Susanne Mohr

Susanne Mohr
Norwegian University of Science and Technology | NTNU · Department of Language and Literature

PhD
Currently on maternity leave

About

80
Publications
14,428
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
254
Citations
Introduction
Susanne is Professor of English Sociolinguistics at NTNU Trondheim. Her research on (multimodal) multilingualism has been sponsored by the Humboldt foundation, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies and the NRW Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts among others. She conducts research in Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Typology. Current projects include 'English in tourist-host interactions in Zanzibar' and 'The multimodal realization of politeness in ISL and English'.

Publications

Publications (80)
Article
Full-text available
The article analyses cross-modal language contact between signed and spoken languages with special reference to the Irish Deaf community. This is exemplified by an examination of the phenomenon of mouthings in Irish Sign Language including its origins, dynamics, forms and functions. Initially, the setup of language contact with respect to Deaf comm...
Article
This study analyzes non-standard plurals, which have been reported for several Outer and Expanding Circle varieties, in Tswana English as exemplified in the International corpus of learner English (ICLE). The focus of the study is on substrate influence and transfer, which is often difficult to determine for African varieties of English given their...
Article
In this article we present comparative data on visual hunting signals from the Kalahari Basin Area of southern Africa, encompassing three Kalahari Khoe-speaking (Ts’ixa, Buga, ǁAni) and one Kx’a-speaking group (Juǀ’hoan). For the comparison, an analysis of handshapes, handedness and iconicity in the individual data sets was conducted. Being applied...
Article
In an increasingly mobile world, in which people and languages from different cultures meet all across the globe, the development and dynamics of linguistically and culturally superdiverse spaces are of particular sociolinguistic interest. In this regard, two important phenomena are migration and tourism. This article analyses language choices and...
Article
Full-text available
Tourism discourse, referring to communication in tourism as global industry, contributes to the creation of tourist spaces, where space is a social and affective construct as opposed to place as a geographical one. Tourists and hosts are part of these spaces and form them with their language practices, both offline and online. This article presents...
Article
Hunting gestures, i.e., gestures used to avoid scaring away prey or raising the attention of predators, are a central part of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of many foragers. These gestures have been documented for several groups in Southern Africa. This article is dedicated to such gestures, specifically those used by the speakers of a moribund Eas...
Article
Semiotic landscapes have been documented widely. However, many analyses focus on visible cues and production, and do not investigate soundscapes and the perception of both visual and auditory signs. The present study aims at filling this research gap. It presents an ethnographic investigation of the semiotic landscape of arrival in Bergen, Norway....
Book
This book addresses increasingly diverse language learning trajectories in a modern, globalized world, specifically outside of formal classroom situations and with respect to second and additional language practices. This includes, but is not restricted to, intersections of formal and informal learning, computer-mediated contexts as well as family...
Chapter
This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the range of varieties of English spoken on the island of Ireland, featuring information on their historical background, structural features, and sociolinguistic considerations. The first part of the volume explores English and Irish in their historical framework as well as current issues of contact an...
Article
This article collection showcases recent empirical research on a range of pragmatic phenomena in different parts of the African continent. It also aims at illustrating the diversity of approaches employed to study these phenomena, bringing together experts on various languages and from different backgrounds. In particular, the articles in this col...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Tourism is a central aspect of modern life (MacCannell 2013). Tourism discourse, i.e., “language and communication in tourism as global cultural industry” (Thurlow & Jaworski 2011: 222), contributes to the creation of imaginaries around tourism, i.e., “[t]he creative use of and seductive [and] restrictive imaginaries about peoples and places” (Sala...
Article
Full-text available
The Norwegian company Hurtigruten operates ships cruising along the Norwegian coast and has played an important role in tourism for over a century. This article provides a multimodal discourse analysis of the website advertising Hurtigruten’s most popular journey, drawing on a critical tourism studies approach. It aims to answer the question as to...
Article
The phenomenon of mass and countability is multifaceted and has been controversially discussed in many disciplines. For linguistics, differences in the morphosyntactic marking of the distinction cross-linguistically, and its cross-cultural ontological-semantic conceptualization are particularly interesting. However, most studies into mass and count...
