deuchar, Muysken & Wang 2007) tend to subscribe to assumption three, i.e. that one language is the base or “matrix” language of the mixed code (e.g. Joshi 1985, Myers- Scotton 2009). In other communities, like the Puerto Rican Spanish/ English bilinguals in New York (e.g. Poplack 1982) or the German/ English bilinguals in London (Eppler 1999), language contact results in more alternating patterns of code-switching. Studies based on such data tend to assume a less asymmetric relation between the languages involved in mixing. The period during which some syntactic constraints on code-switching were assumed to be universal and absolute (cf. assumption (4.)) lasted for about ten years, from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, but was clearly over when Gardner-Chloros and Edwards wrote their paper. Too many counterexamples from too many language pairs had been published (e.g. Mahootian 1993) for this claim to be defendable. This, however, does not mean that code-switching is parochial and code-switching patterns are random. Different grammatical structures are switched with different frequencies, and these can be used to make predictions about the bilingual speech produced by the speakers the switch probabilities were obtained from. This is, in a very narrow context, restrictions derived from existing data are predictive (cf. assumption (4.)). Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004) question these assumptions on several grounds. Their first argument is that grammar is distinct from the processes driving speech production. This is undoubtedly the case, but grammatical speech production and successful syntactic parsing require speakers to have and apply knowledge of grammar in language use. Their second contention, that the role of grammar is mediated by the variable, poly-idiolectal repertories of bilingual speakers, is also undoubtedly Eva Duran Eppler 168 1 Lüschner (2008) and Davies (2010) could assign a matrix language (Myers-Scotton 1993) to 80-94% of utterances from some files from the Emigranto corpus. true, but all speech (mono-, biand multilingual) is individual and variable, and as bilingual speech tends not to be codified, it may vary more than monolingual speech. Furthermore, every monolingual speaker’s repertoire is - to a certain extent - idiolectal; so every bilingual speaker’s repertoire will necessarily be bior poly-idiolectal. Many researchers agree with Gardner-Chloros and Edwards’ (2004) third and fourth arguments: Sankoff & Vanniarajan (1990) and McSwann (2009), for example, concur with the view that in many instances of code-switching the notion of base system is either irrelevant, or fails to explain the facts. The present study will show that this is also true for many of the mixed utterances in the German-English corpus. The informants’ L1, German, however, seems to function as a kind of base language, but in a very different sense to the notion of “matrix” language suggested by, for example, Joshi (1985) and Myers-Scotton (1993, 1995, 2002). 1 Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ last contention with grammatical approaches to code-switching, that no principles proposed to date account for all the facts of syntactic code-switching, has been accepted by pretty much everybody working in grammatical code-switching research (e.g. Clyne 1987, Poplack & Sankoff 1988, Mahootian 1993, McSwan 2009). For principles to account for all the facts of a certain phenomenon is rare in linguistics and other disciplines; this tends to encourage rather than discourage further research. Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004) conclude from this that rather than seeking universal, predictive grammatical rules, research on CS should focus on the variability of bilingual grammars. The following paper will do exactly this. Within a variationist framework (Sankoff & Labov 1979) it addresses the following questions: Do these bilinguals possess two identifiable linguistic systems, each with its identifiable grammatical rules and lexicon? Which language, if any, functions as a base for the mixed variety? Can grammatical approaches to code-switching inform our understanding of bilingual syntactic parsing? Which grammatical relations are frequently switched and which ones are rarely switched? Does bilingual speech elude grammatical description because it is variable (i.e. is the blueprint a red herring)? Not all of Gardner-Chloros and Edwards reservations against grammatical approaches to code-switching can receive equal coverage in this paper; the main focus will be on (ii.) and (iv.). With regard to (ii.) it will be demonstrated that bilingual speech can be described grammatically; with regard to (iv.) it will be argued that grammatical restrictions on code-switching are “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 169 2 The long account is Duran Eppler (2010). 3 A notational summary is presented in Appendix 1. 4 The word on which a word depends syntactically is its head. probabilistic (and not absolute). The Distance Hypothesis, furthermore, sheds light on syntactic processes driving bilingual speech production. Section two of this paper provides information about data collection and the corpus. The main section presents a short 2 variationist account of the grammar of a German-English mixed code. The study is synchronic, i.e. it presents the lexical and syntactic composition of the mixed code at a specific point in time (1993). The analysis is carried out in a lexically based dependency grammar (Hudson 2007). 3 I will focus on monolingual dependency relations (where both word A and word B are from the same language) and mixed dependency relations (where words A and B are from different languages) and will compare and analyse the variability in switch frequencies and dependency distances (the number of words between a word and its head 4 ) of these syntactic relations. Standard grammatical terminology is used throughout the paper. In the final section I will compare the problems Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004) have with grammatical approaches to code-switching with the results of this (and other) grammatical studies of code-switching. This will lead to the conclusion that grammatical approaches to code-switching are not futile but can reveal new insights into monoand bilingual speech, i.e. the blueprint is not a red herring. 2. The Emigranto data The empirical study I am going to present is based on a corpus of German- English monolingual and code-mixed discourse. The data is drawn from a community of Austrian Jewish refugees from the National Socialist regime who settled in London in the late 1930s. The L1 of the informants is Austrian German. Yiddish was not part of the linguistic profile of the so-called assimilated Jewish community in Vienna of the time and none of the speakers included in this study speaks Yiddish. The age of onset of the L2, British English, was during adolescence (15-21 years) for all speakers included in this study. At the time the audiorecordings were made (1993) all informants were in their late sixties or early seventies. A bilingual mode of interaction, called Emigranto developed among a close-knit network of community members. Linguistically the mixed code is characterised by frequent switching at speaker turn boundaries and heavy intra-sentential code-switching. Eva Duran Eppler 170 5 The LIDES Coding Manual (2000) and http: / / www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/ staff/ mark/ lipps/ lipps.html. 6 I will use a conservative count of code-switches (1,274) as the basis for all further calculations. 7 The total is higher than the sum of word tokens from both languages, and some of the percentages do not add up to 100% because the total includes words which could not be assigned to either German or English on an unequivocal basis. The basis for this study is a corpus (48,467 words) of ten and a half hours of monolingual and code-mixed speech transcribed in the LIDES format. 5 It consists predominantly of group recordings of casual speech involving the central informant (DOR), three of her friends from the refugee generation (TRU, MEL and LIL) and the researcher. 3. A grammatical approach to Emigranto 3.1 Quantitative background: distribution of languages and frequency of code-switching This section presents background information to the grammar of the mixed code, i.e. frequency data on the distribution of German and English in the corpus and by individual speakers, the frequency of mixed utterances and the frequency of code-switches. German (28,596 words) is more heavily represented than English (19,446 words) in the corpus this study is based on, and code-switching is asymmetrical, i.e. there are 50% more switches from German to English (813) than from English to German (543). 6 The distribution of word tokens from each language and the fact that there are more code-switches from German to English may be interpreted as a first vague indicator that the German language plays a more basic or prominent role in the data than English. The distribution of languages, however, varies considerably among the individual speakers. German English Word tokens Percent Word tokens Percent 7 Tokens *MEL Overall 3,451 50% 3,407 48% 6,947 c-s 794 50% 739 47% 1,561 *TRU Overall 6,564 56% 4,984 43% 11,639 c-s 881 60% 568 39% 1,469 “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 171 German English Word tokens Percent Word tokens Percent 7 Tokens *LIL Overall 3,069 61% 1,845 37% 4,999 c-s 476 65% 244 33% 733 *DOR Overall 11,331 80% 2,615 19% 14,049 c-s 1,928 72% 719 27% 2,691 Table 1: Distribution of languages in the overall corpus and in code-switched utterances by speaker *MEL is quite balanced in the number of word tokens she selects from both her languages. *TRU, *LIL and *DOR, on the other hand, are increasingly more German dominant. Interestingly, this correlates exactly with the age at which they arrived in the United Kingdom. Only *DOR uses significantly less German in her mixed utterances than in her overall speech. Relating these findings to Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ (2004) paper, these frequency data show that the repertoires of the bilingual speakers involved in this study are indeed poly-ideolectal and that socioand psycholinguistics factors, like age of onset of the L2, do play a role, but neither of these findings necessarily mean that the role of grammar is mediated or overridden by them. Following this overview of the overall proportions of German and English in the corpus and among individual speakers, I will now focus on codeswitching. The corpus contains 52% monolingual German, 37% monolingual English and 11% mixed utterances. Proportional to their total number of utterances, the individual informants produce roughly the same number of mixed utterances (10%). In mixed utterances the switch frequency is 5.0, this is, in intra-sententially code-switched utterances every fifth words is in a different language to the preceding one. The switch frequency in mixed utterances is not significantly different between the individual informants (× 2 = 1.74; df = 4; p > 0.5). This is important for the analysis as the speakers represented in the data thus produce • roughly the same number of mixed utterances, and • the intra-sentential mixing of my informants is not significantly different. The data chosen as a basis for analysis are therefore similar enough to warrant a comparison; and, within these texts, it is the intra-sententially mixed utterances, i.e. the main focus of this study, that are most similar. These results relate to Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ paper in two ways: first, they show that when my informants switch within an utterance, they switch several times and thus produce patterns that are unlike insertion and Eva Duran Eppler 172 8 In insertion, lexical items or entire constituents from one language are embedded into a structure from the other language. In the alternational mixing pattern, bilinguals oscillate between structures from at least two languages. When material from different lexical inventories is used in grammatical structures that are shared between the languages involved in intra-sentential switching, Muysken (2000) talks of congruent lexicalization. 9 A comparison with monolingual Viennese German from the early 20 th century and contemporary London English is unfortunately not feasible because of a lack of comparable corpora. The monolingual sample is large enough for quantitative syntactic analysis because grammatical feature counts tend to be stable across samples half the size of what is used here (Biber 1998). more akin to alternation and congruent lexicalization. 8 In these types of code-switching the notion of base system makes little sense as neither of the two languages establishes a matrix language frame (Myers-Scotton 1993) into which elements of the other language are inserted. Second, the switch frequencies can be combined with the relative switch frequencies of individual syntactic relations to form a probabilistic grammar of code-switching (akin to Sankoff & Poplack 1982). The next section presents the analysis of grammatical functions in the German/ English corpus. The mixed syntactic functions are systematically compared to a random sample of monolingual syntactic functions from the corpus (2,025 words) to show how often a particular phenomenon occurs relative to other possible realisations (cf. the principle of accountability, Labov 1972, Poplack 1990). 9 3.2 Quantitative analysis of grammatical functions A grammatical function is a specific type of syntactic (dependency) relation, e.g. an object or an adverbial. Each dependency relation is controlled by at least one syntactic rule that allows that particular pair of words to occur as dependent and head (Hudson 1990). In monolingual dependencies both word A and word B are from the same language. If words A and B are from different languages, we are looking at a mixed dependency. The null hypothesis for this study requires each word in a dependency to satisfy the constraints imposed on it by its own language. It therefore constrains codemixed and monolingual dependencies alike. Before I proceed with the grammatical analysis I need to state how the relation between (conversational) utterances and (grammatical) sentences is handled in this study. This is important in relation to Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ paper, because they question whether informal speech can be adequately and appropriately described in terms of grammar. A sentence can be defined as any string of words held together by syntactic relations. I did not edit the transcribed speech before the grammatical analysis (unlike many of the quoted examples). I left any material that could not be taken as “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 173 10 The null hypothesis this study is based on does not a priori ascribe a more prominent role to heads. a token of a word-form of either German or English in the texts, but if it could not be linked to other elements in the utterance via a dependency relation, it was not included in the syntactic analysis. Thus all the words in a transcribed utterance that are related to other words by syntactic relationships constitute the sentences on which the following grammatical analysis is based. I will first outline the more general picture, frequency distributions and mean distances of monolingual and mixed dependencies, before focusing on individual grammatical functions. The distribution of monolingual German and English dependency relations is 5 : 4. In the mixed dependencies the number of heads per language is even more skewed towards German (76% German: 24% English) than the number of words per language (63% German: 36% English). German thus is not only numerically dominant in the speech of my informants, but also contributes a significantly higher proportion of heads to code-mixed utterances than English. If we assume that heads play a more prominent role in syntactic relations than dependents, then the lexical and syntactic properties of the numerically dominant German heads should have more influence over code-mixing patterns in Emigranto than English heads. 10 This finding may again indicate that German functions as a default or base language in mixed utterances. The dependency distance of a word is the number of words between it and its head. Table 2 presents the mean dependency distances and standard deviation in monolingual and mixed dependencies (listed by the language of the head). German English Total Monolingual 0.87 (ó = 0.78) 0.49 (ó = 0.41) 0.68 Mixed with head… 0.85 (ó = 0.81) 1.26 (ó = 1.08) 1.06 Table 2: Mean distances (and standard deviation) in monolingual and mixed dependencies These results generate hypotheses which will be tested in the next section. Table 2 shows that: 1. Monolingual German dependencies are longer than English ones. This is a direct result of the word order properties of the two languages; e.g. V2 vs. SVO, Verbalklammer. 2. Mixed dependencies with a German head are shorter than mixed ones with an English head. This is surprising if we assume (a.) that code- Eva Duran Eppler 174 mixing is based on the two monolingual grammars (cf. (1.)) and (b.) that heads play a more prominent role in syntactic relations than dependents (see above). 3. Monolingual German and mixed dependencies with a German head are of a similar length. This similarity may suggest that mixed dependencies with a German head are not very different from monolingual German ones, at least as far as distance is concerned. 4. Monolingual English dependencies are considerably shorter than mixed dependencies with an English head. In contrast to German heads, English heads thus seem to enter into ‘looser’, literally more remote syntactic relations with German dependents. We would then expect English words to enter more dependency relations that are characterised by long distances, e.g. adjunct, extractee and extraposee relations, and German dependents of English heads to be more frequently located at the clause periphery (cf. Treffers-Daller 1994). 5. The difference in distances between monolingual and mixed dependencies is highly significant (× 2 = 18.6, df = 1, p < 0.001); and the standard deviation from the mean is higher for mixed dependencies; i.e. there is more variation in the distances of mixed dependencies and there are more mixed outliers. 6. The mean distance of mixed dependencies (1.06) is longer than that of both English and German monolingual dependencies. If we assume that the influence of a word’s language on that of its dependent will decrease with increased distance (speakers ‘forget’ the language of the head), mixed dependencies may be the result of distance. By their very nature, long distance dependents are more likely to be located at the clause periphery (cf. Treffers-Daller 1994, Muysken 2000). The long dependency distances of mixed syntactic relations may point towards a processing motivation behind code-switching: the influence of a word’s language on that of its dependent may decrease with increased distance. This would then mean that the longer the dependency distance, the more likely we are to encounter an other-language dependent, i.e. a code-switch. Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004) stress that grammar is distinct from the processes driving speech production, but speech production and comprehension does not and cannot happen without grammar (syntactic parsing). The Distance Hypothesis combines aspects of grammar (syntactic relations) with a psycholinguistic processing feature (dependency distance). “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 175 11 Sharer, the WG term for xcomp or incomplement, is the type of verb complement which shares its subject with the head verb. Sharers are found with auxiliary, copula raising and control verbs. 12 Prepositionals and particles are treated as separate syntactic functions, but their numbers are so low that I conflated the figures in Tables 3-8. 13 < and > are used in WG notation for the direction of the relation, >x = ’following’, x< = ’preceding’. Distance Hypothesis Greater dependency distance of syntactic relations increases the chances of code-mixing. (Duran Eppler 2010) Because the Distance Hypothesis combines syntax with parsing, evidence in its support potentially sheds light on both grammatical and psycholinguistics aspects of code-switching. The next section presents the analysis of individual monolingual and mixed grammatical functions. An analysis of monolingual and mixed dependency relations will (a.) establish whether the “speakers who code-switch possess two (or more) identifiable linguistic systems or languages, each with its identifiable grammatical rules and lexicon” (Alvarez-Caccamo 1998: 36, quoted in Gardner-Chloros 2004: 104); (b.) highlight the similarities and differences of the two languages involved in bilingual production in this particular incident; and (c.) indicate where, i.e. in which dependency relations, the syntax of German and the syntax of English allow mixing. Because dependency distance is a property of all dependency relations, this analysis will also establish whether the German/ English data support the Distance Hypothesis. 3.3 Monolingual syntactic relations A comparison of the sample of monolingual German and English grammatical functions, disregarding the position of the dependent, shows that there is no significant difference for most functions (c = complement, s = subject, a = adjunct, r = sharer 11 , o = object, >x = extraposee, x< = extractee, n = negative, p = prepositional/ particle 12 ). This is a good indicator that German and English are typologically similar languages. Differentiated by position 13 , a comparison between the monolingual German and English dependency relations highlights the main word order differences between the two languages. Eva Duran Eppler 176 14 This comparison does not include extractees because they are neither adjuncts nor valents. >c s< >s >a a< >r r< >o o< >x x< >n n< >p p< Total German 21% 19% 6% 13% 11% 9% 2% 7% 5% - 3% 2% 1% - 1% 754 English 22% 22% 1% 12% 7% 16% 0% 14% 0% - 1% 4% 0% 1% 0% 596 p 0.575 0.588 0.518 0.013 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.405 0.004 0.009 0.000 0.497 Table 3: Comparison of monolingual dependencies differentiated by position: percentages, p-values (significant differences are in bold), Four columns have a 0 entry for English, which means there are no predependent sharer, object, negative, particle and prepositional relations in the monolingual English of my informants. These syntactic functions are postdependency relations of verbs in English, but pre-dependents in German when their heads are clause final verbs. This result therefore shows that, when in monolingual English mode, my informants adhere to English syntactic rules. In other words, they “possess two identifiable linguistics systems [...] , each with its identifiable grammatical rules” (Gardner-Chloros 2004: 104). From this comparison and the null hypothesis we would expect no, or hardly any, code-switches across the dependency relations that are not shared by the two grammars. In the next section I will contrast the monolingual dependencies from each language with the correlating mixed ones. This will show whether the mixed variety results from the interaction between lexical elements and grammatical rules from the two languages involved in code-switching in Emigranto. The analysis of the mixed syntactic relations will also allow us to evaluate the universality of various constraints on where code-switching can occur in a sentence. 