2011-2012 Colloquium Series and other events of interest
Events planned or anticipated at this time: (additional events possible)
- 4/09/2012 Shirley Brice Heath's campus-wide talk, 4:30pm – 5:30pm, Swearingen Building, Room C101, Amoco Hall
"Platforms for Literacy: The Multiplying Tomorrow"
- 4/05/2012, Renee Blake of New York University, 3:30-4:30 in Wardlaw 126
"Interrogating African American: Language Variation in New York City’s Black Population"
- 11/1/2001, Steven Black, Anthropology Colloquium, 3:30–5:00pm, Hamilton College 318
"Vocal Practice: Noun Classes, Click Consonants, and Creativity Amid Stigma in South Africa"
- 11/8/2011, Juan Rodriguez, Anthropology Colloquium, 3:30–5:00pm, Hamilton College 318
"Rhetorical Strategies and Political Gift Giving in the Orinoco Delta"
- 12/1/2011, Sherina Feliciano-Santos, Anthropology Colloquium, 3:30–5:00pm, Hamilton College 318
Title TBA
- 9/15/2011, Amadu Massally, "Reclaiming Lost Family: My Journey Through the Sierra Leone-Gullah Connection"
Thursday, September 15, 2011, 5:30 pm, Gambrell 152. (LING cosponsor.)
- 9/23/2011, Dan Fogerty (COMD), 3:30 pm, Gambrell 152 - Dan Fogerty (COMD; Director, Speech Perception Laboratory), "Differential contributions of consonants and vowels to spoken word recognition: Implications of aging", (reception to follow in English Department Lounge, Welsh Humanities Office Building)
- 10/13/2011, 3:30 - 5:00 PM, Hamilton 318, ALICE B. KASAKOFF LECTURE SERIES IN NATIVE AMERICAN AND GENDER STUDIES, Dr. Barbara Duncan, Cultural Revitalization and Collaboration at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian
[Reception to follow]
- 10/14/2011, 12 - 1:30, BA 005, ENDANGERED LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION WORKSHOP, Dr. Barbara Duncan, Education Director, Museum of the Cherokee Indian
Both events sponsored by the Department of Anthropology & Linguistics Program
- Early spring: Tracey Weldon on middle class AAE (in conjunction with ENGL talk)
Additionally, there are three conferences planned to be held at USC which will be of interest to linguists and for which the Linguistics Program is a co-sponsor:
- October 28-30, 2011, NSF-funded conference/workshop New Horizons in Conflict System Analysis: Applications to the Middle East (Stan Dubinsky, co-organizer; includes linguistic approaches; see this page.; Session III: Language, Linguistics and Identity: October 28, 4:00 - 6:00pm)
- Feb 16-19, 2012, Current Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese Second Language Phonology
and Workshop on experimental methods and research tools
- March 22-24, 2012, The Spanish Program will be organizing this year's 14th annual Comparative Literature conference, "Cultural and Linguistic Intersections of the Transatlantic"; there will be four keynote speakers, one of which will be language related and by Prof. Gilvan Müller de Oliveira, the director of the Instituto Internacional da Lingua Portugesa, and there will also be a featured panel (tba) organized by Prof. José del Valle, as well as other papers/panels of interest to linguists.
Finally, several allied units are hiring new faculty, and there will be campus visits of interest to linguists from ANTH, CHIN, COMD and PSYC beginning in late October and/or November
Colloquia: 2011 | 2010
Spring 2011 Colloquium Series (flyer)
Dr. Margaret Lubbers-Quesada - University of Georgia
Title: "Does the first language interfere in the acquisition of the second? Evidence from experimental and corpus studies"
Date/Time/Place: Thursday, February 24th, 3:30 p.m., BA 363
Co-sponsored by: The Latin American Studies Program
Abstract
Early research in Spanish second language acquisition followed the trend of the day and focused on tracing the development of either specific morphosyntactic structures or a series of discrete grammatical morphemes (Bailey, Madden, & Krashen 1974; van Naerssen 1981; VanPatten 1985, 1987, 1990). Researchers often concluded that the results revealed that learners followed certain natural developmental sequences in the acquisition of forms regardless of first language background and independently of explicit classroom instruction. Several researchers went as far as to suggest that grammatical forms should not be explicitly taught because it made no difference in learning patterns, that learner errors could not be corrected and that the first language had no influence on a learner’s interlanguage development. Recent research continues to focus on the acquisition of discrete morphosyntactic forms; however, much research focuses on the formal properties of the structures and whether or not these properties are shared by the first language and if so, whether or not they are transferable to the second language. Experimental and corpus studies in second language acquisition in Spanish suggest that the L1 plays a more important role than previously thought, but in more complex ways, and that learners often do learn, even over-learn, what they are taught in the foreign/second language classroom.
