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Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons

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Rhetoric and Composition

Discourse, place, and dialect

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Full-Text Articles in Discourse and Text Linguistics

Proximity And Journalistic Practice In Environmental Discourse: Experiencing “Job Blackmail” In The News, Barbara Johnstone, Justin Mando Dec 2014

Proximity And Journalistic Practice In Environmental Discourse: Experiencing “Job Blackmail” In The News, Barbara Johnstone, Justin Mando

Barbara Johnstone

The shift from coal to natural gas to fuel electricity generation has positive (environmental) and
negative (economic) consequences for people in the affected areas of the US. Representations
of the situation in the media shape how citizens understand and respond to it. We explore
the role of proximity in media discourse about the closing of a coal-fired power plant near
Waynesburg, a small city in a Pennsylvania coal-mining region. Comparing reporting in smallercirculation
newspapers closer to the site with reporting in larger-circulation regional newspapers,
we find that Waynesburg-area papers simply describe the events leading to the closure while
regional papers …


“100% Authentic Pittsburgh”: Sociolinguistic Authenticity And The Linguistics Of Particularity, Barbara Johnstone Dec 2012

“100% Authentic Pittsburgh”: Sociolinguistic Authenticity And The Linguistics Of Particularity, Barbara Johnstone

Barbara Johnstone

As Bucholtz (2003), Coupland (2007, pp. 25-26), and others have pointed out, what counts as an authentic linguistic variety or an authentic speaker depends on who is counting and why. Sociolinguists have often unthinkingly privileged as their object of study the most unselfconsious, “vernacular” speech in relatively closed, homogeneous communities like traditional working-class neighborhoods, with their dense, multiplex social networks, and in the relatively self-contained symbolic economies of schools. This has allowed us to explore social correlates of variation and processes of change in communities where these things appear least muddied by outside influences, and doing so has given us …


Dialect Enregisterment In Performance, Barbara Johnstone Dec 2010

Dialect Enregisterment In Performance, Barbara Johnstone

Barbara Johnstone

In recent work I have been exploring how one set of linguistic forms has become enregistered as the dialect known as “Pittsburghese” ( Johnstone 2007a; 2007b; 2009; Johnstone, Andrus, and Danielson 2006). In this paper I analyze dialect enregistration in highly self-conscious performances of Pittsburgh speech and social identity. My data consists of three comedy sketches performed by the cast of WDVE radio’s “’DVE Morning Show.” One, called “Mother”, alternates lines of a somewhat parodically sentimental song about the singer’s mother with spoken-word illustrations by a “mother” character who uses elements of Pittsburgh-sounding speech. The second is an advertisement for …


Linking Identity And Dialect Through Stancetaking, Barbara Johnstone Dec 2006

Linking Identity And Dialect Through Stancetaking, Barbara Johnstone

Barbara Johnstone

No abstract provided.