Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

[X]Splaininggender, Race, Class, And Body: Metapragmatic Disputes Of Linguistic Authority And Ideologies On Twitter, Reddit, And Tumblr, Judith C. Bridges

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the language of “citizen sociolinguists,” everyday users of social network sites (SNS) who contribute to the discourses about language on Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr, platforms with distinctive user demographics and technological affordances. The data were collected through keyword searches for mansplain, whitesplain, richsplain and thinsplain, metapragmatic neologisms which are lexical blends of the verb explain and one of four social categories. Disputes of macro-level ideologies are revealed by users’ creative meaning-making strategies and metapragmatic awareness of micro-level texts and utterances. Making use of the linguistic practices of the SNS, as well as the concisely-compacted semantic and pragmatic …

Occupation And Displacement Of Palestinian Multilinguals: Language Emotional Perception, Language Practice, And Language Experiences In Palestine And In The Diaspora, Anastasia Khawaja

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the emotional perceptions, language practices, and language experiences of Palestinian multilinguals in Palestine, and the more under-studied population in the diaspora - focusing on Arabic, English, and Hebrew. A total of 47 participants filled out the adapted Bilingual Emotional Questionnaire (Dewaele & Pavlenko, 2001-2003) in order to compare and contrast positive and negative emotional perception of participant reported languages via a Likert scale, and overall language practices and experiences via open-ended questions. Several independent sample t-tests were run by location of participants in order to determine significant differences in emotional perception, and a thematic analysis was run …

International Teaching Assistants’ Perceptions Of English And Spanish Language Use At The University Of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, Edward G. Contreras Santiago

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Globalization and sociopolitical factors impact migration patterns all over the world. In Puerto Rico, these factors created superdiverse environments where languages users have pushed the boundaries of language in order to make sense of their worlds. Even though this language dynamic is natural for locals, it is those who visit from different countries, specifically international graduate students, that have a difficult time adjusting to Puerto Rico’s rich use of English and Spanish. Understanding how international graduate students perceive the language used at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez (UPRM) upon arrival is essential to provide a better experience for future …

Lexical Influence In Phoneme Perception With Non-Degraded And Spectrally-Degraded Speech, Jane Bradley Smart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In speech perception tasks with ambiguous bottom-up information, lexical processes have been shown to influence listener responses, such as in phoneme categorization tasks (Ganong, 1980). Proponents of interactive theories of speech perception and spoken word recognition assert this influence is a top-down feedback mechanism that can affect bottom-up perceptual processes (e.g., McClelland & Elman, 1986). While robust influences on phoneme perception have been reported in multiple studies (Connine & Clifton, 1987; Ganong, 1980; Gow, Segawa, Ahlfors, & Lin, 2008; Pitt & Samuel, 1993; among others), some phonetic contrasts, particularly those that distinguish place of articulation, have been tested in very …

Right-Wing, Nationalist Discourses And Counter-Discourses On Twitter During The European Migrant Crisis, Ramona Kreis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines right-wing, nationalist-conservative discourses on Twitter. Specifically, this study explores the features of right-wing discourses and counter-discourses in the context of the European migrant crisis in 2015 and the terrorist attack in Berlin, Germany, in 2016. Informed by critical discourse analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, the analysis focuses on discursive strategies and semiotic and multimodal resources found in tweets that either endorse or challenge anti-refugee stances during the aforementioned time frames. Additionally, this study explores to what extent the platform-specific technological affordances facilitate dialogic interaction between users who express right-wing opinions and users who challenge right-wing discourses.

The …