Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

If It Looks Like A *Uck: A Provocation On B*D Words, Jodi Kearns, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

For some decades, we’ve been considering (and using) “b*d” words. Such a large part of the document space is made up of words; it seems necessary, upon occasion, to explore the crooked little paths and messy gutters occupied by some words. We invite your company on such a little exploration now.

‘‘Can I Drop It This Time?’’ Gender And Collaborative Group Dynamics In An Engineering Design-Based Afterschool Program, Jessica Schnittka, Christine Schnittka

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

The 21st century has brought an increasing demand for expertise in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Although strides have been made towards increasing gender diversity in several of these disciplines, engineering remains primarily male dominated. In response, the U.S. educational system has attempted to make engineering curriculum more engaging, informative, and welcoming to girls. Specifically, project-based and design-based learning pedagogies promise to make engineering interesting and accessible for girls while enculturating them into the world of engineering and scientific inquiry. Outcomes for girls learning in these contexts have been mixed. The purpose of this study was to explore how …

The Narrative Performances Of Teenage Girls: Participation, Identity, And Authority As The Foundation For Power, Chere M. Smith

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which teenage girls use narrative performance to negotiate participation, social and gender identity, and individual authority in order to establish ratified and equal statuses of power within their social peer group. Although previous work on narrative discourse has shown that narratives can act as the catalyst for the complex co/construction of identity especially in social situations of talk, little work has been done to focus on the way teenagers, particularly girls, use this discourse to their benefit as they fulfill social and gender goals in social and conversational settings. Furthermore, while multimodal, narrative performance …

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.

Lexical Variation, Lexical Innovation, And Speaker Motivations: A Historical Psycholinguistic Approach, Jason Timm Dr.

Linguistics ETDs

Speakers commonly re-purpose existing forms in the mental lexicon to create novel form-meaning. Contemporary evidence that such innovation processes have occurred historically is attested in varying degrees of polysemy in the mental lexicon. This dissertation considers speaker motivations underlying these innnovation processes historically. Strong synchronic relationships between frequency and degree of polysemy, on one hand, and frequency and lexical access, on the other hand, have traditionally been interpreted as evidence for the primacy of economic motivations in processes of lexical innovation. In contrast, the cognitive processes that most commonly facilitate innovation, metaphor and metonymy, have largely been described as processes …

An Analysis Of The English Class Discourse In The Iranian High Schools, Reza Khany, Saeedeh Mohammadi

The Qualitative Report

One of the decisive factors of students’ success in second language learning is employing interactive strategies related to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic discourse. Following Bakhtin’s conceptualization of discourse (1981), monologic and dialogic patterns can be considered as the opposing ends of the teacher’s discourse continuum. Given this, the current research intended to find out whether the Iranian high school teachers maintain a monologic discourse in their classes or a dialogic one. To accomplish this goal, a comprehensive exploration of the related literature carried out to identify the features differentiating monologic and dialogic discourse, which proved to be around thirteen. Afterwards, …

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

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Literacies Of Bilingual Youth: A Profile Of Bilingual Academic, Social, And Txt Literacies, Michelle A. Mcsweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation identifies three types of language skills that urban Spanish/English bilingual youth possess (academic, social, and texting language), and reports on their relationship while documenting and analyzing the features of text messaging among this population. The participants in this study are Spanish-dominant bilingual young adults enrolled in a high school completion program in New York City. They are in the process of developing both Spanish and English academic literacy skills, and it is well known that they tend to perform below the grade they are enrolled in. For this reason, they are often referred to as being “language-less” (DeCapua …

Producing Discursive Change: From "Illegal Aliens" To "Unauthorized Immigration" In Library Catalogs, J. Silvia Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent debates on immigration policies have included a discursive contest over the representation of unauthorized immigrants, in both the news media and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a subject indexing system administered by the Library of Congress. Using a mixed methods approach from a critical discourse analysis perspective, I examine the responses of the news media and the Library of Congress to societal pressures for change, showing how the Library’s complex institutional position can constrain its responses. Those obstacles, when combined with the characteristics of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as a linguistic tool for information …

