Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

When Misclassification Is Misgendering: Gender Prediction In The Context Of Trans Identities, Sean Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a subdomain of author profiling, gender prediction (sometimes called gender inference) has received a substantial amount of attention—both as a task in itself, and for other downstream analyses. Throughout the existing literature various statistical and machine learning methods have been applied to extract features in order to either characterize and differentiate female and male writing styles, or simply to achieve maximum accuracy on gender prediction as a binary classification task. However, researchers often do not disclose how they conceptualize gender nor do they consider the implications that gender prediction has for non-binary and trans individuals. Along with an overview …

The Roles And Functions Of Metaphors In The Malaysian Education Blueprint, Linggatharani Kesavan

Student Works (2020-2029)

Abstract: The Malaysian Education Blueprint (2013 - 2025) seeks to revamp the entire education system in Malaysia, targeting institutions of learning and the stakeholders via a series of radical changes in policy and governance. Upon scrutiny, it was also found to contain several metaphors that are carefully constructed and layered to deliver the contents to the readers. Metaphors have been identified as an effective linguistic tool that can be used to achieve cognitive, semantic and pragmatic goals effectively. More importantly, they are also found to create or alter realities and evoke powerful emotions. This research applies the Conceptual Metaphor Theory …

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 …

The Rainbow Nation Vision: (Re)Constructing & (Re)Imagining South Africanness, Riley Crouthamel

Capstone Showcase

“Rainbowism” or the new form of nationalism inspired by Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation vision” emphasizes unity, equality, and non-racialism, and has become the dominant myth and metaphor by which South Africa is recognized in the post-apartheid era. Through an application of a theoretical framework that emphasizes the mythological and imaginative aspects of constructive nationalism and an analysis of Rainbowism’s rise to mythical dominance and evolution in the South African imaginary over the span of the past three decades of democracy using ANC “Rainbowist” discourses in both explicit and inexplicit ways, this thesis argues that Rainbowism arose as a counter myth in …

Reality And Ideology: The Use Of Gender Indexing Features In Reality Tv, Steven J. Gerencser

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This article analyzes 4 episodes of the Japanese reality television program Terrace house: Aloha State for instances of gender indexing language to investigate the gap between actual speaker usage of these features and the linguistic ideology surrounding their usage as is perpetrated and perpetuated by media. Specifically, the gender indexing features which will be investigated to accomplish this are sentence final particles and first-person pronouns. Instances of these linguistic features are typically presented as features of gendered language, but as will be demonstrated, this does match their actual usage by speakers. I set out to answer three research questions, (1) …

Gendered Use Of Language In Facebook Status Updates Among Jordanian And American Youths: A Sociopragmatic Study, Ashraf Wenas Al Sad

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The study examines the types of speech acts of Facebook status updates that are posted by Jordanian and American youth. The participants were from Yarmouk University which is located in northern Jordan and from West Virginia University which is located in the US. The data was elicited from 50 American males, 50 American females, 50 Jordanian males, and 50 Jordanian females. Searle’s taxonomy was used to do the content analysis of the data. Searle’s taxonomy and additional speech acts were found: directive, expressive, assertive, God’s invocation, humor, and quotation. The findings of the study indicate that the religious and cultural …

El Papel De La Dialogicidad En Los Trabajos De Investigación De Posgrado, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

El presente trabajo advierte de la importancia que adquieren los recursos metadiscursivos en el inter- cambio dialógico que se establece entre el escritor y el lector en los textos académicos redactados en la universidad. Esta interacción es un aspecto de la comunicación académica que los autores necesitan articular de manera efectiva con el fin de establecer relaciones apropiadas con el lector y predisponerlo así para aceptar los argumentos propuestos en sus escritos. Por este motivo, en esta presentación se insiste en la necesidad de elaborar una didáctica que incorpore dichos elementos al contexto universitario, cuyo objetivo final sera el de …

La Dialogicidad En La Tesis Doctoral Y El Artículo De Investigación Escritos En Inglés Y Español En Medicina, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Resumen

Esta investigación presenta una perspectiva intercultural (español e inglés) en el ámbito de la escritura científica médica sobre la interacción que ocurre entre el escritor y la audiencia que recibe el texto. De modo más específico, se estudian las diferencias dialógicas que ocurren en los géneros de la tesis doctoral y el artículo de investigación en Medicina desde el modelo metadiscursivo interpersonal propuesto por Hyland (2005, 2008). El corpus se compone de 40 textos, divididos en 20 escritos expertos (artículos) y 20 de posgrado (tesis). Se analizan los rasgos pragmalingüísticos que contribuyen a la construcción y la negociación de …

