Place Performance Assignment (15%)
Due Sunday 5/26 11:59 p.m.
This project will investigate how place-linked personae, identities, or qualities are performed through language. You will analyze one performance (or series of performances) of a place-linked character that can be found in popular media.
Select a performance with an accessible media file (audio or video) of a place-linked character. You may use the readings we completed in class or other academic articles in sociolinguistics about place-based jokes, parodies, and other kinds of performances as a guide (see additional readings for Week 7 on Canvas for more examples). You will analyze some aspect of the linguistic performance to illustrate how it may reflect and further enregister a link between a linguistic feature or style and a particular place.
You must select a linguistic variable(s) to analyze. This could be a phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic, or discourse-level variable, but you should delimit clearly what the variants are, and how they will be assessed in your study. In your write-up, be sure to clearly introduce your variable and its potential links to place, using prior academic work.
In this assignment, you will conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of this variable. In the quantitative analysis, you will calculate the frequency with which a given variant is used, relative to other variants within the variable. Clearly explain the methods you used to conduct your analysis in the write-up. Then, use the quantitative analysis to make some claim about how language is linked with place in the performance: you may compare the frequency with which some variant is used in the performance with the frequency with which it is used in some other clip of the same speaker, you may compare this frequency to some other study of the variable in usage, or you may do a within-performance quantitative analysis by topic or some other factor. Clearly display your findings as proportions and total Ns in a table. You may also include a graph or visualization of the findings.
Couple this quantitative analysis with a qualitative analysis of the performance, describing the other features of the performer's linguistic and extra-linguistic style, and/or pointing out particular moments in which your variant is salient in discourse. Then, interpret how the quantitative and qualitative findings demonstrate the ways in which this performance ideologically links language to place. Try to answer the following questions:
- What other aspects of the performance illustrate that this linguistic feature is being linked with place?
- What qualities, stances, or personae does the performance link with this place and linguistic style ideologically?
- How does this performance build upon other instances in which this feature and style have been enregistered? How will it further contribute to enregisterment of the feature, given its audience?
All claims, both quantitative and qualitative, should be clearly supported with evidence found in the performance you are analyzing. Provide relevant context about the performer, the performance, and the place-based context to situate your claims, using previous studies on performances and parodies as a guide.
This write-up should be approximately 5 pages double-spaced. Please cite any references in the text, with full citations on an additional page at the end. Submit your paper via Canvas by the deadline. Note that as stated on the syllabus, late papers will be subject to the course late policy.