The epicenter model and American influence on Bahamian Englishes

Americanization has been described as one of the major sociocultural processes of language change currently affecting varieties of English worldwide;it is generally linked to the post-World War II rise of the United States to global superpower status in political, military, economic, and cultural terms. Owing to their immediate geographical proximity, the Bahamas always had closer demographic, cultural, and institutional links with the North American mainland than other British colonies. The present paper applies the notion of epicentral influence, in the sense of a regionally dominant model influencing developments in neighboring areas, to Bahamian-American linguistic relations and attempts to disentangle global from epicentral American influence. It considers not just standard Bahamian English but also Bahamian Creole, all levels of language, diachronic and synchronic data, and corpus findings as well as attitudinal studies and discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of the Bahamian data for the epicenter idea

Persister cell phenotypes contribute to poor patient outcomes after neoadjuvant chemotherapy in PDAC

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy can improve the survival of individuals with borderline and unresectable pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma; however, heterogeneous responses to chemotherapy remain a significant clinical challenge. Here, we performed RNA sequencing (n = 97) and multiplexed immunofluorescence (n = 122) on chemo-naive and postchemotherapy (post-CTX) resected patient samples (chemoradiotherapy excluded) to define the impact of neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Transcriptome analysis combined with high-resolution mapping of whole-tissue sections identified GATA6 (classical), KRT17 (basal-like) and cytochrome P450 3A (CYP3A) coexpressing cells that were preferentially enriched in post-CTX resected samples. The persistence of GATA6hi and KRT17hi cells post-CTX was significantly associated with poor survival after mFOLFIRINOX (mFFX), but not gemcitabine (GEM), treatment. Analysis of organoid models derived from chemo-naive and post-CTX samples demonstrated that CYP3A expression is a predictor of chemotherapy response and that CYP3A-expressing drug detoxification pathways can metabolize the prodrug irinotecan, a constituent of mFFX. These findings identify CYP3A-expressing drug-tolerant cell phenotypes in residual disease that may ultimately inform adjuvant treatment selection

Pseudotitles in Bahamian English

This study investigates the use of so-called pseudotitles, that is, determiner-less structures providing descriptive information in front of name noun phrases, as in linguist Allan Bell, in Bahamian newspaper language. Pseudotitles originated in American journalistic writing, but they have spread to numerous varieties of English worldwide and even to British English. A corpus of pre-independence and contemporary press news reports is analyzed quantitatively with a view to establishing not only the frequency of pseudotitles but also the constraints that govern their usage in Bahamian English. The study also considers the position and structure of equivalent appositives and their relationships with pseudotitles. It will be shown that, at least with regard to the feature investigated here, Bahamian journalists followed American norms even in British colonial times, which may be accounted for by the social history and current sociolinguistic situation of the country. At the same time, these norms have been modified and adapted to local linguistic realities, which presents another piece of evidence in favor of a nuanced view of linguistic Americanization

Southern Bahamian: Transported African American Vernacular English or Transported Gullah?

The relationship between Bahamian Creole English (BahCE) and Gullah and their historical connection with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have long been a matter of dispute. In the controversy about the putative creole origins of AAVE, it was long thought that Gullah was the only remnant of a once much more widespread North American Plantation Creole and southern BahCE constituted a diaspora variety of the latter. If, however, as argued in the 1990s, AAVE never was a creole itself, whence the creole nature of southern BahCE? This paper examines the settlement history of the Bahamas and the American South to argue that BahCE and Gullah are indeed closely related, so closely in fact, that southern BahCE must be regarded as a diaspora variety of the latter rather than of AAVE

Comparing Tense and Aspect in Pidgins and Creoles: Dahl's Questionnaire and Beyond

Schröder A, Hackert S. Comparing Tense and Aspect in Pidgins and Creoles: Dahl's Questionnaire and Beyond. In: Mergenthal S, Nischik R, eds. Anglistentag 2013 Konstanz. Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier; 2014: 349-360

'Will' and 'would' in selected New Englishes: general vs. variety-specific tendencies

This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the use of the modal verbs will and would in six New Englishes (Fiji, Indian, Singapore, Trinidadian, Jamaican and Bahamian English), with British English considered for comparison; will/would in their future use are also compared to other markers of futurity. The database consists of conversations from the respective components of the International Corpus of English or comparable data. The results show that the use of will versus would tends to be more variable in all New Englishes than in British English but that there are differences between the New Englishes in the type and degree of variation. Thus, both general and variety-specific tendencies seem to be at work in our data. Keywords: New Englishes; International Corpus of English; will/would; frequency; semantic

Transcriptional variations in the wider peritumoral tissue environment of pancreatic cancer

Transcriptional profiling was performed on 452 RNA preparations isolated from various types of pancreatic tissue from tumour patients and healthy donors, with a particular focus on peritumoral samples. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDAC) and cystic tumours were most different in these non-tumorous tissues surrounding them, whereas the actual tumours exhibited rather similar transcript patterns. The environment of cystic tumours was transcriptionally nearly identical to normal pancreas tissue. In contrast, the tissue around PDAC behaved a lot like the tumour, indicating some kind of field defect, while showing far less molecular resemblance to both chronic pancreatitis and healthy tissue. This suggests that the major pathogenic difference between cystic and ductal tumours may be due to their cellular environment rather than the few variations between the tumours. Lack of correlation between DNA methylation and transcript levels makes it unlikely that the observed field defect in the peritumoral tissue of PDAC is controlled to a large extent by such epigenetic regulation. Functionally, a strikingly large number of autophagy-related transcripts was changed in both PDAC and its peritumoral tissue, but not in other pancreatic tumours. A transcription signature of 15 autophagy-related genes was established that permits a prognosis of survival with high accuracy and indicates the role of autophagy in tumour biology