October 2007, Volume 2, Issue 2

A RWU newsletter designed to keep the faculty informed of the academic technology resources that are available to them on campus

Spring 2008, Volume 2, Issue 5

A RWU newsletter designed to keep the faculty informed of the academic technology resources that are available to them on campus

Do you park your car or pahk your cah\u27\u27?: The Changing Dialect of Southern New Hampshire

This article reports on a sociolinguistic study conducted in the summer of 2014 in which I interviewed native southern New Hampshire men and women, aged 18 to 89, listening for rhoticity (r variable) in their speech. I found that speakers younger than 60 years old are now exhibiting fully rhotic speech, which contrasts with the results of earlier studies.Possible motivations for the shift were also examined and compared with more recent studies on the r variable. I found in this study a correlation between the non-rhotic speech of many older speakers and small farming communities. The shift from non-rhotic to rhotic speech is partially related to a convergence with the standard rhotic dialect,heard in the larger communities of the younger generations, along with a divergence from the Boston dialect

January 2008, Volume 2, Issue 4

A RWU newsletter designed to keep the faculty informed of the academic technology resources that are available to them on campus

February 2007, Volume 1, Issue 6

A RWU newsletter designed to keep the faculty informed of the academic technology resources that are available to them on campus

September 2007, Volume 2, Issue 1

A RWU newsletter designed to keep the faculty informed of the academic technology resources that are available to them on campus

December 2006, Volume 1, Issue 5

A RWU newsletter designed to keep the faculty informed of the academic technology resources that are available to them on campus

STORIES FROM THE OLD WEST END OF BOSTON: AN ANALYSIS OF EVALUATIVE DEVICES IN ORAL NARRATIVE

The following presents an overview of various evaluative devices found in a series of oral narratives from former residents of the West End of Boston, Massachusetts. In working with an archivist at the West End Museum, I was able to read through interviews, each conducted with residents that were displaced from the West End after the urban renewal project of the late 1950s. These interviews were recorded for the purpose of collecting each resident’s experience growing up in the neighborhood. After reading through each interview I found several instances of narrative speech. I conducted a narrative analysis, based on Labov and Waletsky (1967) method to explore the linguistic devices that narrators used to evaluate their experiences. Each device was defined linguistically and analyzed to determine its implications for the narrator. An overarching theme was discovered such that narrators use these devices to cast themselves in a protagonist role in an idealized community. The narrators’ use of language perpetuates this transformation of experience and their nostalgia of the West End