Texas Linguistics Forum Vol. 52 (2008)

Carmel O'Shannessy
Language contact and acquisition: learning a new mixed language and Warlpiri
Abstract

Presentations

Rizwan Ahmad
Complex indexicality of Urdu in India
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Christy Bird
"It’s not very funny”: Heightened performance through prefaces of formulaic jokes in interaction
Abstract

Christopher Engelke & Dario Mangano
Temporal cues: What children with severe autism can teach us about the organization of intersubjectivity
Abstract

Caleb Everett
Evidence for language-mediated thought in the perception of non-gendered figures
Abstract + Handout(.pdf) + Paper(.pdf)

Brett Falcon
The postcolonial dialogue in Talpense men's talk
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

George Figgs
"We rep the CO, we get Mile High love”: The authentication of a local hip-hop scene
Abstract

Matt Garley
LOL, what a tangled Web we weave: Strategies for coherence in instant messaging discourse
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Maria Gorete Neto
The Impact of bilingual education on indigenous language and culture: The case of Tapirape
Abstract

Marina Gorlach
Intercultural communication in the US college classroom: A Russian professor's perspective
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Theresa Heyd
Genre change, language change? Forms of plural address in email hoaxes and other genres
Abstract

Elizabeth Kickham and LeRoy Sealy
Teaching stories: Cultural and educational uses of traditional and personal narrative in the Choctaw language classroom
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Kenneth Konopka and Janet Pierrehumbert
Vowels in contact: Mexican Heritage English in Chicago
Abstract

Bryan Meadows
Co-constructing the ‘Familiar Exotic’ in second language learner discourse
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Tal Morse
Hebrew GaySpeak: Subverting a gender-based language
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Brendan O'Connor and Gilbert Brown
Not for your average brain: the social meaning of metaphor in an underground hiphop community
Abstract + Handout(.pdf) + Presentation(.ppt) + Paper(.pdf)

Jennifer Sclafani
Newt Gingrich, bilingualism, and “Ghetto” language: Online constructions of language ideologies
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Susanne Stadlbauer
“I want pure Islam”: Gender and religion in the discourse of Muslim women converts in Colorado
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Cindi SturtzSreetharan
Osaka Aunties: Negotiating honorific language, gender, and regionality
Abstract + Handout(.pdf) + Paper(.pdf)

Chris Taylor
Spatialized authenticity in Hip Hop discourse
Abstract + Handout(.pdf)

Cala Zubair
Doxastic modality as a means of stance taking in colloquial Sinhala
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

Sarah Wagner
Family ideologies of lesbian and gay parents
Abstract

Alternates

Felix Julca-Guerrero
Word Borrowing and Code Switching in the Ancash Waynu Songs
Abstract

Margaret W. Smith & Linda Waugh
Covert racist discourse on the WWW: Rhetorical strategies of the Minuteman Project
Abstract + Paper(.pdf)

ABSTRACTS

Keynotes

James Paul Gee
"Basic Information Structure" and "Academic Language": An Approach to Discourse Analysis

This paper has two purposes. One purpose is to introduce a tool for analyzing some aspects of discourse. This tool is based on what I will call "Basic Information Structure" ("BIS" for short). The second purpose is to apply this tool to a specific example so that I can both make the use of the tool clear and speak to an issue I wish to address. The issue is "academic language". Academic language is a general name for many different varieties of language associated with academic disciplines or with academic content in schools, for example, the styles of language and other symbol systems associated with chemistry or social science. Some people have argued that academic varieties of language are functional in the sense that they have evolved in history to do certain intellectual and interactional tasks necessary for an academic domain to make progress. They cannot simply be replaced with less specialized versions of language, any more than a tool purpose-built for a specific job can simply be replaced, without loss, by a more generalized tool. Others have argued that such academic varieties of language are forms of "jargon" and complexity invented to exclude, confuse, and frustrate outsiders (non-academics and people outside a given field) and to hide or evade political, cultural, institutional, and social issues in the name of "reason" or "logic". This issue-whether academic varieties of language are functional or ideological (in the informal senses I have given these terms here)-has played a role in education. Some educators argue that children need to be introduced in school (for example, in science classrooms) to academic varieties of language early on, because mastery of these representational systems is crucial for true understanding and real participation in areas of science, for instance. Others have argued that academic varieties of language simply serve to make the "rich" kids look smarter than the "poor" ones-because they have had more home-based preparation for such varieties. Such academic varieties of language are barriers to understanding and participation, on this view, and need to be replaced with more democratic forms of language, interaction, and participation. I want to use one approach to discourse analysis to investigate these divides.

