In this dissertation, I analyze classroom interactions between a White, nonlocal high school English teacher and American Indian students on the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. I focus on the participants' strategic use of humor and distinctive linguistic features in these interactions, particularly teasing as a cultural activity among the students, the teacher's immersion and adaptation to that culture, and the affective and sociocultural importance of the ethnolinguistic repertoire to the students. I argue that the main functions of the humor and teasing are threefold: (a) to build rapport, (b) to accomplish interactional goals in the classroom, and (c) to negotiate teacher-student power struggles in a socioculturally acceptable way. I show that the students' humor and discourse is constitutive of local culture and often counterhegemonic, implicitly and at times explicitly critiquing mainstream educational practices and the marginalized status of the students. My analysis considers the data from a discourse level as well as examines the indexical and patterned use of microlevel linguistic resources from the student's ethnolinguistic repertoire--specifically, distinctive interjections and scooped-accent intonation. The primary data is naturally occurring classroom discussions, complemented by individual and group interviews and ethnographic observations. This study points to the importance of sociocultural factors in language variation and change in communities undergoing or having undergone radical language shift. It thus adds to the literature that considers how cultural practices are disrupted and may be restructured as the linguistic code changes. This research also contributes to the research that details the difficulties nonmainstream students face in public schools when their home culture and language practices are at odds with those of the school, and it examines humor and teasing as student strategies to navigate these differences. This study aims to help paint a more complete picture of the contemporary social and linguistic contexts in which American Indian speakers live, with a mind toward how this understanding can be applied to the real-world circumstances of these youth. / text

This dissertation analyzes the language used by 20 adult heritage Welsh speakers now living in London, i.e., bilinguals who shifted to English dominance in childhood, and whose Welsh proficiencies now show divergences from baseline norms as a result of incomplete acquisition and attrition. The grammars of these heavily imbalanced bilinguals are compared with baseline informants (20 Welsh-dominant controls) on a narrative elicitation task, in which the informants tell the story of a children's wordless picture book (Frog, Where Are You? by Mercer Mayer). The samples collected for this project (Appendix II.1) constitute the first corpus of heritage Welsh. / Celtic Languages and Literatures

The purpose of this project is to investigate factors that can be used to explain orthographic variation in City of Heroes (CoH), a virtual community based in an online role-playing game. While a number of models of variation exist for speech, to date, no statistical models of orthographic variation in virtual communities exist. By combining traditional variationist methods with computational text processing, this project documents socially meaningful alternations in the linguistic code regarding two types of sociolinguistic variables, namely spelling and use of abbreviations. For each of the two variable types, two dependent variables are posited, i.e. the alternation between: 1) –ing and –in in durative verbal aspect marking in forms such as coming and comin, 2) –s and –z markers of plurality in words such as cats and catz, 3) abbreviated and full forms for referential abbreviation in terms such as Atlas Park and AP, and 4) abbreviated and full forms for conative abbreviations in terms such as looking for team and lft. The study investigates the role that the following factors play in explaining orthographic variation in CoH: 1) message length, 2) standardness of the immediate linguistic environment, 3) cognitive load, 4) relative proximity in the virtual space, 5) degree of message publicness, 6) experience in the community, 7) avatar gender, and 8) social group affiliation. Through mixed-effects, multivariate models, the study demonstrates that each of the predictors has some role in explaining the orthographic variability observed in the textual record of the community. Moreover, interactions between some of the predictors prove to be significant contributors to the models, which highlight the importance of addressing interaction terms in models of language variation. The findings from the study suggest that the socio-contextual meaning of particular structures in the CoH community lead authors to make linguistic choices, which are realized as alternations in the linguistic code. Finally, implications for the study of language variation in general are discussed. / text

This dissertation is a sociolinguistic study of the ideologies about language, culture and ethnicity among Japanese immigrants and descendants in Brazil (hereafter, Nikkeis) who gather at a local Japanese cultural association, searching for what it means to be “Japanese” in Brazil. This study focuses on how linguistic behaviors are ideologically understood and associated with cultural activities and ethnic identities. Using the language ideologies framework, it seeks to describe the ways in which Nikkeis negotiate and create social meanings of language in both local and transnational contexts. Nikkeis are an overwhelmingly celebrated minority group in Brazil. In this context, the cultural association serves as a site where symbolic cultural differences are constructed by those Nikkeis who strive to identify themselves as a prestigious minority. This study demonstrates that the Japanese language is one of the important resources in performing the Nikkei identity. At the same time, due to an on-going language shift, Portuguese as a means of communication is becoming increasingly more important for cultural transmission. Thus, the members of the association, which include both Japanese monolinguals and Portuguese monolinguals, are in constant negotiation, trying to strike a balance between symbolic values of Japanese, pragmatic values of Portuguese, as well as their own language competencies. The goal of this project is to answer the following three research questions: 1) What social meanings do Nikkeis assign to Japanese and Portuguese, and how does this perception affect Nikkeis’ identity formation? 2) What are the characteristics of linguistic practices in the association and how do the speakers use available linguistic resources to construct identities? 3) How can this study inform us about the transforming reality of the Japanese Brazilian community in this global age? Contributions of this study include furthering of the sociolinguistic research on language ideologies, linguistic practices and identity construction in an immigrant community. It also contributes to the study of language shift, by underscoring the role of language ideologies in rationalizing language choices. This project is also significant for the study of Japanese diaspora in Latin America, providing the first sociolinguistic investigation of a Japanese cultural association in Brazil. / text

