Dominik Borner – författare

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Bamberg, course: Proseminar: English Varieties, language: English, abstract: 1. IntroductionEven to non-native speakers of the English language it is in most cases an easy task to differentiate between British and American native speakers by listening to their pronunciation. In this term paper the most characteristic phonological features of American English will be named and explained and an overview of the variety of dialects within the United States will be provided. This can be done best by using British Standard English also known as Received Pronunciation (RP) as reference accent and pointing out the differences to American English. 2. General AmericanHowever, it is hard to work with the term American English when doing a phonological analysis of American speech since it covers a broad spectrum of different dialects. For this reason the term General American (GA), which is widely used and preferred by most linguists today, will be introduced and worked with. General American can be seen as the Standard English of North America, but in contrast to Received Pronunciation, it is not defined by social reputation or a specific geographical origin. Throughout the United States one can not really find a socially preferred accent that is commonly recognized as the standard pronunciation. There have been several different approaches to defining a Standard English for the USA and in this paper General American will be used in means of a range of accents that do not exhibit any of the North-Eastern or Southern features which are perceived as regional by the majority of American speakers. One has to keep in mind that GA is not a single and totally homogeneous accent. But since its internal variation is mainly a matter of differences in the phonetic realizations of a system of phonemes that is by and large shared by all GA speakers, the generalization expressed in the notion General American is useful in phonological terms.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Bamberg, course: Proseminar: Reading British Short Stories, language: English, abstract: 1. IntroductionEarly in the morning she rises,The Woman s work is never done. And it s not because she doesn t try,She s fighting a battle with no one on her side. She rises up in the morning,And she works til way past dusk. The woman better slow down,Or she s gonna come down hard. Early in the morning she rises,The woman s work is never done. Woman s Work, by Tracy Chapman (1992) Ah, to be all things to all people: children, husband, employer, friends! It can be done: yes, it can: super woman (Weldon 1988, 312). The short stories Weekend by Fay Weldon and Doris Lessing s To Room 19 resemble each other in the aspect of presenting two female characters struggling in their lives under the pressure of the multiple roles they are to fulfill every day. But despite the superficial similarity of these stories, the two female authors chose different ways of pointing out the general themes of patriarchy and female entrapment to the reader. Feminist literary criticism covers a broad range of theories and politics and it is hard to define the one feminist approach, however one of the main goals of feminist critics has been to point out patriarchal structures , oppression of women and inequalities of power between men and women. While these themes are often implicitly hidden in male literature, Weldon and Lessing dramatize and display them explicitly in their short stories. In this paper, some of the aspects of feminist theory will be applied to focus on the author s different ways of presenting patriarchal structures by analyzing the similarities, but most importantly the differences in their respective settings and characters. To create a basis for discussion, in the following chapter an analysis of the female and male main characters will be connected with a deeper look at the general themes and motives that both short stories display. Subsequently, the third chapter will deal with the significant differences of the characters and the plots, leading into the question in which way the authors influence their readers and what effect on the reader each author may have desired.