In this talk, I review several studies in the acquisition of complex areas of Spanish morpho-syntax, including tense, aspect and mood, transitivity, and subject reference, and attempt to show that the basic organizing principles of English syntax in discourse and the pragmatic functions of certain forms play a central role in the development of English learners acquisition of Spanish as a second/foreign language.
References
Van Naerssen, M. (1981). Generalizing Second Language Hypotheses across Languages: A Test Case in Spanish as a Second Language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Universityof Southern California.
VanPatten, B. (1985). The Acquisition of Ser and Estar by Adult Learners of Spanish: A Preliminary Investigation of Transitional Stages of Competence. Hispania, 68, 399–406.
VanPatten, B. (1987). Classroom Learner's Acquisition of Ser and Estar : Accounting for Developmental Patterns. In B. VanPatten, T.R. Dvorak, & J. F. Lee (Eds.), Foreign Language Learning: A Research Perspective (pp. 61-75). Cambridge: Newbury.
VanPatten, B. (1990).The Acquisition of Clitic Pronouns in Spanish: Two Case Studies. In B. VanPatten & J. F. Lee (Eds), Second Language Acquisition-Foreign Language Learning (pp. 118-39). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 118–39.
Dr. Margaret Lubbers-Quesada - University of Georgia
Title: “Subject reference and cognitive status in Spanish Second Language Acquisition”
Date/Time/Place: Friday, February 25th, 2:00 p.m., Gambrell 151
Co-sponsored by: The Latin American Studies Program
Abstract
This paper presents the results of an analysis of the subject choices made by second language learners at three proficiency levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) and native Spanish speakers by assessing the cognitive status of the intended referents of third-person subject expressions in oral narratives. The objectives of the analysis are: 1) to gain a better understanding of the extent to which the cognitive status of the referent influences speakers’ choices of third-person referring forms; 2) to show how cognitive status interacts with other constraints on the choice of third-person forms (e.g. syntactic, morphological, and discourse structure); and 3) to characterize the distribution of third-person subject expressions used by native speakers and learners of Spanish in this type of spoken discourse. The theoretical framework upon which the analysis is based comes from the work of Gundel, Hedberg and Zarcharski (1993) who propose a ‘Givenness Hierarchy’, which they define as “a set of implicationally related statuses” (1993:275) and Blackwell and Quesada (2010), who propose a revised version of the hierarchy for Spanish subject reference. The statuses are based on the notion that a speaker’s choice of a referring expression, including pronouns, demonstratives, definite NPs, and indefinite NPs, depends on “the assumed cognitive status of the referent” (1993:275).
Studies in the L2 acquisition of subject reference in Spanish have focused on formal syntactic properties, (Liceras 1989; Liceras and Diaz 1998, 1999; Al-Kasey and Pérez-Leroux 1998; Isabelli 2007), semantic constraints (Montalbetti 1984; Pérez-Leroux and Glass 1997, 1999; Lozano 2002), sociolinguistic or pragmatic principles (Geeslin and Gudmestad 2009; Quesada and Blackwell 2009), and the syntax-pragmatics interface (Rothman 2009). By and large, research in second language acquisition ignores the discourse constraints, including the cognitive status of referents, which determine subject use.
The results show that the use of subject referring expressions for native speakers and learners is constrained by the cognitive status of referring entities. The native speakers demonstrate a strong tendency toward ‘minimization of linguistic form’ for all but two of the cognitive statuses, whereas learners choose more elaborate forms. Second language acquisition of subject marking is a process of replacing more elaborate forms with more minimal ones within a revised cognitive status hierarchy.
