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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Sociolinguistics
In this interdisciplinary study, Monika Fodor explores how intergenerational memory narratives embedded in the speaker's own stories impact ethnic subjectivity construction. Working with thematically selected life experiences from interviews conducted with second- and late-generation European Americans, Fodor demonstrates how the storytellers position themselves in a range of social, cultural, and political discourses to claim or disclaim ethnicity as part of their subjectivity. Tying narrative content, structural, and performance analysis to the sociological and sociolinguistic concepts of "symbolic capital" and "investment," Fodor unpacks the changing levels of identifying with one's ancestral ethnic heritage and its potential to carry meaning for late-generation descendants. In doing so, she reveals the shared features of identification among individuals through narrative meaning-making, which may be the basis of real or imagined, heterolocal discourse community formation and sustained ethnic subjectivity. The narrative analysis demonstrates how the cohesive force among members of the community is the shared knowledge of story frames and the personalized retelling of these. Ethnic Subjectivity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives draws on inherited, often moving, personal experiences that offers new insights into the so far largely unexplored terrain of the narrative structure of intergenerationally transferred memory retellings, that will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic studies, migration and identity studies.
Originally published in 1992. This book discusses the possibilities of developing the research process in social science so that it benefits the subjects as well as the researcher. The authors distinguish between 'ethical', 'advocate' and 'empowering' approaches to the relationship between researcher and researched, linking these to different ideas about the nature of knowledge, action, language, and social relations. They then use a series of empirical case studies to explore the possibilities for 'empowering research'. The book is the product of dialogue between researchers from a range of disciplines (anthropology, cultural studies, sociology and linguistics) and is for those working across the social sciences. Through combination of philosophical discussion, methodological recommendation and case-study illustration, it provides guidance that is practical without being simplistic.
Mastering the vocabulary of a foreign language is one of the most daunting tasks that language learners face. The immensity of the task is underscored by the realisation that it is not only single words but also numerous standardised phrases (idioms, collocations, etc.) that need to be acquired. There is thus a clear need for instructional methods that help learners tackle this task, and yet few proposals for vocabulary instruction have so far gone beyond techniques for rote-learning and familiar means of promoting of noticing. The reason for this is that vocabulary and phraseology have long been assumed arbitrary. The volume offers a long-overdue alternative by exploring and exploiting the presence of linguistic 'motivation' - or, systematic non-arbitrariness - in the lexicon. The first half of the volume reports ample empirical evidence of the pedagogical effectiveness of presenting vocabulary to learners as non-arbitrary. The data reported indicate that the proposed instructional methods can benefit when both the nature of the target lexis and the basic cognitive orientations of particular learners are taken into account. The first half of the book mostly targets lexis that has already attracted a fair amount of attention from Cognitive Linguists in the past (e.g. phrasal verbs and figurative idioms). The second half broadens the scope considerably by revealing the non-arbitrariness of diverse other lexical patterns, including collocations and word partnerships generally. This is achieved by recognising some long-neglected dimensions of linguistic motivation - etymological and phonological motivation, in particular. Concrete suggestions are made for putting the non-arbitrary nature of words and phrases to good use in instructed language learning. The volume is therefore of interest not only to applied linguists and researchers in Second Language Acquisition/Foreign Language Teaching, but also to second and foreign language teaching professionals.
Market forces are widely acknowledged to be at the heart of globalizing forces, and any consideration of how globalization affects language and vice versa requires an in-depth examination of the relationship between languages and markets. Despite this, the disciplines of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have an uneasy relationship with markets. The hegemony of market processes and their negative outcomes has, it could be argued, become a commonsense assumption in the academic treatment of the subject. The aim of the current volume is to challenge this assumption. The book takes the market as its common starting point, and examines, in a large number of individual contributions, the sociolinguistic inputs and fall-out from market processes, using a variety of different methodological approaches and various contexts and case studies. These cases range from a call centre in India to an industrial development agency in the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht, with genres ranging from Sami rap music to corporate mission statements. The book is intentionally interdisciplinary, including perspectives from management and economics, media and communications studies, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and cultural studies.
