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« Partee--Borschev NSF Grant Meeting | Main | Danilo Roeper-Azcarate has a Weblog!»
Future Linguists of Lahore (Report from Heather Walts)
UMass Amherst Linguistics BA Heather Walts is living and working in Pakistan. She filed this report. Check out her weblog for more on her adventures.
My MA TESOL students at Lahore College for Women have embarked on their first ever Syntax and Semantics projects and I am eagerly awaiting their papers. Their task was to compare Pakistani English usage with standard varieties. For a sample, I gave them an idea for an experiment about the interpretation of "dress" in Pakistani English. It's my hypothesis that "dress" can be used to mean any matching set of clothes, whether for men or women, and that what American or British speakers think of as a dress will be referred to as "frock." I was quite taken aback one day when a male friend told me, 'I have to pick up my dresses at the dry cleaner." I was thinking, wow, maybe he has some hobby that I didn't know about, but it turned out that he meant his clothes for work (dress pants and button-down shirts).
If the students were to choose the topic of the word "dress," they would need to design an experiment to see what articles or sets of clothing can be considered as "dress" here in Pakistan, and by what background of speakers.
As the previously mentioned friend is about to head to Canada as a permanent resident, I've now drilled into his head that in North America "dress" can only refer to a specific type of women's clothes, not his clothes!
The other sample idea I gave them was to look into the pluralization of verbs in the case of respect. In Urdu, singular subjects can take plural pronouns, case markings and verbal morphology if respect is due to that person. When this transfers into English, you get sentences like: "My father are coming."
Some of the topics that the students are looking into include:
- use of the word "hotel" and its verbal counterpart "hotelling"
- confusion of adjectives and adverbs
- missing articles
- overuse of the present progressive
- word order of determiner phrases
- interpretation of the word "suit"
- verb tenses used in conditional sentences
- translation of prepositions
and my personal favorite:
- number when it comes to pairs of things, like jeans, trousers, shoes, etc.
Stay tuned, I'll be creating a web blog to post their projects online.
In other news I'm in the middle of coming up with a proposal for a Linguistics Library at the Ali Institute of Education. We'll be starting a post graduate diploma in English Language Teaching next year and I've been encouraging our department to include linguistics courses in the program. There is currently only one linguistics program in Lahore at the University of Punjab. It's a one year post graduate diploma. The Ali Institute has offered to hire me to design a one year program in Linguistics which would culminate with each student writing a thesis. For that to happen, we need resources! My director has given me the task to make up a list of books and articles that I can acquire during my time in the US and we will apply for funding for the resources as well as the shipping.
If you have any recommendations as "must haves" for the library, please contact me at . Thanks!