The purpose of this project is to understand how humor works in expert-novice identity construction in podcasts. I employ a Community of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1989) framework to examine the social hierarchy among the participants of a regular podcast. I am particularly concerned with uncovering how novice members construct themselves and are constructed by expert members through humor, as well as how expert members socialize novice members to participate in the kinds of humor practices that index membership in the Community of Practice (CoP). Rooster Teeth is an internet-based entertainment production company. They produce a weekly podcast which they make available for free on the internet. The podcast participants represent a small CoP with expert/novice differentiation. Combining a corpus linguistic approach with an ethnographic approach, I collected, transcribed, and studied several podcasts that were recorded over a two-year period, beginning with the first few podcasts where founding members established the practices and their roles as experts. Then, I examine the performances of three novices over time. Two of them follow a periphery to core trajectory and become regular members of the podcast while one remained on the periphery. I discovered that teasing and modeling are the primary tools that the experts use to socialize novices and that within Rooster Teeth, novices have the power to negotiate practice from the periphery of the community. This study demonstrates the power that novices may wield within CoPs, and reveals how powerful a socializing tool humor can be.

This study, undertaken within the field of interlanguage pragmatics, investigates the kinds of pragmatic failures observed among tertiary level foreign learners of Japanese and also seeks to find reasons to help explain the occurrence of these failures. The focus of the study is on the data generated from a role play where a student has to borrow a book from their Japanese teacher. The primary role play is performed by nine beginner level learners of Japanese studying at an Australian university, but the role play is also performed by ten Japanese native speakers in order to determine what is normative for native speakers in this situation. Unlike previous studies in this area, this research collects kinesic non-verbal data in addition to linguistic data. The data is analysed using Thomas's (1983) concept of pragmatic failure, and Brown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) politeness theory. The study also considers whether Japanese native speakers evenly evaluate the role play performances of the Japanese learners. Despite difficulties in the application of these linguistic theories to beginner level learners, a number of sociopragmatic failures and one pragmalinguistic failure are observed in the role play performances of the Japanese learners. These are partially explained by a lack of instruction, nervousness in performing the role play and the learners' limited proficiency in the Japanese language. Inconsistencies are also observed in the way that JNS participants evaluate the role play performances of the JFL learners.

The main aim of this thesis is to gain a deep understanding of the meanings of Korean conjunctive verbal suffixes from a pragmatic viewpoint, using real, not constructed data. In order to attain the purpose, this thesis conducts an in-depth analysis of the nature of the meanings, and the use, of six Korean conjunctive verbal suffixes: -ko, -nuntey, -nikka, -se, -ciman, and -to. The term the use refers to the truth-functionality of suffixes, i.e., whether they conjoin or disjoin the two propositions, which are recovered from two segments, truth-functionally. The data are obtained from 360 minutes of audio-taped Korean natural conversations. It adopts as its reasoning tool four major pragmatic theories - Gricean theory, neo-Gricean theory, Relevance Theory, and Default Semantics. However, it does not use the data to compare the four theories. The thesis emphasises how to elucidate the meanings of Korean conjunctive verbal suffixes that modern pragmatic theories cannot neatly explain. In Chapter 1 previous approaches on the six suffixes are analysed. It is pointed out that while these studies correctly equate the meanings of a given suffix with propositional relations that obtain between the two segments (linked by the suffix), they fail to see the importance of the use of the suffix. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the four pragmatic theories. The focus is on strengths and weaknesses of the four theories. In Chapter 3, we introduce propositional relations and the notions of encoding and inferred. What is meant by conjoining and disjoining truth-conditionally is also explained. Chapter 4 specifies the data. In Chapter 5, propositional relations between two propositions which are recovered from two conjoined segments are characterised. Chapter 6 applies the scope test to meanings of the six suffixes and distinguishes encoded and inferred meanings. It discusses encoded meanings of the six suffixes, which conjoin the two propositions truth-functionally, and discusses inferred meanings of only four of the six suffixes, which disjoin the two propositions truthfunctionally. In Chapter 7, we discuss the nature of the meanings of the six suffixes from two theoretical angles, Relevance Theory and Default Semantics, and in particular we argue against a unitary procedure hypothesis. Chapter 8 concludes the thesis and also includes suggestions for future studies.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Center for Language Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-28).

