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
Central American English
This volume is about the Anglophone creoles to be found on the Caribbean coast of Central America (Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama), and its offshore islands (Providencia, San Andres and the Caymans) . The study of these Anglophone varieties is comparatively recent and based on current field work from Belize to Panama. One of the interesting features that emerges is the tentative map of diachronic and synchronic relationsships among the Anglophone creoles of the Caribbean, as illustrated partly by the lexicon and partly by grammatical constructions. The studies in this book are based on phonetic transcriptions of speech acts in their social and linguistic context.
Building Knowledge about the Consumer: The Emergence of Market Research in the Motion Picture Industry
The way film companies obtained knowledge about the consumer resembled that of fashion industries. Initially, intermediaries analysed sales and observed customers while they consumed the service. As the film industry developed between the 1890s and the 1940s, however, its gathering of information increasingly began to resemble the market research of mass-distribution industries. Technological and contractual changes, as well as a rise in sunk costs, affected the way market research was done. By the late 1930s, film companies' increasing need for market information quickly made them adopt the newly available market research techniques. This essay traces this evolution showing how market research techniques were systematised and developed. The surveys by the British Granada Theatres cinema chain stood on the threshold of the era of modern market research, while the work of George Gallup's Audience Research of the US marked its advent.