References
Al-Kasey, T., & Pérez-Leroux, A. T. (1998). Second language acquisition of Spanish null subjects. In S. Flynn, G. Martohardjono, & W. O’Neil (Eds.), The generative study of second language acquisition (pp. 161-183). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Blackwell, S.E. & Lubbers Quesada, M. (2010). The L2 acquisition of discourse-pragmatic constraints on Spanish third-person subject use. Paper presented at the 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, University of Indiana, October 2010.
Geeslin, K. & Gudmestad, A. (2008). Variable Subject Expression in Second-language Spanish: A Comparison of Native and Non-native Speakers. In M. Bowles, R. Foote, S. Perpiñán & R. Bhatt (Eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 2007 Second Language Research Forum (pp. 69-85). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N., & Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69, 274-307.
Isabelli, C. A. (2007). The acquisition of null subject parameter properties in SLA: Some effects of positive evidence in a natural learning context. http://www.unr.edu/cla/fll/isabelli/EffectsPostiveEvidenceIsabelli.pdf 129.
Liceras, J. M. (1989). On some properties of the pro-drop parameter: Looking for missing subjects in non-native Spanish. In S. Gass & J. Schacter (Eds.), Linguistic perspectives on second language acquisition (pp. 109-133). Dordrecht: Foris.
Liceras, J. M., & Díaz, L. (1998). On the nature of the relationship between morphology and syntax: Inflectional typology, f-Features and null/overt pronouns in Spanish interlanguage. In M. L. Beck (Ed.), Morphology and its interfaces in second language knowledge (pp. 307-338). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Liceras, J. M., & Díaz, L. (1999). Topic-drop versus pro-drop: Null subjects and pronominal subjects in the Spanish L2 of Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Korean speakers. Second Language Research, 15, 1-40.
Lozano, C. (2002). Knowledge of expletive and pronominal subjects by learners of Spanish. ITL Review of Applied Linguistics, 135/6, 37-60.
Montalbetti, M. (1984). After binding. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. MIT.
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., & Glass, W. R. (1997). OPC effects on the L2 acquisition of Spanish. In A. T. Pérez-Leroux & W. R. Glass (Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on the acquisition of Spanish, Vol. 1: Developing grammars (pp. 149-165). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., & Glass, W. R. (1999). Null anaphora in Spanish second language acquisition: Probabilistic versus generative approaches. Second Language Research, 15, 220-249.
Quesada, M. L. & Blackwell, S. E. (2009). The L2 Acquisition of Null and Overt Spanish Subject Pronouns: A Pragmatic Approach. In J. Collentine, M. Garcia, B. Lafford & F. M. Martín (Eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp.117-130). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Rothman, J. (2009). Pragmatic deficits with syntactic consequences?: L2 pronominal subjects and the syntax–pragmatics interface. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 951–973.
Dr. Evelina Fedorenko - MIT
Title: “The power of individual- subject analyses in investigating the functional architecture of the language system using fMRI"
Date/Time/Place: Monday, February 28th, 12:00 p.m., Barnwell College, Walsh Conference Room
Sponsored by: The Department of Psychology
Co-sponsored by: The Linguistics Program
Dr. Ted Gibson - MIT
Title: “Working memory constraints in sentence processing: Some preliminary typological predictions and evaluations using a gesture paradigm”
Date/Time/Place: Monday, February 28th, 3:30 p.m., Barnwell College, Walsh Conference Room
Sponsored by:The Department of Psychology
Co-sponsored by: The Linguistics Program
Dr. Manfred Krug – The University of Bamberg
Bamberg Exchange Program Lecture
Title: "Contrastive Corpus Linguistics: English vs. German"
Date/Time/Place: Thursday, March 17th, 3:30 p.m., Gressette Room
Cosponsors: Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, The Honors College
Abstract
This paper will focus on aspects of variation and change in English and German from a contrastive perspective. Aspects to be dealt with include word-formation, pragmatics (e.g. turn taking and thanking) and inflectional morphemes in the two languages. The empirical evidence is gleaned from a number of spoken and written text corpora. Initially, I discuss some aims of corpus-related methods and their import for foreign-language teaching. The empirical part provides a kaleidoscopic sketch of the potential of corpus-based contrastive analyses. In the concluding part, theoretical-linguistic and applied-didactic aspects are suggested to be closely intertwined in foreign-language teaching. Finally, some generalizations are formulated and a more diachronically oriented contrastive linguistics is advocated.
