Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The concept of community development is founded on the premise that changes in the living conditions of people are best effected by the people themselves. The term community evokes the idea of a homogeneous social group who can recognise their common interests and work together harmoniously for their common good. The concerns of the leading development agents and donors in the past two decades have been on empowering communities to participate in their own development by taking control of decisions and initiatives that seek to improve their living conditions. The zeal to address these concerns has in the past decade been pushed with such resounding statements that people’s participation in development projects has not only been seen as a basic human right, but also as an imperative condition for human survival. It has been strongly argued in the UNDP reports that the overall development strategy is to enable people to gain access to a much broader range of opportunities.From this perspective, development as a social activity seeks to ensconce economic liberalisation, freedom of association, good governance and access to free market economy as the guiding tenets of an improved life in all communities in the world. The realization of this dream posed a major challenge to many governments in the Third World and the 1980s saw the emergence of ‘associational revolution’ – the proliferation of small-scale non governmental organizations (NGOs) with relative autonomy from the state. The mainstream development agencies perceived the NGOs as the best instruments to instigate changes in the living conditions of the poor and the disadvantaged people. For this reason, NGOs became increasingly instrumental in implementing development objectives in the rural and disadvantaged communities. Development in this sense consists of processes in which various groups are stimulated to improve aspects of their lives particularly by people from outside their community. This has drawn attention to how these outsider- development agents communicate development information particularly due to the sociolinguistic situation in many rural African communities. The real concern is with is that the target majority of the people in the rural areas are not speakers of the dominant languages of the development discourse, in most cases this is the official foreign languages taught in schools.Communication is a fundamental part in community development programmes and language emerges as a key factor in effective communication and implementation of these programmes. While it is evident that social interactions are sustained by agreeable communicative principles, the role of language and the different mode of communication applied to development interventions have received very little attention from the parties concerned. This has yielded detrimental repercussions in the quality of interaction at the grassroots level. More often than not, it is assumed that once there is a common language, effective communication will take place and for this reason language use and mode of communication are never given much thought in the field of development interaction. / South Africa

Sociolinguists have discussed problematic language ideologies, such as Standard Language Ideology (Lippi-Green 1997) extensively and social perceptions of Standard English in the U.S and U.K are well documented. However, most work in this area has focused on perceptions of dialects within national contexts. This study makes a novel contribution to the study of language attitudes, investigating perceptions of British regional dialects within the U.S. A survey was created to gauge perceptions of five British regional dialects (Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, London). 49 survey participants listened to audio clips of British regional dialect speakers and then completed a mapping activity, answered perception questions, and ranked each speaker on specific qualities. Results showed that speaker region had a significant effect on perception of almost all variables at a statistically significant rate, despite unfamiliarity with all but the London dialect. Results suggest that although participants are largely unfamiliar with varieties of English in England outside of London, they assessed them by recruiting pre-existing stereotypes about vernacular dialects.

Early in her reign, in response to Parliament's formal requests that she marry and secure the succession, Elizabeth calls herself the "mother of England." Her metaphorical maternity signals a rhetorical transaction between Elizabeth and her people that stretches across time, space, and genre; writers respond to Elizabeth by modifying the metaphor in order to shape her behavior. Conceptual blending theory, developed by cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, provides language to articulate the complexities of Elizabeth's metaphor—to understand how language, culture, and cognition interact to create and modify meaning. Furthering the work of critics who analyze Elizabeth's self-presentation and in light of Amy Cook's work with conceptual blending theory and theater, this dissertation examines Elizabeth's maternal metaphor in her speeches and considers Sidney's Arcadia (c. 1581-82, 1584; published in 1590), Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (c. 1588), and Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) as examples of responses to and explorations of Elizabeth's mother–queen blend. By manipulating the mother–queen metaphor in various ways, these writers urge Elizabeth to fulfill her responsibilities as a figurative mother: first, through actual marriage and motherhood, and later, as Elizabeth's age led to infertility, by naming an heir. Elizabeth's attempts to control her image through metaphor were thwarted by the very nature of her method. This examination of her metaphor in the context of imaginative writing reveals the malleability of Elizabeth's carefully crafted image.

The democratization of new media technologies, particularly the software tools though which "content" can be manipulated, has invited a seemingly vast array of modes through which people can express themselves. Conversations in fan studies, for example, cite the novel ways in which new media allow fans to alter texts in the expression of their subcultural needs, while theorizations of media often reverse the paradigm by arguing how advances in technology will revolutionize how we interact with, and hence, know the world. Frequently overlooked are the ways in which these technologies and communities co-construct engagement and the extent to which this engagement spurs novel ways of interaction. This dissertation addresses these problems by theorizing the role of the medium as a ludic negotiation between text and fan, informed--but not determined--by the rules and strictures that construct both these discrete media artifacts and the communities in which these texts circulate. Nowhere are these concerns more evident than in the subcultural realm of anime fan translations, where an eclectic blend of tech-savvy, Japanese language proficient, culturally competent individuals from different backgrounds converge to form groups who have self-nominated themselves to spread anime through timely, efficient, and accurate translations. To be successful, they must navigate multiple linguistic and cultural currents as they move between Japanese and their target language, deftly avoid running aground on the shores that structure the boundaries of container media, all the while remaining mindful of ideological and subcultural discursive shoals as they scan the horizon for alternate paths to their translation goal. These fan translators are, to be less dramatic, limited in the types of translations they can provide by the formal properties of the selected medium, but these limitations should be conceived as a generative process motivating translators to seek novel ways of engagement with the medium to meet both their translation needs and the needs of the communities in which their translations circulate.