The phenomenon of word-final imaala, or taa-marbuuTa raising, in the Levantine dialects of Arabic was well documented about 50 years ago by renowned Arabists who described the phenomenon as a purely phonological one. Today, after some major historical and sociological changes have taken place in Arab societies, this feature deserves to be revisited since this might shed some light on the processes of language change in those societies. The scope of this paper is to look into the issue of word-final imaala in contemporary Levantine Arabic (specifically after raa) through a wide lens, and to establish 1) whether there are patterns governing the production of taa marbuuTa after raa, and 2) whether the existing phonological rules account for all instances of word-final imaala as they appear in the speech of Levantine speakers nowadays. In order to do that, instances of all word tokens ending in -ra were extracted from 252 phone conversations recorded in 2004 and found in the LDC Levantine database. Those tokens were analyzed and the word-forms they represent were divided based on whether they exhibit any instances on word-final imaala. It soon became clear that the existing sound rules cannot account for all current instances of taa-marbouTa raising. Two main factors were identified as having a possible effect on the production of taa marbuuTa after raa: word frequency and phonological word classes. Because of a lack of speaker-related information in the database coupled with some imaala-related discrepancies found in the transcriptions of the conversations, it was impossible to determine the exact social meaning(s) of word-final imaala in Levantine communities. However, this study shows that enough changes have taken place since the 1960’s in terms of taa-marbuuTa raising, to consider it a case of language change in progress. This study also establishes some hypotheses which can be used as the base for a future sociolinguistic study whose scope will be to assign social meaning to word-final imaala in Levantine dialects. / text

No description available.

Ο στόχος της παρούσας εργασίας έγκειται στην διαπραγμάτευση και την ανάλυση των αναδυόμενων ταυτοτήτων μέσα από την εξέταση των συνομιλιακών αφηγήσεων ηλικιωμένων διαλεκτόφωνων γυναικών και ανδρών. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, θα εξεταστούν ξεχωριστά δέκα συνομιλιακές αφηγήσεις με κύριες πληροφορήτριες δύο ηλικιωμένες γυναίκες και επτά συνομομιλιακές αφηγήσεις με κύριους πληροφορητές δύο ηλικιωμένους άνδρες. Στόχος της εργασίας είναι να αναδείξει τις αφηγηματικές στρατηγικές που χρησιμοποιούν τόσο οι γυναίκες, όσο και οι άνδρες στην προσπάθεια οικοδόμησης της δικής τους ταυτότητας, αλλά και των ταυτοτήτων άλλων προσώπων που πρωταγωνιστούν στις αφηγήσεις τους. Ο κυριότερος όμως σκοπός της έρευνάς μας είναι η παρουσίαση των συμπερασμάτων στα οποία καταλήξαμε για τις γυναικείες και τις ανδρικές συνομιλιακές αφηγήσεις με βάση συγκεκριμένα κριτήρια τόσο για το επίπεδο του αφηγούμενου κόσμου, όσο και για το επίπεδο του διεπιδραστικού κόσμου. Τα κριτήρια που θα χρησιμοποιήσουμε και βάσει των οποίων θα φτάσουμε στην ανάδυση των ταυτοτήτων τα αντλούμε από την Blum-Kulka (1993) και την Cheshire (2000) και είναι τα εξής: Σε σχέση με τον αφηγούμενο κόσμο θα εξεταστούν οι συνομιλιακές αφηγήσεις ως προς την θεματολογία, τον τόπο, τους πρωταγωνιστές, τη στοχοθεσία, τον ευθύ λόγο και την εξωτερική αξιολόγηση. Αναφορικά με τον διεπιδραστικό κόσμο οι συνομιλιακές αφηγήσεις θα εξεταστούν ως προς τον τρόπο επιτέλεσης της αφηγηματικής πράξης, την κατοχή του αφηγηματικού λόγου και τις αφηγηματικές ενάρξεις. Απώτερος σκοπός της μελέτης μας είναι με βάση τα ίδια κριτήρια να επιχειρήσουμε μια συγκριτική προσέγγιση των ανδρικών και των γυναικείων συνομιλιακών αφηγήσεων. Η βασική παραδοχή μας που διαπνέει ολόκληρη την εργασία βασίζεται στην άποψη περί κοινωνικής και δυναμικής κατασκευής των ταυτοτήτων, απορρίπτοντας οποιαδήποτε ουσιοκρατική και στερεοτυπική προσέγγιση. Ολοκληρώνοντας την εισαγωγή, πρέπει να τονίσουμε ότι η εξέταση των συνομιλιακών αφηγήσεων βάσει καθορισμένων κριτηρίων δεν σημαίνει πως στην εκτενή ανάλυση των συνομιλιακών αφηγήσεων που επιχειρούμε δεν κάνουμε λόγο και για άλλα θέματα, όπως το χιούμορ ως πεδίο έκφρασης ταυτότητας και η εναλλαγή κώδικα ως ένδειξη κατασκευής ταυτότητας. Ωστόσο, τα κριτήρια που παραθέσαμε θα μας βοηθήσουν να καταλήξουμε σε ασφαλή συμπεράσματα για τις ταυτότητες που αναδύθηκαν από τις συνομιλιακές αφηγήσεις των ηλικιωμένων διαλεκτόφωνων ανδρών και γυναικών και για τις ποικίλες στρατηγικές που χρησιμοποίησαν. Η σύγκριση των συνομιλιακών αφηγήσεων των ανδρών και των γυναικών σκόπιμα θα αποτελέσει το τελικό σημείο συζήτησής μας, καθώς πιστεύουμε πως πρώτα θα πρέπει να διαμορφώσουμε μια ξεκάθαρη άποψη για τις γυναικείες και τις ανδρικές συνομιλιακές αφηγήσεις ξεχωριστά και στο τέλος να τις δούμε σφαιρικά και συγκριτικά.. / -

