This study of the Elizabethan influences remaining in the spoken language of the people of Allen County, Kentucky, is an outgrowth of discussion in the English classes of Dr. Gordon Wilson, Western Kentucky State Teachers College, concerning the folklore of the present-day rural people of Kentucky. I have endeavored to give a true picture of the picturesque language of the farming people as they go about their every-day business of making a living, with particular emphasis upon those words and usages that are no longer considered in good use.

A biblical passage from the Old Testament book of I Samuel is studied from the perspective of narrative, folktale, and proverb. The narrative account of Saul's becoming the first king of Israel, as depicted in I Sam. 9:1-10:16, is examined and found to be an example of traditional folk narrative. Using the work of Stith Thompson and Axel Olrik, the Saul narrative yields evidence indicating it is composed of traditional motifs and arranged in a manner reflecting traditional interpretation. Within the larger Hebrew narrative of the I Sam. 9:1-10:16 passage there is lodged a folktale. The folktale is found interspersed with other narrative material composed and collected by the biblical editor. The folktale, when singled out, is located in I Sam. 9:1-14, 18-19, 22-24; 10:2-4, 9, 14-16a. Identifying the folktale in the Saul narrative is done by using the work of Bascom, a folklorist, and Gressman, a biblical scholar. A proverb appears within the bounds of the I Sam. 9:1-10:16 passage in 10:10-13. After presenting several proverb definitions, attention is focused on the biblical equivalent of a proverb--mashal. The characteristics of proverbs are applied to the mashal about Saul and the mashal is shown to be a traditional proverb. Working with the tools of folklorists and biblical scholars is both necessary and instructive when studying biblical literature from the standpoint of narrative.

This dissertation demonstrates that notions of language and identity are not entirely about personal characteristics (what a person is born with, what is "in his blood"), nor are they entirely about agency (how a person chooses to present herself). Instead, they are largely about markets and about the multiple positionings of social actors within markets that are structured by ideologies of the nation state, immigration and the globalized new economy. This critical perspective challenges the normalized view that immigrant (diasporic) communities are simply natural social groupings or depoliticized transplantations of distinct ethnolinguistic units from their "homeland". They are, like language and identity, carefully constructed and managed social projects that are shaped by forces from within and from without. In Canada, the conditions for the institutionalization and (re)production of ethnolinguistic differences, which also make and mark class relations, are strengthened by the state’s multiculturalist policy. The Portuguese-Canadian community is one such ethnolinguistic market and the goal of this research is to examine which forms of portugueseness dominate the market, why and with what consequences for whom. Building from an ethnographic and critical sociolinguistic approach (Bourdieu 1977, Heller 2002), the qualitative data behind this research was produced through a two-year ethnography, participant observations and semi-structured interviews drawing primarily from six second-generation Portuguese-Canadians and members of their social networks. The findings suggest that the kind of portugueseness that dominates the Portuguese-Canadian market is one from Mainland Portugal; one that is folklorized, patriarchal, and that promotes (Mainland) Portuguese monolingualism and false cultural homogeneity. A consequence of this sociolinguistic structuration is a division between Azoreans and Mainlanders who make up two parts of the same Portuguese market; partners in conflict over the legitimacy and value of their linguistic and social capital. Furthermore, the inheritors of this market, the second and subsequent generations, navigate discursive spaces filled with contradictions that often marginalize them. Their experiences highlight strategic mobilizations of Portuguese language and identity, as well as the consequences of having delegitimized cultural and linguistic capital. In short, this dissertation highlights the productive tensions between structure and agency, between uniformity and variability, and between exclusion and inclusion.

