The Middle-class Card: A Corpus-based Study of the Characteristics of the Middle Class in US News

The ups and downs of the American middle class led several social scientists to rethink and reflect on their conditions, yet the characteristics of how the middle class are represented in the news have been hardly examined from a linguistic perspective. This study used a synergy of tools of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, guided by Norman Fairclough’s 3-D model (1989), to investigate the collocation profile of the middle class and the ideology underpinning its representation in US web news discourse from 2010 until 2022. The study relied on a specialized news corpus that had 1,253,678 tokens, including middle class (30,975 times) and middle-class (23,587 times). The findings showed that the US web news was consistent in constructing the characteristics of the middle class during the past twelve years. Under neoliberal policies, the idea of classism is an intrinsic dividing system in American society, and the notion that the middle-class family is an economic unit seems to be ubiquitous. Also, the middle class are depicted as the economic unit that establishes stability and the political card that politicians use in their agendas to win the majority of votes. In spite of the political and economic significance of the middle class, they are mostly passivated by minimizing their human agency and downplaying their roles as doers of social actions. The study can be a part of a branch of Applied Linguistics that focuses on the relationship between the science of economics and the science of language

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationA novel flash ironmaking technology is being developed at University of Utah aiming at producing iron directly from magnetite concentrate ( 90% was achieved at a temperature as iv low as 1175 °C in a few seconds of residence time. The results obtained from this reactor was verified by the developed rate equations and good agreement was achieved. A Larger Scale Bench Reactor (LSBR) was installed in which heat and reductants were generated by a natural gas/oxygen flame in the temperature range 1200-1600 °C and concentrate feeding rate of 1-7 kg/h. This reactor was controlled completely with an automated system with high built-in safety measures. Complete reduction of magnetite concentrate was obtained at an average temperature of 1350 °C and H2/H2O ratio in the offgas of about 3

Reduction kinetics of magnetite concentrate particles with H2 + CO at 1200 to 1600 oC relevant to a novel Ironmaking process

The kinetics of magnetite reduction with mixtures of hydrogen and CO of various compositions has been investigated as part of the development of a flash ironmaking process at the University of Utah. This new process bypasses the cokemaking and pelletization or sintering steps required for the blast furnace. The particle kinetics were studied using magnetite concentrate particles of different sizes. Reduction degree of 60% was achieved in a few seconds in at 1350 oC using CO reductant alone and over 90% when H2 + CO gas mixture was used. The effects of reductant partial pressures, temperature, and particle size on the reduction kinetics were studied