ENG3221: Grammars of English: Language and Culture

Examines the barbershop as a rhetorical site in African American culture across genres, including fiction, film, poetry, and theater.

Topics explored include African-American drag queens, gender and class on the shopping channel, and talk in the workplace.

H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded, cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President--from his use of Black Language and his'articulateness'to his'Race Speech,'the so-called'fist-bump,'and his relationship to Hip Hop Culture. Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America.

Maciej Widawski explores patterns of form, meaning, theme and function, showing it to be a rule-governed, innovative and culturally revealing vernacular.

A comprehensive and fully updated introduction to the study of the relationship between language and society.

Located at the intersection of sociolinguistics and Hip Hop Studies, this cutting-edge book moves around the world – spanning Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas and the European Union – to explore Hip Hop cultures, youth identities, the politics of language, and the simultaneous processes of globalization and localization.

The essays gathered in this volume explore specific areas of linguistics, providing a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the study of language.

Lakoff's introduction to linguistic theories and the philosophy of language lays the groundwork for an exploration of news stories that meet what she calls the UAT (Undue Attention Test). As the stories became the subject of talk-show debates, late-night comedy routines, Web sites, and magazine articles, they were embroidered with additional meanings, depending on who was telling the story. Race, gender, or both are at the heart of these stories, and each one is about the right to construct meanings from languagein short, to possess power.