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 …

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …

Wacana Fiksimini Bahasa Indonesia: Analisis Struktur, Keterpaduan, Permainan Bahasa, Dan Fungsi, Cicik Tri Jayanti

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This study is aimed to describe the characteristics of mini fiction by explaining the structure and coherence between elements, forms of language, and discourse functions in Indonesian mini fiction. It is a qualitative study by using mini fiction discouse as research objects. The research data were in the form of tweets by the users who retweeted any tweets from @fiksimini account. Thus, the data collected in the research were written and collected by transcribing the data. The results of the study showed that (1) the structure of mini fiction discourse consists of three elements, topic, title and content; (2) the …

Tracking The Development Of Critical Self-Reflective Practice Of A Novice Sign Language Interpreter: A Case Study, Kirri J. Dangerfield Ms, Jemina M. Napier Prof

Journal of Interpretation

The purpose of this case study was to track the progression of a novice interpreter’s use of self-reflective practice while interpreting a series of six University lecture segments, in a controlled environment over a period of three months. It became evident that the novice interpreter in this case study was able to articulate a variety of coping strategies used, and found improvements in her self-reflective practice skills. The results of this study support key suggestions in the literature: that interpreters need to be motivated to aim for expertise by improving their skills through self-reflective practices, via supported environments such as …

A Discourse Analytic Approach To Accusations Of Infidelity In Romantic Couples' Natural Conversations, Neill Korobov

The Qualitative Report

This study uses a discourse analytic approach to examine how twenty young adult heterosexual romantic couples (ages 19-26) formulate accusations and insinuations of infidelity in their unstructured natural conversations. The analyses demonstrate how accusations of infidelity among romantic partners work to pursue and avert relational trouble. They indirectly index local interactional breaches that may, if left unattended, lead to non-affiliative interactional outcomes. Unlike mainstream psychological work that would treat talk about infidelity as a sign of emotional insecurity or jealousy, the present study posits that accusations of infidelity may function as a brief but effective way for one partner to …

Event Parsing In Narrative: Trials And Tribulations Of Archaic English Fairy Tales, Rebecca Lovering

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While event extraction and automatic summarization have taken great strides in the realm of news stories, fictional narratives like fairy tales have not been so fortunate. A number of challenges arise from the literary elements present in fairy tales that are not found in more straightforward corpora of natural language, such as archaic expressions and sentence structures. To aid in summarization of fictional texts, I created an class - a template for a digital object, in this case a semantic and story event - that captures elements predicted to help classify events as important for inclusion. I wrote a processor …

Language-Mixing In Discourse In Bilingual Individuals With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Avanthi Paplikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Language-mixing (LM) as defined by Chengappa (2009, p. 417) is an “intra-sentential phenomenon referred to as the mixing of various linguistic units (morphemes, words, modifiers, phrases, etc.), primarily from two participating grammatical systems”. LM is influenced by grammatical, environmental, and social constraints (e.g., Milroy & Wei, 1995; Bhat & Chengappa, 2005). Researchers have suggested that LM in patients with aphasia is a communicative strategy used to achieve successful exchanges between speakers; the effectiveness of this mixing, however, had yet to be demonstrated quantitatively.

In the current study we investigated whether LM is present in bilingual speakers with aphasia, and if …

One’S A Crowd: Gendered Language In Ursula Le Guin’S The Left Hand Of Darkness, Kayla Stephenson

Senior Capstone Theses

Deconstruction questions the very meaning of words put into an assigned use. Yet how can we imply meaning unto words that do not exist in our language? To have a word for an intended use is to have an implied concept behind it, and where there is no concept there can be no word. Consequently, to construct a concept outside of the realm of human and earthly possibility is to create something outside of the limits of the human language. Concerning gender, to imagine a third or a singular gender is to be unable to describe such a concept without …

