Department of English
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11875/2417
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Browsing Department of English by Author "Halmari, Helena"
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Item Finnish Women in Gainesville, Florida(Siirtolaisuus – Migration, 2010) Halmari, Helena; Halmari-Meneses, IreneIn this article, we take a look at Gainesville, a northern Florida university town, as a sample of today’s (2010) Finnish-American immigration patterns. The Gainesville area has a history of Finnish immigration, but, as elsewhere in the United States, the stereotypical immigrant has changed from a male laborer more to an educated woman. We base the article on interviews with eleven Finnish women living in Gainesville. What the interviews show is that all these women treasure their Finnish heritage and their Finnish or bicultural identity. They maintain contacts with Finland, intend to maybe return there one day, and attempt to pass the Finnish language to their children. These women differ from the typical immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: in addition to being highly educated and of a higher socio-economic class, they live in a different world where visiting the ‘Old Country’ is often an annual possibility, where Finnish language can be accessed via the internet, DVDs, telephones, and Skype, and where returning to Finland is not out of the question. Yet, these Finnish women struggle to pass their Finnish cultural identity and the Finnish language to their children, and just like the Finnish immigrants a century ago, they feel a sense of community, being brought together by the mere common denominator of Finnishness.Item Language Mixing as a Persuasive Strategy in Oxford, MS Bodley(Medieval Worlds, 2021) Halmari, HelenaOne of the salient features of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, a fifteenth-century sermon collection, is its frequent switching from Latin to English - and back to Latin again. Building on Wenzel’s (1994) groundbreaking work on macaronic sermons, I discuss the rhetorical characteristics of English elements in MS Bodley 649, with the purpose of showing that language mixing in this collection is not random but rather one of the rhetorical devices that the author uses for persuasion. The English elements are frequently used to build grammatical cohesion through structural parallelism. Also, lexical and semantic cohesion are achieved via repetition of the same words in both languages or through English paraphrases of Latin scriptural content. Alliteration, another rhetorical device, often coincides with language switches within the sermons. I hope to show that, together with other rhetorical strategies, mixing English into Latin constitutes one means within an entire bundle of linguistic devices that all contribute to the persuasive purpose of the genre. As a preliminary finding of some work in progress, I report on the nature of the English words mixed into these highly scholastic and often allegorical sermons. The English elements within the sermons tend to provide content that is mundane, or objectionable (from the point of view of Christian conduct and goals), or even merely negative (if not repulsive). An important conclusion is that none of the rhetorical strategies that overlap with code-switching into English are used mechanically and systematically by the sermonist; the coincidence of the bundled persuasive features is never predictable. However, this does not mean that mixing English elements into Latin in MS Bodley 649 should be characterized as random. A persuasive sermon is not tamely predictable in its delivery; it must offer surprises as audience-engagement strategies. The most salient surprises in MS Bodley 649 are provided by the English elements.Item On the Grammar and Rhetoric of language mixing in Piers Plowman(Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 2002) Halmari, HelenaIn excerpt (1) below, the Dreamer of Langland’s Piers Plowman is expressing his dissatisfaction with friars; the passage is a typical example of what is often called “macaronic language” - a conventionalized style where two languages (here Middle English and Latin, or a few times French) are mixed in a happy combination for fairly well-documented rhetorical purposes. In line (4) the Latin prepositional phrase In fame et frigore conjoins the Middle English NP flappes of scourges; lines (5) and (12-13) exemplify full clauses, with Biblical associations, in Latin. That Langland’s virtuoso combining of Latin and English is a result of careful planning is shown by his occasional, extremely pointed metalinguistic comments,Item Structural relations and Finnish-English code switching(Linguistics, 1993) Halmari, HelenaWhile several initially convincing code-switching theories have been proposed, the introduction of a new pair of code-switched languages often seems to present puzzles to the earlier proposed constraints. In this paper I will present data from Finnish-English code switching, attempting to explain the constraints on intrasentential switches in this language, which relies heavily on inflectional morphology. I will suggest that, despite the fact that many of the earlier proposed code-switching constraints seem to fail to explain the Finnish-English data, no special new code-switching theory is needed to account for the Finnish-English facts, but the general syntactic principle of government can account for the constraints on intra- sentential switching. The most characteristic feature of Finnish-English code switching is morphological assimilation to Finnish. This can be explained by the government constraint: insertion of lexical items to terminal nodes from English is always possible, provided that case and agreement morphology are in Finnish when in government relation with Finnish elements. This paper thus gives support to the basic idea of the government constraint proposed by Di Sciullo et al. (1986) and suggests a minor reformulation to their theory. The paper also provides independent evidence for the decomposed Finnish IP-structure (Mitchell 1991).