<p> Despite the vast research on the relationship between bilingualism and cognition, no consensus has been reached about the positive impact of bilingualism and how various bilingual parameters may be effective to varying degrees. Thus, the purpose of this research is to examine the effects of bilingualism on inhibitory control and divergent thinking by assigning language learners to groups reflecting different bilingual background experience. To address this issue, 114 second language learners, assigned to three groups based on L2 frequency of use and L2 proficiency, were compared to 38 monolinguals in their performance at the Simon task (inhibitory control test) and the Alternate Uses Test (divergent thinking test). Inhibitory control results demonstrated that the positive effect of bilingualism was only found among the L2 group exhibiting the most frequent and regular use of L2. Findings of the divergent thinking task indicated similar performance across different L2 groups compared to the monolingual group. Results are discussed in light of how frequency of L2 use may improve inhibitory control by engaging similar mechanisms recruited for language control. Light is also shed on how different bilingual variables, such as the age of acquisition, may obscure the advantage of bilingualism on divergent thinking. Implications for this study are its relevance to the larger population of language learners and its contribution to the advancement of our understanding of the research gap surrounding how different linguistic parameters may influence the bilingual advantage.</p>

<p> The aim of this study is to reveal and analyze language ideologies and stereotypes associated with the three main regional dialects of Saudi Arabia: Najdi, Hijazi, and Janoubi. The research questions were &ldquo;How do Saudi speakers with different educational levels perceive other regional dialects?&rdquo; and &ldquo;Does experience and exposure to other dialects play a role in terms of their perception?&rdquo; Since college students typically have more opportunities to interact with speakers of different dialects, I hypothesized that their evaluations of other dialects would be different from high school students&rsquo; perspectives. The study participants consisted of 66 college subjects and 69 high school subjects; they came from different regional backgrounds.&nbsp;Lambert's&nbsp;Matched-Guise Test (1960) was implemented in order to examine the language attitudes toward&nbsp;these dialects. Interviews were also conducted to probe participants&rsquo; reasons and justifications for their judgments and opinions and also to support statistical findings. I found significant difference between college and high school subjects in the measures of five items. High school subjects tended to have a hard time guessing the speaker&rsquo;s background, which indicates they lack awareness of other dialects. College participants also applied more positive adjectives to Hijazi and Najdi speakers. On the other hand, high school subjects tended to judge the Hijazi speaker as a very slow speaker. In the interviews, I found that college interviewees tended to provide more details than high school interviewees, which showed college participants are more aware of other dialects. This study tried to determine whether or not discriminatory attitudes existed among the participants.&nbsp;The results indicate that certain dialect speakers could be judged negatively based on which dialect they speak, and that there are implications for their social and work lives. This study may help scholars better understand some of the language ideologies held by high school and college students in Saudi Arabia.</p>

<p> This thesis empirically asks whether Cajun English, a variety of American English spoken in South Louisiana, is an accent or a dialect. Because dialects are phonologically and syntactically and/or semantically different from a language&rsquo;s standard form, this thesis examines one feature within each of those domains: the realization of interdental fricatives as stops, the use of perfective aspect on past tense verb phrases, and manner salience in descriptions of motion. In each domain, I ask if Cajun English is different from Standard English and, if it is, if that difference could be attributable to influences of Cajun French.</p><p>