(Re)Positioning Black: Negotiating Racial Subjectivities In White Discursively Constructed Spaces, Elisa Davidson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis is both a personal and social inquiry of the experience of Black students at a predominantly white university. Within this inquiry, I extend Nakayama and Krizek's (1995) concept of whiteness as having "no true essence" to conceptualizations of blackness to assert that blackness is “a pattern of negotiation that takes place in conditions generated by specific discursive formations and social relations” (McLaren, 1999, pg. 40) rather than a fixed, essential category. Viewing blackness as encounter means that it is emergent through specific social and discursive conditions that are constantly constructed and negotiated through interactions with whiteness. I approach …

"Mi Niño Con Asma": Hispanic/Latina Mothers, Environmental Justice, And Photovoice At The Front Lines Of The Asthma Epidemic, Robin A. Evans-Agnew Rn, Phd, Julie Postma Rn, Phd, Lee Sledd M. Ed

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Asthma is an important environmental justice concern for first generation Mexican-Americans. Families experience disparities in housing conditions, access to care, and legal marginalization. Little is known about how Hispanic/Latina mothers of children with asthma navigate these oppressions.

Problem: The purpose of this paper is to describe the discourses of environmental justice of a group Hispanic/Latina caregivers of children with asthma.

Method: A photovoice design was used with Hispanic/Latina mothers (n=11) in Tacoma, Washington, to take, discuss, select and display phototexts to policymakers that communicated their experiences and opinions in managing asthma for their child. Using critical narrative analysis, phototexts were …

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 …

Satuan Lingual Pengungkap Kearifan Lokal Dalam Pelestarian Lingkungan, Hari Bakti Mardikantoro

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This study aims to reveal the type and the function of linguistic units as the proof of the local wisdom in preserving environment towards society of Javanese Talk. The data on the study are gathered and analyzed based on two procedures; they are the analysis on the process of collecting data and the analysis after the data are collected. The result of the study shows that the type of linguistic units consist of word, phrase, sentence, and expression. Meanwhile, those linguistic units function in expressing local wisdom such as in giving name, commanding/advising, praying, and teaching sesorah values.

The Impact Of Length Of Stay On Adjudicated Male Youths;' Language Use: Focusing On Linguistic Analysis Of Verbal Samples, Yousun Shin Ph.D., Terry P. Overton Ph.D., Ed.D., Zelica Espinoza M.Ed.

Journal of Human Services: Training, Research, and Practice

The primary purpose of the study was to examine the impact of the length of juvenile offenders’ stay in a residential facility on attitudinal changes, measured by language use of 22 participants’ interviews analyzed by using a computerized text tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to obtain a measure of language use. A series of one-way ANOVA (SPSS 18.0 version) were used to examine the differences between the groups identified by the length of stay and interview interval. The results indicate that the length of stay significantly impacts language use regarding the language categories of affective process words …

Hpcnmf: A High-Performance Toolbox For Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Karthik Devarajan, Guoli Wang

COBRA Preprint Series

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a widely used machine learning algorithm for dimension reduction of large-scale data. It has found successful applications in a variety of fields such as computational biology, neuroscience, natural language processing, information retrieval, image processing and speech recognition. In bioinformatics, for example, it has been used to extract patterns and profiles from genomic and text-mining data as well as in protein sequence and structure analysis. While the scientific performance of NMF is very promising in dealing with high dimensional data sets and complex data structures, its computational cost is high and sometimes could be critical for …

Lengua Latina: Representations Of Sex And Gender In Latina Literature, Jessica L. Harris

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

An exploration of the influence of Spanish language on gender, sexuality, and sisterhood in various aspects of Latina/o literature. In Chapter I, I examine Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s film, Chicana playwright Josefina Lopez's Real Women Have Curves, and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a tool for analyzing conceptions of “Other” and the ways these issues intersect with one another. In Chapter II, I look at La Virgen and La Malinche dichotomy and the ways stereotypes appear in Latina poetry. In Chapter III, I discuss hermanas and comadres and their importance outside the intimacy of romantic relationships. Throughout this project, I …

