Linguistics Commons^™

Media Discourse: Social Semiotics And The Study Of Multimodal Discourse. An Interview With Theo Van Leeuwen, Theo Van Leeuwen, Judith Reitstaetter, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

This interview article is intended to provide both an overview of the contribution Theo van Leeuwen has made to the field of semiotics and approach his work from an unconventional angle. The first aspect of our aim is covered in the form of an introduction comprised of a short biographical note, a list of recent publications and short reviews of van Leeuwen’s major works. The second aspect of what we hope to accomplish is tackled in the form of the interview itself. In this, we have tried to balance general questions – e.g. about the epistemological …

Review Of Lacan To The Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, By Bruce Fink, 2004, Hervé Regnauld

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Spivak After Marx After Derrida, Philip Leonard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Spivak is often viewed as an unequivocally deconstructive theorist, and she frequently reinforces this impression by proclaiming her allegiance to Derrida's ideas. Recent comments by her suggest, however, that there are limits to her deconstructive convictions. This essay considers some of Spivak's debts to Derrida's work, though it is primarily concerned with those occasions when she states her misgivings about his ability to understand postcoloniality, global power, and resistance movements. Reading Marx more accurately would, she insists, have allowed Derrida both to grasp capitalism's complex logic and to consider the effects of subaltern interventions upon capitalism's global authority. Such an …

What Is New In The New Toefl-Ibt 2006 Test Format?, Alla Zareva

English Faculty Publications

In recent years TOEFL has become one of the most popular high-stakes tests affecting not only what and how English language teachers teach but also what and how students learn (e.g. Johnson, Jordan, & Poehner, 2005; Alderson & Wall, 1993). The new 2006 TOEFL–iBT exam is on its way; yet, until now, information about the new test format and test preparation materials is scarce. Above and beyond interest in the test alone, the burning question is what demanded the revision of the current test, given that the latest computer-based TOEFL was introduced fairly recently worldwide. The paper elaborates on some …

Review Of Bilingual Aesthetics: A Sentimental Education, By Doris Sommer (2004), Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Institutionalizing Gender And Sexuality In A Call-In Radio Advice Program: A Characterization Of Loveline, Meagan P. Storey

English Theses & Dissertations

Previous studies of advice characterized it as a discourse in which authority is afforded to the giver by virtue of being asked for advice. As an authoritative discourse, advice sets the standards by which interlocutors base their judgments of normalcy. The consequences of these judgments are multiplied when advice is given as part of public, institutional talk, such as with radio call-in programs. This thesis examines how the authoritative discourse of global advice (public, commercial advice) is used to construct and normalize human experiences, specifically gender and sexuality. This study is based on an analysis of ten audio-taped episodes, each …

Is Feminist Humor An Oxymoron?, Janet M. Bing

English Faculty Publications

Is the subject of feminist humor male oppression or a celebration of the female experience? This paper argues for the latter and suggests that inclusive jokes can be more effectively subversive than divisive ones. As long as women's jokes focus on men, male definitions, and male behavior, women are marginalizing females, even if their jokes target males. In addition, divisive jokes can strengthen prevailing beliefs about essential female-male differences. However, when straight feminists make jokes and laugh about the shared experiences of females rather than on oppressive male behavior, then feminist humor, like lesbian humor, becomes an agent for change.

Lesbian Jokes: A Reply To Christie Davies, Janet Bing

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Discourse Of Evil: Speaking Terrorism To Silence, Galip Isen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

That the impact of terrorism is equal to the reaction it elicits may be a truism, but one that deserves further probing as demonstrated by the way that reaction is put to use politically. Whichever of 150-strong definitions [1] is accepted, the consequential aspect of terrorism is ideational: the assault targets the concept and experience of normal in the lives and minds of ordinary people. Several writers argue that terrorism is generally inefficacious, strategically counterproductive and mostly unsuccessful as a method of attaining socio-political objectives [2]. However, overall public response to 11 September 2001 has been so profound …

The Electronic Polis: Media Democracy And The Invasion Of Iraq, Jeff Lewis, Kirsty Best

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The American-led victory in Baghdad was announced to the world with scenes of Iraqi citizens dragging down the statues of the deposed tyrant. Like the spectacle of World Cup Soccer or the Olympic Games, the image was transmitted live through the global media network to the billions of people who had been closely watching the three week invasion. President Bush shared in the celebration, announcing the dawn of a new age for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. This new democracy, the president proclaimed, would bring stability and prosperity to the region through the obliteration of terrorism …

Innovating Superheroes, Alvise Mattozzi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Introduction]

Superhero comics have changed. They have passed through a Golden Age and Silver Age, they have been transformed, cancelled, revived, killed, deconstructed, reconstructed, revisited, etc. My aim is to account for part of these changes and show how superhero comics have been innovated. In order to track these changes I chose to compare different versions of a few DC Comics series, such as Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Shade, that had been cancelled and then revived and are known to have introduced relevant changes between the earliest and the subsequent versions.

