Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

Counterstories Of Black High School Students And Graduates Of Nyc Independent Schools: A Narrative Case Study, Kahdeidra M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public youth resistance movements in 2019 and 2020 exposed the entrenchment of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and classism across New York City independent schools (NYCIS). In order to support the imminent need for schools to provide effective diversity, inclusion, and equity supports that address broad issues of school climate, relationships, and pedagogy, there is a need to better understand the specific, hyperlocal experiences of Black/African Descendant (BAD) students, who occupy several unique, unexplored spaces in educational research. The following four research questions helped to conceptualize the experiences that support and hinder the academic success and long term well-being of BAD students …

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 – …

Rewriting Web 2.0 Discourses Of The Local For Socio-Spatial Literacy Theory, Erin Daugherty

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to provide a framework for engaging with two spatial concepts that have been foundational to theorizing literacy across time but have often been taken for granted as passive backdrops to the social action of literacy practice: the notions of “the local” and “the global.” By interrogating the histories, both past and ongoing, of these two spatial concepts as they are interwoven into the sociocultural paradigm of literacy theory, research, and pedagogy, this project identifies new ways that literacy researchers and educators can attend to spatial concepts so as to promote and encourage literacy research and learning that …

A Corpus Approach Study On The Manzanar Free Press, Danielle Jochums

University Honors Theses

Past studies on the physical environment of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II have argued that internees were able to express their agency and identity despite the dehumanization of the camps. However, studies on the newspapers circulated in the camps have argued that internees had no agency as they worked on newspapers. In a preliminary reading, it was clear that these newspapers evidenced internee agency in their language. Utilizing de Certeau's theoretical framework of tactics, this study addressed the following questions: What tactics did Japanese-American internees use to take agency when writing and editing camp newspapers? How did …

Creating A Theoretical Framework To Underpin Discourse Assessment And Intervention In Aphasia, Lucy Dipper, Jane Marshall, Mary Boyle, Deborah Hersh, Nicola Botting, Madeline Cruice

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Discourse (a unit of language longer than a single sentence) is fundamental to everyday communication. People with aphasia (a language impairment occurring most frequently after stroke, or other brain damage) have communication difficulties which lead to less complete, less coherent, and less complex discourse. Although there are multiple reviews of discourse assessment and an emerging evidence base for discourse intervention, there is no unified theoretical framework to underpin this research. Instead, disparate theories are recruited to explain different aspects of discourse impairment, or symptoms are reported without a hypothesis about the cause. What is needed is a theoretical framework that …

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 …

When To Make The Sensory Social: Registering In Face-To-Face Openings, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

This article analyzes naturally occurring video-recorded openings during which participants make the sensory social through the action of registering—calling joint attention to a selected, publicly perceiv- able referent so others shift their sensory attention to it. It examines sequence-initial actions that register referents for which a participant is regarded as responsible. Findings demonstrate a systematic preference organization which observably guides when and how people initiate registering sequences sensitive to ownership of, and displayed stance toward, the target referent. Analysis shows how registering an owned referent achieves intersubjectivity and puts involved participants’ face, affiliation, and social relationship on the line. A …

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 …

A Mixed Methods Analysis Of Corpus Data From Reddit Discussions Of "Gay Voice", Sara Elizabeth Mulliner

Dissertations and Theses

In the last decade, there have been a number of public discussions about "gay voice" and "sounding gay." These two phrases often serve as a shorthand for the belief that a listener can determine the sexuality of a speaker based on phonetic qualities found in a speaker's vocal output. However, these expressions are more accurately described as "catch-all" terms for speech that may contain features associated with non-gender conforming stances and personae. Notions about gender and sexuality could be intertwined in complicated ways in this language ideology. Investigating popular discussions of gay-sounding voices could provide information on what people are …

This Is What A Feminist Tweets Like: "Women's Language" And Styling Activist Identities In A #Yesallwomen Twitter Corpus, Eleanor A. Morikawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents results of a study of linguistic practice in the context of feminist activism on Twitter. Twitter has become a primary medium for social and political activism and a rich venue for study of the relationship between digitally mediated language and identity production. The focus of this study is the viral Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen, a hashtag that rose in popularity following a misogyny-motivated terrorist attack in the spring of 2014. This dissertation treats the #YesAllWomen hashtag as an imagined space and a Discourse (Gee, 2015) where language serves as a site for the production of gender and feminist …

