The discourse of commercial aviation flight attendants has historically received no sociolinguistic attention. To address this gap, this thesis explores how flight attendants use language in workplace-related contexts to construct their professional identity and community. I draw on interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1981; Schiffrin 1994; Tannen 1993) and sociological research (Van Maanen and Barley 1984; Williams 1986; Marschall 2002) to address how flight attendants use language to orient to occupationally related knowledge and practices which contribute to the discursive construction of community. Data come from two sources: 1) A corpus of 150 textual incident reports submitted by flight attendants to a US government agency which include summaries and proposed causes of the incidents in flight attendants’ own words. 2) A corpus of 105 unique discussion threads containing 4,043 posts to a website hosting several discussion forums aimed primarily at flight attendants. The forums are not affiliated with either government bodies or airline employers and are a virtual space for flight attendants to discuss aspects of their job away from occupational demands. Following Bucholtz and Hall (2004), I show how identity is contextually related and situationally constructed, and emerges from discursive orientations to professional practice, indexicality, ideology, and performance. Moreover, there are certain intersubjective relationships embedded in the discourse which emerge from and add detail to the situational identity constructed through flight attendant discourse. Indexical stances and ideologies which are grounded in institutional training frame and are heightened in the discursive performances of the reports and forum posts. These ideologies motivate and enhance the existing institutional, physical, and sociocultural divisions between flight attendants and pilots, which may have consequences for intercrew cohesion in emergency situations.

In the past decade we have been privileged to witness the creation and revolution of social media on the World Wide Web. The abundance of content available on the web allows us to analyze the way people interact and the roles they play in a conversation on a large scale. One such role is influencer in the conversation. Detecting influence can be useful for successful advertisement strategies, detecting terrorist leaders and political campaigning. We explore influence in discussion forums, weblogs, and micro-blogs using several components that have been found to be indicators of influence. Our components are author traits, agreement, claims, argumentation, persuasion, credibility, and certain dialog patterns. In the first portion of this thesis we describe each of our system components. Each of these components is motivated by social science through Robert Cialdini’s “Weapons of Influence” [Cialdini, 2007]. The weapons of influence are Reciprocation, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority, and Scarcity. We then show the method and experiments for classifying each component. In the second part of this thesis we classify influencers across five online genres and analyze which features are most indicative of influencers in each genre. The online genres we explore are Wikipedia Talk Pages, LiveJournal weblogs, Political Forum discussions, Create Debate debate discussions, and Twitter microblog conversations. First, we describe a rich suite of features that were generated using each of the system components. Then, we describe our experiments and results including using domain adaptation to exploit the data from multiple online genres. Finally, we also provide a detailed analysis of a single weapon of influence, social proof, and its impact in detecting influence in Wikipedia Talk Pages. This provides a single example of the usefulness of providing comprehensive components in the detection of influence. The contributions of this thesis include a system for predicting who the influencers are in online discussion forums. We provide an evaluation of a rich set of features inspired by social science. In our system, each feature set used to detect influence is complex and computed by a system component. This allows us to provide a detailed analysis as to why the person was chosen as an influencer. We also provide a comparison of differences across several online discussion datasets and exploit the differences across the different genres to provide further improvements in influence detection.

Studies of mixed-gender conversation have established that the gender of speakers plays a role in talking power, conversational dominance, topic control, and perception of the speaker’s communicative ability. The purpose of this study was to expand upon previous research of interruption by examining its function and frequency in conversation among peers. While previous research in this area has focused on interruption in the workplace or the home, this research examines its place in mixed-gender conversation between university students. Participants in this study were recorded in group conversation and the transcription was later analyzed for general trends of interruption with relation to each gender. From these results, it was concluded that while men and women interrupt each other in different ways, both genders interrupt frequently and exercise control over the floor. We hypothesize that greater awareness of the patterns of interruption and conversational dominance between genders will improve the inclusion of all speakers in discussion and topic development.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation studies the survival, or resistance, of regional languages in France through the use of two case studies: Picard in Picardy and Provençal in Provence. In order to create the French nation, the revolutionaries of 1789 decided upon the necessity of political unity. In order to facilitate, or to create, this unity, the cultural provinces were abolished and generic "départements" were created in their stead. However, when political unity did not occur immediately after the territorial change, the revolutionaries determined that national unity, both political and cultural, would be attained through the imposition of the French language. It was thus language that was deemed to be the greatest separating factor of the French at this period. In 1794, Abbé Grégoire called for the “programmed demise” of the regional languages through education in and of French. While this program was not officially enacted until the Third Republic (1870-1914), due to numerous factors, these languages were supposed to have died long ago. While their numbers of speakers have decreased, and there are no longer any monolingual regional language speakers, they still exist. How is this fact possible? Despite explanations attributed to enduring diglossia, the extended process of language shift or time itself, this study focuses on regional identity and posits that the durable bond between regional identity and language is the explanation. / 1 / Patrick Sean McCrea

In this paper I discuss the results of a study on stylization and stylistic productions of "gay speech." The paper has three interrelated goals: one experimental, one methodological and one theoretical. The experimental goal was to determine if and to what extent exaggeration prevails in stylistic performances of "gay speech." Additionally, the methodological goal was to help establish experimental methodologies as useful for sociocultural linguistic analyses. Finally, the theoretical goal was to add to the robustness of sociocultural linguistic theory by providing evidence from experimental and quantitative analyses that support previous theoretical claims. Analysis of /s/ frequency at peak amplitude from 9 speakers performing both base recordings and stylized recordings indicated that exaggeration is likely relevant with respect to this feature and it's role in the production of stylized "gay speech." These findings also suggest that the experimental methodologies are effective in eliciting data for fruitful sociocultural linguistic analysis. Importantly, the data presented in this essay reflect patterns emergent in sociocultural linguistic analysis of identity, namely theories of adequation and distinction (Bucholtz & Hall 2005) and neo-minstrelsy (Bucholtz & Lopez 2012) and thereby suggest that experimental techniques such as the ones presented can be beneficial to the solidification of these linguistic theories. By combining qualitatively oriented and quantitatively oriented methodologies, this essay provides new directions for the analysis of the role of language variation in the production of local meaning while offering new insight to the way researchers might consider this relationship.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Thesis--Cornell University. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Originally presented as the author's thesis, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-184).

Thesis (Ph. D.) in Psychology--University of Maine, 2003. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-110).