Linguistic Anthropology Commons^™

The Manito Topos Project: Place Naming And Toponymic Silencing In The Sierras Of Northern Nuevo México And Southern Colorado, Len N. Beké

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This dissertation reports on documentary research on vernacular toponymies in Manito communities in Nuevo México and Colorado. These toponymies are erased, obscured and delegitimized in official maps. Within the study area, vernacular antecedents for 49.5% of official names for natural features were documented, along with 280 previously unmapped names. These data were compared to the state-sanctioned toponymy to determine a typology of linguistic mechanisms of toponymic silencing. While a majority of official toponyms are based on Manito oral tradition, only 15.4% of the labels for natural features represent unaltered versions of names in that tradition. This dissertation theorizes the conceptual …

“Investment In Inertia”: Language Ideologies Of Instructors And Students Of Spanish As A Heritage Language, Michael E. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When the Spanish-language skills of heritage Spanish learners are disparaged in an academic environment, these learners are at high risk of abandoning further study of Spanish and shifting entirely to English. This dissertation uses mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods, including thematic and discourse analysis, to investigate the language ideologies of instructors and students of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) and the effects of those ideologies on students’ experiences in SHL college courses. It builds on earlier research on language ideologies in the post-secondary heritage language context (e.g., Carreira, 2011; Loza, 2017; Valdés et al., 2003). I find that …

La Voz De Los Sures: Etnografía Glotopolítica Del Activismo Comunitario, Lara Maria Alonso Pinero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The relevance of the strategic use of language and communication in the consolidation and action of a political subject has not yet been sufficiently analyzed. Drawing on a glottopolitical perspective, this research project aims to incorporate the object of study of the political dimension of voice and point out the importance of mastering linguistic and discursive practices in community activism. Based on the case of the Latino community of Los Sures in Brooklyn, NY, in this dissertation I embark on a journey through the communicative practices through which a group of people begins to conceive of itself as a community, …

Misinformation And Disinformation: Detecting Fakes With The Eye And Ai, Victoria Rubin

Data and Test Instruments

How do we detect, deter, and prevent the spread of mis- and disinformationwith the human eye and AI? How does theory inform the practice, and how do theevidence-based research and best practices in lie-catching and truth-seekingprofessions—inform AI? The book looks into well-established human practicessuch as the routines and processes used in detective work, journalism, and scientificinquiry, and how they contribute toward innovative AI solutions. The book explainsthe principles, inner workings, and recent evolution of five types of state-of-the-artAI technologies suitable for curtailing the spread of mis- and disinformation:automated deception detectors, clickbait detectors, satirical fake detectors, rumordebunkers, and computational fact-checking tools.

Student Attitudes Towards English Grammar, Evalyn H. Bassett

Honors Theses

The literature on English grammar is mostly on its history, standardization, educational implementations, how ideologies shape its frequency of usage, and how it is perceived by students learning English as a second language. This study seeks to address a gap in the literature that reviews the attitudes of college students towards English grammar as their first language and how these attitudes correlate with any past experience with English grammar up to this point. To gain a better understanding of student’s attitudes towards English grammar, an online mixed-methods survey was distributed to graduate and undergraduate students in all departments of the …

Resurrecting Gaelic: Modernity And Heritage Language Revival In Scotland In A Comparative Perspective, Sean Coady

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Many people from across the world have little or no connection to their heritage languages. Whether this loss is caused by conquest, colonialization, or simply lack of parent-child transmission, many believe that they are missing an integral part of their cultural identity and want to reclaim the languages of their forebearers. There is wide debate about how, why, and if this linguistic reclamation and revitalization should happen because, in the face of modernity and language evolution, the best solutions are not always clear. What constitutes successful language revitalization in the modern world, and why does it happen? Gaelic in Scotland …

Ambiguous Appalachianness: A Linguistic And Perceptual Investigation Into Arc-Labeled Pennsylvania Counties, Crissandra J. George

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The Appalachian Regional Commission (2022) designates 52 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties as Appalachia, excluding only the southeast portion of the state. Matthew Ferrence, in Appalachia North, states that his "home is sometimes called Appalachia, sometimes Rust Belt, other times Midwest, even though very few who live there would accept any of those labels as correct" (xi). This ambiguous and fluid identity is due to the shaping, forming, and changing of Pennsylvania’s role within society from a founding colony to a thriving state with industry, unselfishly spoiling others, to the grounds of converging identities (Ferrence xi). This ambiguous identity makes …

Sacred Music In Colonial Era Hispaniola: The Evangelization Of The Taino People, Tito J. Gutierrez

Student Theses

During the 15th-18th centuries, the major European religious orders; the Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Jeronymites, journeyed to the newly colonized American territories in an attempt to convert the multitudes of natives peoples living there. Along with prayer books, crucifixes, and religious images, these missionaries brought sacred European music to American shores in an attempt to attract the native people to the Catholic faith.The use of music as a tool for conversion of native people in places such as Mexico, South America, California, and the South West United States, have been well researched and documented. However, the research of the spiritual …