Levels of education and, consequently, of literacy were low in the Dublin tenements at the beginning of the 20th century, and this facilitated the persistence of an oral tradition which stretched back for thousands of years. This book is an analysis of O'Casey's Abbey plays in the context of the oral culture in which they were set. Because they were powerless in a culture dominated by those who had reaped the advantages of education, the tenement dwellers were dazzled by the apparent magic of literacy and in awe of those who wielded its power. O'Casey uses this to dramatize the ease with which the poor were seduced into what he saw as a bourgeois revolution which brought them nothing but suffering and death. Although Sean O'Casey's Abbey plays"The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars"--are universally admired for the richness of their language, this is the first authoritative analysis of the plays in relation to the linguistic and political culture at the turn of the century. Levels of education, and consequently, of literacy were low in the Dublin tenements and this facilitated the persistence of an oral tradition which stretched back for thousands of years. What might strike the modern reader as extravagant in the language of O'Casey's characters would be quite normal in an oral community where all communication was performative. Because they were powerless in a culture dominated by those who had reaped the advantages of education, the tenement dwellers were dazzled by the apparent magic of literacy and in awe of those who wielded its power. O'Casey uses this to dramatize the ease with which the poor were seduced into what he saw as a bourgeois revolution which brought them nothing but suffering and death. It is hardly surprising, then, that the villains in these plays are educated intruders who speak a language strikingly different from that of the tenement dwellers.
In today's global commerce and communication, linguistic diversity is in steady decline across the world as speakers of smaller languages adopt dominant forms. While this phenomenon, known as 'language shift', is usually regarded as a loss, this book adopts a different angle and addresses the following questions: What difference does using a new language make to the way speakers communicate in everyday life? Can the grammatical and lexical architectures of individual languages influence what speakers express? In other words, to what extent does adopting a new language alter speakers' day-to-day communication practices, and in turn, perhaps, their social life and world views? To answer these questions, this book studies the expression of emotions in two languages on each side of a shift: Kriol, an English-based creole spoken in northern Australia, and Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, non-Pama-Nyungan), an Australian Aboriginal language that is being replaced by Kriol. This volume is the first to explore the influence of the formal properties of language on the expression of emotions, as well as the first description of the linguistic encoding of emotions in a creole language. The cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists.
Metalanguage brings together new, original contributions on people's knowledge about language and representations of language, e.g., representations of dialects, styles, utterances, stances and goals in relation to sociolinguistic theory, sociolinguistic accounts of language variation, and accounts of linguistic usage. Drawing on a variety of data sources such as lay and linguists' metalanguage, the media, parliamentary debates, education, and retail shopping, the book comprises four sections and an integrative commentary. The main thematic parts deal with metalanguage in relation to the following issues: the theory of metalanguage, ideology, social evaluation, and stylisation. Other key themes discussed include constructionism, identity formation, in- and out-grouping, deception, discrimination, manipulation, and the increasing semiotisation of the socio-cultural landscape. Apart from the strictly linguistic concerns, some contributions focus on discourse in a broader sense examining meta-commentary construed in modalities other than language. The book follows from and complements a great tradition of the study of metalanguage, reflexivity, and metapragmatics, and offers a new, integrating perspective from various fields of sociolinguistics: perceptual dialectology, variationism, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, and social semiotics. The broad range of theoretical issues and accessible style of writing will appeal to advanced students and researchers in sociolinguistics and in other disciplines across the social sciences and humanities including linguists, communication researchers, anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, critical and social theorists. The book includes chapters by Deborah Cameron, Nikolas Coupland, Dariusz Galasinski, Peter Garrett, Adam Jaworski, Tore Kristiansen, Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, Dennis Preston, Theo van Leeuwen, Kay Richardson, Itesh Sachdev, Angie Williams, and John Wilson.
