Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

Observing Census Enumeration Of Non-English Speaking Households In The 2010 Census: Spanish Report, Christina Isabelli, Yuling Pan, Lubkemann Stephen

Scholarship

This study was part of an ethnographic research project in the 2010 Census Assessment and Research Program to observe the 2010 Census Nonresponse Followup interviews with households that speak a language other than English, in areas of the U.S. with heavy concentrations of residents with limited English proficiency. A multilingual research team consisting of seven sub-teams in the seven primary languages (Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese) was commissioned to carry out the research in the 2010 Census.

The objectives of this research were to identify: (1) how language and socio-cultural factors affect the enumeration of non-English-speaking populations …

Acquisition Of The Non-Generic Definite Article By Spanish Learners Of English As A Foreign Language, Christina Isabelli, Rachel Slough

Scholarship

This study explains the acquisition of the non-generic uses of the English definite article the by L2 learners. Chilean university students completed a questionnaire containing deleted obligatory uses of the. in all, four identified categories showed to have different accuracy rates. Of the four categories, the one most similar to the L1 was the least difficult to acquire while the most different resulted as the most difficult. This concurs with other research and can be explained by L1 rules that are transferred to the L2. The other two categories did not show the same acquisition rate as compared to previous …

Being Physically Active: Perceptions Of Recent Mexican Immigrant Women On The Arizona-Mexico Border, Donna Hartweg, Christina Isabelli, Marylyn Mcewen, Rosie Piper

Scholarship

Mexican immigrant women report being physically active prior to arrival in the United States. However, with increased years of U.S. residency, this positive lifestyle behavior diminishes, increasing their risk of obesity and chronic disease. A qualitative descriptive design was used to elicit recent Mexican immigrant women’s perceptions of “being physically active” and to describe how living in the United States has influenced their perceptions of being physically active. Three themes were inductively generated: (a) purposeful exercising, (b) being active, and (c) being active with purposeful exercising. Overall, being physically active was described within the context of daily living well below …

Choice, Coercion, Capabilities And Conflict: Multilingualism, Human Development And Peacekeeping In A Globalized World, Megan R. Thompson

Honors Projects

The development of English into an international lingua franca is not an inevitable result of globalizing forces. Instead, the “triumph” of the English language and the consequent decline of the world’s linguistic diversity cannot be viewed in isolation of its parallel history of conquest, violence, power and exploitation. Today, the languages privileged by the powerful—not only English, but also other dominant languages or standard varieties of those languages—determine access to social, economic and political mobility. This fact renders any discussion of language “choice” irrelevant—when a choice yields the sacrifice of basic human capabilities on one hand and the denial of …

Deaf Education Policy As Language Policy: A Comparative Analysis Of Sweden And The United States, Sarah Compton

Sarah Compton

The present study offers a cross-national, comparative analysis of Swedish and US deaf education policies to examine the ways in which status planning and acquisition planning for sign languages are taken up. Major policy documents were selected from each polity, reflecting key national legislative policies as well as the primary texts that guide educational implementation: for Sweden, the Ordinance for Special Schools, the Education Act, and the national syllabi for special schools; for the United States, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Title 34 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Analysis of these texts shows that such planning tends …

On Swearwords And Slang, Robert Moore

Faculty Publications

Slang lexemes and swearwords are commonly discussed in conjunction with each other as though they were slightly different versions of the same phenomenon. However, they clearly are not, as a careful consideration of their different prototypical functions reveals. Each of these lexical categories has a central or core function, and in each case this function is linked to the obligatory expression of affect. Different kinds of affect are entailed in the prototypical uses of slang and of swearwords, but in the case of both of these lexical types, this affect is incompatible with the formality and deference of honorifics, or, …

Fundaments Of Morfo-Syntactical Ergativity (Fundamentos De Ergatividad Morfológico-Sintáctica), Eva Núñez-Méndez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The main goal of this research paper is to clarify the concept of ergativity, which has been used as a modern term in recent grammar studies, from a morpholo gicalsyntactical approach. This term, nonexistent in the traditional linguistic studies on romance languages, has been newly applied to values of transitivity where the participant roles in the action may or may not have the agent function. latin and his daughter-languages have a syntactical accusative profile where the subject of the action is also the agent, different in form from the direct object. in latin, the correspondence subject-agent is marked morphologically in …

Key Concepts For Theorizing Spanish As A Heritage Language, Andrew Lynch

Andrew Lynch

In this chapter, I provide a selective, critical overview of the principal theoretical concepts that have served to frame studies of Spanish as a heritage language in the United States since the 1970s. Among the concepts I consider are: diglossia, standard language, proficiency, register, agency, and generation.

