LINGUIST List 18.864
Wed Mar 21 2007
Diss: Anthropological Ling/Socioling: Breidenbach: 'Deconstructing ...'
Editor for this issue: Hunter Lockwood
<hunterlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Carla
Breidenbach,
Deconstructing Mock Spanish: A multidisciplinary analysis of mock Spanish as racism, humor, or insult
Message 1: Deconstructing Mock Spanish: A multidisciplinary analysis of mock Spanish as racism, humor, or insult
Date: 21-Mar-2007
From: Carla Breidenbach <BreidenbachCcofc.edu>
Subject: Deconstructing Mock Spanish: A multidisciplinary analysis of mock Spanish as racism, humor, or insult
Institution: University of South Carolina
Program: Program in Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2006
Author: Carla Maria Breidenbach
Dissertation Title: Deconstructing Mock Spanish: A multidisciplinary analysis of mock Spanish as racism, humor, or insult
Linguistic Field(s):
Anthropological Linguistics
Sociolinguistics
Subject Language(s): Spanish (spa)
Dissertation Director:
Amit Almor
Janina Fenigsen
Eric Holt
Ann Kingsolver
Tracey Weldon
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation analyzes Mock Spanish from a multidisciplinaryperspective to address the general question: How does Mock Spanish work?Drawing on a variety of theories and research methods from the fields oflinguistic anthropology, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, thisdissertation attempts to answer that broad question by examining what MockSpanish involves, namely, whether Mock Spanish is racist in all contexts orare there contexts in which Mock Spanish might have a differentinterpretation such as humorous or insulting, and what makes Mock Spanishracist. Based on my previous research (Breidenbach 2002, unpublishedstudy), I argue that there are four important factors that contribute to amore complete understanding of the interpretation of Mock Spanish as a formof covert racism: 1) the ability and willingness to consciously acknowledgethe past and present socio-historical context of the Hispanic Americanexperience, 2) the relationship between participants involved in the MockSpanish exchanges or discourses, 3) the ideological frameworks hiddenbehind the utterance, and 4) the intentionality of the source.
I also argue that Mock Spanish can have multiple interpretations ifanalyzed within a framework that treats meaning as flexible (Hall 1996,Fenigsen 2005), whereby meaning can be "fixed" or "frozen" for a moment(Hall 1996) within the broader structures of society such as ideologies,power, and knowledge (Foucault 1980). In other words, meaning isinterpretation at one moment in time when all the appropriate factors(e.g., ideologies, power, and knowledge) converge to produce a meaning forone person at that point in time. Mock Spanish images and discourses arenot fixed but have a potentially wide range of meaning.
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