Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

Who And What Is Amazigh? Self-Assertion, Erasure, And Standardization, Alexis Colon

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research focuses on the identity of the indigenous peoples of Morocco, or the Amazigh. While this culture has endured different iterations of colonization, self-assertion and activism in favor of preserving culture and improving conditions for Amazigh can often be viewed as controversial to the elites of Morocco. This controversy, however, does not stop Moroccans from proclaiming their Amazigh background or portraying their culture. This paper aims to describe qualitative data taken from numerous interviews on the subject of self-identification of Amazigh and different hopes and expectations for the continuation of the language and culture of Amazigh among common peoples.

Troping The Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, And The Big Data Black Boxes Of National Security, Robert Albro

Secrecy and Society

This article considers how cultural understanding is being brought into the work of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through an analysis of its Metaphor program. It examines the type of social science underwriting this program, unpacks implications of the agency’s conception of metaphor for understanding so-called cultures of interest, and compares IARPA’s to competing accounts of how metaphor works to create cultural meaning. The article highlights some risks posed by key deficits in the Intelligence Community's (IC) approach to culture, which relies on the cognitive linguistic theories of George Lakoff and colleagues. It also explores the problem of …

Arriving: Expanding The Personal State Sequence, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

When arriving to a social encounter, how and when can a person show how s/he is doing/feeling? This article answers this question, examining personal state sequences in copresent openings of casual (residential) and institutional (parent-teacher) encounters. Describing a regular way participants constitute – and move to expand – these sequences, this research shows how arrivers display a non-neutral (e.g., negative, humorous, positive) personal state by both (i) deploying interactionally-timed stance-marking embodiments that enact a non-neutral state, and (ii) invoking a selected previous activity/experience positioned as precipitating that non-neutral state. Data demonstrate that arrivers time their non-neutral personal state displays calibrated …

How To Begin, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

This article introduces the special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction organized around the theme “Opening and Maintaining Face-to-Face Interaction.” The contributions to this special issue collectively consider “how to begin” – either a new encounter, or a new sequence after a lapse in conversation. All articles analyze naturally-occurring, videorecorded episodes of casual and/or institutional copresent interaction using multimodal conversation analytic methods. Though the opening phase of a face-to-face encounter may elapse in a matter of seconds, this article shows it to house a dense universe of phenomena central to sustaining our human sense of self and our …

New Use Of An Old Discourse Marker: The Interface Of Implicit Attitudes, Explicit Attitudes, And Rapid Language Change Of "So", Syelle Graves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates a linguistic feature called “backstory so,” defined as discourse marker so when it prefaces the answer to a question or request for information from an interlocutor. The motivation for its investigation is a collection of highly negative internet comments expressing irritation and insulting attitudes toward this use of so and the people who say it, calling them annoying, inarticulate, and condescending, for example. I also examine controversy in the (limited) literature about whether or not this language feature is new.

I therefore first present findings that this use of so is an instance of rapid language …

De-Centering The Monolingual: A Psychophysiological Study Of Heritage Speaker Language Processing, Christen N. Madsen Ii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Models of grammar, processing and acquisition are primarily built on evidence from monolinguals and adult learners of a second language. Heritage speakers, who are bilinguals of a societal minority language, acquire and use their heritage language in informal settings; but who live, work, and are educated in the societal majority language. The differences between heritage speakers and both monolinguals and adult second language learners are extensive: heritage speakers are not educated in the heritage language, their input is typically not from a prestige variety of the heritage language, and they are dominant in the majority language, using it more frequently …

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.

Decolonial Gestures Of Andean Bilingual College Students Promoting Quechua: Community-Based Participatory Research With Photovoice, Yuliana H. Kenfield

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Andean college students in Cusco, Peru, struggle to overcome discrimination against bilingualism during their pursuit of higher education. To examine this situation and possibilities for change, I employed a participatory method, photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1994) within a community-based participatory research framework, to facilitate Quechua-Spanish bilingual college students’ exploration of Quechuan practices in their university. Participatory research methodology promoted critical dialogues to challenge ideologies that have obstructed the revitalization, maintenance, development of the Quechua language in higher education. Although university policies in Cusco formally promote inclusion of indigenous knowledge and practices, bilingual Spanish-Quechua practices on campus have remained largely symbolic. …

Forgive, Forget Or Feign: Everyday Diplomacy In Local Communities Of Polish Subcarpathia, Iuliia Buyskykh

Journal of Global Catholicism

The paper is based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Przemyśl, Poland and several surrounding villages in 2015-2017. While conducting my research on a set of religious practices and pilgrimages in confessionally and ethnically mixed localities, I faced many challenges that changed the main course of my initial research plan. During my interaction with people here themes came to light that seemed little related to religiousness. My status as a researcher from Ukraine and even more so, my being a young single woman from Ukraine, gave rise to a number of other topics that my interlocutors, both of Polish and Ukrainian …

Nevertheless, She Persisted: A Linguistic Analysis Of The Speech Of Elizabeth Warren, 2007-2017, Matthew Jennings

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A breakout star among American progressives in the recent past, Elizabeth Warren has quickly gone from a law professor to a leading figure in Democratic politics. This paper analyzes Warren’s speech from before her time as a political figure to the present using the quantitative textual methodology established by Jones (2016) in order to see if Warren’s speech supports Jones’s assertion that masculine speech is the language of power. Ratios of feminine to masculine markers ultimately indicate that despite her increasing political sway, Warren’s speech becomes increasingly feminine instead. However, despite associations of feminine speech with weakness, Warren’s speech scores …

