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Browsing Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies by Author "Angermeyer, Philipp"
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Item Open Access English-Mandarin code-switching in a bilingual family(2022-08) Cui, QingXiao; Angermeyer, PhilippThe study of code-switching has raised and attempted to answer a number of questions related to the nature of language use, the motivations behind different kinds of language use, and the very nature of a “language.” Broadly, two questions have been central: the “how?” and the “why?” When interlocutors alternate between two or more languages or language varieties, what are the formal and structural features of their language use, and what are their motivations for doing so? The present study intends to investigate both of these questions in the context of the code-switching behaviours of one English-Mandarin bilingual family living in Canada. Canada is home to many immigrant languages, one of the most prominent among them being Mandarin (Statistics Canada, 2017; 2022). In addition, Chinese diaspora communities that speak a variety of Chinese and non-Chinese languages exist worldwide, and their code-switching practices are accordingly varied (Li, 2016).Item Open Access How the name of your lipstick reflects society’s notion of who you are: A linguistic analysis of cosmetic colour names(2022-08) Bressler, Clint; Angermeyer, PhilippThe topic for this paper was inspired from frequent visits to cosmetic retail outlets which prompted an inquiry about colour names driven by two primary observations. The first was that the colour names displayed for the products rarely described their ascribed colour. The second was that these colour names were often abstract in nature, indexing an abstract concept rather than anything directly related to the properties of colour. This pattern varied some between brands and products, but the general observations remained the same. The question arises, if most colour names can have no descriptive qualities, then what is their intended purpose? Thus, this paper focuses on the themes and entities that colour names index, why brands choose to index these themes, how these colour naming conventions relate to the linguistic anthropologic discussions of colour terms, and how this affects the scope of linguistic landscapes.Item Open Access Power Dynamics in Police Interviews: A Comparison Between Witness and Suspect Interviews in Canada(2024-08-29) Choi, Yan Kiu Desiree; Angermeyer, PhilippInterviewing is a critical component in police investigation and the judicial process. As a type of institutional discourse, police interviews are asymmetrical talks, in which participants are expected to speak and act within their own institutional and discursive role (Thornborrow 2002). In general, the interviewers have more power to influence and control the interaction through different discursive practices (Fairclough 1989; Thornborrow 2002), such as the selection of topics, the choice of question types, including questioning sequences, and the overall control of the duration of talk by other participants. However, it is not uncommon to see resistance from the interviewees too. There are typically two types of police interviews: interviews of suspects and interviews of victims or witnesses. Despite the different goals and purposes, studies have shown that suspect and witness interviews in Canada share similar features, such as the dominance of the interviewers, reliance on closed-ended questions and frequent interruptions from the interviewers to name a few. These practices raise concerns as they can contaminate interviewees' memory and may lead to false confessions (Snook et al. 2012; King & Snook 2009; Wright & Alison 2004). With limited studies focusing on victim or witness interviews, the resistance strategies of interviewees and, more generally, police interviews in Canada, this major research paper explores power constructions and resistance in interviews of suspects and witnesses in Canada through a high-profile murder case. Section 2 discusses some relevant literature related to the theoretical frameworks and police interviews in Canada and defines some key concepts. Section 3 introduces the data and the data collection, transcription and coding process. Section 4 focuses on the analysis of individual interviews, with excerpts from the data. Section 5 compares the discursive features across interviews. Finally, Section 6 summarizes the findings and briefly discusses the limitations and future research ideas.Item Open Access The Perception of Mixed Utterances by Jamaican Bilinguals(2023-08) Gooden, Amanda C.; Angermeyer, PhilippLanguage in Jamaica is marked by high variation (Patrick, 2004 as cited in Kennedy, 2017) among speakers across all linguistic contexts (Christie, 2003). This is caused by two broad factors: firstly, by the varying linguistic repertoires among speakers, with some speakers being dominant Jamaican Creole (JC) speakers, some dominant Standard Jamaican English speakers (SJE), and some balanced bilinguals (Kennedy, 2017) and secondly, by the blurred boundary between English, the language brought to the island by British colonizers in 1655, and Jamaican Creole, the de facto National language of the country and language of the majority (Farquharson, 2013), whose genesis is attributed to language contact between speakers of English and various African languages during the period of colonization in the country. Because of the relationship between these languages in their structure and usage, they are proposed to exist on a continuum, with forms closer to Jamaican Creole being basilectal forms at one end and forms closer to Mainstream English being acrolectal forms on the other end (DeCamp, 1971). These however, are idealized forms, as most speech lies between poles, and speech found here are called mesolectal forms. These forms are likely the result of language mixing that has been present since the creation of JC (Patrick, 2013) and continued contact between JC and its lexifier, SJE. The purpose of this research project is to determine how Jamaican speakers process linguistic forms that do not neatly belong to either language by observing where they judge linguistic utterances to belong on a visual depiction of the proposed language continuum. The placement of these utterances by participants of this study will be tested against two social variables: the geographical location of speakers and their language attitudes. The first variable will be tested by including speech perception by Jamaicans living in the island and those living in the diaspora, namely various cities in Canada and the United States of America. The second variable will be tested by asking participants about their attitudes towards language use in Jamaican contexts, specifically JC that has held an inferior social status to SJE in Jamaica, because of its perception as a broken variety of English (Kouwenberg et al., 2011), associated with poverty and a lack of education (Christie, 2003).