3.4 Comparison of monolingual and mixed syntactic relations The code-switching literature (Mahootian & Santorini 1996, Treffers-Daller 1994) proposes that switching of head-complement relations is more constrained than the switching of adjunction structures. In the corpus the present study is based on the difference between monolingual and switched complement and adjunct relations 14 is highly significant (× 2 = 6.82, df = 1, p = 0.009), but there are more switched complements than adjuncts. Overall, Mahootian & Santorini’s (1996) and Treffers-Daller’s (1994) hypotheses that adjuncts are more easily switched than complements are thus not substantiated by the present analysis, but a more fine-grained analysis of grammatical relations is required for a clearer picture to emerge. “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 177 15 In WG determiners are the head in determiner-noun relations. The comparison between monolingual German and mixed syntactic relations with a German head is presented in Table 4. It shows that codeswitched speech results from the interaction between lexical elements (German heads and English dependents) and grammatical rules (functions) from the bilinguals’ two linguistic systems. The code-switching is predictable in that it only occurs between lexical elements from the two languages that enter recognisable syntactic relations which are based on grammatical rules. >c s< >s >a a< >r r< >o o< >x x< >n n< >p p< Total Mono G 21% 19% 6% 13% 11% 9% 2% 7% 5% 0% 3% 2% 1% 0% 1% 754 Mix h G 59% 2% 0% 7% 5% 12% 1% 6% 4% 0% 3% 0% 1% 0% 0% 525 P 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.002 0.000 0.195 0.383 0.272 0.427 0.447 0.874 - - - - Table 4: Comparison of monolingual German and mixed dependencies with a German head: percentages, p-values (significant differences are in bold) Of the most common syntactic relations (complements, subjects, adjuncts, sharers and objects) in this category, three show a significant difference between their monolingual and their mixed frequencies in the data. There are significantly more mixed complements with a German head than monolingual German ones. The most frequent complement relation is the one between nouns and their heads, 15 and nouns are the most frequently switched (or borrowed) word class in all borrowability hierarchies listed in the code-switching literature (van Hout & Muysken 1994 for a summary), an observation confirmed by the data. If I distinguish between code-switches and borrowings and classify all English nouns that enter syntactic relations with German heads as borrowings, the complement versus adjunct distinction simply becomes non-significant (× 2 = 0.416, df = 1, p = 0.838). So even if we take all potential borrowings out of the equation, Mahootian & Santorini’s (1996) and Treffers-Daller’s (1994) hypotheses that adjuncts are more easily switched than complements are not substantiated by the present analysis. It therefore supports Garnder-Chloros and Edwards’ (2004: 110) argument that hypothesis formulated on the basis of a particular data set may not apply to all code-switching situations. Subjects also show a significant difference in tokens between their monolingual German occurrences and the mixed ones with a German head - not because there are so many, but because there are so few (12 tokens). This finding is in accordance with other studies of code-switching which indicate that subjects, and particularly subject pronouns, are infrequently Eva Duran Eppler 178 switched (Gumperz & Hernandez-Chavez 1971, Timm 1975, Treffers-Daller 1994). My mixed corpus contains four English subject pronouns depending on German heads. One example is (1) *LIL: you kannst # jauchzen . (English/ German) When arguing against the tradition of universal and predictive constraints on code-switching, Garnder-Chloros and Edwards (2004) invoke Muysken’s (2000) argument that bilingual speech may contain too much variation for a single set of rules to account for code-mixing. Muysken, however, maintains that it is legitimate to describe code-mixing in terms of the grammatical regularities which characterise it. One of these regularities is that subjects and subject pronouns are significantly less likely to be switched than other syntactic categories. Absolute constraints on switching subjects and subject pronouns are therefore not supported by the data, but probabilistic ones are. Table 3 furthermore shows that adjuncts form the second most frequently mixed syntactic relation after complements (the borrowed English nouns). Speaker *MEL, for example, switches adjuncts frequently. (2) *MEL: nein # ich bin draussen ## as per usual. (German/ English) Sharers, objects, extraposees and extractees show no significant difference between their monolingual German occurrences and those with German heads and English dependents. For sharers this result is, on the one hand, surprising, because Timm (1975) proposes that auxiliaries and main verbs are only found in unilingual constructions (although she did find a few counterexamples to this constraint in her own data). My corpus contains only eight switches between German auxiliaries/ modals and English verbs (many morphologically integrated) and thus lends probabilistic support to this constraint. If we focus on a different word-class-pair that can be involved in sharer relations, i.e. verbs and predicative adjectives, this finding is less surprising. Pfaff (1979), Poplack (1980), Treffers-Daller (1994) note that predicative adjectives are frequently switched in their data. This is indeed the sharer relation that contributes most mixed tokens to this category (i.e. sharers with a German head and an English dependent) in my corpus, namely 32. (3) *MEL: die [gay men] sind meistens nice-looking . (German/ English) The switching of sharer relations is therefore not restricted by an absolute constraint. The present and the referenced studies, however, show that there are grammatical regularities that characterise code-switching across different language pairs, and we can therefore predict that the sharer relation between auxiliaries predicative adjectives is more frequently switched than the sharer relation between auxiliaries and main verbs (whether this prediction holds is an empirical issue). “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 179 That objects are more frequently switched than subjects is a fairly wellestablished fact in the grammatical literature on code-switching. That there is no significant difference between monolingual German and mixed ones with a German head (p = 0.272 for >o, and p = 0.427 for <o) is interesting because objects of German clause final verbs tend to have fairly long dependency distances. This should increase chances of code-switching according to the Distance Hypothesis. The result of objects therefore corroborates the Distance Hypothesis. Monolingual and mixed extrapositions and extractions (see Example 1) show no significant difference in this category, i.e. monolingual German vs. mixed with a German head, but given the small sample size, there are quite a few (17). These two syntactic relations involve dislocated constituents, i.e. (groups of) words that have been shifted out of their ‘normal’ position towards the right (extraposition) or the left periphery (extraction) of a clause. Treffers-Daller (1994: 207) reports 21 switched dislocated constituents in her Dutch-French data; my German-English corpus contains 14 switched extractees and 3 switched extraposees with a German head. An example illustrating an extracted English objects is (4) *DOR: +” one club +” hab(e) ich gemeint sagt man wenn man nicht +/ . The relatively high proportion of mixed dislocated constituents in my data thus supports Treffers-Daller’s (1994) proposal that switching is favoured for dislocated constituents at the clause periphery. Again, this is not an absolute rule, but seems to constitute one of the four ‘primitives’ of code-switching (Muysken 2000). Extractees and extraposees also have particularly long dependency distances and the relatively large number of mixed ones in the data therefore support the Distance Hypothesis. I will return to this point in the discussion of Table 5. The results from this section show that the code-switched speech results from the interaction between lexical elements and grammatical functions from German and English. The analysis furthermore revealed no significant difference between the number of German and English dependents for most syntactic relations German heads enter. This finding supports the hypothesis that the dependency relations German heads enter with English words are not very different to the ones they enter with same-language words. If we furthermore assume that heads determine the syntactic properties of the constructions they head, this result may also point towards German as a base language of the mixed code. Table 2 demonstrates that the mean distance of mixed dependency relations with a German head is similar to the one of monolingual German dependencies (0.85 versus 0.87). Table 5, however, reveals that most mixed grammatical relations (subjects, adjuncts, pre-dependent sharers and postdependent objects) are actually longer than their monolingual German Eva Duran Eppler 180 equivalents. The slightly shorter mean distance of mixed dependencies is mainly attributable to the large number of English complements with a German head, i.e. the English noun borrowings. >c s< >s >a a< >r r< >o o< >x x< >n n< mean German 0.65 0.54 0.07 1.1 0.37 1.64 0.07 0.78 0.83 2.16 0.33 0.87 Mix h G 0.1 0.7 0.5 2.9 0.52 0.95 0.29 1.38 0.5 0.33 2.07 0.33 0.85 Table 5: Comparison of the mean distances of monolingual German and mixed dependencies with a German head The fact that English (post-dependent) adjuncts are almost three times as far away from their German head as monolingual ones supports Treffers- Daller’s (1994), Mahootian & Santorini’s (1996) and Muyskens’ (2000) assumption that code-mixing is favoured in adjoined peripheral positions and the Distance Hypothesis. The next paragraphs compare monolingual English with mixed syntactic relations with an English head. Table 6 and the subsequent analysis reveal that the bilingual speech produced by the Austrian Jewish refugees living in London is a product of the interaction between words and grammatical rules from both their languages, i.e. English and German. Like the comparison between monolingual German and mixed syntactic relations with a German head, this section demonstrates that code-switching is not random, but that constraints derived from existing data are probabilistic rather than universal. c s >a a< r o >x x< n p Total E 22% 23% 12% 7% 16% 14% 0% 0% 4% 1% 596 h E 27% 7% 11% 22% 4% 11% 4% 8% 2% 0% 165 p 0.249 0.000 713 0.000 0.001 0.397 0.000 0.000 0.000 - Table 6: Comparison of monolingual English and mixed dependencies with an English head: percentages, p-values (significant differences are in bold) As for German, we get a highly significant result for subjects, with disproportionately fewer mixed ones (eight, including three subject pronouns). (5) *DOR: die don’t mind ## aber I do . (German/ English) Subjects are thus rarely switched in both directions. Absolute constraints on switching subjects or subject pronouns (Gumperz & Hernandez-Chavez 1971, Timm 1975) are therefore not supported by my data, but subjects are significantly less likely to be switched in both directions than many other syntactic relations. “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 181 16 The examples are clause objects which only count as extraposees because of an intervening post-modifying adverb. Table 6 furthermore demonstrates that my informants like switching for German adjuncts that precede their English heads. The difference is highly significant and, proportionally, there are more German pre-adjuncts of English words than English ones. (6) *LIL: also die dings ... hat es # in high heaven gelobt . (German/ English) The results for sharers are also highly significant, but for the opposite reason. Hardly any English verb shares its subjects with a German word. Hawkins (1986) assumes that English is less resistant to sharer structures than German because of generally increased semantic diversity of basic grammatical relations in English. If he is right, the low sharer numbers with English heads and German dependents in my data may indicate that the dependent rather than the head inhibits switching (see footnote 10). In this category, i.e. monolingual English vs. mixed with an English head, there are significantly more mixed extraposees and extractees than monolingual ones. The extraposee examples are not clear-cut, 16 but the extractee ones are. Example (7) illustrates a German long-distance (distance = 7) extraction. (7) *MEL: was die Dorit wieder geschmissen hat , I [/ ] I would have liked. In its default position the German object would have a distance of zero; because it has been dislocated to the clause periphery at the front, the dependency distance between like and was increases to seven. The significantly larger number of mixed extractions supports the Distance Hypothesis and Treffers-Daller’s (1995) findings and establishes code-switching in peripheral positions as a potential grammatical ‘primitive’ of code-switching (Muysken 2000). There is no significant difference between the monolingual English complements and the German complements of English heads in the data. This indicates that there are not many ‘borrowed’ German nouns in my corpus. As in the German case, objects are relatively easily switched and the difference is not significant (p = 0.397). The comparison between monolingual English dependencies and mixed ones with an English head shows that the words that enter mixed dependencies are either English or German, and that the type of syntactic relations they enter are also established by the grammatical rules of English and German. This is, the mixed variety results from the interaction between lexical elements and grammatical rules from the speakers’ two linguistic systems. The results furthermore confirm the hypotheses formulated on the basis of the data presented at the beginning of this section, i.e. that English Eva Duran Eppler 182 heads preferably enter into rather ‘loose’ syntactic relationships with their German dependents. This result lends even stronger support to the findings of Treffers-Daller (1994), Mahootian and Santorini (1996) and Muysken (2000) that code-switching is favoured in peripheral and/ or adjoined positions than the data presented in the previous section on German. English heads encourage switching to pre-adjuncts and extractees (and extraposed objects), but discourage switching to subjects (as with German heads) or sharers (unlike German heads). The comparison of the mean distances (Table 7) moreover strongly supports the assumption that the influence of a word’s language on that of its dependent seems to decrease with increased distance. >c s< >a a< >r >o >x x< >n mean English 0.22 0.07 1.26 0.38 0.53 0.5 - 0 0 0.49 Mix h E 0.84 0.9 1.33 0.78 2.12 0.18 0.45 3.5 - 1.26 Table 7: Comparison of the mean distances of monolingual English and mixed dependencies with an English head Table 7 shows that all mixed dependencies with an English head (apart from objects) are longer than their monolingual English counterparts. This result clearly supports the Distance Hypothesis. 3.5 Comparison of mixed syntactic relations I have already discussed all mixed dependency relations in comparison with their monolingual equivalents and will therefore only briefly comment on the comparison of mixed dependency relations to complete the grammar of the mixed code. c s >a a< r O >x x< N Total h G 59% 2% 7% 5% 13% 9% 0% 3% 1% 525 h E 27% 7% 11% 22% 4% 11% 4% 8% 2% 165 p 0.000 0.006 132 0.000 0.002 0.551 0.001 0.001 0.000 Table 8: Comparison of mixed dependency relations with a German and an English head: percentages and p-values (significant differences are in bold) Table 8 confirms that even in intra-sententially mixed utterances my informants hardly ever violate the rules of the two monolingual grammars they mix. There are no pre-dependent sharers, and only one German object and two German negatives in, for English, ungrammatical word order positions. For the aspects of the bilingual speakers’ grammar investigated in this study, “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 183 17 Notable exceptions to this generalisation are ‘borrowed’ English noun complements and predicative adjectives. i.e. grammatical functions, the research conducted convincingly proves that (a.) the speakers who code-switch possess two identifiable linguistic systems or languages, each with its identifiable grammatical rules and lexicon (Table 3); and (b.) code-switched speech results from the interaction between lexical elements and grammatical rules form these languages (Tables 4-8) (cf. Gardner-Cholrs & Edwards 2004). The scope of the present study does not allow for an in-depth analysis of all aspects of the bilingual speakers’ linguistics systems. Grammatical functions, however, are a fundamental aspect of every linguistic system, and the results obtained from the analysis of the German English bilinguals speech shows that it does not elude grammatical description (Gardner-Chloros 2004: 125). Table 8 furthermore illustrates that mixed dependency relations deviate much more from the expected distribution than their monolingual counterparts (more differences are significant). This supports Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ (2004) assumption that there is more variation in mixed than in monolingual utterances. To summarise the results from the more detailed analysis of individual syntactic relations presented in Sections 3.3-3.5, they confirm what was hypothesised on the basis of the less detailed analysis at the beginning of that section. The finding that German words more frequently act as heads of mixed dependency relations than English ones points towards German as a base language, especially if we assume that heads determine the grammatical character of the words they establish syntactic relations with. German heads in mixed dependencies furthermore act much more as they do in monolingual ones, but ‘loose’ long-distance relations are also favoured for switching, that is, pre-adjuncts and extractees. 17 In this respect the complement versus adjunct distinction proposed in one form or another by Mahootian and Santorini (1996), Treffers-Daller (1994), and Muysken (2000) appears to have some validity. When English words do function as heads of other language dependents, they predominantly enter syntactic relations that are not essential for building sentence structures, that is, adjunction and extraction (and extraposition). These grammatical relations are also associated with long distances. The fact that mixed syntactic functions with an English head deviate more from the monolingual English ones than their German counterparts furthermore seems to indicate that German grammar contributes more to the mixed code than the L2 grammar. The analysis of the dependency distances of the individual syntactic relations reveals that the trend emerging from the rough analysis, i.e. that mixed dependency distances are longer than monolingual ones, is actually Eva Duran Eppler 184 a far more robust finding. With two exceptions all dependency relations are longer than their monolingual counterparts. This finding therefore strongly supports the hypothesis that greater dependency distance increases the chances of code-switching. 4. Conclusion This paper follows Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ (2004) suggestion that, rather than seeking universal, predictive grammatical rules, research on code-switching should focus on the variability of bilingual grammars. The quantitative background to the grammatical analysis presented in Section 3.1 has shown that the repertoires of the bilingual speakers involved in this study are indeed poly-ideolectal (Gardner-Chloros & Edwards 2004: 103): the amounts of German and English in their bilingual speech differs significantly from speaker to speaker, as do the overall switch frequencies. Some socioand psycholinguistics factors, e.g. age of onset of the L2, seem to play are role, while others, e.g. number of years of exposure to English and membership in the same close-knit network of speakers, do not. Neither of these findings, however, means that the role of grammar is mediated or overridden by these factors. This becomes apparent from the grammatical analysis presented in the main sections of this paper (Sections 3.3-3.5). They present a quantitative account of the grammar of the German- English mixed code spoken by Jewish refugees from the Holocaust living in London. The syntactic analysis in terms of monoand bilingual grammatical functions demonstrates that, contrary to Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ (2004) claims, informal bilingual speech can be adequately and appropriately described in terms of grammar, and that the linguistic behaviour of codeswitching speakers does not elude grammatical description, although their mixed utterances are found to be more variable than their monolingual ones (Table 8). Deuchar, Muysken and Wang (2007: 298), working on codeswitching of entirely different language pairs, come to a similar conclusion. They state that “bilingual speech, just as monolingual speech, shows variation, but this variation is patterned or structured, not random.” The comparison of monolingual and mixed syntactic relations has shown that the bilingual informants possess two identifiable linguistic systems, each with its grammatical rules and lexicon (Sections 3.3 and 3.5), and that the mixed variety results from the interaction between lexical elements and grammatical rules from these two languages (Section 3.4). Only three codeswitches in the overall corpus violate syntactic rules of one of the two languages involved in this contact situation. Absolute constraints on where in a sentence code-switching can occur are not supported by my data (cf. Gardner-Chloros & Edwards 2004: 103, 110), but there is strong probabilis- “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 185 tic support for syntactic restrictions on code-mixing. Subjects, for example, are significantly less likely to be switched in both directions than adjuncts, extractees or extraposees. Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004) furthermore question the validity of the notion of a base system as either irrelevant, or failing to explain the facts. The notion of a “matrix” language as suggested by, for example, Joshi (1985) and Myers-Scotton (1993) does not seem to be relevant to the mixed utterances in the German/ English data. The quantitative analysis has, however, revealed that German contributes more word tokens and syntactic heads to the mixed variety than English, that German words behave more uniformly in monolingual and mixed dependencies than English words, and that code-switching is asymmetrical in the corpus, with more switches from German to English than vice versa. These results were interpreted as the informants’ L1, German, possiby functioning as a kind of base language, but in a very different sense to the notion of “matrix” language suggested by, for example, Joshi (1985) and Myers-Scotton (1993). Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004: 103) challenge grammatical approaches to code-switching on the ground that grammar is distinct from the processes driving speech production. A feature of the syntactic theory used for the grammatical analysis, i.e. dependency distance (the number of words between a head and a dependent) revealed a syntactic processing factor as a facilitator of code-switching. Variation in the overall dependency distances of monolingual and mixed syntactic relations led to the hypothesis that the influence of a word’s language on that of its dependent seems to decrease with increased distance. The more fine-grained examination of individual syntactic functions in my data supports this proposed explanation, i.e. the longer the distance, the more likely we are to encounter an other-language dependent, i.e. a code-switch. This finding is in line with previous research, which revealed a propensity for switching for dislocated constituents at the clause periphery (Treffers-Daller 1994, Muysken 2000). The Distance Hypothesis (Duran Eppler 2010), which states that greater dependency distance increases the chances of code-mixing, captures this fundamental principle of code-mixing on a more general processing level. So is the blueprint a red herring? In response to this question I would like to quote Newport and Aslin (2000: 3), who state that a corpus provides a rich source of information for identifying grammatical regularities. At the same time, however, access to the distributional properties of a corpus and the calculations one might perform on it only worsens the theoretical problem of limiting hypotheses: corpora provide yet larger infinities of things to calculate. The blueprint, which I take to be bilingual speech corpora, is not a red herring. Bilingual corpora, like all corpora, are messy in that they suggest Eva Duran Eppler 186 many analyses, but they also contain the information for identifying grammatical regularities. Grammatical approaches to code-switching can help us find them (despite variation). References Biber, D. / S. Conrad / R. Reppen (1998). Corpus linguistics. Investigating language structure. Cambridge: CUP. Deuchar, M. / P. Muysken / S. Wang (2007). “Structured Variation in Codeswitching: Towards an Empirically Based Typology of Bilingual Speech Patterns.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10/ 3. 298-338. Duran Eppler, E. (2010). Emigranto. The syntax of German / English code-swtiching. Vienna: Braumüller. Eppler, E. (2004). “… because dem Computer brauchst’ es ja nicht zeigen.”: because + German main clause word order.” International Journal of Bilingualism 8. 127-143. Eppler, E. (2010). “German/ English LIDES database.” Talkbank. http: / / talkbank.org (July 2010). Gardner-Chloros, P. / M. Edwards (2004). “Assumptions Behind Grammatical Approaches to Code-Switching: When the Blueprint Is a Red Herring.” Transactions of the Philological Society 102. 