Browsing by Subject "Language, Linguistics"

Consumers frequently share stories about consumption experiences with others through word of mouth (WOM). Past research has focused on how hearing WOM influences the listener; I examine how sharing WOM influences the speaker. My proposed model outlines variables that determine storytelling language, predicts how specific language influences speakers' evaluations of experiences, and identifies the process through which language influences speakers. I test this model in five experimental studies and in a field study using Amazon.com data. I find that stories containing relatively more explaining language influence speakers through a process of sense-making. Sense-making helps consumers understand and recover from experiences by allowing them to figure out why experiences occurred and why they liked or disliked them. Making sense of experiences through explaining language has several consequences for consumers. Explaining language can cause paradoxical effects of WOM in terms of consumers' evaluations of experiences and their intentions to repeat and recommend experiences. Explaining positive experiences can decrease speakers' evaluations of experiences, making experiences less positive and decreasing consumers' willingness to repeat and recommend these experiences. Conversely, explaining negative experiences can increase speakers' evaluations of experiences, making experiences less negative and increasing consumers' willingness to repeat and recommend these experiences. In addition, making sense of and explaining experiences decreases consumers' intentions to spread future word of mouth about their experiences.

Recordings of speech play a central role in the diverse subdisciplines of linguistics. The reliance on speech recordings is especially profound in sociolinguistics, where scholars have developed a range of techniques for eliciting and analyzing natural talk. Despite the focus on naturalistic speech data, sociolinguists have rarely focused explicitly on the management (e.g. organization, storage, accessibility, and preservation) of their data, and this lack of focus has had consequences for the advancement of the field. At the same time, the interviews that sociolinguists labor so hard to obtain are often barely mined for their full potential to further our understanding of language. That is, sociolinguists often focus on a handful of phonological and/or morphosyntactic variables to the exclusion of so many other features of speech. The present work both addresses the management of sociolinguistic data and, through an innovative approach to speech data management and analysis, extends the sociolinguistic lens to include the lesser-examined realm of variation in sequential temporal patterns of talk.

The first part of this dissertation describes the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP), a web-based digitization and preservation initiative at North Carolina State University. SLAAP, which I principally have designed and developed, is more than an archive; it has actively sought to explicate approaches to spoken language data management and to enrich spoken language data through the development of analytic tools designed specifically for sociolinguistic analysis. This dissertation begins by situating SLAAP within the history of data management practices in the field of sociolinguistics. It then provides an overview of many of SLAAP's features, discussing in particular the transcript model that enables most of its analytic and presentational capabilities.

The second part of this dissertation takes advantage of SLAAP's data model and the extensive language data accumulated within its archive to examine variation in speech rate and silent pause duration by North American English speakers of four ethnicities in North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Washington, DC, and Newfoundland. This work brings a wide range of previous research from different areas of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics to bear on an array of quantitative analyses, demonstrating that speech rate and pause exhibit meaningful variation at the social level at the same time as they are also constrained by cognitive and articulatory processes.

Specifically, pause and speech rate are shown to vary by region, ethnicity, and gender - albeit not in mono-directional ways - although other factors arise as significant, including, for speech rate, a strong effect of utterance length as well as a number of interactional or discourse-related factors, such as the gender of the interviewer and the number of participants in the speech event. A number of the examinations undertaken relate sociolinguistic conceptions of style to language production and cognitive processes, including a quantitative analysis of sequential temporal patterns as paralinguistic cues to attention to speech, performativity, and the realization of phonological and morphosyntactic variables. Through this analysis, sociolinguistic data and findings are brought to bear on a tradition of psycholinguistic investigations with the hope to benefit both, often disparate, areas of research.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the book of Genesis as a functioning literary whole, orienting

post-exilic Persian-era Judeans toward their ideal future expectations. While many have

contrasted Genesis' account of origins with the prophetic books' account of the future, this work

argues that Genesis narrates Israel's origins (and the world's) precisely in order to ground Judean

hopes for an eschatological restoration. Employing a speech-act linguistic semiotics, this study

explores the temporal orientation of Genesis and its indexical pointing to the lives and hopes of

its Persian-era users. Promises made throughout Genesis apply not only to the characters of

traditional memory, but also to those who preserved/ composed/ received the text of Genesis.

Divine promises for Israel's future help constitute Israel's ongoing identity. Poor, sparsely

populated, Persian-ruled Judea imagines its mythic destiny as a great nation exemplifying (and

spreading) blessing among the families of the earth, dominating central Palestine in a new pan-

Israelite unity with neighboring Samaria and expanding both territory and population.

