Dive into the world of linguistics and discover a collection of resources from the podcast and beyond. Find essays, articles, dissertations, and other work by the linguists featured on Linguistics in Action, alongside current news, events, and developments from across the field. Together, these resources offer new perspectives, ideas, and opportunities to learn more about language and linguistics around the globe. Explore new topics, discover new ideas, and immerse yourself in the world of linguistics!
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"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied."
Noam Chomsky, 1970
Multilingual governance is not a neutral reflection of linguistic diversity, but a structured and ideologically informed process shaped by policy choices, institutional design, and historical trajectories. This thesis examines how national language policies construct multilingualism, represent linguistic communities, and organize inclusion and exclusion across four national contexts: the United States, Switzerland, South Africa, and New Zealand. Drawing on comparative discourse analysis, the study investigates the ideologies underpinning language policy, focusing on how policies frame linguistic minorities, define legitimate participation, and encode underlying power relations.
Lexi Slome
Courtroom Opening Statements
PhD Thesis
Slome, A. (2024). Discursive Construction of Defendant and Victim Identity in Courtroom Opening Statement Narratives. Linguistics. hdl.handle.net/10822/1089061
Courtroom narratives are not simply accounts of events, but persuasive constructions that shape how defendants and victims are understood. This thesis examines how attorneys construct opposing narratives and identities in the opening statements of three U.S. criminal trials: MN v. Chauvin, FL v. Lewis, and WI v. Rittenhouse. Drawing on structural and performative narrative analysis, the study investigates how linguistic strategies such as stancetaking, comparison, and attribution of agency position defendants and victims in relation to legal standards and sociocultural expectations. The analysis demonstrates how these identity constructions contribute to broader narratives of guilt and innocence, highlighting the role of language in shaping persuasive courtroom narratives.
Kathleen Guerra
Social Meaning in Ecuadorian Andean Spanish
Guerra, K. S. (2023). Context-Specific Use and Ideology: Perception of Appropriate Domains for Dar + Gerund. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 16(2), 447–471. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2023-2016
This work examines the use of dar + gerund (for example, dame pasando, “pass me”) as a way of making requests in Ecuadorian Andean Spanish. It explores how this distinctive form communicates more than politeness, revealing subtle meanings about familiarity, equality, social relationships, and the level of imposition involved in a request. The study shows how a particular grammatical construction can carry important social and cultural meanings.
Nick Glasson
Bridging Psycholinguistic Modelling and Interactional Competence in Language Assessment
Glasson, N. (2026). The Challenge of Interaction: Bridging Psycholinguistic Modelling and Interactional Competence in Language Assessment. Language Assessment Quarterly, 23(1), 69–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2025.2612621
This work explores how speaking tests can better reflect the mental processes involved in real-world conversation, particularly the interactive nature of dialogue. He proposes combining insights from psycholinguistics, conversation analysis, and cognitive modelling to better understand how people predict, comprehend, and produce language during turn-taking.