New Approaches to American English [antikvár]

Preface The essays in this volume have grown out of a conference entitled The Success of American English: Teaching American Studies in Central Europe, organized by the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in May, 1995. The main goal of the conference was to see how the study of American English can contribute to the teaching of American Studies in general—especially in the post-cold war era in Central Europe. To achieve this goal, we have enlisted the help of some of the finest scholars in the study of American English, including Dennis Baron, Kenneth Cmiel, J.L. Dillard, and David Simpson. To our great regret, Dennis Baron had to cancel his trip to Budapest at the last minute. However, the others came and contributed in large measure to the success of the conference. The papers they presented are included in this volume. We decided to include two additional papers not given by conference participants: those by John Haiman and Klaus Weimann. Haiman's paper was presented at our previous conference Everyday Values in American Culture, where he was an invited plenary speaker, but its obvious relevance to the issues discussed in the 1995 conference made it natural to place his presentation in these proceedings. Klaus Weimann did not participate at our conferences, but through our exchange program with Heidelberg University we found out about his fascinating work on Webster and asked him to contribute to the volume. A major, perhaps the major, question that runs through the essays of this volume in some form is explicitly asked by Simpson (this volume): ". . . what is it that we recognize as American English in the late twentieth century?" This is a large and complex issue, since the answer depends, in large part, on the frame of reference within which we work. Do we contrast it with other varieties of English, or with other languages? A further complication is that there are many different kinds of American English itself, as the work of many scholars has shown in the past thirty or so years. When we talk about American English, which one of these do we have in mind? There are several further questions that assume an answer to the one above. Again, Simpson (this volume) provides us with some of these: "What does it [American English] contribute to global English? What are the forms of its dissemination? What roads has it taken and vii