AUTHOR: Onysko, Alexander TITLE: Anglicisms in German SERIES: Linguistik - Impulse & Tendenzen 23 PUBLISHER: Walter de Gruyter YEAR: 2007
Tyler K. Anderson, Department of Languages, Literature and Mass Communication, Mesa State College.
SUMMARY Alexander Onysko's monograph _Anglicisms in German_ is intended for specialists in language contact. The author focuses on the manifestations of English loanwords as witnessed in a corpus of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. Coupled with the discussion on the lexical productivity of anglicisms, the book also includes a discussion of German-English code-switching (both inter- and intra-sentential) as they appear in the corpus.
The book is divided into three parts. After a brief introductory chapter, Part I takes on the task of defining what is an anglicism, and touches on the distinction of several theoretical terms, such as the differentiation of borrowing from code-switching, which can be found in chapter 3. Chapter 2 takes on the task of synthesizing the various terms used in the antecedent literature to discuss lexical borrowings, such as loanwords, foreign words, loan meanings, loan translations and loan creations. The theoretical distinction of the borrowing process is continued in chapter 4, wherein pseudo/hybrid anglicisms are distinguished from more direct borrowings. Chapter 5 includes a discussion on the merits and disadvantages of investigating the etymology of a given word in determining its status as a borrowing or integrated lexical item. The information that is presented in the previous chapters is then summarized in chapter 6, where the author provides a complex ''Model of transmission from SL (source language) to RL (receptor language)'' (85).
Part II discusses the methodology of this study and provides the results of the quantitative research. Chapter 7 begins by providing a justification of using Der Spiegel in the study, including the facility of researching the magazine due to its accessibility on CD-ROM and the ''traditional medium of research'' (98) that this magazine represents. Also included in this chapter are the demographics of the readership, along with a description of the corpus linguistic software (Wordsmith Tools 4) used in the elicitation of data. In chapter 8, the author looks at the token frequencies of anglicisms, and finds that the vast majority (71%) of the anglicisms appear only one time in the corpus. A diachronic comparison of the use of the most frequent words reveals that in most cases the token frequencies have increased from 1994 to 2000. The data also confirms the hierarchies of borrowabilty that other investigators have postulated (cf. Muysken 2002), namely that nouns are more likely to be borrowed than adjectives, followed by verbs. Within this chapter, morphological adaptation is also considered, where gender and plural suffixation are quantitatively investigated. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the increase of anglicisms in the German press over the past five decades. The author does so by comparing findings from his corpus to those of other researchers using the same newsmagazine in their study. The author finds that the number of anglicisms per page in Der Spiegel has steadily increased from 2.9 anglicisms per page in 1950 to 6.6 in 2000, which surge, he argues, is in part ''connected to new importations particularly in the field of computer and communication technology'' (147).
In Part III the results of the qualitative analysis of the data are presented in three chapters, each one focusing on the grammatical integration of anglicism into the German morphological system. Chapter 9 for example looks at the integration of English loans into German, with a special focus on the assignment of gender and plurality to nominal borrowings from the corpus. The chapter begins with a review of various theoretical postulations on grammatical gender assignment in German, which, the author summarizes, is based on an interaction of phonological, morphological and semantic rules. A default hierarchy (masculine>feminine>neuter) for nominal borrowings is then postulated. The author demonstrates how this hierarchy interacts with the phonological, semantic and morphological rules to determine the gender of nominal anglicisms. The second half of the chapter discusses the plural and genitive case inflexions of nominal loans. Chapter 10 continues looking at the lexical productivity of nominal anglicism, and then turns its focus to morphological patterns of integration with regards to verbal, adjectival, and adverbial loans. The final chapter of this section focuses on code-switching in the corpus, beginning with phrasal borrowings and then looking at the use of inter- and intra-sentential switches separately.
The book concludes with chapter 12, which provides a brief synopsis of the impact of anglicisms on the German language and what implications this may have for its future. The author provides a brief yet enlightening discussion on why anglicisms are present in the German newsmagazine, focusing on the denotative and connotative needs of the author, and continues by stressing the important conclusion that while the corpus in question ''resembles a stable language contact scenario, in which English influence leads to an expansion of the German lexicon... these anglicisms continue to have a minimal numerical impact in the general German language'' (317-318). This leads the author to conclude that ''German stands undisputed in its integrity on the lexical and structural level'' (322).
