LINGUIST List 23.4553
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Wed Oct 31 2012
Diss: Socioling/ Tok Pisin: Walczynski: 'A living language. Selected aspects of Tok Pisin...'
Editor for this issue: Lili Xia
<lxia linguistlist.org>
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Date: 29-Oct-2012
From: Marcin Walczynski <marcinwaluso2.pl>
Subject: A living language. Selected aspects of Tok Pisin in the press (on the basis of ''Wantok'' newspaper)
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Institution: Wroclaw University
Program: Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2009
Author: Marcin Walczynski
Dissertation Title: A living language. Selected aspects of Tok Pisin in the press (on the basis of "Wantok" newspaper)
Dissertation URL: http://www.pwsz.nysa.pl/oficyna/a_living_language.php
Linguistic Field(s):
Sociolinguistics
Subject Language(s): Tok Pisin (tpi)
Dissertation Director:
Dissertation Abstract:
The book strives to fulfil five main aims and objectives:
1. It is an attempt to demonstrate that pidgins and creoles are worthy of
serious linguistic study as in the past they used to be criticised as well as
ridiculed and if some mentions of them were made, they were usually in the
forms of humorous references and anecdotes told by the speakers of
European languages who, by doing so, wanted to show that pidgin speakers
were barbarous and primitive people, incapable of any reasonable thought.
2. The study aims at showing the role of Tok Pisin in one of the most
multilingual countries of the world - in Papua New Guinea. This is done by
discussing Tok Pisin internal history - i.e. the linguistic growth - and external
history - i.e. the socio-cultural factors underlying the emergence and
development of Neomelanesian Pidgin English. The role of this pidgin in the
region of Melanesia is discussed against the background of the linguistic
situation of the area, where so many different languages are used.
3. Owing to the fact that Wantok - the newspaper which the research parts of
this book are based on - is claimed to be written in the standard form of Tok
Pisin, the next goal is to assess whether Wantok is really an example of a
printed medium with standard Tok Pisin in use.
4. Tok Pisin is used in so many areas of social life that it is definitely more
expanded than other pidgins. This has been confirmed by another analysis
carried out in Chapter 6 which has shown that Neomelanesian Pidgin English
lexicon and grammar are adequately developed to realise the majority of
language functions (i.e. emotive, referential, phatic, conative). However, on
the basis of the corpus, it can be concluded that the poetic and metalinguistic
functions have not yet been fully developed.
5. The fifth aim of this book is to answer the question of why certain types of
Wantok writing - or more precisely, advertisements, public notices and
announcements - are published in English. Wantok is sometimes referred to
as a Tok Pisin-only newspaper but it is not really so. The coexistence of Tok
Pisin and English in this newspaper can be called textual diglossia.
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