English/Applied Linguistics

This study provides a qualitative examination of African American Language (AAL) in use and explores the interaction between phonological, syntactic and rhetorical features of AAL and situational factors related to the event structuring, speaker goals, and audience composition. Data for this research is derived from the speech of four prominent African Americans who spoke during the 2008 State of the Black Union. Analysis of their speech suggests that they use switches to black preaching style to redefine their relationship with audience members. Overall, shifts in style correspond to shifts in interactional framework, suggesting that black preaching style allows the speakers in this study to temporarily cloak themselves with the status and respect associated with black preachers, providing a favorable context for the reception of their message while allowing for the display of their ethnic affiliation with the black community.

This dissertation utilizes a sociocultural linguistic approach that combines sociolinguistic, discourse analytic and ethnographic methods in order to examine how black public figures use African American English (AAE) to express complex identities in interaction. This study explores the interaction between phonological, grammatical, suprasegmental and rhetorical features of black speech and situational factors related to event structuring, speaker goals, and audience composition. Overall, this study illustrates how shifts in speaking style can help speakers manage the presentation of controversial political and social messages. While the speakers in this study make limited use of hallmark vernacular features of AAE (such as copula deletion and invariant be), they consistently draw from a black stylistic repertoire, specifically black preaching style, that allows them to take controversial political stances as they express their ethnic, religious, and philosophical affiliation with members of the black community.

Absorbed by an interest in collaborative teaching, four relatively new faculty formed a Marian Wright Teaching Circle and spent a year researching the literature, analyzing various models, and assessing pros and cons. Then they collaborated on writing this summary. All four came to the topic with a range of experiences, some good, some bad, but a gusto for the possibilities -especially for interdisciplinary collaborations. In assessing the challenges, they conclude, “Whether playing the role of the enlightened or the enlightener, instructors should be willing to recognize that teaching is not just about guiding students. It is also about teaching each other as faculty.”

Using a combination of conversation analysis and phonetic transcription methods, I examine the construction of the voice of the Black preacher in three performances by Richard Pryor.  The contrast of phonological, syntactic, and stylistic features and the non-congruence of content come together to help audience members make sense of what Pryor is doing with the characters that he is constructing. These performances allow Pryor to produce a pointed social commentary on preachers perhaps helping to shift the public image of the preacher from one that is elevated and sanctified to one that mirrors the crass, secular experiences of the layperson.

Vehicle City Voices Corpus – Part I was developed at the University of Michigan-Flint, and is an ongoing oral history project and survey of English language variation in Flint, Michigan. It contains approximately 16 hours of speech with corresponding transcripts from interviews of Flint residents conducted between 2012 and 2015.

The corpus was designed to provide high-quality recordings for acoustic analysis and to examine narrative structure and discursive construction of individual and collective identity in urban spaces.

https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2017S17

This article explores the ways that Flint residents report on their encounters with various kinds of "outsiders" who are influenced by mass-mediated images that position Flint and its residents in a certain way. Through the voicing of outsiders who engage in the circulation of negative discourses about Flint, residents then insert their own voices as they contest negative discourses about the city. Here, the images that they project about life in Flint provide a powerful counternarrative about what it means to have lived in the city during its deindustrializing period. This suggests that oral history interviews are an important site for the discursive production (and contestation) of individual and collective identities for Flint residents. [oral history, discourses of place, identity, Flint, chronotope] O n December 26, 2013, an article appeared on the Policy.Mic website originally titled, "This Is America's Most Apocalyptic, Violent City-And You've Probably Never Heard of It." This article, written by New York-based journalist Laura Dimon, hit such a raw nerve in Flint, Michigan, the focus of this article, that Policy.Mic editors were forced to retitle the article, "This Is America's Most Apocalyptic, Violent City-And It Deserves More Attention" and provide an apology and clarification about the wording and authorship of the original title. Nevertheless, the body of Dimon's article provided a string of commonly cited statistics about the city of Flint-the reduction of jobs at the automotive giant General Motors (GM), staggeringly high poverty and crime rates for a predominantly African American city of just under 100,000 residents, and a rapidly declining population. The article also included photographic evidence of the "apocalyptic" nature of the city including images of abandoned, burned-out homes, and desolate city streets. In the weeks that followed, residents and city leaders responded in a number of social media outlets and a local news outlet, Mlive, decrying what they considered faulty journalism centered on their belief that the author never actually visited the city and that some of the original pictures in the article, which were later removed, were not of Flint, but of houses in Detroit and even a street in Ramla, Israel (Stamm 2013; Atkinson 2014). Local and national news outlets also began to highlight the voices of entrepreneurs (Mariotti 2014), university faculty members (Atkinson 2013), and city leaders (Acosta 2013) who challenged the negative view of Flint and even the

