While considering Makoni and Pennycook's (2006) critique of the colonial nature of the notion of singular languages in this dissertation, a documentation and investigation of English and Spanish use on billboards in Carolina, Guaynabo, and San Juan, three cities in Puerto Rico, is presented. The billboards in these towns make use of Spanish, the…

This essay explores the language of social protest in two geographic and diasporic locations in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic) with long and ongoing histories of colonialism and imperialism. We analyze social media and digital mobilizing to examine how, in the midst of social protest, linguistic and semiotic tools indexed…

This qualitative study examines the semiotic meanings communicated through multiple representations in the teaching of an advanced undergraduate course in biology. Scientific discourse is intrinsically multimodal in nature; in other words, science is discussed and researched using multiple modes that convey meaning (Lemke, 1998). Therefore, to…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…