Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons^™

Discovering Conversation Spaces In The Public Discourse Of Gender Violence: A Comparative Between Two Different Contexts, Meliza M. De La Paz, Ma. Regina Justina E. Estuar, John Noel C. Victorino

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

A huge factor in gender-based violence is perception and stigma, revealed by public discourse. Topic modelling is useful for discourse analysis and reveals prevalent topics and actors. This study aims to find and compare examples of collectivist and individualist conversation spaces of gendered violence by applying Principal Component Analysis, NGram analysis and word association in two gender violence cases which occured in the different contexts of the Philippines and the United States. The data from the Philippines consist of 2010-2011 articles on the 1991 Vizconde Massacre and the data from the United States consist of 2016-2017 articles from the 2015 …

Language, Rhetoric, And Politics In A Global Context: A Decolonial Critical Discourse Perspective On Nigeria’S 2015 Presidential Campaign, Yunana Ahmed

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this dissertation, I conceptualize a rhetorical and linguistic analysis of politics from a decolonial framework (Mignolo, 2011; Smith, 2012). My analysis draws on classical rhetoric (Aristotle, 2007), cultural rhetoric (Mao, 2014; Powell, et al., 2014; Yankah, 1995), and linguistics (Chilton, 2004) to reveal the different ways ideological and hegemonic struggles are discursively constructed in Nigerian political campaign discourse. The data for this study come from two speeches delivered by former President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan during the 2015 electoral campaign. This includes his declaration-of-intent speech and his speech marking the commencement of his formal campaign activities. My …

If It Looks Like A *Uck: A Provocation On B*D Words, Jodi Kearns, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

For some decades, we’ve been considering (and using) “b*d” words. Such a large part of the document space is made up of words; it seems necessary, upon occasion, to explore the crooked little paths and messy gutters occupied by some words. We invite your company on such a little exploration now.

‘‘Can I Drop It This Time?’’ Gender And Collaborative Group Dynamics In An Engineering Design-Based Afterschool Program, Jessica Schnittka, Christine Schnittka

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

The 21st century has brought an increasing demand for expertise in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Although strides have been made towards increasing gender diversity in several of these disciplines, engineering remains primarily male dominated. In response, the U.S. educational system has attempted to make engineering curriculum more engaging, informative, and welcoming to girls. Specifically, project-based and design-based learning pedagogies promise to make engineering interesting and accessible for girls while enculturating them into the world of engineering and scientific inquiry. Outcomes for girls learning in these contexts have been mixed. The purpose of this study was to explore how …

The Narrative Performances Of Teenage Girls: Participation, Identity, And Authority As The Foundation For Power, Chere M. Smith

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which teenage girls use narrative performance to negotiate participation, social and gender identity, and individual authority in order to establish ratified and equal statuses of power within their social peer group. Although previous work on narrative discourse has shown that narratives can act as the catalyst for the complex co/construction of identity especially in social situations of talk, little work has been done to focus on the way teenagers, particularly girls, use this discourse to their benefit as they fulfill social and gender goals in social and conversational settings. Furthermore, while multimodal, narrative performance …

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.

Lexical Variation, Lexical Innovation, And Speaker Motivations: A Historical Psycholinguistic Approach, Jason Timm Dr.

Linguistics ETDs

Speakers commonly re-purpose existing forms in the mental lexicon to create novel form-meaning. Contemporary evidence that such innovation processes have occurred historically is attested in varying degrees of polysemy in the mental lexicon. This dissertation considers speaker motivations underlying these innnovation processes historically. Strong synchronic relationships between frequency and degree of polysemy, on one hand, and frequency and lexical access, on the other hand, have traditionally been interpreted as evidence for the primacy of economic motivations in processes of lexical innovation. In contrast, the cognitive processes that most commonly facilitate innovation, metaphor and metonymy, have largely been described as processes …

An Analysis Of The English Class Discourse In The Iranian High Schools, Reza Khany, Saeedeh Mohammadi

The Qualitative Report

One of the decisive factors of students’ success in second language learning is employing interactive strategies related to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic discourse. Following Bakhtin’s conceptualization of discourse (1981), monologic and dialogic patterns can be considered as the opposing ends of the teacher’s discourse continuum. Given this, the current research intended to find out whether the Iranian high school teachers maintain a monologic discourse in their classes or a dialogic one. To accomplish this goal, a comprehensive exploration of the related literature carried out to identify the features differentiating monologic and dialogic discourse, which proved to be around thirteen. Afterwards, …

Virtual Meatspace: Word Formation And Deformation In Cyberpunk Discussions, Matt Garley, Benjamin Slade

