<p> This study investigates why and how bilinguals speakers tend to code switch on social media such as; Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Bilingual speakers who were born in the US, who adapted English as their second language or who have learned Spanish as their second language in school, usually tend to combine the two languages, English and Spanish, in order to get across their point of view to others. For this reason, this investigation was created to analyze how code- switching can influence people when it's exposed on media. There were three social medias with the total of 37 participants who had posted comments, status, pictures, videos in English, Spanish or mixing both where a good amount of people got influenced by. Therefore, the leading results were the following: (1) at every code switching done on any social media, users code switch or use the same style as a way to expand and influence others. (2) Users code switch as a way to expand a new culture and identity as being one big group.</p>

<p> The purpose of this thesis is to examine the syntactic structure of Guerrero Nahuatl using Baker&rsquo;s proposed Polysynthesis Parameter (1996). Baker (1996) claims that polysynthetic languages must have common features that aggregate to the concept of the Polysynthesis Parameter, which suggests that polysynthetic languages employ morphology for syntactic functions. Baker (1996) suggests that in polysynthetic languages, &thetas;-roles are assigned through either an agreement relationship (agreement morphemes) or a movement relation (Noun Incorporation). As a result, Baker (1996) claims that polysynthetic languages must be non-configurational due to the flexibility of the word order and the absence of true quantifiers which indicates that all overt NPs are adjuncts. Prior researchers have made competing claims regarding the structure of the Nahuatl languages and Baker (1996) Polysynthesis Parameter. In this thesis, I show that Guerrero Nahuatl is a non-configurational polysynthetic language. I provide data showing that &thetas;-roles are assigned through either an agreement relationship or through a movement relation (NI) as Baker (1996) predicated for polysynthetic languages. I also argue that Guerrero Nahuatl has free word order and no occurring true quantifiers. I provide evidence that all overt NPs are in adjunct positions rather than in actual A-positions. In addition, I show that there is an extensive use of null anaphora, and an absence of reflexive overt NPs.</p><p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 293-325). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisors: Keith Walters and Qing Zhang. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholm University, 1995. / Additional abstract page laid in. Includes bibliographical references (p. [151]-172).

In this thesis, I aim to investigate the variation of Persian pronominal address system and politeness strategies in contemporary Iranian society from a quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic perspective. I focus on Persian speakers’ use and perception of pronominal address forms in the light of socio-cultural norms in contemporary Iran. Persian, has two personal pronouns for singular address, to ([to]) the familiar or intimate ‘you’ and šoma ([∫oma:]) the deferential or formal ‘you’ (historically the second person plural but now also used as second person singular). Moreover, Persian is a pro-drop language, so the interaction between address pronouns and agreement marking on the verb must be taken into account. Another significant feature of colloquial Persian is a hybrid usage of the overt deferential second person pronoun and informal agreement forming a mismatch construction (i.e. šoma with 2s verb agreement) and intra-speaker pronominal address switches that occur between the deferential and casual pronominal address forms. Those deviations from the prescribed forms and/or distribution of the address pronouns are very interesting aspects that may show different levels of politeness even in one utterance. Consequently, this research examines spontaneous data looking at the sociolinguistic distributions and the pragmatic functions of pronominal address forms in contemporary Persian language and politeness synchronically. Three types of spontaneous data were collected for the purpose of analysis: a) participant observation, b) natural media conversations and c) sociolinguistic interviews with Persian speakers. In this study, the quantitative analysis investigates the correlation of pronominal address forms with extralinguistic factors such as age and gender of speaker and addressee in the interactional data. The qualitative analysis sheds light on how pronominal address forms and their variation encode communicative strategies in face-to-face interactions. Based on triangulation of quantitative and qualitative results with sociolinguistic interviews, I propose a dynamic model of indexicality for Persian pronominal address forms, which accommodates different forms and functions of address pronouns in interactional stances.

The idea that Canada consists of “two solitudes” (MacLennan, 1945), according to which the two dominant (English and French) linguistic groups live in separate worlds with little interaction or communication, has also received attention in sociolinguistic circles (e.g. Heller, 1999). This thesis examines this claim further, by comparing the content of English and French Canadian newspapers. More specifically, the thesis compares how English and French serve different purposes in three coexisting conceptualisations of national identity in Canada: Quebec national identity, English Canadian national identity, and pan-Canadian national identity. In each corresponding national identity discourse, the nation and its language(s) are imagined differently. With a corpus of 7.5 million words in English and 3.5 million words in French, the thesis employs corpus linguistics and discourse analysis tools to test the salience of these ideologies and discourses, as well as to compare and contrast findings across languages. Adopting the theoretical framework of language ideologies (e.g. Woolard, 1998; Milani and Johnson, 2008), it seeks to contextualise languages with regard to discourses of national identity. In other words, the thesis compares and contrasts language ideology findings within the three discourses examined. More specifically, three research questions are addressed: (1) How do the French and English Canadian media discursively represent languages and language issues in the news? (2) How do these representations differ? (3) How do the different representations relate to understandings of national identity in Canada? The findings indicate that French and English serve predominantly different purposes, thus helping to reinforce the image of a Canada comprising “two solitudes”.

Using the combined approach of Variationist Sociolinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, this thesis undertakes the classification and analysis of certain prepositions in spoken Quebec French. The study examines 21 interviews that make up part of the Corpus de français parlé au Québec (CFPQ). The aim of this thesis is to examine the use of the variables expressing the concept of ‘possession’, and those equivalent to English before/in front of and after/behind. These three variables are represented as (POSS), (ANTE) and (POST). An initial quantification of the variants is carried out, which establishes the contexts of production, and helps determine the areas of linguistic analysis to be explored. For the (POSS) variable, the data is examined in terms of linguistic factors such as the reference of the possessor, the avoidance of hiatus, and inalienable/alienable possession. Interpersonal variation is also considered, including age and gender in addition to level of education. From the Cognitive Linguistic perspective, we investigate ‘reference point theory’ and how it can shed light on the alternation between the variants. The (ANTE) and (POST) variables are studied in terms of the type of reference (i.e. locative or temporal), the locating noun category, and the age, sex, and level of education of the speakers. The Cognitive Linguistic theory of ‘subjectification’ is also considered for these two variables. For the (POSS) variable, the reference of the possessor and the level of education are seen to be important factors for the use of possessive à. In addition, the ‘reference point theory’ contributes to our understanding of the use of this variant. With the (ANTE) and (POST) variables certain variants are seen to be employed both with and without an overt complement. The variant devant is predominantly found in contexts involving narrative discourse, and the variants en avant and en avant de are preferred for locative reference. Once again, the Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach highlights the possibility that the difference in variant choice is linked to the speakers’ cognitive construal of the situation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-254). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ruprecht-Karl-Universität zu Heidelberg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-212).