EVALUATION In this stimulating book on anglicisms in the German press, Onysko has made an important contribution to the understanding of lexical borrowings in a language contact situation. His ability to analyze the anglicisms in question and provide plausible implications of these anglicisms on the German language is a strength of this book. An additional strength is the accessibility of the German-language text, through translation or paraphrase, to a non-German speaker.
Although the dedication to certain topics was thorough and clear, other topics were either evaded or only briefly mentioned. For example, while discussing lexical borrowing, the author fails to include a discussion on what words are deemed acceptable for borrowing, and which are not. Whereas it is true that nouns are more commonly adopted than verbs, not all nouns are seen as acceptable loans, as postulated in Backus' (2000) Specificity Hypothesis. In this hypothesis, Backus postulates that certain words are facilitated in the incorporation of the language by their semantic specificity (cf. Anderson and Toribio 2007). In a similar vein, the conclusion in chapter 12 is too concise, and could be amplified to include further research questions that would expand the excellent findings of this monograph.
The most salient shortcoming of this book is the lack of discussion on intra-sentential code-switching. While other topics were extensively examined, this one was left with few remarks. For example, aside from the mention of the seminal research of Poplack (1980), there was no treatment of the literature dealing with the syntactic implication of code-switching (i.e. Belazi et al 1994, D'Introno 1996), laying the discussion aside because other researchers had argued that ''these approaches can only account for limited data of codeswitching'' (288). The author then proceeds to briefly describe Myers-Scotton's Matrix Language framework. While this framework may be the most appropriate for analyzing the data in this study, the author provides no justification for its preferred status over other frameworks (i.e. MacSwan 1999).
Another topic that is not included in the monograph is a treatment on mock languages (cf. Zentella 2003). At one point the author mentions that some journalists have used English to ''ridicule German speakers of English, particularly German politicians'' (116); however, no elaboration on the topic is included. This discussion could have been fleshed out to show how this communicative strategy in the German newsmagazine compares to the same use of ridicule in other language contact situations (cf. Barrett 2006).
Obviously, many of the shortcomings mentioned here concern space and scope restrictions, and should not diminish in any way from the overall quality of this monograph, but rather serve as ideas for continued research on the impact of lexical borrowings on the receptor language. It should be clear that this book represents an important contribution to the understanding of lexical productivity in language contact situations, and will be useful to specialists in contact linguistics, especially those focusing on lexical borrowings.
REFERENCES Anderson, Tyler K. & Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline. 2007. Attitudes towards lexical borrowing and intra-sentential code-switching among Spanish-English bilinguals. _Spanish in Context_ 4 (2).
Backus, Ad. 2000. The role of semantic specificity in insertional codeswitching: Evidence from Dutch-Turkish. In Rodolfo Jacobson (ed.), _Codeswitching worldwide II_, 125-154. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Barrett, Rusty. 2006. Language ideology and racial inequality: Competing functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant. _Language in Society_ 35. 163-204.
Belazi, Heidi M., Edward J. Rubin, and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio. 1994. Code switching and X-bar theory: The functional head constraint. _Linguistic Inquiry_ 25 (2). 221-237.
D'Introno, Francesco. 1996. English-Spanish code-switching: Conditions on movement. In John B. Jensen & Ana Roca (eds.), _Spanish in Contact_, 187-201. Cambridge: Cascadilla Press.
MacSwan, Jeff. 1999. _A minimalist approach to intra-sentential code switching_. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Muysken, Pieter. 2002. _Bilingual speech_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zentella, Ana Celia. 2003. José, can you see? [email protected] responses to racist discourse. In Doris Sommer (ed.), _Bilingual Games_, 51-67. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Tyler K. Anderson received his PhD from The Pennsylvania State University in Spanish Linguistics. He is currently an assistant professor of Spanish at Mesa State College, where he teaches courses in Spanish language and teaching methodologies. His research includes manifestations of contact linguistics, including the acceptability of lexical borrowing and code-switching in Spanish and English contact situations.
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