To lure potential customers to buy a holiday away from home, most marketers incorporate certain semantic and pragmatic features into their promotional material: words and images are chosen with utmost care. The present study is conducted in order to reveal these semantic and pragmatic features and equally, to show how they highlight the concept of “magic”.This research is based on responses from six different interviews in which the interviewees had to describe twelve key words and key phrases taken from twelve tourism advertisements, in and out of context. Secondary material further consists of publications dealing with the areas of linguistics, advertising and tourism.The conclusion of this research will reveal that the impact of tourism advertisements depends on agreement between various semantic and pragmatic elements rather than implementation of individual semantic and pragmatic features per se. In other words, all the semantic and pragmatic elements (linguistic and non-linguistic content) have to reinforce one another, acknowledging common ground and meeting the reader's pre-existing assumptions. Hence, for an advertisement to avoid ambiguity it has to be relevance-governed, delivering just what is necessary to ensure that the reader is able to decode the message: that one should leave the ordinary and travel to a temporary, yet seemingly magical holiday destination.

<p>This dissertation investigates the text of Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and its history, how it changed over time. This dissertation performs a stemmatic analysis of 92 witnesses to the text of Galatians, using cladistic methods developed by computational biologists, to construct an unoriented stemma of the textual tradition. The stemma is then oriented based on the internal evidence of textual variants. After the stemma is oriented, the textual variants near the base of the stemma are examined and the text of Galatians is established based on stemmatic and eclectic principles. In addition, two branches of the textual tradition, the Western and the Eastern-Byzantine, are studied to assess the nature of textual variation in their history. This study reaches the conclusion that a modified stemmatic approach is an effective way to study both the text of a New Testament book and its history.</p> / Dissertation

Revision of dissertation (Ph.D)--State University of New York, Buffalo - "Demonstratives in cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective". / Includes index. Includes bibliographical references at the end of each section.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-189).

This dissertation focuses on two aspects of expressive affixes: their morphological/typological properties and their semantics. With regard to the former, it shows that the expressive morphology of many languages (including Bantu, West Atlantic, Walman, Sanskrit, English, Romance, Slavic, and others), has the following properties: 1) it is systematically anomalous when compared to plain morphology, or the ordinary processes of word-formation and inflection. From this, it follows that many familiar morphological arguments that adduce the data of expressive morphology ought to be reconsidered; and 2) it is far more pervasive than has been traditionally thought. For example, the Sanskrit preverb, and the Indo-European aspectual prefix/particle generally, are shown to have systematically expressive functions. With respect to the semantics of expressive affixes, it develops a novel multidimensional account, in the sense of Potts (2005, 2007), of Spanish "connotative affixes," which can simultaneously convey descriptive and expressive meaning. It shows that their descriptive meaning is that of a gradable adjective, viewed as a degree relation which includes a measure function, in the sense of Kennedy (1997). The expressive meanings of connotative affixes, and expressives generally, arise as they manipulate the middle coordinate, <b>I</b>, of expressive indices which, it is proposed, is inherently specified on all lexical items and canonically set to "neutral." It introduces a new mechanism, <b>AFF</b>, which is an algebraic operation for manipulating <b>I</b>, and which accounts for the well-known, and seemingly "contradictory," range of meanings that expressive affixes can express. Whereas prior work assumes that expressive affixes are inherently polysemous, this approach derives their many attested meanings and functions (e.g., "small," "young," "bad," deprecation, appreciation, hypocorism, intensification/exactness, and attenuation/approximation, as well as pragmatic effects like illocutionary mitigation) compositionally, from the interactions of their multidimensionality with the meanings of the roots to which they attach.

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts