This study in linguistic stylistics examines the coherence in Sam Shepard's play Fool for Love by focussing on the relationship of speech exchanges to frames and the relationship of frames to one another. A frame, defined as the activity that the speakers are engaged in, consists of two types: (1) single-speaker frames, which involve only one speaker and an implied or passive listener, and (2) multi-speaker frames, which involve more than one speaker. The following paper, however, will examine only multi-speaker frames.

Because frame analysis enables one to focus on units larger than those usually examined in linguistic stylistics, it can be seen to provide a clearer understanding of textual coherence in dramatic texts. Specifically, the study argues that both coherence in Shepard's play results when speech exchanges and frames are formed into patterns which the reader perceives as unified wholes, and that coherence may result when even discontinuous utterances are organized into a pattern which the reader can perceive as a unified whole. On a larger scale, it is shown that discontinous frames can themselves be arranged into a pattern which can be perceived as coherent by the reader, and that overall coherence depends not upon continuity between frames, but rather on the arrangement of discontinous or continuousframes into a coherent whole.

This dissertation investigates how feminist and LGBTQ undergraduate students involved in activism on UC Davis use language to construct their identities, focusing on two gender and sexuality-based resource centers (the women’s center and LGBTQ center). It seeks to address two research questions. First, how do cisgender, trans, and nonbinary students draw on linguistic resources to construct their dynamic gender identities? Second, in what ways do policies and practices in the two centers aid them in their identity formation (thus either reproducing or challenging larger ideologies regarding language and gender)?The dissertation is situated within sociolinguistics, with theoretical and methodological influences from linguistic anthropology and feminist studies. It seeks to describe and analyze a snapshot of a constantly changing linguistic and ideological landscape regarding gender and sexuality. These shifts in ideologies have been enacted, produced, and reproduced through linguistic strategies and policies. Online and real-life progressive feminist and LGBTQ communities have expounded on the importance of language in anti-discrimination and pro-social justice efforts. The analysis also compares larger media discourses around feminist language with how language is used in a small, localized context. On-campus resource centers are ideal environments to study these phenomena. University students, especially those at prestigious institutions, are often more radical in their political beliefs, and close contact to like-minded individuals on campus allow them to organize and build solidarity. On-campus centers like the women’s center and LGBTQ center provide physical spaces for students to gather, learn, and organize. This creates a community within the larger university community specifically dedicated to issues of equity and social justice, including feminism. I collected written materials from both centers, including pamphlets in their physical space and posts on their websites and social media accounts. I also interviewed students and staff members affiliated with each center. I used discourse and prosodic (intonation) analysis to explore underlying ideologies and speakers’ attitudes toward these ideologies and practices. Results indicate that knowledge of language norms acts as social capital within activist spaces on campus. What is considered acceptable language changes quickly, and students who are able to master the terminology are respected by other students. They also police any transgressors of these norms within interactions in the community. These seasoned community members, along with staff members, socialize new students into the informal policies about language within the centers’ physical and online spaces. Students also report learning about new terms and how to use them on social media like TikTok and Instagram. A major ideology promoted by both centers in their written materials and echoed by student participants is the importance of language for self-identification. By selecting identity labels and third-person pronouns, members to reify their inclusion within the LGBTQ community and express how they fit within it. Part of this ideology mandates that other members should affirm each other’s linguistic choices to be inclusive. This dissertation has implications for the field of sociolinguistics as well as feminist and LGBTQ activist communities. Instead of prescribing how activists should use language, the dissertation investigates how language is actually used. It explores how widespread ideologies about language, gender, and sexuality are upheld, challenged, and negotiated at a local level.

This dissertation uses mixed methods to critically investigate the role of listening and the constitution of listenership in various contexts of asylum processes. Drawing from scholarship in applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and speech perception, I developed three distinct, yet related, studies. The first study, in Chapter Three, reconciles these diverse bodies of work by developing an experiment that investigated the effects of bias on listeners evaluations of migrants’ narratives. In the second study, in Chapter Four, I ethnographically investigate listening practices in interaction based on two years of fieldwork with a mutual aid group that hosts monthly pro se clinics to assist migrants with filing their asylum applications. An investigation of how participants in the group use various modes of listening as they co-construct asylum narratives, this study also addresses how listening is a vital yet underacknowledged component of bottom-up initiatives to expand access to asylum. The third study, in Chapter Five, goes further by exploring how nonhuman entities can also act as listening subjects of asylum speakers. Here I scrutinize a new US asylum policy whereby officials use text analytics to screen asylum applications for fraud. To do this I comparatively apply sentiment analysis, a form of text analytics, with a discourse analytic evaluation of a corpus of migrants’ narratives. This study shows how regimes of hearing can become embedded in technologies used by states to adjudicate asylum policies. In the conclusion, Chapter Six, I synthesize what I have learned from the studies and review my contributions to the linguistic study of asylum and to the social theory of listening and listenership. In doing so, I underscore the value of critically aware listening as a form of mutual aid and advocacy for asylum seekers.

This dissertation draws on various discourse analysis approaches to uncover the grammatical, discursive, and prosodic linguistic features shaping the opioid crisis in order to understand how language provides a window into chronic pain management issues. Specifically, this dissertation is comprised of three interrelated investigations examining the language used by California policymakers in addressing the crisis and by physicians and patients at West Coast Medical Center (a pseudonym) to enact, negotiate, and reinterpret such policies.

Part I focuses on policymakers’ use of modality as a grammatical feature that calls attention to the gravity of local issues and reconfigures the interpretive spaces in which policy stakeholders could act. Part II reveals physicians’ use of face-saving discourse features when enacting restrictive opioid policies, demonstrating the communicative burden placed upon physicians by policy demands. Lastly, Part III focuses on patients’ use of prosodic features (i.e., low pitch and creaky voice) in describing their chronic pain symptoms and requesting opioids.

This dissertation demonstrates how the mining of modals could help streamline policy analysis on any pertinent issue and how the study of discourse could help identify opportunities for medical institutions to support their physicians and for physicians to support their patients.

This dissertation offers a top-down policy analysis and a bottom-up interaction analysis perspective on how communities linguistically address the opioid crisis, contributing to an applied sociolinguistic understanding of health policies and their discursive manifestations on the ground. This dissertation is also methodologically and theoretically informed by various linguistic domains and approaches, including language policy and planning, sociopragmatics, sociophonetics (prosody), and corpus linguistics. Such an interdisciplinary undertaking allows for a broader understanding of the discourses surrounding opioids and chronic pain while remaining sensitive to the subtlest—yet socially significant—linguistic features that could help us make sense of the linguistic choices made during medical crises.