Elizabeth Keating
New Communication Technologies and Interaction

New communication technologies are providing us not just with a new context for our conventional ways of doing things, but are creating new spaces and boundaries for participation. At the interactional level, human actions are highly influenced by shared repertoires learned over a lifetime but people also show a surprisingly fast adaptability to new tools and conditions and new forms and spaces of human-machine collaboration. This talk will discuss some current research into ways that communication technologies are impacting interaction, such as how participants are managing multiple participation spaces through technology, and new forms of sociality. Data will be discussed from current research on societal impacts of mobile phone technology, digital gaming contexts, visualizations of new processes in engineered medicine, and interactions using web cameras and personal computers.

Jacqueline M. Martinez
Communicative Sexualities: Queer and Feminist Theories in Practice (paper)

The present work provides an argument for and illustration of how to study lived-experiences of sexuality in a classroom or academic setting. It makes an argument for a specific development of queer and feminist theory related to sexuality. It presents a theoretical argument in favor of communicological approach to the study of sexuality, and illustrates the cogency of this approach with feminist and queer theories. Semiotic phenomenology (the methodological approach in communicology) is presented as an appropriate research practice from which to study sexuality. Three major concerns are addressed: the meaningfulness of sexuality as the subject matter of study; the body and the immediacy of lived experience as the site of study; and the relationship between speech, culture, and linguistic representation in the research process. The work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides the theoretical and applied foundation of the present work.

Carmel O'Shannessy
Language contact and acquisition: learning a new mixed language and Warlpiri

A new mixed language, Light Warlpiri, has emerged in a remote community in northern Australia. It is spoken by children and young adults in the multilingual community of Lajamanu and has developed within the last 30 years. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol (AE/Kriol), while most nominal morphology is from Lajamanu Warlpiri (the variety of Warlpiri spoken in Lajamanu community). Nouns are drawn from both types of source language. An innovative auxiliary system has developed which draws on, but is not the same as, the systems in the source languages. But the system for indicating grammatical functions draws directly on the two typologically different source languages. Lajamanu Warlpiri uses case-marking in an ergative-absolutive system while AE/Kriol uses word order (SVO) in a nominative-accusative system. In Light Warlpiri these two systems meet.

The language ecology in the community is complex, and code-switching between languages is very common. Children growing up in the community learn the new language, Light Warlpiri, as their primary language, and also learn Lajamanu Warlpiri in their early years. Their learning situation raises the question of how they deal with very mixed input - to what extent do they show adult-like variation and patterning in the grammatical systems of each language? The study uses production and comprehension data to examine the children's use of word order and ergative case-marking in each language.

Presentations

Rizwan Ahmad
Complex indexicality of Urdu in India

There is an implicit assumption in sociolinguistic research using the concept of indexicality that at a given time, one linguistic element indexes one single social category. In this paper, I argue that linguistic units often exhibit multiple layers of indexicality. Analyzing language ideologies of Urdu and Hindi speakers of Delhi, I demonstrate that Urdu represents a palimpsest of indexicality. To the first generation of Muslims and Hindus born before the Partition of India in 1947, Urdu indexes education and cultural refinement. To the second generation of Muslims and Hindus born after 1947, however, Urdu indexes an exclusive Muslim identity. To the third generation of Muslims of Delhi, Urdu indexes a poor, uneducated, and conservative Muslim identity. Theoretically, I draw upon frameworks from the disciplines of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Methodologically, this research combines in-depth ethnographic observations with a quantitative analysis of the distribution of the Urdu phonemes across three generations.

Christopher Engelke & Dario Mangano
Temporal cues: What children with severe autism can teach us about the organization of intersubjectivity

This paper examines the achievement of a joint temporal orientation in interactions involving a child with severe autism. Based on video recordings of naturally occurring interactions between children with severe autism and their RPM teachers/assistants, this paper highlights patterns through which the children and adults attend to each other and the process of creating meaning in the dynamic unfolding of an RPM-mediated interaction. Drawing from linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, and phenomenology, it is argued that temporal synchronization is foundational to the development of intersubjectivity on a pre-symbolic level. Specifically, this paper explores ways in which interlocutors use their bodies, objects, and pitch to indicate their attention to different segments of an action sequence, thereby lessening their interlocutor’s need for prior knowledge of an event and allowing for attunement in novel situations. Individuals’ modification of the physical environment can function as temporal cues, facilitating the coordinated advance of joint attention.