This article illustrates the 'moving parts' involved in the stylization of the voice of the Black preacher in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor with the ultimate goal of uncovering what these linguistic features help the performer to accomplish in interaction. Overall, while Pryor often utilizes hyperbolic and exaggerated features of Black preaching traditions and potentially Southern-inflected speaking styles in his performances, I argue that he engages in a type of linguistic subterfuge, blending elements of his own voice into a more favorable depiction of a witty, street-wise preacher. In fact, stretches of working-class speech, whose features overlap considerably with Pryor's 'stage voice', may blur the line between Pryor's 'own' personal stance and that of the preacher that he is constructing. (Black preachers, performance, stylization, comedy, African American English)*

As critical perspectives in language studies have gained legitimacy and even mainstream status in applied linguistics, it is necessary to re-examine the meaning of criticality in language studies and to re-envision criticality for further development. The authors explore criticality from several theoretical perspectives as well as from the notion of praxis. They review three major theoretical threads—namely, postmodernist constructionism including poststructuralist theory, Marxist-influenced theories, and postcolonial theories—and examine how these frameworks have influenced critical applied linguistics and how their criticisms of other perspectives within the critical framework are historically, ideologically, and geopolitically implicated. Although these theories constitute the core of conceptual criticality, praxis is essential for critical enactment. The authors thus unpack the meaning of praxis and discuss how reflexivity, action, and transformation must inform the continuing (re)envisioning of criticality in contemporary society and institutions where it is necessary to confront neoliberalism as a new kind of domination

How come is an old idiomatic expression, not a modern syntactic construction, and needs to be analyzed against the background of morphosyntactic features that were productive in Anglo Saxon syntax and up to the 16th century. There are several distinct flavors of how come sentences; Michael Montgomery's collection for the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English contains three distinct types. This particular use of the verb come is historically rooted in Anglo-Saxon (be)cuman in the sense that someone has an experience resulting in a change of state; the EXPERIENCER is selected as the verb's indirect object and assigned inherent case (Dative; e.g. hu becom þe swa mycel swyʒe? 'How did such great speechlessness befall youDAT?'). Becuman coexisted with weorðan and eventually took over its semantic duties as internal language changes rendered weorðan obsolete. Concurrent with those changes was the loss of productive inherent Case for the indirect object (Dative), so English had two choices (and took both): The verb come (here, in combination with how) could be reanalyzed as strongly inflected or fossilize as a modifier (wh-element).

State curricula in English Language Arts are calling for grammar instruction to be folded into the teaching of writing, linguistic diversity / identity, and stylistic variation (as does the new North Carolina Course of Studies). Such a reorientation raises the stakes for teachers who will now teach advanced applications of something that is no longer taught as a subject: grammar. And traditional grammar, which sought descriptive adequacy in coherence, is a myopic guide to a language that provides a wealth of options and alternatives to be exploited by a writer / speaker. This article provides a survey of such choices among alternative morphosyntactic constructions (pre- and postnominal AP, inflected and periphrastic degree and possession), systems (inherent case vs. structural case assignment), and phi-features (strong vs. weak inflections) and demonstrates how alternative phi-features were put to use by Shakespeare for register in 'Romeo and Juliet.' It is argued that lingu...