Hans Georg Wolf Boeken

The multilingual situation in Cameroon and the status of English as a co-official language constitute a unique and fascinating case for sociolinguistic investigation. Drawing from first-hand material, the author investigates several aspects of this complex configuration, including the historical development of English in Cameroon, the various languages and lingua franca areas, the linguistic policy, the de facto status of English and the situation in the anglophone provinces. The speech community of the Anglophones is highlighted as a rare example of an ethnicity tied to the second language. Apart from important sociolinguistic findings, the work includes a novel, corpus-based analysis of Cameroon English. Certain lexical phenomena are explained by the cognitive coding of culture - particularly the African cultural model of community, which also underlies the self-perception of the Anglophones - a perspective hitherto neglected in the study of the New Englishes.

The contributions to the present festschrift for Peter Lucko deal with a broad spectrum of topics in English linguistics, ranging from variationist and comparative research in world Englishes, the investigation of second language varieties, the study of academic and political discourse to accounts of verb categories. The authors make use of various methodological and theoretical frameworks, including computational and corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis and descriptive sociolinguistics. The plurality of topics and approaches reflects not only latest trends in English language studies but also Peter Lucko's own research interests.

The book is the first of its kind to establish Cognitive Linguistics as a research paradigm within the field of world Englishes. The authors survey the main tenets of both areas of linguistic enquiry and suggest that the theoretical and methodological apparatus developed both within Cognitive Linguistics generally and within its novel sub-discipline Cognitive Sociolinguistics can overcome certain limitations inherent in traditional approaches to cultural variation in language. They present a case study of the linguistic realization of the cultural model of community in African English as an exemplar for the investigation of cultural models in other varieties of English. Corpus-linguistic methods are combined with conceptual metaphor analysis and blending theory to elucidate a vast network of conceptualizations salient to speakers of African English. The findings, based on computer corpora and a range of additional sources, are discussed against the background of work in anthropology, religious studies, and political science. The book also reflects on the role of English in intercultural communication and concludes with a comparison of Cognitive Linguistics and pragmatic functionalism, placing the former in the wider framework of a hermeneutic philosophy that stresses dialogic understanding.

Die deutsche Vereinigung war für die Institute der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR mit tiefgreifenden Wandlungsprozessen verbunden. Diese organisationssoziologische Studie dokumentiert, mit welchen endogenen und exogenen Faktoren sich die unterschiedlichen Transformationsverläufe und -resultate erklären lassen. Autor: Hans-Georg Wolf ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Akademie für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart.

Based on Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor, the author analyzes and criticizes the Western model of the «Internal Self», constituted by a system of not unifiable but reifying metaphors. Both experts (psychologists, philosophers, etc.) and lay persons draw upon this model when they refer to the self. The reification of the self into separate entities leads to contradictions in the futile attempt to bridge the subject-object gap. The work points to social constructionism as an alternative language game that may help us overcome the confusions intrinsic to our present conceptualization of the self.