10-29. Gumperz, J.J. / E. Hernandez-Chavez (1971). “Cognitive aspects of bilingual communication.” In: W.H. Whiteley (ed.). Language use and social change. Oxford: OUP. 111-125. Hawkins, J.A. (1986). A comparative typology of English and German. London: Croom Helm. Hudson, R.A. (2007). Language networks: the new Word Grammar. Oxford: OUP. Hudson, R.A. (2010). An Introduction to Word Grammar. Cambridge: CUP. Mahootian, S. / B. Santorini (1996). “Code-switching and the complement/ adjunct distinction.” Linguistic Inquiry 27. 464-479. McSwann, J. (2009). “Generative approaches to code-switching.” In: B.E. Bullock / A.J. Toribio (eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching. New York: CUP. 309-338. Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual speech. Cambridge: CUP. Myers-Scotton, C. (1993). Dueling Languages. Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching. Oxford: Clarendon. Newport, E.L. / R.N. Aslin. (2000). “Innately Constrained Learning: Blending Old and New Approaches to Language Acquisition.” In: S.C. Howell / S.A. Fish / T. Keith-Lucas (eds.). Proceedings of the 24 th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 1-21. Pfaff, C. (1979). “Constraints on language mixing: intrasential code-switching and borrowing in Spanish/ English.” Language 55. 291-318. Poplack, S. (1980). “Sometime I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y terminó en español: toward a typology of code-switching.” Linguistics 18. 581-618. Romaine, S. (1986). “The syntax and semantics of the code-mixed compound verb in Punjabi-English bilingual discourse.” In: D. Tannen / J. Alatis (eds.). Language and Linguistics. The Interdependence of Theory, Data and Application. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. “Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch …” 187 Sankoff, D. / W. Labov (1979). “On the use of variable rules”. Language in Society 8. 189-222. Timm, L.A. (1975). “Spanish-English code-switching: el porque y how - not - to”. Romance Philology 28. 473-482. Treffers-Daller, J. (1994). Mixing two languages: French-Dutch contact in a comparative perspective. Berlin: de Gruyter. Van Hout, R. / P. Muysken (1994). “Modeling lexical borrowability.” Language Variation and Change 6. 39-62. Eva Duran Eppler English Language and Linguistics Roehampton University, London Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de NEUERSCHEINUNG JETZT BESTELLEN! Sandra Handl The conventionality of figurative language A usage-based study Language in Performance, Band 46 2011, 371 Seiten, 22 Abb., 54 Tab., €[D] 68,00/ SFr 96,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-6624-9 Das studienbuch positioniert sich zwischen den zahlreichen Einführungen zur Englischen Fachdidaktik (die entweder Sprachdidaktik oder Literaturdidaktik zum Gegenstand haben) und Büchern zum interkulturellen Lernen, Cultural Studies und Landeskunde. Leitfrage ist: Wie kann die »Kultur« eines anderen Landes repräsentativ unterrichtet werden? Wie prägt das Verständnis von Kultur und Sprache den Unterricht und welche Themen, Texte und Methoden sind hier zu favorisieren? Konkret geht es dabei dann um Themenbereiche wie die Zusammenhänge von Sprache und Kultur beim Erlernen und Verwenden einer Fremdsprache, die verschiedenen Formen der kommunikativen Kompetenz, die wachsende Rolle des Englischen als Sprache internationaler Kommunikation (lingua franca) und die Folgen für den Englischunterricht, die Veränderungen von Bewusstsein, Verhalten und Kommunikation durch die Neuen Medien und die resultierenden Folgen für den Englischunterricht sowie die neuen Lernziele der inter- und transkulturellen Kompetenz. 004711 Auslieferung Januar 2011.indd 20 19.01.11 16: 02 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Metaphor Revisited Cognitive-conceptual versus Traditional Linguistic Perspectives Hartmut Stöckl The present contribution reviews two of the most prominent and recent models of metaphor, one rather traditionally linguistic (interactive property attribution), the other cognitive (conceptual metaphor). By contrasting and comparing them the paper attempts a synthesis, which is to demonstrate the closeness and compatibility of the two approaches. Two small extensions seek to apply the methodological insights gained from the review of the theories to diachronic lexicology and to multimodal text analysis. Two major points emerge from those short applications. First, conceptual metaphor theory can make transparent what language development obscures in the process of semantic de-motivation. Second, metaphorical expressions intricately and densely interconnect in text and discourse to act as a powerful text-generating principle, which is also suited to connect various semiotic modes, e.g. picture and language. 1 Introduction: the significance of metaphor Metaphor is a central object of linguistic enquiry which has bothered scholars through the ages; and it is not hard to see why. First, metaphors confront us with the conundrum of saying one thing and meaning another, associated with a more or less distant idea - this concerns the notion of non-literal or figurative language use. Second, metaphorical language constantly reminds us of the apparently huge significance of mental imagery for the production and processing of natural language (Makkai 1993, Gibbs 1994). Third, the lexicons of natural languages are littered with the debris of metaphorical meaning transfers, a sign-generating principle that remains active to date. When examined etymologically an overwhelming proportion of the words Hartmut Stöckl 190 1 See Kövecses (2002: 68f.) for a succinct explanation of the central tenets of traditional metaphor theory. 2 Recent approaches to metaphor have tended to focus on researching the functions and forms of metaphor usage in text and discourse. For some programmatic ideas on this see Cameron 1999, Gibbs 1999a and Steen 1999. ultimately turn out to be dead or fossilized metaphors (Haser 2000, Sweetser 1991). Finally, all registers and genres re-produce or invent metaphorical expressions in large numbers - from the salient metaphor of a poem (e.g. there is a garden in her face, Thomas Campion 1567-1620), to the inconspicuous metaphor of a newspaper article (e.g. chilly encounter, give ground, be under fire) and the often highly suggestive metaphor of a scientific theory or taxonomy (e.g. big bang, junk DNA, gene taxi, zinfandel zebra fish). In short, it is its inevitability and its underlying playfulness of the mind which fascinates linguist and literary scholar alike. In the present paper I should like to show that theories of metaphor have come a long way - from treating metaphor as a fancy rhetorical trick with words 1 to acknowledging the all-pervasive cognitive operation surfacing in a multitude of linguistic expressions. The core of the article (2, 3) contrasts two current models, one linguistic, the other cognitive and aims at a synthesis of both approaches showing overlaps, potential interfaces and differences. Two application sections are to illustrate the usefulness of metaphor analysis in linguistics. They are meant to enable the reader to judge the merits of linguistic and cognitive approaches. In section 4, I will show how conceptual metaphor theory can be applied to historical semantics. Finally, in section 5 I will point out the use of metaphor as a text-generating principle and a powerful analytical device in the service of multimodal text analysis. 2 Linguistic vs. cognitive approaches to metaphor Looking back over a long story of theorizing (Ortony 1979, Kittay 1991, Goatly 1997, Jäkel 1999, Stern 2000), it seems that metaphor models are mainly concerned with three issues: (1) How is metaphor verbally produced? (2) How is it mentally or cognitively handled? and (3) What are its effects on the recipient? In the rhetorical tradition of antiquity (Aristotle 1954) and the Renaissance (Puttenham 1970) much thought went into examining the first and the third issues. Current accounts of metaphor 2 , however, are rather generalized models of metaphor’s mental representation and processing. As far as I can see, the two most consistent theories of metaphor available are Glucksberg’s (2001) property attribution model and an elaborated version of conceptual metaphor theory as developed by Lakoff/ Johnson (1980), perhaps best summarized in Kövecses’ 2002 textbook. Let me briefly explain Metaphor Revisited 191 Fig. 1: Schematic depiction of property attribution and compare these two approaches to metaphor in order to see their relative strengths and weaknesses. 2.1 Metaphor as interactive property attribution - a linguistic explanation A linguistic-semantic metaphor theory like Gluckberg’s treats any metaphorical utterance as a class inclusion statement, that is a statement that one semantic category is assigned to another. So in a utterance like In last night’s concert that Schumann string quartet was the hors d’oeuvre that whetted the audience’s appetite. (cf. fig. 1), hors d’oeuvre exemplifies a super-ordinate ad hoc category, call it ‘pleasurable situation of consumption’. The class-inclusion statement made in this utterance would be to attribute the string quartet to this category. In metaphor theory parlance we could say that in any metaphorical expression a topic (string quartet) is treated as belonging to a semantic category which the vehicle (hors d’oeuvre) calls up or creates ad hoc. Most importantly, then, semantic properties of the vehicle are transferred or attributed to the topic. In our example such semantic features as the savoury qualities, the small size/ amount of an hors d’oeuvre (compared with the main course), the location of starters in a sequence of courses, and associated with this, perhaps, the feeling of anticipation and joy connected with the eating experience would qualify as attributable vehicle qualities. From a linguistic point of view, what is crucial for the functioning of metaphor is the ‘dual reference’ of the vehicle. That is, any vehicle in a metaphorical utterance must be fit to simultaneously refer to both the designated “In last night’s concert that Schumann string quartet was the hors d’oeuvre In last night s concert, that Schumann string quartet was the hors d oeuvre that whetted the audience’s appetite.” SUPER-ORDINATE CATEGORY SUPER ORDINATE CATEGORY ‘pleasurable situation of consumption’ class inclusion - property attribution calls up - sets up to TOPIC string quartet VEHICLE hors d’oeuvre calls up sets up dual reference to to string quartet hors d oeuvre Dimensions lowvs. high- Properties ambiguous vs. interaction to g constraining g unambiguous Hartmut Stöckl 192 3 Other major linguistic theories of metaphor are aptly described and contrasted in Goatly 1997: 107ff., 116ff. 4 For an application of prototype theory to diachronic semantics and lexicology see Geeraerts 1997, 1999. A general account of prototype theory in linguistics is Taylor 1989. category (literally) and, as a result of some kind of semantic switching, to a super-ordinate category set up ad hoc (or entrenched in linguistic knowledge). A concomitant precondition of metaphor understanding (and construction) would also be to know which vehicle properties are to be transferred onto the topic. In order to explain this, the model makes use of Max Black’s (1962) interaction theory, 3 which says that topic and vehicle in any metaphorical utterance interact. Sam Glucksberg (2001: 53) introduces the notion of topic dimensions and vehicle properties, which come together in a metaphor and provide for a negotiation of semantic features. So, first, the topic sets a local context for the vehicle to operate by indicating a semantic frame which guides the transfer of potential vehicle properties, selecting some and rejecting others. Second, the vehicle makes available a number of properties which enable the combination with certain topics but not with others. Applied to our example, the Schumann string quartet is a relatively high-constraining topic because it only has few semantic dimensions available and relevant. Similarly, the vehicle hors d’oeuvre is capable of exemplifying an appropriate super-ordinate category fairly unequivocally due to its basic-level category status. So here a relatively high-constraining topic and a fairly unambiguous vehicle provide easily accessible metaphoric meaning. We might ask, at this point, what makes interactive property attribution a linguistic theory of metaphor. Its main claim is that metaphors are verbal statements about the inclusion of one semantic category in another. So it is semantic knowledge, knowledge of word, phrase and sentence meanings and their relations to categories and concepts which informs the handling of metaphors. Treating metaphors as linguistic phenomena also means to assume they are not themselves stored as fixed mental units so that they have to be construed every time they are encountered. In order to construct or interpret a metaphor language users have to engage in an active utterance processing. Perhaps, most importantly, interactive property attribution relies heavily on prototype semantics. The central element in the model is the semantic switch from the vehicle given (hors d’oeuvre) to the super-ordinate category instantiated by it (‘pleasurable situation of consumption’). For this to work flexibly, language users need to have a representation of semantic concepts organized along prototypes, allowing for graded membership in radial categories and semantic concepts with fuzzy boundaries. 4 Experimenting a little with our example, it is easy to see that basic level categories obviously work best to create the envisaged super-ordinate category. If we choose a vehicle Metaphor Revisited 193 5 Cognitivists are adamant in pointing out that any similarities involved in metaphor cannot be pre-existing. (Kövecses 2002: 71ff.) on a higher level, say food, the metaphorical statement is put at stake, whereas selecting a lower-level category with a higher degree of specificity, say tomato salad, asparagus soup or prawn cocktail, the metaphorical statement stays intact but shifts its focus. A vehicle then needs to be able to function both as a classifier (‘food’/ ’consumption’) and as a prototypical instance of a category (‘typical part of a meal’). Property attribution also preserves some of the older metaphor theories, most notably the interaction and comparison view. There is interaction between the semantic frame of a topic and selectable vehicle features. But interaction might also quite suitably be interpreted as the wider interrelation between metaphorical utterance and the surrounding discourse, which gives the language user keys to potential readings of a specific metaphorical expression. This would be a pragmatic and textual interpretation of interaction theory. It stresses an idea crucial in social semiotics (van Leeuwen 2005: 4f.) that meanings made from signs are hardly ever definite, but open up “fields of possible meanings” to be navigated by the discerning text recipient. Comparison comes into play in working out metaphorical meaning, too, as determining which features to project from vehicle to topic might involve - more often than not - establishing similarities or analogies, even if only on a very abstract level (concerts are like dinners). 5 Fig. 2: Schematic depiction of conceptual metaphor “In last night’s concert, that Schumann string quartet was the hors d’oeuvre that whetted the audience’s appetite.” pp Conceptual metaphor activates instantiates IDEAS ARE FOOD TARGET SOURCE producing ---------preparing TARGET ‘ideas’ SOURCE ‘food’ perceiving ----------taking in understanding ---processing well-being -----nourishment Sk l l Ri h Skeletal Structure Rich Knowledge utilization of source knowledge highlighting of target aspects partial mapping perceived structural similarity ‘mind’ = ‘container’, ‘ideas’ go into ‘container’ Hartmut Stöckl 194 2.2 Conceptual metaphor - a cognitive explanation Contrary to a semantic explanation, cognitive theory locates metaphor in conceptual structure, not in linguistic knowledge. Metaphor is thus granted a mental representation which underlies the functioning of language. Metaphorical linguistic expressions, therefore, merely realize certain conceptual metaphors. This view claims that metaphors are systematic connections or sets of mappings between conceptual domains, which come about through correspondences between target and source domain. What underlies our example (cf. fig. 2) is the conceptual metaphor IDEAS ARE FOOD . Here, IDEAS is the ‘target’, the domain we are trying to understand by drawing conceptual entities from the ‘source’ domain, FOOD . I DEAS ARE FOOD makes available a number of conceptual mappings - these are perceived structural similarities between the two concepts. preparing food producing an idea taking in food perceiving an idea processing food understanding an idea nourishment/ pleasure from food physical/ mental well being from an idea For these similarities to become obvious at all, the mind needs to be conceived of as a container and ideas as entities which we receive from outside the mind and which can go into the container. Lakoff & Johnson (1980: 25ff.) have called these basic-level connections between concepts ontological metaphors, which, in turn, derive from non-metaphorical assumptions about the human body gained from physical and sensory experience (body - container, food - objects and substances, objects go into container). So here is a step-by-step explanation of how metaphor, or rather the conceptual structure underlying it, manages to provide similarity between distant domains. It should be easy to see the conceptual metaphor IDEAS ARE FOOD in our sample utterance, provided you know that hors d’oeuvres includes certain types of food and that string quartets are a musical genre. However, there is additional knowledge that we bring to bear on the interpretation of the metaphorical utterance. What we know about hors d’oeuvres is that they precede the main course in a sequence of meals all contributing to a social event regulated by convention. So there are implications here of small size or amount and little time needed to consume the food. Also, we know that hors d’oeuvres are relished by many as food to increase feelings of anticipation. These pieces of knowledge can all be mapped onto the target and enrich the reading of the underlying conceptual metaphor. Kövecses (2002: 93ff.) calls this mapping of everyday rich knowledge of the source metaphorical entail- Metaphor Revisited 195 ments. Any aspect of the source thus has conceptual elements, which together constitute the source’s entailment potential. Fig. 3: Various aspects of the target domain MUSIC How much of the entailment potential is mapped onto the target depends on the image-schematic structure of the target concept. Some elements are compatible with it, others are not. So while taste, short duration and location in the sequence of a meal can be mapped onto the string quartet, chewing and swallowing are unlikely candidates in this local context. On the other hand, talking about complex and long symphonies one could utilize other aspects of the source domain. For example, one might say: The early Mendelssohn symphonies are more palatable than the later ones., or This innovative symphony gave the audience something to chew on. Interestingly enough, if we sample possible ways of talking about music in culinary terms (cf. fig. 3), it is obvious that a whole variety of aspects and elements from the domain food can be used to talk about the target domain (music). The skeletal structure of the concept ‘musical composition’ obviously lends itself to focusing the following aspects: high quality of the music/ experience (champagne, vintage, icing on the cake, cherry on the trifle), a knowledge/ enjoyment of music (relish, taste, savour), accessibility of the music (palatable, to chew on) and the composition/ character of the music (blend, concoction/ to concoct, hotchpotch, bland/ spicy). So here is one way in which conceptual metaphor theory allows for a systematic inspection of linguistic expressions. That was a champagne performance of a Schumann string quartet TARGET ASPECT 1: ‘high quality of music/ experience’ That was a champagne performance of a Schumann string quartet. The opus 41 n ° 2 is vintage Schumann. The Schumann string quartet was the icing on the cake/ the cherry on the trifle. I particularly relished the Schumann string quartet. The audience savoured every note of the Schumann string quartet. H ’ t fi d t t i i TARGET ASPECT 2: ‘knowledge/ enjoyment of music’ He’s got a refined taste in music. TARGET ASPECT 3: ‘accessibility of music’ That innovative choral symphony gave the audience something to chew on. I find Mendelssohn’s early symphonies more palatable than his later ones. TARGET ASPECT 4: ‘character of music’ His new symphony is a hotchpotch of diverse ingredients. Still it seems bland. Dvorak’s late string quartets are a spicy concoction of rhythms and tunes. TARGET ASPECT 4: character of music Hartmut Stöckl 196 6 The example draws on Kövecses 2002: 84ff. Another way would be to examine how many different sources can be applied to a given target. With a more abstract target like, for example, ‘happiness’ a whole list of possible sources can be drawn up, which demonstrates how various source domains are needed to structure the target to the full ( HAPPINESS IS BEING OFF THE GROUND , VITALITY , FLUID IN A CONTAINER , LIGHT , INSANITY , NATURAL FORCE , AN ANIMAL LIVING WELL , AN OPPONENT , etc.) 6 . This phenomenon is known as the partial nature of metaphorical mapping (cf. Kövecses 2002: 79ff.). In any one metaphorical linguistic expression it is usually only one aspect of the source which is utilized to highlight one aspect in the target. 3 Comparing linguistic and cognitive metaphor models - a synthesis Let us now briefly compare the linguistic and the cognitive metaphor models. My claim is that, given the ambiguous evidence we have from psychological experiments, the two models do not necessarily contradict one another. They could - in a pluralistic vein - even be synthesized to form a more flexible model. In comparison with property attribution, which portrays metaphor as a dynamic semantic process of meaning construction, conceptual metaphor theory seems rather static. Once you hold the required conceptual metaphor in your mind, you will be able to understand any metaphorical linguistic expression that refers back to it. So, whereas here, metaphorical understanding seems to mainly boil down to ‘mechanical’ recognition or retrieval, in property attribution it is active semantic engineering, which also factors in pragmatic and context information. Consequently, bold and unconventional creative metaphors can more suitably be explained by property attribution. In contrast, the conventional, familiar metaphorical expression rather lends itself to conceptual metaphor. On the other hand, there is also an aspect of mental economy involved, which somehow favours conceptual metaphor theory: It would seem more economical to be able to process a metaphorical expression by retrieving underlying metaphorical representations which come equipped with a whole set of mappings than having to work out topic dimensions and vehicle properties and make them compatible. What needs to be considered, too, is how both theories relate to the pictorial or sensory nature often granted to metaphorical expressions. Here, again, it would seem that conceptual metaphor fares better as it offers an explanation of why there is metaphor in the first place. Pre-linguistic sensory Metaphor Revisited 197 7 For a discussion of some of the current processing models see Brugman/ Lakoff 1988 and Cacciari/ Tabossi 1993. and motor experience is used to conceptualise our understanding of abstract, intangible phenomena. This basic notion of metaphor as embodied experience (Johnson 1987) emphasizes the associative tie between language and the perceptual system (i.e. vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch). In contrast, property attribution cannot really explain why many metaphors are pictorial or experiential as here metaphor understanding is based on the manipulation of undifferentiated semantic features. On further reflection, however, the differences outlined have to be put into perspective. For one thing, activating a conceptual metaphor need not necessarily be as static as one may assume. Language users will have to focus on those available mappings which bear on the metaphorical expression in question. They are also, as we have seen, free to add from their rich knowledge anything which might facilitate metaphorical entailments (Kövecses 2002: 93ff.). Taking these processes into account it seems metaphor recognition or retrieval is less automatic and more active than may be assumed. On the other hand, interactive property attribution is likely to be less of an active process, the more metaphors are lexicalized and conventional. In this case - as McGlone (2001: 99) argues - the metaphorical meaning is already part and parcel of the semantic features of the vehicle. Consequently, understanding the metaphor might simply involve retrieving the metaphorical reading of an expression. Summing up, both models are weak in one respect, which traditional linguists would probably see as paramount. Both explain metaphor understanding as an analysis of their semantic components - either on the basis of conceptual mappings or knowledge of semantic features. With any lexicalized metaphorical linguistic expression (e.g. opaque idioms: bite the dust, kick the bucket) the more likely hypothesis might be that its meaning does not need to be derived but can simply be retrieved from the mental lexicon. 