Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

Finding Their Chrysanthemum: Linguistic Representation In Children's Literature, Marielena Zajac

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Children in America today struggle with finding themselves in the books they read due to societal expectations. From an early age, children are dictated on the correct way to speak and write in “American,” which can leave children and their home languages feeling unseen and dismissed. To help further the conversation and promotion of linguistic diversity in American society, this capstone analyzes dialectal representation in children’s books, with a heavy focus on attitudinal linguistic principles rather than prescriptive mechanics. The secondary research explores current literature and resources that discuss literacy acquisition in adolescents, trends in dialects in America, and childhood …

Using Sociolinguistics And Literary Studies To Understand Code-Switching Within Works By Louise Erdrich, Bruno Santic

Undergraduate Theses

There exists a multitude of definitions and concepts that describe the movement between and from one linguistic code to the next, commonly referred to as code-switching. Each definition given differs not only between fields of research but also within said fields of research, making it incredibly difficult to create one unified definition for code-switching. The two most popular fields of research that have extensively studied code-switching are sociolinguistics and literature/literary studies, with both fields having basic tenets of study that create different nuances in how code-switching is described by researchers in each respective field of study. One of the key …

Cross Crossings Cautiously: Uses Of African American Vernacular English In American Literature, Emily Crnkovich

English Honors Projects

This project uses sociolinguistics to theorize the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in literature across three time periods: the Antebellum era, the post-bellum/Reconstruction era, and the Harlem Renaissance. Different dialects of English encode different power structures, and in order to interrogate those power structures I track how white and black authors represent the language of African American characters on the page and how audiences interpret that language. I find that African American authors tend to embrace the variability and diversity of natural language better than their white counterparts, whose use of literary dialect often falls into essentialist clichés.

The Phrasal Verb In American English: Using Corpora To Track Down Historical Trends In Particle Distribution, Register Variation, And Noun Collocations, David Brown, Chris Palmer

David C. Brown

The Phrasal Verb In American English: Using Corpora To Track Down Historical Trends In Particle Distribution, Register Variation, And Noun Collocations, David West Brown, Chris C. Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

Borrowed Derivational Morphology In Late Middle English: A Study Of The Records Of The London Grocers And Goldsmiths

Chris C. Palmer