Language As The Medium: A Literature Review. Harnessing The Prolific Power Of Dramatic Language As A Therapeutic Tool In Drama Therapy, Edward Freeman

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Language in and of the theatre, with its palate of variegated writing styles and playwrights from throughout time, has the potential to be harnessed, focused, and systematized for use as a therapeutic tool within drama therapy – the field’s artistic medium. Drama therapy could benefit from having a specific medium germane to its artform which has the potential to provide practitioners with a common resource and means of communication, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning, as well as align the field with other creative arts therapies. Language encompasses all forms of human communication – speaking, writing, signing, gesturing, expressing facially – …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

The Lexiculture Papers: English Words And Culture, Stephen Chrisomalis

Anthropology Faculty Research Publications

The Lexiculture Papers is a collection of scholarship on English words and culture. Each of the 62 chapters was originally authored by a student-scholar in the course, Language and Culture, at Wayne State University, between 2013 and 2020. Each chapter is a short social and historical description of a single English word in its cultural context, principally since 1800. Using a combination of historical linguistics, etymology, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis, the papers analyze English-speaking social life through the lens of specific words.

A Fat Imposter: The Embodied Intersection Between Race, Body Type And Fatness In Margaret Cho’S Comedy, Julia Cox

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Margaret Cho is a comedic goddess who, in her mockery, serves flaming hot social commentary about race, body image, and fatness. Within this thesis, I used critical discourse analysis to understand how Margaret Cho embodies Asianness, whiteness, and the body types and images prescribed respectively. While working on data analysis, I came across a common media trope of fat women: the use of indexically Southern (United States), Appalachian, and Working class indexicals in speech and lexical items. I connected the ideologies surrounding Southern and Appalachian language to the inequalities that fat women face. This voicing had not previously been written …

An Instrumental Study Of Front Oral Monophthongs In Kensiu, Azizan Adilah

Student Works (2020-2029)

This paper acoustically examines the front oral vowels of Kensiu, a highly endangered Austroasiatic language spoken in Peninsular Malaysia. Although there have been initial studies on the phonology of Kensiu, (Bishop, 1996; Burenhult, 2001), these are mainly on the variety spoken in Thailand. This far, there is a lack of studies especially those based on the acoustic analysis. The changes in the sounds of Kensiu are likely to have taken place with increasing contact with the local Malay community in Kedah where the only Kensiu village is located. This paper aims to fill the gap by examining the acoustic properties …

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 …

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 …

Loss For Words: An Investigation Of The English Nature Vocabulary, Margaret C. Luthin

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This research assesses the state of English nature vocabulary in Montana, defined here as words and terms relating to local species, weather, and topography. Studies have shown declining nature knowledge among English speakers as well as a marked decrease in the usage of nature words in English popular culture throughout the 20th century, and while research across disciplines points to a growing disconnect between humans and their environment, researchers have yet to investigate the role of vocabulary and language attrition in humans’ changing experience of nature. This study develops a new survey instrument to gather vocabulary data from Montanans, aiming …

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 …

Language Documentation In The Aftermath Of The 2015 Nepal Earthquakes: A Guide To Two Archives And A Web Exhibit, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, Tanner Burge-Beckley, Jacob Sebok

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

We describe two institutionally related archives and an online exhibit representing a set of Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal. These archives and exhibit were built to house materials resulting from documentation of twelve Tibeto-Burman languages in the aftermath of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. This account includes a detailed discussion of the different materials recorded, and how they were prepared for the collections. This account also provides a comparison of the two different types of archives, the different but complementary functions they serve, and a discussion of the role that online exhibits can play in the context of language documentation archives.

Influencia Del Quechua En El Castellano Andino Del Cusco, Perú, Meredith Church

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Esta investigación lingüística intenta analizar la influencia del quechua en el castellano andino de la ciudad del Cusco, Perú, con los objetivos de identificar y registrar las características lingüísticas que diferencian el castellano andino del español estándar en la ciudad del Cusco y delinear cuáles de estos cambios lingüísticos son resultados del contacto con el idioma quechua. La muestra consta de dieciséis residentes del distrito de Wanchaq, que han provisto 4.45 horas de entrevistas grabadas durante dos semanas de trabajo de campo. Las observaciones del corpus grabado se complementan con las observaciones de la investigadora durante su estadía en la …

Differential Responses To Constraints On Naming Agency Among Indigenous Peoples And Immigrants In Canada, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation.

