The thesis is an attempt to apply procedures of descriptive linguistic analysis to a body of material phonetically transcribed by Leo J. Frachtenberg in the Mary's River dialect of the central Kalapuyan language. In 1913-14 Frachtenberg collected thirteen volumes of myth texts in Mary's River, twelve from William Hartless and one from Grace Wheeler; in addition, there were notes to the texts, three volumes of grammatical notes, and some ethnographic material. The phonetic transcription was carried out in the pre- phonemic tradition of recording everything the speaker said as accurately as possible. There was no attempt to elicit forms in a manner which would establish which sounds were "the same" to the speaker, resulting in a considerable proliferation of variations of forms. The main methodological problem, therefore, has been to sort out phonetic variation and phonemic contrast. This task was more difficult because no complete morphemic analysis exists as yet, so that morphophonemic alternations created additional complications. My method consisted first of tallying the forms that occurred, to establish those variants found most frequently (modal forms). The modal forms were examined to discover patterns of contrast and complementary distribution; those variants of forms which were not modally distributed, and single examples, were then compared to help confirm or modify the emerging phonemic patterns. I arrived at a system of 21 consonants, six vowels, four diphthongs, and phonemic stress. This includes two obstruent series, glottalized and unglottalized, five fricatives, three resonants; and two glides. The vowels are high to mid front, low center, and high to mid back, with length distinctive. One pair of diphthongs is also distinguished by length; the others involve non-phonemic length. Consonant clusters are limited to two members initially and finally. A number of uncertainties remain. These include the behavior of glottal stops and aspiration in final and medial position, the variation in vowel length, the distribution of velars, the distribution of diphthongs, and the relationships between /w/ and / u / , /y/ and /i/, and /f/ and /w/. These may be clarified when the morphemic analysis is complete. The phonemic system appears to resemble most closely that of the neighboring Molala, although the lexicon and grammar show only slight similarities; the related Takelma also seems quite similar phonologically. Since phonological features can be borrowed by one language from another, and in the Northwest frequently have been, further examination of such resemblances may shed light on former historical contacts between Kalapuyan speakers and other groups.

A rhetorical theory of folklore was used to interpret how summer camp staffers use a folk drama as a means of identification and as a type of artistic expression. The performance was analyzed for ethnographic information using Kenneth Burke's theory of dramatism and for artistic techniques using Burke's theory of the psychology of audience. The dramatistic pentad contextualized the performance, and this information was analyzed for motives through the delineation of dramatistic ratios. The skit's syntagmatic structure was outlined using Burke's description of five aspects of form. The analysis demonstrates that meaning is emergent through both the content and form of the symbolic action of the folk drama. Identification is achieved primarily through the presentation of motives. The aesthetic experience is created primarily through the use of form. The interpretation demonstrates that the skit's content and form can not be understood apart from each other and that understanding content and form is but one aspect of the performance's meaning.

Taped interviews, fox hunting magazines, and a questionnaire were primary sources for collecting approximately 290 of the specialized terms employed by pedestrian fox hunters known as "hilltoppers." Once the terms were collected, they were co,pared with the terms related to formal fox hunting. The comparison revealed that hilltopper jargon and formal fox hunting jargon contain many identical terms, yet the former body of terms is significantly larger and more varied. In order to determine whether or not the jargon of hilltopping qualifies as an aspect of folk speech, methods of dissemination, patterns of innovation, speaker response to social and technological change, geographical variance, and the perpetuation of archaic terminology were taken into account. The mapping of regional patterns of distribution could not be accomplished within the confines of this study, although tems do vary geographically. The study resulted in ascertaining that the jargon of hilltopping does qualify as an aspect of folk speech, and in the recording of many terms and phrases never before organised in glossary form.

