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This thesis examines the spread and promotion of English on a global level, from a historical perspective in particular ‘Third World’ contexts. The globalization of English as an exclusive language of power is considered to be a trap, when accompanied by an ideology aiming to universalize monolingual and monocultural norms and standards. World-wide English diffusion is related - not to any mystical effects of some psycho-social mechanisms or transmuting alchemy - but to a global rise of military, political, economic, communicational and cultural Euro-American hegemony. The fact that the English language has become perhaps the primary medium of social control and power has not been given a prominent place in the analyses of established social scientists or political planners. On the contrary, the positively idealized dominance of English as a universal medium has become part of a collection of myths seeking to deny the global reality of multilingualism. Not allowing for the existence of any power besides itself, the perpetuation of this hegemony of English within a multilingual scenario has become a contradiction in terms. Centuries of colonialism, followed by neo-colonialism, are seen to have resulted in a world-wide consensus favouring centralization and homogenization of state and world economies, administrations, language, education and mass media systems, as prerequisites to local and global unity. The particular case of India as encountered by a colonizing Britain is used to illustrate the historical clash between differing language and educational traditions and cultures. It was on the strength of their own predominantly positive attitudes towards diversity - encoded in their promotion of complex social and religious philosophies, as well as varied economic and educational practices of pluralism and hierarchy-without-imposition, unity in diversity, etc. - that the people and their leaders finally achieved Indian independence from British colonialism. Contemporary Indian society, however, is still grappling with the legacy of a Eurocentric civilizational model - encoded in the neo-colonial system of English education - and in conflict with its own positively idealized and actively promoted traditions of pluralism. On national and international levels, the destabilization and destruction of diversity continues to threaten more than the linguistic and cultural uniqueness of numerous communities and individuals. For those majorities and minorities who refuse to give up their ‘differences’, political, economic and physical survival is at stake. A paradoxical reality, seldom acknowledged, is that while for the politically and economically already powerful language groups, the enormous resources spent on formal (language) education have become a means to maintain their material and political capital, whereas for the majority of modern societies' marginalized members, powerful linguistic barriers to full economic or political participation remain firmly in place. The justifications for perpetuating exclusionary policies and sustaining structural inequality have come from monocultural ideological assumptions in education and language policies as one of the key mechanisms for state control of labour. This thesis concludes that the trap of an ideologically exclusive status for English can be avoided by theoretically positivizing and institutionally promoting existing multilingual and multicultural peoples’ realities as an integral part of their human rights, in order to resist global Englishization.
In the present monograph, we will deal with questions of lexical typology in the nominal domain. By the term "lexical typology in the nominal domain", we refer to crosslinguistic regularities in the interaction between (a) those areas of the lexicon whose elements are capable of being used in the construction of "referring phrases" or "terms" and (b) the grammatical patterns in which these elements are involved. In the traditional analyses of a language such as English, such phrases are called "nominal phrases". In the study of the lexical aspects of the relevant domain, however, we will not confine ourselves to the investigation of "nouns" and "pronouns" but intend to take into consideration all those parts of speech which systematically alternate with nouns, either as heads or as modifiers of nominal phrases. In particular, this holds true for adjectives both in English and in other Standard European Languages. It is well known that adjectives are often difficult to distinguish from nouns, or that elements with an overt adjectival marker are used interchangeably with nouns, especially in particular semantic fields such as those denoting MATERIALS or NATlONALlTIES. That is, throughout this work the expression "lexical typology in the nominal domain" should not be interpreted as "a typology of nouns", but, rather, as the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical areas constitutive for "referring phrases" irrespective of how the parts-of-speech system in a specific language is defined.
Why variables?
(1999)
This paper addresses the question of how sentence-internal semantic dependencies are computed? The kind of semantic dependency I am looking at is that between a so called "bound (variable) pronoun" and its binder illustrated in (1), where the dependency is indicated by a connecting line. With all the literature on the topic (see for example Partee 1973, Percus 1998), I assume that this case is the prototype of all semantic dependencies, and therefore any result for this case generalizes to all types of sentence-internal semantic dependencies.