Thesis (M.ED.) --University of Limpopo, 2009 / The study looks at the attitudes of students towards the use of their source languages at the Turfloop campus, University of Limpopo. The study is aimed at finding out the reasons why students have attitudes towards their source languages, whether these attitudes are negative or positive. More specifically, the research focuses on, among other things, the students‟ attitudes towards their mother tongue as compared to English and their options and beliefs about the use of importance of English is outlined. The survey methods used are questionnaire survey as well as follow-up interview, supplemented by on campus observation. The results are first analysed as a whole, and then split into different according to as set of background variables (gender, year of study, subject studied etc). This analysis indicates that, while English is recognised as the dominant language in South Africa and, more specifically, in the domain of education, some categories of respondents acknowledge the usefulness of their source languages. This is part of a growing set of surveys on the attitudes of university students towards the use of African languages in education, and can be fruitfully compared with similar research at other institutions. Moreover, the results of the present research can be used to inform future decisions regarding language policy in the University of Limpopo.

Thesis (M.A. (Linguistics)) --University of Limpopo, 2011 / This study examines the effectiveness and relevance of Xitsonga at the University of Limpopo, Turfloop Campus. The study argues that as one of the six (6) official languages of Limpopo Province, Xitsonga deserves to be treated with the respect that it deserves. Although Xitsonga enjoys some recognition and support nationally and on campus, the study has discovered that there are problems associated with negative attitudes among Xitsonga speakers as they feel that the use of the English language enables them to be part of a global world. Furthermore, a major stumbling block with regard to the use of Xitsonga at the University of Limpopo Turfloop Campus is that some of its speakers hold a negative attitude towards their language as they prefer the use of English language for academic purposes. This is one reason English is still dominant amongst the student community as it is viewed as the language of the corporate world. However, the study reveals that a large number of respondents now support the idea that Xitsonga should be used in all official communication. Finally, the study recommends the use of Xitsonga in social and educational settings. It also recommends the holding of workshops and cultural activities in order to further promote and revitalise the language and its people, thus widening the circle of its acceptance at the Turfloop Campus of the University of Limpopo and beyond. / the National Research Foundation

This dissertation uses the reading patterns of New York’s earliest elites, including a significant portion of the founding fathers, who checked out books from the New York Society Library (NYSL), to evaluate the shifting meanings of political thought, affiliation, and action in the years between the ratification of the Constitution and the War of 1812. The reading data come from two charging ledgers spanning two periods –1789 to 1792, and 1799 to 1806 – during which a new country was built, relations with foreign nations defined, and contestation over the character of a new democracy was intense. Using novel combinations of text and network analysis, I explore the political nature of reading and the extent to which social, economic, and political positions overlapped with what people read. In the process, I identify the key social and cultural dimensions on which New York, and by extension, American, elite society was politically stratified in its early years.

This dissertation examines women's representations in the Algerian print media. Different methods were used to explore these representations: a questionnaire-based survey, in-depth interviews and a content analysis of data collected from press clippings published between 1996--2006, a period which witnessed major social and political upheavals that impacted women as well as the media. The research was based on hypotheses from the literature on the topic, notably that the media ignore and trivialize women. This study concludes that sexist terms, meanings and processes and sexist assumptions concerning gender roles are pervasive. Masculine generics---exclusionary of women---are dominant. Sexism is not always intended as journalists consider the use of masculine generics normative. Women are also invisible both as objects of news and as news sources This study revealed that sexism in the media and its power in shaping attitudes and views about women continue to elude media professionals. More than half of all respondents disagreed with survey statements related to sexism in the media. This study shows that sexist content is more common in the Arabophone press. But, ironically, the number of Arabophone journalists who disagreed with statements about sexism in the media is higher than the number of Francophone journalists. As a whole, media representations project a patriarchal model of ideal womanhood. Women are portrayed in reductionist restrictive roles and overrepresented as 'helpless victims'. In contrast, women's social and political struggles for full citizenship rights are often overlooked if not ridiculed. While these representations reflect the power structure in society, their repeated playing out 'naturalizes' unequal power relations. Very few journalists challenge dominant representations as ideological positions. The media redeploy the slogans of groups competing for power which made of women their primary battleground. Even the more liberal Francophone press affirms elements of the hegemonic discourse. The oppositional discourse of the women's movement does not pose a significant threat to the dominant discourse because of the differential of power and widespread antagonism against feminism. Part of the Arabophone press adopted the anti-legal reform arguments used by the nationalists against the 1959 French reform and resurrected by the Islamists to suggest that reform efforts were a neo-colonial attack on national identity. These arguments resonate with part of the public because the language of feminism was used in the attack on the Algerian identity and culture. The study shows that journalists are unaware of the involvement of language in setting subject identities, and power relations and of the role they play in passing down and reinforcing the dominant gender ideology. The stronger presence of women in newsrooms has not significantly changed media content with respect to approaches to news stories on 'women's issues'. Women have internalized the masculine-privileging ethos of the newsroom and see the male definition of news as professional practice. Journalists are wary of gender issues and consider that they have other priorities such as fighting for better social and professional conditions, legal protection from government interference and public access to the media. Women who tend to be dominated in the private as well as in the public realm are not seen as being part of 'the public'. A stronger partnership between all those interested in a better future for Algeria can enhance efforts to raise awareness among journalists about gender issues and transform the media from a tool in the hands of the powerful to a tool that enlightens the public and provide citizens with the opportunity to engage in democratic public debate about important issues, including those related to gender. This study is a contribution to these efforts and to the emerging scholarship on gender in the Arab region / acase@tulane.edu

Complaining happens in all cultures, and offers a unique insight into the values, taboos, and communicative practices of a given society. The ways in which complaining is viewed and performed vary drastically not only cross-culturally, but across smaller communal groups and between individuals, too. This dissertation approaches complaining from a multilateral perspective to investigate how individuals in three different language groups – monolingual French speakers, monolingual English speakers, and native English speakers enrolled in upper-division university French courses – perceive and produce complaints as well as the influential role played by social context. In the perception study, the researcher explores how individuals within the examined language groups identify the presence of complaints and perceive their naturalness when presented with contextualized scenarios involving native speakers. In the production study, the researcher examines both the frequency with which individuals complain and the strategies they employ to perform a complaint in various social situations. Additionally, within the production study the researcher examines the frequency with which participants opt out from complaining and their provided rationale for doing so. This dissertation not only identifies a variety of universal linguistic and sociocultural features of complaints, it also uncovers several aspects distinctive to the individual language groups. At the core of this dissertation is the argument that to best understand complaint behavior, researchers should acknowledge the essential influence of social context on both the perception and production of complaints. Above all, future research must consider the complex and dynamic interplay that exists between cross-cultural complaint behaviors and social norms of politeness.

Typescript. Bibliography: leaves 242-251.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Riverside, 1993. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-03, Section: A, page: 0987. Chairman: Eugene N. Anderson, Jr. Includes bibliographical references.

<p>This thesis aims to explore the ways in which space patterns regimes of language use and language attitudes among Cameroonian immigrant children in a primary school in Cape Town. The presence of migrants in any classroom represents a significant challenge from the theoretical as well as practical point of view, given that schools are responsible for both socialization and learning (Gajo &amp / Mondada 1996). Most African countries are going through large-scale migration from rural to urban areas as well as increasing transnational migration due to recent socio-economic and socio-political trends. These flows affect the sociolinguistic economy of the places concerned, not only the individuals within them. Thus immigrants&rsquo / movement into an urban area not only affects their repertoires, as they find themselves confronted with the task of acquiring the communicative resources of the autochthonous population, but also those of the autochthonous population who find themselves confronted with linguistic communicative processes and resources &lsquo / alien&rsquo / to their environment. Similar effects are felt by local educational and other institutions, now faced with learners with widely varying degrees of competence in the required communicative skills. The participants in this study are a group of young migrants from Cameroon where English and French are the two official languages. These learners already have some languages in their repertoire, which may include their mother tongue or either of the two official languages. My focus will be on the multilingual resources of these learners and how they make use of these in the daily life of their new spaces, the school, the homes and community spaces, to construct new social identities.</p>

