Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

Flip Cup: Problems Related To Alcohol Consumption In Modern China, Helen Lamm

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The habits and attitudes surrounding the consumption of alcohol, in any culture, are just another lens through which we can look to better understand social life. The hierarchical social systems in China, which dictate common behavior, are unique. Much work has been written on the topic of guanxiand face: the defining factors for China’s ubiquitous, self-affirming system of relationships. Drinking culture is perhaps more interesting to travel bloggers than academics, but I believe that China’s drinking culture is a direct practice in guanxi production. The darker side of China’s drinking culture is anexercise in preserving face.

The gap in …

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 …

Chinese Slang, Robert L. Moore

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Voicing The Other: Mock Aave On Social Media, Hanna L. Smokoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the use on social media sites of features of African American Vernacular English by nonspeakers of it. This outgroup use of AAVE does not require nor reflect any true proficiency with the variety, but instead is often used to exaggerate the social distance between the stylizers using it on social media and the marginalized people for whom AAVE is a genuine mode of communication. Through double indexicality, nonspeakers of AAVE use features of it to annex certain positive qualities associated with Black or hip hop culture—toughness, coolness, an anti-establishment stance—for themselves, while reproducing negative stereotypes of …

Iis It Really “Fine”?: An Analysis Of The Paralinguistic Function Of Punctuation In Text Messages, Meridean Shim

Scripps Senior Theses

This study has two major purposes: (1) to investigate if and how punctuation conventions have been rewritten in text messages to compensate for lack of paralinguistic cues and (2) the sociolinguistic implications of these findings. Data for this study was collected through an online, anonymous questionnaire in which participants gave their judgments about the meanings and function of punctuation used in sample text messages. The results show that punctuation is used to convey differences in meaning in direct and indirect ways and most are dependent on the context. Furthermore, age showed to be a factor in punctuation style and interpretation. …

On The Shithouse Wall: The Communicative Value Of Latrinalia, Thomas Lively

Online Theses and Dissertations

Graffiti has communicative value, and it is a medium through which individuals voice their innermost thoughts, concerns, and beliefs. Restroom graffiti or "latrinalia" offers a unique space for graffiti writers to deliver their messages. The sole focus of this paper is to examine the meaning and communicative value of latrinalia as found in the men's restrooms of a medium-sized university. For this study, restrooms in 17 buildings were visited and a total of 965 instances of graffiti were recorded and codified into 14 different categories. The four most common categories of latrinalia were signature, sexual, artistic, and discriminatory. Latrinalia was …

The Perception Of Creaky Voice: Does Speaker Gender Affect Our Judgments?, Kaitlyn E. Lee

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study focuses on the phonetics of creaky voice saliency and the perceptual sociolinguistic indexes that are evoked during creaky voice use. This study consists of two experiments: the first a listener judgment based Likert scale, the second an AXB study. The first experiment used modal and creaky voice statement-of-fact tokens to determine whether the speaker is or isn’t x characteristic (intelligent, feminine, educated, masculine, hesitant, and confident). This study found that both male and female speakers were found to be less intelligent, less educated, less feminine, more masculine, less confident, and more hesitant when using creaky voice phonation as …

Hebrew And Computer-Mediated Communication: The Effects Of A Language Manipulation On Perception, Identity, And Preservation, Tamar Nir

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study aimed to explore the ways in which Hebrew is currently being manipulated online through a linguistic deviation called Fakatsa. In this study, participants were asked to rate random statements of frivolous or serious topics in either standard grammatical Hebrew or Fakatsa Hebrew conditions on specific judgment values. It was hypothesized that participants would rate the Fakatsa writer negatively on certain characteristics, such as intelligence, education, religiosity, and nationalism and positively on other characteristics, such as femininity and creativity. Twenty-four participants completed this experiment. Results showed that participants responded as expected for certain negative attributes typical of Fakatsa and …

The Push And Pull Of Language Ideologies : Multilingual Communicative Practices Among Youths In An Indonesian City, Kristian Tamtomo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis deals with the use of Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia and English in the spoken and written communication of high school youths in the city of Semarang, Central Java. The thesis aims to understand the patterns in which youths make use of these languages in various communicative contexts and the way youths use languages to either enact or negotiate the polycentric "push and pull" of the various language ideologies associated with local, national, and global language. Data collection was conducted using ethnographic methods, which involved participant observation, recordings of conversations, collection of texts, as well as interviews with youth groups …

