The abstracts below are summaries of papers by junior scholars from the 2013 edition of my course, Language and Societies, and presented at the course blog of the same name. The authors are undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and linguistics at Wayne State University. Over the next few weeks, some students will be posting links to PDF versions of their final papers below their abstracts. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at this critical juncture over the next week, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers.
Heather Buza: An Analysis of Driving Contracts for Persons with Dementia
Darlene Pennington-Johnson: The Verbal Art of Bribery: Going Further than Detroit’s Front Door
Stephen Teran: Aviation English and Communication Problems
Hind Ababtain: Saudi Arabic Diglossia and Code-Switching in Twitter: Education and Gender Effect
Kaitlin Muklewicz: Physician communication with women who have multiple sclerosis
Jennifer O’Hare: Irish or English? An Irish Parent’s Decision about a Child’s Education
Michael Thomas: Fixing and Fixing: Literal Language and Perceptual Relevance in High-Functioning Autism and the Less Wrong Community
Georgia Diamantopoulos: The Linguistic Expression of a Greek-American Identity
Kelsey Garason: Exploring Language and Gender through Blood and Combat
Brenna Moloney: The Dialectics of Pronoun Use in Modern Russia
Elspeth Geiger: Anishinaabemowin Animacy: The Metalinguistic Beliefs in Language Revitalization Websites
Jeri L. Pajor: Can Sacred Spaces Reveal Clues to Wyandotte’s German Ethnic Heritage and Show Status?
C.A. Donnelly: I Want to Convince You to Believe: Discourse and Authority in the Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theory
Kelly A. Johnston: The Invisible Majority: Language as a Means of Education in the Context of a German-American Historic House Museum
Talia Gordon: Beyond the Board: Metalinguistic Awareness and Language Beliefs Among Expert Scrabble Players
Leah Esslinger: Greeting Patterns in Midtown Detroit
Kimberly Anne Shay: Indigenous Language and Assimilation: Navajo and the Workplace
Sarah Carson: Black Nerds in the Media: A Linguistic Analysis
Monica Mieczkowski: “She may have wanted it”: Discourse of Consent in Online Accounts of the Steubenville, Ohio Rape
Julie Haase: Judging a Wine (Or Winery) by its Label
Kimberly A. Compton: A Community of Practice and Constructing Children’s Agency
Katherine Korth: AKC: Ravelry’s Impact on the Language of Knitters
Glossographia 