Caleb Everett
Evidence for language-mediated thought in the perception of non-gendered figures

Recently, researchers have begun applying experimental methodologies in the investigation of language-mediated thought in domains such as mathematics (cf. Gordon 2004) and spatial topology (cf. Levinson and Wilkins 2006). This study presents evidence for language-mediated thought in a more socially-oriented domain. A series of short discrimination tasks, involving diagrams of non-gendered figures, were undertaken with speakers of an Amazonian language lacking grammatical gender. The same tasks were also undertaken with speakers of languages with grammatical gender in their pronoun paradigms, namely English and Portuguese. Significant differences between the two populations were obtained for the tasks described, demonstrating that Karitiana speakers were much less likely to perceive non-gendered figures to be male, when contrasted to the Portuguese and English speakers. The motivation for the disparity between groups appears to be the non-prompted default utilization of male pronouns by the majority of Portuguese and English respondents, during the course of the tasks.

Brett Falcon
The postcolonial dialogue in Talpense men's talk

Religious practices have significant impacts on residents’ ideologies of personhood in Talpa de Allende, Jalisco, Mexico (Keane 1997). People’s experiences of religious and economic practice in rural Mexico affect their discursive practices. The ways that Talpenses talk about the Church have implications about their social identities. Residents’ orthodox, neutral, and critical stances toward the practices of Church personnel manifest in their everyday conversations. Much to the public dismay of Talpense women (who generally engage in an orthodox discourse supportive of Church personnel and practice,) many Talpense men engage in a postcolonial discourse that critically frames their relationship toward the Church. Disturbingly, men’s engagement in this postcolonial evaluation of the Church inextricably links them to another discursive forum¬ (usually in the course of one speech event) where they give voice to their marginalized experiences in light of contemporary Mexican economic and government contexts.

George Figgs
"We rep the CO, we get Mile High love”: The authentication of a local hip-hop scene

This paper explores how local rappers (MCs) and producers of an independently produced rap music radio program position the quality and authenticity of the local hip-hop scene of the greater Denver, CO region, or “Front Range”, in perspective within the national and commercial hip-hop movement. As these individuals consider the local scene to be overlooked or somewhat lesser in status to the national hip-hop scene, they cannot necessarily appeal to the same ideologies that are used in larger markets. Rather, they appeal to qualities that are rooted locally, both in terms of the individuals involved in the culture and positive aspects of the community.

Matt Garley
LOL, what a tangled Web we weave: Strategies for coherence in instant messaging discourse

Instant messaging (IM) has unique linguistic properties and norms due to the limitations of the medium and users’ needs. Specifically, Herring (1999) identifies “interactional incoherence”, which involves the “fragmented, agrammatical, and interactionally disjointed” nature of IM. This incoherence is characterized by overlap of adjacent exchanges and the simultaneous existence of multiple topics in chat discourse. I propose that IM users have specific strategies for maintaining comprehensibility, and examine two factors affecting these strategies: IM experience and interpersonal familiarity. To discover the properties of conversational organization in IM, I use an adapted Conversation Analysis methodology and posit the ‘contribution’ as the basic unit of IM conversation. I analyze ten short conversations, finding that overlap occurs equally in novice and advanced users’ conversations. Advanced users, however, maintain comprehensibility by using shorter contributions, discourse markers, and special characters. Shared background knowledge between conversants also plays a large role.

Maria Gorete Neto
The Impact of bilingual education on indigenous language and culture: The case of Tapirape

Bilingual schools are recognized as an important resource for increasing the chances of language survival, but in many cases have shown to be ineffective. Among the Tapirape (central Brazil), an effective bilingual school exists; however, this study shows that even a successful school brings complications for the community. Participant observation and audio-recorded interviews, in which teachers and leaders discuss their bilingual school and its consequences for the Tapirape people, reveal that Tapirape teachers and leaders feel that the school has changed the Tapirape lifestyle in both negative and positive ways. A continuous evaluation and on-going reconstruction of aspects of the school, through consultation with the community, is proposed as a way to both attend to the needs and to relieve the worries of groups like the Tapirape with respect to the impact of their school on the community.

Marina Gorlach
Intercultural communication in the US college classroom: A Russian professor's perspective

This paper discusses some aspects of intercultural communication in an academic setting reflecting the linguistic and cultural differences between Russian and American speakers of English. It examines cultural variation in classroom discourse and the role of verbal and non-verbal patterns in teacher-student communication.

