Student Learning Center, Culture and Language Studies

Abstract
In this paper, the author examines from multiple perspectives a phenomenon she calls “acoustic identity” and demonstrates the inseparability of speech from race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality as criteria used to establish identity. The study begins with an autoethnographic account of the Anglo-American author’s voluntary immersion into the medium of northern Mexican Spanish and is followed by an ethnographic inquiry into the linguistic experiences of several other mono/bi/multi-lingual individuals. This auto/ethnographic methodology exposes the socio-cultural and political significance of acoustic identity by comparing the disparate experiences and treatment of mono/bi/multi-lingual speakers from dominant (Euro-American) and non-dominant (Mexican-American, African-American, and Australian-Aboriginal) social groups. Among the ethical implications of this analysis is the imperative to recognize the relationship between linguistic and racial/ethnic stereotyping as well as the conflation of (Standard) English(es) with whiteness and the West.

This dissertation is an historically contextualized set of auto/ethnographic case studies and critical analyses of the discursive productions of race, ethnicity, class, and the nation-state. Based on the life histories of culturally and linguistically diverse individuals living in the United States and Mexico between the 19 th and 21 st centuries, this research deconstructs binary discourses that police human subjectivity, identity, and conduct according to the laws of the state and the cultural norms of a stratified and racialized society. Microanalyses of the articulations of everyday speech are used to track the movements and migrations of people across borders and boundaries of all kinds, yielding rich evidence of the legacies and presences of macro-level processes of colonization and globalization. The project establishes new ground in the field of cultural studies by offering an unusually nuanced understanding of language that extends our capacity to theorize identity. It does so by bringing linguistic-rather than, typically, literary-forms of analysis to bear on language as a cultural practice. In examining the under-studied "soundscape" of speech, this dissertation brings existing theoretical frameworks from the fields of cultural studies, sociolinguistics, intercultural/international communication, and critical whiteness studies into new configurations and conversation to produce a theory of "acoustic identity." The term serves as a metaphor to capture a set of auditory and visual performance practices, which crosscut relations of power and disrupt hegemonic epistemes of race/ethnicity, social class, language, culture, and the nation. As a theoretical lens, it addresses dialectical tensions among modernist/ postmodernist, essentialist/anti-essentialist, local/global, and micro/macro approaches to analyzing the intersection of language, identity, and power (agency). This research was conducted using a distinctive multi-sited ethnographic method, which historically contextualizes the autoethnographic narratives, ethnographic interviews, and critical analyses of discourse presented in each case study. Ethnographic "thick descriptions" are infused with broad historical overviews of people, places, and events relevant to the case studies, which include monolingual, bilingual, and bidialectal speakers of standard and non-standard varieties of American English, Mexican Spanish, and Navajo. By linking the particulars of each case to a larger set of sociocultural and political-economic forces, this method makes the historical trajectory of certain discourses more transparent and provides a logic with which to understand how legacies of the past-both empowering and debilitating ones-are able to go on living. The effort to produce an integrated archaeology of discourses and narratives of lived experience sets this method apart from other multi-sited ethnographic projects. On the basis of evidence from the case studies, the author argues that: (1) Standard American English (SAE) is not neutral, but rather clearly associated with a professional, educated, "white," US-American, middle class experience; (2) Even more so than grammatical knowledge, the mastery of an accent (phonological repertoire) suggests lived experience, or "native speaker" status, which in turn suggests the "authenticity" of a speaker's identity; (3) Codeswitching can be understood as both a sociocultural credential and liability; and (4) "White/whiteness"-as a social identity-is not monolithic and does not necessarily refer to skin color. It also operates as a metaphor indexing privilege within a complex set of possibilities. A theory of acoustic identity informs contemporary debates and discussions over public and cultural policy in sectors that include education, government, and industry.

This is a draft of an area studies syllabus for the benefit of military linguist students at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center. Major topic areas are broken down into key components of study to develop general background knowledge among US intelligence workers.

This present study examines the structural impact of language contact on discourse information marking in narrative. It focuses on the surface patterns and underlying linguistic principles used to describe the foregrounding events in traditional and modem short stories, written in Indonesian (the official language of Indonesia) and Sundanese (the native language of West Java province). These two languages have been in an intensive contact since 1945.The data indicate that aspect sets apart background from foreground, whereas tense distinguishes ordinary from significant within the background and foreground levels. Cross-linguistically, the ordinary background information appears in existential, stative, and progressive constructions, marked by the underlying past-tense and imperfective aspect; the significant background and significant foreground types occur in a direct speech and/or direct quote, with the underlying Historical Present. Besides signaling a switch from the past-tense to the HP, the direct speech or direct quote also marks a shift in deixis, distal to proximal. The ordinary foreground information, containing events that advance the story, appears in the underlying past-tense and perfective aspect.The surface markings of the ordinary foreground events, however, are different. In the traditional and modern Indonesian data, these events are dominantly depicted in the active-voice structure. The traditional and modern Sundanese texts, on the other hand, show two different dominant surface marking patterns: the KA (particle) and the active-voice constructions respectively. This appears as a shift in the surface marking strategy attributed to the Indonesian structural influence. The KA- to active voice surface-marking strategy shift indicates the change from the KA + Topic – Comment pattern to the Subject – Predicate structure, suggesting the adoption of the SVX word-order pattern. This affects not only the pragmatic relations of the constituents in an utterance, but also the marking of given-new information distinction.The study demonstrates that the KA to active-voice marking shift in the modern Sundanese data is mitigated by the long-term language contact with Indonesian. Follow-up investigations with varied narrative themes and oral speech data are warranted. Since the shift also appears to indicate the authors' unbalanced bilingual skills, it raises an issue pertinent to the current teaching of Sundanese in the West-Javanese provincial curriculum.Department of EnglishThesis (Ph. D.