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Literacies Of Bilingual Youth: A Profile Of Bilingual Academic, Social, And Txt Literacies, Michelle A. Mcsweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation identifies three types of language skills that urban Spanish/English bilingual youth possess (academic, social, and texting language), and reports on their relationship while documenting and analyzing the features of text messaging among this population. The participants in this study are Spanish-dominant bilingual young adults enrolled in a high school completion program in New York City. They are in the process of developing both Spanish and English academic literacy skills, and it is well known that they tend to perform below the grade they are enrolled in. For this reason, they are often referred to as being “language-less” (DeCapua …

Producing Discursive Change: From "Illegal Aliens" To "Unauthorized Immigration" In Library Catalogs, J. Silvia Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent debates on immigration policies have included a discursive contest over the representation of unauthorized immigrants, in both the news media and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a subject indexing system administered by the Library of Congress. Using a mixed methods approach from a critical discourse analysis perspective, I examine the responses of the news media and the Library of Congress to societal pressures for change, showing how the Library’s complex institutional position can constrain its responses. Those obstacles, when combined with the characteristics of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as a linguistic tool for information …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …

Wacana Fiksimini Bahasa Indonesia: Analisis Struktur, Keterpaduan, Permainan Bahasa, Dan Fungsi, Cicik Tri Jayanti

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This study is aimed to describe the characteristics of mini fiction by explaining the structure and coherence between elements, forms of language, and discourse functions in Indonesian mini fiction. It is a qualitative study by using mini fiction discouse as research objects. The research data were in the form of tweets by the users who retweeted any tweets from @fiksimini account. Thus, the data collected in the research were written and collected by transcribing the data. The results of the study showed that (1) the structure of mini fiction discourse consists of three elements, topic, title and content; (2) the …

Tracking The Development Of Critical Self-Reflective Practice Of A Novice Sign Language Interpreter: A Case Study, Kirri J. Dangerfield Ms, Jemina M. Napier Prof

Journal of Interpretation

The purpose of this case study was to track the progression of a novice interpreter’s use of self-reflective practice while interpreting a series of six University lecture segments, in a controlled environment over a period of three months. It became evident that the novice interpreter in this case study was able to articulate a variety of coping strategies used, and found improvements in her self-reflective practice skills. The results of this study support key suggestions in the literature: that interpreters need to be motivated to aim for expertise by improving their skills through self-reflective practices, via supported environments such as …

A Discourse Analytic Approach To Accusations Of Infidelity In Romantic Couples' Natural Conversations, Neill Korobov

The Qualitative Report

This study uses a discourse analytic approach to examine how twenty young adult heterosexual romantic couples (ages 19-26) formulate accusations and insinuations of infidelity in their unstructured natural conversations. The analyses demonstrate how accusations of infidelity among romantic partners work to pursue and avert relational trouble. They indirectly index local interactional breaches that may, if left unattended, lead to non-affiliative interactional outcomes. Unlike mainstream psychological work that would treat talk about infidelity as a sign of emotional insecurity or jealousy, the present study posits that accusations of infidelity may function as a brief but effective way for one partner to …

Event Parsing In Narrative: Trials And Tribulations Of Archaic English Fairy Tales, Rebecca Lovering

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While event extraction and automatic summarization have taken great strides in the realm of news stories, fictional narratives like fairy tales have not been so fortunate. A number of challenges arise from the literary elements present in fairy tales that are not found in more straightforward corpora of natural language, such as archaic expressions and sentence structures. To aid in summarization of fictional texts, I created an class - a template for a digital object, in this case a semantic and story event - that captures elements predicted to help classify events as important for inclusion. I wrote a processor …

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 …

One’S A Crowd: Gendered Language In Ursula Le Guin’S The Left Hand Of Darkness, Kayla Stephenson

Senior Capstone Theses

Deconstruction questions the very meaning of words put into an assigned use. Yet how can we imply meaning unto words that do not exist in our language? To have a word for an intended use is to have an implied concept behind it, and where there is no concept there can be no word. Consequently, to construct a concept outside of the realm of human and earthly possibility is to create something outside of the limits of the human language. Concerning gender, to imagine a third or a singular gender is to be unable to describe such a concept without …

(Re)Positioning Black: Negotiating Racial Subjectivities In White Discursively Constructed Spaces, Elisa Davidson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis is both a personal and social inquiry of the experience of Black students at a predominantly white university. Within this inquiry, I extend Nakayama and Krizek's (1995) concept of whiteness as having "no true essence" to conceptualizations of blackness to assert that blackness is “a pattern of negotiation that takes place in conditions generated by specific discursive formations and social relations” (McLaren, 1999, pg. 40) rather than a fixed, essential category. Viewing blackness as encounter means that it is emergent through specific social and discursive conditions that are constantly constructed and negotiated through interactions with whiteness. I approach …