7 As the issue of the mental representation of language is bound to remain a minefield, it is probably safest to say that in any process model of metaphor the following components might be utilized: (1) semantic features, frames and scripts of topic/ target and vehicle/ source; (2) [if available] conceptual metaphor and its mappings, (3) encyclopaedic, symbolic and sociocultural knowledge; (4) sensory experience. 4 Extension/ application 1: historical semantics This section aims to show how conceptual metaphor theory can usefully be applied to diachronic lexicology. It does so by presenting a brief sketch of an Hartmut Stöckl 198 8 For a distinction between the two phenomena from a cognitivist perspective see Kövecses 2002: 143ff. and Radden 2002. investigation into the metaphorical etymology of English expressions for stupidity. This small chapter attempts to outline just some of the ways in which onomasiological studies of subsections of the English lexicon may benefit from an historical approach to conceptual metaphor. In diachronic linguistics, metaphor and metonymy 8 have long been acknowledged as catalysts of semantic change (cf. Traugott 1985, Blank 1999). Why semantic change occurs in the first place is a matter of much speculation. According to Rudi Keller’s (1994) idea of an “invisible-hand process”, it is the language performance of individual speakers and its cumulative effects which form the primary source of all semantic shifts. In this view, metaphorical expressions are innovations aimed at impressing the communicative partner (Geeraerts 1999: 103 calls this hearer-oriented expressivity). If such innovations are perceived as useful by a speech community, they will be adopted, irrespective of how obvious the metaphorical motivation of the expression is. Semantic change might conveniently be subdivided into three stages. Lüdtke (1999: 50) labels these outset - the single act of innovation in speech, intermediate - a period during which the speech community gradually adopts a new expression or a new sense of an existing word, and outcome - a point in time when the innovation is established and has become part of normal language behaviour. Whereas at stage 1 a borrowed or newly coined word seems novel, it gradually loses its novelty during stage 2, and at stage 3 it has become fully integrated into the system. This effect of increasing familiarity and decreasing salience is normally termed de-motivation. Historical linguists try to trace the original motivation behind semantic innovations and shifts, that is, they are interested in re-motivating the sense of a word. To engage in this kind of work means to focus on the cognitive processes which members of a speech community must have practiced when they innovated or made sense of lexical-semantic innovations. This job could easily be called cognitive diachrony, as Lüdtke (1999) suggests. The interface between historical semantics and cognitive linguistics offers two perspectives. On the one hand, diachronic linguistics might be considered a testing ground for all kinds of cognitive theories of language. On the other hand, cognitive theory can be used as a practical toolkit in doing diachronic linguistics. Conceptual metaphor theory proved to be especially powerful here as it helped explain processes of lexical-semantic change. It has been applied to words of cognition and emotion in Sweetser’s (1990) and Haser’s (2000) work, to the polysemy of prepositions in Brugmann/ Lakoff’s (1988) and Boer’s (1996) studies and most recently to lexical-semantic fields in the projects of Fabiszak (2002) and Gevaert (2002). Within Metaphor Revisited 199 the broad scope of diachronic linguistics all these lines of research are underrepresented. In order to illustrate how semantic domains can be studied diachronically from a cognitive perspective, I shall, in the next section, briefly present my own rough-and-ready investigation into the conceptualisation of STUPIDITY in the English lexicon. My methodological approach was simple: From a thesaurus I sampled words denoting the quality of stupidity. These were either adjectives and their corresponding abstract nouns or idiomatic expressions. All adjectives (+ nouns) were then checked against the OED in order to determine their origin, underlying semantics and the time when they entered the English language. This kind of information was supposed to clarify two points: (1) How many different conceptualisations of ‘stupidity’ are there? (2) Is there a way of charting the historical development of those linguistic conceptualisations? What is important to note at this point is that the different conceptualisations can only be worked out by looking at the original, i.e. historical senses of the lexemes involved and tracing how these shifted to become usable as expressions of ‘stupidity’. (Example: mad < Goth. gamaips, original sense: ‘crippled’ later used for quality of the mind) The first observation is that there is quite a number of different ways of lexically representing the domain of stupidity. All in all, 9 major conceptualisations can be defined (cf. fig. 4). On further inspection, it seems that some are metaphorical in nature ( STUPIDITY IS HAVING BLUNT INSTRUMENTS ), whereas others seem to be based on metonymy ( STUPIDITY IS PROVOKING LAUGHTER ). Most conceptualisations build on the ontological metaphors THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and/ or MENTAL ACTIVITY IS PHYSICAL ACTIVITY . This is in accordance with the folk knowledge that the location of intelligence (stupidity = lack of intelligence) is the brain and that some processing needs to be going on inside it. As there is no way of immediately inspecting the brain and its activities, all sorts of basic physical properties have been projected onto them. Perhaps the most prominent and frequent sources in the conceptual metaphors for stupidity are: ABSENCE OF BRAIN SUBSTANCE , IMPROPER BRAIN SUBSTANCE , IMPAIRED SENSORY PERCEPTION and PHYSICAL WEAKNESS (this, in fact, is based on a metonymy: BODY FOR THE MIND ). Other sources complement the conceptualisation. There is the obvious connection of stupidity with SLOWNESS and BEING BEHIND SCHEDULE (ontologically), which add a temporal dimension. Another conceptualisation establishes a link between BLUNT INSTRUMENTS - and by implication - the action of CUTTING , which indicates one way of how we conceive of human rational cognition. Hartmut Stöckl 200 Fig. 4: Metaphorical conceptualisations of ‘stupidity’ viewed etymologically A sideways glance at major conceptualisations of intelligence reveals antonymic source domains in similar conceptual metaphors. So, intelligence is perceived as SPEEDY PROCESSING (quick), SHARP INSTRUMENTS (acute, penetrating, sharp, trenchant, smart, sagacious), SPLITTING OPEN (perceptive) and PHYSICAL STRENGTH (able, clever). Similarly, LIGHT (bright, brilliant) and SEEING (alert, perspicacious, insight) are source domains in clear opposition to the domain of darkness found in fig. 4. In a historical perspective, the oldest expressions (OE/ ME) seem to be based on the conceptualisation of stupidity as an ABSENCE OF A SUBSTANCE - e.g. memory, attention, consciousness, care (e.g. unwise 825, mindless 900, witless 1000, gormless 1200, foolish 1275). The only non-negated adjectival meaning here is foolish, which equates the contents of the brain with air as a folk equivalent of nothing. Conceiving of stupidity as SLOW PROCESSING (slow 888), as HAVING BLUNT INSTRUMENTS (dull 940), as IM - PAIRED PERCEPTION (dumb 1000, blind 1000) and as PHYSICAL WEAKNESS (mad 1000) is equally old. ME introduces the conceptual connection between stupidity and IRREGULAR OR HIGHLY IDIOSYNCRATIC BEHAVIOUR (idiotic 1300, lunatic 1290) as well as DARKNESS (dim 1350). In EME new conceptualisations appear, such as understanding stupidity as IMPROPER BRAIN SUBSTANCE (thick 1597, crass 1660, half-baked 1621), as PROVOKING LAUGH - TER (ridiculous 1550) and as BEING BEHIND SCHEDULE (immature 1635 puerile 1685). Of course, it was particularly during the EME period that conceptualisations already existing at that time were added to by frequent borrowings from Latin. The same holds for later stages in the development of English, when older conceptualisations are taken up again. 1 absence of substance witless < ON vit 2 physical weakness mad < GOTH gamaips 3 slow - behind schedule immature < LAT immaturus witless < ON vit ‘memory, attention, consciousness’ mad < GOTH gamaips ‘crippled’ immature < LAT immaturus ‘untimely’/ ‘unripe’ TARGET 4 bad brain substance LAT 5 irregular behaviour idiotic < GR idios ‘privately peculiar’ TARGET ‘stupidity is…’ crass < LAT. crassus ‘solid’/ ‘thick’/ ‘dense’ 6 darkness dim < ON dimmr ‘obscure’/ ‘dark’ 8 impaired senses dumb < GOTH dumbs 7 blunt instruments obtuse < LAT obtusus 9 provoking laughter ridiculous < LAT ‘obscure’/ ‘dark’ dumb < GOTH dumbs ‘mute’ obtuse < LAT. obtusus ‘dulled’/ ‘blunt’ ridiculous < LAT. riduculus > ridere ‘laugh’ Metaphor Revisited 201 9 Sjöström 1998 is an account similar to mine exploring, however, a different semantic domain. It could, however, serve as a starting point for interlanguage-comparison. 10 For a general discussion of the connection between metaphor and models of culture see Gibbs 1999b and Kövecses 1999. What can be generalized from this diachronic look at conceptualisation is that apparently stupidity was initially regarded as the absence of something unknown. Subsequently the notion of what could be inside the container guided further conceptualisation. At this early stage there is both a focus on brain substance and brain ‘physics’. Attributing qualities to the mental substance is obviously the guiding momentum behind innovation in the EME period. But also behavioural effects of stupidity are metonymically used. Finally, it seems that the majority of the conceptualisations were basically in existence as early as OE and ME, while later stages merely refined them and added lexemes to them. The practical use of studying semantic fields in a cognitive-diachronic vein seems obvious: such studies provide insights into which “metaphtonymies” (Goossens 1990) drive the semantic development of the vocabulary for a specific domain. This may shed light onto conceptualisations current at certain historical periods, thus telling us something about the mindset of a speech community at a given point in time. Also, such information can be put to use in comparative linguistics, where one might look at the spectrum of existing conceptualisations in a number of different languages and inspect how richly or poorly lexicalized they are. 9 Which part socio-cultural factors play in giving prominence to some conceptual metaphors and suppressing others can also be revealed by diachronic semantic studies. 10 A few cautionary words, however, also seem in place here. It must remain a matter of speculation whether the introduction of a new vocabulary item for an existing concept necessarily involves fully comprehending its underlying conceptual metaphor or metonymy. This might be a part of a lexical innovation at the outset, but need not be. As for the historical development, the reliability of the OED is perhaps doubtful. In order to give an adequate account of the evolution of a semantic field, one would need to consult corpus evidence. This is the only way to move beyond alleged first appearance and to be able to say something about the frequency and real stylistic currency of a word in various text types at various historical stages. 5 Extension/ application 2: multimodality - text linguistics So far I have only been looking at metaphor in isolated linguistic expressions and utterances. However, the real site of metaphor generation and understanding, after all, is pragmatically situated text and discourse, especially Hartmut Stöckl 202 11 Forceville 1996 combines conceptual metaphor theory with relevance theory and points out how recipients need to establish relevance in order to be able to allocate pictorial elements or lexemes to source or target. semiotic objects that involve other modes beside language. So, in order to do full justice to metaphor one needs to ask how metaphors behave in texts. This final section intends to sensitize us to the fact that an investigation of metaphor in use has to draw on both a linguistic and a cognitive account of metaphor. The cognitive angle seems profitable when we are interested in underlying conceptual domains used in texts and the metaphoric mappings between them. The linguistic view will particularly take note of the various forms and expressions in which metaphors materialize and the subtle semantic differences between them. It takes a text-linguistic and textpragmatic viewpoint to work out the interconnections between various metaphorical expressions and their functional impacts on the text. In what follows I will very briefly show how these different methodologies may be applied in practical text analysis. The claims I will be making stem from my work on language-image texts (Stöckl 2004) and from observations on recent trends in social semiotics (van Leeuwen 2005). Even though the sample text (cf. fig. 5) might be an extreme, it is well suited to point to at least three aspects of metaphor usage and analysis in the multimodal text. 1. Metaphors can be constructed in modes other than language (cf. Kövecses 2002: 57ff.), e.g. in visual images. Accompanying verbal text, however, plays a crucial part in focusing and shaping the visual metaphor. 2. In texts, metaphorical expressions may be interconnected to form intricate patterns of semantic and pragmatic relations, which contribute to the coherence of the text. Here, metaphor acts as a text-generating principle. 3. In a very wide cognitive view, metaphor can be understood as a meaning making principle active in and across various semiotic modes. Any sign may be understood metaphorically when recipients activate, from their semantic experience, meanings which are related to the sign through contiguity, co-occurrence in perception, or similarity. Let us take a look at the Toshiba advert (cf. fig. 5). Its pictorial message displays a hybrid object, which merges features of tins with those of laptops. In the discourse context of advertising, where the advertised product takes priority, recipients are likely to perceive this visual metaphor as a statement about laptops. 11 So the laptop acts as the target and the fish tin as the source in a conceptual metaphor, which - however vaguely - brings together the domains of computer manufacturing and fish processing (i.e. Metaphor Revisited 203 Fig. 5: Toshiba Advertisement, The Sunday Times Magazine 14 September 1997: 2f. We’ve squeezed a desktop into a portable. No catch (1). The only difference between a Toshiba portable and a desk-top is scale. When it comes to size and weight the two are oceans apart (2). And for power, function and features our portables are no small fry (3). Features like the best chips, Intel MMX, the largest screens, 13’3” and the fastest CD-ROM drives, mean our portables are a good haul (4). And the PC Card Slots on every Toshiba mean our portables can take the bait of most networks (5). Whilst our innovative firsts have always created waves (6) amongst desktop and portable manufacturers alike. It’s because we would rather lead the shoal than swim with it (7), that makes us the world leader in portable computing. Our portables have consistently landed prizes from PC Magazine for Service, Reliability and Technical Innovation. If you’d like to take the plunge (8) and see why more people are working wherever and whenever they like, call us on … Hopefully you’ll agree, Toshiba really do have portable computing canned (9) … MANUFACTURING LAPTOPS IS CANNING FISH ). This reading of the metaphor is also facilitated by the claim in the headline We’ve squeezed a desktop into a portable, which foregrounds purposeful actions involving tins and laptops rather than just the objects. Against the backdrop of this visual metaphor a fair number of metaphorical expressions link up to create an intricate semantic network (cf. fig. 6). First, individual idioms are connected because the lexemes in them (e.g. catch, ocean, small fry, haul, bait, waves, shoal, to swim, plunge, canned) refer - in their literal senses - either to the semantic frame ‘sea/ water’ or ‘fishing’. Second, the idioms also pragmatically cohere, as - in their meta- Hartmut Stöckl 204 phorical senses - each fulfils prototypical speech acts of an advertising text. So some promise product qualities (no small fry, good haul), others describe or evaluate them (take the bait from most networks), while yet others appeal to the customer (take the plunge) and promote the advertiser’s image (rather lead the shoal than swim with it, have portable computing canned). Third, and most importantly, the metaphorical expressions generate strong coherence as all of them fulfil functions in extending and colouring the metaphor which the picture plus headline introduced and which organizes the text conceptually. SOURCE DOMAIN METAPHORICAL EXPRESSION TARGET DOMAIN Action of catching no catch (1) Toshiba/ company Sea/ water oceans apart (2), create waves (6), take the plunge (8) Market Quantity/ quality of catch no small fry (3), good haul (4) Quality computers Instruments for catching take the bait from most networks (5) Flexible instruments Fish rather lead the shoal than swim with it (7) Business philosophy/ claim Processing/ canning have portable computing canned (9) Perfection Fig. 6: Metaphor as a text-generating principle - metaphorical expressions and their sources and targets for the example in fig. 5 Readers may only arrive at this kind of reading if they invest semiotic work and open up the meaning potentials inherent in the idioms and their textual structure. It is social semiotics among other schools which emphasises that despite the conventionality of expressions, there is nothing static about meaning making in texts. In the Toshiba advert recipients need to somehow oscillate between literal and metaphorical interpretations, but they also have to activate conventional knowledge of relevant domains (computing/ fishing) and relate them to each other. It is not surprising then that van Leeuwen (2005: 29ff.) in his latest textbook advocates a very wide notion of metaphor. In particular, he argues that nearly all signs in any modality can be extended or enriched metaphorically, when the sign users activate the experiential basis of the signs in their contexts. In the sample text, we, given our knowledge of computer networks, have no difficulty interpreting bait as data which computers draw from networks. Metaphor in this broad sense would then encompass all transfers of meaning conditioned by knowing that any one Metaphor Revisited 205 sign is linked to another - be this through similarity (haul/ purchase), contiguity (tin/ fishing), or causality (leading/ better). 6 Conclusions What I hope to have shown in this paper is that metaphor must count as an extremely powerful cognitive process - both in the historical development of languages as well as in their current use in text and discourse. Even though we cannot at present know which mental reality metaphor has, it definitely drives semantic change and innovation. One main point of my argument was that it may be helpful to be pluralistic in explaining the workings of metaphor. What are often portrayed as mutually exclusive theories are in fact rather the starting point for a synthesis which enriches our understanding. 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(1999b). “Taking Metaphor out of our Heads and Putting it into the Cultural World.” In: Raymond Gibbs / Gerard Steen (eds.). Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 145-166. Glucksberg, Sam (2001). Understanding Figurative Language. From Metaphors to Idioms. New York: Oxford University Press. Goatly, Andrew (1997). The language of metaphors. London: Routledge. Goossens, Louis (1990). “Metaphtonymy. The Interaction of Metaphor and Metonymy in Expressions of Linguistic Action.” Cognitive Linguistics 1. 323-340. Haser, Verena (2000). “Metaphor in Semantic Change.” In: Antonio Barcelona (ed.). Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 171-194. Jäkel, Olaf (1999). “Kant, Blumenberg, Weinrich: Some Forgotten Contributions to the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor.” In: Raymond W. Gibbs / Gerard Steen (eds.). Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 9-29. Johnson, Mark (1987). 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Makkai, Adam (1993). “Idiomaticity as a Reaction to l’arbitraire du signe in the Universal Process of Semeio-genesis.” In: Cristina Cacciari / Patrizia Tabossi (eds.). Idioms: Processing, Structure, and Interpretation. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. 297-324. McGlone, Matthew S. (2001). “Concepts as Metaphors.” In: Sam Glucksberg (ed.). Metaphor Revisited 207 Understanding Figurative Language. From Metaphors to Idioms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 90-107. Ortony, Andrew (ed.) (1979). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxford English Dictionary (1989). Second Edition. Oxford: Clarendon. Puttenham, George (1970). The Arte of English Poesie. Reprint. Ed. by Gladys Doidge Willcock / Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Radden, Günter (2002). “How Metonymic are Metaphors? ” In: René Dirven / Ralf Pörings (eds.). Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. 407-434. Sjöström, Sören (1998). “From Vision to Cognition. A Study of Metaphor and Polysemy in Swedish.” In: Jens Allwood / Peter Gärdenfors (eds.). Cognitive Semantics. Meaning and Cognition. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 67-85. Steen, Gerard (1999). “Metaphor and Discourse: Towards a Linguistic Checklist for Metaphor Analysis.” In: Lynne Cameron / Graham Low (eds.). Researching and Applying Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 81-104. Stern, Josef Judah (2000). Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stöckl, Hartmut (2004). Die Sprache im Bild - Das Bild in der Sprache. Zur Verknüpfung von Sprache und Bild im massenmedialen Text. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Sweetser, Eve E. (1991). From Etymology to Pragmatics. Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, John R. (1989). Linguistic Categorization. Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Traugott, Elizabeth (1985). “On Regularity in Semantic Change.” Journal of Literary Semantics 14. 155-173. Hartmut Stöckl FB Anglistik & Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This book presents the first detailed empirical study of irregular verb morphology in the German-English interlanguage. Starting with a theoretical in-depth account of irregular verb morphology both in English and German, three widely discussed theses about its nature are tested against a wide range of empirical data, both from L1 and L2. Although the findings partly confirm existing models and theories, the data also show the need for further re-examination of some fundamental questions through associative or probabilistic computer models. All in all this book provides a rigorous, profound and thought-provoking discussion of the phenomenon in question, involving an up-to-date revision of existing theories as well as the cross-linguistic examination of L1 and L2 data by an array of sophisticated multivariate statistical models. It is mainly directed towards university students of German and English linguistics, psycholinguistics and language acquisition at an advanced level. Thomas Wagner Interlanguage Morphology Irregular Verbs in the Mental Lexicon of German-English Interlanguage Speakers Language in Performance, Band 42 2010, 194 Seiten, €[D] 58,00/ SFr 98,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6547-1 028310 Auslieferung April 2010.indd 17 23.04.10 10: 33 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein”: Verbesserte Informationsverarbeitung durch Supertexte: Pilotstudie zur Anwendung des Prinzips der kognitiven Plausibilität Margit Reitbauer It crossed my mind: Improved knowledge transfer through supertexts: Pilot study on the application of the principle of cognitive plausibility to linear texts. The present study aims at assessing the impact of modelling textual structures on knowledge transfer. 