Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Linguistics

As a result of migration starting in 1990 Albanians constitute the largest ethnic minority and a considerable part of the population of Greece today. This work examines how Albanianness is constructed in Greece through various avenues. First, a linguistic and thematic analysis of internet memes that target the Greek of Albanians shows that the stigmatization of Albanians is still present in the Greek society as it was when they first arrived albeit is less direct. The analysis also shows the enregisterment of a Mock Albanian Greek or a Pan-foreign L2 Greek that is evident and is disseminated through the internet memes. Second, an analysis of semi-structured interviews with Albanian migrants in Greece shows the strategies Albanians have developed in order to navigate this hostile environment in which they live. One of them is to reject ethnic labels such as Αλβανος [alvanos] ‘Albanian.MASC' and Αλβανεζα [alvaneza] ‘Albanian.FEM' that have come to be ethnoracial slurs in Greek along with being used as labels of ethnicity. These are replaced by high register forms that do not carry the slur potential such as Αλβανη [alvani] ‘Albanian.FEM' or have been reclaimed and imbued with positive meanings that express ethnic solidarity. Others reject ethnic labels altogether and show preference for periphrastic constructions centering nationality such as απο την Αλβανια ‘from Albania'. Periphrasis allows them to make a cautious claim to Albanianness but not the negative indexicality of Albanianness, as well as to cautiously suggest a claim to Greekness. While Greekness is not something the second-generation can openly claim despite most of them holding Greek citizenships and spending their formative years in Greece, they feel that Greekness describes part of their identities. Another strategy by which Albanians navigate xenophobia is family and personal name changes and Hellenizations which deracialize them, removing the indexical link to their Albanianness, and reracialize them (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian Joseph (Advisor); Anna Babel (Committee Member); Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Linguistics

This dissertation project examined the sociolinguistic knowledge of heritage speakers of Albanian in the United States, compared this knowledge to that of their Albanian language-dominant parents, and analyzed the context in which these heritage speakers are exposed to and use the Albanian language in their daily lives. In general, very little is known about the sociolinguistic knowledge that heritage speakers have about variation in their language, either in heritage contexts or in the homeland. Two recent studies on heritage Spanish offer conflicting results with regard to the extent and nature of heritage speaker sociolinguistic awareness. While it seems that heritage speakers are on a par with their non-heritage peers in the perception of variation in familiar dialects (Chappell 2019), it is not clear that heritage speakers have the same sociolinguistic constraints as their parents (Maddux & Rao 2019). Moreover, there is virtually no work available that has addressed the sociolinguistic knowledge of Albanian heritage speakers in particular. I designed several methodological components in order to tease apart the various factors at play in heritage speakers' sociolinguistic knowledge. Data collection included perception tasks such as a verbal-guise experiment and in-depth ethnic orientation and sociolinguistic interviews in which I employed novel methods to elicit variation in attention paid to speech. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, I have been able to capture systematic patterns among heritage speakers while balancing this with individual-level insight into the diverse experiences that heritage speakers have had that influence their sociolinguistic knowledge. Not only do the results of this dissertation project provide clear evidence that heritage speakers do acquire complex sociolinguistic knowledge, the perception results also show that heritage speakers express many of the same attitudes towards linguistic variation that their paren (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian Joseph (Advisor); Mazeika Sullivan (Other); Anna Babel (Committee Member); Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (Committee Member) Subjects: Families and Family Life; Foreign Language; Language; Linguistics; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Sociolinguistics

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2015, Slavic and East European Studies

