Robin Shoaps 

27916. Talk Radio and Discourses of the American Right. Talk radio -- traditionally associated with a conservative political message -- has received much attention as a "new medium" that plays a major role in American politics and the tenor of public discourse. Rather than a critique of conservative political philosophy, this seminar course is designed to enable students to bridge fine-grained analyses of radio broadcasts with the macro-level concerns of political groups. A major focus of the class will be on "hands-on" analysis of talk radio data and examination of communicative practices found there. Students will be responsible for collecting and transcribing the talk radio broadcasts that will make up the material for class analysis and discussion. The rigorous focus on data collection and analysis will provide students with a basic training in discourse analytic methods, while the nature of the material allows examination of political discourse as an ethnographic object. Larger questions to be considered include whether or not there is a unified rhetorical style associated with the American Right; the nature of the relationship between a message, its form and persuasion; and how moral stances are taken in political contexts. 

27915/47815. Advanced Methods in Discourse Analysis (=LING 27310/37310)  PQ: Language in Culture 1 & 2, Discourse Analysis, or consent of instructor. This class is intended for students who already have a background in discourse or linguistic analysis and/or linguistic anthropology. In it, students will gain hands-on experience in the collection, transcription and analysis of discourse data. Regular class periods will be focused on the theoretical background and conceptual tools relevant for the study of language-in-use. Students will be introduced to contemporary usage-based theories of language structure with the aim of enabling an understanding of the cognitive, interactional and historical motivations for the shape of linguistic resources, and situating our focus on language as a resource for social action. We will also consider-and evaluate through application to interacitonal data-several different subdisciplinary approaches to and case studies of, the discourse and culture nexus, with a focus on evaluating the type of data-collection and ethnographic questions most suitable to students' own proposed research topics. During supplementary weekly lab sessions, students will have an opportunity to learn and practice software and recording technologies as well as to share their data with the group in an informal workshop-style format.

37201. Language in Culture I (=Ling 31100, Psych 47001, ISHU 35400). This is the first part of a two-quarter sequence that introduces some of the central theoretical issues involved in the semiotic study of language in its contexts of communicative use. This course will provide students with key analytic tools for approaching empirical data about language-in-context. The material introduced -- an overview of diverse theoretical approaches to linguistic anthropology -- is designed to situate contextualized language use as the medium by which culture concepts are brought to life and recursively constituted. Several general themes will be addressed: 1) The orderliness of real-time interaction as a product of language as a semiotic system; 2) The role of and properties of language-in-use as the preeminent field of social interaction and the creation of cultural concepts; 3) The role of discourse as a dialectic mediator of "cultural" concepts and knowledge that social actors may share with others and the role such mediated knowledge plays in group formation. Central questions that will be addressed, via elaboration of these themes include how language makes meaning, how language participates in semiotic processes and how we can study them.