This sociolinguistic study examines the functions and motivations of code-switching, which is used here to mean the use of more than one language in the same conversation. The conversations studied here take place in a very particular context: one-on-one speaking sessions in a study abroad program in Morocco where English is the L1 and Arabic the L2 of the students, and the opposite applies to their speaking partners. The conversations in this study are conducted in Arabic, and the study focuses on code-switching from Arabic to English in spite of whether the L1 of the speaker is Arabic or English. The functions of code-switching in this study are examined from the perspective of two well-known competing sociolinguistic approaches to code-switching: (1) the markedness model (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 1998; Myers-Scotton and Bolonyai, 2001), based on micro and macro-levels of analysis, and (2) the conversational code-switching approach (Auer, 1984, 1995, 1998; Li Wei 2002), based on micro-levels of analysis. Application of the markedness model showed that marked instances of code-switching were used for a variety of functions, such as (1) strengthening solidarity between speakers; (2) taking care of business and show seriousness and authority; (3) adding aesthetic effects; and (4) playing with words for the sake of joking. The model also showed that unmarked switches served different functions such as (1) requesting the meaning of vocabulary and expressions; (2) asking for accommodation (repetition and speaking slower); (3) bridging a communication gap; (4) and providing expressions and the meaning of vocabulary when circumlocution does not work. The conversational code-switching approach revealed the following functions of code-switching: (1) quotations and reported speech; (2) reiteration (for clarification); (3) change of participant constellation (selection of addressee); (4) language play; and (5) language negotiation. Both approaches proved effective in analyzing the Arabic-English data in this study. However, the analysis shows that the markedness model has an advantage over the conversational code-switching approach. The data shows evidence that speakers' choices are based on rationality rather than on sequential structure. Participants code-switch based on their own goals and what linguistic codes are available to them to achieve these goals.

According to critical scholars there is a global education policy community that contributes to the increasing convergence of national education policies (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Key players in this community include the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Although the scholars point out that global education policies are not uniformly copied or implemented, missing from the literature on globalization and education are the voices of the students and educators impacted by them. The process of policy implementation is neither seamless nor mechanical. The intended impact of a policy is not necessarily its outcome. Not only may there be unanticipated consequences, but educators and students may also resist, adapt, or transform practices suggested by the policies. This study examines international influence on the classroom practices of educators in one high school in northern Mexico by tracing the implementation of a recent national high school reform. Mexican education officials drew on the examples of recent high school reforms in Europe in designing the reform and, in addition, borrowed money from the World Bank for its implementation. Analysis of key official documents related to the reform along with participant observation and interviews of teachers, students, parents, a union representative, and education officials reveal that although just like the policies of the global education policy community the reform promotes neoliberal and human capital views of schooling, these views are not shared by all of the participants in this study. In addition, participants do not believe that the reform is adequately adapted to the context of Mexican schools. Judging from the teachers participating in this study, Mexican schools and educators have strengths that were overlooked in the development of the reform.

The role of the lexicon has been ignored or minimized in most work on computational stylistics. This research is an effort to fill that gap, demonstrating the key role that the lexicon plays in stylistic variation. In doing so, I bring together a number of diverse perspectives, including aesthetic, functional, and sociological aspects of style. The first major contribution of the thesis is the creation of aesthetic stylistic lexical resources from large mixed-register corpora, adapting statistical techniques from approaches to topic and sentiment analysis. A key novelty of the work is that I consider multiple correlated styles in a single model. Next, I consider a variety of tasks that are relevant to style, in particular tasks relevant to genre and demographic variables, showing that the use of lexical resources compares well to more traditional approaches, in some cases offering information that is simply not available to a system based on surface features. Finally, I focus in on a single stylistic task, Native Language Identification (NLI), offering a novel method for deriving lexical information from native language texts, and using a cross-corpus supervised approach to show definitively that lexical features are key to high performance on this task.