Spanisch in den Anden und Französisch in Kamerun als Kontaktvarietäten unter den Bedingungen globalisierter und computergestützter Kommunikation
Final Report Abstract
The project investigated very large corpora (> 35 million words) of authentic spoken and webforum data produced by speakers and writers in Latin America and West Africa. In Latin America, the project focused on Andean Spanish in Bolivia, Peru and EcuadorIn West Africa, the focus was on contact varieties of French in Senegal and Cameroon. The amount and the nature of the material necessitated the development of new corpus linguistic tools (NCAT “NetCorporaAdministrationTool” and MOCA.A “Multimodal Corpora Administration & Analysis”), which combine data visualization and interactional analysis with more traditional corpus linguistic techniques such as concordancing and textual statistics. The results of the research contribute to the following fields of research: (i) research on varieties of Word Spanish / World French; pidgin and creole linguistics: Structural description of orthographic, morphosyntactic and lexical features displayed by Spanish in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, by French in Senegal and Cameroon, and by other nonstandard varieties used in computer-mediated communication (Camfranglais, French Guyana Creole and French in Egypt). (ii) discourse analysis of computer-mediated communication (CMC): Description of the digital ethnolinguistic repertoires developed by web-based communities of practice. (iii) sociocultural linguistics, sociolinguistics of globalization: Impact of media and mobility on the spread of contact varieties of American Spanish and African French; linguistic ideology; critique of traditional models of World French and World Spanish, which often focus on the linguistic legacy of colonialism too heavily and hence fail to account for the sociolinguistic dynamics of contemporary globalization. Integrating these three layers of analysis, the project has made important contributions to corpus technology, to sociolinguistically informed multimodal interaction analysis, and to a deeper understanding of the status and functions of contact varieties of French and Spanish in the world’s rapidly changing mediascapes and ethnoscapes (Appadurai). The performance and creativity analyses proposed in Vold-Lexander & Alcón (2016) emerge directly from the results of the present project and represent a long overdue step towards taking the individual speaker/writer and their activities in social interaction seriously in context of the description of ongoing change both in communicative routines and in language use.
Publications
- “Convergencias en el área andina: la testimonialidad y la marcación de la evidencialidad en el español andino y en el quechua”, in: Neue Romania 41, 2012, 89-120
Dankel, Philipp & Soto Rodríguez, Mario
- “Rhétorique ordinaire et tâches communicatives: convergences et divergences dans des entretiens médiatisés d'experts africains et français”, in: Le français en Afrique, 2012, 93-107
Skrovec, Marie & Pfänder, Stefan
- Lo criollo en cuestión. Filología e historia, Buenos Aires, 2013
Ennis, Juan & Pfänder, Stefan
- “Vernacular and multilingual writing in mediated spaces: web-forums for post-colonial communities of practice”, in: Auer, P., M. Hilpert, A. Stukenbrock & B. Szmrecsanyi (Hg.), Space in language and linguistics: geographical, interactional, and cognitive perspectives, Amsterdam, 2013, 529-556
Mair, Christian & Pfänder, Stefan
- “Creating a Multimodal Corpus of Spoken World French”, in: Ruhi, Ş., M. Haugh, T. Schmidt & K. Wörner (Hg.), Best Practices for Spoken Corpora in Linguistic Research, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, 142-161
Ehmer, Oliver & Martinez, Camille
- “Similarity effects in language contact”, in: Besters-Dilger, J. et al. (Hg.), Congruence in Contact-Induced Language Change, Berlin, 2014, 219-238
Palacios, Azucena & Pfänder, Stefan