20 students of English and American Studies of Graz University, who were on the linguistic level C1, took part in a reading test series in which they had to read a linear text on the topic “How does the human brain work? ” The participants were tested on a recall and a reading comprehension task. In a pre-test the number of propositions had been determined by test readers. The experimental group was provided with a linear text (457 words) and an additional networked supertext. This supertext was created by applying the principle of cognitive plausibility to linear texts. The principle of cognitive plausibility refers to the ability to restructure one’s knowledge in adaptive response to changing situational demand. The supertext restructured the original text by keeping the original question-answer pattern of the linear text and outlining its informational structure i.e. the macropropositions with their respective micropropositions in form of flow charts. The flow charts displayed the semantic structure of the text as a network of propositions. The control group only got the linear text. In accordance with the principle of cognitive plausibility, which so far has mainly been attributed to hypertexts, it was assumed that the supertext would facilitate the building of networked knowledge structures and the integration of new knowledge. The results of this pilot study suggest that the modelling of textual structures based on the principle of memory structures has a positive effect on both knowledge transfer and recall of propositions. A recognition posttest, which was conducted one week later, confirmed the results of the first test series. The group who had worked with the networked supertext also reached higher scores in the recognition test. Margit Reitbauer 210 Einleitung In der vorliegenden empirischen Studie, die sich mit der visuellen Modellierung von Textstrukturen zur Förderung des Leseverstehen und der Behaltensleistung beschäftigt, werden nach einer kurzen Einführung in Aspekte der multisensorischen Informationsverarbeitung folgende Hypothesen überprüft werden: • Können Textinhalte besser verarbeitet und behalten werden, wenn sie durch bildhafte Assoziationen und Visualisierungen in Form von Supertexten semantisiert werden? • Entstehen durch die Kontiguität von Supertext und Bild multikodale Behaltensvorteile? • Kann der Rezipient durch Supertexte bildhafte und propositionale Repräsentationen leichter referentiell aufeinander beziehen und sie integrieren? Die Hypothesen beruhen im Wesentlichen auf Paivios Theorie der behaltensfördernden Wirkung mentaler Repräsentationen im Rahmen einer dualen Kodierung von verbal begrifflichen Logogenen und bildhaft-anschaulichen Imagenen. 1. Aspekte der multisensorischen Informationsverarbeitung Bei der Verarbeitung von Wörtern und Bildern werden sprachliche Zeichen durch verbale oder non-verbale piktorale Formate bzw. Symbolsysteme kodiert und repräsentiert. Dabei werden unterschiedliche Sinnesmodalitäten aktiviert. Zunächst ging man davon aus, dass jedes Medium in einem spezifischen Code als Symbolsystem erfasst und mit dem entsprechenden Sinnesorgan monomodal rezipiert wird. Neurophysiologische Erkenntnisse wiesen aber bald auf Interdependenzen hin. Die von Paivio (1986) aufgestellten psychologischen Annahmen über eine kognitiv-emotionale Interdependenz in Lernprozessen und die duale Kodierung von Bildern und Wörtern werden in der neurophysiologischen Forschung mittlerweile bestätigt. Es hat sich gezeigt, dass Wörter besser verarbeitet und behalten werden, wenn sie durch bildhafte Assoziationen und Visualisierungen semantisiert werden. Collins und Convey (1998) bestätigen das und nehmen auf die förderliche zusätzliche Aktivierung der rechten Hirnhälfte Bezug: In general, our research is consistent with the view that the left hemisphere lexicon is comprised of a complex network of abstract, imaginary, and concrete words, while the right hemisphere operates as a subsidiary word processor, subserving linguistic processing with a limited, special purpose lexicon “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein” 211 comprised of associative connections between concrete, imaginable words. (Collins and Coney 1998: 49) In der multimedialen Theorie des Gedächtnisses von Engelkamp (1990: 62ff.) wird versucht, den Bildüberlegenheitseffekt, der durch die Aktivierung der rechten Hirnhälfte entsteht, zu erklären. Laut Engelkamp werden bei der Wahrnehmung verbale und non-verbale Konzepte gedächtnispsychologisch in zwei qualitativ verschiedenen Systemen modalitätenspezifisch in Form von Wort- oder Bildmarken abgespeichert, wobei diese miteinander interagieren. Bildmarken sind im Gegensatz zu verbalen Repräsentationen nicht sequentiell sondern einheitlich holistisch abgespeichert. Dementsprechend hinterlassen sie eine reichhaltigere Gedächtnisspur und sind laut Engelkamp bei der Reproduktion als mentale Bilder simultan verfügbar. Grafiken und Bilder ermöglichen durch ihre externe analoge Repräsentation die unmittelbare Konstruktion eines mentalen Modells, während Texte zunächst zur Konstruktion von propositionalen Repräsentationen führen, bevor mentale Modelle aufgebaut werden können. Vertreter der amodalen Common-Code-Theorie (vgl. u.a. Stadie 1999) sind der Auffassung, dass Bedeutungsrepräsentationen unabhängig von ihrer Darbietungsmodalität entstehen können, da die zugrunde liegenden Konzepte mental als Bündel von Elementen repräsentiert werden und in Beziehung zueinander stehen. Während Lexeme durch assoziative Relationen miteinander verbunden sind, werden visuelle Elemente durch strukturelle Ähnlichkeit determiniert. Daher scheint es denkbar, dass es im semantischen Kategorisierungssystem eine Schnittstelle der Verarbeitungsebenen für Bilder und Wörter gibt, die bei unterschiedlichen Darbietungen durch die vernetzte Bündelung von Merkmalen zu ähnlichen oder sogar identischen Repräsentationen führen kann. Die aktuelle neurokognitive Forschung liefert ebenfalls interessante Erkenntnisse über Prozesse, die bei der Verarbeitung von Text und logischen Bildern bzw. Supertexten wirksam werden. Für die vorliegende Studie ist das Phänomen der Bahnung bzw. des Priming von besonderem Interesse. In der Neurophysiologie wird damit das Phänomen beschreiben, dass eine wiederholte Erregung bestimmter Nervenbahnen den Wirkungsgrad von Reizen gleicher Stärke erhöht. Dadurch wird eine Erregung dieser Nervenbahn schon aufgrund schwächerer Reize ermöglicht. Auf Gedächtnisinhalte bezogen bedeutet das, dass diese schneller oder automatisiert abgerufen werden können, wenn der Inhalt zuvor aktualisiert worden ist. Diese Aktualisierung kann durch den Supertext erfolgen, da dieser die Information in wiederholender Form zur Verfügung stellt und dazu beiträgt, dass neuronale Korrelate mentaler Repräsentationen durch die gleichzeitige Aktivierung miteinander verbunden bzw. aktiviert werden (vgl. u.a. Wentura/ Degner 2010). Margit Reitbauer 212 Im Folgenden soll überprüft werden, ob durch multiple Repräsentationen des Inhalts die Effektivität des Lernens bzw. Erinnerns erhöht werden kann. 1.1 Informationsvernetzung: Textverarbeitung als Rekonstruktion von Wissen Die Modellierung von Textstrukturen unter Anwendung von Erkenntnissen kognitionspsychologischer Modelle des Textverstehens hat in der Linguistik eine lange Tradition. Die Anwendung von Theorien zur Informationsverarbeitung im Hinblick auf Textoptimierung, Förderung des Leseverstehens und der Behaltensleistung standen dabei im Mittelpunkt des Forschungsinteresses angewandter Linguisten (vgl. u.a. van Dijk/ Kintsch 1983, Rickheit/ Strohner 1993, Schnotz/ Dutke 2004, Göpferich 2008). Textverarbeitung wird in den meisten Modellen als sequentieller, zyklischer, hierarchischer und strategisch semantischer Organisationsprozess gesehen. Ziel des Textverarbeitungsprozesses ist eine kohärente Organisation von semantischen und kognitiven Daten. Diese Sicht der Textverarbeitung schließt den Gebrauch von Wissen, das im Gedächtnis der Rezipienten gespeichert ist, mit ein und geht von einem interaktiven Prozess aus, der sowohl bottom-up als auch top-down Prozesse integriert. Im Construction-Integration-Modell (vgl. Kintsch 2005) geht man davon aus, dass Rezipienten versuchen, durch diese Prozesse ein kohärentes, vollständig verbundenes Netzwerk herzustellen. Im Zuge der zunehmenden Bedeutung elektronischer Texte wurden die Modelle aufgrund der Textvernetzung immer komplexer. Gleichzeitig wurde mit der Postulierung des Prinzips der kognitiven Plausibilität eine Überlegenheit der Darstellungsmöglichkeit in elektronischen Medien suggeriert. Nach diesem Prinzip werden Textstrukturen im Hypertext mit Gedächtnisstrukturen in Zusammenhang gebracht. Das Prinzip der kognitiven Plausibilität geht davon aus, dass die aus textstrategischen oder pragmatischen Gründen entstehenden Knotenstrukturen in Hypertexten der Speicherung von Wissen im menschlichen Gedächtnis entgegen kommen, da die Hypertextstrukturen den semantischen Netzwerken im Gedächtnis ähnlich sind (vgl. u.a. Johanssen 1989, Berressem 2000, Rauwald 2008). Nicht-linear präsentierte Informationen können somit leichter in die ebenfalls nicht-linear organisierten Gedächtnisstrukturen übernommen werden. Kritiker dieses Konzepts sehen in hypermedialen Strukturen eher die Gedächtnisstruktur des Autors repräsentiert, die nicht direkt auf die des Lesers übertragbar ist (vgl. u.a. Dillon 1996). Zahlreiche empirische Befunde - u.a. auch die der aktuellen Studie - weisen aber darauf hin, dass sich netzwerkartige Darstellungen sowohl in linearen als auch in digitalen Texten positiv auf die Behaltensleistung auswirken (vgl u.a. Gold et al. 2009, Gailberger 2009). “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein” 213 Informationsvernetzung fördert die Entwicklung von transferierbarem, flexiblem Wissen, das bei Bedarf adaptiert und zur Erweiterung und Konstruktion von neuen Wissensstrukturen herangezogen werden kann. Diese Entwicklung stellt nicht nur eine gesellschaftspolitisch relevante Forderung vieler Bildungsexperten dar, sondern bildet auch den Kernpunkt von Theorien zur Informationsverarbeitung wie z.B. der sogenannten Cognitive Flexibility Theory (Spiro/ Jehng 1990). In dieser Theorie steht die flexible Anpassung und Erweiterung von Schemata im Mittelpunkt und weniger das Abrufen bestehender Schemata. Spiro und Jehng (1990: 165) formulieren die zentrale Hypothese ihrer Theorie wie folgt: By cognitive flexibility, we mean the ability to spontaneously restructure one’s knowledge in many ways, in adaptive response to radically changing situational demands […]. This is a function of both the way knowledge is represented (e.g. along multiple rather than single conceptual dimensions) and the processes that operate on those mental representations (e.g. processes of schema assembly rather than intact schema retrieval). Wie die vorliegende Arbeit zeigen wird, kann die Entwicklung von transferierbarem, flexiblem Wissen durch Netzwerkdarstellungen gefördert werden, da sie eine Umsetzung der linearen Darstellung im Text in nicht lineare kognitive Repräsentationen erleichtern (vgl. u.a. Jahr 1996). Aus vernetzten Überblicksdarstellungen wird für den Rezipienten die Hierarchie der Bedeutungseinheiten ersichtlich und das Einordnen in übergeordnete Zusammenhänge kann leichter erfolgen. Empirische Befunde sprechen dafür, dass auch Erinnerungslücken, die Leerstellen in Schemata entsprechen, leichter aufgefüllt werden können (Gold et al. 2009). Da Überblicksdarstellungen der Textstruktur nur die relevantesten Makropropositionen enthalten, geben sie gleichzeitig Hinweise auf die wichtigsten zu speichernden Bedeutungseinheiten. Die Speicherung von Wissen erfolgt in Form propositionaler Netzwerke entlang bestehender Verbindungen durch ein langzeitgespeichertes Netzwerk von Assoziationen zu anderen Teilen des Gedächtnisses. Um Informationen aus dem Langzeitgedächtnis abrufen zu können, müssen sie zunächst aktiviert werden. Diese Aktivierung soll durch die netzwerkartige Darstellung der Informationen im Supertext gefördert werden. Der für die vorliegende Untersuchung entworfene Supertext stellt dem Rezipienten eine elaborative Zusatzstruktur zur Verfügung und damit gleichzeitig einen alternativen Abrufweg, um die abzurufenden Informationen zu erschließen. Im Sinne Heinemanns (1990: 12f.) könnte man von einem “textorientierten psychischen Potential” sprechen und den Supertext als “abstraktes Rahmenschema” bezeichnen, das aktiviert werden kann. Der Grad der Aktivierung, die auf eine Wissensstruktur fällt, ist abhängig von der Stärke der Verbindung, über die sich die Wissensstruktur ausbreitet. Margit Reitbauer 214 1 Es ist hilfreich, zunächst den für das Experiment eingesetzten Text (siehe Appendix 1) zu lesen, damit man einen Überblick über die Propositionen, die in der empirischen überprüften Textverarbeitung eine Rolle spielen werden, gewinnt. Supertexte sollen diese Aktivierung verstärken, indem sie eine Disambiguierung vornehmen und die Aktivierung konkurrierender Verbindungen unterbinden. Gibt es konkurrierende Verbindungen, so kann sich ein nachteiliger Effekt auf die Aktivierungsmenge ergeben. In diesem Fall spricht man von assoziativer Interferenz (Anderson 2000: 242). Gedächtnisspuren stören sich gegenseitig und werden mit der Zeit schwächer. Dadurch wird auch der Zugang zu ihnen erschwert und es kommt zum bekannten Phänomen des Vergessens. Dabei ist allerdings immer noch nicht zweifelsfrei geklärt, ob wir tatsächlich Dinge ganz vergessen, oder ob wir nur an die gespeicherten Informationen nicht mehr herankommen. Tatsächlich sind Gedächtnisspuren anfänglich fragil und müssen durch Aktivitäten im Hippocampus konsolidiert werden, da sie sonst zerfallen würden. Im Hippocampus fließen Informationen verschiedener sensorischer Systeme zusammen, werden verarbeitet und zum Kortex zurückgesandt. Damit kommt es zur Überführung von Gedächtnisinhalten aus dem Kurzzeitin das Langzeitgedächtnis (vgl. Kolb et al. 2001: 508). Permanente Gedächtnisinhalte werden über die Veränderung synaptischer Verbindungen zwischen den Neuronen kodiert. Diese Veränderungen haben den Effekt, dass das Aktivierungsmuster eines Neuronenverbandes auch in einem anderen Neuronenverband Aktivierung auslöst. Die Kodierung von Gedächtnisrepräsentationen erfolgt in Form von Chunks d.h. kleiner leicht zu verarbeitender Informationseinheiten. Dieses chunking soll durch die visuelle Repräsentation des Textinhaltes in Form des Supertextes unterstützt werden. Im folgenden Abschnitt soll nun die Untersuchung mit Bezug auf die mentalen Operationen und ihrer Ergebnisse während der kognitiven Aufgabe des Lesens und der anschließenden Überprüfung der Behaltensleistung beschrieben werden. 2 Empirische Untersuchung zur Überprüfung der Behaltensleistung 1 2.1 Probandengruppe An dieser Pilotstudie nahm eine Gruppe von 6 männlichen und 14 weiblichen Studierenden der Studienrichtung Anglistik/ Amerikanistik der Universität Graz teil, die sich auf dem Sprachniveau C1 nach dem Common European Framework of Reference (vgl. CEFR 2001: 22ff.) befanden. Die Probanden waren im Alter zwischen 19 und 21 Jahren und wurden in eine Versuchsgruppe (10 Probanden), die mit einem Supertext arbeitete, und “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein” 215 eine Kontrollgruppe (10 Probanden), die nur den linearen Text zur Verfügung hatte, unterteilt. Die Probanden nahmen an einem Seminar zur Textlinguistik teil und waren in fünf Unterrichtseinheiten zu je 90 Minuten mit Aspekten der Analyse von Textstrukturen, sowie der Untersuchung der kommunikativen Funktion und Rezeption von Texten vertraut gemacht worden. 2.2 Versuchsaufbau 2.2.1 Pretest Die 10 Studierenden der Versuchsgruppe lasen einen linearen Text zum Thema “How does the human brain work? ” Bei diesem Text handelt es sich um einen populärwissenschaftlichen Werbetext, der einer Homepage entnommen ist, auf der versucht wird, Seminare und Produkte für die erfolgreiche Karriereplanung zu verkaufen (Jordan Cheng http: / / www.mind-powerfor-success.com/ index.html). Anschließend nahmen die Probanden an einem Test teil, der Leseverstehen und Behaltensleistung in der Fremdsprache bzw. die Wiedergabe der im Text enthaltenen Propositionen überprüfte. Die 10 Fragen zum Textverständnis mussten unmittelbar nach der Lektüre des Textes, die zeitlich auf 10 Minuten limitiert war, beantwortet werden. Das Textblatt war vor der Durchführung des Lesetests eingesammelt worden und somit stand der Text nicht mehr als Referenz zur Verfügung. Die Aufgabenstellung forderte die Probanden nicht nur im Hinblick auf Wissenskonstruktion sondern auch sprachlich. Die Überprüfung der Behaltensleistung erfolgte auf Basis der Ergebnisse einer Voruntersuchung. Die Zahl der im Text enthaltenen Propositionen war in dieser Voruntersuchung von 15 Testlesern, bei denen es sich um Lektoren des Instituts für Anglistik der Universität Graz handelte, erhoben worden. Die Testleser waren aufgefordert worden, jene Einheiten im Text zu markieren, die für sie Inhalte, d.h. in den Sätzen ausgedrückte Sachverhalte, darstellen. In diesem Vortest wurden 47 Propositionen ermittelt, die dem propositionalen Gehalt von Sätzen entsprechen (vgl. u.a. Ernst 2002: 97). Die Versuchsgruppe, deren Lesezeit ebenfalls auf 10 Minuten beschränkt war, erhielt zusätzlich zu dem 457 Wörter umfassenden Text einen Supertext, der ebenfalls von den Testlesern erstellt worden war und den inhaltlichen Aufbau in Form der Makrostruktur nachzeichnete. Die dazugehörigen Mikrostrukturen wurden in Form von Flussdiagrammen dargestellt. Diese Flussdiagramme zeichnen die semantische Struktur des Textes als Gefüge von Propositionen nach und spiegeln die Frage-Antwort-Struktur des Ausgangstextes wider. Die vier Flussdiagramme entsprachen im Wesentlichen den vier Teiltexten, die durch Überschriften gekennzeichnet sind. Eine Subeinheit bzw. ein Organigramm, in dem die Hauptaussagen des Textes Margit Reitbauer 216 zusammengefasst werden, wurde von den Lesern hinzugefügt. (The 4 frequencies, siehe Abb. 1). Die folgende Abbildung zeigt den von den Testlesern entwickelten Supertext. Abb. 1: Supertext Electric energy Vibration frequency Science of the human brain Brain operates on: Brain exercises Increase brain power How does the human brain work? Function of the human brain The 4 frequencies Beta normal state Alpha between Theta deep sleep Delta unconscious Benefits of sleep frequency Control of emotions Effects on learning “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein” 217 2.2.2 Posttest Nach einer Woche wurde ein Posttest durchgeführt, in dem es um das Wiedererkennen von im Text enthaltenen Propositionen ging. Das Testformat des Wiedererkennungstests wurde gewählt, da es meist zuverlässigere Ergebnisse bezüglich der Informationen, die im Langzeitgedächtnis der Leser gespeichert sind, liefert als reine recall tests. Wiederkennen ist nämlich mit geringerem kognitiven Aufwand möglich und aktiviert oft Inhalte, die zwar gespeichert sind, aber vom Leser selbst nicht aktiv abrufbar sind. Man spricht von Erinnern mit Abrufhilfe bzw. cued recall (Anderson 2000: 242). Im Wiedererkennungstest bekamen die Versuchspersonen eine Liste von 6 Propositionen vorgelegt und sollten jene drei unterstreichen, die ihrer Ansicht nach in dem vor einer Woche gelesen Text enthalten waren. 2.3 Untersuchungsergebnisse 2.3.1 Leseverstehen: Pretest Die Ergebnisse des Leseverstehenstests zeigen, dass die Versuchsgruppe, die mit dem Supertext gearbeitet hat, deutlich bessere Lesetestergebnisse aufwies. Sowohl im Bereich der Verständnisfragen als auch bei der letzten Frage, in der es um das Erinnern einer Propositionsliste ging, lag die Versuchsgruppe deutlich vor der Kontrollgruppe. Wie aus Abbildung 2 ersichtlich, wies die Versuchsgruppe bei allen Fragen (siehe x-Achse) bessere Werte auf als die Kontrollgruppe (Zahlen beziehen sich auf richtige Antworten). Abb. 2: Lesetestergebnisse: Gruppenvergleich Lesetest: Gruppenvergleich Reihe 1(rot): Versuchsgruppe Reihe 2 (grün) Kontrollgruppe 9 8 10 9 6 10 10 9 8 9 8 7 9 5 5 5 4 5 4 5 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Reihe1 Reihe2 Margit Reitbauer 218 Analysiert man die einzelnen Fragen im Hinblick auf die Hierarchiehöhe der einzelnen Propositionen, die abgefragt wurden, so zeigt sich, dass hierarchiehohe Propositionen in beiden Gruppen deutlich besser abgerufen wurden. Die Fragen 1 und 3, die auf ranghohe Propositionen bezogen waren, wurden in beiden Gruppen zu einem hohen Prozentsatz korrekt beantwortet. (90%, bzw. 100% in der Versuchsgruppe und 80% bzw. 90% in der Kontrollgruppe). Damit scheint Kintsch und van Dijks Strategiemodell (1983) zumindest in diesem Punkt bestätigt. Elaborierte Strukturen, d.h. Strukturen, die Erweiterungen der ursprünglichen Propositionen enthielten und durch zusätzliche redundante Informationen untermauert wurden, konnten ebenfalls besser abgerufen werden. Damit bestätigt sich eine weitere Grundannahme der kognitiven Textverarbeitungtheorie. Die Gedächtnisleistung verbesserte sich mit zunehmendem Elaborationsgrad, da durch die Mehrfachdarstellung im Text und im Supertext zusätzliche alternative Abrufwege für eine Reproduktion zur Verfügung gestellt wurden. Die Fragen 4, 5, 6 und 7, die sich auf die vier im Text mehrfach elaborierten Ausführungen zu den Gehirnfrequenzen beziehen, wurden von den Probanden der Versuchsgruppe zu 90%, 60%, 100% und 100% richtig beantwortet, während die Werte der Kontrollgruppe mit 50%, 50%, 50% und 40% deutlich darunter lagen. Die betreffenden Propositionen sind im Supertext in einer eigenen Teilsequenz grafisch dargestellt und mit einer Subüberschrift versehen, die im Originaltext nicht enthalten ist. Damit bot sich der Kontrollgruppe nach dem Prinzip der dualen Kodierung (vgl. Paivio 1986) eine zusätzliche bildliche Informationsrepräsentation, die den Wissenserwerb mehr fördert als eine reine textuelle Präsentation. Laut der dualen Kodierungstheorie beinhaltet das Arbeitsgedächtnis zwei voneinander unabhängige Systeme für die Repräsentation verbaler und nonverbaler Informationen, die, wenn sie beide aktiviert werden und sich inhaltlich ergänzen, eine Speicherung im Langzeitgedächtnis fördern und das Erinnerungsvermögen unterstützen. Bei Frage 9 (Are negative thoughts associated with fast or slow brain waves? ), die sich auf den Subtext Understanding Brain Frequency bezog, scheint der Bildvorteil ebenfalls wirksam geworden zu sein. Die Versuchsgruppe beantwortete diese Frage zu 80% korrekt, während nur 40% der Probanden der Kontrollgruppe dazu in der Lage waren. Im Supertext gab das letzte Flussdiagramm mit den zusammenfassenden Propositionen Benefits of Slower Brain Frequency und Control of Emotions entscheidende Hinweise auf die korrekte Beantwortung. Obwohl sich diese Frage auf eine elaborierte Proposition im Text bezog, die mehrfach abgehandelt wird, konnte die Kontrollgruppe ohne Bildvorteil sich in geringerem Ausmaß daran erinnern. Frage 10, bei der es um das Abrufen einer Propositionsliste ging, in der die Vorteile von Gehirntraining noch einmal aufgelistet wurden, zeigte “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein” 219 ebenfalls klar bessere Ergebnisse für die Versuchsgruppe, die sie zu 90% richtig beantwortete, während in der Kontrollgruppe nur 50% in der Lage waren, zumindest 3 der 6 Propositionen wiederzugeben. Bei dieser Frage zeigte sich sowohl der bekannte recency effect, d.h. das letzte Item auf der Liste wurde häufiger abgerufen, als auch der primacy effect, d.h. das erste Item auf der Liste wurde sowohl in der Kontrollals auch in der Versuchsgruppe häufiger genannt. Diese Effekte wurden in der Gedächtnispsychologie schon sehr früh nachgewiesen und sind sehr stabil sowie unabhängig von der Länge der Listen und vom kulturellen Hintergrund (vgl. u.a. Postman/ Philips 1965). Dass die Unterscheide zwischen den Gruppen dennoch so hoch waren, lässt sich vielleicht dadurch erklären, dass die Versuchsgruppe durch den Supertext Vorteile in der Konsolidierungsphase gehabt haben könnte. In den meisten prozessorientierten Theorien zur Informationsverarbeitung (vgl. u.a. Atkinson/ Shiffrin 1968) geht man von einem dreistufigen Prozess aus, der von der Enkodierung über die Konsolidierung zum Abruf führt. Die Konsolidierung bzw. das Einprägen erfolgt dabei auf zwei Arten: Zunächst bildet sich eine Gedächtnisspur als Folge synaptischer Veränderungen und dann kommt es zur Stabilisierung und Reorganisation der Gedächtnisspuren bzw. zur Bildung eines neuen, erweiterten Netzwerkes. Der Supertext könnte diese Stabilisierung unterstützt haben, da er als Überblicksdiagramm die Kohärenzbildung fördert, indem er Zusammenhänge zwischen den Propositionen visualisiert und die Textinformationen durch Bildinformationen komplementär ergänzt. Während beim Abruf verbaler Informationen Zusammenhangsverhältnisse nur sukzessiv verfügbar sind, kommt bei einem Überblicksdiagramm auch der Bildvorteil mit zum Tragen, da bei visuellen Darstellungen Beziehungsverhältnisse simultan verfügbar sind. Die daraus resultierende Komplementarität von Text- und Bildinformationen führt zu einer Verbesserung der Textverstehens- und Behaltensleistung (vgl. Kuhlhavy et. al. 1993: 52). Die Versuchsgruppe, die durch das Textdiagramm ein logisches Bild (vgl. Schnotz et al. 2002) mit verknüpfenden Struktureigenschaften zur Verfügung hatte, konnte sich an mehr Propositionen im letzten rein aufzählenden Textteil erinnern. Logische Bilder sind schematische Darstellungen, die Bereiche der realen Welt auf ihre wesentlichen Elemente und Beziehungen reduzieren. Logische Bilder in Form von Textdiagrammen können dazu beitragen, die Verarbeitungstiefe zu erhöhen, indem sie formale logische Beziehungen verdeutlichen und damit auch die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass Items vom Kurzeitgedächtnis ins Langzeitgedächtnis übertragen werden. Diese ist größer, wenn Informationen semantisch verarbeitet werden bzw. deep encoding stattfindet, im Vergleich zu einer rein phonologischen oder orthographischen Verarbeitung (shallow encoding). Die Kombination Text und Bild bzw. Supertext erleichterte die Konstruktion eines kohärenten mentalen Modells. Eine Erklärung hierfür liefert das integrative Modell zum Margit Reitbauer 220 Abb. 3: Posttest: Versuchsgruppe Text- und Bildverstehen von Schnotz und Seufert (2002). Es geht von der Bildung multipler interner Repräsentationen aus, die nach dem Prinzip von Paivio (1986) auf der Existenz zweier verschiedener unabhängiger Repräsentationssysteme beruhen. Beim integrativen Textverstehen wird versucht, auf Grundlage der propositionalen Textbasis und der bildlichen Informationen ein kohärentes mentales Modell zu erzeugen, in dem auch die Kommunikationsebene zwischen Autor und Leser sowie die Genre-Ebene, auf der es zu einer Klassifizierung bzw. Einordnung des Textes kommt, berücksichtigt werden. Beim Bildverstehen werden Oberflächeninformationen als wahrgenommenes Abbild gespeichert und das mentale Modell ist sozusagen der enkodierte Gegenstand des Bildes, der auch den Aufbau der Wissensrepräsentation der textuellen Information unterstützt. 