This dissertation demonstrates that notions of language and identity are not entirely about personal characteristics (what a person is born with, what is "in his blood"), nor are they entirely about agency (how a person chooses to present herself). Instead, they are largely about markets and about the multiple positionings of social actors within markets that are structured by ideologies of the nation state, immigration and the globalized new economy. This critical perspective challenges the normalized view that immigrant (diasporic) communities are simply natural social groupings or depoliticized transplantations of distinct ethnolinguistic units from their "homeland". They are, like language and identity, carefully constructed and managed social projects that are shaped by forces from within and from without. In Canada, the conditions for the institutionalization and (re)production of ethnolinguistic differences, which also make and mark class relations, are strengthened by the state’s multiculturalist policy. The Portuguese-Canadian community is one such ethnolinguistic market and the goal of this research is to examine which forms of portugueseness dominate the market, why and with what consequences for whom. Building from an ethnographic and critical sociolinguistic approach (Bourdieu 1977, Heller 2002), the qualitative data behind this research was produced through a two-year ethnography, participant observations and semi-structured interviews drawing primarily from six second-generation Portuguese-Canadians and members of their social networks. The findings suggest that the kind of portugueseness that dominates the Portuguese-Canadian market is one from Mainland Portugal; one that is folklorized, patriarchal, and that promotes (Mainland) Portuguese monolingualism and false cultural homogeneity. A consequence of this sociolinguistic structuration is a division between Azoreans and Mainlanders who make up two parts of the same Portuguese market; partners in conflict over the legitimacy and value of their linguistic and social capital. Furthermore, the inheritors of this market, the second and subsequent generations, navigate discursive spaces filled with contradictions that often marginalize them. Their experiences highlight strategic mobilizations of Portuguese language and identity, as well as the consequences of having delegitimized cultural and linguistic capital. In short, this dissertation highlights the productive tensions between structure and agency, between uniformity and variability, and between exclusion and inclusion.

In this paper I explore the role of ambiguity in the creation of meaning in the Urdu ghazal. Ghazal, the predominant genre of Urdu poetry, consists of a series of thematically unrelated yet metrically and prosodically related couplets, each densely packed with multiple and complex meanings. Ambiguity, both lexical and grammatical, is a key technique in the poetics of this genre. Here I not only analyze the different ways ambiguity manifests itself but also the way it has historically been and continues to be mobilized by poets and practitioners of the genre to further imbue each couplet with culture-specific, socially relevant meanings. Breaking with previous approaches to Urdu poetry and poetics, I examine ambiguity in the ghazal with reference to theoretical traditions in linguistic anthropology of ethnopoetics, performance and verbal art, and ethnographic examination of poetic praxis. Finally, addressing various phenomenologies of language, I propose a phenomenological turn in the study of this poetry in order to better theorize processes of meaning creation on both an individual and wider ethnographic level. / text

Recently, network theory has been used to analyze the formal syntactic and semantic properties of written texts to explain the development of language (Solé et al. 2005). While foundational, this approach neglects the social and cultural pressures affecting language in interaction, a central focus of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (Hymes 1974, Goffman 1981, Gumperz 1982, Goodwin 2006). The influential work of M.M. Bakhtin (1981) frames speech as an emergent social process inflected by shifting patterns of negotiated meanings. As Hill (1986) observed "the enormous impact of Bakhtin's work, already felt with earthquake strength in literary studies...[is] now beginning to appear with equal force in the anthropology of language" (1986: 89).The aim of this research is to test the conjecture that by expanding the frame of language network analysis to include the social context of speech, the emergent properties of heteroglossia predicted by Bakhtin will be clarified. This analysis builds on prior research on language in interaction, drawing from sociolinguistic analysis (Sacks et al. 1974, Atkinson & Heritage 1984), word frequency (Nelson et al. 1998, Mendoza-Denton 2003), and network analysis (Bearman & Stovel 2000, de Nooy et al. 2005, Solé et al. 2005, Mehler 2010).According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia emerges as speakers "appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention" (1981:428). This multi-sited doctoral research investigates the speech of butchers through participant observation, work place interactions and interviews, with a focus on references to blood. Some of the semantic features that become affixed to blood are due to historical and popular culture understandings of this signifier, while other salient features derive from subject positionality and community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991). This work provides a snapshot of all of these processes at work in the speech of an occupational community of American butchers. The results of this analysis show that including the social context has significant effects on the conceptualization of both semantic and social networks, in comparison with networks derived exclusively from written texts.