Is linguistic revival beneficiary to the plight of newly emerging, peripheral or even 'threatened' cultures? Or is it a smokescreen that hides the vestiges of ethnocentric ideologies, which ultimately create a hegemonic relationship? This book takes a critical look at revival exercises of special historical and geopolitical significance, and argues that a critical and cautious approach to revival movements is necessary. The cases of Sinhala, Kazakh, Mongolian, Catalan, and even Hong Kong Cantonese show that it is not through linguistic revival, but rather through political representation and economic development, that the peoples in question achieve competitiveness and equality amongst their neighbors. On the other hand, linguistic revival in these and other contexts can, and has been, used to support nationalist or ethnocentric agendas, to the detriment of other groups, recreating the same dynamics that generated the argument for revival in the first place. This book argues that respect for linguistic and other diversity, multilingualism and multiculturalism, is not compatible with linguistic revival that mirrors nation-building and essentializing identity construction.
Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean interrogates conventional notions of writing. The contributors-whose disciplines include anthropology, art history, education, film, history, linguistics, literature, performance studies, philosophy, sociology, translation, and visual arts-examine the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture. The twenty-five essays explore various patterns of writing practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted the literatures and cultures of Benin, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Morocco, Niger, Reunion Island, and Senegal. Special attention is paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and non-material culture to tell "stories" of great significance, co-mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the "classical" and the "popular" in new ways.
The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship provides an essential contribution to understanding the politics of Israel/Palestine through the prism of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Arabic-speakers who also know Hebrew resort to a range of communicative strategies for their political ideas to be heard: they either accommodate or resist the Israeli institutional suppression of Arabic. They also codeswitch and borrow from Hebrew as well as from Arabic registers and styles in order to mobilise discursive authority. On political and cultural stages, multilingual Palestinian politicians and artists challenge the existing political structures. In the late capitalist market, language skills are re-packaged as commodified resources. With new evidence from recent and historical discourse, this book is about how speakers of a marginalised, contained language engage with the political system in the idioms at their disposal. The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship is key reading for advanced students and scholars of multilingualism, language contact, ideology, and policy, within sociolinguistics, anthropology, politics, and Middle Eastern studies.
This collection showcases a multivalent approach to the study of literary multilingualism, embodied in contemporary Nordic literature. While previous approaches to literary multilingualism have tended to take a textual or authorship focus, this book advocates for a theoretical perspective which reflects the multiplicity of languages in use in contemporary literature emerging from increased globalization and transnational interaction. Drawing on a multimodal range of examples from contemporary Nordic literature, these eighteen chapters illustrate the ways in which multilingualism is dynamic rather than fixed, resulting from the interactions between authors, texts, and readers as well as between literary and socio-political institutions. The book highlights the processes by which borders are formed within the production, circulation, and reception of literature and in turn, the impact of these borders on issues around cultural, linguistic, and national belonging. Introducing an innovative approach to the study of multilingualism in literature, this collection will be of particular interest to students and researchers in literary studies, cultural studies, and multilingualism.
Drawing on a large corpus of narratives recorded at a church shelter for abused domestic helpers in Hong Kong, this monograph explores how the women discursively construct themselves in sharing sessions with other helpers. They see themselves as 'helpers' who have come to Hong Kong to help their families, to help the people in the city, and to serve God. A wide variety of competing identities are constructed in the narratives: submissive helper, sacrificial mother, daughter and wife, and powerless traumatised victim, but also resourceful indignant migrant women who, through sharing and peer support, become empowered to fight against abusive employers. This book provides a detailed discourse analysis of the women's narratives, but it also explores larger issues such as global migration, exploitation, language and power, abuse and the psychology of evil, intergroup communication, and peer support and empowerment.
