This dissertation examines the role of a specific Korean deictic, ilehkey (‘like this,’ ‘this way’), in organizing participants’ attention in a situated activity. Deictic expressions in English, such as this, that, here, and there are terms which point out referential objects in connection with surrounding context (Hanks, 2009). Because of ilehkey’s efficacy in organizing gaze, it proves

vital to creating the “moving focus of cognitive and visual attention” which lies at the center of face-to-face interaction (Goffman, 1964).

Using video data collected during cooking instruction conducted in Korean, the study argues that the deictic expression functions precisely to link language simultaneously to the bodies of actors and the world they are creating in the activity. Specifically, I illustrate 1) how participants build actions that incorporate deictic expressions, gesture, prosody and objects in the local environment, and 2) how participants decompose, reuse and transform the actions and materials from previous turns.

The current study contributes to interactional studies by analyzing the function and the organization of deictic terms in two contexts: 1) within a framework that is not restricted to the stream of speech, but instead illustrates how the deictic emerges from and reconstitutes the specific changing contextual configurations of bodies, objects and language, and 2) from a crosslinguistic

perspective.

The Occupy movement in the U.S. is primarily associated with the occupation of outdoor public space and the iconic tents of the encampments. However, a less mediatized but equally distinctive feature of the U.S. Occupy movement is the practice of participants gathering to form deliberative assemblies. As in the occupation and square movements elsewhere, the re - appropriation of public space in the U.S. became a highly influential precondition for an emergent form of public, large-group deliberation. The General Assembly (GA), a regular event at Occupy sites in which participants engaged in forms of direct democratic practice, both produced and reflected attested ideologies of horizontalism and egalitarian decision -making.

Direct participatory democracy requires elements of process that are structured and fluid, instructional as well as receptive. In the U.S., the emergent processes of the Occupy General Assembly (GA), a real-time interactive localized event which was a common and central feature across U.S. Occupy sites nationwide, were informed by historical elements of Quaker, anti-war movement, feminist movement, and anti-globalization movement practices, among others. Additionally, U.S. Occupy Facilitation Committees, responsible for agenda setting and group discussion moderation during GAs, worked to facilitate General Assemblies using process suggestions provided on international websites written by participants in related movements outside the U.S. In this way, locally emergent discursive practices were influenced by and then fed back in to ongoing global discourses and decision-making processes. This crosspollination of practice reinforced global solidarity and refined local systems of group communication. Participants developed and adapted specific embodied tools for assembly use, including hand signals and the human mic or people's mic, in order to facilitate a discursive praxis of egalitarianism within the context of a speech exchange system suited to a large outdoor deliberative body.

Approximately one in four pregnancies are lost; yet, most women are not aware of this high incidence rate until they face a miscarriage or a stillbirth. This research studies 43 narratives collected from interviews and 40 video blogs compiled from YouTube, focusing on the discursive and multimodal manifestations of the involvement of four different actors that play a significant role in shaping the pregnancy loss experience and its recollection. I first explore the role of the self in the loss experience and analyze how, as a means to understand the loss, women attribute blame and responsibility to themselves by discursively detaching their selves from their bodies. Furthermore, I examine how they reconstruct their identities as women and mothers as part of their sense-making process. The second actor that plays a significant role in the women’s recollection of their experiences is the interviewer, as a peer who also endured pregnancy losses. This peer-relationship formed during the interviews often leads to the co-narration of the loss, facilitated through the interaction of non-verbal semiotic resources and the embodiment of the most traumatic moments in the stories. Medical personnel are the third actors analyzed, as they bring the news of the demise to the women and significantly impact their experience and emotional recovery. Studying the direct and indirect reported speech of these interactions elucidates how these two forms are used in combination with other semiotic resources to embed layers of emotional and epistemic stances onto the discourse and to display dissatisfaction with medical personnel. Finally, a pregnancy (loss) community has emerged in the last few years on YouTube, fostering vloggers’ and viewers’ interactions as members of a community of experience. By exploring the content and the semiotic resources present in the vlogs, I unveil how vloggers establish and maintain a connection with the viewers and how this online community is created and expanded. With this research, I seek to open up a dialogue centered on pregnancy loss as an undesirable but natural part of life. My aim, ultimately, is to change how our society receives the news of an unborn’s demise, how medical personnel communicate with the grieving parents, and how mothers grief and overcome the pain of such loss.

This multi-sited ethnographic study explores U.S. gay men's interactional usages of camp, a queer aesthetic and sociopolitical mode of expressivity that reframes and transforms dominant, heterosexual-constrained communicative conventions and reality through queer forms of experience. Differing from earlier work on camp, which primarily explored the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, the current analyses are premised upon the examination of camp as a product of talk-in-interaction, looking specifically at its role as an interactive resource with the capacity to aid in the construction of queer personhood and community, while also challenging the heteronormative communities that render this queer coalescence subjugated within larger social structures and hierarchies. Drawing from audio-video ethnographic data collected over a one and one half year period in four different U.S. cities (New York, New York; Atlanta, Georgia, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and Los Angeles, California), the talk is analyzed from a methodologically conversation analytic perspective, wherein detailed transcriptions are used to explore the systematic and sequential nature of talk. In this way, participants themselves, and by extension the talk of said participants, are taken as the primary sources for understanding social structures and courses of interactional action. As the research is conducted from a participant-observer perspective, follow up interview and survey materials are also used as an additional means for substantiating and grounding the analyses, and in some cases, adding layers of in-group understanding that might be overlooked using etic observational approaches alone. With regard to the analyses, the usage of camp as an interactive practice within queer friendship groups is explored not only for its ability to transform mundane everyday life events into discursively queer interactional spaces, but also for its ability to act as a type of covert code through which queer identity is systematically recognized and performed, to varying degrees. This code, which emerges as a product of explicit usages of queer-identified forms of camp humor, queer associative fields of imagery and pop cultural iconicity, and referential invocations of camp identified media and texts, is shown to in turn discursively reconstruct heterosexual normalcy, resulting in a form of critical subversion of the concept of heteronormative behavior. As a result, the study, in addition, explores both the usage of camp within micro-level social contexts that comprise the daily lives of queer social actors, and within the macro-level contexts wherein resides an ever-present interface between marginalized sexual identities and heterosexually defined institutions and hegemony. This critical subversion, in turn, is argued for as a means to understand queer subjectivity by way of understanding what it is not (as seen through a backdrop of heterosexual conventions that constrain interactive practices). The research culminates in a call for further explorations of camp as an interactive practice, and for alternative forms of queer expressivity as potential loci for understanding queer experience and social organization.

Having first come across the name Callimachus in the opening line of Ezra Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, I became enticed by the so called ‘shades of Callimachus’ described therein.  His work carries such variety within it, from odes and hymns to critical discussions and the epigrams which are of particular interest to me, that I was surprised that nothing of his had ever invaded the prescribed texts in the course of my study of Classical literature.  Here, I submit translations of Epigrams 41, 43 and 58 (as numbered by Pfeiffer).  This small selection, to my mind at least, captures some of the tone and beauty of language evident in the sixty-four epigrams that are extant (the Byzantine encyclopaedia, Suda, numbers his epigrammatical works in the region of 800).  What attracts me to these short writings, and to these particular three, is the atmospheric tone and substance of feeling created in such a brief number of lines, the essence of which one can only hope to communicate in some measure through an English translation.