The aim of the present study is to examine the interactional functions of code-switching in plurilingual conversation, with a particular focus on those related to the elaboration of the social identities of the interlocutors, i. e. their identity work. The adopted analytical model was initiated by Auer, and further developed by Gafaranga, who combined it with the Membership Categorization Analysis elaborated by Sacks. The study is based on a corpus consisting of the audio recorded dinner talk of an Italian-Swedish family whose members use Swedish, Italian and a Ligurian dialect, and focuses on the sequential progression of the talk in interaction, thus based on an approach proper of conversation analysis. The participants create and display their different roles (identities), which are related to both group membership and individuality, a subsequent distinction made by Fant. Code-switching is used as a communicative strategy among the speakers and is used to make relevant identities, as well as a tool for the management of the interaction. The analysis is divided in two distinctive parts: one related to the code-switching connected to the organisational management of the conversation, the other connected to the identity work of the interlocutors. The linguistic codes used within the group are either inclusive (Swedish, Italian) or selective (Ligurian) and the analysis indicates a general inclusion rather than exclusion of interlocutors, as the speakers accommodating to the linguistic preferences and competences of the interlocutor. The speakers, when selecting a code, thus make use of recipient design, a concept worked out by Sacks, Schegloff &amp; Jefferson. They choose code in order to include a particular interlocutor, adjusting to the language preferences of the other. There are some instances of asymmetrical plurilingual conversation, in which the interlocutors maintain different codes, but since the code choice appears to be anticipated by the addressee the interaction runs smoothly between them. As for the direction of the code switch, two different tendencies emerge: one in the switches connected to the identity work of the participants in which the direction of the switches seems to be highly significant. The other in the switches connected to the management of the conversation in which the direction proves to be reversible.

Combining quantitative sociophonetic methods and a qualitative, ethnographic acpproach to the study of language and social relations, my current research program focuses on the role of language in competing hip hop cultures. This research draws on early scholarship in cultural studies (Hebdige 1979), as well as what some have termed post- subcultural studies (Muggleton & Weinzierl 2003). Central to my own work are two theoretical concerns shared by these currents of scholarship, including: (1) How sociohistorical forces (including institutionally-mediated social action) shape cultural frameworks for symbolically staking out a position in the social landscape (2) How prominent social positioning in local cultral hierarchies shapes popular ideas regarding such intersecting notions as authentcity and indigeneity Regarding the first of these concerns, I examine how popular hip hop artists reflexively bring into focus a repertoire of spatialized social practices by rapping about them in their music -- a discursive practice I term metastylistic discourse. By selectively rapping about social practices indexical of their experiences of place, not only communicate a particular take on the local (i.e. their own); they directly position social and indirectly position soicolinguistic practices centrally among stylistic practices distinguishing Houston aeshetically from the cultural forms associated with other scenes. Central here is the second concern I share with current approaches to cultural studies, particularly, the significance of where social actors (i.e. established artists) find themselves in local social hierarchies. Established artists shape and reshape ways of talking about local life partly through econtextualizing prior texts. It is through the circulation of such texts that a discursive framework emerges, the product of a trans-modal series of recontexutalizations which serve to communicate an experience of Houston, what it looks and sounds like. In short, my current project works to close the gap between sociolinguistic approaches to the formation and interrogation of stylistic norms and research in cultural studies along these same lines (Hodkinson 2003, Piano 2003). By examining these processes in the context of hip hop, my work illustrates how social actors shape cultural norms through performance