Modern Languages Commons^™

The Effects Of Multilingualism And Music Experience On Tone And Vowel Discrimination Ability, Niloufar Ansari Dezfuly

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study investigates the effects of language background (monolingual/bilingual and early/late bilingual exposure), knowledge of a tonal language and music experience on auditory discrimination by employing tone and vowel discrimination tasks. A total number of 8,769 observations were analyzed using logistic regression to answer the following questions: (1) Do vowel and tone discrimination abilities correlate with language background in diverse groups of speakers such as monolinguals and bilinguals of different types (early/late bilinguals)? (2) Does musical training affect tone and vowel discrimination? (3) Does knowledge of tonal language affect tone discrimination? The findings suggest that with regard to vowel discrimination, …

Writing Against The Grain: Expressions Of Resistance In The Postcolonial Novel Of Equatorial Guinea, Sarita Addy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the extent to which selected postcolonial narratives of Equatorial Guinea express resistance at the social, religious and political levels. Three postcolonial texts, namely Los poderes de la tempestad (1997), El párroco de Niefang (1996) and Arde el monte de noche (2009) emit various discourses of resistance. These works which rehash the Spanish colonial legacy are also concerned with the social degeneration brought on by the first postcolonial presidency, often referred to as Nguemism. In response to these events, the writings of these authors show a refusal to be absorbed by both the colonial rhetoric and nguemist …

The Language Vitality Of Nahuatl In Santiago Tlaxco, Mexico, Grace Gomashie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis assesses the language vitality of Nahuatl (also known as Mexicano) in Santiago Tlaxco, a rural bilingual community in the municipality of Chiconcuautla, located in Puebla, Mexico, in the face of the growing trend of language endangerment for many Indigenous languages. It explores the linguistic use and attitudes of community members, and how they contribute to language maintenance and language shift of Nahuatl. The main research questions are: a) what are the language use patterns of the community? and b) what are the prevailing language attitudes of this Nahuatl-speaking community towards its Indigenous language? Data on the language practices …

Code-Switching In L2 Spanish: A Comparison Of French And English Learners, Liliana Montoya

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates whether L2 Spanish learners’ grammar intuitions on code-switching (CS) show evidence of the predictions made by the Functional Head Constraint (FHC) proposed by Belazi, Rubin, & Toribio (1994). Building on this theory, the present work supports the idea that L2 learners have an intuitive sense of code-switching well-formedness, i.e., they count on unconscious grammatical principles to produce code-switched utterances as well as to assess their grammaticality. Our primary research question is: given the usual absence of CS input that classroom L2 learners receive, will their grammar intuitions on CS show evidence of the predictions made by the …

La Recepción Literaria Y Artística De Don Quijote En Toronto A Través De The Globe (1844-1936), Ivan B. Vazquez Clavellina

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

La siguiente investigación responde a las preguntas: ¿Existió la presencia de Don Quijote en Toronto, Canadá? Y si sucedió ¿Cómo fue? Para poder develar las interrogantes se utilizó como fuente primaria la publicación periódica The Globe, impresa en la provincia canadiense de Ontario desde 1844 hasta 1936. El método de aproximación consistió en buscar en el acervo digital ProQuest Historical Newspapers información sobre la obra de Miguel de Cervantes. Las notas localizadas muestran aspectos sobre la presencia del texto entre los lectores desde mediados de siglo XIX, hasta las primeras tres décadas del siglo XX. Durante la búsqueda inicial, …

Postcolonial Trauma In The Mediterranean: The Italian-Libyan Transnational Community, Rosario Pollicino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study aims to recuperate the Italian collective remembering originating from the colonial offense in Libya. Focusing on works of testimony in different genres of contemporary literature written by the Italian former settlers in Libya, I analyze how these former settlers who moved to Libya have been subjected to different kinds of traumas by the Fascist government. I focus on how these traumas, individual and collective, are documented through these works and discuss how they continue to be relevant today. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, history, literary and trauma studies I argue that these cultural representations prove the existence of a …

The Production Of Mexican Rhotics By Haitian Creole Speakers In Tijuana Mexico: A Sociophonetic Approach, Natasha A. Swiderski