Russian professors teaching in the US colleges encounter numerous intercultural distinctions in communication, from different terms of address and lack of the tu/vous distinction to dissimilar ways of expressing requests, asking questions, and wording negative answers. The ‘directness’ of Russian is sometimes interpreted as ‘rudeness’ by American students, while the American tendency to use understatements impresses Russian professors as ‘vagueness’, ‘ambiguity’, and lack of accuracy. Avoiding extreme statements or absolute claims is natural for American students, but alien to East European professors. I discuss the intercultural differences in applying politeness/directness discourse strategies drawing on the observation of class discussions and the analysis of the surveys filled out by students.

Theresa Heyd
Genre change, language change? Forms of plural address in email hoaxes and other genres

While the Internet is a vibrant site of genre emergence and change, it remains disputed whether this macro-change plays a role in actual linguistic micro-change. This paper argues for a more subtle role of CMC genres: due to their intermediate spoken/written status, they can act as catalysts for ongoing processes of linguistic change and provide a first “point of entry” into the written domain for previously oral forms.

This hypothesis is tested against a corpus of 150 email hoaxes (EHs): deceptive messages that spread in digital social networks and are a form of 1-to-n communication which fosters open plurality. The morphosyntactic variable under investigation is the emergence of 2nd person plural forms such as 'you guys' that strive to fill the gap in the English pronoun paradigm. The occurrence of such forms in the EH corpus is analyzed: what is their function within the genre? How may the technicality of the medium ultimately support the process of linguistic change? As an outlook, comparative data from digital and traditional genres are discussed.

Elizabeth Kickham
Teaching stories: Cultural and educational uses of traditional and personal narrative in the Choctaw language classroom

Stories, traditional indigenous forms for cultural and linguistic transmission, provide comprehensible language input as described by Krashen (1985), enable scaffolding (Vygotsky 1986), and reduce learner affect (Cantoni 1999). Native language instructors may also use stories to provide relevant texts, to recreate Native identity, and to transmit sociolinguistic knowledge. This paper relates one Choctaw language instructor’s narrative use in the classroom.

Choctaw linguistic knowledge, such as vocabulary and sentence construction, is intimately tied to sociolinguistic practices, such as eye-contact avoidance and salutation and departure customs. The instructor uses cultural, traditional, and personal stories in a fluid, interwoven narrative style to support cultural instruction, community identity construction, and language and sociolinguistic practice integration, mirroring the traditional Choctaw narrative style (Mould 2003). While not reflecting the methods advocated in SLA, this grounding of traditional and personal stories in instructional narrative, meta-narration, and linguistic example, appears particularly appropriate to teaching Choctaw language and culture.

Kenneth Konopka and Janet Pierrehumbert
Vowels in contact: Mexican Heritage English in Chicago

Recent research on the dialect of English spoken in Hispanic communities in the U.S. has acknowledged the importance of distinguishing between the dialectal form and the accented English spoken by second language learners. However, empirical analysis of the differences is limited. The current study characterizes the vowel space of native speakers of Mexican heritage English (MHE) in the Albany Park community of Chicago. The stable vowel system of these speakers is contrasted with the more variable system of Mexican late learners of English (L2E). Further, MHE vowels are compared to those of the Chicago matrix dialect. Analysis of the three varieties demonstrates that the vowel system of MHE, while influenced by a Spanish language context, is distinct from that of L2E, but also distinct from the system of the Chicago matrix dialect. Chicago MHE is then compared to similar communities in other U.S. regions, focusing on similarities that demonstrate the influence of Spanish.

Bryan Meadows
Co-constructing the ‘Familiar Exotic’ in second language learner discourse

This study recounts an interaction between three second language learners of Japanese who were given the task of constructing a ‘Japan booth’ to represent Japan to an audience of American undergraduates at a hypothetical international festival. Qualitative analysis informed by van Dijk’s ideological analysis identifies the interlocutors’ co-construction of what can be termed, the familiar exotic. In other words, the product that emerges from this interaction displays symbols chosen for their imagined familiarity to an American audience as the exotic Japanese ‘other’. It is argued that, from their trans-national stance both between and across national borders, second language learners are able to manipulate two otherwise distinct national ideologies in order to construct familiar exotic imagery. The notion of the familiar exotic may contribute to ongoing research into the process of re-negotiating‘self’ and ‘other’ during second language acquisition.

