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<p>  </p> <p>This study addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by investigating the manifestation of impoliteness through the use of emojis within the online Vietnamese community on social media. The research is guided by three central questions: (1) How do Vietnamese Facebook users use emojis in their posts and comments? (2) How do Vietnamese Facebook users perceive impolite behaviors in cyberspace? and (3). What strategies do Vietnamese speakers employ to express impoliteness with emojis on social media? Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on a corpus of posts and comments on a Facebook showbiz confession page. Results show that facial emojis, particularly those forming homogeneous sequences, are preferred, with laughter-related emojis prominently featured. Additionally, emotive particles, together with expletives, frequently co-occur with emojis, compensating for absent extralinguistic cues in computer-mediated communication. By administering checks using dictionaries, mutual information scores, collocation visualizations, and cosine similarity, a nuanced understanding of impoliteness in CMC was achieved. Religious influences, particularly from Buddhism, were found to play a significant role in shaping Vietnamese impoliteness perception, exemplified by terms such as <em>vô duyên</em> and <em>sân si</em>. A coding scheme informed by findings from the second research question on a sample of 100 first posts and comments in the main corpus was used. The study further substantiates the hypothesis that Vietnamese speakers predominantly employ implicational impoliteness strategies, particularly through multimodal mismatches facilitated by emojis. Conventionalized formulas featuring emojis were infrequent, suggesting a preference for more dynamic and context-specific impoliteness expressions. This research contributes to the refinement of impoliteness theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as providing a foundation for further studies in online discourse and natural language processing. </p>

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Using a case-study design, this qualitative investigation examines individual linguistic identity formation and the development of multiliteracies of two second language (L2) English speakers within the context of the massively multiplayer online role-play gaming (MMORPG) community. The theories and methodologies of this study draw from perspectives of sociolinguistics, digital ethnography, and discourse studies. From October 2021- March 2022, data was collected and consisted of the participants’ personal interviews and their asynchronous computer mediated communications (ACMC) within their respective gaming discussion communities. Data analyses consisted of both qualitative coding procedures of the ACMC data into literacy features and cross examination with participants’ personal interviews. Through these two case studies, this thesis shows how two English L2 gamers- one being Russian L1 and one being both Russian and Ukrainian L1- use linguistically sophisticated employment of digital multiliteracies to express their translocal and individual identities. The findings of these case studies contribute to conceptual understandings of how modern virtual communities of practice mediated by communication technologies act in conjunction with translocal L2 identity formation.

This dissertation describes the language and identity trajectories of twelve purposefully selected heritage Spanish adolescents who were currently studying in a heritage language program within an urban high school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. These twelve students represented six sibling groups and five different nationalities, specifically Dominican, Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican, Salvadorian, and Venezuelan,. The research questions were: 1) How do Hispanic heritage students negotiate their bicultural/bilingual identities?; 2) What is the role of the heritage language in those negotiated identities?; 3) Do these negotiated identities influence their investment to maintain the heritage language?; 4) What are the linguistic manifestations of the Spanish spoken by these bilingual students? Findings of the study revealed that 1) the study participants negotiate their bicultural/bilingual identities in a variety of ways, 2) for some of these students, the heritage language is part of their `out of school' identities, 3) the dominant language ideologies of the school system have had a significant impact on the heritage students' investment in HL practice, and 4) although each participant's identity and linguistic trajectories are distinct, they each have maintained, to a greater or lesser degree, the aspectual preterit/imperfect contrast, and, at the same time have displayed some level of incomplete acquisition of the subjunctive mood. The implications of these findings as they relate to the fields of bilingualism, languages in contact and the developing theory of Heritage Language Acquisition are addressed in the concluding remarks. / Spanish