Thursday, May 26, 2005
Dame un hamburger plain con ketchup y papitas
Highlights from the April issue of the excellent journal English Today:
Dame un hamburger plain con ketchup y papitas
Ileana Cortés a1, Jesús Ramírez a2, María Rivera a3, Marta Viada a4 and Joan Fayer a5
English/Spanish contact in Puerto Rico.
ONE OUTCOME of language contact is lexical borrowing. Borrowing in Puerto Rico (for political, economic, and social reasons) is evident in the influence English has had on Spanish, especially in lexical terms. This paper explores the impact of American English on the lexicon of Puerto Rican Spanish, specifically on vocabulary relating to food. Data were collected through participant observation in selected fast food restaurants from different regions in P.R. An analysis of the corpus provides the basis for five categories useful in understanding the influence of English on Spanish in this domain. The study indicates that English borrowings have had a tremendous influence on the Puerto Rican lexicon, and predicts that, even though Spanish will continue to be the dominant Puerto Rican language, it will continue to change under the influence of English.
English Today (2005), 21:2:35-42 Cambridge University Press
The case against the ‘native speaker’
Carmen Acevedo Butcher a1
a1 Fulbright Lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul, KoreaDo we need fairer names for speakers of English? A discussion of current popular early 3rd-millennium definitions attached to the phrase native speaker (meaning ‘someone born and raised speaking correct English’), including an examination of global changes which suggest that a profoundly changed and changing world requires radically new linguistic terms.
English Today (2005), 21:2:13-24 Cambridge University Press
Alan S. Kaye a1
a1 Professor of Linguistics, California State University, FullertonAn account of consonantal ‘twinning’ in English and other languages.
THIS ESSAY concerns itself with gemination in English, but more specifically, it asks whether English has consonantal gemination (CG), as has been reported by some in the literature. Gemination is usually defined as a phonetic doubling (cf. Latin geminus ‘twin’); however, phonetic length (as opposed to a single or nongeminated segment) is a more accurate designation (see Matthews 1997:141, who cites Italian atto [at[Length mark]o] ‘act’, making reference only to ‘doubling’). It has long been known that English does not have contrastive CG as is recognized, say, from the phonemic difference between Classical and Modern Standard Arabic kasara (‘he broke’) and kassara (‘he smashed’) or darasa (‘he studied’) and darrasa (‘he taught’).
English Today (2005), 21:2:43-55 Cambridge University Press