Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 4 (2012)

The abstracts below are summaries of papers by junior scholars from the 2012 edition of my course, Language and Societies. 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.

Siobhan Gregory: “Detroit is a Blank Slate”: Metaphors in the Journalistic Discourse of Art and Entrepreneurship in the City of Detroit

Stephanie Nava: Language Loss and Maintenance in the United States: An Examination of Mexican and Japanese Immigrants and their Kin

Scott Shell: The Conversion of Scandinavia by Means of Script Transition

Sean Shadaia: Analyzing medical discourse through the lens of the non-English-speaking patient / interpreter / physician interaction

Lauren Powers: Hip-Hop Lyrics and the Defaming of Women in Hip-Hop Culture

Wendy D. Bartlo: Elderspeak: an examination of language directed at older adults

Alex Beaudin: 140 Characters

Amelia Baumgarten: “Okay, at this point you’re abusing sarcasm”: Figurative language and negative emotion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Sophocles Sapounas: A contemporary cross-cultural study of politeness: The universal necessity of politeness in human interaction

Nadia Maraachli: Death-related discourse in assisted living facilities

Jennifer Schechter: Grammar Nazis, prescriptivism, and snobs, oh my! Social standards and spoken language

Colleen Face: Queer Russian intersectionality

Robert A. Johnson: “Frugal or spendy?”:  public accountability in an online debt support group

Junguk Spurrier: American indifference to foreign language learning