Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: Language and Gender, 10 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In London during the 1980ies there were reports in the right-wing press, that socialist local councils like Hackney Council had to banish the word manhole by order of its Women's Committee since the term was meant to be sexist. This is just one out of many incidences that came up during the political correctness debate. Since the eighties this phenomenon has...

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: A Survey of American History, 9 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: America in the sixties was above all a time of protest in which the minorities including Afro- Americans as well as women began to plead for equal rights. Many organizations were founded during this time and every movement applied its own methods in order to achieve its goal. The Black Panther Party was one of these organizations which developed out of the...

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: Non-verbal aspects of communication, 4 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This essay deals with the question whether facial expressions are universal meaning that all cultures use the same mimics for expressing a certain feeling. Are these expressions innate or do they have to be learned? First, I will give an overview of Charles Darwin's theory about the universality of facial expressions because he was the first who...

Examination Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: According to the World Atlas of Language Structure there are nearly seven thousand languages spoken throughout the world and more than half of the worlds' population is estimated to be bilingual and engages in code switching. Due to such statistics it becomes obvious that nowadays the alternation between two languages is rather the norm than exception in many communities. However, the fact that bilingualism is so...

Nowadays the alternation between two languages which is known as code-switching is rather the norm than exception in many communities due to the fact that there are nearly seven thousand languages spoken throughout the world and more than half of the worlds' population is estimated to be bilingual and engages in code-switching. Code-switching remains one of the central issues in bilingualism research. For a long time, code-switching has been considered as a lack of linguistic competence since it was taken as evidence that bilinguals are not able to acquire two languages or keep them apart...