A lingthusiastic social and a meet and greet with linguistics professors! All undergraduates welcome. Kabob & Curry dinner will be provided. 190 Thayer Street, Basement Link Space.
Speaker Series on The Linguistic Expression of Racial and Ethnic Identity
Speaker: Minh Nguyen, Ph.D., Amazon
Title: Place, Memory, and Diasporic Identities in Everyday Vietnamese Family Discourse
Abstract: The very notion of “diaspora” hinges upon the concept of place, and Vietnamese diasporas around the world are entangled in complex sociocultural, geopolitical, and spatiotemporal relationships with their ancestral homeland. One word to describe diasporic Vietnamese is Việt Kiều, which means ‘overseas Vietnamese; Vietnamese sojourner’; the term itself evokes the image of movement and highlights the importance of place in the formation of a diasporic identity. Many in the Vietnamese American diaspora will return to their ancestral homeland, or đi về Việt Nam, to visit extended family and friends in their natal villages, or quê. This practice of updating family members on changes in their quê is the context this analysis explores.
In this study, I examine a naturally occurring conversation within a family of Southern Vietnamese dialect speakers. I investigate how speakers construct a shared, diasporic family identity grounded in mutual knowledge about the family’s natal village. Extending Tannen’s (2007) discussion of scenes, I demonstrate how, through expressions of epistemic stance (Heritage, 2012), speakers co-construct detailed hometown scenes and past experiences. As speakers attempt to establish relatively equal epistemic authority, they balance power and solidarity and position each other as expert co-tellers of the family history. Through strategies such as conferring (Gordon, 2003) and ratifying co-participants’ contributions of details, speakers co-construct the family’s past experiences and memories of living in Vietnam, which indexes the transnational and diasporic aspects of the family’s identity. Moreover, these past experiences and memories are grounded in a sense of place and belonging, and they comprise the family’s shared history together.
Speaker Series on The Linguistic Expression of Racial and Ethnic Identity
Speaker: Sabriya Fisher, Wellesley College
Title: Innovation and social stratification in AAE negation
Abstract: This talk presents the results of a sociolinguistic investigation of variation in the use of negation in a corpus of naturalistic speech from 42 speakers of African American English in Philadelphia. Particular focus is placed on the use of ain’t in the past tense, where it varies with didn’t, which is a unique feature of AAE that may also be a recent innovation in the grammar (Fasold & Wolfram, 1970; Green, 2002; Howe, 2005; Labov et al., 1968; Loman, 1967; Weldon, 1994, 2021; Wolfram, 1969). Use ofain’tin the past tense is compared to its uses in other tense-aspect contexts whereain’thas been used for centuries (Anderwald, 2006; Jespersen, 1961). Results of apparent time comparisons reveal that past tense uses of ain’t increased over the course of the 20th century while uses in other contexts remained stable, aligning with the hypothesis that past tense uses ofain’t result from a recent change. Generalized linear models of variation between ain’t and other negated auxiliaries in past tense vs. other contexts support the recent change hypothesis and point toward innovation in Northern cities like Philadelphia following the Great Migration. Finally, these results are evaluated in light of the Divergence Hypothesis (Labov & Harris, 1986, Bailey & Maynor, 1987) as well as new insights on social stratification in the use of morphosyntactic features of AAE (Weldon, 2021).
Sponsored by: C.V. Starr Foundation Lectureship Fund, the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, The Program in Judaic Studies, the Department of Africana Studies and with additional support from the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.
Speaker Series on The Linguistic Expression of Racial and Ethnic Identity
Speaker: Dr. Nicté Fuller Medina,Swarthmore College
Title: Nation, State and Race: Multilingual Acts of Identity in Belize
Abstract: Belize is the only country in Central America to have English as its official language yet only 63% of the population claim English as a language they speak. Another 57% of the population claims Spanish and 46% claim Belize Kriol, an English-lexified Creole (Statistical Institute of Belize 2013:21). English is the prestige language, while Spanish (the de facto official second language) has dual status as prestige and stigmatized language. Kriol, on the other hand, largely considered a lingua franca, has been recruited as a marker of pan-Belizean identity since the time of independence. Thus, is holds covert prestige but remains highly stigmatized (Young 1995; Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). Speakers who use these languages in the same utterance in everyday speech as in (1) must navigate multiple grammatical systems as well the ideological landscape in which these languages are hierarchically positioned. 1. Tiene miedo que se haga drop su amiga. Have3PL.PRES fear that CL do3SG.SUBJ drop her friend ‘She is afraid that her friend will fall’ Drawing on data from language policies, language attitudes and a corpus of multilingual data from Belize, I examine how state ideologies, colonial raciolinguistic ideologies, and linguistic agency can be observed in the empirical practices of plurilingual Belizean Spanish speakers as they employ their linguistic resources to achieve communicative goals and project various acts of identity.
Sponsored by: C.V. Starr Foundation Lectureship Fund, the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, The Program in Judaic Studies, the Department of Africana Studies and with additional support from the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.
