Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

/Ae/ And /E/ In El Paso English, Lance Levi Williams

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The production and perception of front vowels /ae/ and /e/ by El Paso residents was examined in a pilot study to begin to establish linguistic variables in an understudied yet dynamic speech community and explore the question of the unity of the speech community and possible influence of L2 English speakers on L1 English speakers. 25 subjects, males age 19 to 34, were given both tests of perception and production, and these results were analyzed with respect to their social and linguistic backgrounds. In general, subjects in the Anglo group appeared to be more united in their production and perception …

A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Mahathir Mohamad's Speeches Against The War On Terror, Azimah Shurfa Mohammed Shukry

Student Works (2010-2019)

This study is a Critical Discourse Analysis of the discursive strategies and argumentative moves deployed by Mahathir Mohamed, former Prime Minister of Malaysia in ten of his speeches that express resistance and challenge towards former U.S. President George. W Bush’s military ideology of ‘War on Terror’ post September 11 2001. The themes of this study are Mahathir’s assessment of the 9/11 attack, his construction of terrorists and terrorism and his description of the political and social actors involved in the context of ‘war on terror’. This study also examines how Mahathir constructs his own position in the speeches, with particular …

Percampuran Kod Dalam Bahasa Mandarin Di Kelantan., Lee Wei Ying

Student Works (2010-2019)

This study examined the phenomenon of mixed code in Mandarin language in Kelantan. The purpose of this study was to explore the extent of the phenomenon of mixed code that occurred in Mandarin language spoken by the Chinese in Kelantan as well as the factors influencing it. To complete this study, the two main methods used by the researcher were observation and questionnaire. Respondents selected by the researcher were Chinese youths in Kelantan who were in the range of 15-30 years of age. The results of this study showed that Chinese in Kelantan often mixed code when interacting in Mandarin …

Language Choice In Interracial Marriages : The Case Of Filipino-Malaysian Couples., Francisco Perlas Dumanig

Student Works (2010-2019)

Language choice has become a common phenomenon in interracial encounters in which speakers are always faced with the challenge of choosing an appropriate language in various domains of communication. In multilingual and multiracial societies, language choice can sometimes be crucial because of its social, political, and economic impact on the speakers. Even in the smallest unit of a society which is the family, language choice plays an important role particularly in interactions between husbands and wives who come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. It is therefore the objective of this research to examine the language choice in interracial couples’ …

A Preliminary Linguistic Analysis Of Plant Names In Ikpaná (Logba), An Endangered Ghana Togo Mountain Language, Lydia Jewl Green

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Methodology: I spent 12 days living in three of the towns in the Logba traditional area (Alakpeti, Klikpo, and Tota) during which time I elicited approximately three hours of footage spread over four miniDV tapes of native speakers of Ikpaná describing the names and uses of the plants in the surrounding area in the Ikpaná language.

Findings: I analyzed some of the linguistic properties of the plant names as they relate to the endangered language status of the language.

Conclusion: Ikpaná is being pressured by Ewe and by globalization. This can be demonstrated through an analysis of the plant names, …

Like As An Exemplifier: A Description Of Its Construction And The Relations It Can Mark, Helena L. Osborne

English Theses & Dissertations

This thesis analyzes data where like marks exemplification in naturally occurring discourse. The data for this study were obtained from thirteen interviews and consist of 193 utterances in which exemplifying like links two clauses. Each token consists of two components, each consisting of at least one clause (SV _^FINITE), linked by like. Based on Vincent's (2007) definition of exemplification, one component introduces a general situation and the other provides an example of that situation. This thesis presents several types of evidence that exemplifying like is a component in an exemplification construction. First, the semantic relation between components is …

Die Taal Is Gans Die Volk? Building A Common Afrikaans-Language Identity And Community In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Susan Demartino

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The following paper examines some of the ways in which Afrikaans-speakers have begun to renegotiate Afrikaans-speaking identity and community in reaction to a perceived decline in Afrikaans in post-apartheid democratic South Africa. It also examines the values of re-negotiating Afrikaans for a multilingual South Africa.

