Browsing by Author "Jeffrey Reaser, Committee Member"

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    Political Apology in the Discursive Construction of Hurricane Katrina
    (2007-08-06) Shelton, Cecilia D.; Agnes Bolonyai, Committee Chair; Walt Wolfram, Committee Member; Jeffrey Reaser, Committee Member
    With the recent events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the United States saw a natural disaster turn into a national disaster as the storm devastated the American citizens of the Gulf Coast region. The discourse regarding Hurricane Katrina is uniquely characterized by its political component whose primary topical focus was the responsibility. In response to widespread public unrest and complaint, many politicians issued apologies regarding the government response to Hurricane Katrina. This study will examine the theme of responsibility through analysis of the complaint-apology adjacency pair; that is, the complaints voiced by citizens and the apologies offered by two key political figures in Katrina's political discourse—Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, LA and George W. Bush, President of the United States. Specifically, I will use the notions of framing, voice and intertextuality to determine how discourse participants present other relevant voices and how those participants represent their own voices the dialogical negotiation of responsibility. I intend to compare and contrast how these two participants manage the acceptance of responsibility in order to understand the significance of their distinct discursive voices and perspectives. Analysis of the complaint-apology discourse structure should reveal how varying personal and public perspectives of political discourse participants affected their participation in the political discourse about Hurricane Katrina. This analysis demonstrates the importance of voice and dialogicality in the discursive construction of apology. Moreover, it suggests that researchers who are beginning to investigate political apology take into account factors that could influence variation in voices participating in that discourse which could, in turn produce variation in the forms of political apology and how it is managed pragmatically.
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    Regional /o/ in North Carolina: A Cartographic Analysis of a Feature of the Southern Vowel Shift
    (2007-08-01) Sellers, James Clark; Walt Wolfram, Committee Member; Erik Thomas, Committee Chair; Jeffrey Reaser, Committee Member
    This thesis examines sociophonetically the variation of ⁄o⁄ in North Carolina. Though often overlooked in terms of its diagnostic status, it is one of the most symbolic vowels in terms of a range of social and ethnic variables. Previous research by Kurath and McDavid (1961), Thomas (1989), and Thomas and Wolfram (2002) has found that ⁄o⁄ fronting was occurring in the late 18th Century in the northeast coastal region while in the Piedmont region ⁄o⁄ was farther backed. The centralization and lowering of the nuclei of back vowels, including ⁄o⁄, is considered to be a part of the Southern Vowel Shift (Labov 1991). The glide of ⁄o⁄ in the Southeastern US has become fronted more recently (Labov, William, Yaeger, and Steiner, 1972; Thomas 1989; Thomas 2001). Is /o/ in North Carolina conforming to the traditional specifications of the Southern Vowel Shift? Does its conformity vary regionally? How did the change spread across North Carolina? Using acoustic analysis, this paper attempts to answer these questions by looking at the speech of European Americans from twelve sites scattered throughout North Carolina. These sites roughly represent the major dialect regions of the state in an attempt to map the fronting and raising of the nucleus and glide of ⁄o⁄ regionally. Previous research has shown that the nucleus of ⁄o⁄ in North Carolina cities is currently more fronted and lowered, in accordance with the Southern Vowel Shift, than it was in the past. However, the results of this comparative analysis show that this is not universally true for North Carolinians and that the trajectory of change for ⁄o⁄ varies regionally throughout the state. For example, ⁄o⁄ fronting was previously less advanced in the western part of the state but young speakers from that area are now showing a high degree of ⁄o⁄ fronting while speakers from areas like Hyde County, a coastal area, have younger generations showing increasingly backed nuclei for ⁄o⁄. State wide, however, the range of possible values narrows among the younger speakers while the older speakers are much more varied. This variation could indicate that the possible vowel space for ⁄o⁄ is becoming more static as the feature has undergone a change and is now settling into a vowel space that is shared statewide. This study focuses on a single feature and includes both a large quantity of subjects engaged in conversational speech and a broad-based geographic analysis with a representative sample of subjects for each region. This representation allows for an in depth analysis of each speech community so that instead of representing each community as a homogenous group, intra-community variation is accurately represented in a way that allows for regional comparison. For example, the younger generation in Hyde County can be divided up into those who have a fronted glide for ⁄o⁄ and those who do not. This study looks at correlations between site specific variables and represents these correlations geographically allowing for a regional evaluation of intra-community variation. By incorporating geography into sociolinguistic inquiry this study contextualizes intra-community variation within the larger regional dialect, showing how macro- and micro-variables need to be factored into variation analysis.