Speaker Series on The Linguistic Expression of Racial and Ethnic Identity
Speaker: Dr. Rachel Steindel Burdin, University of New Hampshire
Title: “But I don’t do that anymore, because I live in Maine”: Exploring language, place, and Jewish identity in New England and beyond
Abstract: What does it mean to “sound Jewish”? What does it mean for a place to “be Jewish”? And how do the two interact? In this talk, I will explore the relationship between language, place, and Jewishness, focusing on two locations: New England, and Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter in Krakow, Poland. First, I will present research from New Hampshire and Southern Maine, which builds off previous work suggesting ideological links between “Jewishness” and “New Yorkness” as well as research on language change and urban/rural orientation in Northern New England (Nagy, 2001; Stanford et al., 2012). Jewish community members from the area appear to be leading a change away from some traditional Eastern New England dialect features, mirroring the situation in Boston (Laferriere, 1979; Stanford, 2019). In addition, Jewish community members from outside the area appear to maintain a LOT/THOUGHT distinction, and a distinctly New York City English raised THOUGHT vowel is noted by some speakers to be emblematic of “Jewish-sounding” speech, providing further evidence of an indexical link between New Yorkness and Jewishness. Next, I will present an analysis of the use of Hebrew and Yiddish in the linguistic landscape of Krakow’s Jewish quarter, Kazimierz. While some local businesses’ use of Hebrew and Yiddish ends up either displacing Jewishness in either time or space, reinforcing tourist narratives of Poland as a place devoid of Jews (Lehrer, 2013), the Jewish Community Center use of Hebrew and Yiddish situates the Jewishness of the quarter in the here and now, presenting a vibrant, growing community to visitors, and creating new narratives about Jewishness in Poland.
Despite the varied methodologies employed (quantitative vs. qualitative), modalities (written vs. spoken language) and different locations (New England vs. Poland), both of these studies end up showing the impact of similar metalinguistic narratives and other ideologies. People’s ideas about where Jews live, the languages they speak, and what it means to “sound Jewish” end up shaping both the production and perception of Jewish language(s).
Sponsored by: C.V. Starr Foundation Lectureship Fund, the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, The Program in Judaic Studies, the Department of Africana Studies and with additional support from the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.
Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.
Speaker: Guillaume Thomas - Associate Professor - University of Toronto
Title: Switch-reference, discourse coherence and centering
Abstract: Switch Reference (SR) is a family of grammatical devices whose primary function is to indicate whether two linked clauses have coreferential pivots, where the pivot is a prominent argument of some sort. We refer to the two clauses linked by a SR marker as the marked clause (which contains the SR marker) and the reference clause. In some languages, in addition to their function of reference tracking, SR markers can be used to indicate whether the events or situations described by the marked and reference clauses differ with respect to some parameter, such as time, place or actuality. This phenomenon is known as non-canonical switch reference. One of the open questions in studies of SR is whether canonical and noncanonical SR are different manifestations of a single process (Stirling, 1993), whether they are triggered by different configurations (McKenzie, 2012), or whether they are different phenomena altogether, with independent syntax and semantics (Weisser, 2012; Baker & Camargo Souza, 2019).
This talk will discuss the relation between canonical and noncanonical SR in Mbyá, focusing on a construction that has received little attention in the literature, in which a pronoun is used in place of the marked clause. Crucially, we show that despite the availability of non-canonical interpretations‚ most occurrences of reduced SR (in a corpus of narratives) still track subject reference across sentences. In addition, we argue that non-canonical uses of SR marking are not associated with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but compete with canonical uses in the same contexts and configurations: speakers are more likely to use SR marking to indicate subject identity or difference, but may also use it to emphasize contrast or similarity between situations, although this use is less frequent.
Speaker Series on The Linguistic Expression of Racial and Ethnic Identity
Speaker: Dr. Amelia Tseng, American University and Smithsonian
Title: “They talk just like an African American kid, and if you hear their Spanish, it’s worse”: Raciomultilingual ideologies in Latinx language and migration
Abstract: Migration and global cities raise new questions for language, identity, and diversity, as well-established discourses of race, class, and social status vie with new semiotic meanings that emerge transnationally and in the local context. Washington, D.C. is a unique site of Latinx migration and sociolinguistic contact. Latinx of all backgrounds, with a Salvadoran majority that is unique in the United States, mingle in a diverse city which is historically both African American and racially segregated, and which is undergoing radical gentrification-related change. I argue that a raciomultilingual perspective is essential to understanding the language beliefs and behavior of U.S. Latinxs and other racialized immigrant groups within this complexity. This approach emphasizes that multilingual repertoires must be studied holistically since raciolinguistic ideologies are not constrained by abstract language boundaries and speakers do not experience their languages in isolation. Taking the example of D.C. Latinx language, I examine multiscalar language ideologies that circulate from the local to transnational and relate to particularities of identity construction as well as commonalities of broader systems of colonialist thought. I conclude with a reflection on directions in linguistics and related fields in relationship to foundational questions of language as part of society and social change.
Sponsored by: C.V. Starr Foundation Lectureship Fund, the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, The Program in Judaic Studies, the Department of Africana Studies and with additional support from the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.
Speaker Series on The Linguistic Expression of Racial and Ethnic Identity
Speaker: Professor Sharese King, University of Chicago
Title: “Operationalizing Intersectionality: A variationist’s approach to complicating identity categories in sociolinguistics”
Abstract: The term intersectionality was coined by legal scholar, Kimberle Crenshaw, to account for the discrimination Black women faced at the intersection of both race and gender (Crenshaw 1989). Since, scholars across disciplines, including linguistics, have drawn on the theory to account for the complexity of identity, recognizing that dimensions of identity co-occur and co-constitute one another, with one informing the other (Levon 2015). In this talk, I discuss why exploring intersectionality in sociolinguistics is vital for advancing both theory and social justice efforts (King 2020). Drawing on previous work from Rochester, NY and Bakersfield, California, I propose ways to operationalize this social theory into variationist analyses.
Sponsored by: C.V. Starr Foundation Lectureship Fund, the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, The Program in Judaic Studies, the Department of Africana Studies and with additional support from the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.