Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Why Russian Inflection Is And Isn't Complex: From A(Ckerman And Malouf) To Z(Aliznjak), Jeffery R. Parker

Faculty Publications

Why do we care about morphological complexity?

• Typologically languages vary in how many morphosyntactic properties they express; morphological systems can have a large number of inflection classes, morphological distinguishers (e.g. exponents) to express these properties

• Paradigm Cell Filling Problem

Affect-Marked Lexemes And Their Relational Model Correlates, Robert Moore

Faculty Publications

Four categories of affect-marked lexemes are prominent in a variety of languages, suggesting thereby that all four may be universal, cross-cultural categories: slang, swearwords, honorifics and terms of endearment. Each of these categories (as well as the closely associated ones of nicknames and pet names) is "designed" to serve specific social functions. Data from China and the U.S. indicate that these lexemic categories overlap with each other both functionally and in terms of the specific lexemes that comprise them (Moore et al. 2010). However, they can be distinguished in terms of their prototypical forms and functions. Furthermore, the prototypical functions …

A Review Of The Routledge Encyclopedia Of Second Language Acquisition, Avizia Long

Faculty Publications

A review of The Routledge encyclopedia of second language acquisition, by Peter Robinson (Ed.). New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. Pp. xxiv + 756.

Educating Students Who Do Not Speak The Societal Language: The Social Construction Of Language-Learner Categories, Guadalupe Valdés, Luis E. Poza, Maneka Deanna Brooks

Faculty Publications

On 21 September 2012, California Assembly Bill 2193 was approved by Governor Jerry Brown. The bill added sections to California’s Education Code defining the terms long-term English learner and English learner at risk of becoming a long-term English learner. It mandated that the Department of Education collect data on the number of students corresponding to both new categories and report those data to school districts. This specific example of the construction of categories and labels matters because it is a clear example of how coexisting discourses and language ideologies provide a set of cultural rules, conditions, practices, and power …

An Ontology-Driven Reading Agent, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle

Faculty Publications

Textual data—from manuscripts to publications to website content—contains much of extant human knowledge. Unfortunately, the ability to harvest and effectively use this information beyond simple search/retrieval is greatly hampered by the scale of the “reading” problem: there is too much for any one person to read, and computers are not entirely adept at comprehending all information—explicit and implicit—contained in natural language text. Developing increased capability in this area is the focus of ongoing “machine reading” and “reading the web” research initiatives. Interested parties include businesses, the military, and intelligence-gathering agencies. Our own ongoing work with the Church Family History Department’s …

Student Achievement And French Sentence Repetition Test Scores, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Benjamin J. Millard

Faculty Publications

Sentence repetition (SR) tests are one way of probing a language learner’s oral proficiency. Test-takers listen to a set of carefully engineered sentences of varying complexity one-by-one, and then try to repeat them back as exactly as possible. In this paper we explore how well an SR test that we have developed for French corresponds with the test-taker’s achievement levels, represented by proficiency interview scores and by college class enrollment. We describe how we developed our SR test items using various language resources, and present pertinent facts about the test administration. The responses were scored by humans and also by …

The Variable Effect Of Form And Lemma Frequencies On Phonetic Variation: Evidence From /S/ Realization In Two Varieties Of Colombian Spanish, Earl K. Brown, Micheal S. Gradoville, Richard J. File-Muriel

Faculty Publications

Research has shown that frequency conditions the variable realization of sounds. However, the literature has not addressed whether the frequency of the individual word forms, or form frequency, has a larger conditioning effect than the combined frequencies of the members of the paradigm to which the forms belong, or lemma frequency. Monofactorial correlation tests and monofactorial and multifactorial linear regression analyses are performed on 2,734 tokens of Spanish /s/ in sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Cali and Barranquilla, Colombia. Two findings are highlighted: (1) frequency is only significant in the variety of Spanish that has low overall rates of /s/ reduction, …

Combining Elicited Imitation And Fluency Features For Oral Proficiency Measurement, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen

