Digital Commons Network^™

The Syntactic And Semantic Atoms Of The Spray/Load Alternation, Michael A. Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

What is the relationship between the word spray in the sentence John sprayed the paint onto the wall and its identically pronounced counterpart in John sprayed the wall with the paint? At some level, we recognize these two uses of spray as the same word. But the fact that they combine with their arguments in different ways means they cannot be identical. The relationship between these two uses of spray—called the spray/load alternation—is productive in a way that a descriptively adequate grammar of English should capture. Other verbs show the same pattern, adults and children extend …

The Acquisition Of Advanced Level Chinese Heritage Language (Chl) Learners：A Comparative Analysis Concerning The Aspect Marker “Le了”, Jingjing Ao

Masters Theses

Over the decades, research on heritage language learners has been quite popular, but most studies concern Russian, Spanish and other languages rather than Chinese. The Chinese heritage language learner’s studies focus mainly on K-12 students and their learning motivations, writing characteristics, and identification recognition and those concerned with language acquisition address their vocabulary and verbal Chinese development. There have been very few studies about learning grammar. This study emphasizes on the acquisition of the aspect marker LE among advanced learners.

To investigate the acquisition characteristics of advanced CHL learners, this study adopted the advanced CHL learners as the research group …

La Adquisición De Los Verbos Posicionales En Niños Bilingües De Zapoteco-Español En Un Contexto De Pérdida Lingüística, Ana D. Alonso Ortiz

Doctoral Dissertations

The present study investigates the acquisition of positional verbs on bilingual children of Zapotec and Spanish in the indigenous community of Hidalgo Yalalag in Oaxaca, Mexico. The main research question is how bilingual children of Zapotec-Spanish acquire positional verbs in a language shift and language displacement context. Ninety-four young scholars between the ages of five to ten years old took part in this study. They participated in three tasks, a vocabulary task, an acceptability task, and a production task. A sociolinguistic questionnaire was also employed. The vocabulary task goal was to recruit and identify participants for the study. The acceptability …

Critical Language Awareness In The Multilingual Writing Classroom: A Self-Study Of Teacher Feedback Practices, Emma R. Britton

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite the increasing amount of ethnolinguistic diversity in US schools and universities, traditional approaches to university writing instruction continue to advance the teaching of standard written American English (SWAE) from uncritical ideological standpoints (Bommarito & Cooney, 2016). To disrupt the naturalization of monolingual and standard language ideologies, existing scholarship shows the potential of critical language awareness (CLA), as a pedagogical approach which aims to develop students’ awareness of the relationships between languages, language varieties, language ideologies, power, and social inequities, alongside the teaching of SWAE (Fairclough, 1992). Because the production of student texts is central to a CLA pedagogy (Gilyard, …

Tourism-Related Climate Change Perspectives: Social Media Conversations About Canada’S Rocky Mountain National Parks, Farshid Mirzaalian, Elizabeth Halpenny

TTRA Canada 2021 Conference

This study employed quantitative social media big data analysis in conjunction with qualitative analysis of postings to better comprehend online lay discourse of climatic change issues in a nature-based tourism destination, Jasper National Park, Canada. Such mixed methodological approaches to big data enable tourism researchers to not only study unstructured social media big data for future-proofing purposes but to address some methodological concerns often raised about solely using corpus linguistic or thematic analyzes. This study unearthed divergent themes regarding tourists’ perceptions of climate change upon visiting JNP, with the most significant discourses on climate grief, education and interpretation, pro- environmental …

Learning Phonology With Sequence-To-Sequence Neural Networks, Brandon Prickett

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation tests sequence-to-sequence neural networks to see whether they can simulate human phonological learning and generalization in a number of artificial language experiments. These experiments and simulations are organized into three chapters: one on opaque interactions, one on computational complexity in phonology, and one on reduplication. The first chapter focuses on two biases involving interactions that have been proposed in the past: a bias for transparent patterns and a bias for patterns that maximally utilize all of the processes in a language. The second chapter looks at harmony patterns of varying complexity to see whether both Formal Language Theory …

The Event Structure Of Attitudes, Deniz Özyıldız

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on what it means to think that or to think whether something is the case. First, I show that the type of clause that think combines with makes a difference in the kind of attitude a thought report ascribes, and in the kind of eventuality that it describes. With a declarative complement, think entails belief and introduces an eventuality description that may (but need not be) stative. With a question complement, think introduces an eventuality description that is necessarily dynamic, and often deliberative. In this case, there is no entailment of belief, but one of agnosticism and …

Visual, Lexical, And Syntactic Effects On Failure To Notice Word Transpositions: Evidence From Behavioral And Eye Movement Data, Kuan-Jung Huang

Masters Theses

Evidence of systematic misreading has been taken to argue that language processing is noisy, and that readers take noise into consideration and therefore sometimes interpret sentences non-literally (rational inference over a noisy channel). The present study investigates one specific misreading phenomenon: failure to notice word transpositions in a sentence. While this phenomenon can be explained by rational inference, it also has been argued to arise due to parallel lexical processing. The study explored these two accounts. Visual, lexical, and syntactic properties of the two transposed words were manipulated in three experiments. Failure to notice the transposition was more likely when …

The Double Scope Of Quantifier Phrases, Cornelia Endriss, Andreas Haida

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Ellipsis In Spanish And The Stranded Affix Filter, Marcela A. Depiante

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Bypassing Subjacency Effects: How Event Structure Amnesties Extraction Out Of Object Nps, William D. Davies, Stanley Dubinsky

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Intonation Patterns Of Particle Verb Constructions In English, Nicole Dehé

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

What The Hell?!, Marcel Den Dikken, Anastasia Giannakidou

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Reconsidering Identificational Focus, Jocelyn Cohan

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Deletion Under Identity In Relative Clauses, Barbara Citko

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Synchronic Handshape Variation In Asl: Evidence Of Coarticulation, Adrianne Cheek

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Proper Binding Condition Effects Are Phase Impenetrability Condition Effects, Carlo Ceccherto

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

A Typology Of Rhotic Duration Contrast And Neutralization, Travis G. Bradley

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Floating Quantifiers And Θ-Role Assignment, Željko Bošković

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

An Meg Study Of Tone Processing Asymmetries In English Versus Mandarin Speakers, Benjamin Bruening, Elissa Flagg, Vivian Lin

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Syntactic Dependencies Versus Trace Deletion: Evidence From Korean And Spanish, Alan Beretta, John Halliwell, Alan Munn, Cristina Schmitt

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Avoid-F In Acd, Ana Arregui

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Tonal Complexes And Tonal Alignment, Akin Akinlabi, Mark Liberman

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Minjoo Kim, Uri Strauss

North East Linguistics Society

No abstract provided.

Why Can Or Mean And Or Or?, Anne Vainikka

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Anti-Quantifiers, Jae-Woong Choe

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Aspectual Classes And Aspectual Composition, Henk J. Verkuyl

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Situation-Based Semantics For Adverbs Of Quantification, Stephen R. Berman

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Possible Worlds In Model-Theoretic Semantics: A Linguistic Perspective, Barbara H. Partee

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, James Blevins, Anne Vainikka

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics

No abstract provided.