<p> With the rising rate of Internet penetration in Morocco, digital media, including social media, represent an increasingly important role in the spread of news in Moroccan society. In general, young Moroccans are the most digitally literate in the country and consume a wide range of online media. In the context of Morocco&rsquo;s complex and plural linguistic landscape, language abilities and preferences add an additional layer to the study of the spread of digital media. This study uses a mixed methods approach involving a researcher-designed online survey of 193 Moroccans between the ages of 18 and 35 as well as 34 in-person semi-structured interviews with students attending four Moroccan universities in order to examine the news media consumption habits of young Moroccans, focusing on the intersection of language preferences, digital media choices and Moroccan nationhood. This study demonstrates that young Moroccans appear to possess a certain flexible news citizenship, allowing for a unified sense of the Moroccan nation despite linguistic differences. Overall, young Moroccans tend to rely on indigenous Moroccan digital news media outlets, such as Hespress, as well as foreign news sources, for daily news; both of these types of media are outside of the state- and party-run news media system, which includes the majority of television and radio channels and many print newspapers. While different language ideologies and their supporters do exist in Morocco, the &ldquo;imagined community&rdquo; of Morocco continues despite these linguistic distinctions. In contrast to concerns that new media will result in a fragmentation of the public sphere, the Moroccan case seems to show instead digital news media reinforcing an existing unified nation across linguistic difference.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 151 pages : ill. (some col.) Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Charles R. Hancock, College of Education. Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-125).

This dissertation represents an effort to critically assess the practice of community mediation from a social constructionist perspective and to develop a method for its empirical analysis. While recognizing the value of this particular form of alternative dispute resolution, two fundamental problems are described that significantly limit its utility: The application of an oversimplified notion of communication and the employment of a problematic definition of success. These problems are explored through the development of "narrative" and "story-telling," two related metaphors that are used to capture the nature of communicative interaction. The value of the two metaphors is demonstrated through a mediation case study conducted via a methodology particularly designed for the analysis of mediation discourse. More specifically, the method is a combination of narrative analysis and the Coordinated Management of Meaning theory. Through their unique combination, some fundamental problems associated with the prevailing practice of mediation are documented and analyzed. Thus, the case study not only illustrates the value of the method used but it also provides empirical support for the critique on which it is based. The dissertation concludes with suggestions for how this research can improve the quality of community mediation practices.

This dissertation is an attempt to loosen what I see as a chokehold by which two paramount assumptions constrict our epistemic endeavors. These Enlightenment assumptions--that we accept or refute ideas as true based on transparently clear and orderly methods and criteria, and that individuals accept or refute truth claims--are still central in epistemology, despite their many critics (for the first, Kant, Hegel, James, Quine, Bayes; for the second, postmodernism, Deleuze and Guattari, Gilbert). Thinking about gossip as an epistemologically productive concept provides us with the means to critique those assumptions, and further attempts to broaden our notion of an epistemological foundation. Gossip at first appears to be an unlikely candidate for such a resurrection, mainly because its treatment by academics has been dismissive; this dismissal is in part due to Enlightenment conceptions about truth and falsehood. Chapter One surveys the social science literature on gossip and rumor, revealing that social scientists begin with such restrictive definitions of what gossip is that their conclusions amount to little more than tautology. Chapter Two shows that humanists have a slightly different approach to gossip, but with roughly similar results. The handful of philosophers who deal directly with gossip or rumor almost as a unit accept uncritically a division between "purposive" conversation and "idle" chatter. To do so, I think, perpetuates a limiting epistemic foundation on a linguistic level. In contrast, I argue in Chapter Three that the very existence of something like gossip proves the inadequacy of the foundationalist myth (at least in its current form), and that to attempt to understand and use gossip with foundationalist tools is simply a wrong fit. My understanding of gossip is based on this central fact: we undertake the activity of gossip or rumor-spreading because we are trying to make sense out of something--we need to collect knowledge socially. Gossip originates from dissonance; it acts as a (necessary) counterweight to more official information, and can't be considered apart from official knowledge. We use gossip and rumor, along with more orthodox sources of information, to formulate our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The extent to which gossip and rumor are spread is the extent to which the analysis is shared, and not individualized. Gossip is both a genealogical tool and an speculative tool.

This study is an Ethnography of Communication of a communication practice that explores the ways American women speak about menopause and hormone replacement therapy in face-to-face and Internet speech events. Called MenoSupport, this kind of talk occurs in specific speech events where validation, support, and information gathering are the key components of participation. The theory and method of Ethnography of Communication guides the analysis and interpretation of this talk that is described from the perspective of a communication ritual where norms for interaction and rules for interpreting the talk are analyzed to construct features of a model of personhood for this speech community. Key findings in this study include an analysis of a linguistic agon produced in MenoSupport that signals how women talk about both their bodies and their experiences in their bodies. The features of personhood discovered in this study include a woman's expressed requirement for doing something about menopause. Talk about this includes a woman's individual “quality of life” and the statement that she must be able to talk about menopause as a problem. Problematizing menopause creates an expressed need for a woman to take action during this stage of life. Taking action includes talking about menopause and hormone replacement therapy in venues other than the physician's office and medical interview. The key symbols of “doing something”, “taking action”, “quality of life”, problematizing a natural stage of life, talking as support for and validation of self are indicative of a model person who identifies with the unique qualities of being a “Baby Boomer”.