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This study investigates the production of the Spanish /ɾ-r/ (e.g., [ˈpɛ.ɾo] ‘but’ vs. [ˈpɛ.ro] 'dog') contrast by 30 multi-lingual Haitian Creole speakers learning Spanish, living in Tijuana, Mexico. Specifically, it (a) tests the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) regarding the ease of acquisition of 'new sounds' (i.e. the Spanish rhotics), (b) examines the effect of orthography and (c) investigates the role of social factors, namely language attitude and education on the production of the Spanish rhotics. An acoustic analysis of 2396 tokens show that despite Flege's predictions, the [r] and the [ɾ] are difficult for the learners to produce, albeit …

Narrativa Multiterritorial Hispanoamericana, Ana Maria Gonzalez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Esta disertación examina dos manifiestos literarios y dos novelas producidas por escritores de origen y formación hispanoamericana durante finales del siglo XX e inicios del siglo XXI. Los manifiestos son los presentados por los grupos McOndo y Crack en el año de 1996. Por otra parte, las dos novelas que se examinan son El sueño del celta (2010), escrita por Mario Vargas Llosa, y En busca de Klingsor (1999) cuyo autor es Jorge Volpi. En el primer capítulo se presenta el marco conceptual e histórico alrededor de nociones como nacionalismo y nación, globalización, ciudadanía global, e hibridez cultural. En el …

An Interventionist Approach To Language Study Abroad: Exploring Metalinguistic Awareness In The Acquisition Of Spanish Through Digital Portfolio Documentation And Expert Mentorship, Meredith Mcgregor

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Language study abroad offers the possibility of acquiring a multitude of competencies, linguistic and otherwise. While historically study abroad research has emphasized linguistic gains in isolation, it has gradually moved towards a more sociocultural approach whereby individual factors and intercultural competencies are seen as integral to the process of acquiring knowledge of a language. With remaining gaps in the literature, and as new instruments emerge, so too do new opportunities for tracking and measuring learning outcomes in innovative ways. The present study, framed by the intervention hypothesis and sociocultural theory, utilizes the social media platform Google+ as a space to …

Double/Cross: Erasure In Theory And Poetry, John Nyman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of “erasure poetry” as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derrida’s “writing under erasure,” I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically …

Aprendizaje Y Procesamiento De Secuencias Formulaicas Con Distintos Grados De Variabilidad, Jaime Ontiveros

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The aim of this dissertation is to explore theoretically and empirically the nature and the learning of two kind of formulaic sequences (FSs) in Spanish second language acquisition: discourse connectors and idiomatic expressions. Two experiments were designed to analyze the nature of these FSs and the effectiveness of three explicit teaching methodologies for its instruction: practical exercises, comprehension reading, and graphic organizers. The comparison frame of these methodologies is based on the connections that each of these methodologies can make between new and previous knowledge. The first experiment consists of a pre-test post-test task to evaluate the learning and retention …

Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy In Literary History And In The Works Of Baudelaire And Benjamin, Kevin Godbout

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Aristotle famously asked the question: why are extraordinary people so often melancholics? “Problem XXX,” written by Aristotle or one of his disciples, speculates that black bile, the humour once believed to cause melancholy, can promote a form of genius, a profound intellectual power. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire are two writers for whom this theory was true: though they suffered from gloominess and despondency, they also recognized that in the interior of sadness, and even madness, is a kernel of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical truth. Melencolia illa heroica – whose theory was authoritatively formulated by Ficino, taking after Aristotle’s Problems …

Input Y Fonf En La Adquisición De La Doble Negación En Español Por Angloparlantes, Yolanda Pangtay Chang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dos factores importantes en la adquisición de una L2: estructura a adquirir y metodología de enseñanza, se estudian en esta tesis. En la negación en español L2, el cambio de la forma del inglés a una forma en principio más sencilla, puede necesitar reestructuración. El segundo factor, la metodología utilizada en su enseñanza, puede variar de manera importante de una clase a otra. Por lo tanto, surgen los siguientes cuestionamientos:

1) ¿Existe la reestructura de la L1 a la L2?

2) ¿Qué tipo de metodología ayuda a la reestructuración?

3) Si hay reestructuración, ¿es ésta permanente o no?