Article
The phenomenon of mass and countability is multifaceted and has been controversially discussed in many disciplines. For linguistics, differences in the morphosyntactic marking of the distinction cross-linguistically, and its cross-cultural ontological-semantic conceptualization are particularly interesting. However, most studies into mass and count...
Preprint
Full-text available
This is a joint project of the members of the working group 'Ideologies, Beliefs, Attitudes' of the COST network 'Language in the Human-Machine Era' and discusses current themes and topics related to changing language ideologies in the context of digital technologies.
Chapter
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110726626-007/html
Book
Full-text available
This book is the first comprehensive analysis of plural marking, its morphosyntax and semantics, in African varieties of English. Mohr explores the rich diversity in the varieties and how different conceptualizations of the number category are realised across different cultures. The investigation of unstandardized noun plurals in Kenyan, Tanzanian...
Chapter
Increasing global mobility has also affected the global language ecology and tourism is a central phenomenon in this regard, both socially and linguistically. Tourist contexts, where English as global lingua franca is often used at the grassroots level, provide an important opportunity to investigate English away from the traditionally studied acad...
Article
As the most widespread global language, English now has substantially more second and foreign-language speakers than native speakers. It is increasingly spreading beyond an ‘educated elite’ of academics, politicians, business professionals and the like, among speakers with limited access to formal education, that is at the grassroots of societies....
Article
Full-text available
This paper provides an analysis of discourse markers in English(es) spoken by Zanzibaris, using data from sociolinguistic interviews. The focus is on you know and I think. In English as a lingua franca (ELF), both have been shown to be used differently than by ‘native’ speakers, especially marking subjectivity or speaker‐centeredness. The data show...
Article
With regard to eastern Africa, English is usually discussed as a language of urban metropolises, connected to global capital and high education. However, globalisation has created pockets away from these urban centres, where English is an important part of local linguistic practices, coexisting with rather local linguae francae. This study presents...
Article
In African sociolinguistic studies a dichotomy between approaches focusing on urban centres with newly developing linguistic codes and languages used by the elite, as opposed to approaches concentrating on language documentation in rural areas has long been prevalent. That dichotomy has often been the point where English and African studies diverge...
Article
This paper illustrates the importance of reflexivity for the awareness of a researcher’s subjectivity in (socio)linguistic work on tourism, particularly during fieldwork. It shows that a researcher’s positionality, i.e. their loyalties to epistemological conceptions and tools, crucially affects every part of the research process, reaching from the...
Article
Full-text available
The UK is facing important changes in the near future, with Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union (EU), looming ever more closely on the horizon. These important political and economic changes will certainly have an influence on Europe as a whole, and have had linguistic consequences for the English language, such as Brexit-related neologi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The adaptation of language to new cultural contexts as a result of globalization causes fascinating sociolinguistic effects that have only recently come to the increased attention of linguistics. One central issue in this regard is tourism, whose relevance has also been acknowledged for World Englishes research (e.g. Buschfeld & Kautzsch 2017). Tou...
Article
Full-text available
This paper compares teaching practices of English as a foreign language in Sweden and Germany based on a questionnaire targeted at investigating teachers’ experiences and views on language use, giving a snapshot of teaching practices in classrooms in the two countries. In this regard, the focus is on the following questions: Which target varieties...
Chapter
Tanzania has a long-standing problem of choosing a language of instruction (MoI) that suits its context presently. English, which has been the MoI since 1919, is reported to have lost its efficiency due to the growing influence of Swahili. As a result, there have been calls from academics and educators for the replacement of English with Swahili in...
Article
There is a variety of methods used in the field of linguistics. However, Q methodology has only rarely been employed and this article showcases one of the few linguistic studies to do so. Its focus is on assembling a concourse and compiling a Q-sample, two of the basic and thus most important steps in the application of the method. While designed a...
Article