The data was obtained through interviews with four Afrikaans-speaking South Africans who connect with the language both as a mother-tongue speaker and as players in renegotiating its role through empowerment efforts, blogging, and creating positive language policy and programming.

I have concluded that the renegotiation of Afrikaans involves depoliticizing and consciously separating Afrikaans from ideologies …

The Role Of Pragmatics In Second Language Teaching, Roberto Eduardo Echeverria Castillo

MA TESOL Collection

This research paper explores the application of pragmatics in second language teaching. It presents pragmatics as a discipline that may be taught and learned utilizing the experiential learning cycle. The paper explores challenging pragmatic experiences and how the cycle was used to overcome them. Additionally, it proposes a model to teach pragmatics, illustrated by a lesson based on an episode of a television show. Finally, the paper ends with my personal view of this project, and its applications on my learning of English and to my language teaching.

United States Mainland Speakers' Use Of Hawaiian Creole English And Standard American English Across Social Situations, Nicole Kaylani Kanahele Stutz

Theses Digitization Project

This study will focus on Hawaiian Creole English and standard American English (HCE/SAE) speakers who grew up in Hawai'i and relocated to the mainland as adults, and how their use of HCE and SAE varies across different social situations. In Hawai'i much of the population speaks Hawaiian Creole English and Standard American English, speakers often code-switch between the two varieties. Fluency in HCE and SAE differs among speakers, and this fact has implications for communication in a preferred language variety in particular social situations.

What Happens To Class When A Language Dies? Language Change Vs. Language Death, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents the first documentation of the noun class system of the dying language Mani (buy), Bullom So in Ethnologue, a.k.a. Mmani, Mandenyi, etc. spoken in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Mani has some few hundred speakers, all of whom speak either Soso (sus) or Temne (tem) as their everyday language. The Mani are concentrated in a restricted coastal area straddling the border between Guinea and Sierra Leone near the town of Morebaya, Kambia District, in Sierra Leone. A few other speakers are scattered in the littoral region from Conakry to Freetown.

Slavic Sociolinguistics In North America: Lineage And Leading Edge, Mark Richard Lauersdorf

Linguistics Faculty Publications

This article provides a general overview of North American research in Slavic sociolinguistics from the beginnings of the field at the start of the 1960s up to the present day.  The work of North American scholars published in a selection of journals, series, and special collections, as well as in monographs and dissertations, is reviewed to illustrate the research trends and the overall coverage of languages and sociolinguistic subfields as Slavic sociolinguistics developed and matured in a North American context.  This study is intended to serve as a historical backdrop for the new research presented in this volume, and it …

Physician-Patient Communication About Patients' Sexual Activities And Substance Use : Information Exchange On Potentially Delicate Matters, Paul Michael Denvir

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Previous interaction-based research has shown that physicians and patients collaboratively realize the routine character of comprehensive medical histories through their communicative behavior. A primary resource in this regard is the design of information seeking and reporting actions. Physicians seek information through closed-ended query formats and patients report information in fitted, minimal formats. This organization provides a relatively efficient way to address a wide range of health-related topics. One topical domain that has been described as sensitive and difficult is patient `lifestyle,' which typically includes discussion of sexual activities and substance use. In these domains, patients engage in some special interactional …

Latino Language-Use Patterns In New York City, 2005, Carolina Barrera-Tobón

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This study examines the linguistic patterns of New York City Latinos in comparison to other race/ethnic groups as of 2005.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: Among all four racial/ethnic groups the foreign-born population reported speaking English at home at lower rates than the domestic-born population, a finding which could have been anticipated. Yet, Latinos reported speaking English at home at …

Self-Perceived Personality Shift On Non-Native English Speakers, Yalin Lee

Theses Digitization Project

This qualitative study is conducted to investigate how language learners are socialized into the target speech comunity, and also, whether they perceive the shift in personality when using the target language to interact with different social groups in different social contexts. A two-month case study was done to inspect the language socialization process of 10 out of 14 NNES (non-native English speaking) students enrolled in Level Three Composition Class in IEP (Intensive English Program) at CSUSB in 2006 Summary. The data for this current study was collected through audio taping, interviews, and the journals of the student participants.