Before tackling the series mentioned, I …

"How Many Lesbians Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?", Janet M. Bing, Dana Heller

English Faculty Publications

This paper explores how humor reveals shared aspects of a culture of lesbian communities in the US. For lesbians, jokes and other forms of humor are an active, narrative means of self-construction and community imagining that help lesbians negotiate their positions both inside and outside mainstream culture. Whether consciously or unconsciously, much of lesbian humor challenges the dominant culture by rejecting its definitions of and presuppositions about lesbians, and by making lesbian experience central to its understanding of normalcy. Whereas the term "lesbian joke" usually activates a sex frame for the dominant culture, much humor created by and for lesbians …

Minimum Mean Square Error Spectral Peak Envelope Estimation For Automatic Vowel Classification, Jaishree Venugopal

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Spectral feature computations continue to be a very difficult problem for accurate machine recognition of speech. In this work, which focuses on vowels, a new spectral peak envelope method for vowel classification is developed, based on a missing frequency components model of speech recognition. According to the missing frequency components model, vowel recognition depends only on the spectral (harmonic) peaks. Smoothing and interpolation of the spectra, performed in the standard cepstral analysis method commonly used in automatic speech recognition, actually loses valuable information and results in reduced recognition accuracy. The new method for feature extraction presented in this thesis is …

An Investigation Into The Relationship Between Language Attitudes And Academic Performance In Northampton County, Virginia, Public Schools, Glenda L. Rose

English Theses & Dissertations

This language attitude study targets third grade, fifth grade, eighth grade and high school students in the Northampton County, Virginia, Public School System. Two hypotheses were proposed. First, students exhibiting negative attitudes toward their own dialect have a lower performance level in language arts classes than students expressing positive attitudes. Second, factors such as sex, race, grade level, and level of exposure to other dialects are reflected in language attitudes. In order to determine the validity of these hypotheses, school officials were asked to identify five students performing well and five students having difficulty in the language arts. Ten third …

What's Up Wif Ebonics, Y'All?, Abha Gupta

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

This paper examines the controversy surrounding the use of Ebonics among African American students in schools in the United States, with a twofold purpose: (1) to focus on the primary function of language as a tool of communication that varies in its use according to the social context; and (2) to provide suggestions to teachers of ways to support students' acquisition of standard English without devaluing the nonstandard variants they may have learned in their homes and communities. The discussion is highlighted in the paper with classroom stories, anecdotes, and vignettes. The paper contains the following sections: Introduction; The Ebonics …

The Effect Of Usage On Degrees Of Constituency: The Reduction Of Don't In English, Joan Bybee, Joanne Scheibman

English Faculty Publications

In this paper we take the position that there are many degrees of constituency and that these derive in a direct manner from the frequency with which elements are used together: elements that are frequently found next to each other show a tighter constituent structure than those that collocate less frequently. We use both phonological and functional evidence from conversation to argue that repetition conditions chunking (Haiman 1994), sometimes overriding the syntactic and semantic logic of the organization of utterances. Our study examines the reduction of don't in American English conversation. We find that don't is reduced the most in …

Gendered Jokes: Humor As A Subversive Activity, Janet M. Bing

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Brain Sex: How The Media Report And Distort Brain Research, Janet M. Bing

English Faculty Publications

Testosterone gives men a particular advantage in that it is focusing and galvanizing a brain that is already, by its very structure, more focused than the female. Remember that the male brain is a tidier affair, each function in its special place . . . Biology, then, every bit as much as social conditioning, militates against a strongly feminine role in areas traditionally regarded as male preserves.

English Sound Stucture [Book Review], Janet Mueller Bing

English Faculty Publications

Review of English Sound Structure, by John Harris. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994.

Hold As A Monosemic Verb, Amy D. Camp

English Theses & Dissertations

The verb hold is normally presumed to be highly polysemous; dictionaries ascribe to it several senses and sub-senses. This treatment is supported by the polysemous bias in current semantic research. In this thesis, I claim that hold is monosemic, with ascribed meanings resulting from pragmatic modulation. My treatment of hold is based on Charles Ruhl's work with monosemy in his book On Monosemy: A Study in Linguistic Semantics.

This study isolates hold's constant semantic contribution throughout 250 diverse example sentences. I claim that hold: (1) presupposes a sequence, and then (2) suspends the sequence.

