Johannes Huhmann – författare

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Hamburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik ), course: Parts of Speech , language: English, abstract: This term paper is concerning Construction Grammar and the way it attempts to handle parts of speech categories like nouns, verbs and adjectives. The seminar this paper was written for proved in a manifold of ways that when we restrict ourselves to the categories provided by traditional grammar, we may face serious difficulties which call into question the fundamental categorizations of such grammar. These problems, or potential problems, are the subject matter of the first part of this paper. In the second part, I will give an overview of Construction Grammar. Since the concept of construction is central to Construction Grammar, I will first clarify the notion of construction outside of the Construction Grammar framework in 2.1., before moving to an account in 2.2 of those features that can be seen as the smallest common denominator for defining constructions within different Construction Grammars.One of my principal findings is the differing manners in which Construction Grammars in general, and a specific variant of Construction Grammar, namely Croft’s Radical Construction Grammar, address the issue of parts of speech. Part three will present Croft’s grammar as an answer to one of the central questions raised in this seminar, namely, which model is most adequate for categorising word classes in a single language like English but also in a cross-linguistic sense. This examination will be followed by some concluding remarks in part four.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject History - Africa, grade: 71 von 80, University of Manchester (Department of History), course: Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Africa, language: English, abstract: The aim of this essay is to discuss in how far the impact of western education on Africans varied between different territories or colonies in terms of their impact on the emergence of nationalism and the struggle for independence. Education was a major tool in the cultural conquest of Africa and the colonising powers realized this quite early. Missionaries were among the first to make serious efforts to introduce a western style education in the early nineteenth century. To the same extent different colonial powers approached the colonization and administration of their territories differently, approaches to educate the Africans differed. Western education had an impact on the African societies during colonial rule, in the process of decolonization and also in the time after independence. As said, I want to focus on the impact of educational efforts on the struggle for independence and the nationalist movements in Africa. To do this, I chose three territories as case studies which were administered by three different European powers: The Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast and the Be lgian Congo. Methodologically, I opted to work through a list of questions which I grouped into six categories. The questions are:1. When did education get introduced in this colony?2. By whom was the education conducted and who had control over it?3. How was the educational system outlined and how big was the proportion of Africans that were schooled?4. Where and when was the vernacular, where and when the language of the colonisers used in the educational process?5. What were the underlying ideologies and colonial policies that determined the education?6. In what kind of jobs or functions and with what kind of attitudes or orientations did the educated continue their lives when leaving the educational institutions? How did this affect the emergence of nationalism and the struggle for independence?

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 71 von 80, University of Manchester (School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures), course: Introduction to Middle English Language, language: English, abstract: In the history of English, the language came into contact with different speech communities. Influences of Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian and French left their mark from the beginning in Anglo-Saxon times onwards, and the colonial expansion of the British Empire in the last three centuries resulted in the contact with even more speech communities. Through these language contacts, English changed a lot it showed the tendency to incorporate foreign influences, especially lexical ones, more likely in the first place; its grammar changed from being and analytic one towards being synthetic; and in terms of the lexicon, it changed from being a Germanic to a partly Romanic influenced language. In this essay, I want to examine the influence of the Scandinavian language on English and to what extent it was responsible for the general changes mentioned above. 45 per cent of the commoner words and 25 per cent of the general lexis1 in the present day English lexicon are a result of the language contact between Old English and Old Norse during the period of Scandinavian invasions and settlement in the eighth and ninth century but the lexical influences are only one result of the language contact and I will try to show the other effects the Scandinavian influence had on English as well. AbbreviationsThe Abbreviations I will use in this paper are EME for Early Middle English, ModE for Modern English, ON for Old Norse, OE for Old English and PDE for Present Day English.