"I'm not proud, I'm just gay": lesbian and gay youths' discursive negotiation of otherness

This article outlines the shared identity construction of five gay and lesbian members of an LGBT youth group, situated in a conservative, working-class, Northern English town. It is shown that the young people’s identity work emerges in response to the homophobia and ‘othering’ they have experienced from those in their local community. Through ethnography and discourse analysis, and using theoretical frameworks from interactional sociolinguistics, the strategies that the young people employ to negotiate this othering are explored; they reject certain stereotypes of queer culture (such as Gay Pride or being ‘camp’), and aim to minimise the relevance of their sexuality to their social identity. It is argued this reflects both the influence of neoliberal, ‘homonormative’ ideology, which casts sexuality in the private rather than public domain, and the stigma their sexuality holds in their local community. These findings point to the need to understand identity construction intersectionally

Greece, the Netherlands and (the) Ukraine: A Corpus-Based Study of Definite Article Use with Country Names

This study investigates the grammatical behavior of English country names based on corpus linguistic evidence. An overview of the basic patterns of definite article use with country names as commonly described in English reference grammars and of the morphological structures of English country names is presented. Against this backdrop, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is used to explore which (groups of) country names occur more or less frequently with a definite article. The data analysis reveals that virtually all of the English country names examined are, to some extent, used in the syntactic position following a definite article. It is shown that certain grammatical constructions call for the use of a definite article in connection with country names. However, the morphology of the country names also has a strong influence on how often they are used with a definite article. Furthermore, it is argued that the minority of English country names that do not fit this morphological pattern may differ because they derive from other place name types that generally take a definite article

Corpus Linguistic Onomastics: A Plea for a Corpus-Based Investigation of Names

Corpus linguistics is, to date, still an underexplored methodology in onomastics. This article seeks to advance the field through a theoretical discussion of onomastic issues from a corpus linguistic point of view. It presents an overview of the linguistic status, meaning and grammar of proper names in order to highlight aspects that lend themselves to corpus linguistic inquiry. Earlier onomastic research is adduced, to highlight how corpus linguistic methods have substantially improved our understanding of names in language use. While previous onomastic work has often concentrated on the description of names in their own right, without necessarily taking the usage context into account, it is argued that the investigation of the semantics and the grammar of names needs to be complemented by work that draws on usage-based, corpus linguistic evidence. A stronger integration of four types of corpus linguistic analysis (frequency analysis, concordance analysis, collocation analysis, keyword analysis) is suggested for future research

Walking on Wilton Drive: A linguistic landscape analysis of a homonormative space

This study analyses the linguistic landscape of Wilton Manors, Florida, as it surfaces on its main street, Wilton Drive. Wilton Manors is a community with one of the largest LGBT populations in the US. The study thus makes a contribution to the field of linguistic landscapes and sexuality, using normativity as a central theoretical reference point. The data for the study were collected during a daytime walk on Wilton Drive and consist of photos of store fronts, restaurants, bars, advertisements and other signs, supplemented by printed material collected on the Drive and information provided by the official website of Wilton Drive. In my multimodal analysis, I investigate linguistic and non-linguistic signage, identifying mechanisms that render Wilton Drive a gay space. More specifically, I analyze how signage is used to discursively construct sexual identity, gender, desire and sexual practices. It is shown that homonormativity plays a central role in this context. Same-sex sexualities are discursively constructed as the local norm. At the same time, the signage on Wilton Drive is highly exclusive in the sense that it represents predominantly gay male experiences, whereas heterosexualities, lesbian and other sexualities are discursively marginalized or even silenced. At the same time, particular versions of gay masculinity are privileged, namely ones that can be described as white, middle-class and focused on consumption, gay identity politics and non-romantic forms of sexual activity

Coming out – seducing – flirting: Shedding light on sexual speech acts

This study investigates British and US gay men's comments on certain types of speech acts in their life narratives. This procedure yields folk linguistic evidence of the relationship between language and sexuality from a pragmatic point of view. At the theoretical level, the concept of “sexual speech act” (SSA) is introduced, distinguishing identity-related and desire-related SSAs. The analysis concentrates on gay men's comments on coming out as an identity-related SSA, and on seducing and flirting as desire-related SSAs. The narrated speech acts are analyzed quantitatively with respect to agency patterns, while a qualitative analysis of data extracts studies how narrators construct the illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects of SSAs, and how the SSAs are integrated in the contextual discursive construction of sexuality

Affective regimes on Wilton Drive: a multimodal analysis

This study focuses on public signage on Wilton Drive in Wilton Manors, Florida – a homonormative space that privileges the representation of the experiences and needs of particular groups of gay men to the exclusion of other sexualities. I use a linguistic landscape methodology to conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis in which I identify prevalent affective regimes discursively surfacing in public signage on Wilton Drive. My research interest lies in the question of how affective regimes are produced through signage practices, and how they shape social representation in this homonormative space. After a theoretical outline of the concepts of linguistic landscape, affect and affective regimes, I illustrate and analyze the discursive construction of three types of affective regimes that are particularly common in this context: love, tolerance and homonationalism. The analysis shows how the three affective regimes contribute to making Wilton Drive a space in which specific social normativities prevail, but also takes a critical look at the downsides of such discursive constructions