Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

Defining Antisemitism Or Activism?: An Analysis Of Congressional Debate Over The Antisemitism Awareness Act Of 2023, John Carpenter

University Honors Theses

Introduced amid widespread campus protests against the Israeli militarys actions in the Gaza Strip, the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 (AAA) directs the Department of Education to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism during investigations of potential discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. This study investigates congressional debate on the AAA using the Discourse Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis to assess how members of Congress portray the victims and perpetrators of antisemitism and whether these portrayals align with the stated aim to "improve safety and security for Jewish Communities." Findings reveal that …

Rationality And Discomfort: Stance In "The End Of The Altaic Controversy" And "In Defense Of The Comparative Method, Or The End Of The Vovin Controversy", Logan Mcdowall

University Honors Theses

This study will use corpus linguistics techniques and Hyland's framework for stance in academic discourse to analyze authors' discoursal roles in different framings of a famous controversy in historical linguistics: the classification of the Altaic language family. Two significant pieces of discourse in this debate include "The End of the Altaic Controversy" by A. Vovin and "In Defense of the Comparative Method, or the End of the Vovin Controversy" by A. Dybo and G. Starostin. Despite the importance of these works, no one has analyzed how these authors use stance to position themselves within it. After performing a corpus word …

Analyzing Agency In Online News Reporting Of The Events Of January 6th, 2021: A Corpus-Based Investigation, Matthew W. Abernethy

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Over the last decade or so, politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized. A central focus of this polarization has been the news media, including both traditional print news, online news, and television news. Results of this have been a rapid rise in misinformation, disinformation, the demonization of news (especially political) providers as purveyors of ‘Fake News’, and distrust in mainstream news outlets. The central focus of this thesis is bias in news reporting, leading naturally to the question of how widespread this bias really is. This thesis uses corpus linguistic and discourse analytic methods to pursue this …

Trashing Gender Scripts: Indexical Misrecognition In The Zine "Galatea's Naked", Jules Blank

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Zines, short for ‘fanzines’ or ‘magazines,’ refer to physical, printed, self-published creations that can consist of a single sheet of paper or many, fastened together. These artifacts are rich with meaning—and, thus, can be read as tangible manifestations of the ideologies and identities of the creator(s).

This thesis focuses on the way zines are used as tools of resistance. Additionally, it shows that the creation and circulation of zines are highly pragmatic acts that solidify social bonds and enable individuals to perform and reinforce their emergent identities within a collective—explicitly making a claim about who they are and what they …

Retórica Intercultural En El Discurso Académico Universitario: Las Funciones Retóricas De La Citación En Los Trabajos De Fin De Máster Escritos En Español Y En Inglés Por Hablantes Nativos Y No Nativos, David Sanchez-Jimenez

Publications and Research

This research derives from the interest in learning the cultural differences in citation practices in the academic genre of Master's thesis of native Spanish (Ee), non-native Filipino writers of Spanish (Fe), native Filipino writers of English (Fi), and American writers of English. A total of thirty-two (32) master´s theses – eight (8) for each group – were analyzed. A quantitative and qualitative methodology was used to study this phenomenon based on the computerized textual analysis of the rhetorical function of citations arranged in typological classification that modified the outline proposed by Petrić in his 2007 article. The results obtained from …

What’S In A Threat: A Corpus-Based, Speech Act And Lexicogrammatical Approach To Threats In English, Natalie Raun Carter

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Threats can be made without using language at all, but previous research on the language of threats is limited and primarily examines threats with a small amount of constructed data. Building on Austin (1962) and Searle (1965; 1969)’s speech act theory and using a corpus of naturally occurring data consisting of 827 threatening texts from publicly available websites and law enforcement, this dissertation determines what constitutes a threat, as well as the interdependence between words and grammar.

