Although medical and public health practitioners aim for high rates of vaccination, parent vaccination concerns confound doctors and complicate doctor-patient interactions. Medical and public health researchers have studied and attempted to counter antivaccination sentiments, but recommended approaches to dispel vaccination concerns have failed to produce long-lasting effects. We use observations made during a small study in a rural area in a southeastern state to demonstrate how a shift away from analyzing vaccination skepticism as a national issue with a global remedy reveals the nuances in vaccination sentiments based on locality. Instead of seeing antivaccinationists as a distinct public based on statistical commonalities, we argue that examining vaccination beliefs and practices at the local level offers a fuller picture of the contextualized nature of vaccination decisions within the psychosocial spaces of families. A view of vaccination that emphasizes the local public, rather than a globally conceived antivaccination public, enables medical humanists and rhetoricians to offer important considerations for improving communications about vaccinations in clinical settings.
The Southern Double Object Construction, a regular form in Southern vernacular varieties of American English, is well attested. Among speakers of Southern Vernacular English, its use is not stigmatized, and it appears that it can be exchanged variably with its mainstream English approximate, the “self” reflexive (e.g., Sheiwent to the store to get herisome candy vs. Sheiwent to the store to get herselfisome candy). In this article, we contextualize the Southern Double Object Construction within the scope of syntactic literature on double object constructions. We contend that although syntactic theories, such as the Principles and Parameters model, can explain Southern Double Object Constructions in general terms, they overlook idiosyncratic, language-specific properties that we argue, like Fillmore, Kay, and O'Connor (1988), constitute theoretically important information essential to evaluation of a grammar.
This study examines the development of a Native American Indian variety of English in the context of a rural community in the American South where European Americans, African Americans and Native American Indians have lived together for a couple of centuries now. The Lumbee Native American Indians, the largest Native American group east of the Mississippi River and the largest group in the United States without reservation land, lost their ancestral language relatively early in their contact with outside groups, but they have carved out a unique English dialect niche which now distinguishes them from cohort European American and African American vernaculars. Processes of selective accommodation, differential language change and language innovation have operated to develop this distinct ethnic variety, while their cultural isolation and sense of "otherness" in a bi-polar racial setting have served to maintain its ethnic marking.
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