Dr. Manfred Krug– The University of Bamberg
Title: "Auxiliaries and grammaticalization”
Date/Time/Place: Friday, March 18th, 3:30 p.m., Gambrell 151
Co-sponsored by: The Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, The Honors College
Abstract
This paper illustrates the relationship between auxiliaries and grammaticalization and tries to shed light on two major issues: How does grammaticalization impact on discussions and definitions of auxiliaries? And how can auxiliaries contribute to a better understanding of grammaticalization? Building on crosslinguistic empirical and theoretical work such as Bybee et al. (1994), Heine (1993) and Kuteva (2001), this paper takes a typologically informed, functional approach towards defining and describing auxiliary verbs. Like these, and like formal crosslinguistic work (Steele et al. 1981), this paper assumes a universal category of auxiliaries. Unlike synchronic analyses, however, a treatment of auxiliaries and grammaticalization must consider the history of auxiliaries. The aim of this paper, then, is not to criticize or even falsify detailed and descriptively adequate accounts of language-specific auxiliary verbs. The focus is simply different: I shall argue that a discussion of the relationship between auxiliaries and grammaticalization necessitates a broader, that is, functional and panchronic approach to auxiliarihood. Exemplification will primarily come from English but include some other languages such as Spanish, German, classical Latin and Greek.
Dr. Dovid Katz – Yale University
Title: "Recovering Lithuanian Yiddish between Apocalypse and homeland Extinction: Post-Holocaust Yiddish Dialectology in Eastern Europe"
Dr. Katz is one of the preeminent scholars of Yiddish in the world. A former Guggenheim fellow and Visiting Professor at Yale Univer-sity, Dr. Katz founded and directed Yiddish Studies at Oxford University and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University, Lithuania. He has won both the Manger Prize and the Zhitlovsky Prize in Yiddish Literature.
Date/Time/Place: Thursday, March 24th, 3:30pm-5:00pm, Gambrell 152
Co-sponsored by: Office of International and Comparative Education, The Walker Institute of International and Area Studies, in association with:
The Jewish Studies Program
The European Studies Program
The Russian-Eurasian Studies Program
The Linguistics Program
Lindsey Hudson, Dr. Duncan Buell, Dr. Stanley Dubinsky, Brian Galloway – University of South Carolina
Title: “Wordify! Morphology meets Ludology “
Date/Time/Place: Friday, April 1st, 2:30 p.m., Sloan 112
Co-sponsored by: The Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Abstract
Wordify! is a computer application that supports a suite of linguistically oriented activities and games, suitable for teaching English Language Arts students (grades 4-10) and for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. The activities and games in Wordify! are designed to teach awareness of word forms (pronunciation through phonetic representation), word structure (morphological derivation and compounding), parts of speech, etc. The activities are designed in such a way as to allow the user to discover this knowledge without explicit instruction, and to do so in a way that is exciting and entertaining. The Wordify! platform is open-ended in such a way as to allow developers to expand and enhance the activities that it supports, without major rebuilding of the platform. Wordify! will serve to augment K-12 and TESOL texts (and their web-based resources), and to accelerate the pace of learning for the knowledge bases that it supports.
Fall 2010 Colloquium Series
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Lorina Naci
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom
"Mechanisms for the Semantic Representation of Everyday Objects in the Human Ventral Stream"
12:00-1:00pm
Walsh Conference Room
Barnwell Building
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Ana Celia Zentella, Professor Emerita
Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego
"TWB (Talking while Bilingual): The Linguistic Profiling of Latinas"
After almost five centuries in the USA, Latinas became the largest ethno-racial minority in the modern nation in 2003, a fact which many African Americans fear will result in ignoring their communities™ unmet needs. In the dominant society, Latinas are accused of threatening the supremacy of English and the national culture; anti-immigrant fervor, focused primarily on Mexicans, has led to increased violence at the border and throughout the USA. The relentless attacks on the languages Latinas speak, and the physical attacks they encourage, make research on the linguistic profiling of Latinas a priority.