The purpose of this study is to investigate historical and linguistic forces that interact to undermine school achievement in Haiti. From a sociocultural perspective, this study explores the social, political, and historical forces that mediate language ideology and practices in Haitian schools and how such ideology and practices influence students' academic achievement. This study analyzes the role of French and Creole in schools and investigates the linguistic tensions in the Haitian society where Creole, the home language of both students and teachers and the only language broadly used in the country, is relegated to secondary importance in education and other institutional settings. The study relies on ethnographic data collected in a third grade, a fourth grade, a fifth grade, and a sixth grade classroom in a private and a public school in a semi-urban area around the capital city of Haiti as well as data collected in different sectors of the society (e.g. state and private institutions). Building upon the literature regarding classroom discourses and the literature on sociocultural theory, coloniality, language ideology, and symbolic domination, this study problematizes language and educational practices in Haiti and offers recommendations for rebuilding Haiti's educational system in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of January 12th 2010. Given the role of students' home language in their instruction, this study argues that any effort aiming the revitalization of the school system in Haiti needs to take into consideration issues related to language in the education system.

À is the prototypical preposition used before city names in French, yet there are reports that, since the mid-20th century, sur also appears in this context in vernacular varieties of European French. To date, research on the choice between à and sur has focused on semantic and pragmatic differences between the two, and has relied on made-up examples, small participant usage surveys, or empirical datasets that were not systematically analyzed. Moreover, the influence of social factors has received only scant attention. This thesis addresses these shortcomings by providing a quantitative, variationist and longitudinal account of à/sur alternations. It asks the following question: Which factors (linguistic and social) can account for prepositional variation before city names in Hexagonal French? The data was drawn from two publicly available corpora of spoken Hexagonal French, representing three locales: the Parisian city-centre, a group of suburban cities surrounding Paris, and the midsize provincial city of Orléans. The speakers (N = 151) were born between 1878 and 1994, providing a mixture of real- and apparent-time perspectives on variation. Following variationist methods, the analysis considers all contexts where à/sur variation is possible (N = 2542) and seeks to elucidate the variable grammar. Results indicate important differences between the three areas under study, both in terms of social patterns and in terms of linguistic constraints. In Paris, the use of sur is restricted to a few speakers and a few linguistic contexts, and is overall very infrequent. In the suburbs and Orléans, sur is more widely attested across speakers and contexts, but it remains a minority variant which seems to be on the decline, especially in the suburbs. Further, in Orléans, the variable grammar is less linguistically constrained, suggesting a trajectory of geographic diffusion. Overall, the quantitative findings support some of the semantic and pragmatic hypotheses proposed in earlier work while shedding light on how geographic, social and linguistic factors combine to explain a phenomenon of variation that has never been studied using variationist methods before. / Graduate / 2022-07-19

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博士(学術) / 甲第636号 / 186 p. / Hitotsubashi University(一橋大学)

Computer gaming is an important and growing form of popular media that has many cognitive and social benefits for players. It has also developed a reputation for being a white-male pastime and barring access for people who fall outside of that social grouping. While statistics show that this is increasingly not the case, certain games, particularly those that fall under the category of eSports, do attract largely male player bases. League of Legends is one such game. With Butler's Performativity Theory as a theoretical starting point, a qualitative sociolinguistic study was undertaken into the gendered dynamics of a male-dominated clan of League of Legends players. The data, collected primarily via audio-recordings of player interactions between games, is used as the basis for a sociolinguistic case study that looks at how performativity plays itself out in an environment that is characterised by a strong gender bias. With a focus on a Coloured female gamer in a League of Legends team, this paper explores the ways in which she and her teammates construct their own genders within this particular sociolinguistic context. The relationship between identity and desire, which has been a point of debate in sociolinguistics, is discussed in the context of the clan's interactions. Here I focus on the debate between Cameron and Kulick on the one hand and Bucholtz and Hall on the other. The paper looks into ways in which desire and identity interact with each other during sociolinguistic interaction. Moreover, issues around the construction of gender, race and sexuality are central to the study. The paper uses the data collected to look into the ways that social identities are collaboratively constructed, and contested. The discussion shows that while the team members replicate the gender binary, they do so by simultaneously reifying and challenging gendered norms. The study provides a compelling look into the ways in which gender identities are played with in interaction, and sheds some light on the fluidity of performative identity while simultaneously sketching out the ways that such performance is limited by its environment.

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