Life on the edge: Understanding social change through everyday conversation in a Ukrainian border community.

This dissertation examines the role of everyday language in the development of local understandings of social change within the context of political and economic transformation. The study focuses on a community of Ukrainian dialect speakers located near the Romanian border in the ethnically and linguistically diverse Zakarpattja region of Ukraine. Residents of this village view recent political and economic changes, including the establishment of independent Ukraine, the shift to toward a market economy and the increasing importance of migrant labor in the face of widespread domestic unemployment as contributing to a continuum of social change that began with the arrival of Soviet power to the area in the late 1940's. The central question that this dissertation addresses is: How do the structures of everyday conversation contribute to local recognition and interpretation of change? In establishing an analysis based on Bakhtin Circle theories of meaning in language, as well as on influential work in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, this dissertation integrates ethnographic and linguistic data to demonstrate the importance of studying everyday linguistic interactions as sites where conversational participants can cooperatively form and re-form conceptualizations of social order and social relations. A central assertion of this dissertation is that linguistic behavior, and in particular the everyday language of routine conversation, does not merely reflect processes of social change, but rather, through negotiation of meaning and of points of view, operates as the medium through which change is perceived and becomes meaningful to members of a community. Features of conversation analyzed in this dissertation include: the application of linguistic ideologies defining linguistic groups; structures of conversational storytelling such as reported speech and participatory frameworks; and conversational naming as a form of social action. All of these materials focus attention on the linguistic means by which villagers negotiate the social meaning of economic and other changes in their everyday lives. This analysis forwards the conclusion that linguistic practices provide a link between macro-scale economic changes and the incorporation of the effects of those changes at the local level of a community in transition.PhDCommunicationCommunication and the ArtsCultural anthropologyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLinguisticsSocial SciencesSocial structureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132118/2/9959745.pd