Sociolinguistics

This dissertation investigates the ethics of authorial collaboration in contemporary collaborative women’s writing and its effect on the power dynamics inherent in the writing process. Collaborative writing occupies a continuum, from ethnographic autobiography, in which the writer outranks the generally anonymous subject, to the celebrity “ghostwritten” autobiography, which overturns this hierarchy. This study focuses more narrowly on more covert forms of collaboration implying a differential of symbolic capital that foregrounds asymmetrical writing relationships. Importantly, these asymmetrical relationships cannot be unproblematically reduced to the general (or generic) conception of “coauthorship,” turning instead towards a form of paratextual dialogue that acknowledges the presence of diverse and sometimes conflicting authorial voices that manifest themselves in various ways in different parts of the text.
By focusing on a variety of covert collaborative forms, including so-told narratives from different epochs and traditions, the dissertation will expand our conception of collaborative writing and simultaneously develop a more dialogic notion of authorship, putting in conversation Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and polyphony with feminist theory. The case studies present in the dissertation, ranging from feminist journals of the 1970s to slave narratives, provide the crucial function of offering a profound and carefully nuanced series of contexts in which to examine the deeper moral principles and obligations that tie collaborators to each other. Simultaneously, this analysis aims to start a discussion about privilege in the writing collaborative process as well as issues of minority representation in literature.
The relationship between authorial voices that hold a differential of symbolic capital also invites to reflect on the complicated sociocultural dynamics between socalled “dominant” or “prestige” languages–what Pascale Casanova calls “dominating” languages–and “minority” languages (such as Italian dialects and Guadeloupean Creole). For this reason, starting from the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia this dissertation leads to a sociolinguistic analysis of the linguistic habits of collaborators, highlighting how language becomes one of the forms of power imbalance.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how nigga is used between speakers of African American Language (AAL). Nigga has few detailed analyses that examine its intracommunity usage, especially regarding non-negative uses of the word. It is the center of much controversy within African American communities, particularly due to the generational divide on its racist potency, and horrific historical ties. Therefore, I ask whether in-group speakers use nigga in different contexts to convey meanings that are also neutral or positive in sentiment, and whether factors such as gender and age affect these sentiments. This thesis is a partial replication of Smith (2019), and I utilize spoken data from the Corpus of Regional African American Language in my quantitative analysis. I find that AAL speakers use nigga across all sentiments, and in a variety of syntactic environments. Additionally, men seem to say nigga more often than women in spoken conversation, and younger individuals are more likely to use the term over older individuals. Through this thesis, I shed light on the invisible linguistic boundaries that complicate AAL speakers' feelings on nigga. Cultural experiences and social pressures of being African American inform many speakers' opinions regarding nigga, and care should be taken to discuss these complexities.

This study examined the relation between home language exposure from different
household members, specifically older siblings, and English and Spanish vocabulary
development in bilingual toddlers. The English and Spanish vocabularies of 38 toddlers
(19 boys and 19 girls; Mage = 2.14 years, SD = .14) were measured. Parental EI?-glish use
was found to be the strongest predictor of English and Spanish proficiencies. Among
households in which the parents use less than 10% English, having older siblings had no
effect on English language proficiency but was associated with lower levels of Spanish
proficiency.

In this study, we investigated what informational aspects of faces could account
for the ability to match an individual’s face to their voice, using only static images. In
each of the first six experiments, we simultaneously presented one voice recording along
with two manipulated images of faces (e.g. top half of the face, bottom half of the face,
etc.), a target face and distractor face. The participant’s task was to choose which of the
images they thought belonged to the same individual as the voice recording. The voices
remained un-manipulated. In Experiment 7 we used eye tracking in order to determine
which informational aspects of the model’s faces people are fixating while performing
the matching task, as compared to where they fixate when there are no immediate task
demands. We presented a voice recording followed by two static images, a target and
distractor face. The participant’s task was to choose which of the images they thought
belonged to the same individual as the voice recording, while we tracked their total
fixation duration. In the no-task, passive viewing condition, we presented a male’s voice
recording followed sequentially by two static images of female models, or vice versa, counterbalanced across participants. Participant’s results revealed significantly better
than chance performance in the matching task when the images presented were the
bottom half of the face, the top half of the face, the images inverted upside down, when
presented with a low pass filtered image of the face, and when the inner face was
completely blurred out. In Experiment 7 we found that when completing the matching
task, the time spent looking at the outer area of the face increased, as compared to when
the images and voice recordings were passively viewed. When the images were passively
viewed, the time spend looking at the inner area of the face increased. We concluded that
the inner facial features (i.e. eyes, nose, and mouth) are not necessary informational
aspects of the face which allow for the matching ability. The ability likely relies on global
features such as the face shape and size.

This thesis uses graphic design to explore the experience of an individual attempting to

bridge two countries’ distinctly different cultures: Iran and the United States. Each has a particular political relation to the other in history. I am using graphic design as a tool to compare specific and various aspects of the two cultures and how these aspects impact each other based on my personal experience. I use design to explore my place in between two cultures and as a way to make sense of the exchange or replacement of culture that I perceive. Another aspect of my thesis emphasizes how western influences and technology are altering or eradicating traditions in Iran. This thesis demonstrates collation and confrontation of cultural and social elements through the application of design to a set of culturally symbolic objects. The goal is to utilize graphic design tools to elevate awareness about illustrating the cultural and traditional aspects of the two countries.

If we define language fluency as more than simply a way of speaking, but also a
way of thinking, acting, and being, then we enter a conversation of language as
‘Discourse’ that was sparked by James Paul Gee. This conversation invokes discrete
designations of Discourse as home-based, school-based, dominant, and non-dominant.
These designations reveal divisions between Discourses that are believed to manifest
themselves in the identity formation of ‘language-minority students:’ those whose
home Discourse is non-dominant. The dominant Discourse that these students
encounter in school generates two documented paths: Richard Hoggart’s scholarship
boy and Herbert Kohl’s not-learner; both paths reflect the limited agency of these
students within academia. In order to counteract this delimiting of student agency, this
project proposes a progressive shift towards a post-modern conception of identity
formation; this can be accomplished by opening the Composition classroom to student authored, non-traditional, ‘hybridized’ Discourses.

The current study addressed several questions about the use of language intermingling in child-directed speech and its influence on children's English and Spanish language acquisition on children's language code-switching, Participants were 65 children (Mean age=30.93 months, SD=0.44, 28 boys and 37 girls) who had been exposed to English and Spanish from birth and for whom at least one parent was a native Spanish speaker.... Measures of the children's lexical, grammatical, receptive, and productive language development in English and in Spanish were collected concurrently.... Consistent with sociolinguistic theories that propose that language separation is necessary for heritage language maintenance, children who were exposed to more language intermingling were more English-dominant. Both sensitivity to the language context and children's language dominance were related to children's production of mixed utterances. Children code-switched more when speaking in their less proficient language and when in the context of minority language use.