Blogging About Feminist Lnterdisciplinarity In The Study Of Communication, Language, And Gender, Cynthia Berryman-Fink, Janet Bing, Deborah Cameron, Amy Sheldon, Anita Taylor

English Faculty Publications

This article provides information about several blog posts discussed during a round-table discussion on feminist interdisciplinary studies in relation to communication, language, and gender. Topics under discussion include the nature of interdisciplinarity and its relevance to feminist studies, intercultural communication, and the study and teaching of gender in women's studies programs in higher education.

Topics In Action Sources Of Definiteness Of Topic Noun Phrases In Thai Interactive Discourse, Prakaiwan Vajrabhaya

English Theses & Dissertations

The notion of topic has been widely discussed in past literature; however, the use of naturally occurring data in these studies, especially in Thai, has been lacking. This study approaches topic from a functionalist standpoint. It uses definiteness, a feature of topics generally agreed upon by scholars, to investigate topic noun phrases (NPs) in the topic with a clausal comment construction in naturally occurring data in Thai. The main objectives are to identify the sources of definiteness of topic NPs and demonstrate their functions. The data for this study was obtained from the Chulalongkorn University Linguistics Department corpus which …

Grice's Conversational Implicature Revisited: A Discourse Analysis Of Reproductive Loss In Women's Talk, Barbara Hauser

Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis, Grice's Conversational Implicature Revisited: A Discourse Analysis of Reproductive Loss in Women's Talk, it is my intent to explore the discursive modalities of reproductive loss narrated by women, who, at different stages of gestation, have lost one or more children. Rooted in a theoretical framework in discourse analysis, my thesis seeks to analyze how women, having participated in an interview with a female interlocutor who lost a child herself, narrate their experiences of reproductive loss.

My hypothesis is that the more personal information about the experience of reproductive loss the participant is supposed to share, the …

Liberated Jokes: Sexual Humor In All-Female Groups, Janet Bing

English Faculty Publications

Females have formerly been under-represented in jokes. Many scholars have claimed that joke making is primarily a male activity, particularly in the domain of sexual jokes. In this paper, I discuss sexual jokes that women share with each other both in all-female groups and by e-mail. After reviewing some widely held assumptions about women and jokes, I explore liberated women's jokes, including their structure, use of stereotypes, and subversive ideas. Finally, I discuss why humor theory is incomplete without the inclusion of a female perspective and suggest that women should tell more jokes.

Health Perceptions Of Low-Income, Immigrant Spanish-Speaking Latinas In The United States., Donna Hartweg, Christina Isabelli

Scholarship

The health outcomes and health practices of immigrant Latinas tend to decrease with acculturation to U.S. culture. The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate health perceptions of first- and second generation, low-income, Spanish-speaking women from Mexico and Central America to learn their views of health and also to identify any differences between subcultures. This investigation was the first phase of a larger study to understand the relationship of physical activity to health, as Latinas define it. Seven focus groups were conducted in Spanish with women, ages 25 to 64, by country of origin. Fifteen themes emerged, with more …

Language, Racism, And Ethnicity, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

While ethnic prejudices can be expressed in and through language, they are not, however, intrinsically linguistic in nature. They are, instead, supralinguistic concepts that become disguised as linguistic ones and imported into the theater of language. The pathways that facilitate this importation have been made by the repeated interconnections between the concept of language and the concept of race. In other words, language in the service of racism and ethnocentrism cannot occur without conceptualizing language and race in similar ways. Accordingly, the identification of language with race is not possible without the genetic misprisions that create the myth of race …

Język: Attitudes Toward Language In Poland, Angela Ott

Honors Program Theses

Perceptual dialectology is the study of how people perceive differences in language. This study was designed to discover Polish college students' attitudes toward the dialects in Poland. Modeled after Dennis Preston's 1986 study of language attitudes in the United States, a map questionnaire was distributed to 100 Jagiellonian University and Krosno College students in Fall 2006. Participants drew boundaries around the areas where people speak differently in Poland and rated each area's correctness compared to Standard Polish. Most participants indicated between three to five regions; the most commonly named regions were Podhale, Katowice, Katowice/Wroclaw, Poznan, and Warsaw. Over half of …

