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  The Language of Protest: Acts of Performance, Identity, and Legitimation

  Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

  Rooted in the performative of Speech Act Theory, this interdisciplinary study crafts a new model to compare the work we do with words when we protest: across genres (chants, songs, poetry, prose), from different geographies (Turkey, U.S., West Germany, Romania, Great Britain, Guatemala, Northern Ireland) and from different languages (Turkish, Spanish, English, German, Romanian, Ki’che’, Irish Gaeilge). This model generates two new concepts: pragmatic legitimacy, when a hearer recognizes a speech act, regardless of genre, as one of protest; and convocativity, the effect of convoking hearers into distinct camps, creating degrees of solidarity or distance on the protest issue.Framed by the metaphor of a neighbourhood, the book opens by defining protest, as an expression of social, political or cultural dissent, supported by a wide range of examples, and concludes with a discussion of the McLuhan dictum of the “medium is the message” as emerging in a virtual commons.

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  Digital Diagramming: Adapting a Tried and True Pedagogy to a Digital Environment

  Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

  With the move away from formal grammatical instruction in many US primary and secondary schools over the past thirty years, college writing teachers often find themselves dealing with student papers riddled with basic syntactic errors. Sentence diagramming, which requires students to parse a sentence into its most basic components, provides a method to assist students in mastering syntactic fundamentals. The following exercise adapts this old pedagogy of diagramming sentences to a new technology, Prezi presentation software, in the hopes of increasing student comprehension of writing basics. Diagramming sentences, whether one is familiar with the rocket, tree, or another diagramming process, is a proven pedagogy that helps students sharpen their analytical skills. Martha Kolln and Robert Funk provide a rich portrait of traditional sentence diagramming in their textbook Understanding English Grammar (9th edition). That text provided the initial inspiration to adapt this established pedagogy for our contemporary digital environment.

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  The Relationship Between Candidate Sex and Pronoun Usage in a Louisiana Governor's Race

  Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

  This study explores the usage of pronouns in two political debates by ten candidates (seven male, three female) in the 1995 Louisiana governor's race. The purpose of the study was to examine whether patterns associated with male and female pronoun usage held in an environment where males and females had the same communicative needs. Proforms were examined to determine if they were functioning inclusively (speaker including the addressee), a pattern associated with female usage, or exclusively (speaker excluding the addressee), a pattern associated with male usage. The results of statistical testing found that the relationship between the male candidates and exclusive proform usage was statistically significant but not the relationship between the female candidates and inclusive proform usage. Another finding was that the males used more pronouns overall, including inclusive ones, than their female counterparts.