Dana Osborne

Current Research

I have been at the University of Arizona since the Fall of 2006. During my tenure here, I have been able to work with many different brilliant scholars and explore some of my various interests. Linguistic anthropology provides an excellent foundation to explore just about anything and I have used the lessons provided to me by some of my academic mentors (including, but not limited to Jane Hill, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Ana Maria Alonso, Heidi Harley, Qing Zhang and Jennifer Roth-Gordon) to cultivate some of these ideas. The following is an annotated list beginning from most to least recent on projects and papers I have worked on:

  • "Self-Help in an Urban Neighborhood: The Being and Becoming of the Non-Modern Subject" -- uses the concept of heterogeneous space-time (from modernity studies) as a backdrop in explaining the role of public housing, religious iconography and perceived violence in the construction of East Los Angeles as a not-quite-modern place S10
  • "Notes from the Field: Life Among the Geographers" -- an experimental paper dealing mostly with reflections on Laclau and Mouffe as a useful analytical base for anthropological analysis S10
  • "Some ideas on understanding the semantics of prepositions" -- explores the semantics of propositions as conceptual primitives where terms are treated as fundamental and unmediated ormetaphorically, where the organizational patterns that emerge as a result of spatial experience in the world may be mapped onto other domains, such as sensory, aesthetic or cosmological systems which are then realized in language F09
  • "A Syntactic Exploration of Locatives and Existentials" -- addresses the commonalities between locative and existential to be in English F09
  • "Variation in Spatial Coordinate Systems Based on Language Contact in Local Economy" -- a hypothetical, statistically and sociolinguistically motivated research plan in Ilocos Sur, Philippines regarding possible catalysts for regional sociolinguistic variation in spatial coordinate systems S10
  • "Manner of Motion, Path and Spatial Representational Gestures in Spanish and English: An Exploratory Comparison of Bilingual Speakers" -- spatial representation in bilinguals through an examination of gesture (collaborative paper written with Micaya Vance Clymer, Don Anderson and Jessica Nelson) S09
  • "The Control of Information in the Narrative Construction of Los Angeles" -- strata of truth and social memory in East Los Angeles S09
  • "A Theoretical Overview of Gesture in Narrative" -- what we can glean from gesture using a cognitive science approach S09
  • "Recognition in Silence: The Hegelian Dialectic of Recognition Imminent in Color-blind Discourse" -- an examination of color-blind discourse using Hegel's dialectic F08
  • "'From East LA to Montebello to Whittier': History and Phoricity in the Deictic Construction of Los Angeles -- Master's Thesis exploring the connection between systems of deixis and experience in the world F08
  • "Toward an Understanding of the Question" -- an appeal to soft relativism in the analysis of speech perception and categories of truth S08
  • "Being-Toward-Death" -- an examination of the concept of the 'anachronistic moment' which represents the union of philosophical constructs and literary metaphor in the context of naturalistic talk about time providing a window into assumptions about the way that time and the subject are mutually constituted S08
  • "Identifying the Pitch and Duration Ranges for Enregistered Utterances: Mexicano and White Voice" -- an examination of how enregistered voices (social personae) are realized through the modulation of pitch contour and time-to-f0 extremum F07
  • "iPeople" -- an exploration of regulated gestures present in virtual video tours in Japanese and English on the Apple Macintosh web site F07
  • "Pointing Westward: An Exploration of Engrish" -- an examination of how Japanese advertisers use English for its uniquely Western appeal, indexing what can be interpreted as primarily positive aspects of the West, such as individuality, existential satisfaction and success S07
  • "Hyper-Alignment and Affective Hypo-Alignment" -- uses Pomerantz' concept of alignment to understand an interaction among friends S07
  • "Strategic Voices" -- examines the ways that voices allow the author/speaker to performatively dramatize the multivariate assemblage of identity and relative locatedness of that identity with the other voices involved in a segment of speech S07
  • "Projections of Power" -- collaborative video project dealing with perceptions of the US by international students F06