‘Its Something You Do Bro’: Language And Identity On A Male Erotic Hypnosis Messageboard, Eric Chambers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on a seven-year corpus of data (total words N = 86,881) on a publicly-accessible messageboard on which self-identified gay men discuss their experiences undergoing erotic hypnosis, this study applies Critical Discourse Analysis methods to understand how posters understand their sexual identities and those of others. This study identifies the emergence of two main identity-types at-play on OnYourKnees: the jock and the coach. Jocks are generally characterized by a focus on sports and body-consciousness, a disinterest or inability to engage in scholarly/academic pursuits, and a desire to be submissive to others to achieve sexual pleasure. Coaches, on the other hand, …

"Do They Know The Normal Language?": Language Attitudes And Ideologies In German Hip Hop Culture, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

This article presents a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language ideologies and language attitudes and builds on previous work by providing an organized framework connecting these notions. This framework is evaluated with reference to online and offline ethnographic work surrounding attitudes and ideologies about anglicisms, or English loanwords, among German hip hop fans and artists. Language attitudes are theorized as individual thoughts and expressions about language, and are often, but not always, informed by individual reproductions of language ideologies, which are conceived of as systematic, shared over groups of individuals, enduring, and mediated. Language ideologies can then be organized …

Choutouts: Language Contact And Us-Latin Hip Hop On Youtube, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

This paper presents a corpus-sociolinguistic analysis of lyrics and com-ments from videos for four US-Latinx hip hop songs on YouTube. A‘post-varieties’ (Seargeant and Tagg 2011) analysis of the diversity andhybridity of linguistic production in the YouTube comments finds thenotions of codemeshing and plurilingualism (Canagarajah 2009) usefulin characterizing the language practices of the Chicanx community ofthe Southwestern US, while a focus on the linguistic practices of com-menters on Northeastern ‘core’ artists’ tracks validate the use of namedlanguage varieties in examining language attitudes and ideologies asthey emerge in commenters’ discussions. Finally, this article advancesthe sociolinguistics of orthography (Sebba 2007) by examining thesocial …

The Impact Of Ideology On Lexical Borrowing In Arabic: A Synergy Of Corpus Linguistics And Cda, Sami Hamdi

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Lexical borrowing is a natural outcome of language contact and one source of neologisms. The traditional view of lexical borrowing explains it as motivated mainly by lexical need or prestige where loans in the recipient language have more or less similar if not identical meanings with the borrowing language. Linguistic adaptation has been often seen grammatically based where grammarians or linguists assume the major task of nativizing foreign terms. This is typical in many studies on linguistic borrowing in Arabic while a secondary attention is given to semantic, sociolinguistic, and educational perspectives. The present study approached lexical borrowing as more …

Transnational Vietnamese: Language Practices, New Literacies, And Redefinition Of The “American Dream”, Nguyen Dao

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

The research focuses on the transnational literacy and language practices of a Vietnamese immigrant family in Midwestern United States. Drawing upon multiple bodies of contemporary research and conceptual frameworks, this investigation intends to go beyond transnational movements to indicate the complex nature of bi-literate, bilingual and bi-cultural development and the role of national and supranational ideologies, as well as to describe how the Vietnamese diaspora have mobilized their identities and in so doing, redefined the provoking term “the American Dream.”

Peaze Up! Adaptation, Innovation, And Variation In German Hip Hop Discourse, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

In this study, I investigate the stylistic use of various forms of the hip hop leave-taking peace in a 12.5-million-word corpus (2000-2011) of German-language Internet hip hop discussions. The English orthography is compared with a number of hybrid variants including, e.g., , , and . I analyze the distribution of these variants over time by comparison to use of the form in an American hip hop forum. I complement these results with a qualitative analysis of peace and its variants as situated in discourse, drawing a connection between linguistic features, discursive use, and corpus distribution. The discourse of German hip …

New Use Of An Old Discourse Marker: The Interface Of Implicit Attitudes, Explicit Attitudes, And Rapid Language Change Of "So", Syelle Graves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates a linguistic feature called “backstory so,” defined as discourse marker so when it prefaces the answer to a question or request for information from an interlocutor. The motivation for its investigation is a collection of highly negative internet comments expressing irritation and insulting attitudes toward this use of so and the people who say it, calling them annoying, inarticulate, and condescending, for example. I also examine controversy in the (limited) literature about whether or not this language feature is new.