To date, the auction as a type of folklore performance has not been adequately researched. In order to place auctions in perspective as folklore, chapter one of this thesis reviews the history of auctions in the United States. Chapter one further presents the idea of the auctioneer as a folk occupational specialist. The second chapter is concerned with the skills of an active Kentucky auctioneer, who offers, during a series of interviews, insights concerning his performance skills. The third, and final, chapter attempts to construct a theoretical base for researching auctions as folklore performance. The criteria by which any given performance is called folklore are applied to the study of auctions. This thesis concludes with the writer's firm belief that a variety of techniques and scholarly orientations can be applied to the study of auctions.

In this project, I endeavor to bridge the gap between these two by analyzing "Latinx" as a symbol that functions distinctly when employed as a personal or group identity. My argument for this thesis can be broken into two main parts: its significance as an identity, and its tangibility. As a group identity, I argue "Latinx" represents a social movement for liberation, visibility, and minority allyship. While this is not unconnected to its personal meaning, individual embodiment of the term involves the performance and realization of the intersectional. In other words, it gives those with overlapping queer and Latina/o identities a space to exist without compromising the validity of either identity. In addition to this, I argue that instead of representing the unknowable, "Latinx" is made tangible through the community it names. As such, the term itself, its symbolism, and controversial reception have all only been viable because of the agency of the individuals that have adopted "Latinx" as a way to communicate their identities. My analysis considers the relation between these two parts in order to understand "Latinx" as a symbol and community.

The purpose of this thesis is to discover the ways in which language plays a role in constructing Palestinian collective memory. My research draws mainly upon primary literary sources, including Emile Ḥabībī’s Sudāsiyyat al-ayyām as-sittah and Yaḥyá Yakhlif’s “Tilka al-mara’ah al-wardah” and “Nūrmā wa rajul al-thalj,” and places these texts within a theoretical framework supported by secondary sources. While most prior research has focused on anthropological or geographic approaches to cultural memory studies, my project takes a linguistic approach to understanding how collective memory is shaped. Through analysis of remarkable linguistic features appearing in these short stories, I seek to demonstrate how linguistic reference, personalization of emotion, narrative strategies and temporalities, and metaphorical language create speech acts that facilitate the processes of transmitting individual remembrance into collective awareness that underlie the formation of collective memory. I will also seek to examine the language used in these literary works for forms of rupture, circularity, lack of reference, or ineffability and the ways in which those features are indicative of experiences of trauma and of attempts to grapple with those experiences of trauma. / text

How are beliefs about the nature of knowledge reflected and reproduced in language use? It is clear that some linguistic resources, e.g. the modal verbs may and must, indicate one’s epistemic stance with respect to a proposition, i.e. one’s judgement of how likely it is to be true. What is less clear is how the use of such resources relates to speakers’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge per se, i.e. their epistemic policies (Teller 2004). To investigate the putative relationship between epistemological variation and linguistic variation, I examine samples of written and spoken English from a community that is particularly epistemologically diverse: academia. I synthesize research on social epistemology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and Academic English (AE) to propose an explanatory model of variability in the expression of epistemic stance. Then, using AE as a case study, I evaluate the predictions of this model both quantitatively via corpus analysis of research articles and regression modelling of interview data, as well as qualitatively via analysis of discursive practices in terms of experience-organizing frames (Goffman 1974) and the semiotic notion of indexicality (e.g. Irvine 2001), whereby ideological differences produce, and are reproduced by, linguistic differences. This research makes contributions to a number of fields. It questions the analytic validity of disciplinarity, providing support for a unifying theory of variation in AE based instead on an epistemologically principled analysis of institutional language use. The indexical basis of sociolinguistic research on language and belief/identity is problematized by attending to epistemological context; the ramifications of this will be explored in future research. I develop a linguistic metric of epistemic belief, offering a means of developing a quantitative social epistemology to complement that field’s highly articulated theoretical work. Applications beyond academia are possible in areas concerned with knowledge management and transfer, such as public health.

