Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper considers the role of linguistic ideology in driving legal doctrine in American employment discrimination law by examining the rules adopted by some American employers requiring that employees speak exclusively in English on the job. Multi-lingual employees fired for violating such employment policies have attempted to argue these so-called “English only” policies violate American laws prohibiting discrimination against workers based on their national origin. They have, however, found a chilly reception in US courts for their claims. In part, this is due to the ideology of language incorporated into the fabric of law, including the belief by lawyers and judges that languages are transparent media for representing reality. Judges presume therefore that, since all languages are commensurate with one another as means of communication, it cannot be a disadvantage to a fully bi-lingual employee to be made to select one language over another while on the job. Multi-lingual employees, by that reasoning, are not disadvantaged by being required to speak English alone. I argue that the law in this area fails to account for the linguistic research on bilingual communication. By ignoring the cognitive aspects of bi-lingual code-switching, the law falsely assumes that employees are making deliberate and unnecessary choices about their manner of expressing themselves when they code-mix and code-switch on the job. By ignoring the social and cultural context of language use by multi-lingual speakers, these courts fail to understand the degree to which code-switching by bilinguals serves as a rich resource for encoding identity and meaning.

Publication Type: Session Presentation
Abstract: This presentation describes a study abroad program where American students and teachers work in pair with Italian students and teachers acting as “cultural partners”. Sharing activities and working in team they exchange ideas and they have a unique opportunity to learn from each other and to reflect upon their own and foreign culture.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines linguistic and cultural hegemony and resistance during the period of globalization at the beginning of the 20th century. The premise is that such an examination can broaden our conceptualization of contemporary linguistic and cultural globalization: Were the cultural implications of the earlier period of globalization fundamentally different from or nearly the same as those of today’s globalization?
The paper first identifies the nature of cultural hegemony in the early 20th century. Ranajit Guha, one of the founders of Subaltern Studies, has argued that British colonial rule in India exemplified cultural domination rather than hegemony. The British never penetrated the Indian cultural zone of autonomy, as Partha Chatterjee has put it. Yet by the nineteen-teens, Mahatma Gandhi was clearly concerned that a preference for the English language was widespread amongst Indian nationalists.
Gandhi’s admonition against British linguistic hegemony was, however, constrained by the local language politics of North India. The renown historians, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, have suggested in their seminal studies of imperialism that resistance to colonial rule is patterned according to local culture and environment rather than to imperial practices. Similarly, cultural and linguistic imperialist patterns may well be determined by local politics in the metropole. By comparing resistance to differing linguistic policies and practices in the early 20th century, the paper weighs the importance of the local and global contexts of cultural hegemony and resistance. For purposes of comparison, the focus of the paper will be on the English language in British India and French linguistic hegemony during the same period of rapid economic globalization and liberalization in the early 20th century.
The paper concludes with a longitudinal comparison of this early era of globalization with linguistic globalization of today, the latter outlined in my recent book, The Local Politics of Global English: Case Studies in Linguistic Globalization (Lexington, November 2003).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This essay criticizes Jurgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action from a pragmatist perspective. It offers an overview of the questions and problems addressed by Habermas’s project from 1962-2001. Habermas’s attempt to renew the foundations of social science on a universal theory of communicative interaction fails to free itself from Thomas Hobbes’s civil science. In failing to formulate a research program capable of empirically corroborated claims concerning social interaction, Habermas is unable to directly address the question of how we overcome Hobbes’s modeling of just interactions on contractual relations. Consequently, this raises questions as to the adequacy of his proposed social evolutionary response to the fact of pluralism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper reports on an exploratory field study in which student coders collected samples of sarcastic utterances and described the sarcastic speakers’ linguistic and paralinguistic behaviors for each utterance. Analysis of the data revealed that sarcastic utterances included more positive language than negative language, more evaluative than expressive intent, more declarative than interrogative or imperative sentence types; and frequent use of specific verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. Regarding paralinguistic features, few gestures were associated with sarcasm, but facial expressions were abundant (most frequently raised eyebrows, open eyes, and smiling). Vocal features reported included increased emphasis and stress, both increased pitch and decreased pitch, and increased volume.