The use of and attitudes towards the languages of Tanzania have always been closely related to language policies, the most recent policy having been issued in 2014. However, most studies on language attitudes are relatively dated (e.g. Schmied 1990). In light of policy changes and the results of earlier studies, this article aims to shed light on c...
Presentation
Full-text available
In an increasingly globalized world, tourism accounts for mass movements of people across countries and cultures. From a linguistic point of view, tourism instigates fascinating sociolinguistic effects as language is re-contextualized and commodified under global capitalism (Jaworski & Thurlow 2010). It is especially this commodification that is th...
Article
Tanzania is, like most countries in East Africa, extremely culturally and linguistically diverse. Language counts range from 125 (Lewis, Simons & Fennig, 2016) to 164 living languages mentioned by the ‘Languages of Tanzania project’ (2009). Given this extreme multilingualism, institutional languages had to be chosen on a national level after indepe...
Presentation
Full-text available
Talk given at ”Vorher, nachher, zwischendurch? Test-Szenarien in eCampus”.
Article
Full-text available
Hunting sign systems as used by San groups in Southern Africa have only recently received increased scientific attention. To date, it is not yet completely clear whether they constitute alternate sign systems in the sense of Kendon (1988) or rather inventories of gestures that are not analyzable into smaller meaning-bearing and meaning-distinguishi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
While Kiswahili is the official language of Tanzania, English is the medium of instruction (MoI) from secondary school onwards, despite being a minority language. Studies show that using English, a foreign language for students and teachers, impairs learning outcomes (Qorro 2002), leading to English-Kiswahili code-switching in the classroom (Tibate...
Chapter
The present article investigates the use of pluralized mass nouns such as furnitures in two East African (Kenyan, Tanzanian) and two West African (Nigerian, Ghanaian) Englishes. Using corpus data from the ICE and GloWbE corpora, the analysis has several levels. Firstly, similarities and differences concerning the use of 22 selected mass nouns are s...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The field of World Englishes is dedicated to the study of the varieties of English worldwide, their sociolinguistic settings and structural features. Especially the “New” Englishes spoken in Asia and Africa, have received increased attention in the past decades (e.g. Platt et al. 1984; Kachru et al. 2006; Mesthrie 2008). Typologically, they have sh...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recent sign linguistic studies have established a dichotomy of “primary” and “alternate” sign languages (Kendon 2004; Zeshan 2008; Pfau 2012). Primary sign languages are full-fledged systems acquired by deaf people as their L1, while alternate sign languages are “kinesic codes” (Kendon 2004), developed by the hearing members of a speech community f...
Article
Full-text available
Phonology of hunting signs in two Kalahari-Khoe speaking groups (Ts'ixa and ||Ani)
Conference Paper
Full-text available
While most sign linguistic research focuses on sign languages of the deaf, Kendon (1988) investigated alternate sign languages, i.e. sign languages developed by hearing people already competent in a spoken language. Especially the sign languages of Aboriginal groups in central Australia have received increased attention in this context (e.g. Kwek 1...
Poster
Full-text available
The language contact situation between signed and spoken languages is special in many respects. Firstly, contact is cross-modal, involving a language from the visualgestural modality and one language from the oral-aural modality. Secondly, contact is “sustained and overwhelming” (Ann 2001), as deaf people are constantly surrounded by hearing indivi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Increasing research on non-manuals in sign languages (e.g. Pfau & Quer 2007; Sutton-Spence & Woll 2006) has investigated the linguistic importance of non-manual articulators such as the body and different parts of the face for signed languages. Mouth actions as one non-manual feature have been researched for different sign languages such as Dutch S...
Poster
Increasing research on non-manuals in sign languages (e.g. Pfau & Quer 2007) has investigated the linguistic importance of non-manual articulators such as the body and different parts of the face. Mouth actions have been researched for different sign languages such as Dutch Sign Language (NGT) or British Sign Language (BSL). A general distinction b...
Poster
Full-text available
Increasing research on non-manual markers in different sign languages (e.g. Pfau & Quer 2007; Sutton-Spence & Woll 2006) has shown that apart from the hands, other articulators such as e.g. the body and different parts of the face are linguistically important for sign language communication. Actions of the mouth also seem to fulfil certain linguist...
Conference Paper
Sign languages use the hands as main articulators which is why the study of non-manuals has been somewhat neglected in sign linguistic research for a long time. However, sign languages make use of different kinds of non-manuals, such as facial expression, eye gaze or mouth gestures in order to convey meaning. Concerning the mouth as articulator, ma...

Network

Cited By