Pragmatically, this dissertation identifies four required felicity conditions that must be met to constitute a threat—building on those set by John Searle, Bruce …

"And I / Am The Arrow": The Narrative, Personae Construction, And Language Ideology Of Confessional Poets' Identity Performance, Madison Fuchs

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis argues for consideration of linguistic features in service of raising the postmodern confessionalist poet identity as an utterance and an act of loyalty to performance. The embodiment of the confessionalist identity, attributed to the features used to adhere to the confessional mode, is realized through the invention of confessional personae. These confessional personae merge the responsibilities of the speaker and the narrator to convey a pseudo-autobiographical utterance to a designated audience. In this thesis, I analyze a sequence of poems that either possess taboo subjects or utilize linguistic functions, like indexicality and audience design, that mark its mode. …

Gaps And Overlaps In Conversation: Analyses Of Differentiating Factors, David W. Edwards

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Human social behavior relies on communication, and much of that communication occurs in conversation. A crucial feature of conversation is turn-taking, the (usually) orderly pattern of listening and speaking that humans employ in conversation. In analyzing details of actual conversations, Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) launched the field of Conversation Analysis by outlining a set of observations of turn-taking behavior and by proposing a list of rules to explain that behavior. They noted that the vast majority of transitions from one speaker to another happen with very little gap or overlap (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974: 700–701). More recently, researchers …

Distribución De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas En Los Apartados Del Trabajo Fin De Máster Escrito En Español Y En Inglés, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This study correlates with a research study published in the journal Pragmalingüística, in which the contrastive use of the rhetorical functions of citations in master’s theses in Spanish and English was studied. The main objective pursued by this new research is to determine which rhetorical functions are used most frequently in the different parts of a master’s thesis and what these can accomplish in each part of the text. Following Petrić (2007), a computerized textual analysis of the rhetorical function of citation was used to study this phenomenon in a corpus of sixteen (16) theses of which eight (8) were …

Violence, Intimidation And Incarceration: America’S War On Whistleblowers, Kevin Howley

Communication & Theatre Faculty Publications

Much has been made of US President Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and draconian policies lay bare the violence embedded in contemporary political discourse and power relations. While Trump’s verbal assaults on news workers are well documented and widely discussed, his efforts – and those of his immediate predecessor Barack Obama – to silence government whistleblowers receive far less scrutiny. Drawing on discourse theory and analysis, this paper explores the experience of three prominent leakers and the epistemic violence underpinning America’s war on whistleblowers.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Dialogicity In Written Specialised Genres, Editado Por Luz Gil-Salom Y Carmen Soler-Monreal (2014)., David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Review of Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres, edited by Luz Gil-Salom and Carmen Soler-Monreal.

Worlds With Words: Discourse And Frame Analysis Of Performance Storytelling, Chelise Fox

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I explore how performance storytellers create intense focus on imaginal realities through language—a phenomenon sometimes called “transport” or “realm-shift.” To this end, recordings of performances by two professional storytellers were transcribed and examined through the lens of frame theory and discourse analysis. Examination of these transcripts shows that storytellers employ clusters of linguistic involvement strategies around frame transitions, facilitating realm-shift. Additionally, it shows that throughout a telling, tellers shape discourse around frame shifts that draw attention to significant elements, particularly those that establish a story’s relevance to the occasion of its telling and those that contribute to …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Stance Taking In Japanese Newspaper Discourse: The Use And Non-Use Of Copulas Da And Dearu, Michiko Kaneyasu

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

The present study aims to demonstrate how writers display their stances in information-oriented written discourse. In particular, the paper analyzes nominal sentences in three newspaper subgenres, and explicates how the Japanese copulas da and dearu , which are normally considered stylistic variants in written language, are used by journalists as important grammatical resources for expressing their epistemic and evaluative stances toward certain types of information conveyed in nominal sentences. Da in newspaper discourse is used as a marker of the writer’s commitment to the relevance of the information in the given discourse context. Dearu, on the other hand, marks …

A Study Of Pragmatic Competence: International Medical Graduates' And Patients' Negotiation Of The Treatment Phase Of Medical Encounters, Amy Fioramonte

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite advances in medical technologies, interpersonal communication remains the primary tool physicians use to exchange information, make diagnoses, and treat patients (Cameron & Williams, 1997; Groopman, 2007; Ong, de Haes, Hoos, & Lammes, 1995). In the medical encounter effective communication between physician and patient is essential so that beneficial health and wellbeing outcomes are achieved for patients. Taking a discourse analytic approach, this study examined interactions occurring between international medical graduate (IMG) residents, attending physicians, and patients during the treatment advice phase of the supervised medical encounter. The aim of the study was to examine the co-constructed nature of the …

