Читать книгу Language planning and policy in Quebec - Jakob Leimgruber - Страница 5

Many people have helped me in the course of writing this book, and on the path to the habilitation thesis that forms its basis. I would like to express my gratitude to Christian Mair, who did his utmost mentoring me in the course of the research leading up to this final piece of work. His constant encouragement and extremely pertinent feedback were invaluable. He also relentlessly supported me in the course of (successful!) funding applications for the fieldwork phase.

I am also indebted to Charles Boberg, who was my local contact at McGill University, and whose insights on the sociolinguistic situation in Quebec helped shape my understanding of the realities there. He was also instrumental in guiding me along the path to successful data collection during fieldwork. I also thank the Department of Linguistics and its head, Bernard Schwartz, for their hospitality during the fieldwork phase.

The fieldwork in Canada, consisting of an entire year spent at McGill University’s Department of Linguistics, was made possible by a European Research Council Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship (7^th Framework Programme, project no. 327100), running from 2013-09-01 to 2015-08-31, and including an outgoing phase in Montreal and a return phase in Freiburg. I thank the funding agency for their generous commitment. I also thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for making possible the pilot study by financing an initial two-week stay in Montreal in September 2012. The publication of this book was supported by a generous grant from the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft of the University of Freiburg, Germany.

Countless other people have influenced my work in one way or another. For want of space, I shall here just acknowledge the help of Victor Fernández Mallat for assisting with the dissemination of the questionnaire and generally being of help in understanding Montreal, Joyce Xiao and Tang Xinsheng for their data collection and processing work, Anna Kristina Hultgren for help with Swedish orthography reforms, and Laura Terassa, David Lorenz and the members of the Freiburg RnB group for support with statistical analyses. Debra Titone and her team in McGill’s psycholinguistics lab are responsible for drawing my attention to the potential of eye-tracking methods in linguistic landscape research.

Finally, I’d like to thank my parents, for always believing in me and for thoroughly proofreading these pages, and my wife, Marie, for her unfailing support in looking after me and the two boys. Without her constant encouragement, it is doubtful this piece of work would have made it into its present form.