The Development Of Bilingual Education In Berlin’S Primary Schools, Elizabeth Buckley

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The debate on language education is flourishing in the current state of globalization and immigration. The rising amount of globalization has increased the amount of linguistic diversity present in one’s everyday life. There are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages in the world and half of them are in danger of disappearing. Therefore, it is becoming more common for the presence of many different linguistic groups within one country. For instance, in Indonesia, there are over 700 languages spoken. Although, the distribution of languages is not equal, it is nearly impossible to go through life without being exposed to another language …

That Was Totally Intense! A Study Of Emphatic Adverbial Modifiers In Male And Female Speech, Shellie Chiavetta

Inquiry Journal 2006

No abstract provided.

Study Abroad Social Networks, Motivation And Attitudes: Implications For Second Language Acquisition., Christina Isabelli

Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Quelques Remarques Sur Les Belgicismes Métalinguistiques, Jean-Nicolas De Surmont

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Of all Belgicisms, only a few have metalinguistic connotation and they have to be considered of special interest in this respect, even if the literature on French in Belgium has not addressed this issue specifically. This essay proposes some observations on these few important words, supported by recent lexicographical descriptions and data obtained through research undertaken in collaboration with Michel Francard of the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium).

The Role Of Asynchronous Computer Mediated Communication On Enhancing Cultural Awareness, Elizabeth Zeiss, Christina Isabelli

Scholarship

This study investigates the effect of CMC participation on language learners’ willingness to learn more about the target culture through study abroad. Also, it seeks to discern whether CMCactivities improve language learners’ self-perception that they have learned more about the target culture. An experimental group of 23 U.S. university students engaged in CMC with Mexican university students with a control group of 38 students from the U.S. university. We administered a questionnaire grouped thematically around seven topics. The data suggest that CMC may have a more positive effect on the acquisition of cultural awareness of students that engage in CMC …

Translingual Literature: The Bone People And Borderlands, Jill Marie Murphy

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis proposes that by producing and existing within a translingual text, the ethnofeminist has found a way to subvert others' construction of her and redefine her identity. In particular, the ethnofeminist uses code switching to select and reinvent meaning from the language system of the dominant culture while maintaining the language system of the "marginal" group. In combining two (or more) language systems within a literature she has created her own language.

Consonantal Variation Of Spanish In Northern Morocco, Ruth Scipione, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

In former Spanish Morocco, many educated speakers are able to draw upon various phonological systems such as French, Moroccan Arabic, and Modern Standard Arabic in order to pronounce Spanish sounds. However, although the speakers of this study are highly proficient in Spanish, there are still some segmental features that set them apart from a native Spanish speaker. These features include the failure to produce the fricative allophones of bilabial, dental, and velar stops the failure to distinguish between the simple and multiple vibrant trill, and difficulties in producing the palatal nasal. While the Spanish of these Northern Moroccans seems to …

Introduction: Selected Proceedings Of The Second Workshop On Spanish Sociolinguistics, Lotfi Sayahi, Maurice Westmoreland

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This introduction to the Selected Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics includes descriptions of the papers chosen for the volume and acknowledgments.

The Consequences Of Conflicting Stereotypes: Bostonian Perceptions Of U.S. Dialects, Laura Hartley

Faculty Publications - Department of Sociology

This study examines the perceptual dialectology of residents of eastern Massachusetts. The data reveal detailed attention to perceived dialect boundaries, particularly within the northeastern U.S., but also in other regions of the country. As is commonly the case in perceptual dialectology work, the respondents use the tasks presented to them to differentiate their home area from other states. In doing so, however, they exhibit an interesting mix of linguistic security and insecurity. The analysis suggests that respondents have internalized two common but conflicting American stereotypes of Boston residents – the educated elite and working class descendants of immigrants – and …