Lauren Squires (second-year PhD student) presented a paper last weekend at the first Interdisciplinary Conference on Culture, Language, and Social Practice, held at the University of Colorado-Boulder.  The conference brought together scholars from many different fields working within sociocultural linguistics, broadly defined.  Lauren’s talk, People who type ”lyk dis all da time”: exploring language ideologies and linguistic artifacts through meta-Netspeak, addressed metadiscourse about language and the internet.

Abstract 
Linguistic variation in computer-mediated discourse (CMD) has received the recent attention of scholars seeking more adequate sociolinguistic approaches to studying the internet (e.g. Paolillo 2001; Raclaw & Squires 2006). This research has worked with impoverished knowledge about speakers’ linguistic orientations to the internet and to text-based variation in general. The internet’s effects on language seem to be of great concern to English speakers around the world, as is well-documented in Thurlow’s (2006) analysis of media reportage about CMD. Yet despite documentation of linguistic variation in online practice (Baron 2005; Raclaw 2006; Squires 2007), there is little analysis of internet users’ own understandings of such variation.

This project explores folk perceptions of CMD, taking folk metalanguage as a fruitful site of language ideologies (see Blommaert & Verschueren 1998; Niedzielski & Preston 2003; Coupland & Jaworski 2004). My point of departure is an interrogation of the concept represented by terms like “Netspeak”: a distinctive variety of language used in CMD (Crystal 2001). I analyze two English-language comment threads formed in response to a published college newspaper column about the internet’s negative effects on English. The threads’ topic is explicitly language used online, hence they represent a fertile source of focused, naturalistic metadiscourse. I first discuss the profile of Netspeak that emerges from the comments: what features does it consist of, and who speaks it? I find that features such as acronyms (< LOL > for < laugh out loud >) and rebus-like letter replacements (< u > for < you >) are highly salient and often subsumed under evaluative categories like “bad grammar,” and that speakers often attribute Netspeak to teenage girls and lazy people. I next discuss language-ideological underpinnings of the comments, namely that “good English” exists and is in danger, though the internet is just one factor contributing to its demise.

Situating this speaker-produced metadiscourse within a larger context of institutionally-driven public discourse about the internet and English, I suggest that these differently-sited metadiscourses echo one another to construct Netspeak as a linguistic artifact (after Preston 1996). In the construction of Netspeak, variation is ignored; of particular interest is the erasure of standard English practiced online, since “Netspeak” effectively equates internet discourse with nonstandard language. The dominant ideology of standard English is reinforced by erasure of the ideologically dominant variety (itself an artifact) from a specific field of discourse, protecting “good English” from the perceived dangers of the internet–a feared social space (see Paradis 2005). I hope to illustrate that language ideologies set sociolinguistic parameters for licensing variation in practice, but that both discourse (linguistic practice) and metadiscourse (talk about practice) are also active mechanisms of ideological production. In explicitly relating ideologies, discourse, and metadiscourse in this way, we are compelled to attend to the dialogue between metadiscourse from different layers of social interaction.

Lauren will be presenting a related paper next week at the 8th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, held in Vancouver, British Columbia.  Her paper will be part of a themed panel she organized, called Mediating Play: Perspectives on Playful Language in Online Discourse.

CLASP-goers take a break from talking about sociocultural linguistics: Madeleine Adkins (UCSB), Lauren Squires (UMich), Bryan Gordon (UMinnesota), Lal Zimman (CU-Boulder), Mary Bucholtz (UCSB), Norma Mendoza-Denton (UArizona), and Lauren Hall-Lew (Stanford). [photo by Jenny Davis]

After successfully defending his dissertation (Shifting Dunes: Changing Meanings of Urdu in India) in August, Rizwan Ahmad joined the faculty of the American University of Kuwait as Assistant Professor of English. In this three-year appointment, he will teach courses in composition and history of the English language.

Rizwan is also currently collaborating with Elabbas Benmamoun of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is a Fulbright fellow at the American University of Kuwait. Their project explores aspects of language and ethnicity in Kuwait, focusing on speakers of Egyptian and Lebanese dialects who were born and raised in Kuwait.

Graduate Linguists at Michigan meets Thursday, Oct. 11 at 4 pm

Foundations of Generative Grammar, and Beyond: A student-faculty interactive

Tonight, Tuesday Oct 9 several UM syntacticians will take part in an interactive discussion at Eastern Michigan University to discuss foundational issues in generative grammar.

Speakers include:

Marlyse Baptista (Ph.D, Harvard)
http://www.ling.lsa.umich.edu/fac/

Sam Epstein (Ph.D, UCONN):
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/ling/epstein/

John Hale (Ph.D, Johns Hopkins University)
http://www.msu.edu/~jthale/

Hisa Kitahara (PhD, Harvard)
Dr. Kitahara will be visiting the Department of Linguistics at the Unviersity of
Michigan for two years beginning Fall 2007 from Keio University, Japan.

Acrisio Pires (Ph.D, U. of Maryland)
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/ling/pires/

Li Yang has just returned from the 10th Conference of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics (PACLING 2007) in Melbourne, where he presented a paper titled Named Entity Recognition Using Syntactic/Semantic Information, co-authored with Steven Abney.

In their paper, Yang and Abney show that combining deep syntactic knowledge with machine learning methods significantly improves the performance on the task of named entity recognition.

Deep processing is the major theme of PACLING 2007.

Carmel O’Shannessey and Sally Thomason attended the “Variations et changements morphosyntaxiques en situation de contacts de langues” workshop in Paris, Sept. 20-25.

Carmel presented “The emergence of a new mixed language in Australia”

and as reported by an unbiased and anonymous observer, “…if the workshop attendees had voted on which data-rich paper had the clearest and most elegant presentation of data and analyses, Carmel’s would have won hands down.”

Sally presented “On internally- and externally-motivated morphosyntactic change in contact situations (and how to tell which is which)”