Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Cov And Underspecified Nouns: A Syntactic And Semantic Analysis Of Hmong Classifiers, William L. Ball , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Hmong nominal classifiers are quite complex. One clear rule however is that double classifiers are not allowed. Surprisingly, then, there is a double classifier construction involving the classifier cov and underspecified nouns that appears to break these rules. The goal of this thesis is to resolve this problem, syntactically and semantically modeling Hmong classifiers along the way. After giving background on the literature on Hmong classifiers, I develop a syntactic model for Hmong classifiers based on the Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology, and use Link’s semantic model of plurality to make sure the syntactic model works out semantically. Then I …

Relevance And Turn-Taking In Cross-Modal Computer-Mediated Communication: A Case Study Of Online Live Streaming Platforms, Qingyun (Catherine) Wang , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

Indefinite Nps With Creative- And Destructive-Type Verbs In Mandarin Ba Construction, Sijia (Ella) Wei , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

The ba construction in Mandarin is a widely studied topic. It is generally established that ba constructions can only be used with definite or bare ba NPs. This thesis, however, provides the first systematic exploration of the varying behaviors of ba construction with indefinite NPs. It explores ba construction’s preferences further from the angle of presuppositionality of indefinite ba NPs in the context of creative-type and destructive-type verbs, attempting to generalize the exceptions to ba construction’s rejection of indefinite NPs. Specifically, I propose that while ba sentences with creative-type verbs reject indefinite ba NPs, such sentences are acceptable with destructive-type …

Translanguaging Or Code-Switching?: A Case Study Of Multilingual Activities In College-Level Mandarin And Japanese Classrooms, Huayu Liu , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Classroom translanguaging has recently gained popularity in ESL and foreign language classrooms, where students come from diverse linguistic backgrounds. In a nutshell, translanguaging researchers highlight an individual’s linguistic repertoire, which goes beyond the boundaries of named languages and focuses on all language elements that an individual knows. As a pedagogy, translanguaging advocates linguistic equity because it encourages students to access their linguistic repertoire, which is not limited to the target language in the classroom. Yet, the viability of this approach in the classroom is unclear, and its distinction from code-switching can also be ambiguous. Therefore, this thesis studies this issue …

Social And Linguistic Marginalization, And The Question Of ‘Standard’: An Analysis And Translation Of Giulio Cesare Cortese’S La Vaiasseide, Lina R. Marsella , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

Testing Current Theories Of Auxiliary Selection In German Verbs Of Motion On A 19th Century Corpus, Anna G. Karpowicz , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

German verbs of motion can use either the perfect auxiliary sein ‘to be’ or the perfect auxiliary haben ‘to have’. It has been posited that the auxiliary selection in these types of verbs is linked to the presence of a [locomotion] feature, sein ‘to be’ occurring with [+locomotion] and haben ‘to have’ occurring with [- locomotion]. Lewandowski (2018) uses empirical data from contemporary German to argue that there is further distinction than previously thought, namely that within the manner-of-motion verb category, non-directional motion verbs and directional motion verbs diverge in auxiliary selection when the [-locomotion] feature is present. I am …

Quaker Interpretation: The Role Of Communication And Identity In The Production Of Quaker Values, Katalina I. Kastrong , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

In this thesis, I examine the shift in Quaker language use over time, focusing on the formation of group identity, the accessibility of Quaker language, and legacy and silence in a history of racial discrimination. These aspects of Quaker practice are crucial in addressing concerns about inclusivity and justice work, providing the potential for greater metalinguistic intentionality. My research analyzes language's role in shaping such attitudes, beliefs, and action. I examine seventeenth century Quakers’ use of Quaker Plain Speech (QPS), observing that the progression towards modern Quaker language is uneven among these three areas of focus. I claim that these …

Development Of Southern Interracial Marriage And Divorce: Why Our Children Are Code-Switching, Zoe R. Grant

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

The fundamental basis of my final paper will be of my own lived experience. In my paper, I will argue that as a result of an interracial divorce, mixed-race children are learning to code-switch leading to a greater sense of empathy and community. I will pull from the theoretical framework of Gloria Anzaldua’s “Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza” as well as other sources to support my claims.

