#tumblinguistics

[prototumblinguist]

why is 'buddy' (referential, not vocative) so damn indexing of gender=man????

[sternentinte]

How fucked up is it that I almost have a whole degree in linguistics, but I never did a seminar on pronouns? That's like half the reason I was even interested in the first place. And honestly, I don't even think I know that much more about pronouns than I did when I started? Like wtf

[linguisticillustrations]

Dixon, R. M. W. 2003. Demonstratives: A cross-linguistic typology. Studies in Language 27(1). 61–112. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.27.1.04dix.

Table 2. Forms of nominal and adverbial demonstratives. 

[austen-in-august]

Help me with my research!

Hi everyone! I am collecting data for a project about language on the internet for my linguistics class. If you have 10 minutes, and want to help me out, please follow this link: https://unh.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6mLCVY5oFnfiynb 

[caffeinated-linguist]

The Fired "Rude" Waiter Was Not "Just French"

Stereotypes form harmful boxes for containing entire peoples, but some can establish a chicken-and-egg relationship when paired with observ...

Remember that French waiter in Canada who was fired for being too rude, and how he filed a discrimination complaint that it was because he was French? A lot of people wrote about it... including me. This post is my analysis of the sociopragmatic aspects of the case, according to Politeness Theory.

[thelingspace]

What can silence tell us about the syntax of a sentence? How do we know what meaning to fill in when words are missing? In this week's episode, we talk about ellipsis: what rules are at work to tell us how to use it, how sentence structure plays into what words we can leave out, and whether words are even missing at all, or just hiding.

We’re really glad to be back and sharing stuff with you all again! Looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

[lhaasiri]

So, I have been offered admission to all but 1 of the linguistics PhD programs I applied to! That means, U. of British Columbia (currently top choice), U. Chicago, UC Berkeley, and U. Hawaii. Does anyone here in the tumblrverse have any perspective they can offer on any of these linguistics programs? Pros, cons, insider tips, insight, sagacious wisdom? I am unexpectedly in a position of making a hard decision. :’) 

[allthingslinguistic]

Social practices and user stances: a study of tagging on Tumblr

On Feb 1, 2017, Alyssa Hurtig published a research thesis starting with the following thesis statement: This dissertation aims to introduce Tumblr as a research site, and is focused on the tag practices of Tumblr users.

A master’s thesis about tumblr tags by Alyssa Hurtig, who notes that while the publication date is technically 2017, that’s due to university bureaucracy, and the dissertation was actually written in 2014-2015 and defended in 2016, so it’s a snapshot of that era of tumblr. Abstract:

This dissertation aims to introduce Tumblr as a research site, and is focused on the tag practices of Tumblr users. This study provides preliminary description of communicative goals associated with reading and writing practices on Tumblr. I present a quantitative analysis of how Tumblr users tag, and a qualitative analysis of what communicative goals users are attempting to achieve through these practices. 

I investigate how users evaluate their own tagging practices. I chose six Tumblr posts about tag practices. The corpus consists of tags written in response to these posts. Responses consisting of only one tag are the most common, as the higher the number of tags, the lower the frequency. 

I coded the corpus twice for features of interest, which resulted in three main codes: affective stance, epistemic stance, and classification. The coding process also revealed that tags are found to have both commentary and classificatory functions. I performed a content analysis to identify common themes within the posts, such as creativity and inclusion of various speech/writing metaphors. 

My findings include that users tag for their own benefit, using tags for self directed talk and self-directed classificatory retrieval. Users write in the tag space as a politeness practice. Comments consisting of feelings, stories, and trivial thoughts are written in the tag space. Whether users are tagging for an audience or for themselves, they report enjoying reading and writing tags. These practices and goals provide insight into why users engage in the reading and writing of tags.

Full citation: Alyssa Hurtig. 2017. Master’s thesis at Kingston University London 

Read the whole thing at ResearchGate.