Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Department Colloquium, January 26

Title: Work that -S! Drag queens, gender, identity, and traditional Newfoundland English
Authors: Gerard Van Herk, Becky Childs, & Matthew Sheppard
Time: 3:30 - 4:30
Place: C2011
Abstract: We study the adoption and adaptation of a traditional Newfoundland English speech feature, non-standard verbal s-marking (as in We knows a lot of people or I loves it), by social groups not usually associated with traditional dialect: young urban women and drag queens. Using quantitative data from sociolinguistic interviews and language surveys, we show that the form is both decreasing in frequency and progressing from a strictly grammatical function to a resource for the performance of gender and affiliation with local and urban identities.

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