By focusing heavily on a southern perspective, I will question whether or not a history of southern interracial marriage causes a strain on nuclear families. Are interracial children having new experiences, and …

Self-Censoring On Social Media Sites, Talia A. Feshbach , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Many users of social media sites self-censor by using character replacements or euphemisms to obscure the language they are using. The reasons for doing so vary from trying to avoid other users finding their posts in searches to evading censorship from site administration to adapting to site culture. This paper seeks to answer whether or not there is an association between reasons for self-censoring and tactics used for self-censoring. It also examines three sites where self-censoring is in different forms and amounts - Tumblr, Twitter, and TikTok - and how the tactics and reasons for self-censoring appear on those sites. …

Accounting For Toponyms With Multiple Classifiers In Colonial Valley Zapotec, Jasper E. Nash , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Toponyms are place names which have certain common linguistic properties across languages. Toponyms are typically formed by the combination of descriptive morphemes and noun classifiers (Ursini 2017). Southern Zapotec (SZ) languages are primarily spoken in the Southern Sierra Madre region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Southern Zapotec toponyms appear to have similar structures compared to those in the four languages analyzed by Ursini (2017), with spatial classifiers and descriptive morphemes merging to create a phrase which carries spatial features. Beam de Azcona (2012) categorizes Southern Zapotec toponyms according to whether there are no classifiers, one classifier, or multiple classifiers, as well as …

Translation Al Mercato Del Pesce: The Importance Of Human Input For Machine Translation, Emma Y. Schechter , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis investigates translation of Italian idioms and metaphors into English, and the difficulties encountered by Machine Translation in this process. I use a framework of foreign concepts to explain many of the difficulties, as well as interviews with native Italian and English speakers to provide further context for the cultural knowledge encoded in figurative language. I conclude that in Machine Translation a consistent human input interface as well as a continuous training in language corpora is crucial to improve the accuracy of translated metaphors and idioms, using Italian to English translation as a case study.

Viable Verbs And Adjectives For Mandarin Reduplication, Carrie Zhang , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

In Chen Wang’s 2021 paper, the verb mingbai is used an example to prove his claim that for an AB word that could “be used potentially as either a verb or an adjective, its ABAB form tends to be verbal while its AABB form tends to be adjectival,” a claim that is also substantiated in Huang et. al (2009). As far as mingbai goes, this trend appears to be true, but does it apply to adjectives such as xuxin as well? This brief paper tests whether the claim about Chinese reduplication patterns holds true for other AB phrases, and looks …

“I’M Certainly No Language Police”: Language, Race, And Identity Negotiation Among White K-8 Teachers, Luca Poxon , '22

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

Drawing on concepts from critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, scholarship on raciolinguistics and racial identity, and methods from grounded theory and discourse analysis, this thesis explores the following research questions: 1) How do White teachers of students of color understand language, race, and their own role as raced people teaching language? 2) How do they act on these understandings? Interviews with five White K-8 educators show how particular combinations of understandings of race, language, and self produce raciolinguistic and pedagogical tensions; these include knowing that the concept of “academic language” is racialized and power-laden while also believing that …

Raciolinguistic Socialization And Subversion At A Predominantly White Institution, Momoka Keicho , '21

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

By interviewing current Swarthmore students on their linguistic experiences at Swarthmore College, I investigated how students with diverse linguistic practices interact with the raciolinguistic ideology of academic language at a predominantly white institution. Ultimately, I argue that Swarthmore’s linguistic climate perpetuates the academic language raciolinguistic ideology by equating academic language with academic performance. In response to this linguistic climate, students whose linguistic diversity is not appreciated by the institution either conform to or subvert the expectations for academic language in the classroom in order to survive and succeed. Students expressed four main approaches to responding to the linguistic climate: 1) …

Multi-Script Morphological Transducers And Transcribers For Seven Turkic Languages, Jonathan North Washington, F. Tyers, O. Kuyrukçu

Linguistics Faculty Works

This paper describes ongoing work to augment morphological transducers for seven Turkic languages with support for multiple scripts each, as well as respective IPA transcription systems. Evaluation demonstrates that our approach yields coverage equivalent to or not much lower than that of the base transducers.