The Social Perception Of Three Features Of New York City English, Giacomo Castronovo Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the late 19^th Century, the accent particular to New Yorker City natives of European descent has been negatively perceived by both the American general public and the speakers themselves. The stereotypification of New York City English speakers has largely been the cause of this negative evaluation, in that the features of the accent, as well as the unique New York discourse style, have long been utilized by actors and comedians to create characters of uneducated, uncultured provenance, as well as, all too often, unscrupulous behavior. Thus, the features of European-American New York City English appear to be inextricably …

Speaking Sober: Program Language As A Mechanism For Community Creation In Alcoholics Anonymous, Talya Wolf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) is a fellowship of more than two million members in 180 countries worldwide who are joined by their common desire to achieve and maintain sobriety. A.A. is comprised of small, self-sustaining groups of individuals who meet, typically weekly or biweekly, to share their successes and struggles and to provide support to their fellow alcoholics. There are no dues or requirements for membership other than the wish to stop drinking. The organization is not evangelical; it does not recruit, but rather welcomes those who wish to participate. The open nature of this program attracts individuals of all ages, …

Perspectives From The Streets And The Classrooms In The Same 'Hood: Linguistic Landscapes Of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Luis Guzman Valerio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the linguistic landscape of the neighborhood of Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, New York by taking into account both a main commercial avenue and a public school with a dual language bilingual program in English and Spanish. Sunset Park is a multi-ethnic and immigrant neighborhood (Hum, 2014). While research has been done into the linguistic landscape of streets, cities, and communities, on the one hand, and about the linguistic landscape in education, on the other, the co-existence of these two in the same context has barely been studied (cf. Maldonado, 2015). This dissertation makes a contribution to the …

The Pragmatic Strategy Of Main-Clause Omission In Japanese: Its Contrast With Hebrew, And Its Learnability, Maayan Barkan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Typically, linguists study things that people actually say, but this dissertation focuses on what people do NOT say; specifically, it deals with main-clause omission. This paper presents an empirical study on main-clause omission constraints in Japanese after the concessive particle ga (‘although’/’but’), the first known controlled experiment of its kind in the literature. It investigates, from a pragmatic and discourse-analytic perspective, intuitive judgments regarding the allowance of main-clause omission in Japanese, in an attempt to reveal whether Japanese Native Speakers (JNS) use main-clause omission as a pragmatic strategy, as is suggested in the literature. If they do, then what triggers …

Abroad Perspective: Conceptualizing The Relationship Between Language And Identity, Rita Louise Ewing

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

In the field of migration studies, research on transnationalism has been well established. By applying an intersectional framework of post-colonial narrative and sociolinguistics to research on transnational migration, this research allows us to better understand how the transnational immigrant deploys language. Through a nostalgia studies approach, this study is able to analyze how transnational immigrants place value on their heritage and second languages, and reflexively deploy their language sets to reflect their unique positionality. This paper is a case study examination of five adult members of the 1.5-Generation of Filipino American immigrants, who immigrated to the U.S. before the age …

El Andaluz Y El Español Estadounidense: Exploring Traces Of Andalusian Sibilants In U.S. Spanish, Carolyn M. Siegman

Hispanic Studies Honors Projects

The Andalucista Theory claims that Andalusian Spanish was particularly influential during the development of Spanish in Latin America during the time of Spanish colonization. The present study seeks to examine traces of Andalusian Spanish in Spanish in the United States, considering the added level of complexity brought by contact with English and heightened contact with other dialects of Spanish. By examining 10 interviews from Andalusian Spanish speakers and 12 interviews from Spanish speakers in the U.S., we provide a comparison of the modern-day phonetic realizations of , , and in these two distant linguistic regions.

Exploring Spanish Heritage Language Learning And Task Design For Virtual Worlds, Brandon J. King

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this exploratory case study, I take a constant comparative methods type approach to exploring a shift in second language acquisition (SLA) away from approaches built on the assumption that language participants in the U.S. are monolingual English speakers (Block, 2003; Ortega, 2009, 2013; Thompson, 2013; Valdés, 2005), with little initial investment in the language or its culture (Rivera-Mills, 2012; Valdés, Fishman, Chavéz, & Pérez, 2006). This bias has entrenched a monolingual speaker baseline for statistical analysis within many experimental designs (Block, 2003; Ortega, 2009, 2013; Thompson, 2013; Valdés, 2005). Further, I redress this methodological bias by applying sociocultural theoretical …

The Social Factors Of Fossilization, Ashley Brigham

MA TESOL Collection

The notion of fossilization has been one of the most controversial, yet enduring topics in second language acquisition (SLA) theory since its first appearance in Selinker’s 1972 seminal article “Interlanguage.” In the past, work regarding fossilization sought to either support or challenge its existence, to determine the putative causes and to predict what linguistic items were prone to becoming fossilized. Initially, the possible causes which enjoyed the most attention were first language interference and the learner’s age and length of residency in the target language community. Now, however, with the current climate of SLA acknowledging that both learning and non-learning …

Fresa Style In Mexico: Sociolinguistic Stereotypes And The Variability Of Social Meanings, Rebeca Martinez Gomez

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation examines the flexibility in the social meanings of sociolinguistic stereotypes and how linguistic and non-linguistic information affect these meanings. The investigation consists of four empirical studies surrounding the case of fresas in Mexico –members of the upper class that are perceived as using a unique linguistic style.

Study 1 investigates the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics associated with the fresa stereotype. Through a qualitative analysis of 64 webpages and 3 performances of the style, it is shown that fresasare perceived as the counterpart of another construct, nacos,and that their linguistic style is linked to English due 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 …