After an introduction and a chapter …

Names As Insults Among Middle School Students, Susan M. De Veer

English Theses & Dissertations

The following is a study of playful and insulting name-calling among suburban and rural public middle school males and females in grades six through eight in Tidewater, Virginia. Little is known about the effects of name-calling on self-esteem. Students were asked to rate the comfort level of the names they reported their friends called them. They were also asked to list their favorite television programs, films, and music videos to determine what influence, if any, the media has on name-calling. The 135 participating male and female students completed an anonymous survey administered by their teachers during home bell.

The collected …

The Transference Of Traditional American Indian Oral Narratives Into Contemporary Literature, Barbara A. Baisley

English Theses & Dissertations

This thesis will examine Native American oral narratives and determine what influence western culture has had on the written recording of these stories. By examining traditional literature, I will analyze a trickster myth in order to establish Native American literary patterns. I will then examine Henry Schoolcraft's translations of Chippewa oral narratives and determine what is characteristic of Native American oral narratives and what alterations he made in order to market these narratives to an audience deeply entrenched in western literature.

I will also distinguish between Native American narratives translated into English and English narratives that contain an Native American …

Computer Networks And The Teaching Of English As A Second Language: How Networks Affect Second Language Acquisition, Kirstin J. Reed-Perez

English Theses & Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Threats, Carol DĺYnn West Bleyle

English Theses & Dissertations

As J. L. Austin and John Searle point out in their philosophies of language, words communicate more than surface meaning. Some utterances, speech acts, actually stand for actions. A threat is a speech act, but it is difficult to define. This study reviews several examples of threats, such as ( 1) and (2) and analyzes their essential characteristics.

( 1) If you don't give me all your money, I will shoot.

(2) I have a gun.

Threats are found to have three essential features which consistently identify a threat. The threat must indicate a future world which is detrimental for …

Linguistic Theory Applied To Teaching Practice: Looking Through Linguists' Eyes At An Urban Esl Classroom, Caroline Mary El-Kadi

Theses and Dissertations in Urban Services - Urban Education

The quality of instruction in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs is of utmost concern to urban educators as more and more non-native speakers settle in urban areas and need better language skills to participate fully in American society. Training of ESL instructors is often difficult, given the limited resources of most programs. In ESL, a close study of classroom discourse has long been considered particularly useful, but undirected classroom observation is of limited use because what novices notice in the classroom is often inaccurate or irrelevant. Ways are needed to focus beginning teachers' observations. Over several decades, discourse analysts have devised methods …

The Complexities Of Learning Prepositions: Spanish To English, Denise J. Simon Chiavarini

English Theses & Dissertations

This study explores reasons for the improper use of English pronouns by Spanish speaking ESL students, as evidenced in the Free Writing Placement Tests given at The Adult Learning Center in Virginia Beach and Old Dominion University.

The database includes 84 examples of prepositional errors (Appendix B) that were translated into Spanish for comparison and analysis. Some errors can be attributed to first language interference (Chapter 2, Contrastive Analysis). Some can be attributed to interlanguage (Chapter 3, Error Analysis). Other chapters show additional complications such as variation in native speaker preposition use and the effects of some prepositional contexts. Although …

A Phenomenology Of Textuality, Alessandro Tomasi

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis introduces a new meaning of the word "textuality" based on its etymology, as a "woven thing. I reject the notion of isolatable entities that we call "words" and argue that language presents itself, in our experience, as "textual." In this sense, "textuality" is not limited to written texts, but it applies to every linguistic media: thinking, writing, and speaking.

I attempt a distinction between "textuality" and "contextuality" which allows me to isolate this phenomenon, "textuality," and to proceed with a phenomenological description of its features and structures. Among these, I describe to some length what I call "diesis," …

Penguins Can't Fly And Women Don't Count: Language And Thought, Janet M. Bing

English Faculty Publications

Many people object to sexist and racist language partly because they assume that language not only reflects, but somehow affects attitudes. A one-to-one relationship between language and thought seems obvious to those who never question it, but the issue of whether language influences thought and behavior has been a matter of debate in philosophy even before Berkeley and Wittgenstein. Literary critics, particularly those who call themselves deconstructionists, are still debating to what extent language constructs reality.

A Syntactical Approach To Mr. Collins' Letter, Shixing Wen

Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Role Of Imitation In Language Assessment Tests, Abha Gupta

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

A study investigated whether imitation plays a significant role in the acquisition of grammar. Three 6- to 8-year-old hearing-impaired children were administered the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), which is designed to evaluate hearing-impaired children's use of grammatical aspects of spoken and/or signed English. Subjects' verbal responses to the "imitated" component (in which subjects were asked to say just what the tester said) of the GAEL were transcribed and analyzed. Results indicated that imitated speech is neither longer nor grammatically more advanced than non-imitated, spontaneous speech. Findings suggest that the children produced "unique" language structures to …