A Lexical Frequency Analysis Of Irish Sign Language, Robert G. Smith, Markus Hofmann

Articles

Word frequency has a significant impact on language acquisition and fluency. It is often a point of reference for the teaching and assessing of a language and indeed, as a control for psycholinguistic studies. This paper presents the results of the first objective frequency analysis of lexical tokens from the Signs of Ireland corpus. We investigate the frequency of fully lexical, partly lexical and non-lexical signs in Irish Sign Language as they are presented in the corpus. We confirm the accuracy of the lexical gloss frequency data with a supplementary corpus subset that is tagged for grammatical class and additional …

50 Anos De Evolução Nos Estudos Linguísticos Transculturais: Da Retórica Contrastiva À Retórica Intercultural, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Este trabalho apresenta um panorama histórico dos estudos linguísticos transculturais, discorrendo sobre o surgimento da retórica contrastiva por meio do trabalho seminal de Robert Kaplan em 1966 e as contribuições de Ulla Connor ao rebatizar tais estudos como retórica intercultural. Explana-se também sobre as críticas endereçadas à retórica contrastiva feitas durante os anos 1980, 1990 e 2000 e de que maneira tais críticas redefiniram o quadro teórico-metodológico e o objeto de estudo da disciplina. Conclui-se com exposição de uma crítica à homogeneização das distintas culturas retóricas causada pela globalização e internacionalização do inglês no âmbito acadêmico e nas atividades profissionais.

The Grammatical Systems Of Attentionworthiness: Positional Signals And Invariant Meanings In Spanish Word Order, Eduardo Ho-Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a Columbia School analysis of word order phenomena in Spanish. The data was sourced from a corpus of manually collected utterances extracted from six volumes of Latin American short stories written in the twentieth century. The study employs various qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to test the various hypotheses offered as explanations of the distributional problems selected for the study. The observations roughly correspond to word orders that the grammatical tradition describes as having to do with either verbs with one argument (SV, VS, OV, VO) or verbs with two arguments (SVO, OVS, VSO, VOS, SOV, …

Intercultural Rhetoric In The Written Academic Discourse: The Rhetorical Functions Of Citation In English And Spanish By College Students And Expert Writers, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This research studies the practice of citation in two cultural communities, the American and the Spanish, in an academic setting. The main objective of this research is to determine what are the rhetorical functions of citations in the master’s thesis of 12 American and 12 Spanish students written in their native language, as well as in scientific articles of 12 American and 12 Spanish professional writers in Applied Linguistics, and to identify the differences found among these groups.

To study this pragmalinguistic phenomenon, I used the computational text analysis of the rhetorical functions of citations via the Antconc 3.2.4w concordance …

From The Unspoken To The Verbalized: Different Ways Of Communication And Their Relationship To Culture In A Traditional Lakota Narrative "Ikto Na Wičhá Ha Kiŋ”, Or “Ikto And The Racoon Skin”, Liliana R. Boladz-Nekipelov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master’s thesis is a discourse analysis of a traditional Lakota story, " Iktó na wičhá ha kiŋ”, or “Ikto and the Racoon Skin”, one of the 64 stories included in the “Dakota Texts”, which were collected by Ella Deloria at three Lakota reservations in 1930s as a part of Franz Boas’ language documentation project. The thesis is also an attempt to examine different communicative strategies employed within the narrative and their relationship to culture, as well as the relationship between form and the transfer of meaning and culture and meaning. The analysis is conducted using Dell Hymes’ ethnographic approach …

Conceptualizing The Unspeakable: A Conceptual Metaphor Theory Analysis Of Sexual Assault Trauma In Creative Nonfiction, Ariana Ciamaricone

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This paper explores the use of conceptual metaphors (CMs) in two works of creative nonfiction, namely Laurie Halse Anderson’s (2019) Shout and Elissa Washuta’s (2014) My Body is a Book of Rules. Anderson’s (2019) poetic memoir centers on her experiences with sexual assault throughout her childhood and the process of writing her young adult novel Speak (1999). Washuta (2014) writes on her experiences with rape and mental illness via prose. Both memoirs detail their authors’ reckoning with the experience of sexual assault, and this paper investigates how trauma narratives attempt to “resolve what cannot be resolved, to generate meaning, …

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 …

Scholarly Communication And Documentary Fragmentations In The Public Space: A Functional Citation Study, Fidelia Ibekwe, Lucie Loubère

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper studies how academic content published in Open Edition.org, an online publication platform in the Social Sciences and Humanities is re-appropriated by members of the public. Our research is therefore concerned with the public appropriation of science and Open science. After extracting the contexts of citation of these content and mapping them, we propose a typology of citation functions as well as of citers (their origins and types). Our preliminary results indicated that academic literature is repurposed and cited by members of the public mainly as scientific warrant (support for their argumentation). We also found that academic content is …

