12 Oct 2017: Rhys Sandow on Anglo-Cornish dialect


Linguistics PhD student Rhys Sandow is presenting his work in the English Graduate Seminar Thursday 12 October at 16.00 in the Arts B Social Space.

His abstract:

Through a process of bricolage, human agents negotiate and manage aspects of their identity by drawing upon a system of semiotic resources. A central part of this system and one which is easily adaptable and adept at marking social difference, is language. Taking a specific geographical context with rich social and linguistic heterogeneity, more specifically the Cornish town of Redruth, this study considers variation in the use of Anglo-Cornish dialect vocabulary against a range of emic and etic social parameters. By interpreting a  set of elicited data in the context of a language ideology framework and drawing on the literature from Cornish Studies, speakers appear to be using language to do identity work which has nuanced indexical meaning in the matrix of local society.

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