Genesis' narrative of Israel's origins and destiny thus dovetails with the Persian-era

expectations attested in Israel's prophetic corpus--a coherent (though variegated) restoration

eschatology. This prophetic eschatology shares mythic traditions with Genesis, using those

traditions typologically to point to Israel's future hope. Taken together, Genesis and the prophetic

corpus identify Israel as a precious seed, carrying forward promises of a yet-to-be-realized

creation fruitfulness and blessing. Those who used this literature identify their disappointments

and tragedies in terms of the mythic destruction and cursing that threaten creation but never

extinguish the line of promise. The dynamic processes of Genesis' usage (its composition

stretching back to the pre-exilic period, and its reception stretching forward to the post-Persian

era) have made Genesis an etiology of Israel's expected future--not of its static present. Because

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this future will be fully realized only in the coming divine visitation, Genesis cannot be attributed

to an anti-eschatological, hierocratic establishment. Rather, it belongs to the same Persian-era

Judean synthesis which produced the restoration eschatology of the prophetic corpus. This

account of Genesis contributes to a canonical understanding of Second Temple Hebrew literature;

prophetic scrolls and Pentateuchal (Torah) scrolls interact to form a textually based Israelite

identity, founded on trust in a divinely promised future.

It is fair to identify the motive of this dissertation with the paradoxical formulation of Gerhard von Rad, to the effect that the essence of biblical Wisdom is disclosed where the sages articulate this wisdom as inherently limited. This coincidence of opposites has been widely embraced by commentators and read as evidence for the sages' encounter with an infinite divine transcendence, to which they responded in humility, and by which their epistemological certitudes were rebuked. Proceeding from these assumptions, the interpretation of Proverbs has widely concerned itself with two nodal points: (1) the fear-of YHWH as the central concept in Proverbs' articulation wisdom as a finite human operation, conducted in the presence of an infinite divine; and (2) the figuration of this sublime experience in the iconic form of Woman-Wisdom.

The hypothesis of von Rad lends itself to another trajectory that prioritizes immanence over transcendence. On this reading, the limit of Wisdom lies not between its mere appearance for us (i.e. finite human subjects) and its essential being in itself (corresponding to a noumenal, divine beyond) but rather runs through the field of appearance, which cannot be rendered coherent by the sages' discursive intervention. This non-symbolizable yet immanent check on the sages' wisdom is analyzed in terms of Lacan's Real, a kernel of being (in psychoanalytic terms, jouissance) entirely beyond the signified that nevertheless arises out of the operations of signification. If discourse is thus intrinsically self-defeating, the status of transcendence should re-evaulated with respect to "limit." Transcendence is not the site that disturbs the Symbolic field, but rather the aporetic conditions of linguistic meaning rely on an externalizing process--what I have called a "poetics of making transcendent"-- for a given discourse to maintain its own coherence, i.e. as that which would be coherent if not for the contingent, impossible object. The fear-of YHWH and Woman-Wisdom, whose importance no one disputes, are re-read from this perspective: the former according to Lacan's concept of the Master-Signifier, the latter according to object (a), the object cause of desire.

Debate about the development of African American English (AAE) dominated sociolinguistic inquiry for the second half of the 20th century and continues to be a subject of investigation. All hypotheses about the development of AAE integrate ideas of shared linguistic features coupled with strong regional influences or founding effects. Most Southern evidence used in the development of these hypotheses, however, is from rural communities or somehow unique enclave communities. The early urban centers of African American life in the South that followed the abolition of slavery and disintegration of plantation life have seldom been investigated with respect to the development of AAE. This study examines precisely those sites looking at AAE in three Southern urban centers during the time of Jim Crow or institutionalized segregation: Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans.

This analysis is based on a series of tape-recorded oral history interviews that were conducted as part of the Behind the Veil project at Duke University. The Behind the Veil project was launched in 1990 at Duke and the majority of the interviews were conducted between 1994 and 1997. Each speaker completed a survey regarding her/his life history, education, professional history, and family background. The speakers used for this study were chosen based on age (all born before 1942) and residency status in their respective communities - all speakers are lifelong residents of Birmingham, Memphis, or New Orleans. These criteria and others shape an inclusive corpus of 100 total tape-recorded interviews with 33 from Birmingham, 35 from Memphis, and 32 from New Orleans.

Quantitative analysis of five core diagnostic structures of AAE (i.e. copula absence, plural -s, pre-vocalic consonant cluster reduction, rhoticity, and 3rd person singular verbal -s) was performed to provide a window for determining the shared and distinct patterns of early, urban AAE development. These data are used for inter-generational analyses, cross-gender analyses, analyses of socioeconomic factors and overall interpretation for each individual site and between different sites.

These data contribute to the continuing study and scholarship on the historical development of African American English, providing the first multi-community overview of core African American English linguistic variables from the early urban South. The trans-regional similarities of linguistic variables in AAE speakers are often attributed to the influence of early Southern English varieties. These data confirm the early presence of these variables in African American urban centers in the South, but also suggest how language ideologies relate to dialect development.