This book offers a way forward toward a better understanding of perceived discrimination from a critical discourse studies perspective. The volume begins with a discussion of quantitative studies on perceived discrimination across a range of disciplines and moves toward outlining the ways in which a discourse-based framework, drawing on tools from cognitive linguistics and discursive psychology, offers valuable tools with which to document and analyze perceived discrimination through myriad lenses. Rojas-Lizana provides a systematic account, grounded in a critical approach, of perceived discrimination drawing on data from discourse from two minority groups, self-identified members of an LGBTIQ community and Spanish-speaking immigrants in Australia, and explores such topics as the relationship between language and discrimination, the conditions for determining what constitutes discriminatory acts, and both the copying and resistance strategies victims employ in their experiences. A concluding chapter offers a broader comparison of the conclusions drawn from both communities and discusses their implications for further research on perceived discrimination. This volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in critical discourse studies, social policy, gender and sexuality studies, and migration studies.
In this volume, Soe Marlar Lwin proposes a contextualized multimodal framework that brings together storytelling practitioners' and academic researchers' conceptions of storytelling. It aims to highlight the ways in which various institutions in contemporary society have been using live storytelling performances as an effective communicative, educative and meaning-making tool. Drawing on theories of narrative from narratology as well as from related fields such as discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, communication and performance studies, the author proposes a contextualized multimodal framework to (a) uncover the potential narrativity of a live storytelling performance through an analysis of narrative elements constituting the story, (b) capture the process of developing actual narrativity through a multimodal analysis of performance features in the storytelling discourse, and (c) highlight the importance of context and dynamics between the storyteller and audience for an achievement of optimal narrativity in a particular storytelling event. The sample analysis shows how the framework not only describes the system governing institutionalized storytelling performances in general but also serves as a useful model to examine individual performance as a unique realization of the general system. The book also offers implications for possible applications of such contextualized multimodal frameworks more broadly across the disciplines.
Genre theory has focused primarily on the analysis of generic constructs, with increasing attention to and emphasis on the contexts in which such genres are produced, interpreted, and used to achieve objectives, often giving the impression as if producing genres is an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. The result of this focus is that there has been very little attention paid to the ultimate outcomes of these genre-based discursive activities, which are more appropriately viewed as academic, institutional, organizational, and professional actions and practices, which are invariably non-discursive, though often achieved through discursive means. It was this objective in mind that the book develops an approach to a more critical and deeper understanding of interdiscursive professional voices and actions. Critical Genre Analysis as a theory of discursive performance is thus an attempt to be as objective as possible, rigorous in analytical endeavour, using a multiperspective and multidimensional methodological framework taking into account interdiscursive aspects of genre construction to make it increasingly explanatory to demystify discursive performance in a range of professional contexts.
It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if this is so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behaviour that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioural biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research.
The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship provides an essential contribution to understanding the politics of Israel/Palestine through the prism of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Arabic-speakers who also know Hebrew resort to a range of communicative strategies for their political ideas to be heard: they either accommodate or resist the Israeli institutional suppression of Arabic. They also codeswitch and borrow from Hebrew as well as from Arabic registers and styles in order to mobilise discursive authority. On political and cultural stages, multilingual Palestinian politicians and artists challenge the existing political structures. In the late capitalist market, language skills are re-packaged as commodified resources. With new evidence from recent and historical discourse, this book is about how speakers of a marginalised, contained language engage with the political system in the idioms at their disposal. The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship is key reading for advanced students and scholars of multilingualism, language contact, ideology, and policy, within sociolinguistics, anthropology, politics, and Middle Eastern studies.
Corpus Linguistics and the Analysis of Sociolinguistic Change demonstrates how particular styles and varieties of language are chosen and represented in the media, to reveal changing language ideologies and sociolinguistic change. Drawing on a corpus of ads broadcast on an Irish radio station between 1977 and 2017, this book shows how corpus linguistic tools can be creatively employed, in conjunction with frameworks and concepts such as audience and referee design and indexicality, and examines how accents and dialects (vernacular and prestige) are exploited in the ads across the decades. In addition, this book: illustrates the key principles of corpus design for sociolinguistics studies and offers a framework for future diachronic corpus studies of advertising on social media; provides a model for analysing corpus data at both inter-varietal and intra-varietal levels in terms of both accent and dialectal features and explores the efficacy of using particular corpus linguistic tools; identifies key factors which can be used by researchers as evidence for sociolinguistic change and links these factors to relevant theories and frameworks; demonstrates how corpus tools can be used to compare advertising discourse with naturally occurring discourse, with particular reference to markers of (pseudo) intimate discourse. Building on the growing body of research relating to variation and change in Irish English, this book is key reading for researchers and advanced students undertaking research within the areas of sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.
