The Use of Expletives in Drag Queen Performances
Stephen L. Mann

Barrett (1998) quantifies and examines style shifting by African-American drag queens (AADQ's) among three styles: African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), gay men's English (GME), and stereotyped white women's English (WWE). Barrett suggests that AADQ's index their racial, sexual, and gendered identities through the use of AAVE, GME, and WWE, respectively. The present study adds to Barrett's research by quantifying and examining lexical expletives, a feature whose use, according to Lakoff (1975), should be infrequent among WWE speakers. The study attempts to answer the question: Why would a man who is consciously assuming a feminine physical form continue to make use of stereotypical masculine linguistic features?

The subject of the study is the hostess of a weekly drag talent show in a southeastern US city. The data were collected during one of her weekly performances.

The results of the study suggest that expletives used by the hostess fall into three main categories: body parts, address terms, and "all-purpose" expletives. The use of expletives occurs in several themes or contexts: promoting audience involvement, filler or miscellaneous banter, discussion of a performance, a personal need or request for action, information gathering, or a discussion of upcoming events. The analysis of the use of expletives by category in these contexts suggests that drag queen hostesses use expletives to play on the crossing of genders, to add humor to their performance, and to build or enforce group solidarity among their audience.

Works Cited

BARRETT, RUSTY. 1995. Supermodels of the World, Unite! Political Economy and the Language of Performance Among African American Drag Queens. Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Imagination, and Appropriation in Lesbian and Gay Languages, ed. by William L. Leap, 207-26. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers.

LAKOFF, ROBIN. 1975. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Harper and Row.

Second Language Influence on Native Language Intuitions of Russian-English Bilinguals
Anna Mikhaylova

It is often taken for granted in the Second Language Acquisition research that learners acquiring a second language make errors under the influence of their first language. Cook’s (1991) multi-competence hypothesis, however, suggests that the influence is bidirectional and that bilinguals draw from both pools of language resources available to them. Most studies view the influence of one’s second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in terms of L1 attrition in early bilingual immigrants (Schmitt 2001, Pereltsvaig 2004). Polinsky (1996) distinguishes Émigré Russian, characterized by incomplete competence, as a reduced form of Full Russian. Studies of late bilingual immigrants (Jarvis 2003 and Pavlenko 2003) rely heavily on production data and report little influence of second language on first language morpho-syntax and greater influence on first language lexico-semantics. The present study continues this line of research but sets out to examine the influence of English as a second language on Russian as the native language of Russian non-immigrant adults by testing their comprehension rather than production.

The participants were asked to judge the appropriateness of 15 Russian target sentences and 15 distracters and to provide comments on the errors they noticed. The elicitation tool was constructed based on five types of morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic errors produced by early bilingual children from the same community. The target sentences contained errors of prepositional use, use of aspect, second language lexical borrowing, loan translation of single words, and loan translation of structures.

The study tested and supported the following hypotheses. First, extensive language contact and conceptual and discursive multi-competence of late bilinguals can affect their native-speaker intuitions. Second, L1 is vulnerable to L2 more on the lexico-semantic than on the morpho-syntactic level. Finally, the participants with similar L2 exposure and proficiency are affected in similar ways.

The results showed that none of the participants made more than 86% target judgments. The overall judgments of distracters were more accurate than judgments of target sentences. For all participants, their morho-syntactic intuitions were more salient than their lexico-semantic judgments. The subjects with more extensive second language exposure and proficiency and same professional affiliation outscored significantly in judgments of distracters, had overall similar judgments, and provided fewer comments.

These findings suggest signs of second language influence in non-immigrant native-speaker intuitions. The acceptability judgment test, as predicted, showed second language influence more on the lexical level than on the grammatical level for all participants. The group with higher second language proficiency and exposure, shows more effects of second language influence than the group, whose second language proficiency and exposure varies. Finally, the group with similar Russian-English domains has more consistent acceptability judgments.
This study has important implications for non-immigrant communities of international scholars and professionals working abroad whose native languages may be considerably influenced by the languages of their professional discourse. More importantly, their bilingual children, whose main source of native language input is from the parents, may be getting reduced feedback and thus acquiring a non-standard form of the native language.

Phonological information and morphological decomposition in visual word recognition
Cintia Widmann
(Advisor: Dr. Robin Morris)

In Linguistics, it is often assumed that the knowledge a person has of a language is represented in the person’s mind by, at least, a lexicon and a grammar. Roughly, the lexicon is the set of words the speaker knows in the language, whereas the grammar is the set of procedures the speaker uses to combine the words in ways that are possible in the language. Morphology is the subfield of Linguistics that studies the structure of words. One important assumption in Morphology is that words like houses and briskness, for instance, are made up of smaller units, called ‘morphemes’, which contribute different types of information to the word. That is, these words are morphologically complex: houses is made up of house and –s, and briskness is made up of brisk and –ness.

In Psycholinguistics, the notion of morpheme is central to the study of visual word recognition (VWR), since it raises the question of whether morphologically complex words are in fact decomposed into morphemes during access. The full-access hypothesis claims that morphologically complex words are recognized as whole units. On the other hand, the decomposition hypothesis claims that words are decomposed into morphemic units on the way to recognition. Under the decomposition view, the question arises as to what kind of information drives segmentation. For example, if a morphologically complex word like teacher is decomposed into teach and –er, is a pseudo-morphologically complex word like center also broken down into cent and -er, despite the fact that a center is not somebody who cents?

My research addresses the question of whether sound form information influences the segmentation of an input letter string into morphemic units. The springboard for the project presented here is the finding that, early in VWR, pseudo-morphologically complex words like center seem to be treated the same as morphologically complex words like teacher. This study was limited to the orthographic dimension. However, there is evidence that sound form information becomes active earlier on in VWR, and, what is more, that it plays an important role in the processing of derived words. It has been found that a word like freshness, for instance, is recognized faster than a word like conclusion – even if both words are controlled for factors known to influence processing speed. The difference in processing speed has been attributed to what researchers have called ‘phonological transparency’ – a term used to refer to the degree of identity of sound form between a morphologically complex word and its base (or the word it comes from). The pair freshness-fresh is said to be phonologically transparent, because the pronunciation of fresh, the base, is identical in both words. The pair conclusion-conclude, on the other hand, is said to be phonologically opaque, because the pronunciation of the base is different in the derived word. In this presentation, then, I address the question of whether sound form information influences the early morphological segmentation mechanism in VWR. In order to do so, I am looking at the processing of morphologically complex words like fisher, and of pseudo-morphologically complex words like ponder and cater – which differ in terms of phonological transparency. I have hypothesized that, if sound form information plays a role in morphological segmentation, then fisher and ponder should be processed similarly, because they are phonologically transparent. Words like cater, on the other hand, should be processed differently, due to their phonological opacity.

This investigation may contribute knowledge to Linguistics and Psycholinguistics in very specific ways, but it may also indirectly influence the many fields which, to different extents, make use of linguistic theory and psycholinguistic findings. These include areas of Pedagogy, Speech Pathology, and Machine Translation, to name a few. Most importantly, however, this research may contribute to the understanding of the human mind.