Just as DWB, or ˜Driving while Black™ (based on DWI, ˜Driving while Intoxicated™), refers to the profiling of African American drivers, TWB stands for ˜Talking while Bilingual™, the linguistic profiling of Latinas. Examples of TWB include the maligning of the varieties of English and Spanish spoken by Latinas, and of the bilingual speech known as Spanglish. Of particular concern is the number of cases of people hired for speaking Spanish, and then fired for speaking Spanish. Court records and my interviews with several defendants and one plaintiff reveal troubling aspects of linguistic profiling on the job. An analysis of the responses of a convenience sample of 650 New Yorkers indicates that specific ethno-racial groups have different reasons for being in favor of or against speaking a language other than English on the job. Addressing these attitudes and challenging linguistic profiling provides us with the opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to equality and justice.
3:30 PM
Sloan 112
Reception to follow
Sponsors in Alphabetic Order: Department of Anthropology, Linguistics Program, Moore Office of Child Advocacy and the Spanish Program.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Ellen Lau
Harvard University Department of Psychology
"Context effects in language comprehension: active prediction or passive priming?"
12:15-1:15pm
Walsh Conference Room
Barnwell Building
Friday, October 1, 2010
Ana Celia Zentella, Professor Emerita
Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego
"Bilinguals and Borders: Conflicting Constructions of Bilingualism"
Fluency in Spanish and English, the most visible cultural marker of the identity of students who have spent years living and studying in both San Diego and Tijuana (transfronterizos), is both a product and facilitator of their frequent trips back and forth across the US-Mexico border. Interviews in Spanish and English with eighty transfronterizo college students indicate that, despite their proficient bilingualism, their bilingual and bicultural capital may not translate into expected rewards; they struggle with language and identity conflicts that are the result of rigid national and language borders. In particular, intra-sentential code switching, or Spanglish, is frowned upon, because that way of speaking is identified with el hablar mocho de los pochos [˜chopped up Mexican American speech™]. Nevertheless, the obstacles transfronterizos encounter in ESL programs, criticisms of their Spanish by Mexican citizens, feelings of shame about their Spanish-accented English, and heightened English-only fervor in the state and nation may undermine their avowed commitment to Spanish and its central role in their identity. Interrupting the reproduction of linguistic and educational inequality requires educational and governmental language policies in the USA and Mexico that challenge static notions of nation and language, building on the principles of an anthro-political linguistics.
3:30 PM
Sloan 112
Sponsors in Alphabetic Order: Department of Anthropology, Linguistics Program, Moore Office of Child Advocacy and the Spanish Program.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Dirk den Ouden
University of South Carolina, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
"Syntax Across the Brain"
Based on lesion studies and functional neuroimaging studies, language processes requiring syntactic computation are generally found to be supported by left-hemisphere brain areas and networks. However, more and more studies reveal a role for the right hemisphere in syntactic processing, as well. Of importance here is one™s definition of ˜syntactic processing™. What is included in the autonomy of syntax? In this talk, I will develop and explore the strongly localizationist hypothesis of a distinction between ˜narrow syntax™, supported by left-hemisphere brain areas, and ˜broad syntax™, supported by the right hemisphere. Narrow syntax entails the use of hierarchical structure in algorhythmic computations, whereas broad syntax incorporates the contributions of heuristics, pragmatics and discourse information to the derivation of the syntactic parse. Such a state of affairs may have consequences for the way in which we approach treatment for impairments of syntactic processing and production in aphasic speakers with different types of neurological and behavioral profiles. We will discuss the hypothesis against the background of behavioral and neuroimaging data from healthy speakers and speakers with agrammatic aphasia, also with an eye on developing further experiments that can test it.
