Glossographia

Welcome to the latest and perhaps the last in a series of self-flagellatory blog posts in the post-blog era of Glossographia, apologizing for a lack of content here! Ahhh … but this time I have lots of exciting things to come in the next few months.

Most notably I want to draw your attention to my forthcoming book, Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History, coming out in late fall from MIT Press: Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History. Lots of new publications and content and such to be coming out this fall.

In general, though, to keep up to date on whatever doings are transpiring, follow me on Twitter @schrisomalis where I will surely post more regularly than here.

The abstracts below are summaries of papers by junior scholars from the 2019 edition of my course, Language and Societies, posted at the course blog of the same name. The authors are undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and linguistics at Wayne State University. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at this critical juncture over the next two weeks, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers.

Kate Blatchford: Redefining Urban Space: Language in the City Beautiful Movement

Dina Charara: Islamophobic Discourse Beneath the Façade of Liberalism and Atheism

Amanda Diaz: To stage manage or not to stage manage

Josh Linden: Contrastive Focus Capitalization: Nonstandard Usages of Capital Letters in Web-based English and their Capital-I Implications

Sam M: Comparing nineteenth century literature portrayals of AAVE by black and white authors

Justin Mazzola: A Ghost of a Tale: Discerning Evidentiality Among Ghost Narratives on Reddit

Shannon Mckeown: Fake News, Crooked Hillary, and Bad People: A Linguistic Analysis of Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults

Jahnavi Narkar: The Promise of Fairness: A Linguistic Analysis of Skin Lightening Advertisements in India

Jennifer Reed: Linguistic Landscape of Japanese in Novi

Zachariah Shorufi: The linguistic legacy of British colonization in Iraq

Tabitha Trembley: The Dichotomy of Gender in Relation to Honor as Shown in the Language of Irish Fairy Tales and Folktales Printed After 1800

Michael T. Vollbach: Historical Influences on the Odawa Language

Li Zhang: Navigating internet censorship in China

 

 

The abstracts below are summaries of papers by junior scholars from the 2018 edition of my course, Language and Societies, posted at the course blog of the same name. The authors are undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and linguistics at Wayne State University. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at this critical juncture over the next two weeks, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers.

Yen-ting Chang: “Found My Best Self”: Women’s Fitness and Body Transformation Discourse

Asa Choate: French Naming Practice of Assimilating English-based Internet Terminology

Grace Fusani: Languages in Dreams: A Look into the Influencers of Bilinguals & L2 Learners in the Dreamworld

Ashley Johnson: Language, gender, and uncertainty in writing about sex identification in Maya bioarchaeology

Robert McCallum: Tensions, Power and Words: The Use of Authoritative Brand Identity Language on Ad Agency Websites

Andrew McKinney: Sorrow, shame, and lament in Irish folk lyrics

Kelsey McKoy: The Interpretation of African American Vernacular English in Museums

Craig Meiners: Metaphors in Branding and Design of Professional Basketball Players’ Shoes

Haley Scott: Melancholia, A Lover’s Rejection, and Fortune Teller’s Reading: A linguistic analysis of suicide obituaries in a historical newspaper

Carly Slank: Dogespeak: a Heckin Good Descriptive and Contextual Analysis

Samantha Spolarich: The magical discourse of Harry Potter: how spells came to be

Cory Taylor: The Language of the Time Lords: A linguistic study on the effect of invented languages on the social hierarchy of fandom communities

Jami Van Alstine: Voice in postcards related to the woman’s suffrage movement in the United States in the early 20th century

Anna Zabicka: “Rigvir, Anyone?”: A Discourse Analysis Of Oncolytic Virotherapy Medication Websites

 

Linguistic anthropologists (et al.): I’m looking for a suggestion for  a different ethnography for my undergrad Language and Culture class.   I’ve been using Basso’s Portraits of “the Whiteman” and while it’s  great, it’s almost 40 years old now.  What I need:

– (Relatively) short (<200 pages of text)
– In print and for sale for <$20 or so (or widely available used, or a good ebook edition)
– Ideally, focus on a non-English context
– Accessible to and of interest to juniors/seniors
– Appeal to both anthro and linguistics majors (could be more  sociolinguistic, or more linguistic anthro, but needs to have something  that looks like linguistic data)
Thoughts?