Faculty Publications

The automatic grading of oral language tests has been the subject of much research in recent years. Several obstacles lie in the way of achieving this goal. Recent work suggests a testing technique called elicited imitation (EI) that can serve to accurately approximate global oral proficiency. This testing methodology, however, does not incorporate some fundamental aspects of language, such as fluency. Other work has suggested another testing technique, simulated speech (SS), as a supplement or an alternative to EI that can provide automated fluency metrics. In this work, we investigate a combination of fluency features extracted from SS tests and …

An Experimental Approach To Ambisyllabicity In English, David Eddington, Dirk Elzinga

Faculty Publications

The factors that influence English speakers to classify a consonant as ambisyllabic are explored in 581 bisyllabic words. The /b/ in habit, for example, was considered ambisyllabic when a participant chose hab as the first part of the word and bit as the second. Geminate spelling was found to interact with social variables; older participants and more educated speakers provided more ambisyllabic responses. The influence of word-level phonotactics on syllabification was also evident. A consonant such as the medial /d/ in standard is attested as the second consonant in the coda of many English words (e.g. lard), as well as …

Earthy Concreteness And Anti-Hypotheticalism In Amazonian Quichua Discourse, Janis B. Nuckolls, Tod D, Swanson

Faculty Publications

This paper attempts to weave together a number of strands of research conducted by the authors among Amazonian Quichua-speaking people in the Napo and Pastaza provinces of eastern Ecuador. We are attempting to elucidate something that we have both observed, which we are calling an earthy concreteness in the orientation of Runa, which privileges the contextualization of utterances, thoughts, and ideas to such an extent that statements about typical behaviors and generalizations are perceived to be both morally and aesthetically objectionable. This orientation is therefore highly problematic for hypothetical questioning, which is a major tool for social scientific research. In …

Mythologizing Change: Examining Rhetorical Myth As A Strategic Change Management Discourse, Jacob D. Rawlins

Faculty Publications

This article explores how rhetorical myth can be used as a tool for persuading employees to accept change and to maintain consensus during the process. It defines rhetorical myth using three concepts: chronographia (a rhetorical interpretation of history), epideictic prediction (defining a present action by assigning praise and blame to both past and future), and communal markers (using Burkean identification and rhetorically defined boundary objects to define a community). The article reports on a 3-year ethnographic study that documents the development of a rhetorical myth at Iowa State University’s Printing Services department as it underwent changes to its central software …

On The Interaction Of Implicative Structure And Type Frequency In Inflectional Systems, Jeffery R. Parker, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

How do sources of information minimize the uncertainty associated with predicting unknown inflected forms?

Evaluating Lemmatization Models For Machine-Assisted Corpus-Dictionary Linkage, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Kevin Black, Eric K. Ringger, Paul Felt, Kevin Seppi, Kristian Heal

Faculty Publications

The task of corpus-dictionary linkage (CDL) is to annotate each word in a corpus with a link to an appropriate dictionary entry that documents the sense and usage of the word. Corpus-dictionary linked resources include concordances, dictionaries with word usage examples, and corpora annotated with lemmas or word senses. Such CDL resources are essential for many tasks including assisting language learners, linguistic research, philology, and translation. Lemmatization is a common approximation to automating corpus-dictionary linkage, where lemmas stand in for the headwords of an actual dictionary. In our machine-assisted CDL system design, data-driven lemmatization models provide machine assistance to human …

Exploring The Explanatory Power Of Semitic And Egyptian In Uto-Aztecan, Dirk Elzinga, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The factors that influence English speakers to classify a consonant as ambisyllabic are explored in 581 bisyllabic words. The /b/ in habit, for example, was considered ambisyllabic when a participant chose hab as the first part of the word and bit as the second. Geminate spelling was found to interact with social variables; older participants and more educated speakers provided more ambisyllabic responses. The influence of word-level phonotactics on syllabification was also evident. A consonant such as the medial /d/ in standard is attested as the second consonant in the coda of many English words (e.g. lard), as well …