Insider Perspective: Attitude And Motivational Orientation Among Heritage Learners Of Japanese At Colleges In The Philadelphia-Area, Miki Gilmore

#CritEdPol: Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies at Swarthmore College

This study investigates the attitudes and motivational orientations of heritage learners of Japanese. Twenty-seven students enrolled in Japanese classes in colleges and universities in the Philadelphia area participated in this study. Participants fell into two categories: heritage learners (N=6) and foreign language learners (N=21). Data was collected through an online questionnaire consisting of both quantitative and qualitative sections. Descriptive statistics were used to determine participants’ attitudes toward Japanese language, people, and culture and primary motivational orientations toward learning Japanese. The Fisher’s exact test was used to determine the effect of heritage status on attitude and motivational orientation. Results show both …

Internet Linguistics Final Project, Miranda Weinberg

Digital Humanities Curricular Development

The final project was the opportunity for students to explore some question in Internet Linguistics that interested them. They were asked to produce two final products: one academic paper, and one public-facing product. The paper followed the norms of a standard academic paper. The audience for this was the instructor, fellow student, and (potentially) a wider academic community. The public-facing product was an opportunity to be more creative with form. Students were asked to decide: What audience do you want to share this with, and how would that best be achieved? Students might record a video for YouTube; edit/create Wikipedia …

Internet Linguistics (Ling 004b) Syllabus, Miranda Weinberg

Digital Humanities Curricular Development

Despite predictions to the contrary, it seems that the internet has not destroyed English. But how has the internet changed language use, and the study of linguistics? This course will be an exploration of the various forms that language takes online and in other digital formats, such as texting. We will explore questions such as: Why do my parents insist on texting in full paragraphs?; Is the internet good or bad for the future of indigenous and minority languages?; Is there a difference in meaning between :), :-), ^_^,?; What are the differences and similarities between face-to-face and online communication? …

Manual Movement In Sign Languages: One Hand Versus Two In Communicating Shapes, C. Ferrara, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

In sign languages, the task of communicating a shape involves drawing in the air with one moving hand (Method One) or two (Method Two). Since the movement path is iconic, method choice might be based on the shape. In the present studies we aimed to determine whether geometric properties motivate method choice. In a study of 17 deaf signers from six countries, the strongest predictors of method choice were whether the shape has any curved edges (Method One), and whether the shape is symmetrical across the Y‐axis (Method Two), where the default was Method One. In a second study of …

Machine Translation For Crimean Tatar To Turkish, M. GöKırmak, F. M. Tyers, Jonathan North Washington

Linguistics Faculty Works

In this paper a machine translation system for Crimean Tatar to Turkish is presented. To our knowledge this is the first Machine Translation system made available for public use for Crimean Tatar, and the first such system released as free and open source software. The system was built using Apertium, a free and open source machine translation system, and is currently unidirectional from Crimean Tatar to Turkish. We describe our translation system, evaluate it on parallel corpora and compare its performance with a Neural Machine Translation system, trained on the limited amount of corpora available.

