I am pleased to announce the public defense of my doctoral thesis in Language Sciences titled “White Flag Typography”. The defense will take place on Friday, December 1st, at 9 am in the Salle des Thèses - CY Cergy Paris University, Chênes 2 Site, 33 Boulevard du Port, 95011 Cergy-Pontoise cedex, France.

Examining Committee :
Julien Longhi, Professeur des universités (CY Cergy Paris Université), Directeur,
Élise Mignot, Professeur des universités (Paris Sorbonne), Présidente,
Chris Smith, Maître de conférences HDR (Université de Caen), Rapportrice,
Jürgen Spitzmüller, Professeur des universités (Universität Wien), Rapporteur,
Catherine Marshall, Professeur des universités (CY Cergy Paris Université),
Julie Neveux, Maître de conférences (Paris Sorbonne), Examinatrice

Abstract
White Flag Typography proposes a study of non-standard minuscule use (e.g., following a full-stop in Latin script languages, or when used for the 1SG in English: <i>); the thesis being that they are deployed in Computer Mediated Communications by social actors for their attenuative effects in the absence of universal non-lexical markers. Non-lexical markers for emphasis abound; all caps, underlining, italics, exclamation marks—hence we posit that social media users, especially in the English language which has a small script inventory, only one 1SG, no speech levels, and zero diacritics, are implementing attenuative variation to pragmatic ends. This thesis analyses the phenomenon using qualitative and quantitative methods, and adopts a usage, not user based social stratification in order to propose a taxonomy of six different usages under the novel term White Flag Typography. Each of these ‘taxon’ is analysed in separate chapters to reveal their idiosyncrasies: in-grouping indexicality, aural implicature, sociophonetic enregisterment, visual iconicity, syntactic/semantic interface disruption, and possible reflective function impairment marking.

Keywords: Discourse analysis ; sociophonetics ; computer mediated communication; metapragmatics; cognitive linguistics ; linguistic anthropology

For the preparation of the traditional post-defense ‘pot’, kindly inform me via email of your attendance.

Sincerely,
Sophia Burnett
[email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics