John Holm and Creole Linguistics
Linguists who meet John Holm today, a newly retired Professor Catedratico with a chair in English Linguistics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and one of the most eminent creolists in the world, might imagine that his path to academic prominence must have been the usual sort of straight-line progression: high school to college to graduate school, followed by tenure-track academic employment and a steady climb through the ranks. This would be a mistake. John’s career path has been impressive indeed, but far from ordinary. He came to languages and to creoles early, but mostly not in classrooms. His background doesn’t immediately suggest adventure. John was born in 1943 and grew up in Jackson, Michigan, which is not the most exotic of towns. His family was hardly the monolingual and monocultural Midwestern stereotype, however. His Danish father was a much travelled electrical engineer — he lit up Islamabad — and an ex-sailor; his mother’s family descended from the Volga Germans who were taken to Russia by Catherine the Great, and she made sure her children knew about German culture. Both parents valued the languages of their original home countries, and all the other languages they met on their travels. They also leaned left in their political views, which made life dicult during the Communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s; so at one time they considered moving to Uruguay. This plan inspired the whole family to study Spanish, and John remembers the excitement of using the language to open up new perspectives later during a family vacation trip to Mexico. By the time John reached high school his interest in languages was firmly established, and he studied German, Spanish and Russian. A short-lived summer job in Arizona in 1961 evolved into an impromptu hitch-hiking trip to Mexico and then Nicaragua, where he ran out of money but began his life-long journey into creole linguistics. As he describes it, ‘One of the most amazing things I discovered there was that black people from Nicaragua’s Caribbean
The Partial Restructuring of Vernaculars
There is widespread agreement that certain non-creole vernaculars are structurally quite different from the languages out of which they grew: African American English, Afrikaans, Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese, Nonstandard Caribbean Spanish, and the Vernacular Lects of Réunion French. Until now, however, these languages have proved remarkably resistant to the attempts of linguists to provide a plausible theory to account for either their genesis or their synchronic structure. Informed by the first systematic comparison of the social and linguistic facts in the development of these languages, this book argues that the transmission of their source languages from native to non-native speakers led to partial restructuring, resulting in the retention of a substantial amount of the source languages’ morphosyntax, but also the introduction of a significant number of substrate and interlanguage features. This study concludes with the proposal of a formal theoretical model identifying the linguistic processes that lead to partial restructuring, throwing into focus a key span on the continuum of contact-induced language change which has not been coherently analyzed up to now. It demonstrates how the insights gained from the comparative study of such vernaculars cast much-needed light on the relationship between the diachronic development and synchronic structure of this important group of languages, with some 200 million speakers.
Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination
List of illustrations Acknowledgements Note on editions and abbreviations used Introduction: Dickens and the popular radical imagination 1. Popular radical culture in Regency England: Peterloo and The Queen Caroline Affair 2. Dickens and nineteenth-century show trials 3. Dickens, popular culture and popular politics in the 1830s: Oliver Twist 4. Christmas is cancelled: Dickens and Douglas Jerrold writing the 1840s 5. Popular and political writing in the radical press: from Douglas Jerrold to Ernest Jones, Chartist 6. Household Words, politics and the mass market in the 1850s 7. Flunkeyism and toadyism in the age of machinery: from Bleak House to Little Dorrit Notes Bibliography Index.