2.3.2 Wiedererkennungstest: Posttest Die Ergebnisse des Wiedererkennungstests, der eine Woche später durchgeführt wurde, bestätigen die Ergebnisse der ersten Testreihe. Die Versuchsgruppe konnte deutlich mehr Propositionen korrekt wiedererkennen als die Kontrollgruppe. Die sechs Items des Wiedererkennungstests setzten sich aus drei Propositionen, die direkt dem Text entnommen waren und drei Distraktoren zusammen. Bei der Testerstellung wurde auf eine möglichst hohe Distraktorähnlichkeit geachtet. Die Probanden waren aufgefordert, in einer forced choice Aufgabe jene drei Propositionen zu eruieren, an die sie sich aus der ersten Testserie erinnerten. “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein” 221 Abb. 4: Posttest: Kontrollgruppe In der Versuchsgruppe konnten sich 7 der 10 Probanden an alle 3 Propositionen korrekt erinnern, 2 erkannten 2 Propositionen korrekt wieder und nur einer identifizierte nur eine der 3 Propositionen. In der Kontrollgruppe erinnerten sich nur 3 Probanden an alle 3 Propositionen, einer erkannte 2 und 6 erkannten nur eine Proposition wieder. Eine mögliche Erklärung für das bessere Abschneiden der Versuchsgruppe könnte in der Aktivierung von schematischem Wissen zu suchen sein, das sich durch die Arbeit mit dem Supertext entwickelt hat und bei der der Einpassung in die aktivierte Wissensstruktur hilfreich gewesen sein könnte. Darüber hinaus erleichtert der Supertext die Bildung von Inferenzen. Wenn man sich an einen Sachverhalt nicht mehr erinnern kann, besteht die Möglichkeit seiner Rekonstruktion aufgrund von Inferenzen, die zum Zeitpunkt des Abrufs vorgenommen werden. Das Bilden dieser Inferenzen erfolgt auf der Basis von schematischem Wissen. Beim Wiedererkennen handelt es sich semantisch betrachtet um einen Klassifizierungsprozess, in dem es zur Identifikation von Merkmalen, zum Einordnen und zur Bedeutungszuweisung kommt. Das Wiedererkennen basiert daher auf einem Vergleich mit Repräsentationen im Gedächtnis, die in Form einer begrenzten Zahl von Komponenten und Informationen über die möglichen Kombinationen dieser Komponenten gespeichert sind. Da die Repräsentation in Form des Supertextes die Zahl der Komponenten ebenfalls reduziert und die Beziehungen zwischen ihnen aufzeigt, ist der Versuchsgruppe dieser Vergleich und das Sich-Erinnern leichter gefallen. Margit Reitbauer 222 3 Erinnern leicht gemacht? Kognitionspsychologische Erklärungsansätze und ihre Grenzen Aus der Sicht der kognitionspsychologisch orientierten Linguistik sind Menschen aktive Informationsverarbeiter und lernende Systeme, die ihre funktionalen Bedürfnisse befriedigen möchten. Dazu gehört die rasche Informationsverarbeitung ebenso wie die Speicherung und der Abruf von Informationen aus dem Gedächtnis. In der modernen linguistischen Forschung geht man davon aus, dass eine Trennung zwischen kognitiven und sprachlichen Systemen nicht möglich ist, da die Sprache als Teil des kognitiven Systems betrachtet wird (vgl. Bellavia 2007). Linguisten haben seit jeher versucht, Modelle zu entwerfen, die Prozesse der Informationsverarbeitung und Speicherung zu erklären und zu optimieren. Gerne nehmen sie dabei Bezug auf Erkenntnisse der Neurowissenschaften und setzen sich gleichzeitig der Kritik aus, die neuronale Wirklichkeit zu simplifizierend darzustellen. Parallelen zwischen Gedächtnisinhalten und der Enkodierung von gespeichertem sprachlichem Wissen, das aus semantischen Netzwerken wie Schemata oder Skripts abgerufen wird, werden hergestellt. Wenngleich dieser Kritik der Simplifizierung schwer Argumente entgegenzuhalten sind, so deuten doch einige empirische Befunde linguistischer Untersuchungen darauf hin, dass Informationsverarbeitungsprozesse durch die Modellierung von Texten anhand von Vorstellungen über den Aufbau von Gedächtnisstrukturen optimiert werden können. Die vorliegende Studie belegt das und basiert auf einem kognitiv-konzeptuellen Ansatz. Sie stellt die Visualisierung von Textstrukturen als verständnissichernde und behaltensfördernde Maßnahme dar. Probanden erinnerten sich leichter an Informationen, wenn sie übergreifende kognitive Mechanismen wie visuelle Erfahrungen als Fundament zur Verfügung hatten, auf dem die sprachliche Organisation aufbauen konnte. Wir wissen heute, dass verbale und visuelle Informationen in unterschiedlichen Hirnarealen verarbeitet werden und können das durch bildgebende Verfahren nachweisen. Weiters scheint gesichert, dass visuelle und verbale Vorstellungen hierarchisch strukturiert sind. Beide Erkenntnisse stützen das Prinzip der kognitiven Plausibilität und sprechen dafür, dem Rezipienten möglichst viele Abrufwege und Anknüpfungspunkte für die Integration neuer Informationen in sein gespeichertes Wissen zu geben. Systematisch kognitive Grammatiken, wie das Modell von Radden und Dirven (2007) sowie Ansätze die auf die Entwicklung einer Didaktik des Wissenstransfers abzielen (vgl. Göpferich 2008), versuchen, das zu verwirklichen. 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Do you know that you can increase your brainpower by simply following some simple daily brain exercises? The Science of Human Brain Experiments of brain research conducted by research institutions have found that the human brain operates on a small amount of electrical energy. This electric current vibrates at different speeds. Like the way your heart beats, your brain vibrates at a certain number of times every second. The level of your brain’s activity, as determined by your brain’s rhythm or vibration frequency, can have significant impact on the quality of your life. If you can slow down your brain waves, you can control your mind to perform at the same level as the high achievers. Understanding The Brain Frequency The normal human brain can vibrate at four different frequencies: Beta, Alpha, Theta, and Delta. Beta state is the normal conscious state of mind when we are awake. This is the state where people conduct more than 90 percent of their daily activities. Alpha state is a frequency lower than Beta, where a person is somewhere between being awake and asleep. At Theta, the speed of the brain’s vibration is even lower than Alpha, when the mind is associated with deep, comfortable sleep. Lastly, at Delta, a person is at a deep sleep or completely unconscious. When a person becomes stressed, fearful, angry, nervous, or feels any stirring emotion, the brain’s vibration frequency increases. The more stressed we become, the more rapidly our brain waves vibrate. All negative thoughts, as well as anger, fear, and compulsive cravings, tend to be fast. On the other hand, slower brain waves are associated with people who are calm, confident, and at ease. Positive thoughts like love, patience, and understanding, are slow. What Are The Benefits of Slowing Down Our Minds? When the human brain is regularly tuned to a slower frequency such as the Alpha state, it can produce profound impact on all aspects of our well-being - from mental, physical to emotional. Science has proved that slowing down our minds can bring upon the following benefits: • We can control our mind to focus completely in the present. • We can remain calm even while under pressure. • We can accelerate our learning. • When we perform affirmations and creative visualization, it is more effective at the Alpha level of mind. • We can go into the state of deep relaxation, which is important to our health and emotional wellbeing. • It is conducive to creative thinking, intuition, and problem solving. Margit Reitbauer 226 Why Should We Learn to Slow Down Our Brain Frequency? Scientists have gathered conclusive results from brain research to show that most people do their thinking at the Beta level, while only a minority of the population are natural Alpha thinkers. Unfortunately, this common experience of the Beta level of mind is not the ideal state of mind for learning and working. When we think and work at Beta state, we are prone to errors and misjudgments. So, why are people not thinking at Alpha level? With some brain exercises and the right environment, it is not difficult to consciously slow down our mind to enter into Alpha state of mind. However, there is a problem that most people encounter in accessing the Alpha state - there is a tendency to fall asleep when their brain frequency slows down to Alpha. For most people who are not trained, it is difficult to stay awake during Alpha state. The Alpha is the state at which we can connect to our subconscious mind and unleash the maximum potential of our mind. However, if you are unable to remain awake at Alpha state, there is no way to conduct any activities to utilize this high productive state of mind. The high achievers are the minority group of people who are able to stay awake at the Alpha level and perform their thinking at this deeper level of mind. “Jetzt fällt es mir wieder ein” 227 Comprehension Questions 1. What is the main function of the human brain? 2. How can you increase your brainpower? 3. What are the names of the four different brain frequencies? 4. What is the normal conscious state of mind when we are awake called? 5. In which state do we conduct 90% of our daily activities? 6. In which state is a person somewhere between awake and asleep? 7. In which state is a person at deep sleep? 8. What happens to the brain’s vibration frequency when a person gets stressed? 9. Are negative thoughts associated with fast or slow brain waves? 10. What are the benefits that slowing down our mind can bring about? Name at least three: Margit Reitbauer 228 Appendix 2: Wiedererkennungstest: Post-Test Underline the 3 sentences that refer to the text: “How the Human Brain Works” 1. Most people do their thinking at the Beta level, while only a minority of the population are natural Alpha thinkers. 2. For most people who are not trained, it is difficult to stay awake during the Alpha state. 3. Slowing down your brain frequency has negative effects on creative thinking and problem solving. 4. We can accelerate our thinking by increasing brain frequency. 5. Beta is the normal conscious state of mind when we are awake. 6. When a person becomes stressed, the brain’s vibration frequency decreases. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Konferenzbericht 3 rd International Conference “Modernism and the Orient” Mary Bamburg Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, hosted an international conference on Modernism and the Orient, 4-7 June 2010, to explore the role East and South Asia played in the development of literary and visual modernism in Europe and America. Hangzhou 2010 carried on the exciting exchanges begun at Yale 1996 and continued at Cambridge 2004. Members of the organizing committee included Zhaoming Qian (University of New Orleans), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), and Sabine Sielke (University of Bonn). The 3 rd International Conference on “Modernism and the Orient” was convened in Hangzhou, China, 4-7 June 2010. Co-sponsored by Zhejiang University, the University of New Orleans, Hangzhou Normal University, and Shanghai International Studies University, Hangzhou 2010 was to carry on the exciting exchanges on the theme begun at Yale University in 1996 and continued at the University of Cambridge in 2004. Over 130 scholars from twelve countries, six from the East and six from the West, participated in the renewed dialogue. Four plenary sessions set the tone of the conference while 23 concurrent sessions ran throughout the weekend. The conference opened on the morning of June 5 with welcome addresses by the presidents of both Zhejiang University and Hangzhou Normal University, followed by the first plenary session “Asian Prelude to Modernism” featuring three speakers: Longxi Zhang of City University of Hong Kong, Sabine Sielke of the University of Bonn, and Daniel Albright of Harvard University. Longxi Zhang’s presentation sought to redress an aspect of Oscar Wilde’s work which criticism has so far ignored - his reading of the Taoist leader Zhuangzi in 1890 and the impact of Taoism on his philosophy. Zhang analyzed the particular perspective from which Wilde understood Zhuangzi, allowing the latter to impact his social and political views, his conviction of personal freedom, and his rejection of all forms of government. Wilde recognized in Zhuangzi’s works a philosophy that he later sympathized with in his essay “The Soul Mary Bamburg 230 of Man under Socialism”. Wilde’s interest in Zhuangzi, Zhang concluded, anticipated a similar interest many modernists had well into the twentieth century. Sabine Sielke focused on how Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore - as paradigmatic figures in American modernism and more recent critical debates on how modernist poetics participate in the ongoing (deand re-)constructions of gender - have been recontextualized by current critical perspectives emerging in the larger force field of postcolonial studies. Wondering what we remember of modernism as we ‘orientalize’ its cultural practices, Sielke explored the politics and desire informing revisionary approaches to the poets’ work that waver between yet another attempt at othering modernism and a domestication of the Orient. Daniel Albright began his presentation by recounting a 2009 archaeological discovery, a 33,000-year-old flute which had been found in a cave in southern Germany. Taking off of the Modernist sense that “the most profound art comes from the innermost recesses of the body”, he playfully examined this notion in his reinterpretation of Yeats’s The Herne’s Egg. Featuring a flute made of a heron’s thigh-bone, the play engages an instrument strongly associated with the Orient. Albright also discussed Pound’s opera Le Testament, which has flute music accompany a brothel scene, as well as a selection of Pound’s Chinese poems in which flutes figure prominently. Exploring how in the work of Yeats and Pound the flute interweaves the celestial and unearthly with the outright carnal and sexual, Albright’s presentation showed how at the crossroads of literature and music modernist texts made Orient and Occident collide. The second plenary session “Post-World War II Pound and Moore” featured Ronald Bush of Cambridge University and Zhaoming Qian of the University of New Orleans. Bush centered his presentation on the Buddhist icon Ezra Pound calls Kuanon. Building on previous work on the subject, Bush closely examined the way in which Pound developed the figure in the Italian and English avant-texts of the Pisan Cantos. Pound’s unpublished drafts revealed more of the process of refining the figure of Kuanon and thus allowed us to trace its way into the Cantos. For Bush, Pound’s drafts make Kuanon function as a bridge between Buddhist and Confucian thought. Closely associated with the trope of the willow, Kuanon amplified Pound’s account of “the power of compassionate nature to rescue the poet from the depths of his despair”. Qian’s presentation was based on his recent discovery of a recording of Moore’s 1957 lecture on The Tao of Painting by the Chinese painter and writer Mai-mai Sze. This lecture, entitled “Tedium and Integrity”, proved to be at once a tribute to the Taoist aesthetic (“Integrity”) and a critique of contemporary American poetry (“Tedium”). Qian used Moore’s lecture along with other archival material to show that Moore’s exchanges with Sze, during the years between 1957 and 1968, channeled a new creativity, resulting in the astonishing experimental modernism of her late lyrics. Poems such as, for instance, “To a Giraffe” and “Blue Bug”, which appeared in Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), display Moore’s renewed confidence in the modernist ideal of impersonality during the early postmodern era. The final two plenary sessions were held on the afternoon of June 6. The session on “Proust, Joyce, and Woolf” featured presentations by Christine Froula of Northwestern University, Ira Nadel of the University of British Columbia, and Fen Gao of Zhejiang University. In her presentation, Froula discussed Marcel Proust’s À la 3 rd International Conference “Modernism and the Orient” 231 Recherche du Temps Perdu and its complex allusions to cultures of the Near, Middle, and Far East. In the spirit of André Benhaïm’s argument that Proust’s Orient “owes little to Orientalism: rather it shows a desire to disorient Frenchness” (2005: 87) by registering residues of influences from beyond France’s geographical borders, Froula’s presentation approached Proust’s evocations of Eastern cultures through allusions to the seventeenth-century Dutch master Vermeer. Appropriating for Bergotte’s death scene a French art critic’s 1921 claim that Vermeer’s craft had a Chinese patience otherwise to be found only in paintings from the Far East, Proust opened France’s borders, Froula argued, to a historically-grounded cultural imagination resonating throughout his Recherche. Showing that elements of and allusions to Chinese culture permeate James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, the presentation by Ira Nadel focused on the Oriental touches in Joyce’s graphic design - and in particular on the ways in which Joyce’s typography and visual forms echoed Chinese writing. Joyce’s choices in diction and punctuation, such as the isolated full stop at the end of the “Ithaca” section of Ulysses, shape meaning through visual form in a manner reminiscent of ideogrammic methods. Nadel attributed this practice to the impact of Ernest Fenollosa, whose work Joyce knew by way of Pound’s revision and publication of Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. In her paper, Fen Gao examined Virginia Woolf’s critique of traditional Western conceptions of truth and argued that the author’s insights relate to a complementary concept of creativity called zhenhuan in traditional Chinese poetics. Tracing the development of Woolf’s writing through works including “Monday or Tuesday”, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own, Gao found in each a different facet of this proximity. In the fourth and final plenary session, “China in Modernism/ Modernism in China”, Qiping Yin of Hangzhou Normal University and Jiande Lu of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences presented their work. Yin began by addressing an imbalance in Robert Frost criticism: many critics argue that the common ground between Frost’s poetics and Taoism is their “quest for a thorough freedom” from self, society, and nature. Yin countered this somewhat reductive view by discussing two opposed, but balanced impulses within Taoism: Chu Shi (meaning to renounce the world) and Ru Shi (meaning to accept the world). On this ground he examined Frost’s poetry, finding both aspects of Chu Shi and juxtaposed moments of Ru Shi. Lu’s presentation was an injunction to further explore modernism and its relationship to the Orient, to widen the field of inquiry. Starting from a discussion of G.L. Dickinson’s critique of nationalistic sentiments, Lu proposed that we develop a more global perspective of modernisms. To do so, the conferences on “Modernism and the Orient” should begin to take a look at Chinese modernism of the 1920s and what Lu called “home-made orientalism”. 23 concurrent sessions ran throughout the conference, 15 on the afternoon of June 5 and eight on the morning of June 6, interrogating subjects such as “Modernism Out of Japan”, “Visual Modernism”, “Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence”, “East/ West: a Post-Apocalyptic World”, “China and India in Western Works”, “Oriental Readings of Western Modernism”, “China’s Imports from and Exports to Modernism”, “Moore, Stevens, and China”, “Pound’s Chinese Translations”, “Eliot and India”, “Between Oriental Culture and Modernism”, “Pound and Confucian Ethics”, “Reception and Mary Bamburg 232 Recognition”, “Buddhism and Confucianism in American Poetry”, and “Recognizing Eastern Selves in Modernism”. From diverse critical perspectives participants explored the relationships of China, Japan, and India to Western modernism across the fields of literature, fine arts, film, television, music, science, religion, and philosophy. Three extracurricular events supplemented the conference: “Chamber Music and Chamber Conversation”, mediated by Daniel Albright and Lidan Lin, on the evening of June 5 (with Western pieces responding to Li Bai’s poetry by John Austin and Eastern pieces by local musicians); a walking tour of Hefang Street, a renovated Song Dynasty street, on the evening of June 6; and a visit to Linying Temple, a Buddhist temple of the Chan sect, in Hangzhou, on the morning of June 7. During the closing session Jieping Fan, Assistant President of Zhejiang University, praised the conference both for its intellectual scope and as an ongoing dialogue of an international community of scholars. References Benhaïm, André (2005). “From Baalbek to Baghdad and Beyond: Marcel Proust’s Foreign Memories of France.” Journal of European Studies 35/ 1. 