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 …

Reseña De Manual De Escritura Académica_Prat Ferrer Y Peña Delgado, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Code-Switching In Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza And Sandra Cisnero's Caramelo, Julia Jordan

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

This research explores the practice of code-switching by bilingual Latinx writers by looking at the works Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa and Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. In addition to discussing these two primary sources, the paper draws upon scholarly analyses of these works and the practice of code switching at large. This review discusses the growing prevalence of code-switching in Latinx literature, the subversive nature of the practice of code-switching, and the different approaches towards and functions of code-switching in literature. Ultimately, this research demonstrates the ways in which Anzaldúa and Cisneros use code-switching to explore Latinx …

Structural Justice: A Critical Feminist Framework Exploring The Intersection Between Justice, Equity And Structural Reconciliation., Camille Burnett, Michael Swanberg, Ashley Hudson, Donna Schminkey

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Violence against women is a human rights violation (UN, 2006). It affects the health of women globally (UN, 2009) and its elimination is at the heart of many international and national goals. Intimate partner violence (IPV), one of the most common forms of gender-based violence, affects one in three women worldwide (WHO, 2013). The consequences of IPV create negative health outcomes for women that diminish their quality of life and their overall well-being. Abused women access community supports such as shelters to seek safe refuge from the abuse and restore their lives. While shelters play an extensive role in helping …

The Family Of Japanese No-Wa Cleft Construction: A Register-Based Analysis, Michiko Kaneyasu

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

This paper presents a comparative study of the Japanese (pseudo-)cleft no-wa construction, schematized as: [clause] no-wa [NP/AdvP/clause] (da), in four spoken/written registers: informal conversations, academic presentations, news reports, and newspaper editorials. The study finds that the no-wa cleft appears more frequently in non-objective discourse that deals with a higher level of complexity. Close examination of instantiations of the no-wa cleft uncovers various register-oriented functions that show a varied degree of family resemblance with one another. These functions can be subsumed under two general functional properties of the no-wa construction: highlighting function at the local level and (retrospective) anticipatory …

Slurs And Register: A Case Study In Meaning Pluralism, Justina Diaz-Legaspe, Chang Liu, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always includes [-polite] and [+derogatory]. Thus, e.g., what distinguishes ‘Chinese’ from ‘chink’ is neither a peculiar sort of descriptive nor …

"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 …

Final Vowel Devoicing In Blackfoot, Samantha Leigh Prins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a study of final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot, an indigenous language of Montana and Alberta. Previous research on final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot variously suggests word-final, phrase-final, and utterance-final vowel devoicing processes (e.g. Taylor 1965, Bliss & Gick 2009, Frantz 2017), though, the conditioning environment for this phenomenon had not been a research focus prior to this study. The present study investigates intonation units (IUs) as the conditioning domain for final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot.

Final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot is investigated here by examining the common word-final suffixes –wa (3SG.AN) and –yi (4SG) in two recordings …

Estudio Contrastivo Intercultural De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas: La Producción De Textos Académicos En El Nivel De Posgrado Escritos En Español E Inglés, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

The main objective of this research is to discover which rhetorical functions were used in the Master´s thesis writing written by eight (8) American and eight (8) Spanish postgraduates in their na-tive language. A computerized tex-tual analysis of the rhetorical func-tion of citation was used to study this phenomenon (Petrić, 2007). The results obtained from the re-search showed that the different cultural conventions in the thesis writing indicate that when com-pared with native Spanish writers, the American writers of English use the highest number of cita-tions, and write a relatively longer Introduction and Conclusion parts. On the other hand, the …

Aproximación Didáctica Al Apendizaje De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas En El Discurso Académico Universitario, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

El presente estudio investiga cómo conciben la práctica de la citación en el contexto académico dos comunidades sociales de distinta nacionalidad (estadounidense, española). Para estudiar este fenómeno se realizó un análisis contrastivo utilizando la metodología del análisis textual computarizado de las funciones retóricas de las citas en la escritura de un trabajo de investigación universitario de máster realizado por 8 estudiantes estadounidenses y 8 españoles en su lengua nativa, ordenadas estas en una tipología clasificadora de 9 categorías.

Los resultados obtenidos en la investigación mostraron que las diferentes convenciones culturales implicadas en la composición de las memorias estudiadas responden a …

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 Variable Expression Of Transitive Subject And Possesor In Wayuunaiki (Guajiro), Andres M. Sabogal

Linguistics ETDs

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. …