As far back as the late Ottoman Empire, language ideologies have construed the two main dialects of Albanian, Geg in the north and Tosk in the south, as iconic of sociocultural figures representing the rural/undeveloped/closed and the urban/developed/open, respectively. These figures were reinforced by the Tosk-dominated socialist-era government's codification of a Tosk-based standard language and its removal of literary Geg from the public sphere. The post-socialist period, however, has seen different ideologies surrounding Geg, Tosk, and Standard Albanian arise due to political changes and increased dialect contact, particularly in the capital city of Tirana. I argue that speakers' language ideologies under contact conditions in contemporary Tirana posit two different models of difference, one between the Albanian north and south and another between the Albanian periphery and center, the latter largely represented by Tirana. The metaphors underlying these differences are importantly tied to Albania's place in Europe. Furthermore, these models and the beliefs about European modernity that underlie them have implications for the social indexical meaning of dialects and features, in particular Standard Albanian and Geg as they are used in Tirana. Differences in the way dialect features are construed metalinguistically and the way they are used in everyday conversation depend on the models of difference speakers align with. Ultimately, I argue this suggests that standard language ideologies can be about more than the national and that etically defined dialect differences alone cannot explain the social significance of dialect features and communicative practices.

Committee: Brian Joseph (Advisor); Anna Babel (Committee Member) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Sociolinguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Linguistics

Agreement is broadly defined as the systematic covariance between the properties of one element and those of another (adapted from Steele 1978: 610, via Corbett 2006: 4). Essentially, the feature values of a target (e.g. verb, adjective, pronoun) vary according to the feature values of its syntactic controller (usually, a noun/nominalization). Central to this dissertation is the observation that the controller's features need not be purely morphosyntactic in nature (as syntactic agreement); agreement can also proceed according to the semantic properties of the controller (as semantic agreement). The context of multiple antecedent agreement, or agreement with coordinated controllers, provides a case study for understanding the limits and conditions on semantic agreement. First, one of the agreement patterns that surfaces is considered a type of semantic agreement: Resolution draws on meaning-based information of the coordinated controllers. The other agreement pattern is considered a type of syntactic agreement: Partial Agreement draws on the morphosyntactic feature values of only one controller. The primary evidence for this characterization is the fact that the distribution of these patterns conforms to the typological generalizations of the Predicate Hierarchy (Comrie 1975) and the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979, 2006). However, semantic and syntactic features affect the outcome and distribution of both strategies in direct and indirect ways. In this dissertation, I explore the role of non-formal information in the agreement process via studies of multiple antecedent agreement in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Albanian. Latin and Ancient Greek were investigated via corpus studies, while an elicitation study was undertaken in Albanian (where native speakers are available). Data from these studies suggest that while the characterization of Resolution as semantic agreement and Partial Agreement as syntactic agreement is not wrong from the point of view of the typologic (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian Joseph (Advisor); Andrea Sims (Committee Member); Robert Levine (Committee Member); Hope Dawson (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures

As historical relationships of Slavs and Albanians in the western Balkans have been subject to a wide range of scholarly interpretations, this dissertation seeks to present the facts of linguistic evidence of Slavic-Albanian contact, and apply them to an informed understanding of Slavs' and Albanians' interactions historically. Although individual linguistic features are important for establishing the historical fact of language contact, only a systematic, comprehensive analysis of the several interrelated parts of language—vocabulary, phonology, and morphosyntax—can indicate how the languages, and the communities speaking them, have been affected by the long-standing contact. This study also considers the languages from the perspective of several language-contact theories, creating a multifaceted approach that reveals strengths and weaknesses of each theory, and also paints a multidimensional picture of the effects of language contact and socio-cultural reasons for the languages' changes. This layered analysis demonstrates that contact between Slavs and Albanians has brought about many linguistic changes, particularly in dialects that have remained in contact with one another. While the most obvious effects are the plenteous lexical borrowings, language contact is also present in phonology and morphosyntax, thus affecting every aspect of the dialects in contact. As the linguistic data shows, Albanian and Slavic communities have enriched one another linguistically and likely in other aspects of their cultural inheritances as well.

Committee: Brian Joseph PhD (Advisor); Charles Gribble PhD (Committee Member); Daniel Collins PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: East European Studies; European History; Foreign Language; History; Language; Language Arts; Linguistics; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Morphology; Slavic Literature; Slavic Studies; Sociolinguistics