My dissertation argues that in his Notebooks and his fiction Hawthorne experiments with theories of language posited by his contemporaries, showing how the impossibility of clearly distinguishing between literal and figurative meanings indicates a similar lack of distinct boundaries between realism and allegory, history and fiction, and ultimately nature and spirit. The intense interest in the origins and nature of language in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century produced a number of theories about the origins of language and about its relation to the physical world and to spiritual truth. Emerson and the Transcendentalists believed that language mediated between nature and spirit, revealing their unity. On the other hand, empiricists such as A. B. Johnson argued that language is a system separate from 'truth' and from 'Creation.' Hawthorne's position is somewhere between these two, similar to the views of Horace Bushnell, who finds language, nature, and spirit connected by a 'vast analogy,' but also finds the analogy 'mysterious' and the correspondences between physical and spiritual worlds inexact I discuss briefly the various nineteenth-century American theories about language and analyze passages from Hawthorne's Notebooks that address the linguistic and philosophical issues raised by the language theories of his contemporaries. Then I examine ways in which Hawthorne experiments with these theories, first in three short stories, 'Egotism; Or, The Bosom-Serpent,' 'Ethan Brand,' 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' and then in The Scarlet Letter. He particularly focuses on relations between literal and figurative meaning, between realism and allegory, and on the possible correspondence, raised by some of his contemporaries, between literal/figurative relations and physical/spiritual relations. In addition, in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne also raises the issue of the relations of literal and figurative meaning to relations between history and fiction. At the same time, Hawthorne always indicates ways in which perspective guides the determination of meaning. Thus, my study moves from an investigation of the complex context of language study in the mid-nineteenth century, connected as it is to theological, literary, scientific, and political contexts, to Hawthorne's explorations of the implications and ramifications of the language theories of his contemporaries / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

This study documents variation in the French of Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes, Louisiana, seeking possible correspondence between language variation and ethnicity or geographic origin of the speaker. In doing so the study seeks to document the French of a long-neglected Francophone community, the American Indians of South Louisiana. Both general and scholarly presentations of francophone Louisiana have tended to stress the Acadian ancestry of Louisiana French, thereby misrepresenting the complexity of Louisiana's linguistic and ethnic makeup. Native American francophones have been particularly neglected by researchers, under the assumption, untested, that they have fully assimilated to their white (Cajun) neighbours, including the adoption a French identical to theirs in the 19th century as a result of extensive contact and intermarriage The study is based on extensive ethnolinguistic fieldwork conducted over a nearly three-year period from January of 2006 until the fall of 2008. Data were collected in two parts. The first was an extensive sociolinguistic interview, comprising a translation exercise and a long sociolinguistic questionnaire that collected a sample of casual speech in addition to demographic information. The second was a perception exercise in which informants were asked to listen to sound clips and guess the ethnic and regional affiliation of the speaker. Both these elements were buttressed by extensive participant observation The results reveal a complex interplay between ethnic and geographic variation in the region. While no features emerged that were unique to Louisiana (whether to Indians or Cajuns), a general pattern exists that distinguishes Indians from Cajuns and links the Indian communities to each other. Moreover, there is additional variation within both the Indian and Cajun communities, with Indians attesting more internal variation than Cajuns and each Indian community distinguishing itself in some way---if not several ways---from the others. The town of Dulac/Grand Caillou further emerged as the source of many of the Indian patterns of speech. Finally, the perception test revealed a tendency within the area to minimize the importance of recognized variation, and moreover revealed a possible lowering of long-held barriers between ethnic groups in the region / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation is composed of two essays on international aspects of public finance. The objective is to carry the theoretical analysis of income tax evasion, and fiscal competition into an international context The first essay models income tax evasion as a part of a portfolio choice between domestic and foreign investment. The latter is termed as 'capital flight' because of its illicit character. As opposed to the previous models of tax evasion, this model recognizes the non-simultaneity of tax evasion and portfolio decisions in a two-stage setting. The transactions costs are explicitly modelled, and the uncertainty about the returns of domestic and foreign investments is introduced, as an addition to the audit uncertainty. It is found that an increase in government enforcement might be ineffective at reducing tax evasion and capital flight; it might even exacerbate the problem under some specified conditions. The change at the tax revenue of the government and the change at the amount of tax evaded are also unpredictable, and depend on the relation between the individual's risk-taking characteristics and the enforcement parameters The second essay models fiscal competition for a multinational corporation (MNC) as a game between two host countries. In a world of certainty, the size of the host's tax increases with the ratio of the site's inherent profits to the MNC's zero; the winning host must subsidize the MNC to the extent of its benefits. When the countries are not sure of the value of their sites, then they decrease their subsidy offers to the MNC as their uncertainty increases. The intuition is that each country can lower its subsidy offer without the certain knowledge that it will drive the firm to its rival. Like the silent master of a cartel, uncertainty prevents fiscal competition between similar countries from driving their returns to zero / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

This thesis includes three essays which examine different aspects of the relationship between institutions and firms in which they invest taking into consideration objective functions of institutions' managers. First, shareholder-initiated proposals are examined to understand the objectives of institutions that pursue this type of shareholder activism and the role of ownership structure in determining the outcome. We find that a sponsor's identity and a firm's ownership structure are important in determining the outcome of a proposal. Large institutions pressure management not to compromise on value decreasing proposals. Furthermore, sponsors who are perceived to have different objectives from other shareholders receive less voter support Second, this thesis investigates the valuation effects associated with objective functions of institutions' managers by examining how the cross-sectional variation in private and public pension fund ownership affect the cross-sectional variation in relative firm value (industry-adjusted Tobin's Q). Using data for a sample of Fortune 500 firms, we find that relative firm value is positively related to ownership by private pension funds and negatively related to ownership by public funds that publicly target firms Finally, this thesis studies firm performance around potential increases in institutional ownership by examining a sample of firms announcing private placements of equity. We find a negative relation between increases in institutional ownership and market reaction. We also find that investors in the private placement have a positive long-term performance afterward via a discounted purchase price while the firm has a negative long-term performance Taken together, these results suggest that institutional investors are not homogeneous, and their incentives are not necessarily aligned with those of other shareholders. When objective functions of institutions' managers place more importance on performance, incentives are more aligned with wealth maximization. This benefits other shareholders when they are acting as existing shareholders. However, it can be at the expense of existing shareholders when they are acting as new shareholders as in the case of private placements. Less importance on performance, on the other hand, leads to objective functions that can be in conflict with the objective function of shareholders / acase@tulane.edu

A distinction has long been recognized between the realistic novel and the prose romance. I argue that there is a form of prose fiction which resembles the romance in several ways but which cannot be classified as a romance according to prevalent theories mainly because it has a strong ethical center and because it is not a distinctly American form as Richard Chase, in The American Novel and Its Tradition, and others have argued. The problem goes beyond the controversy about national temperament begun by Chase to the larger question of fictional forms and our criteria for judging them. Authors who have written novels of this kind, which I call the ethical novel, include Hawthorne, Hardy, James, Lawrence, and Faulkner. This different kind of novel uses certain elements of the romance to demonstrate that we are inevitably part of a moral and ethical system, that in experience each and every action has moral and ethical significance. It is the temperamental quality of the author's mind, completely outside the question of national temperament, that gives this kind of novel its thematic and structural character. A close reading of a major novel of each author, The Scarlet Letter, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, and Light in August respectively, demonstrates that the ethical center and the fictional devices used to express it (from narrative voice to prose style) are the sources of the unity and therefore the strength of the novel / acase@tulane.edu