Acquisition Of The Non-Generic Definite Article By Spanish Learners Of English As A Foreign Language, Christina Isabelli, Rachel Slough

Christina Isabelli

Observing Census Enumeration Of Non-English Speaking Households In The 2010 Census: Spanish Report, Christina Isabelli, Yuling Pan, Lubkemann Stephen

Christina Isabelli

What Code-Mixed Dps Can Tell Us About Gender, Elena Valenzuela, Joyce Bruhn De Garavito, Ewelina Barski, Maria De Luna Villalón, Ana Faure, Yolanda Pangtay, Alma Ramírez Trujillo, Sonia Reis

Ewelina Barski, PhD

There has been a growing interest in the examination of the steady state of simultaneous bilinguals. An understanding of what leads to the possible weaknesses in the grammar of early bilinguals can contribute to our understanding of the possible causes of the apparent characteristic ‘failures’ in second language acquisition (Montrul 2008). Spanish has a gender feature for nouns (Carroll 1989) and gender agreement for determiners and adjectives. Problems with the acquisition of gender marking on the noun and/or with gender agreement are well-known in the L2 literature (Hawkins 1998; Fernández–Garcia 1999; Franceschina 2001; Bruhn de Garavito and White 2002; White …

Current Perspectives On Tunisian Sociolinguistics, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Despite its small size (63,170 sq miles) and a rather small population with a stable growth rate,2 Tunisia represents a rich sociolinguistic laboratory with a long history of bilingualism and language contact. The delicate position of Berber, the diglossic situation of Arabic and the increasing efforts for Arabization, the regional and social variation in Tunisian Arabic, the presence of French, and the gradual spread of English, among other closely-related topics, constitute the core themes of research within Tunisian sociolinguistics. Since the publication of R. M. Payne’s Language in Tunisia in 1983, no attempt has been made to reassess the situation …

Constraining Interpretation: Sentence Final Particles In Japanese, Christopher M. Davis

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with how pragmatic particles interact with sentential force and with general pragmatic constraints to derive optimal dynamic interpretations. The primary empirical focus of the dissertation is the Japanese sentence final particle yo and its intonational associates. These right-peripheral elements are argued to interact semantically with sentential force in specifying the set of contextual transitions compatible with an utterance. In this way, they semantically constrain the pragmatic interpretation of the utterances in which they occur. These conventional constraints on interpretation are wedded with general pragmatic constraints which provide a further filter on the road to optimal interpretation.

Talking Masturbation: Men, Women, And Sexuality Through Playful Discourse, Geoffrey Evans-Grimm

Honors Projects

This study seeks to understand the relationship between talking about masturbation and masturbation as an everyday practice in the United States. This essay is arranged in terms of a number of overlapping sections that converge to offer a clearer interpretive context for a discussion of the results of the questionnaire and interview data. The first part of my essay is an attempt to make sense of the cultural history and to situate conceptions about masturbation and attempts to regulate it up to present day. Then, as a gendered talk, it is necessary to engage in a theoretical discussion of gender …

Why Lesotho And Swaziland Should Merge With Sa, Vikas Kumar

Vikas Kumar

The gains to the people of Lesotho and Swaziland from merger with South Africa are immense and the costs to South Africa are relatively negligible. So, it is time that the colonial era boundaries are dismantled in the interests of the people of Lesotho and Swaziland.

Meat And Meanings: Adult-Onset Hunters’ Cultural Discourses Of The Hunt, Tovar Cerulli

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This study is a description and interpretation of talk about hunting. The study is based on data gathered from in-depth interviews with twenty-four hunters in the United States who did not become hunters until adulthood. A single overarching research question guides the study: How do people create and use discourses of hunting? The study is situated within the ethnography of communication research program and, more specifically, within the framework of cultural discourse analysis. The study employs cultural discourse analysis methods and concepts to describe and develop interpretations of how participants render hunting symbolically meaningful, and of what beliefs and values …

Animating Talk And Texts: Culturally Relevant Teacher Read-Alouds Of Informational Texts, Laura A. May

Early Childhood and Elementary Education Faculty Publications

This article describes the classroom interactions surrounding teacher read-alouds of nonfiction texts in the classroom of a teacher who strived for cultural relevancy. Participants in this study were one European American teacher and her upper- elementary students who lived in the surrounding working-class neighborhood; all but two students identified as Latino or African American. Data were collected for two consecutive school years using ethnographic and discourse analytic methods. Analyses showed that the teacher took up three social positions (i.e., cultural advocate, facilitator of classroom interactions, and teacher of reading) by animating texts and students.

Gendering French In Tunisia: Language Ideologies And Nationalism, Keith Walters

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper seeks to describe and account for a common ideology among Tunisians and North Africans more broadly that associates the use of French with women, thereby symbolically associating the use of Arabic with men. In this regard, the use of French can be said to be "gendered" there. In an effort to historicize this phenomenon, I sketch the social history of French in Tunisia, particularly in regards to the access female and male Tunisians would historically have had to it through the institution of schooling. I then consider the different relationships contemporary Tunisian men and women have with French. …

Frank Gouldsmith Speck Collection Index Of Penobscot Materials, Pauleena Macdougall

Field Notes/Notebooks

No abstract provided.

Schizophrenic Worshippers And Monolingual Gods: Deconstructing The Jamaican Discourse On Language In Religion, Joseph T. Farquharson

Joseph T. Farquharson

No abstract provided.