3:30 PM
Sloan 112
Reception to follow
Sponsored by the Linguistics Program and the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
Jennifer Bloomquist
Gettysburg College
"The impact of southern styled hip hop on African American English: Place and regional developments in hip hop culture"
While there is well documented evidence of certain supra-regional features in African American English (AAE) phonology and morphosyntax (for example, see Labov 1972; Rickford 1999; Baugh 2000; Green 2002) recent trends in the study of linguistic variation suggest that the homogeneity of the variety has been largely overstated (Hazen 2002; Mallinson & Wolfram 2002; Friedland 2003; Jones 2003; Wolfram 2003; Mallinson & Childs 2004). For the most part, contemporary AAE influences on mainstream language have originated from varieties spoken in the northeast and on the west coast which have evolved independently of one another over the past forty years, and which vary in significant ways from southern AAE; however, the most popular linguistic styles of rap music and hip hop culture have shifted over the years as artists from various regions (the West Coast, the Midwest, and the South) have put their particular speech communities on the map in the Black Public Sphere (Pough 2005). We argue here that as southern American rappers have become more dominant in the popular music scene, like East and West coast rappers before them, they have had a significant impact on the AAE spoken by hip hop™s insiders, and they have also influenced the language of mainstream speakers as well.
This paper builds on Smitherman™s insights on Hip Hop Linguistics (2006) even as it explores a more recent sociolinguistic phenomenon: the imminent emergence of southern AAE forms in the music and lyrics of the most popular rap artists of this decade and the attendant influence that these forms might have on AAE in general. Preliminary findings suggest that the linguistic effects of southern rap on AAE (and to a lesser extent, mainstream varieties) are not only evident in the lexicon (which could be dismissed simply as fleeting slang), but also in the phonology and morphosyntax of the variety, providing us with a more complete understanding of contemporary AAE and the ways in which the variety continues to develop.
2:00 PM
Sloan 112
Sponsored by (listed alphabetically) The English Department, The Institute for African American Research, The Institute for Southern Studies, and The Linguistics Program
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
Jennifer Bloomquist
Gettysburg College
"The construction of ethnicity via voicing: African American English in children™s animated film"
In the post-Ebonics debate era, there is a great deal of interest in expanding our understanding of educational and developmental issues in child language and language attitudes. Work on the way in which children acquire AAE, evaluation of effective teaching strategies for child AAE speakers, and teachers™ attitudes toward the variety are also being considered (Green 2010; Charity and Mallinson 2010). This area of inquiry speaks to an overarching concern for many linguists who engage in AAE research, which is the socio-cultural role of AAE. There is a growing body of work by linguists, anthropologists, and critics of popular culture that examines the ways in which social factors contribute to the construction of identity and the use of AAE. In an effort to expand our understanding of the ways in which AAE is used and perceived in both the African American community and the American community in general, we need to examine every aspect of the ways in which language shapes culture and vice versa. To draw together the threads of child development, attitudes regarding AAE, and the role of the media in shaping and disseminating these attitudes, this project looks closely at the way in which animated films have historically exploited AAE voices to develop social and political ethnicities, and continue to do so today. My contention is that this long overlooked area of linguistic inquiry is essential to filling in the ways in which we perceive AAE and package the variety, stereotypes firmly in tact, to the nation™s youngest consumers.
Media scholars have clearly demonstrated that film serves as a cultural mirror in which we can see our societal mores writ large. Animated films serve both the purpose of reflecting as well as teaching, given the fact that they are largely directed toward an audience of children. We often look to animated film to introduce children to social or developmental situations and to teach a variety of moral and ethical lessons which uniquely positions the genre in contemporary society as a barometer of our cultural ethos. Children are shown a variety of familial relationships, gender roles, and conflicts between good and evil through animated characters; it is upon these characters and situations that they begin to build their own belief systems. Their expectations for a variety of behaviors and social roles are formed (in part) by watching animated films. The purpose of this project is to closely examine the ways in which language has contributed to the representation of African Americans in animated film and the impact œBlack voiced characters have on children™s understanding of ethnicity. Through the analysis of the roles to which these characters are confined, their physical representations, and the examination of dialogue of œBlack voiced characters, including the language variety used (or misappropriated in some cases) for their voicing and the topics available to them, I will demonstrate that the genre has played (and continues to play) a significant, and even insidious, role in the way in which children learn to perceive blackness.
4:00 PM
Sloan 112
Reception to follow in the English Department Lounge (HU 104)
Sponsored by (listed alphabetically) The English Department, The Film and Media Studies Program, The Institute for African American Research, and The Linguistics Program
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