Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

Tone Mergers In Spontaneous Speech And Gaps In The Tone Inventory, Naomi Nagy, James Stanford, Holman Tse

English Faculty Scholarship

We investigate the status of three ongoing tone mergers, comparing Heritage Cantonese in Toronto and Homeland Cantonese in Hong Kong, using conversational recordings from the Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC) Corpus (Nagy 2009). The mergers, which have been reported from experimental tasks in several Cantonese dialects (cf. Bauer et al. 2003, Mok et al. 2013, Zhang 2018) are: T2/T5 忍 jɐn35 / 引 jɐn23; T3/T6 印 jɐn33 / 孕 jɐn22; and T4/T6 仁 jɐn11 / 孕 jɐn22. In connected speech, many contextual variables influence the acoustic value of a tone in a given syllable (cf. Stanford 2016), so each …

The Om/Op ~ Am/Ap Merger In Cantonese: Acoustic Evidence Of A Not Quite Completed Sound Change, Holman Tse

English Faculty Scholarship

According to Bauer & Benedict (1997: 419-420), descriptions of Cantonese published before the 1940s describe a contrast between the om/op and am/ap rime groups (ex: gom2, ‘thus, so’, 噉vs. gam2, ‘embroidered’, 錦). They say that “one presumes that these earlier scholars were making a distinction that actually existed in the Cantonese language of their time; nonetheless, it was one which eventually disappeared from standard Cantonese” (1997: 420). This presentation addresses two questions about this purported contrast by analyzing sociolinguistic interviews (spontaneous speech samples) from speakers born between 1922 and 1998: (1)Is there acoustic evidence of this contrast among Cantonese speakers …

Politics And Its Impact On Code-Switching In Puerto Rico, Juliette Marie Acosta-Santiago

MA in Linguistics Final Projects

Puerto Rico is considered a bilingual community for having English imposed to it as a result of the Spanish-American war. However, a notable difference between the perception of code-switching (a natural phenomenon after language contact) in Puerto Rico, and other bilingual communities such as Miami seems to take place. Research states that a considerable amount of Puerto Ricans have a negative perception against code-switching, while the limited research on code-switching in Miami states that Miami Cubans have a more positive perception towards code-switching. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the ways in which listeners perceive and …

The Effects Of Media Exposure And Language Attitudes On Grammaticality Judgments, Chun-Yi Peng

Publications and Research

While traditional 1st wave variationist sociolinguists resist citing media exposure as a source of language variation, this experimental study demonstrates that Mainland Mandarin speakers with reported exposure to Taiwanese TV were more likely to rate syntactic constructions found in Taiwanese Mandarin as grammatically acceptable. Data were collected through an online survey consisting of acceptability judgments, written-guise attitude tasks, reported viewing habits, and demographic questions. Principle Component Analysis was deployed to reduce data dimension, which allows for the identification of the key personality traits linked to Taiwanese Mandarin that contribute to the media effects. The results suggest an intertwined relationship in …

“Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture Of Anti—Intellectualism As A Local Strategy, Mark Ward Sr.

Sermon Studies

The anti-intellectual strain of American evangelicalism, rooted in the populist Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, has prompted much commentary from the 20th century to the present. Analysis of this anti-intellectualism has gained new currency today as evangelicals, who comprise 1 in 4 Americans, reject theories of evolution and manmade climate change. Scholarship on the subject has focused on the discourses of evangelical leaders at the national level. The present study, based on three years of fieldwork at an evangelical church, finds that an animus against intellectual elites is a potent "local strategy" for constructing a satisfying evangelical …

Linguistic Differences In Swiss Cantons And Its Role On The National Identity, Karen Lin

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Switzerland is home to four national languages followed with a positive image on the international stage as a linguistically diverse country. In Swiss history, there has never been a record of a civil war or tensions between linguistic groups raising the question of what accounts for the national identity. The Swiss do not follow the typical definition in nationalism leading to an investigation on establishing the factors that comprise of the Swiss national identity and its effect on the political system. The results indicated linguistic diversity and the political institutions are the factors that compose the national identity creating a …