87-101. Mary Bamburg University of New Orleans New Orleans, Louisiana, USA AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen Matthias Hutz and Kathryn Khairi-Taraki, Praktische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. Wilhelmsfeld: Gottfried Egert Verlag, 2008. Katja Giersemehl 1. English ain’t no easy language … Is this the reason why Matthias Hutz and Kathryn Khairi-Taraki published the reference book Praktische Grammatik der englischen Sprache in German? As it is written in German, it unambiguously addresses German-speaking university students of English or pupils at Abitur or Matura level as well as other advanced language learners with a German linguistic background. Indeed, the book could have been written for me, a fourth-year student in teacher training at the University of Freiburg. - Come to think of it: shouldn’t I have said: In fact, the book could have been written for me? It is precisely commonly experienced hesitations like these - familiar to any learner - which I would like to take as a starting point for using and reviewing this book (… or a starting point to use it? ) In the following it will be shown that Hutz and Khairi-Taraki’s comprehensive book answers most of my questions. However, for several reasons which I am going to spell out below this grammar would still not be my first choice as a reference and study book. In their introduction the authors claim to provide a detailed reference on structures and rules of the English language. In 26 chapters they intend to cover the characteristics of the different word-classes as well as the basics of English pronunciation, orthography, word-formation, the tense system, and sentence structure. One chapter focuses on differences between British and American English. Based on the assumption that there is a close connection between grammar and the lexicon, the grammar gives numerous examples of idiomatic expressions, most of which are translated into German. The different chapters all have a similar structure: After giving a general survey of the grammatical phenomenon under study, the relevant linguistic forms and constructions are presented. This is followed by explanations of usage, rules and exceptions. Finally, an index lists the grammatical terms (in German) as well as (English) lexical items. Rezensionen 234 2. Compared to German? Opportunities of the contrastive approach A grammar of English for advanced language learners written in German is news on the bookshelves - so far, most other up-to-date detailed reference grammars have been in English. A contrastive approach that involves the comparison of the target language with the learner’s mother tongue offers many opportunities for language teaching. Its main objective is to work out in which respect the two language systems differ and how such differences might affect learner progress and performance, i.e. Robert Lado’s (1957) contrastive hypothesis in its classic formulation, with its emphasis on transfer and interference between L 1 and L 2 . Since German learners’ needs are likely to differ from those of other learners - let’s say, for example, learners from Russia or Japan - writing a ‘German’ English grammar offers the opportunity to have a clear focus on one particular target group of learners. Being lecturers in higher education (Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg and University of Gießen), Hutz and Khairi-Taraki will be familiar with German students’ learning difficulties from their own teaching experience. Indeed, Hutz and Khairi-Taraki keep referring to the contrasting aspects of English and German in great detail and clarity. Thus, the book explains English word order and sentence structure as well as thoroughly covering the particularities of the English verb (as a matter of fact, at least eight chapters have a direct focus on verbs). Likewise, the chapters on pronunciation, singular/ plural, and articles are very informative - again in good part because of the contrastive approach. 3. What is a ‘good’ grammar? To answer this question, it is useful to look at the following criteria: According to Michael Swan (1994), truth, demarcation, clarity, simplicity, conceptual parsimony and relevance are characteristics of a ‘good’ grammatical rule in the language classroom. How does the Praktische Grammatik fare if judged against these criteria? Truth and demarcation go hand-in-hand as “truth is rarely pure and never simple: it can be difficult to be sure exactly what the facts are, and to decide how much of the truth to tell” (Swan 1994). Consequently, the aspect of demarcation expresses the idea that “a pedagogic rule [...] is useless unless it demarcates clearly the area within which a given form is appropriate, so that the learner will know when to use the form and when not to” (Swan 1994). Hutz and Khairi-Taraki realize these principles by giving numerous example sentences showing how a distinct structure or form is used in English. Moreover, the grammar contains additional information about frequency, context and register of use, and there are references to differences between German and English. However, truth and demarcation necessarily conflict with simplicity: Swan states that simplicity is one of the things that distinguish pedagogic rules (prescriptive grammar) sharply from descriptive rules: “The truth is of no value if it cannot be understood.” Therefore, he continues, clear and simple rules are psychologically valuable. They make students feel that they can understand and control the complex material they have to cope with. Facing the complexity of languages, the relevance criterion points to the need for choices and selections to be made. Thus, “a good pedagogic rule does not present a neutral analysis of a set of linguistic data; [but] it Rezensionen 235 answers a question [...] that is asked by the learner, or that is generated by his or her interlanguage” (Swan 1994). Consequently, as a contrastive German-English grammar Die praktische Grammatik der Englischen Sprache could score well on simplicity and relevance. For several reasons I feel that Hutz and Khairi-Taraki could have done better since overall it is clarity which is sometimes missing in their exposition. First, clarity is sometimes obscured due to the authors’ attempt to provide the reader with too many details. Explications are lengthy and rather stodgy at times, making it difficult to distinguish the very important aspects from those that are less commonly used. In this respect, the layout is not a big help either since the book lacks any visualisation: printed in plain black and white, no pictures, no graphs, no charts. Hutz and Khairi- Taraki neither summarise key-points nor do they provide exercises which could be used by learners to check their comprehension. Important information or differences between English and German are not highlighted at all. On the contrary, very often the most important aspects are ‘hidden’ in the small print of the Anmerkungen. Secondly, the numerous examples given in the grammar suggest an exhaustiveness which is not and cannot be achieved by a grammar book. It is true, grammar is strongly linked to the lexicon and therefore there are good reasons why Hutz and Khairi-Taraki use extensive vocabulary lists to get their ideas across. Still, I fear that I might not be the only reader who tends to get lost in the jungle of examples. Therefore, for the sake of clarity, they could have restricted themselves to those examples that are really telling - whereas everything else is better relegated to a learners’ dictionary. Finally, clarity suffers because of insufficient and unclear referencing. For example, you can find the expression to be on the wrong track > auf dem Holzweg sein listed in chapter 21 “Die Präpositionen”, § 248 on/ upon. I am, however, wondering how the reader will know where to search for the translation of auf dem Holzweg sein? It is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Unless the learner studies the whole book from cover to cover, there is no possibility of searching systematically for the expression in question. The annex lists only the English morphemes but not their German translations. Conceptual parsimony, the need to use clear and familiar terminology, is the last aspect Swan mentions as a measure for ‘good’ grammatical rules. In this light, the fact that the grammar is written in German may cause more than minor problems. These days, university students and students at Abitur or Matura level are used to monolingual teaching. As a consequence, the intended target group of the grammar will have picked up a fair amount of English terminology, and using (predominantly) German terms in the accompanying reference grammar is unnecessarily confusing. The table of contents as well as the annex just list the German terms. English terminology is only given (in brackets) within the single chapters. Moreover, as many English structures do not have German equivalents, the contrastive approach is fraught with problems. Therefore, it might be easier for students to ‘just’ understand how the foreign language works instead of trying to compare it to their mother tongue. For example, giving one-to-one translations of the different English verb forms implies an equivalence in meaning and usage - which is hardly ever the case. Rezensionen 236 4. A practical grammar I would argue that the main strengths of this grammar are that it covers a wide array of useful grammatical constructions, that it richly illustrates their usage and usually offers relatively accessible and formally correct explanations. Nevertheless, from a pedagogical point of view the Praktische Grammatik der englischen Sprache definitely needs improvement. Pedagogical grammars aim to be a help for teachers and learners “who need [...] clear and easily digestible summaries of what is and what is not correct” (Harmer 2001: 15). Describing ‘everything there is’ is not their aim (Harmer 2001: 15). This job is done by comprehensive descriptive reference grammars, which typically are more extensive and far longer. In my opinion, Hutz and Khairi-Taraki attempt to reconcile two contradicting principles: completeness of coverage and pedagogical accessibility. However, as demonstrated above, truth can never be ‘simple’. Whilst the fact that the grammar is written in German could be helpful for some students, the general ‘digestibility’ is hampered by the lack of visualisation, emphasis, summaries and exercises. This makes reading unnecessarily difficult and is likely to put present-day students off. In my opinion, the Praktische Grammatik der englischen Sprache might be ‘practical’ for language teachers being in need of a rule, definition or an example - but not so much for foreign language learners who need a practical - pedagogical - grammar to improve their English. References Harmer, Jeremy (2001). The Practice of English Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman. Lado, Robert (1957). Linguistics across Cultures. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Swan, Michael (1994). Design criteria for pedagogical language rules. http: / / www. mikeswan.co.uk/ elt-applied-linguistics/ design-criteria.htm (September 20, 2009). Katja Giersemehl Freiburg Rezensionen 237 Veronica Smith, Tertiary Language Learning. Changing Perspectives and Practical Responses. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2010. Margit Reitbauer In Tertiary Language Learning: Changing Perspectives and Practical Responses Veronica Smith focuses on a group of learners which has so far been largely neglected in research and pedagogy, namely adult learners of English at tertiary level. Her ambitious attempt to create a coherent pedagogical framework for adult learners through Scenario-based Learning can be regarded as successful. Smith surveys recent developments in Second Language Learning and integrates insights from genre analysis and skills-based English for Specific Purposes teaching with the aim to help tertiary language learners to master genres relevant to their studies and to acquire intercultural pragmatic competence. Her approach to Second Language Research is pedagogically motivated since she bases it on her rich teaching experience. Second language teachers interested in recent developments that relate to language teaching and learning practice are provided with a comprehensive survey and are given insight into the multi-faceted process of language learning in adult learners. Smith is one of the few authors who acknowledge the fact that adult language learners approach their language learning tasks as individuals with their own learning preferences and styles and their personal negative and positive experiences. Thus, she pleads for a re-evaluation of the role of motivation in learning and aims to create a combination of cognitive and linguistics challenges with the help of tasks that have real world relevance for the learners. Smith’s model of tertiary language learning is based on the communicative and interactive approach to language learning and focuses on the development of enabling skills which provide learners with powers of analysis and the ability to infer, deduce, abstract, classify and evaluate language also by drawing on L1 experience. Smith sees L1 skills as a valuable source that can provide linguistic insights. Moreover, she considers translation between two languages as an intercultural process that can help to develop cultural and pragmatic competence. In Chapter 1 Smith deals with communicative approaches to language learning. She points out that these approaches have introduced the idea that language teaching should focus on language used for genuine communication. Widdowson’s (1978) claim to focus on language as use as opposed to usage is introduced along with the differentiation between usage type exercises, which direct attention to manifestations of language, and use type exercises, which show operations in meaningful context. Smith also mentions attempts to operationalize communicative language learning for adult learners which were made by the Council of Europe in 1973 when the guideline System Development in Adult Language Learning was published, which ultimately led to the design of notional-functional syllabuses. The author admits that the notionalfunctional approach never totally replaced the structural syllabus. According to Smith, the notional-functional syllabus design has had a lasting influence on ESP and provides a valuable tool for determining skills and discourse types for learners. She then describes task-based learning, which was developed by Prahbu (1987) and foregrounds the cognitive challenge of completing tasks with real-world relevance. Rezensionen 238 Thus task-based learning can be seen as a milestone in the development of Scenario-based Learning. Finally Smith claims that more recent examples of taskbased learning as described in Ellis (2003) focus on project-based learning and on the development of autonomous learning (Skehan 1996), two other key concepts taken up in her Scenario-based Learning approach. Chapter 2 deals with theoretical approaches to Second Language Learning. Smith describes cognitivist and constructivist approaches and outlines how the interest of researchers has shifted from methods to products of language learning and the internal processes involved. In these approaches findings from cognitive psychology provide the explanatory framework. Language learning is not treated substantially differently from other types of learning and the idea is prevalent that practicing subskills until they can be performed automatically is sensible. Adherents of models of instructed language learning claim that explicit knowledge may become implicit and that formal instruction facilitates the automation of both implicit and explicit knowledge whereas meta-linguistic knowledge does not become procedural, i.e. implicit. Critics of these models like Pishwa (1998) refer to the brain’s power of self-organization and see a great deal of interaction between implicit and explicit learning. At the end of Chapter 2 Smith refers to a shortcoming of cognitivist, constructivist and communicative models of language teaching, namely that they largely ignore the question of how to address formal accuracy. Chapter 3 is a very short summary of factors relevant in tertiary language learning. Smith takes a closer look at recent developments in LSP research, which originally focused on the lexicon (Fluck 1985) and later on text-linguistic and discourse analytical approaches (Roelke 1999). What is most noteworthy here is that Smith sees language negotiation among peers as an extremely useful tool which often produces more output than a native speaker/ learner condition. She agrees with Firth (2009), who claims that more and more text conventions from languages other than English are introduced, e.g. in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and that the implications of English as a lingua franca discourse for Second Language Acquisition and ESP are likely to become one of the main themes in the coming years. Finally, Smith raises the issue that learners who learn the second language without instruction are off the research radar although they could help to test and refine models of Second Language Acquisition. Chapter 4 describes the development of enabling skills in language learning, which form the foundation for Scenario-based Learning as later introduced in Chapter 5. Based on findings from cognitive learning theory Smith describes language learning as a complex cognitive skill which can be practiced through raising the awareness of learning processes. This is reflected in the Three Component Model of Enabling Skills, in which three didactic dimensions are incorporated: (1.) the cognitive component, which refers to the activation of cognitive skills and the promoting of individual language awareness and strategies; (2.) mega-skills for language learning such as the ability to deal with language input and appropriate response/ output, and (3.) the didactic dimension, in which scenarios provide a framework for interaction and language related activities on the lexico-semantic and the discourse pragmatic level. The teacher’s role is that of a facilitator who helps the learner develop enabling skills. One point of criticism that could be raised against Smith’s approach to developing enabling skills is that she does not include grammar in her lists of language dimens- Rezensionen 239 ions since she is convinced that learners at tertiary level have acquired grammar exhaustively and may only lack the knowledge to use their grammatical knowledge in a coherent way. To me this statement seems contradictory in so far as it takes us back to the criticism raised by Smith in Chapter 2, where she states that the question of how to provide for grammatical accuracy is ignored in most approaches. This partly also holds true for her own approach. In the activities introduced in Chapter 4 language learning work is organized in recursive work cycles. Both teacher and peer feedback play an important role there. Problems are also raised by the learners themselves, which prepares the ground for meta-linguistic feedback. Smith agrees with Adams (2007) on the role of learnerlearner feedback, who argues that for developmental purposes peer feedback is equivalent to native speaker feedback. Chapter 5 outlines the implementation of Scenario-based Language Learning. This approach advocates language-in-action as the main classroom activity for intermediate and advanced learners and sees reflection on language as a legitimate task. Therefore Smith’s approach to Scenario-based Language Learning cuts across the traditional classification of tasks in pedagogical, rhetorical, cognitive and psycholinguistics categories as defined by Ellis (2003). It fosters semi-autonomous learning, includes elements of project-based and task-based learning but puts greater emphasis on the communication processes and their outcomes. The scenarios are generated by the students themselves and run over several weeks. They involve planning processes and feasibility studies. Smith presents two examples which were tested in the Business English program at Klagenfurt University, Austria. The first example is a scenario that was used for entry level learners, the second for students with a higher level of proficiency. The topic chosen for the entry level was the Klagenfurt City Arcade, a controversial shopping center. At the entry level stage the teacher provided the initial input. Students had to evaluate the impact of the shopping center on existing city-centre retail businesses. In the scenario for advanced students the initial input was no longer provided by the teacher. Students had to develop a business plan for a small enterprise that the group or one of the learners would set up in the region. This more complex framework involved research into the legal framework for entrepreneurship, social security payments, taxation and so on. The teacher commented on the viability of the ideas, provided a reality check as an outsider and gave language input wherever necessary. In both scenarios presented in Chapter 5 the closeness to the students’ environment in terms of content and skills makes up for the lack of authenticity of the language context. In this respect Scenario-based Learning is more than a communicative game since learners are engaged in cognitive processes that will further their language acquisition. Chapter 6 deals with the assessment of speaking and writing skills in Scenariobased Learning. The assessment scales provided by Smith allow a fine-grained distinction and are well suited for learners at higher intermediate or advanced levels of proficiency. Likert scales are used for performance ratings. Along a scale of six, the students’ relative performance is evaluated. One of the main advantages of the scales used by Smith is their flexibility, which allows re-categorizing of students’ performance in relation to a particular criterion. Thus, a learner who has not reached C1 proficiency for a particular criterion can be re-categorized as B2. Both group score Rezensionen 240 sheets and individual assessment sheet are provided. One of the strongest points in Smith’s approach to assessment is the incorporation of group feedback as a nonthreatening format for the evaluation of the final report, which is the product of joint editing. Her assessment criteria mirror the work in the classroom and are transparent to learners. She admits that sometimes it might be necessary to collect materials from individual writers in the form of study reports to get a clearer picture of individual skills. In Chapter 7 Smith presents eight theses which sum up her model of tertiary language learning. This somewhat repetitive chapter mainly deals with proposals already made in chapters 3 to 6. Smith argues that the development of a communicative and interactive approach to language teaching must involve the development of enabling skills. Moreover, she claims that the integration of reading, writing, speaking and listening skills in the course of learning are a prerequisite for Scenario-based Language Learning. The integration of these skills requires a commitment to what Widdowson (1978) calls use of language. Another thesis states that practical pragmatic text comprehension and its assessment will require the explicit treatment of metaphors and metonymies. This thesis is supported by her claim that metaphor is the driving force behind new word coinage in English today. Smith concludes by stating that Second Language Acquisition is intercultural and must be oriented towards particular text types which have a culturally specific character. Summing up one can say that Smith manages to present an interesting multifaceted approach that opens up new perspectives for tertiary language learning. Smith goes beyond the raising of research questions and provides practical responses for language teachers at tertiary level. References Adams, R. (2007). “Do second language learners benefit from interacting with each other? ” In: A. Mackey (ed.). Conversational Interaction in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: OUP. 29-51. Council for Cultural Co-operation (1973). System Development in Adult Language Learning. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: OUP. Firth, A. (2009). “Doing not being a foreign language learner: English as a lingua franca in the workplace and (some) implications for SLA.” IRAL 47. 127-156. Fluck, H.-R. (1985). Fachsprachen. Tübingen: Francke UTB. Pishwa, H. (1998). Kognitive Ökonomie im Zweitsprachenerwerb. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Prahbu, N.S. (1987). Second Language Pedagogy: A Perspective. Oxford: OUP. Roelke, T. (1999). Fachsprachen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Skehan, P. (1996). “A Framework for the Implementation of Task-based Instruction.” Applied Linguistics 17/ 1. 38-62. Widdowson, H.G. (1978). Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: OUP. Margit Reitbauer English Department University of Graz Rezensionen 241 Pia Pichler and Eva Eppler (eds.), Gender & Spoken Interaction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pia Resnik Gender & Spoken Interaction was published on the occasion of Jennifer Coates’ 65 th birthday and is meant to honour her major contributions to this fast developing area of research. Throughout the book, the interplay of language and gender in spoken interaction, which requires linking the linguistic to the social, is analysed in a variety of ways, showing the wide range and high complexity of this interdisciplinary scientific field. Even though the foci of all ten contributions diverge tremendously with regard to the subjects, their backgrounds, relevant contexts and major topics of interest, the publishers still successfully manage to maintain some uniformity and logical order. The topics span various life stages and are arranged in a chronological order covering childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Despite the fact that the studies show great variation, all contributors to this edition take a social-constructionist approach to language and gender issues (cf. Cameron: 4), which adds to the coherence of the individual chapters. This approach sees gender “as emerging in interaction, as being ‘done’ or ‘performed’ by speakers in specific contexts” (Pichler and Eppler: xi) rather than being seen as an ontological factor, essence or biological given. To put it in other words, “[c]ontemporary research sees gender, not as a prior category that affects how people speak, but as a highly contextualised process of identification” (Swann: 19). Thus, the interdependence and mutual influence of macro (societal) and micro (individual) levels are acknowledged, leading to gender being viewed as dynamic and definitely not static. Generally speaking, “[…] this volume reflects both continuity and change in researchers’ approaches to language and gender” (Cameron: 1). In the first chapter of the book, in contrast to the following contributions, the focus lies on theory rather than data analysis. Deborah Cameron presents major developments and changes in the field from the 1970s until today, which have led to its scientific recognition. She discusses how the focus has shifted from ‘women only’ to ‘men as well as women’ and the acceptance of the pluralising of femininities and masculinities, examining the intersection of gender with further categories, such as social class, ethnicity and age (cf. 2). Cameron provides the reader with a thorough understanding of the main developments, controversies and concerns in the research area and its influence on and implications for sociolinguistics by explaining milestones in language and gender research, such as the well-known ‘dominance approach’, which was put into question by the ‘difference approach’ in the 1980s (cf. 9), which was itself challenged in the 1990s by both the ‘postmodern turn’ and social constructionism (cf. 4-8). The explanations of the different theoretical stances prominent in the field clarify the shifts in focus and the study of comparably new issues, such as sexuality, identity and masculinities (cf. 10-13). Besides laying the groundwork for subsequent contributions, the overall aim of the chapter is to show that, “Change does not usually come out of nowhere” (3), but has been “foreshadowed in earlier work” (ibid.). Research questions that might seem outdated nowadays are likely to have enhanced progress and were not necessarily bad questions at the Rezensionen 242 time they were brought up; the circumstances (e.g. political and social context) might simply have changed (cf. 3). Cameron’s theoretical discussion is followed by contributions combine theory with data analysis. Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on the school setting. In her article, Joan Swann shows the importance of investigating contexts in which gender does not figure prominently at first sight but becomes relevant when we pay attention to how it is being ‘done’ (cf. 18-19). She distinguishes two main analytical stances within research investigating the performative, way of (re-)producing gender in spoken interaction: Whereas some researchers are mainly interested in exploring the “indexicality of language” (20-22), i.e. relationship between speech styles and other social categories such as gender, others investigate the “textualised invocation of gender” (22-25), meaning the speakers’ representation of gender. In her analysis of extracts of spoken interaction of three 9-10 year-olds in a primary school in SE- England, Swann mainly focuses on the latter approach, as “[c]hildren themselves are clearly not ‘neutral’ beings and will bring to the classroom gendered practices, values and expectations” (27). Drawing on data from a project teaching pupils effective ways of exploring ideas (cf. 25) and analysing them using an interactional sociolinguistic approach (cf. 18), Swann reveals interesting ways in which gender “creeps into interactions [mainly] in relation to unofficial activities” (36) and that gender is directly or indirectly referred to in a context in which it is actually not salient: “[…] gender is always invocable, even where rarely invoked” (36). Investigating the same context, Janet Maybin combines ethnography with discourse analysis when examining two classes of 10-11 year-olds in Britain. Her account is special in the sense that she avoids approaching her subjects top-down, but tries to “enter into the children’s perspectives and understandings” (44). In contrast to Swann’s classroom examination, Maybin investigates children’s spoken interactions in informal situations (i.e. among themselves) and in semi-structured interviews together with peers (cf. 43-44). To be more precise, she looks at how sexuality and gender are represented in the children’s conversational narratives, as, according to her, “they play an active, inquiring role in their own socialisation” (42) in this respect. Despite wide variation in maturity in this age group, (hetero-) sexuality and associated topics like boyfriends, girlfriends, masculinity and kissing are very prominent in their talk and regarded as public affairs. The pupils’ construction of identity and knowledge is strongly informed by conversational practices which, in turn, are shaped by their social experience at this pre-adolescent stage. Discourse creates a space of experimentation for the children in the context of sexuality and practices. Variation in pitch, mimicking adult voices and using reported speech, for example, allow them to save face when necessary (cf. 58-60). In chapter 4, Anthea Irwin shifts the focus to a slightly older age-group when investigating two drama-groups of adolescents aged 13-16. Drawing on Foucault’s work on discourse (1980) and Goffman’s ideas on framing (1974) and footing (1981), Irwin adopts a qualitative discourse analytic approach. The subjects recorded themselves and this technique allows the researcher to analyse spontaneous talk during break times and before their classes (cf. 64). The two groups differ in social class and so do their ways of marking deviant positions in discourse - especially when speaking about sexuality and/ or gender. Whereas members of the group situated in a working class area in N-London are more likely to say something and then retract it Rezensionen 243 again (e.g. by making clear they were only joking; mostly used by girls) or shifting positions (mostly used by boys), members of the middle class group from SW- London generally tend to avoid fully committing to a deviant position (cf. 68-84). Irwin’s data again shows how the technique of altering their voice (e.g. volume and stress) helps adolescents to signal that they are solely speaking on a fantasy level and are in no way serious when talking about genderand/ or sexuality-related matters (cf. 83). Chapter 5 again deals with adolescence. Pia Pichler offers a discourse analysis of self-recorded spoken interaction of four private school girls in London. The focus of her analysis of discourses, practices and types of knowledge lies mainly on how the girls position themselves in their friendship groups. Not only does their privileged social status thus become obvious, but their notable efforts to distance and differentiate themselves from other members of their peer group who are less socially conscious. The attempt to accomplish “alternative private school femininities” (88) and, along with it, non-conformity regarding the social class they belong to shows an overt orientation towards class, which is rare in adolescent discourse (cf. 90-91). The girls are also unique in that they hardly ever broach the issue of gender and sexuality. Even though these topics play a marginal role in their conversation, the girls still emphasize their knowledge of the subject matter. Again, gender implicitly plays a role: while appreciating working-class masculinity when talking about topics such as music, drugs and sex, adopting ‘cool’, streetwise positions, the girls clearly reject working-class femininity, regarding it as embarrassing (cf. 108-110). The following contribution concentrates on the context of higher education. Siân Preece investigates three male Asian first-year undergraduate students from a working-class background who are taking part in an academic writing programme at a university in London. She examines how laddish masculinity is acted out by them. Although the interest in this age group has been increasing in the research of language and gender, so far most research in the context of higher education has been carried out in the United States (cf. 115) with young, elite (white) members of the middle-class at the centre of attention as they have been thought to represent the prototypical student. But university life nowadays is marked by social diversity, even more so at less prestigious institutions of higher education. According to Preece, exhibiting laddish masculinity particularly helps students who do not conform to the aforementioned middle-class, white student-stereotype to hide their vulnerability. She argues that “[w]ithin education contexts, laddishness appears closely interlinked with young men’s efforts to develop and maintain popularity with peers and resist institutional authority” (117; see also Wehelehan 2000). By examining male students from a non-traditional background and looking at how gender is represented when interacting with their colleagues, Preece is raising new questions and providing the reader with new, valuable insights into this research setting. Following well-known researchers in the areas of discourse (e.g. Fairclough 2003; Foucault 1974) and gender (e.g. Butler 1990; Cameron and Kulick 2003; Coates 2003) she is opting for a holistic approach taking paralinguistic and non-verbal data into consideration and paying attention to intersectionality (cf. 121). Hence, she clearly views gender “as a relational term” (ibid.). The analysis of the boys’ spoken interaction reveals that they are clearly distancing themselves from their peers (cf. 124). By exhibiting laddish masculinity, the boys try to appear rough, strong, self-confident and non-conformist: “[…] laddish Rezensionen 244 masculinity offered these young men powerful and seductive positions from which to speak to counter the relatively powerless institutional ‘non-traditional’ and ‘deficit’ positioning” (133). In chapter 7, Kira Hall tries to show that “‘maleness’ is as much gained as it is given, with speakers reproducing, and often exploiting, ideological links between form and meaning, in the production of a gendered subjectivity” (139). Additionally, she argues that class is not static and that the linguistic indices of both masculinity and class are to some extent flexible. She investigates “‘women who are attracted to women’”, who identify either as ‘lesbians’ or ‘boys’ (cf. 140) and draws on an immense body of data. Hall’s research is also exceptional in that it shows the importance of ethnographic methodology and demonstrates how cultural and societal values and ideologies (may) influence individuals’ ways of identification and language choice. While the ‘lesbians’ in her study orient to Western models of same-sex desire and clearly identify as female, the ‘boys’ identify with rural Indian models and maleness, eventually aiming at sexual reassignment surgery. In the socio-cultural context of interest to Hall, language practices are strictly bound to gender as well: while Hindi is used to mark masculinity and is, hence, used by the ‘boys’, English is regarded as typical of the upper class and associated with progressiveness. English is therefore spoken by the ‘lesbians’ to distance themselves from male-identified, ‘vulgar’ language and consequently to mark their female identities. This study is special in representing an extreme case of language choice depending on how one identifies and Hall “argues for a deeper consideration of the discursive alliance between language, masculinity, and social class” (141; see also Livia 2004). The two following contributions shift the focus to the relevance of gender in spoken interaction in the business setting. Susan McRae in her article explores the role of “gender, occupational roles and relative status in spoken interaction in the workplace” (163), specifically in disagreement situations during meetings. Methodology-wise, two approaches are applied: a Conversational Analytical approach, in which solely the transcripts are of relevance, and a more comprehensive analysis including other factors, such as information about the participants and companies, statistics and feedback (cf. 163). Disagreement situations are particularly interesting with regard to gender as “power differentials can be polarised, with those in superior positions being more likely to have their views or proposals accepted” (166). A first analysis did not reveal any particular gender-specific differences, such as women being more collaborative and men more competitive in their talk. Disagreements were in general expressed in an indirect way, using tag questions, epistemic modal verbs, hesitations, hedges and the like (cf. 167). Hence, the speaking style of both women and men could be described as collaborative in disagreement situations. But on closer inspection (cf. 168), it becomes clear that those with higher occupational status most often ‘won’ an argument and got their say, and these were almost exclusively men. Whenever gender is referred to, it is clearly correlates with differences in role or status. Hence, McRae very well shows that ‘text-only’ analysis is often insufficient as, for example, employment patterns and concomitant distributions of power are of relevance, too. She demonstrates that the gender-language-interface both perpetuates and reflects inequality among women and men at work. Obviously, gender is relevant to workplace communication and clearly has an effect on spoken interaction as women are likely to be given less power in disagreement situations (cf. 182-183). Rezensionen 245 Chapter 9, too, looks at a professional setting, yet approaching it with different research questions. Janet Holmes explores the types of masculinities brought into the workplace and how these are exhibited in interaction between colleagues. Analysing data from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project (188), in which a range of workplaces in New Zealand were examined, she adopts a social constructionist approach using discourse analysis with an interactional sociolinguistic perspective (Gumperz 1996). Holmes identifies three frequently occurring discourse styles used by male leaders in the workplace: the authoritative style, the paternalistic style and the egalitarian style (189). The authoritative style (cf. 189-193) is used to show decisiveness, the ability to control and includes direct criticism of others as well as confrontational and challenging behaviour. It is mainly used by male leaders. The second style covers mentoring and a paternalistic attitude towards employees including supportive and protective behavior. A male leader is most likely to use this kind of speech style to address female employees (cf. 193-200). The third style is mainly used among male-only groups and is associated with a superior who is friendly and plays down differences in status, showing solidarity and collegiality by using rather informal and casual language (cf. 200-204). Needless to say, the aforementioned discourse styles are variable and context-dependent. One leader may even apply all of them depending on who is talking to whom about what, where and when. All in all, Holmes shows that masculinity is not stable but dynamic and constantly needs to be managed (cf. 204; see also Coates: 2003: 79, 81). In the final contribution, Eva Eppler shifts the focus towards the older generation of Jewish Austrian, female refugees living in London. Second, she extends her analysis to the context of bilingual speech. Eppler describes the aim of her chapter as follows: “[…] to establish whether the features of spontaneous interaction that have been identified as characteristics of women’s friendship talk by Coates (1996), among others, are also employed by women from a different and so far unexplored cultural, linguistic, ethnic background” (211) when a collaborative floor is jointly constructed. Methodologically speaking, she moves one step before the so-called postmodern turn (cf. Cameron 2005) empirically examining whether certain speech styles typical of a particular gender in a certain context can indeed be observed. The data she analyses cover informal conversations between four female Austrian Holocaust refugees in their late sixties/ early seventies living in NW-London at the time of investigation. Using a Conversation Analytical approach to code-switching (cf. Auer 1984, 1998), Eppler shows that the participants use their L1 (German) to mention aspects digressing from the main storyline, which is pursued in their L2 (English). English is thus used to mark “generally known fact[s]” (Gumperz 1982: 80) and German is spoken whenever the examinees express their “personal opinion/ knowledge” (Gumperz 1982: 80). All in all, Eppler draws the conclusion that “female participants code-switch to establish an egalitarian bilingual collaborative floor” (222) and need to pay even closer attention than monolinguals to the various linguistic levels involved in order to achieve it (cf. ibid.). By distancing herself from a social constructionist approach, she is trying to advocate being “careful not to overstate the extent of the shifts that have taken place”, as Cameron (4) had suggested in the introductory chapter of this book. To conclude, apart from its first chapter, Gender & Spoken Interaction has a strong empirical focus and shows that analyses of the microlevels of interaction can Rezensionen 246 reveal a lot how gender is expressed in spoken interaction. Beyond offering rich insights into the topic itself, the authors exhibit a wide methodological range of mainly qualitative sociolinguistic research. The majority of the contributions also highlights the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach and a triangulation of research methods to get a better understanding of the vast and complex research area. To someone interested in the areas of applied linguistics (discourse analysis, especially) and/ or gender - advanced students and teachers alike - the book will definitely prove enriching. It offers many answers, but also raises further questions and offers ideas for future study designs. Personally speaking, I agree with Cameron (cf. 4) and Eppler (cf. 232) when they state that the shifts that have taken place in the study of language and gender should not be overrated. Yet I am still convinced that the view of gender being dynamic and relational is more applicable to grasping the intricacies of social realities, rather than viewing it as static or given. From my point of view, the latter clearly holds the danger of perpetuating stereotypes. In general, the authors of the articles in the volume have put a lot of effort into undermining the continuation or reproduction of stereotypes. Focusing on rather uncommon settings (e.g. Preece: 115-138), for example, is certainly a good way to do so. All in all, Gender & Spoken Interaction offers rich insights into the expanding linguistic subfield of gender and spoken interaction. By including a variety of research settings and subjects of various age-groups, ethnic and socio-cultural backgrounds, it is a great contribution that provides the reader with a better understanding of and deep insights into how gender is (re-)produced in spoken interaction across the lifespan. References Auer, P. (1984). Bilingual Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Auer, P. (ed.) (1998). Code-Switching in Conversation. Language, Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge. Buchholtz, M. (ed.) (2004). Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. New York: OUP. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Cameron, D. (2005). “Language, gender and sexuality: current issues and new directions.” Applied Linguistics 26/ 4. 482-502. Cameron, D. / D. Kulick (2003). Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: CUP. Coates, J. (1996). Women Talk: Converstion between Women Friends. Oxford: Blackwell. Coates, J. (2003). Men Talk: Stories in the Making of Masculinities. Oxford: Blackwell. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1974). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. London: Harvester Press. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row. Goffman, E. (1981). “Footing.” In: Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 124-59. Rezensionen 247 Gumperz, J.J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: CUP. Gumperz, J.J. (1996). “The linguistic and conversational relativity of conversational inference.” In: Gumperz/ Levinson (1996). 374-406. Gumperz, J.J. / S.C. Levinson (eds.) (1996). Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: CUP. Livia, A. (2004). “Language and Woman’s Place: picking up the gauntlet.” In: M. Buchholtz (ed.) Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. New York: OUP. 143-150. Wehelehan, I. (2000). Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: Women’s Press. Pia Resnik English Department University of Graz Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de NEUERSCHEINUNG OKTOBER 2010 JETZT BESTELLEN! Gert Rickheit/ Sabine Weiss Hans-Jürgen Eikmeyer Kognitive Linguistik Theorien, Methoden, Modelle UTB 3408 S 2010, IV, 347 Seiten, 95 Abb. €[D] 19,90/ SFr 33,50 ISBN 978-3-8252-3408-9 Die Allgemeine Linguistik beschreibt die Struktur einer Sprache, die Kognitive Linguistik dagegen erklärt Sprachverarbeitungsprozesse mithilfe von Experimenten. Das vorliegende Buch verfolgt den empirischen Ansatz der Kognitiven Linguistik, weil die empirischen Befunde der Spracherwerbsforschung, der Psycho- und Neurolinguistik dafür sprechen, dass dem Lernen mit seinen Umgebungsbedingungen beim Spracherwerb eine größere Bedeutung zukommt, als die Anhänger der Generativen Grammatik annehmen. Ebenso deuten Erkenntnisse der Psycho- und Neurolinguistik darauf hin, dass die Sprache kein von anderen Faktoren des kognitiven Systems isoliertes Modul darstellt, sondern dass die einzelnen kognitiven Module wie Sprache, Wahrnehmung und Gedächtnis, um nur einige zu nennen, miteinander interagieren. 085410 Auslieferung Oktober 2010.indd 30 25.10.10 14: 55 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de NEUERSCHEINUNG OKTOBER 2010 JETZT BESTELLEN! Saskia Kersten The Mental Lexicon and Vocabulary Learning Implications for the foreign language classroom Language in Performance, Band 43 2010, XVI, 197 Seiten, 25 Abb., 18 Tab., €[D] 54,00/ SFr 76,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-6586-0 Lexis was, for a long time, paid scant attention to in foreign language teaching. Over the last 20 years, however, vocabulary acquisition has become a focus of academic research. In particular, the Cognitive Linguistic perspective on foreign language learning offers a rich theoretical framework for research in this area, since it encapsulates both ease of learning and a more profound knowledge of the target language. Learning vocabulary in school contexts, however, is still strongly associated with rote learning in many parts of the world, that is, the repetition of items, usually using lists with little or no contextual information. The implications of Cognitive Linguistics form the basis of an intervention study carried out in German primary schools. This study investigates whether lessons enabling learners to elaborate on words and thereby process the vocabulary more deeply lead to better long-term retention of these items. The results of this empirical study are used to evaluate the relevance and benefits of the theoretical implications of vocabulary research for primary school learners of English. 085410 Auslieferung Oktober 2010.indd 12 08.10.10 14: 44 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de “Cognate Object Constructions in English” is the first comprehensive description of linguistic expressions such as Both died an unheroic death or Jamie grinned his tired grin, viewed from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. Redefining the categor y of “cognate objects”, the book provides a systematic account of prototypical and less prototypical instances of this pattern. Based on real-usage data from the BNC, the study presents a family of constructions which are equipped with their own syntactic and lexical idiosyncrasies and their own semantic-pragmatic functions, such as event structuring and event intensification. In a step-by-step fashion, the author develops a network of constructional schemas ranging from abstract to concrete, thereby investigating and corroborating the plausibility of a lexissyntax continuum - one of the main assumptions of the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise. The book offers important insight on concepts such as argument structure and transitivity and demonstrates the fruitful interrelationship between Cognitive Linguistics and statistical corpus linguistics. Silke Höche Cognate Object Constructions in English A Cognitive-Linguistic Account Language in Performance, Band 41 2009, XII, 312 Seiten, 31 Abb., 35 Tab., €[D] 58,00/ SFr 98,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6489-4 056109 Auslieferung Mai 2009.indd 3 09.06.2009 7: 38: 27 Uhr