Language Choice in U.S. Latina First Person Narrative: The Effects of Language Standardization and Subordination
For a phenomenon that was considered not to exist by the leading expert in bilingualism less than fifty years ago, code-switching has come a long way, baby.2 Actually, it is not the practice of codeswitching, but rather its study, which has flourished over the past quarter of a century. Previously considered a kind of deviant linguistic behavior which indicated a speaker's inability to separate the two languages at her or his disposal, linguists now recognize codeswitching as a functional linguistic behavior which demonstrates the speaker's ability to manipulate the grammar and lexicon of two languages at the same time. John Lipski finds that "[T]here is a certain justice to be found in the fact that the language behavior of a group for so long considered linguistically deficient is now proving to be the most fertile territory for the investigation of all levels of bilingualism" (208). While the study of code-switching is remarkable in its interdisciplinarity, the two fields of literary criticism and socio-linguistics allow for a more thorough exploration of the landscape in which this Spanish-English literary language mixing takes place. This paper investigates the use of Spanish in predominantly English U.S. Latina narratives, focusing on factors which affect language choice (language proficiency and the social
Tender Accents of Sound: Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English
Tender Accents of Sound: Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English. Ernst Rudin. Tempe: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1996. xiii + 285 pages. $20.00. The analysis of bilingual strategies is nothing new to Chicano/a social and literary studies. After all, language constructs personal, social, and literary identity, so the studies of Chicano/a poetry and theater inevitably examine code-switching between English and Spanish as an interlingual literary technique that registers the liminal social position of Chicano/a identity between Anglo and Mexican culture. However, despite the linguistic richness of Chicano/a literary production, Ernst Rudin is correct in asserting that "neither in the field of the Chicano novel nor in the more spectacularly bilingual ones of poetry and theater has there been a book-length analysis on the subject to date." Rudin's project, then, is quite unique and also quite daunting: he examines the use of Spanish in nineteen Chicano/a prose narratives written in English and concludes, among other things, that "[t]he Chicano novels published between the late sixties and the mid-eighties offsprings of the Chicano movement, ... and often marked as `revolutionary literature,' are--on the level of language--very reluctant to use experimental techniques and to be subversive." In the first of his three-part study, Rudin judiciously clarifies his project: he is not analyzing bilingual texts--texts written in both English and Spanish. Rather, he embarks to examine the "bilingual strategies" of Chicano/a narratives in English written between 1967 and 1985 to show that they "are, generally speaking, as `monolingual' or `bilingual' as Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls." Except for The House on Mango Street and Victuum, the literary corpus Rudin examines are by men, and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, from which Rudin's study takes it title, seems to be the master narrative informing Rudin's reading of other Chicano/a narratives, since the structuring theme of his text selection is the assimilation of the Chicano (author-narrator-) protagonists [who] cease at the end of the text to belong to the world, the society, and the value system that surrounded them at its beginning, and try reconstruct their former cultural self for an Anglo American audience whose culture has now become theirs. Along these lines, the first section culminates with Rudin's lucid discussion of the levels of linguistic and cultural translation in Chicano texts, which he demonstrates with an effective analysis of Rolando Hinojosa's English translation of his own Spanish narrative Estampas del valle y otras obras. Unfortunately, parts two and three of the study only show glimpses of the detailed literary analysis with which the first part concludes. Generally concerned with the types of Spanish-language entries in Chicano/a texts, the second part does not offer significant textual analysis until it specifically examines the works of Estela Portillo Trambley, Alma Luz Villanueva, Mary Helen Ponce, and Ana Castillo, all of whom are not included in the primary corpus of the study. And the final section offers a series of lists categorizing the number of times specific words or phrases appear in a text. Granted, Rudin implores that the "statistics tables have to be taken with a grain of salt," but the section highlights the study's tendency to point out Spanish-language entries without fully developing an analysis of how and why they function as competing forms of social discourses. …
A Study on Greenhouse Automatic Control System Based on Wireless Sensor Network
The system proposed in this paper collects temperature of leaves and humidity on leaves of crop. As well as greenhouse environmental information such as temperature, humidity, etc. Crop diseases, especially, have deep relationship not only with indoor environmental factors but also with humidity lasting time on leaves and temperature of leaves. Accordingly, monitoring crop itself is as important as monitoring indoor environments. Using these collected greenhouse environmental data, indoor environments can be more effectively controlled, and monitoring crop itself can contribute to improve productivity and to prevent crops from damages by blight and harmful insects. In addition, it will be possible for farmers to do control plant growth through closely studying relationship between indoor environmental information and monitored information on crop itself. Collected data can be stored to database either in server installed in greenhouse or to remote server. It is made possible to collect information and control effectively and automatically greenhouse in the site or from a remote place through web browser. System components are: temperature sensor, humidity sensor, leaf temperature sensor, leaf humidity sensor, Zigbee based wireless sensor node, relay nodes for automatic control, and data server to store greenhouse information. The system is implemented using low power wireless components, and easy to install.