'This Would Be Much Funner In Person': A Qualitative Grounded Theory Analysis Of Cybergrooming, Maurice Jason Gauz

Dissertations and Theses

The rather novel phenomenon of cybergrooming, or the solicitation of minors for sex via the Internet, has yet to be fully explored. This is a problem because such predatory behavior can lead to psychological and/or physical abuse of minors. The present study seeks to fill this knowledge by performing a qualitative, grounded theory analysis of naturally-occurring cybergrooming discourse. Data were drawn from the website of the online watchdog group, Perverted Justice. The first 20 lines of talk transmitted by the adults in these chat conversations were sampled from 100 transcripts published by Perverted Justice.
Multi-step coding, facilitated by the qualitative …

Wacana Cerita Dalam Al-Qur'an : Satu Kajian Dalam Surah Al-Kahf., Ahmad Fikri Haji Husin

Student Works (2010-2019)

Surah al-Kahf is a distinctive surah that looks into the narrative discourse through retrospections of some of the most amazing tales that had ever happened in the history of human civilisation and customs. It has 110 verses comprising four main stories: The Story of Asha:b al-Kahf (Cave Dwellers), The Story of Sa:hib al- Jannatayn (Owner of Two Orchards), The Story of the Meeting of Prophet Musa (Moses) and Khidr, and The Story of Dhul-Qarnain. This surah also tells a few anecdotes on the sideline that consist of idioms and comparisons through short tales of arrogance and devil’s deceptions, the consequences …

Discursive Construction Of Identities Of Young Homosexual Males., Zainon Shamsudin

Student Works (2010-2019)

This dissertation reports a study addressing the issue of identity construction of four young Malay homosexual men in Malaysia.  Through their narrative discourse of their life experiences and aspirations, this study explores these participants‟ linguistic repertoire and discursive strategies in the formation, negotiation, and establishment of their identities. The narrative data were gathered through a semi-structured interview-cum-conversation which allowed the participants to express sentiments about their lives in a heterosexual dominated society.  Using an adapted framework of discourse-historical approach of Critical Discourse Analysis proposed by Reisigl and Wodak (2009), this study analyzed the participants‟ emergent language use and discursive strategies …

Cohesion And Coherence Shifts In Chinese Argumentative Texts Translated From English., Soh Bee Kwee

Student Works (2010-2019)

this study focuses on the shifts of cohesion and coherence in argumentative texts translated from English into Chinese.  This  research aims to substantiate theoretical assumptions by testing them against authentic data. Firstly, the study discusses the shift of cohesion by comparing the use of third person pronoun and conjunction based on the bottom-up approach proposed by Baker (1992). Secondly, it shows how micro-level coherence affects macro-level coherence of argumentative texts in terms of text-type. Adopting Hatim and Mason’s text-type model (1990), this study highlights the ways in which overall discoursal relations evolve in the 29 unit ‘texts’ used as data. …

Ciri-Ciri Wacana Penjaga Di Rumah Warga Emas., Yaw Yee Peng

Student Works (2010-2019)

This study looks at the features of the discourse in a home for elderly residents. It also determines if the care-takers use elderspeak while communicating with the residents and determines the features of elderspeak in the discourse of the care-takers. The respondents consist of 12 care-takers and 23 elderly residents. Audio-recordings, observation and field notes were the instruments used for data collection and this was for a duration of 270 hours. The analysis shows that elderspeak exists in the discourse of the care-takers. The features of elderspeak included ‘questions structures’, ‘repetitions’, ‘limited vocabulary’, ‘simple syntax’ and ‘patronizing code’. It was …

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 …

Quotative Tense Shift In American English Authority-Encounter Narratives, Anna Marie Guthrie

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

Kidwatching Going Beyond The Language Of The Test, Abha Gupta

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

A study examined the linguistic forms in the discourse of speakers during a language test to indicate why they use certain specific forms over others. Ten children were given the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), a language proficiency test for hearing-impaired children in the age group of 4 to 8 years. Three students were videotaped during administration of the test, and the other students' final responses (omitting the intermediate discourse) were recorded. Some of the test items on which the maximum number of children deviated from the target response were analyzed for common traits and classified …