Historically, American Sign Language (an aspect of Deaf culture) has been rendered invisible in mainstream hearing society. Today, ASL’s popularity is evidenced in an ethnolinguistic renaissance; more second language learners pursue an interest in ASL than ever before. Nonetheless, Deaf and hearing people alike express concern about ASL’s place in hearing culture. This qualitative study engages ethnographic methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviewing as well as popular media analysis to understand language ideologies (ideas and objectives concerning roles of language in society) hearing and Deaf Signers hold about motivations and practices of other hearing Signers. Although most hearing ASLers identify as apolitical students genuinely seeking to build bridges between disparate communities, I argue that ASLers are most concerned with hearing Signers’ colonization of the language through commoditization and cultural appropriation.

This dissertation explores how a solitary writer becomes a social writer, entering into the industrial and community relations of mass publishing. A significant part of this transformation is managed through writing organizations which mediate between the corporate world and individual writers. Despite being one of the most prolific and commercially successful book-markets in a time when both publishing and reading are perceived to be under threat, romance fiction, because of its gendered and classed status, is often neglected by the academy and patronized in the media. Researched through observation of the largest romance writers groups in Canada, which I call City Romance Writers, this dissertation explores how writers’ associations help shape would-be writers into players in the professional market, negotiating the boundaries between professional and amateur, local and global, creative and market-driven. It explores how romance writers organize to manage risk and uncertainty in the publishing industry and how they make claims to legitimacy and authority in the public sphere. Finally, it examines how structures of gender, race and class shape the communities romance writers form and the claims they make. I argue that romance writers’ discourses and practices surrounding writing and publication are a revealing terrain for the exploration of contemporary issues of media production, flexible labour, gender and community. In part because of the particular characteristics of romance writing itself, these themes are also underpinned by the constant presence of love, as a discourse, an activity and a story. While revealing the importance of affective discourses of passion and love in mobilizing writers to embrace their own flexibility, this dissertation also argues that writers’ affective relationship with their writing is not fully contained by capitalism.

This dissertation explores how a solitary writer becomes a social writer, entering into the industrial and community relations of mass publishing. A significant part of this transformation is managed through writing organizations which mediate between the corporate world and individual writers. Despite being one of the most prolific and commercially successful book-markets in a time when both publishing and reading are perceived to be under threat, romance fiction, because of its gendered and classed status, is often neglected by the academy and patronized in the media. Researched through observation of the largest romance writers groups in Canada, which I call City Romance Writers, this dissertation explores how writers’ associations help shape would-be writers into players in the professional market, negotiating the boundaries between professional and amateur, local and global, creative and market-driven. It explores how romance writers organize to manage risk and uncertainty in the publishing industry and how they make claims to legitimacy and authority in the public sphere. Finally, it examines how structures of gender, race and class shape the communities romance writers form and the claims they make. I argue that romance writers’ discourses and practices surrounding writing and publication are a revealing terrain for the exploration of contemporary issues of media production, flexible labour, gender and community. In part because of the particular characteristics of romance writing itself, these themes are also underpinned by the constant presence of love, as a discourse, an activity and a story. While revealing the importance of affective discourses of passion and love in mobilizing writers to embrace their own flexibility, this dissertation also argues that writers’ affective relationship with their writing is not fully contained by capitalism.

Most of the innovations of the Tunica language happen in a top-down manner, with a core group of people mostly from outside of the tribe hashing out neologisms, internally consistent rules, and accessible educational materials. While many of the tribal children, especially teenagers, experience interest in learning and participating in cultural traditions such as crafts, storytelling, and powwow, most of the shaping and development of the language has up to this point happened out of their sight. This is beginning to change with multiple strategies to include students more directly in the creation of neologisms, encouragement to take ownership of their language and culture, and attempts to reframe all participants young and old as simultaneously “speakers” and “learners.” Ideologies of identity, language, education, and academic expertise all combine to create this unique Tunica reawakening experience.