Lydia Cabrera Entre Líneas: Sociolingüística, Etnografía Posmoderna Y Realismo Mágico, Mauricio A. Cabrera

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Los que estudian Cuba seguramente se han enfrentado con la metáfora popular que se usa para describir a los habitantes cubanos: “La isla de Cuba es un ajiaco.” Cuba, como muchos países latinoamericanos, es una mezcla compleja de varias culturas que finalmente terminan marcando la identidad cubana. Desde los principios del siglo XVI se puede notar la presencia africana en Latinoamérica y especialmente en Cuba. Una de las figuras más importantes que se dedicó a estudiar la cultura afrocubana fue Lydia Cabrera. Esta presentación es un acercamiento lingüístico, etnográfico y analítico hacia la obra de esta escritora cubana. A través …

Copulative Compounds Formed By Prepositional Interfixes In Persian Language, Nuriddinov Nodir Mr

Scientific and Technical Journal of Namangan Institute of Engineering and Technology

Copulative compounds are such compound words that are formed by lexicalization. The components of copulative compounds are equal by semantic. The article also discusses the term "copulative compound" and its studying in scientific works of Russian and Iranian linguists. As well as with examples collected from sources it is carried out structural-semantic analysis of copulative compounds formed by prepositional interfixes.

The Interwoven Existences Of Official Catholicism And Magical Practice In The Lived Religiosity Of A Transylvanian Hungarian Village, Cecília Sándor

Journal of Global Catholicism

During the last five years I have been doing field research in a Transylvanian Hungarian village, Sânsimion (Hu: Csíkszentsimon). I present my research on this religiously homogenous, Catholic community’s worldview. Based on interviews conducted with members of the village’s various age groups, I map religious and magical knowledge passed down through the generations, using the theoretical frame of collective memory and religious transmission. Second, I highlight two different but coexisting “constructions of reality” in this rural community. By “constructions of reality,” I mean interpretations of reality expressed in narrative discourses and local magical practices that are closely and inextricably interwoven …

Longings, Letters And Prayers: Visitor's Books At Hungarian Marian Shrines, Krisztina Frauhammer

Journal of Global Catholicism

The following study seeks to show the flow of contemporary rituals associated with pilgrimage shrines. I will consider how visitor’s books placed on display at shrine churches are being utilized in the modern context by pilgrims and tourists alike. Requests, words of thanksgiving, and testimony are coupled with an honest, reflexive style that lends to the formation of these individualized prayers. These prayers are original, specific and peculiar as they follow patterns that are informal in nature. These prayers allow pilgrims to initiate contact with the Transcendent through the act and practice of writing. An idiosyncratic form of sacred communication …

Introduction: Consumer Contexts And Divine Presences In Hungarian Catholicism, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction to Hungarian Catholicism: Living Faith Across Diverse Social and Intellectual Contexts, highlighting both the specific contributions of the articles to the study of Hungarian Catholicism and situating them within the broad sweep of Hungarian and Catholic Studies.

Overview And Acknowledgements, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Overview of Hungarian Catholicism: Living Faith Across Diverse Social and Intellectual Context, highlighting the articles' contribution to the study of Global Catholicism.

A Damn Short Prayer, Beth Jane Toren

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This poster presents a transcript poem created with murder tales in oral history recordings. Leveraging the creative arts of storytelling, transcript poetry and visual orality, the poster brings light and music to Appalachian storyteller voices in tales of shady murders.

The handout presents the poem with visual orality methods juxtaposed beside Standard English orthographic transcription, enabling a visual comparison, a link a video with graphic text and the original voice recordings, and brief readings about concepts and methods.