Humor, Discurso Y Argumentación: Cuando El Comediante Es El Filósofo, Yanira B. Paz

Hispanic Studies Faculty Publications

Este estudio nace de la pregunta sobre si los textos humorísticos pueden servir como construcciones histórico-sociales de la verdad. Tradicionalmente, la comedia y sus derivados han sido confinados a la categoría de géneros menores. No obstante, aparte de su función catártica, los textos humorísticos pueden tener una función cognitiva y pragmática de primer orden. Este trabajo hace uso de valiosos marcos teóricos tales como la teoría sobre la narrativa oral (Labov y Waletzky, 1966; Labov 1979), el análisis crítico del discurso (Fairclough, 1995, 2001; van Dijk, 2000, 2011, Charaudeau, 2015), el valor discursivo de la argumentación (Alcaide Lara, 2000; Kreichman, …

El Tarot Como Discurso De Contestación En La Caricaturista Venezolana Rayma, Yanira B. Paz

Hispanic Studies Faculty Publications

El hecho ocurrido el 7 de enero de 2015, cuando dos fanáticos religiosos armados entraron a las oficinas de Charlie Hebdo en París, asesinando a once personas e hiriendo a otras tantas (en su mayoría caricaturistas y periodistas), nos vuelve a poner en evidencia que no hay “nada más demoledor” que el humor. Me propongo un estudio que combina el análisis crítico del discurso (Fairclough 1995, 2001, van Dijk 2000, 2011), la teoría sobre los discursos multimodales (Kress y van Leeuwen 2001, 2006) y los aportes de la teoría general del humor verbal (Attardo 1994, Ruiz Gurillo 2012) a una …

The Pragmatics Of Economics Experts’ Engagement With Non-Specialists, Brendan O'Rourke, Jens Maesse

Other

A Call for Papers for Panel on Economics and Language Use: The pragmatics of economics experts’ engagement with non-specialists, 15th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA2017) to be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 16-21 July 2017.

Cries From The Jungle: The Dialogic Linguistic Landscape Of The Migrant And Refugee Camps In Calais, France, Jo Mackby

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Since 1999, migrants and refugees from across the Middle East and Northeastern Africa have squatted in makeshift camps in and around the strategic port city of Calais, France, hoping for the opportunity to stow away on a ferry or lorry to England. The inhabitants of these camps seek to engage the world in a dialogue, and although they speak a variety of languages, the voices the refugees and migrants in The Jungle of Calais raise through their protest placards and graffiti are more homogeneous. Like in many other protests, the languages of these messages are universal; they are French and …

The Use Of Gesture In Self-Initiated Self-Repair Sequences By Persons With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Eleanor M. Feltner

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study examines the relationship between types of gestures and instances of self-initiated self-repair (SISR) used by persons with non-fluent aphasia (NFA), which is a type of aphasia characterized by stilted speech or signing (Papathanasiou et al., 2013), in interactions with clinicians. Conversation repairs in this study are assessed using the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), which is an approach for describing, analyzing, and understanding social interaction (Sidnell, 2010). Previous linguistic studies have demonstrated a distinct preference for the use of gesture during a repair by persons with aphasia (Goodwin, 1995; Klippi, 2015; Wilkinson, 2013). This study draws more conclusive …

The Deserving Patient: Blame, Dependency, And Impairment In Discourses Of Chronic Pain And Opioid Use, Maureen Nickerson

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Negative stereotypes about people with chronic pain pose a barrier in the delivery of care; contribute to worsening symptoms of physical and psychological distress; and play a role in policy decisions that adversely affect patients and providers. Pain-care seekers may be accused of malingering, laziness, mental aberration, attention seeking, and drug seeking. The propagation of stigmatizing attitudes was explored in this Critical Discourse Analysis of online-reader-comments responding to a series of pain-care policy articles published by a large metropolitan newspaper. Results suggest that framing pain patients as legitimate and deserving can inadvertently reproduce the inequities advocates seek to redress. Ascriptions …