<p> This study contextualizes the explosive valorization and commodification of dialect in Japan since the 1980s, known as the &ldquo;dialect boom&rdquo;, in terms of Japanese social and economic issues and the growing public interest in diversity within Japan. While the dialect boom has been widely studied in sociolinguistics, little work has related it to the growing valorization of diversity, and most recent work has focused primarily on the Kansai dialect. To these ends, I analyze the enregisterment of six Japanese dialects, those of Osaka, Hakata, Nagoya, Aomori, Okinawa, and K?sh?. I analyze a corpus of YouTube comments responding to videos of dialect usage, using stance (DuBois 2007) to break down the social acts that produce enregisterment (Agha 2003). I draw on the theories of indexicality (Johnstone and Kiesling 2008, Eckert 2008) and the discourse analytic concept of dialect performance (Schilling-Estes 1998, Coupland 2007) as guides to interpreting the micro-social interactions I observe, connecting them to a macro-social context through the theories of Standard Language Ideology (Lippi-Green 1997), identity construction (Bucholtz &amp; Hall 2005), and folklorization (Fishman 1987). </p><p> I examine evaluations of dialect based on attractiveness, humorousness, intelligibility, folklorization, and country-ness, evaluate their relative prestige by investigating the willingness of speakers to debate dialect performances&rsquo; fidelity, and finally examine the political conflicts dialects are implicated in by looking at how they are related to questions of diversity and nationalism. The similarities between evaluations of the dialects of Okinawa and Aomori, particularly in the category of folklorization, suggest that the dialects of Aomori have accrued affective traits of an Indigenous language (such as nostalgia or sentimentality) despite being spoken by members of the ethnic majority. However, the conflicts that arise over the cases of Okinawa and Osaka suggest that the use of dialect as a marker of regional identity is now being integrated into a nationalist Japanese self-image as a country with rich internal diversity. This provides a means by which Japan can engage with the discourses of liberal multiculturalism and diversity without seriously threatening the hegemony of Japanese ethno-nationalism, suggesting a need to reevaluate the past focus on <i>nihonjinron</i> in building critiques of Japanese nationalist ideology.</p><p>

<p> This study examines lexical borrowing, code switching, and polylanguaging in Valencian Spanish to better understand how each is used differently in oral conversation in comparison with online communication on Twitter. This study compares data collected from three published corpora of oral interviews of speakers of Valencian Spanish with data collected from Twitter profiles of individuals residing in Valencia. In each of the sources Spanish is the preferred code into which Valencian material is inserted. A unique feature of data from the published corpora is the high frequency of code switching (CS) into Valencian in instances of reported speech. With regard to frequency, Twitter users switch from Spanish into Valencian, followed by from Valencian into Spanish and then from Spanish into English. On Twitter, the most frequent type of switch found is the tag switch, which includes exhortatives, greetings and farewells, happy birthday wishes, and a variety of other types of tags and other idiomatic expressions used in a highly emblematic fashion as a way of preforming identity. Both intrasentential and intersentential switches also appear online and reflect how discourse might be organized differently online than offline. In looking at lone vs. multiword insertions, the importance of turn taking is noted and instances where speakers are not in a naturalistic conversation evidence traits which influence patterns of CS and polylanguaguing. Additionally, lexical economy is suggested as a motivating factor for CS on Twitter given the platform&rsquo;s technological limitation of 140 characters per tweet.</p><p>

No description available.