The Aesthetic Society And Its Gatekeepers, Aaron Francis Ward

Japanese Society and Culture

The current study draws on Saito’s (2007) application to western context of the Japanese practice of appreciating the aesthetic and ethical aspects of everyday objects, examined through the complexity of aesthetic evaluation. Bourdieu’s (1984a) moderating variable cultural capital is used to advance an understanding of perceptual and linguistic complexity in daily aesthetic consumption. By engaging participants in a quasi-experiment of multi-sensory trials of everyday products (lemon squeezers), an examination was made of how language use reveals embodied knowledge of daily consumption practice. As the participants’ volumes of cultural capital increased, there was a greater tendency to categorize the stimuli according …

Languages And Worldview, Manon Allard-Kropp

Open Educational Resources Collection

Asking and answering questions about what culture entails and examines the fundamental properties and intertwining nature of language and culture. This text explores linguistic relativity, lexical differences among languages and intercultural communication, including high and low contexts.

Changes to a variety of OER works were made by Manon Allard-Kropp in the Department of Language and Cultural Studies to tailor the text to fit the needs of the Languages and World View course at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Materials from the original sources have been combined, reorganized, and added to by the current author, and any conceptual or typographical errors …

Functional Load, Token Frequency, And Contact-Induced Change In Toronto Heritage Cantonese Vowels, Holman Tse

English Faculty Scholarship

Unlike many previous studies of heritage speakers showing phonological maintenance, this presentation will show evidence for a vowel merger among second-generation Toronto Cantonese speakers. Two pairs of vowels are tested for merger. Both pairs are hypothesized to merge due to the lack of similar contrasts in Toronto English: /y/~/u/ and /a/~/ɔ/. Results show merger for only /y/~/u/. This is argued to be due to the lower functional load of /y/~/u/ (three minimal pairs with /y/~/u/, but 105 minimal pairs for /a/~/ɔ/) and due to lower token frequency of /y/ and /u/ compared to /a/ and /ɔ/ in conversational speech.

“Home Is More Than Just A Place”: Oral Personal Narrative Storytelling In Central Appalachia, Brandon Jent

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This project seeks a linguistic understanding of oral personal narrative storytelling in Central Appalachia, particularly as it manifests in Eastern Kentucky, with aims of providing insight into the Appalachian storyteller trope (e.g., Montgomery 1998). Structural and discursive elements of oral personal narrative were identified and positioned within their sociocultural context through discourse analysis and narrative studies. Data were collected from story circles, a methodology first implemented in cultural and community organizing spaces in the South and throughout Appalachia (Roadside Theater 2014, Junebug Productions n.d.). The collected stories were transcribed and analyzed through a discourse analysis framework that combines discourse pragmatics, …

Rezistance: Diné Grassroots Organization And Modes Of Activism, Eric Robert Dougherty

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This ethnography looks at themes of Indigeneity and activism as it exists in the everyday realities of young people living in or around the Navajo reservation in the southwest United States. Through work-related projects of hogan construction, land reclamation, watershed management, and language restoration Navajo youth are given opportunities to take control of their present circumstances and imagine a different future for themselves and their families. Besides work, youth and activism are constituted through other mediums and spaces that allow people to express who they are, what they care about, and why these things are important to them. The consistent …

Vox Et Silentium Dei: A Socio-Cognitive Linguistic Theory Of Religious Violence, Tyler Everett Kibbey

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Contemporary research in the study of language and cognition frequently characterizes religious metaphors as either monoliths of experience or stable synchronic structures, if not both. In addition, by virtue of how the foundational theory of this paper, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, has been situated in the literature, pre-modern theist writing on figurative language has been largely ignored. This has resulted in a general application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to religious language which characterizes religious experience as phenomenologically invalid with the contingent effect of contradicting the basic experiential nature of metaphor. Here, I account for these principal theoretical discrepancies through an exploration …

The Mothman And Other Strange Tales: Shaping Queer Appalachia Through Folkloric Discourse In Online Social Media Communities, Brenton Watts

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Little work has been conducted on the intersections of queer and Appalachian identities, in part because these two identities are viewed as incompatible (Mann 2016). This study uses a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach to examine the Instagram posts of the Queer Appalachia Project, which represent a substantial body of discourse created by and for queer Appalachians. Of specific interest to this analysis are those posts which employ folkloric figures, such as West Virginia’s Mothman, to do identity work that is queer, Appalachian, and queer-Appalachian. Often, this act is accomplished through juxtaposition with Appalachian imagery and the reclamation of homophobic …