This book examines reports that are written by reviewers of submissions to a peer-reviewed journal. This includes a thorough study of the reports from the perspectives of context, content and genre, as well as from the point of view of pragmatics and politeness. The author examines the use of evaluative language, and the roles reviewers assume as they make their evaluations. He also explores how reviewers learn to write these reports. He then discusses the results of these analyses from the point of view of reviewer training, making suggestions for further research in the area of editorial peer review. The demystification of this occluded genre will be of benefit to doctoral students and early career academics not yet familiar with the peer review process, as well as those working in the broader areas of English for Specific Purposes and English for Academic Purposes, discourse analysis and writing for publication.
Why are second language learners in Japan's universities so silent? Using an innovative mixed-methods research approach, Jim King investigates the perplexing but intriguing phenomenon of classroom silence. With its exciting new conceptual framework of Dynamic Systems Theory, Silence in the Second Language Classroom offers a unique insight into the true complexity behind why some learners are either unable or unwilling to speak in a foreign language. This highly interdisciplinary book draws on ideas from fields such as psychology, sociolinguistics and anthropology, and delves deeply into themes relating to Japanese society and the country's education system. Written in an accessible and engaging style, this timely volume will be of interest to researchers, students of educational and applied linguistics, language education policy makers and, indeed, anyone who has ever taught.
Originally published in 1991. This book explicitly examines rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the practical world, and as in the expression of thinking in the language a speaker uses. It presents Leviathan in terms of the philosophical character of the work considered through Hobbes' use of language to express and organise his thought. Throughout, the nature of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy is discussed and the problems of language in philosophical understanding. The book is concerned with Hobbes' political philosophy and his views on figurative language, interest in literary theory and particularly his allegory. A special feature is the chapter on engraved title pages in Leviathan and other texts of the era.
This book examines the relationship between the English language and growth - economic and inclusive - in India. It explores why English continues to be the language of aspiration long after Independence. With the second largest English-speaking population in the world today, India is testimonial to how a linguistic legacy continues to cast a long shadow on its contemporary discourse in the economic arena. The volume: Explores how English language proficiency constitutes as human capital. Draws in the latest India Human Development Survey data. Investigates the relationship between the language and economic indicators such as wages, household income and state growth. Purther investigates the role of English language in the inclusivity of growth. Provides a snapshot of the pedagogy of English in the Indian education system. First of its kind in scope, this volume will be of great interest to scholars of economics, education, sociolinguistics, development studies, politics and sociology. It will also be of great interest to the general reader.
Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.
This book explores the effects of the global spread of English by reporting on a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study of the language attitudes, motivation and self-perceived English proficiency of youth in two Italian cities. Participant narratives highlight the far-reaching role that English plays on the performance and attainment of present and desired future selves, illustrate that English is understood not as singular but as plural and paradoxical, and reveal that English learners, who do not all accept the capital of 'native' speakers, utilize tactics to negotiate their position(s) with respect to their target language. On the one hand, by narrowing in on a specific population and drawing extensively on interview exchanges, this work provides readers with a nuanced depiction of the identities, milieu and learning experiences of English language learners in Italy. On the other hand, this level of detailed analysis gives insight into the understandings, construction of meaning and negotiations of language learners who need and want to acquire English, the global language, worldwide. Indeed, the issues and questions that are raised in this book, such as those concerning research approaches and the definitions assigned to key concepts, have profound implications on the research of English(es) today and can inform future directions in global English teaching. |
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