Query Details
| Query Subject: |
-ise vs. -ize
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| Author: | Zouhair Maalej | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Historical Linguistics
Sociolinguistics |
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| Query: |
Dear colleagues,
Out of accuracy and/or purism, teachers of English as a second and/or foreign language have always urged their students to follow a consistent spelling system. My realization that spelling in -ise or -ize is not necessarily a distinction between British English and American English leaves me with two distinct sets of data: (i) some lexical items admit only -ize even in British dictionaries (e.g. anesthesize); and (ii) some others admit both -ise and -ize (e.g. familiarise and familiarize), which is more like the distinction between the two most important dialects of English. Am I right in assuming that the -ise suffix (rightly or wrongly) associated with British English is disappearing or has never existed? Isn't this a hint that spelling in -ize is becoming the norm? If anyone can indicate rules of thumb, papers, manuscripts, etc. that deal with the issue, they will be greatly appreciated. In case I get enough feedback/material, I promise to post a summary to the list. Zouhair Maalej Dear linguists, I am now beginning to work on my PhD thesis and I intend to reassess the notion of syntactic calque, as a type of language contact phenomenon. I would like to find arguments that help me treat this type of calque as a codeswitch that only occurs at a structural level (since in a sentence where there appears a syntactic calque, the structure of two different languages is being used) and not at the lexical level (since, on the surface, only one language is being used). Let me give you an example drawn from the corpus I work with: ''We went to the highway on foot and saw planes at the [polgono], at the industrial polygon, but to get a better view we came here, and we saw the flame, {two explosions more}, one huge and another smaller''. Here, the sequence ''two explosions more'', although produced in English, is a literal translation of the Spanish ''dos explosiones ms''. This is what makes me say that, in fact, there are two languages involved here and that what is being used is something that could be called a structural codeswitch. If any of you is working on this, or you know of somebody who is, I would greatly appreciate you letting me know. Thank you all for your help, Cristina Corcoll (cristina.corcoll@trad.upf.es) |
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| LL Issue: | 9.1839 | |
| Date posted: | 24-Dec-1998 | |
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