Para el …

Adquisición De Los Contrafactuales Pasados En Español: Mapeo De Formas – Significados En Las Interfaces Morfología – Sintaxis – Semántica – Pragmática, Diana Patricia Botero Ibarra

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This study focuses on the acquisition of the compound form of the Pluperfect Subjunctive to express counterfactual meaning in the past through conditional clauses. The aim was to examine in which instances we can find the greatest difficulty in the acquisition and what are the sets of information that stem from universal mechanisms.

This study included two experiments: Experiment 1 consisted of a sentence completion task and a written production task to investigate morphological recognition and morphological written production of subjunctive and conditional forms. Experiment 2 included an interpretation and context task, a sentence selection task, and a picture-matching task …

Interstory: A Study Of Reader Participation And Networked Narrative In Media Convergence, Elika Ortega Guzman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recently we have seen the proliferation of narratives developing in media convergence: simultaneously on websites, blogs, multimedia platforms, books, magazines, etc. In this thesis, I propose the term interstory to characterize this narrative tendency. Interstory is a narrative constituted by a network of story pieces published in different media and compiled by readers. To illustrate the concept of interstory I take as a study case Hernán Casciari’s and Christian Basilis’ Orsai, which in two years has incorporated into its narrative three blogs, a print magazine, and a web magazine. Orsai has been a successful project thanks to the formation of …

Metaphor And Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer And Cognitive Transformation In British And Irish Modernism, Andrew C. Wenaus

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes to the critical expansions that Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identify as New Modernist Studies. This expansion is temporal, spatial, and vertical. I engage with the effects Modernist texts have “above” the page: lived experience. I examine the structural similarity of linguistic metaphor and the mind as considered by cognitive scientists. Identifying the human mind as linguistic and language as an artifact of the human mind, my research extrapolates upon what I call the “psycho-ecology” of reading, a self-representational knot between text and mind that constitutes lived experience. Far from being an abstraction, psycho-ecology is concrete: …

El Espacio Torcido En La Narrativa Mexicana De Temática Homosexual: 1977-1997, Juan Carlos Rocha Osornio

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines how the narratives of Raúl Rodríguez Cetina, Luis Zapata, Mario Bellatin, and Gerardo Guiza Lemus recreate what I call Espacio Torcido (Queer Space) in which they aim (some more than others) at questioning and deconstructing the values of the heteronormative system: ambiguity, pleasure, rupture, and the quest for legitimacy compose this space. While each author takes a different approach, it can be said that they all participate in the construction of the history of the gay community in Mexico as seen in the latter part of the XX century: 1977-1997. In particular, this study looks at how …

Beyond The Suffering Of Being: Desire In Giacomo Leopardi And Samuel Beckett, Roberta Cauchi-Santoro

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I question critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi’s and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism and nihilism. Beckett quotes Leopardi when discussing the removal of desire in his monograph Proust, a context that has spurred pessimist and nihilist readings, whether the focus has been on one writer, the other, or both. I argue that the inappropriateness of the pessimist and nihilist label is, on the contrary, specifically exposed through the role of desire in the two thinkers. After tracing the notion of desire as it developed from Leopardi to key twentieth-century thinkers, I illustrate how, in contrast to …

From Nizam To Nation: The Representation Of Partition In Literary Narratives About Hyderabad, Deccan, Nazia Akhtar

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This dissertation examines literary representations of the Partition of India in 1947 as it affected the southern princely state of Hyderabad, Deccan. Through my focus on Hyderabad, I interrogate and reject the assumption generally made in scholarly analyses of Partition that this momentous, life-changing event did not significantly affect South India. In doing so, I also question the origins of the self-professed secular, egalitarian, and democratic Indian nation by shedding light on the invasion of Hyderabad and the subsequent erasure of this event from Indian historiography and mainstream culture.

Different literary texts respond differently to this fraught, suppressed history. Engaging …

Architectures Of The Veil: The Representation Of The Veil And Zenanas In Pakistani Feminists' Texts, Amber Fatima Riaz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation, which works at the intersections of feminist theory, architectural theory and postcolonial literary theory, examines the spatiality of the zenana and the burqa as represented in Pakistani literary and cultural texts. I propose that the burqa creates a portable closet, an interstitial, liminal, “third space” that allows Pakistani (secluded and veiled) women to not only traverse the borders between the private (female, domestic) and public (male) spaces, but to also signal chastity and religiosity while in the public, and semi-public spaces of the cities and villages of Pakistan. I argue that the dupatta, the chador and the hijab …