Lucia Munguia

This dissertation sketches a theory of expected conversational roles. An expected conversational role is the trajectory you expect a person will take when contributing to a conversation about a certain topic. ECRs are used to explain instances of surprise that arise in response to what people say. I distinguish Content Directed Surprise from Speaker-Oriented Conversational Surprise. We see the latter in, say, a sexist math professor’s surprise that a young woman has given a correct answer. Here the object of his surprise is not her answer, but that she had it. Instances of speaker-oriented conversational surprise occur when an ECR is violated. I draw attention to two familiar ways we form them. ECRs are formed through practicing what we will say to certain people given certain subject matters. ECRs are also passively formed via tacit beliefs we come to have about people based on their social identity. Last, I give an account of the normative profile of instances of speaker-oriented conversational surprise. This account distinguishes the assessment from the phenomenological charge of an instance of speaker-oriented conversational surprise. The assessment reflects how an utterance has violated expectations while the phenomenological charge reflects the personal importance this violation carries for the subject of speaker-oriented conversational surprise.

After a reflection on my personal experiences with shame for not having information about my family's struggles after I left for graduate studies, I argue that this experience of shame can be understood to be one of epistemic shame. I sketch a short rationale for this claim. I briefly summarize very recent work on epistemic shame careful to highlight two components of it: 1) this affective state relates to a belief that one holds and 2) the intensity of an experience of epistemic shame is a function of the judgements other people make about one for holding a false belief. I suggest that the above experience of epistemic shame I described is some motivation to extend this current understanding.

Shame entangles the linguistic lives of many first and second-generation Latinx Americans. On the one hand, it is easy to find videos and accounts of public acts aimed at shaming Spanish speakers in America. On the other hand, it is also common to hear first-personal accounts of the shame some members of the Latinx American community feel for living an “English-only” existence. I advance an account explaining how one’s linguistic choices can be influenced by acts intending to shame other members of their culture. Further, I analyze the complexities of the shame that results in some of those who decide to live an English-Only existence as a result of the pressures to assimilate into mainstream American culture.