Tal Morse
Hebrew GaySpeak: Subverting a gender-based language

Does language allow gender diversity? Research on gender and discourse tends to focus on differences between women and men, disregarding sexual orientation. The current ethnographic research fills the gap by exploring the discourse strategy of Israeli gay men. I focus on inverted appellation – the use of feminine references for male persons.

Hebrew is an inherently embedded gender-based language. Every word forces the speaker to reveal his or her gender. Every verb, noun and pronoun is either male or female.

The subjects of this research, Israeli gay men, bend the rules of Hebrew grammar, blurring the differences between male and female: A male person might refer to himself or to another male in the feminine reference. The Hebrew GaySpeak serves as a means to articulate and construct identity. Inverted appellation demonstrates the gay critique of the prevalent heterosexual perception of gender in society. Similar to Judith Butler's work on drag queen, GaySpeak strategy enables gay men to reexamine and challenge existing gender categories and question their naturalness. They do so by practicing "linguistic drag."

Brendan O'Connor and Gilbert Brown
Not for your average brain: the social meaning of metaphor in an underground hiphop community

In our discussion of performance and interpretive practices in an underground hiphop community, we draw on interview data with an MC (hiphop performer) and founder of a Native underground “crew” from Farmington, NM, to show that this MC’s use of metaphor is a gatekeeping practice that works to create and reinforce group boundaries, and determine the conditions for group membership, in one hiphop community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992). The MC articulates metalinguistic ideologies about the use of metaphor in hiphop which, he claims, contrast with metalinguistic ideologies from his (Navajo) community of origin. We analyze the MC’s hiphop practice as a process of enregisterment (Agha, 2003) through which he and his crew create an innovative, performative speech variety that is intended only to be understood by fellow participants in the hiphop underground. Our analysis opens up new possibilities for a linguistic anthropological approach to understanding performance in the context of hiphop-based communities of practice.

Jennifer Sclafani
Newt Gingrich, bilingualism, and “Ghetto” language: Online constructions of language ideologies

This paper analyzes public reactions to statements made by former Republican Representative Newt Gingrich on the topic of bilingual education, which he equated with teaching “the language of living in a ghetto”. Considering data from two internet forums, Digg.com and Youtube.com, I explore multimodal constructions of language ideologies through the use of three discourse strategies – linguistic reference, constructed dialogue, and metaphoric language. Incorporating major frameworks from interactional sociolinguistics, perspectives on outgroup language use, and recent work on discourse and identity, I discuss how these devices can be brought together into a framework for analyzing language ideological discourse, which highlights the different ways in which individuals connect Self, Other, and Language in discourse – namely, through the processes of designation, embodiment, and imagination. This study also illuminates the fact that despite the different discursive means afforded by each forum, users index their beliefs about language in similar ways across contexts and modes.

Susanne Stadlbauer
“I want pure Islam”: Gender and religion in the discourse of Muslim women converts in Colorado

This paper analyzes how female American converts to Islam in the Muslim Student Association at the University of Colorado at Boulder construct their gender identity in discourse. Specifically, I look at how two female converts narrate their post-conversion experiences and authenticate their new identities as pious Muslim women. The data consists of narratives collected in interviews and reveals that the pious identity of these American converts to Islam is more complex than an apparent embracing of ‘traditional Islam’: the narratives are the sites of negotiating tensions between ‘secularism’ and ‘religion’ and between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. The interview enables the women to conquer negative stereotypes about them, and about Islam in general, and to construct a shared Islamic and U.S. culture. They use elements of an Islamic discourse, which is a religion that is foreign and marginalized in the U.S. discourse of secularism, modernity, and feminism, but they also construct the U.S. as an ideal place for Muslim women because they can be who they want to be.

Cindi SturtzSreetharan
Osaka Aunties: Negotiating honorific language, gender, and regionality

Our understandings of Japanese women’s speech practices have flourished over the past thirty-plus years; however, the majority of this scholarship has been focused on Standard Japanese speakers, regional women have not enjoyed the same scrutiny. Various questions arise then about how regional speakers use language at the everyday local level. Using empirical data drawn from naturally occurring informal all-female conversations among groups of Kansai women (ranging in age from thirty to seventy), this paper aims to shed light on the speech practices of non-standard speakers of Japanese. The dialect used in the Western (Kansai) part of Japan is considered a prestige yet non-standard dialect. Honorific verb morphology is the specific point of investigation. In particular, the dialectal honorific form ~haru is examined. Preliminary results indicate that this honorific form is preferred by dialect speakers to index equality and intimacy.