I therefore first present findings that this use of so is an instance of rapid language …

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 Pragmatic Strategy Of Main-Clause Omission In Japanese: Its Contrast With Hebrew, And Its Learnability, Maayan Barkan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Typically, linguists study things that people actually say, but this dissertation focuses on what people do NOT say; specifically, it deals with main-clause omission. This paper presents an empirical study on main-clause omission constraints in Japanese after the concessive particle ga (‘although’/’but’), the first known controlled experiment of its kind in the literature. It investigates, from a pragmatic and discourse-analytic perspective, intuitive judgments regarding the allowance of main-clause omission in Japanese, in an attempt to reveal whether Japanese Native Speakers (JNS) use main-clause omission as a pragmatic strategy, as is suggested in the literature. If they do, then what triggers …

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 …

#Hashtags: A Look At The Evaluative Roles Of Hashtags On Twitter, Leah Rose Schaede

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Social media has become a large part of today’s pop culture and keeping up with what is going on not only in our social circles, but around the world. It has given many a platform to unite their causes, build fandoms, and share their commentary with the world. A tool in helping group posts together or give commentary on a thought is the hashtag. In this paper I explore the evaluative roles of hashtags in social media discourse, specifically on Twitter. I use a sample of randomly selected tweets from the Twitter API stream I collected and compiled myself. I …

Understanding A Discourse Marker In Quito, Ecuador, Hannah Jesberger

Honors Projects

The present research project examines the possible factors to explain the word-final /f/ in Ecuadorian Spanish including but not limited to: where it is used, who uses it (gender, age ranges, social class), and with which words it is most commonly used. As the first extensive research study on the word-final /f/, the project may lead to other investigations of this phenomenon and other features of Ecuadorian Spanish. In addition, if there are other variations of the marker pues in the Spanish varieties spoken in different regions and/or countries, researchers can use this present study as basis to analyze the …

Racismo Y Lenguaje, Michele Back, Virgina Zavala

Faculty Published Works

Este libro busca contribuir al estudio de los procesos de racialización y de la construcción discursiva de nuevas identidades en el Perú contemporáneo. En lugar de abordar el racismo desde una dimensión cognitiva, se interesa por el rol que las prácticas lingüísticas cumplen en su constitución. Las diez contribuciones que integran este volumen examinan los discursos y las prácticas del racismo en ámbitos diversos y discuten las sutiles formas en las que se construye a un «otro» desde un criterio aparentemente no racial, pero bajo retóricas raciales de modo subyacente. Todos los artículos abordan la forma en que la raza …

Linguistic And Sociological Dimensions Of The Illusive Concept Of Jamʿ, Mohamed Mohamed

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

The Linguistic and Sociological Dimensions of the Illusive Concept of Jamʿ

Unlike ijmāʿ, which means consensus, jamʿ refers to mere collection, gathering or grouping. In other words, if ijmāʿ is grounded in reason, indicates a choice between two opposites, and represents a reified construction, jamʿ, on the contrary, avoids reason, (con) fuses opposites, and survives on ambiguity. Jamʿ neither dialectically integrates opposites, nor post-modernly juxtaposes them as collage. The secret of jamʿ is an epistemology of truth that is never complete, and always mixed with falsehood. This epistemology is rooted in Islamic theology, where the Truth is …

Hebrew Typography: A Modern Progression Of Language Forms, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Influenced by studies in traditional Ashkenazi and Sephardi scripts. The typeface had been designed for the printing of the Koren Tanakh, a first edition printed Jewish Bible processed through an all-Jewish collaboration for the first time in centuries. Koren’s project was inspired by the revival of Hebrew initiated by Haskalah writers in the 18th century. Haskalah writers utilized the language and scripts of written and printed literary texts. Influenced by philosophical and political ideologies of the European Enlightenment, the Haskalah explored Jewish identity through language by defining the secular context through traditional Jewish symbolism and narratives. The Zionist movement of …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

Virtual Meatspace: Word Formation And Deformation In Cyberpunk Discussions, Matt Garley, Benjamin Slade

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

Pax Populi: Utilizing Technology And Education As A Means To Achieve Peace, Anand Balar

Engagement & Service-Learning Summit

This project of Pax Populi was presented to the students in the Honors course called Beyond Afghanistan taught by Dr. Brite as an opportunity to do service learning. The goal of Pax Populi as taken from their mission statement is to “put the tools of peacemaking into the hands of ordinary people through initiatives that advance peace through education and economic development within a framework of human rights.”

The tool we used in this case was Skype web conferencing to communicate with an Afghan tutee the students were individually partnered up with to teach English skills to whether they be …