“Dear Miss Daly”: 1940s Fan Letters to Maureen Daly and the Age-Grading and Gendering of Seventeenth Summer

Abstract The correlation between external factors such as age, gender, ethnic group membership and language variation is one of the stalwarts of sociolinguistic theory. The repertoire of individual members of speaker groups, vis-à-vis community-wide variation, represents a somewhat slippery ground for developing and testing models of variation and change and has been researched with reference to accommodation (Bell 1984), style shifting (Rickford, John R. & MacKenzie Price. 2013. Girlz II women: Age-grading, language change and stylistic variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17. 143–179) and language change generally (Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell). This paper presents and assesses some first quantitative evidence that non-mobile older speakers from Tristan da Cunha, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean, who grew up in an utterly isolated speech community, vary and shift according to external interview parameters (interviewer, topic, place of interview). However, while they respond to the formality of the context, they display variation (both regarding speakers and variables) that is not in line with the constraints attested elsewhere. These findings are assessed with focus on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in third-age speakers (particularly style-shifting, Labov, William. 1964. Stages in the acquisition of Standard English. In Roger Shuy, Alva Davis & Robert Hogan (eds.), Social Dialects and Language Learning, 77–104. Champaign: National Council of Teachers of English) and across the life-span generally.

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Studies on mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) and anthropic environment: 1- Parity of blood seeking Anopheles (Kerteszia) in South-Eastern Brazil

Revista de Saúde Pública ◽

10.1590/s0034-89101993000100001 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 1-8 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Oswaldo Paulo Forattini ◽

Iná Kakitani ◽

Eduardo Massad ◽

Almério de Castro Gomes

Keyword(s):

Statistical Significance ◽

Abundant Species ◽

Common Pattern ◽

Host Seeking ◽

Eastern Brazil ◽

High Statistical Significance ◽

Age Grading ◽

One Year ◽

Anopheles Cruzii ◽

Indoor And Outdoor

Populations of Anopheles (Kerteszia) were sampled fortnightly over a one-year period (August 1991 to July 1992) at Ribeira Valley, S. Paulo State, Brazil. Indoor and outdoor collections were made on human bait at evening crepuscular period. The Polovodova technique for age grading was applied to 3,501 females of Anopheles cruzii and to 416 females of An. bellator. That sample represented 34.4% of the total number of mosquitoes collected. The most abundant species found was An. cruzii. However, An. bellator showed an endophagy that was almost three times greater than that of An. cruzii. The overall parous rate was 25.4% and uniparity was practically dominant one. A proportion of 26.9% of An. cruzii and 12.0% of An. bellator were found to be uniparous. Only three outdoor females of the former species (0.1%) showed biparity. Parity of An. cruzii was higher in females caught outdoors than in those caught indoors. Nevertheless, 497 nulliparous females examined (417 cruzii and 80 bellator) had ovaries that had advanced to Christophers and Mer stages III to V. These results imply that these females had already practised hematophagy. Relating these results to those from the parous females, a high statistical significance was found, leading to the conclusion that gonothophic discordance is a common pattern among these anophelines. Further, these results obtained with human bait catches strongly suggest that nearly 38.0% of these host-seeking females had already taken at least one previous blood-meal. So it is possible that enough time could thus be available for the plasmodian development in the vectors.

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Exemplifying the Language Change of Jennifer Lopez

Lifespans and Styles ◽

10.2218/ls.v6i2.2020.5217 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 11-21

Author(s):

Lea Bauernfeind

Keyword(s):

Longitudinal Study ◽

Social Context ◽

Language Change ◽

Age Grading

This paper investigates American singer and actress Jennifer Lopez’s use of the sociolinguistic variables (ing), PRICE, and TRAP through a longitudinal study of readily available interviews over the course of 16 years. The study is an example of the same speaker of English showing lifespan change in one variable (TRAP), and age-grading in two others ((ing) and PRICE). The findings show that different variables can pattern differently, and that social context plays an important role in these linguistic developments.

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Les Midinettes Révolutionnaires

Feminist Media Histories ◽

10.1525/fmh.2017.3.4.162 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 3 (4) ◽

pp. 162-194 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Annie Fee

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Young Women ◽

Social Practice ◽

Historical Study ◽

Film Culture ◽

Archival Material ◽

French Film ◽

Social Activists ◽

The Social ◽

Fan Letters

In their quest for official and cultural recognition, French First Wave critics such as Louis Delluc discursively positioned the working-class female cinemagoer as emblematic of the sorry state of unsophisticated French film audiences. From this discourse came the stereotype of the starry-eyed midinette, which is still used by French film critics to describe lowbrow film taste and an overly emotional mode of spectatorship. This essay attempts to reconstruct the social practice of cinemagoing among the midinettes of 1920s working-class Paris by focusing on the female fans of the serial Les deux gamines (1921). Both a critique of intellectual cinephilia as a cultural discourse and a geographically specific retrieval of the multiple ways in which socioeconomically and culturally marginalized audiences interacted with the cinema, this historical study repositions young women from working-class neighborhoods as key actors in film culture—fans, but also social activists. Through a study of disparate, unpublished archival material, including fan letters, film programs, and announcements in the leftist press, this essay attends to the social realities of a number of female film fans in Montmartre and grounds their spectatorship spatially within their local communities.

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