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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Rose

Mary Rose

Stanford University
Department of Linguistics

Mary Rose is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at Stanford. She is from Virginia, and she studies linguistic variation, a.k.a. dialects, in spoken and signed languages, language and gender, discourses of medicine and science, and the structure of American Sign Language. Her project at the Center this year investigates the social meaning of dialect features among older people (or "senior citizens") in rural Wisconsin. She holds a Master's degree in linguistics from Gallaudet University.

Project Summary

What if we viewed the way older people talk as representative of a lifetime's accumulation of linguistic experience, rather than as a relic of history? Rose's dissertation, "Language, Place and Identity in Later Life," is an ethnographic study of the social meaning of linguistic variation among elders in a small, rural community.  During several months' fieldwork at the Senior Center in a small Wisconsin town, Rose interviewed 45 people aged 66 to100, retired farmers and farmers' wives, businessmen, homemakers, teachers, and cheese factory workers. The rich interview and field data she collected allows her to pursue three aims in her dissertation: 1) to describe the dialect of a previously unstudied region; 2) to show how the complex social dynamics of rural areas, often ignored in sociolinguistic research, influence language change; and 3) to show how our theories about social meaning and linguistic practice become more complex when older people become the focus.