The links below lead to abstracts of papers from the 2010 edition of my senior/graduate course, Language and Societies, posted at the course blog of the same name. The authors are junior scholars at Wayne State University, including both undergraduate and graduate students. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at the critical juncture over the next week, when the authors will be making final revisions to their papers.
Anton Anderssen: Exceptional Musical Ability within a Framework of Metalinguistical Ideologies about Swedish Language
Ami Attee: I See What You’re Saying: The Communicative Functions of Hand Gestures
Brandon Davis: Language Variation: A Case Study of the Island of Tanna, Vanuatu
Andrea DiMuzio: Writing History in Formative Mesoamerica: Connecting History and Social Stratification in Four Ancient Scripts
Kate Frederick: Losing Power: The Effect of Language Loss in Native American Communities
Margaret Gale: It’s About Time
Mark Hill: The Implications of Gender in Patient-Physician Discourse
Emily Jelsomeno: Bitch, Nigger and Gay: Exclusive Language? The Semantic Shift of Pejorative Words and Reclamation
Frankie Johnson: Gender-Specific Honorifics in Japanese: A Comparative Study
K.A.L.: Dubbing and Subtitling in Europe: Benefits, Drawbacks, and Cultural Implications
R. LaPorte: Bosnian Language and Ethnic Identity
Kathryn Meloche: On and About Glass Bottles—the effects of technology on the evolution of bottle language
Cherry Meyer: The De-centering of Standard English through Indigenous Postcolonial Poetry
Evelyn Postell-Franklin: Mixed Messages: discourse trends in the hip-hop era
Melinda Pye: Infant Baby Talk: Is it an Effective Device?
Georgia Richardson-Melody: A Worldview Lost in Translation: Issues with Translating Ayurvedic Science into a Biomedical Worldview
Jennifer Rivera: American Sign Language and the influences of Computer Mediated Communication
Leah R. Shapardanis: What do whining dogs have to do with universal grammar?
Graham Sheckels: A Discourse Analysis of Runic Messages in Two Media
Joseph A. Sindone III: Linguistic and paralinguistic cues of text-based computer-mediated communication and their associated social processes
Claudia Voit: Reassessment of the Maya Verb Root, K’al
Glossographia 