In this thesis, I intend to further our knowledge of the sociolinguistics of Early Modern minority languages. Social and political developments in North-Western Europe in the 16th to 18th centuries caused an emancipation of vernacular languages, which took over from Latin as the main language in official domains. The sociolinguistics of this change are well known (e.g. Burke 2004); the fate of languages that did not make it to this new status, emerging ‘minority languages’, remains under-researched. Chapter 2 introduces some of the terminology used in this study. I discuss four categories of research methods into minority language shift and how they are applicable to research on historical situations, which often suffers from ‘bad data’. I then present a model of ethnolinguistic vitality that I use to survey the socio-historical backgrounds of several minority language groups in Chapter 3. Chapter 3 begins with a brief presentation of minority language groups from the Early Modern period. I choose three language groups to focus on in more depth: speakers of Norn in Shetland, of Flemish in Northern France, and of Sorbian in Germany. A survey of these three cases, with the initial wider presentation, identifies three recurring issues that are the focus of the subsequent chapters. The first of these is the influence of demographic change (Chapter 4). In the formation of nation-states in this period, many speakers of the majority language migrate to peripheral minority-language areas. I present two historical-demographic studies showing the integration of immigrants into the local community through intermarriage, based on 17th-century population registers from Shetland and Dunkirk (France). Both show a large amount of intermarriage, despite a bias towards in-group marriage. Intermarriage brings the majority language into the minority-language home; the strength of the bias against intermarriage is likely to be a factor in the rate of shift, one of the main differences between Shetland and Dunkirk. Language policies are the topic of Chapter 5. They are an important part of minority language studies in the present day, particularly with regard to language maintenance. I survey the language legislation that existed in Shetland, French Flanders, and Lusatia, its purpose and implementation, and its effects on language shift. Purpose and implementation of language policies were limited, and its effect on minority language communities therefore only secondary. Chapter 6 is about target varieties in language shift. The question of whether language shift happened through education in a standard variety or through contacts with majoritylanguage speakers from nearby areas can be answered by looking at the new majoritylanguage dialect in the minority area. I undertake two different studies in this context. The first is an analysis of Shetland Scots using theories of dialect contact. The dialect has a number of ‘standardised’ features, but I argue these are mainly due to koinéisation of various dialects of Scots immigrants to Shetland and a second-language variety of Scots spoken by the local population. The second is a study of the French dialect of French Flanders using computational methods of data comparison on data taken from dialect atlases. This dialect shares features with neighbouring Picard dialects, but we can also identify Standard French features. This pattern correlates with what we know of migration to the area (Chapter 4). Both new dialects suggest the shifting population acquired the majority language mainly through contacts with majority-language speakers in their direct environment. In conclusion, I show that language shift in the Early Modern period was an organic process, where the inception, the rate, and the result of shift were steered by the minority population’s social networks. The influence of institutions often blamed for language shift in modern situations – educational and language policies – was very restricted. In addition, I show that methods used in modern sociolinguistics can be successfully applied to historical situations, despite the bad data problem. This opens the door for more extensive research into the area.

The discourse of commercial aviation flight attendants has historically received no sociolinguistic attention. To address this gap, this thesis explores how flight attendants use language in workplace-related contexts to construct their professional identity and community. I draw on interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1981; Schiffrin 1994; Tannen 1993) and sociological research (Van Maanen and Barley 1984; Williams 1986; Marschall 2002) to address how flight attendants use language to orient to occupationally related knowledge and practices which contribute to the discursive construction of community. Data come from two sources: 1) A corpus of 150 textual incident reports submitted by flight attendants to a US government agency which include summaries and proposed causes of the incidents in flight attendants’ own words. 2) A corpus of 105 unique discussion threads containing 4,043 posts to a website hosting several discussion forums aimed primarily at flight attendants. The forums are not affiliated with either government bodies or airline employers and are a virtual space for flight attendants to discuss aspects of their job away from occupational demands. Following Bucholtz and Hall (2004), I show how identity is contextually related and situationally constructed, and emerges from discursive orientations to professional practice, indexicality, ideology, and performance. Moreover, there are certain intersubjective relationships embedded in the discourse which emerge from and add detail to the situational identity constructed through flight attendant discourse. Indexical stances and ideologies which are grounded in institutional training frame and are heightened in the discursive performances of the reports and forum posts. These ideologies motivate and enhance the existing institutional, physical, and sociocultural divisions between flight attendants and pilots, which may have consequences for intercrew cohesion in emergency situations.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

<p> The effects of time and occupational prestige measured in this study had more of an impact than gender on how often witnesses hedged on the stand. A corpus of transcripts from 1893 to 2013 was assembled to test the variables of time, gender and occupational prestige on witnesses&rsquo; production of hedge constructions (e.g., <i>I think, sort of).</i> Results showed no significant differences between female and male hedge production over this 120-year period, yet significant differences were found in the production of phrases between earlier and later testimonies. Furthermore, a significant correlation was found between hedge production and occupational prestige. The more prestigious a witness&rsquo;s occupation, the fewer hedges s/he used. These findings support previous research that suggests a similarity between female and male speech in other genres of discourse and emphasizes social and environmental factors as areas worthy of deeper investigation for the contextual assessment of function in language.</p>