Browsing by Subject "Sociolinguistics"
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Item Open Access Emerging Hispanic English in the Southeast U.S.: Grammatical Variation in a Triethnic Community(2013) Callahan-Price, Erin ElizabethAbstract
This study investigates variable past tense marking patterns in an emerging variety of N.C. Hispanic English (n=44) spoken by language learners at three Length of Residency (LOR) groups in three schools in Durham, NC in terms of 1. lexical semantics (Andersen & Shirai 1996, Bayley 1999), 2. frequency (Guy & Erker 2012) 3. discourse structure (Bardovi-Harlig 1998) and 4. verb class and phonological environment (Wolfram 1985, Bayley 1994). Statistical results show significant effects of verb class, lexical aspect, and frequency and interacting effects of verb class and frequency (specifically, suppletives like copula are simultaneously highly frequent and highly phonetically salient). A subsample coded for the discourse factor shows some evidence for the correlation of copula and backgrounding function. A separate analysis of consonant cluster reduction patterns (CCR) demonstrates dialect acquisition of variable constraints (e.g. in terms of N.C. AAVE), namely phonological environment (_C > _V) and morphemic status (monomorpheme > bimorpheme). Pedagogical applications are discussed, including accurately identifying English Language Learners (ELLs) in the context of local/regional accommodation.
Item Restricted “Is there somebody who’s willing to hold their hand at the edge?” - Bringing the Patient to the Center of Physician-Patient Communication and Decision-Making on Bone Marrow Transplantation(2011-04-04) Chhabra, KaranMedicine is beginning to appreciate the value of “patient-centeredness”—healthcare attentive to the unique characteristics, needs, and values of each patient—and a wide body of evidence shows that physician-patient dynamics can have real effects on patients’ health. The patient-centeredness movement has led to calls for more equitable physician-patient relationships, shared decision-making, and more individualized models of care. But building all those requires fundamental shifts in the language physicians use to communicate. I analyzed 20 conversations between patients and physicians specializing in bone marrow transplantation for the physician-patient relationships that their communication produces, and the effect of those relationships on patients’ decision-making ability. My findings revolved around the “data dump”—that is, the physician’s nearly ubiquitous, depersonalized, extended monologue on the biology and history of the patient’s disease, the array of options available to treat it, and the risks and prognosis associated with each. I found that “data dumping” can have one of two effects: leaving patients confused and unable to decide on a treatment path, or silencing patients and preventing them from actively choosing their treatment. Silencing and disempowering patients can in turn prevent them from voicing clinically relevant information, and even from healing as well as they would if they were empowered. I also found that physicians and patients often had very different definitions of a “cure” and goals for their care; while the transplant specialists were focused on the cancer, patients had their minds on their lives as a whole. Taken together, these encounters showed that patients need treatment options to be individualized, contextualized, and delivered in a way attentive to their uniqueness, autonomy, and ability to process information. The physician is the only person in the encounter capable of fulfilling this need. Thus, drawing insights from a communication theory known as Motivational Interviewing, I offer recommendations on how physicians can humanize their information delivery and support their patients’ decision-making. If put to practice, my analysis and recommendations can make medical information delivery and decision-making more effective and equitable in a wide range of contexts.Item Open Access Lucian and the Atticists: A Barbarian at the Gates(2019) Stifler, David William FriersonThis dissertation investigates ancient language ideologies constructed by Greek and Latin writers of the second and third centuries CE, a loosely-connected movement now generally referred to the Second Sophistic. It focuses on Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian “barbarian” writer of satire and parody in Greek, and especially on his works that engage with language-oriented topics of contemporary relevance to his era. The term “language ideologies”, as it is used in studies of sociolinguistics, refers to beliefs and practices about language as they function within the social context of a particular culture or set of cultures; prescriptive grammar, for example, is a broad and rather common example. The surge in Greek (and some Latin) literary output in the Second Sophistic led many writers, with Lucian an especially noteworthy example, to express a variety of ideologies regarding the form and use of language. A number of authors, including Lucian, practiced Atticism, the belief that the best literature wouldn be made possible by reviving the Attic dialect of Classical Athens, language of Plato and Aristophanes. Others, however, disagree with the narrow and perhaps pretentious version of Greek this ideology produced; intriguingly Lucian was a member of this group as well. This study examines Lucian’s complex and contradictory attitudes towards linguistic practices, focusing the works of his that address Atticism and other linguistic topics—such as the degree to which mastery of a language and its culture will allow one to identify with that culture. Here, too, Lucian portrays the relationship between linguistic practice and cultural identity in several different ways. Investigations into the linguistic views of other authors of the period help answer the question of which contemporary ideologies Lucian may be drawing on for his satire. The dissertation concludes that the detailed, specific humor of Lucian’s linguistic satire is tied into his overall project of creating a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and linguistic position for the self-representation of his disparate personae.
Item Open Access Speech Rate, Pause, and Linguistic Variation: an Examination through the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project(2009) Kendall, Tyler S.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.
Item Open Access The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti(2015) Mobley, Christina FrancesIn my dissertation, "The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti," I investigate the cultural history of West Central African slavery at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the late eighteenth century. My research focuses on the Loango Coast, a region that has received little scholarly attention despite the fact that it was responsible for roughly half of slave exports from West Central Africa at the time. The goal of my dissertation is to understand how enslaved Kongolese men and women used cultural practices to mediate the experience of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic world. To do so, I follow captives from their point of origin in West Central Africa to the Loango Coast and finally to the French colony of Saint Domingue in order to examine these areas as part of a larger "Kongolese Atlantic" world.
My dissertation begins by exploring the social and political history of the slave trade in the Loango Coast kingdoms, charting the structural changes that took place as a result of Atlantic trade. Next, I use historical linguistics to investigate the origins of captives sold on the Loango Coast. I find that the majority of captives came broadly from the Kongo zone, specifically from the Mayombe rainforest and Loango Coast kingdoms north of the River Congo. I then use a sociolinguistic methodology to reconstruct the cultural history of those groups in the near-absence of written documents. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I follow enslaved Central Africans from the Loango Coast to Saint Domingue, examining how they used specific and identifiable north coast cultural practices in the context of slavery. I find enslaved Central Africans used north coast spiritual tools such as divination, possession, trance, and power objects to address the material problems of plantation life. Finally, I argue the persistence of these spiritual practices demonstrates a remarkable durability of Kongolese ontology on both sides of the Kongolese Atlantic world.
My research produces new information about the history of the Loango Coast as well as the colony of Saint Domingue. The north coast origin of captives which I establish using historical linguistics contradicts earlier arguments that slaves traded on the Loango Coast originated from Kingdom of Kongo or from the inland Malebo Pool or Upper River Congo trade. I show inhabitants of the coastal kingdoms and Mayombe rainforest were not mere middlemen in the interior slave trade as previously thought, but were the victims of new mechanisms of enslavement created as a result of the erosion of traditional political institutions due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The north coast origin of Loango Coast captives has repercussions for the cultural history of the Americas. It means that captives were not "Atlantic Creoles" with prior knowledge of European culture and religion. I argue historians can only understand the meaning of the cultural practices of Africans in the Americas by understanding where Africans came from and what cultural and linguistic tools they brought with them. The use and transmission of Kongolese ritual knowledge and spiritual technologies in Saint Domingue challenges historians of slavery to move beyond the false dichotomy that culture originated in either Africa or on the plantation and forces a fundamental reassessment of the concept of creolization.
Item Open Access Voices of Jim Crow: Early Urban African American English in the Segregated South(2009) Carpenter, Jeannine LynnDebate 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.