<p> This study is a rhetorical analysis of 911 active shooter calls. Working from frame theory it examines the types of communication that occur during crisis situations. This study reviews the actual audio tapes of the Columbine Colorado School shooting, the Trolley Square Salt Lake City UT shooting and the Arizona shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Gifford. This study provides a method for investigating the communication between caller to 911 and the telecommunicators that answer 911calls. It provides a baseline of the communication activities that are occurring and this method of communication is rapidly changing with pending text-mediated communication scheduled to take effect in 911 centers in 2014.</p>

<p> Nativist language, expressed as opposition to foreigners, has been a part of American history since the country's founding. At various times, often during periods of recession and economic pressure, nativist movements have arisen with remarkable fervor, at times affecting the course of the nation's history. Most recently, the twenty years from 1990-2010 saw a significant increase both in the number and power of anti-immigration organizations. During this period, the contemporary minutemen, organizations of nativists focused on border security, came to prominence. Anti-immigrant pressure groups, whose purpose was to focus on specific aspects of immigration, became powerful. Nativist politicians found that rhetoric could successfully elevated their cause to prominence on the national stage. </p><p> This study uses principles of generic criticism to analyze the rhetoric of two contemporary Minutemen organizations and their founders, as well as three prominent nativist leaders. It seeks to determine whether there are common characteristics in the chosen examples of nativist rhetoric. Under such circumstances, the rhetoric would be classified as belonging to a particular genre, or type. The analysis reports that there are five common characteristics shared by the five rhetors: Appeals to rationality and positioning within the mainstream; predictions of threats to economic security and political stability; paranoid language; patriotic and constitutional imagery and alignment with law enforcement; and appeals for sympathy for victims. It continues by comparing the five commonalities with common rhetorical forms and concludes that all five align with the rhetorical type known as the jeremiad. Named for the biblical prophet Jeremiah, this type of rhetoric is marked by a call for a return to traditional values, predictions of disasters to come if the audience does not heed the warnings, and reassurance that the audience and the nation will be rewarded for their righteous behavior. The study also finds that contemporary nativist rhetoric can be classified as exhibiting the paranoid style of rhetoric. The study concludes with an enumeration of issues relating to rhetorical studies of nativism that arose during the research. These issues would be useful avenues of inquiry for other researchers intrigued by the subject.</p>

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This thesis develops a model of Spanish intonation designed to account for all possible melodic contours of the language, from a phonetic and phonological point of view. The principles and methods used are mostly derived from the Pierrehumbert (1980) theory of English intonation. The empirical foundation for the model is based on the fundamental frequency contour, which is considered to be the phonetic representation of the underlying tonal structure. The underlying representation consists of sequences of only two tones, High and Low, which conform two tonal categories: pitch accents and boundary tones. These are considered to be on a separate autosegmental tier from the syllables and other suprasegmental elements. A set of rules associate the tones to the texts according to the stress patterns. By means of these elements and principles the phonological organization of some recurrent intonational patterns in Spanish is described, and a repertoire of pitch accents is proposed. The notation used is abstract, as only underlying units and their alignment to the text is represented. This analysis also accounts for the important intonational distinctions that occur between Spanish dialects. It is shown here that the most important differences can be described in terms of underlying tones. This suggests that these differences are not only phonetic but also phonological in nature.

This thesis is about partnerships involving congenitally deafblind people journeying towards language. The focus will be on the first steps of that journey: how partnerships make initial moves away from the here-and-now. In order to understand how this happens in the tactile medium, this thesis will draw on Reddy’s model (2003 and 2008) of the expanding awareness of the objects of the other’s attention to analyse how both partners are able to share attention to self, what self does, what self perceives and finally what self remembers. Demonstrating that both partners can operate at each of these four stages in the tactile medium then allows me to focus particularly on the final stage, what self remembers, and ask: what happens within partnerships if either partner brings movements, gestures or signs that refer to people, objects, places or events not present? Do both partners come to comprehend and produce such referential movements, gestures and signs in forms perceivable by both? Such questions will be considered against the backdrop of the dialogical framework, since in any exploration of human interaction it makes no sense simply to consider it from one perspective. At all times throughout this thesis, the focus will be on partnership. This thesis raises a number of practical recommendations about approaches and attitudes to be adopted by non-deafblind partners if language is going to be an outcome for their partnerships with congenitally deafblind people. But it will also conclude with a number of theoretical questions about how we define language in the first place.