Stephanie Hackert

Pseudotitles in Bahamian English: A Case of Americanization?

This study investigates the use of so-called pseudotitles, that is, determiner-less structures providing descriptive information in front of name noun phrases, as in linguist Allan Bell, in Bahamian newspaper language. Pseudotitles originated in American journalistic writing, but they have spread to numerous varieties of English worldwide and even to British English. A corpus of pre-independence and contemporary press news reports is analyzed quantitatively with a view to establishing not only the frequency of pseudotitles but also the constraints that govern their usage in Bahamian English. The study also considers the position and structure of equivalent appositives and their relationships with pseudotitles. It will be shown that, at least with regard to the feature investigated here, Bahamian journalists followed American norms even in British colonial times, which may be accounted for by the social history and current sociolinguistic situation of the country. At the same time, these norms have been modified and adapted to local linguistic realities, which presents another piece of evidence in favor of a nuanced view of linguistic Americanization.

Linguistic Nationalism and the Emergence of the English Native Speaker

This article examines the rhetoric of national character as deployed in the concept of the English ‘native speaker’. The emergence of the concept and its attendant discourse is analyzed through a corpus of texts that extends from the mid-19th century to just after World War I, including not only linguistic classics but also collections of lesser known periodical articles. As the analysis shows, the second half of the 19th century was a period in which linguists started to think differently about languages and their speakers. The concept of the native speaker provided an important way of labeling a particular linguistic identity and drawing boundaries between some speakers and others, crucially connected to nationalism and Anglo-Saxonism; as such, it has had repercussions up to the present day, as the debate surrounding the native speaker in the World Englishes context shows.