This study traces the relationship between language policy activity and multilingual social identity development through schools and homes in a public school district implementing an English Language Learner (ELL) program. The social impacts of language policies cannot be fully understood without consideration of how they impact social identities and opportunity for the populations they affect (Johnson, 2013; Shohamy, 2006; Tollefson, 1991). Power in language policy processes is seen as multi-layered (Ricento & Hornberger, 1996), with teachers at the heart. However, there has been little attention to the powerful role of those whose language practices policy is meant to regulate: students and parents. Using data gathered in the schools, homes, and communities of multilingual students over the course of two years, this critical ethnographic study provides ethnographic understanding of language policy, language use, literacy learning, and policy negotiation on the part of parents as they relate to social identity development. Ultimately, the work extends exploration of the layers of policy activity to the homes and communities of multilingual students and their families, uncovering implications about the role of language policies in shaping equitable educational opportunity. Findings show how multilingual parents can and should be positioned as powerful negotiators in language policy processes, leading to implications for transformation in theory and practice.

This dissertation explores verbal interactions in mock trial competitions at a US law school, in order to explore the ways that law students are taught the proper ways of speaking like advocates in adversarial speech settings. Learning to prevail in adversarial settings entails the use of conversational linguistic features whose primary function is pragmatic rather than referential. The proper use of these pragmatic markers enables lawyers to achieve desired effects in legal interaction and impression management, while maintaining intact the denotational content of their utterances. This dissertation examines in depth the feedback-mediated practices through which law students learn to use three prominent pragmatic markers in mock trials: tag questions, the declarative falling intonation, and using reported speech to cite legal authority. The metapragmatic discourses that constitute these practices socialize law students to use pragmatic markers in light of their ability to sway institutional decision-makers to favor their interpretation of the facts. The dissertation argues that these metapragmatic discourses articulate an institutional technology for the management of competing claims to propositional truth. How they justify the use of these pragmatic markers reveals, furthermore, that these technologies of truth are dialogic. Pragmatic markers allow legal advocates to project social voicing contrasts in adversarial settings, allowing them to associate the utterances of their courtroom rivals with the voice of dubious social characters, reducing the propositional value of their claims to truth. An analysis of metapragmatic discourses thus reveals the dialogic dimensions of the language of the law that relate language, agency, and power in the verbal constructions of institutional knowledge. It clarifies the ways that law students, as legal advocates, learn to incorporate broadly circulating ideologies of linguistic differentiation in their legal discourse.

This dissertation is an investigation of the use, change, and status of the distinctive local dialect in rural Valdres, Norway. The Norwegian sociolinguistic situation has long been recognized as complicated by a protracted history of language planning and standardization, in which two competing written norms of Norwegian, called Bokmål and Nynorsk, are symbolically and ideologically associated with urban and rural identities, respectively. In addition, while Norwegians can choose from two written norms, no recognized standard exists for spoken Norwegian, and citizens are officially encouraged to use their native, local dialects. The present study approaches this situation through a case study of language use in Valdres today.In the summer of 2005, the distinctive dialect of the rural Valdres valley was voted "Norway's most popular dialect" on one of the country's most listened-to national radio programs, an event that both reflects and has contributed to a recent revaluation of the local dialect. Yet the results of previous dialectological research in Valdres have clearly pointed to long-term convergence toward what locals call "city language" -- the speech of nearby urban Oslo. While evidence of this decades-long trend is not contradicted by the findings of this dissertation research, the present study suggests that there may be more than one direction of dialect change in Valdres today. Despite ongoing changes in dialect morpho-lexis and phonology in the direction of urban regional speech, there is also a large number of relatively resistant dialect features in contemporary Valdresmål, and, even more importantly, evidence of a re-expansion of the dialect among younger speakers, which appears to align with forms found in written Nynorsk, the alternative "rural" norm. The simultaneous sociolinguistic trends of dialect convergence, non-convergence, and divergence in the contemporary Valdres dialect vis-a-vis urban regional norms thus provide an interesting and complicated case of language variation and change.This dissertation combines methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, ethnographic sociolinguistics, and acoustic phonetics to provide an illuminating analysis of the local relationships between standard and non-standard varieties, between written and spoken forms, and between contemporary language use and historically-rooted language ideologies.