published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis explores the language use of bilinguals in the Southern Peruvian Andes. Sociolinguistic studies to date have suggested that the linguistic choices of bilingual speakers are maxbnising strategies which can be understood in terms of the social context in which the interaction is taking place. This thesis argues that the language choice of bilinguals cannot be understood in this way. Context is not a "given" entity to which speakers react and which analysts in their turn can identify and describe. Rather, it is a process of which the linguistic interaction is itself an integral part. People, in Ocongate, hold a dual notion of po~, the power of the animate landscape and autochthonous beings with which Quechua language is associated and the power of the State with which Spanish is associated. Detailed investigation of the oral tradition, and of social practice, reveals that people's vision of an acceptable and noral universe demands that these two forms of po~r are constructed as essentially co-existent without being able to be fused into one syncretic whole or existing independently of each other. Linguistic practice plays a part in constructing the social world in which speakers interact and also holds rreaning through reference to this world. By ~ning the situations in which people use Spanish and Quechua, the thesis docurrents the parallel histories and identities which bilingualism secures for the people of Ocongate. These possibilities are not only bnplicit in bilingualism, they are recognised by the actors themselves. These themes are illustrated through studies of linguistic practice in the areas of: oral history, education and migration, the discourse of race, local politics, ritual and drunkenness.

With the aim of better understanding the social function of Anglicisms in Argentina, this study documents the distribution of Anglicisms across social groups and identifies the semantic domains they cover. In order to access Anglicisms currently used in Argentine Spanish, a 1.8 million-word corpus of newspaper articles from 2012 to 2013 was created and processed to extract English loanwords. This study presents a method for automatic loanword extraction that offers advantages over manual identification. The analyses conducted show that the English loanwords present in the Argentine newspaper corpus are not equally distributed across all newspapers but rather are highly concentrated in La Nacion, a prestigious newspaper targeted towards a highly educated upper-class segment of the population. / text

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This dissertation analyzes adaptation of the Arabic population to temporary residence in the USA, based on conceptual themes from cultural anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics. I begin my analysis by summarizing the cultural background of my target population. I focus on issues of Islamic culture and religion, gender segregation, diversity, and the Arabic language. I next discuss the method by which I arrived at my research problem and population. My population is comprised of Arabic individuals studying in the USA, and their accompanying persons. I narrowed this population into a core group of key consultants, whose perspectives became representative voices. I interviewed my consultants on aspects of academic and social experiences in this country and the adaptative strategies they used to counteract its challenges. I divide my core analysis into two phases of residence--initial and subsequent. The initial documents the incipient adaptative processes used by my consultants in both social and academic settings. It discusses implications of the co-presence of gender in and out of the classroom and the strategy of avoidance. It documents the dynamics of teacher-student interactions and the discourse of authority. Arabic discourse includes communicative strategies of repetition and indirectness. The subsequent phase discussion focuses on outcomes of adaptation. In this phase, I discuss the redefinition of identity and issues of stigma. I address the outcomes of redefinitions of self and social interaction. I focus on discourse and communicative styles, and address nonassimilative adaptive strategies achieved by boundary maintaining mechanisms. I address the role of the home countries in the adaptative strategies of the population. Finally, this dissertation concludes with a recapitulation of macro and micro interaction and the cultural experience. I conclude that issues of culture clash/culture shock are linked to social interaction of the Arabic population. The binding threads of this dissertation are the processes and outcomes of the two phases of residence. The theme is adaptation. Adaptive processes include intercultural discourse, subsuming issues of identity. These issues are embedded and embodied in the main findings I consider important, at the core of this dissertation.

This paper consists of the study of three of the most successful and widely known authors of Chicano Literature: Miguel Mendez, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and Rudolfo Anaya. The theoretical principles on which this analysis is based correspond to the fields of linguistics and narratology. The first part of the study deals with the language choice process related to each of the three writers. The second part of the analysis was carried out by transferring results obtained from the study of live speech to the literary texts. These two different levels of language were confronted in order to verify if any correspondence among them exists.

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