"I Have A Scream" Enunciaciones Disidentes En Torno Al 15m En España, José Del Valle, Natalia Castro Picón

Publications and Research

En este artículo analizaremos el primer Grito Mudo, gesto colectivo de desobediencia realizado por el movimiento de los Indignados en la Puerta del Sol de Madrid en mayo de 2011, como escena glotopolítica. En esta acción, que consistió en que la multitud auto-convocada guardase un minuto de silencio justo antes de la medianoche, cuando entraba en vigor la sentencia que ilegalizaba la concentración, convergen diferentes formas discursivas (que incluyen el lenguaje, el silencio y los cuerpos) que ponen en conflicto los regímenes normativos que limitan el sentido de la participación política y los límites de la democracia. Este tipo de …

Anti-Queer Microaggressions Towards Queer Black Men, Camisha D. Fagan, Anna Smedley-López

McNair Poster Presentations

Microaggressions are reoccurring derogatory messages that degrade and/ or discredit one’s identity. While invisible and unknown to many, they remain visible and apparent to those impacted by them. The research questions for this project are: (1) What microaggressions do Queer Black men experience within larger society? (2) To contrast with larger society, what microaggressions do Queer Black men experience within Black communities? By conducting focus groups, I will examine the intersectional microaggressions that Queer Black males experience in their own community, as well as document microaggression that they experience in larger society. After conducting my focus groups, I will be …

Troping The Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, And The Big Data Black Boxes Of National Security, Robert Albro

Secrecy and Society

This article considers how cultural understanding is being brought into the work of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through an analysis of its Metaphor program. It examines the type of social science underwriting this program, unpacks implications of the agency’s conception of metaphor for understanding so-called cultures of interest, and compares IARPA’s to competing accounts of how metaphor works to create cultural meaning. The article highlights some risks posed by key deficits in the Intelligence Community's (IC) approach to culture, which relies on the cognitive linguistic theories of George Lakoff and colleagues. It also explores the problem of …

How To Begin, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

This article introduces the special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction organized around the theme “Opening and Maintaining Face-to-Face Interaction.” The contributions to this special issue collectively consider “how to begin” – either a new encounter, or a new sequence after a lapse in conversation. All articles analyze naturally-occurring, videorecorded episodes of casual and/or institutional copresent interaction using multimodal conversation analytic methods. Though the opening phase of a face-to-face encounter may elapse in a matter of seconds, this article shows it to house a dense universe of phenomena central to sustaining our human sense of self and our …

The Sound Patterns Of Kachok In The Context Of Bahnaric And North-Bahnaric Studies, Emily L. Olsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a description of the sound patterns of Kachok, Austroasiatic language spoken in northeastern Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The language is spoken by approximately 3000 people and is considered endangered (Simons & Fennig, 2018). Kachok is undocumented, and this dissertation is the first attempt to describe the language and its sound patterns. The goals of this dissertation are twofold: to contribute to linguistics and the science of phonetics and phonological typology, as well as increase the body of work on Austro-Asiatic languages, and to create resources for the Kachok language, culture, and people that have the potential to outlive …

Graphic Representations Of Grammatical Gender In Spanish Language Anarchist Publications, Mariel Mercedes Acosta Matos

Publications and Research

This paper offers a descriptive analysis of the suffixes -@, -x, -e and other orthographic innovations as transgressions to the genderedness of Spanish language. First I discuss the grammatical rules of expressing gender in Spanish and a summary of the ongoing debates concerning linguistic sexism and androcentrism in Spanish language. Then I present some examples of the gender neutral suffixes drawn from articles found in 3 “Do It Yourself” journals published online by three anarchist collectives in Latin America.

“The Lolelaplap (Marshall Islands) In Us: Sailing West To East (Ralik→Ratak) To These Our Atolls (Aelon Kein Ad) Ad Jolet Jen Anij (Our Blessed Inheritance From God)”, Desmond N. Doulatram

Master's Projects and Capstones

This paper discusses the expansion of Oceania through a Marshallese indigenous lens as a focal point. It explains that decolonizing methodologies allows reclaiming of space for mental liberation and reassurement of constitutional rights. It highlights similar occurrences of decolonization practices meeting resistance in the 21st century all while strengthening the human right argument that no human deserves any less than their fellow human brothers and sisters. It argues that an indigenous imagery can only be viewed through an indigenous lens where the researches’ level of purity is retained and unfiltered. It nevertheless argues that Marshallese ethnolinguistics reveal the same cultural …

Fresa Style In Mexico: Sociolinguistic Stereotypes And The Variability Of Social Meanings, Rebeca Martinez Gomez

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation examines the flexibility in the social meanings of sociolinguistic stereotypes and how linguistic and non-linguistic information affect these meanings. The investigation consists of four empirical studies surrounding the case of fresas in Mexico –members of the upper class that are perceived as using a unique linguistic style.

Study 1 investigates the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics associated with the fresa stereotype. Through a qualitative analysis of 64 webpages and 3 performances of the style, it is shown that fresasare perceived as the counterpart of another construct, nacos,and that their linguistic style is linked to English due to …

Ethnolinguistic Convergence And Divergence Within Dyadic Communication, Anna E. Pitman

Honors College Research

This study investigated just one dependent variable within communication: ethnicity. Ethnicity often influences language. The study examined interethnic communication behaviors through the lens of the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), as influenced by one of its offshoots, Ethnolinguistic Identity Theory (ELIT). Communication within CAT is given one of three labels—convergence, divergence, and maintenance. The study included four students at Harding University: two African American females, one Hispanic American female, and one Caucasian American female. The primary participant, an African American woman, had a recorded 20 minute conversation with each of the other three participants. Discussion questions provided were formulated to create …