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 …

Cultural Relevance In An English Language Learners' Classroom: A Qualitative Case Study, Katherine L. Roe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Colleges and universities typically provide remedial reading coursework for English language learners (ELL) to develop academic reading proficiency. However, a disproportionate number of ELLs fail to exit remedial classes. Prior research has indicated cultural relevance can motivate and stimulate learning; however, the extent to which a culturally relevant classroom curriculum makes a difference in the ELL classroom experience has not been fully explored. This study describes the experience of cultural relevance in an academic reading ELL college class. Moll's funds of knowledge was used as the conceptual framework in a qualitative case study to examine how cultural strengths and knowledge …

Ideologías Lingüísticas, José Del Valle, Vítor Meirinho

Publications and Research

This article provides an introduction to the concept of linguistic ideologies and its applicability to sociolinguistic analysis.

Actitud De Los Ciudadanos Andaluces En Cuanto Al Empleo Del Dialecto Andaluz En Los Medios De Comunicación Audiovisuales, Victoriano Pimentel Rivas

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This study presents regulations and linguistic awareness respecting the use of Andalusian dialect on television, radio, and cinema among others to provide a full description of the subject. The qualitative method will reveal aspects more fine-grained through data collection of the different habits and reactions of participants with TV, radio, internet or another audiovisual platform. For example, this research concludes, among other factors, that young Andalusians are more in contact with their dialect than older ones. Empirical and statistical data reflects that the young individual is open to different audiovisual platforms apart from TV and radio. Finally, this thesis leads …

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 …

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

Design Research: Typography Within The Israeli Linguistic Landscape, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

A linguistic landscape signifies language used within a physical or virtual public space, in which communication is presented in typographic form, portraying a message to an audience. Within the state of Israel, the linguistic landscape presents a unique situation in which it is common to view municipal and commercial multilingual signs that are designed using Hebrew, English, and Arabic letterforms. By studying the diverse linguistic landscape within Israeli urban environments, the article offers perspectives on the use of multilingual visual language, based on discussions with five Israeli designers in the summer of 2015.

Language Policy In Turkey And Its Effect On The Kurdish Language, Sevda Arslan

Masters Theses

For many decades the Kurdish language was ignored and banned from public use and Turkish became the lingua franca for all citizens to speak. This way, the Turkish state sought to create a nation-state based on one language and attempted to eliminate the use of other languages, particularly Kurdish, through severe regulations and prohibitions.

Firstly, this thesis traces the language planning policies in the 20th century which resulted in the invisibilization and denial of Kurdish through an attempted linguicide. Through decade long oppressions which resulted in mass killings, arrests, re-location of Kurds, monopolization of education in Turkish and eventually the …

First-Generation College Students, Identity, & Empowerment Labels, Curtis Green-Eneix, Gail Shuck

Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research

First-generation college students (FGCS) have been the primary focus of college retention research due to more FGCS entering universities, and FGCS’s low retention rates. Recent research has focused on quantitative studies of FGCS from comparing education and social backgrounds to non-FGCS, to outside constraints FGCS face while in college. These findings result in general understandings of FGCS dealing with additional hardship to moments of severe loneliness. This study explores (1) how FGCS—from Boise State University’s Student Success Program (SSP)—perceive their identity in a college community, (2) how they have or have not experienced identity conflicts while pursuing a degree, and …

Talking Back, With Reawakened Voices: Analyzing The Potential For Indigenous California Languages Coursework At California Polytechnic State University, Logan Cooper

Ethnic Studies

The legacy of colonialism in the United States, including genocidal practices and cultural assimilation, has left Indigenous languages endangered. Native peoples, scholars, and activists have been working to revive and heal the languages of America’s first peoples, and the cultures those languages speak to, yet more work remains in the field of language revitalization. California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo currently does not offer any course specifically teaching or discussing Indigenous languages, even those of the Chumash people who know the San Luis Obispo area as their ancestral homelands.

By synthesizing revitalization and Indigenous activist literature with the narratives …

A Case For An Ecological Approach And Against Language Commodification In Elt, Vinicius O. Souza

MA TESOL Collection

This paper aims to provide an alternative approach to the English language education practiced in many developing countries which can help reverse their current low-proficiency status, as revealed by standard international examinations such as the PISA scores and others. The author argues that this can be best accomplished by adopting an ecological approach to teaching which promotes language learning as emergent and socially situated phenomena, two concepts largely neglected by current teaching methods. In fact, many of these countries have long been dominated by an extremely commodified and cognitivist ELT market, where business interests have taken precedence over pedagogical considerations. …