Chris Taylor
Spatialized authenticity in Hip Hop discourse

This paper examines Hip Hop music as a site for constructing the spatial authenticity of linguistic, as well as social, practices. Specifically, we argue that the repeated use of certain linguistic features in "authenticating discourse" (Bucholtz 2003; Shenk 2007), whereby artists attempt to emphasize their connection to place, indexically links the linguistic with the local. To explore these processes, we discuss a case study of phonetic variation against the backdrop of spatial authentication in the Hip Hop music of Houston, Texas. Our analysis focuses on /I/-lowering before engma, as the lowered variant is commonly implicated in lyrical representations of the local. The phonetic data come from two Hip Hop albums, produced by the same Houston artist, which differ markedly in terms of local-orientedness. Our analysis shows that /I/-lowering occurs with much greater frequency in the album where references to the local are more frequent. We suggest that this pattern illustrates and provides evidence for an ideology which construes /I/-lowering as locally-authentic speech.

Cala Zubair
Doxastic modality as a means of stance taking in colloquial Sinhala

What has been traditionally studied as the involitive construction in Colloquial Sinhala involves a verb form broadly indicative of non-volitionality (Gair 1970, Inman 1993). However, Inman (1993) categorizes another usage of the Sinhala involitive as doxastic (Kratzer 1981). Doxastic modality indicates eventualities that occur counter to speaker expectations. Previous explorations of stance in linguistics and anthropology have examined a number of features including evidentials, discourse markers, reported and indirect speech, indexicals, prosody, and affect. This work adds to previous investigations of stance by describing an additional means for evaluation and alignment in sets of recorded conversations between young professionals in Sri Lanka. Moreover, contextualizing stance taking methods in reference to both locally and culturally salient expectations as well as interactionally specific participant roles (Bucholtz and Hall 2005), I show how inquiries into!
stance reveal a speaker’s emergent identity.

Sarah Wagner
Family ideologies of lesbian and gay parents

In this talk I will discuss my analysis of semi-structured interviews I conducted with lesbian and gay parents from a range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds regarding the intersection of ideology and family. In particular, I will focus on the discourses available to the children in these families. Findings suggest that the parents draw linguistically on a range of ideologies, from “traditional” definitions of family (such as parents’ comparisons of their roles to heterosexual norms) to those influenced by the feminist and gay rights movements (such as equality, acceptance, and individuality). The ideologies affect a variety of ongoing family practices such as story sharing at dinnertime, religious practices, and the inclusion of extended family into their daily lives. In addition to extending our knowledge of lesbian- and gay-headed families, the work presented broadens our understanding in general of the ways ideologies are used to create “family” in the United States.

Alternates

Felix Julca-Guerrero
Word Borrowing and Code Switching in the Ancash Waynu Songs

In the Andes, long-term contact between Quechua and Spanish speakers has resulted in a variety of language contact outcomes in everyday speech and other forms of language use. Ancash waynus, a genre of traditional Andean songs, display different levels in which Quechua and Spanish interact. This paper presents an analysis of the processes of borrowing and code switching in Ancash waynus, showing the influence of Spanish on this genre. Some waynus are composed ‘purely’ in Quechua, others ‘purely’ in Spanish, and others in both languages. All of them show different levels of mutual influence of Spanish on Quechua and vice versa. Likewise, Ancash waynus often exhibit cases of code switching which requires a mastery of Quechua and Spanish, and it is affected by communicative intentions and poetic effects, and is conditioned by social factors, such as interlocutors, topics, and formality. I conclude that language change and bilingualism cover everyday speech events and waynu songs.

Margaret W. Smith & Linda Waugh
Covert racist discourse on the WWW: Rhetorical strategies of the Minuteman Project

The Minuteman Project (MMP) gained support from the American populace and political elites through print and visual web texts that construct immigrants from Mexico as an invading army of “ILLEGAL aliens” (MMP mission statement). This research employs critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, van Dijk) and (critical) metaphor theory (Lakoff, Santa Ana, Charteris-Black) to illustrate how covert racist representations are widely dispersed and circulated on the WWW. The specific focus of this presentation is the MMP’s use of rhetorical strategies such as metaphors and strategic placement of disclaimers to maintain positive self-representation and circumvent accusations of racism, at the same time as it appropriates and subverts events and web images to create fearful depictions of the “mobs” of immigrants that threaten to overrun the U.S. This research has implications for understanding of covert racist discourse practices as well as the WWW’s role in assisting political groups to create shifting, fluid identities in response to the changing U.S. political climate.