Effort Reduction In Articulation In Sign Languages And Dance, Donna Jo Napoli, Stephanie Liapis

Linguistics Faculty Works

Sign languages exhibit the drive for ease of articulation found in spoken languages, particularly in fast and casual conversation, where the methods that reduce effort are shown here to be limited by the need to maintain recognizability. Participatory dance, which uses the same articulators as sign languages plus additional ones, also demonstrates methods of reducing biomechanical effort, analogous to those seen in sign languages, and, again, limited by the need to maintain recognizability of the dance figures/phrases. However, when we look at performance language (here, sign poetry) and performance dance, we find a contrast: sign language poetry uses reduced and …

Support For Parents Of Deaf Children: Common Questions And Informed, Evidence-Based Answers, T. Humphries, P. Kushalnagar, G. Mathur, Donna Jo Napoli, C. Rathmann, S. Smith

Linguistics Faculty Works

To assist medical and hearing-science professionals in supporting parents of deaf children, we have identified common questions that parents may have and provide evidence-based answers. In doing so, a compassionate and positive narrative about deafness and deaf children is offered, one that relies on recent research evidence regarding the critical nature of early exposure to a fully accessible visual language, which in the United States is American Sign Language (ASL). This evidence includes the role of sign language in language acquisition, cognitive development, and literacy. In order for parents to provide a nurturing and anxiety-free environment for early childhood development, …

Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies In Public Discourse, Jamie A. Thomas, C. Jackson

Linguistics Faculty Works

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

The Year Is 2093: Reanimation From Frankenstein To Prometheus As Sci-Fi Metaphor For (Dis)Embodied Female Futures And Colonization Of Space, Jamie A. Thomas

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Between Zora Neale, Hamlet, And A “Dope Black Woman”: Revisiting Language Ideology Through Alysia Harris’S Performance Poetry, Jamie A. Thomas

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Morphological Theory And Sign Languages, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

Sign language morphology adds new considerations to well-studied areas, including category identification, inflection vs. derivation, the notions of ideophones, subject, and root, and properties used in lexical classifications. It makes necessary the new notion of reactive effort in understanding how biomechanical factors help shape the lexicon. The prevalence of simultaneity (verticality) over linearity (horizontal temporality) shows that linguistic analysis must include the study of physical properties (visual vs. auditory) if we are to understand language typology. Phonological parameters can have meaning associated with them, either arbitrarily or because they are iconic. This allows for lexical networks that require the mechanism …

Deaf Children, Humor And Education Policy, Donna Jo Napoli, R. L. Sutton-Spence

Linguistics Faculty Works

Deaf children need true inclusion to learn, entailing consistent, pervasive use of visual-learning techniques. This is achieved via bilingual education policies that enforce deaf children’s rights to use sign language, permitting teachers to engage in deaf pedagogy using sign language. Educational policies advocating inclusion via an interpreter in the mainstreamed classroom create the “illusion of inclusion” (Glickman 2003). We argue that, in either case, humor can aid inclusion. Understanding humor is a developmental ability, related to cognitive, social, linguistic, and metalinguistic competence. Additionally, learning how humor is understood and expressed contributes to language mastery. However, we find little discussion of …

Italian-American Literature: Respected?, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Sticky: Taboo Topics In Deaf Communities, J. N. Fisher, G. Mirus, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

This chapter offers an overview of taboo topics within deaf communities to bring forward issues not obvious to those outside deaf communities. We look at taboo behaviors of hearing people as they interact with deaf communities, considering linguistic and cultural appropriation, exploitation, and hearing privilege. We also look at taboo topics regarding social hierarchies within deaf communities, those based on gender and race, as well as those based on cognitive abilities, particularly language. These topics present a nuanced and diverse representation of deaf people, which is intended to sensitize those aiming to work with deaf communities or, in fact, with …

Zapotec Language Activism And Talking Dictionaries, K. David Harrison, B. D. Lillehaugen, Jeremy Fahringer , '06, F. H. Lopez

Linguistics Faculty Works

Online dictionaries have become a key tool for some indigenous communities to promote and preserve their languages, often in collaboration with linguists. They can provide a pathway for crossing the digital divide and for establishing a first-ever presence on the internet. Many questions around digital lexicography have been explored, although primarily in relation to large and well-resourced languages. Lexical projects on small and under-resourced languages can provide an opportunity to examine these questions from a different perspective and to raise new questions (Mosel, 2011). In this paper, linguists, technical experts, and Zapotec language activists, who have worked together in Mexico …