Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

Authenticity In Discursive Practices Of The Online Market For Second-Hand Luxury Clothing, Ronan L. Zampier, Rita De Cássia P. Farias, Marcelo R. Pinto

The Qualitative Report

Authenticity is a particularly sensitive and salient issue in the online market for second-hand luxury clothing, and it is still little explored in the field of consumption studies. In this study we sought to analyze how authenticity is represented in discursive practices of the Brazilian online market for second-hand luxury clothing. The corpus of the work consisted of data collected through interviews in five stores of the Brazilian online market of luxury second-hand clothing. The data were analyzed using the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), proposed by Fairclough (1992), articulated to the sociocultural perspective of consumption. From the discursive categories Subject, …

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 …

How Do Welcome Statements Differ From Mission Statements?: The Salience Of Genre, David Ayers, Wanda Brooks

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

In this analysis, we sought to identify key linguistic properties of mission statements and to explain how these properties function toward managerial purposes. Data included a target corpus of 920 community college mission statements (47,943 words), a domain-specific corpus of 632 “welcome statements” published on websites by community college presidents (173,534 words), and a general reference corpus extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (16.53 million words) (Davies, 2017). We used specialized corpus linguistics software to generate standardized word frequencies and to tag each corpus for parts of speech. We then identified the words and parts of speech that …

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

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

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, …

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing At The Local Level : A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Practices In Louisville, Kentucky., Steven P. Sizemore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative research project is an immersion into the beliefs, ideas, meanings, values, and feelings of actors engaged in shaping local housing policies. The dissertation examines how discourse constitutes and shapes the knowledge of policy actors engaged in fair housing policies and practices in Louisville, Kentucky. I argue that policy discourse is the site where social problems become framed, bounded, and transformed into action. Therefore, if the objective of the Fair Housing Act’s mandate for HUD and its recipients is to operate programs in a manner that “affirmatively furthers fair housing” (AFFH), it is essential to understand the discursive acts …

Beneath The Surface Of Talking About Physicians: A Statistical Model Of Language For Patient Experience Comments, Taylor Turpen, Lea Matthews Md, Senem Guney Phd, Cpxp

Patient Experience Journal

This study applies natural language processing (NLP) techniques to patient experience comments. Our goal was to examine the language describing care experiences with two groups of physicians: those with scores in the top 100 and those with scores in the bottom 100 among all physicians (n=498) who received scores from patient satisfaction surveys. Our analysis showed a statistically significant difference in the language used to describe care experiences with these two distinct groups of physicians. This analysis illustrates how to apply NLP techniques in categorizing and building a statistical model for language use in order to identify meaningful language and …

A Jewel Inlaid: Ergativity And Markedness In Nepali, Luke S. Lindemann

Linguistics Graduate Dissertations

Nepali presents with a complex case marking pattern in which ergative case is obligatory in perfective transitive clauses, disallowed in unaccusative intransitive clauses and copular clauses, and varies with the nominative elsewhere. Where ergative marking is variable, its usage correlates with a variety of semantic and pragmatic factors. The purpose of this investigation is to precisely delineate the grammatical domains for which ergative marking is variable and to provide a unified analysis of the semantic and pragmatic factors that correlate with its expression.

The study of pragmatic phenomena requires the implementation of multiple strategies for collecting language data. The data …

Discursive Leadership: Exploring The "Black Box" Challenge In Transcultural Leadership Studies, Christopher Patrick Brown

Dissertations

The increasingly globalized U.S. workforce includes significant numbers of adult immigrants integrating into the North American professional sphere. As such, it is important to have concrete ways to study and interpret different cultures’ thinking about teamwork, and their models of enacting shared leadership and communication in a multicultural context. Since 2006, hundreds of millions in federal grant funding has been invested in university-based language and culture programs focused on training government personnel and heritage populations in the languages and cultures of the Middle East and Central and Southeast Asia. Little is known about the performative strengths and challenges of the …

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 …

Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And Western Authors’ Use Of Evidentiality, Steven Mccafferty, Tian Dong, Shaoan Zhang, Lu Qiu

Educational Psychology, Leadership, and Higher Education Faculty Research

Academic writing is the process of authors’ interaction and communication with readers. Based on Yang's classification of evidentiality and self-built corpus, this study examines and compares the characteristics of Chinese and western authors’ use of evidentiality in second language academic writing. The major results include: 1) Evidentials are universal in research papers. Chinese authors’ less use of evidentials indicates their tendency to conceal personal opinions to offer more objective arguments; 2) Both Chinese and western authors prefer reporting and inferring evidentials, owing to the style of natural science and the language practice of the subject; 3) The frequency of English …

L2 Learners And The Intelligiblity Of The Bostonian And Californian Accents, Russell Paul Kapryn

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis investigates issues of intelligibility through the lens and focus of prosody when the Bostonian and Los Angeles-based accents are heard in casually occurring conversation by native and non-native speakers. Over the spring and summer of 2017, six native speakers and 11 non-native speakers of English were interviewed from having listened to two 2.5 minute audio sample clips of speakers who have these accents. Respondents were asked questions such as what was difficult or easy or whether they could summarize the recordings for me. Findings indicate that while the native speakers often had difficulty with vocabulary due to context, …

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 …

Differential Responses To Constraints On Naming Agency Among Indigenous Peoples And Immigrants In Canada, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation.

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 …

Visions Of The Future In Budgetary Discourse, Ewan Macdonald, Brendan O'Rourke, John Hogan

Conference papers

Whilst there is ample precedent to argue against the common-sense notion that the ideological leanings of political parties are congruent with their implementation of fiscal policy (Boix, 2000; Garrett & Lange, 1991; Hibbs, 1977; Liargovas & Manolas, 2007), there is a relative dearth of research on the role of discourse in shaping fiscal policy with one notable exception by Maatsch (2014). With this in mind, we approach the issue of examining fiscal policy through a fixed, contested and subverted within particular texts” (Howarth, 2005, p. 341). This paper examines how the future is constructed in Irish budget speeches delivered between …

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 …

Research Ethics In Legal Writing: Challenges For Empirical Research, Alissa J. Hartig

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The conference program for the 2018 LWI Biennial Conference provided evidence of a growing interest in empirical research in legal writing. Ann Nowak’s presentation, based on the article for which she received the Deborah Hecht Memorial Writing Award, and a panel by Shaun Spencer, Kenneth Chestek, Brian Larson, and Lance Long were just two out of a number of sessions devoted to such studies. Empirical research can come in many forms: while some scholars draw on publicly available documents, others conduct research that involves the participation of individuals who have been specifically recruited to help answer research questions. While both …

How Two High School Teachers Conceive Of Student Voice, Value It, And Foster It, Katherine Mary Mccleary

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative, exploratory study was to examine two high school English teachers’ experience as they worked together to purposefully implement increased student voice in their classrooms. The study focused on how a convenience sample of teachers designed, implemented, and reflected upon classroom assignments and lessons with the intention to increase student voice and ownership in the classroom. Teachers each participated in four individual interviews, four partnership observations and three classroom observations as they related to student voice implementation.

Data from the interviews, partnership observations and classroom observations were analyzed using qualitative methods and through the lenses of …

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 …