Laureen Zanotti » Linguistics

Code-Switching

Laureen — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:06:05 +0000

“Code-Switching Among English and Swiss-German Speaking Couples” by Azra von Niederhäusern-Hodzic and Laureen Zanotti

The paper, “Code-Switching Among English and Swiss-German Speaking Couples” is a proposal for a hypothetical research project in linguistics, and it was a collaboration between Azra von Niederhäusern-Hodzic and me. We worked on the premise that native speakers of both languages will eventually code-switch during a conversation, no matter how consistently they try to stick to one language. We took the stance that there are certain words in English and Swiss German which are more prone to be subject to code-switching than others. To be more precise, we proposed that the English word ‘cozy’ and the German word ‘Treffpunkt’ do not have a satisfying equivalent in the other language.

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Accent Awareness

Laureen — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:16:55 +0000

The study of accents is by no means a field of interest that is solely claimed or dealt with by linguists in academia. The aim of this paper is to discuss the general awareness of accents in the United States of America, which becomes particularly obvious when browsing the Internet. I discuss three different ways in which this argument can be substantiated. 1) An online accent test is an indicator of an overall interest in accent categorization. 2) Public video posts on the Internet requesting feedback on personal accents. 3) Accent categorization in the film industry is based on generally accepted stereotypes. It goes without saying that it is necessary to go beyond academic textbooks in order to find out how the general US population deals with accent classification. Therefore, the study of popular Internet sites is mandatory for this task.

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