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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

1337 W4yz Of {Dollar}P34king: Toward A Unifying Pragmatic Theory Of Virtual Speech Community Building, Tracy Rene Leblanc Jan 2010

1337 W4yz Of {Dollar}P34king: Toward A Unifying Pragmatic Theory Of Virtual Speech Community Building, Tracy Rene Leblanc

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Building a speech community requires building a shared history of communicative interaction. Within a virtual medium, speech community members employ accommodations for the lack of shared physical space that face-to-face interactions provide. These accommodations, amassing through extended discourse, bring to light the communicative strategies that virtual interlocutors employ in order to build community. Drawing from a corpus of unscripted, naturally occurring discourse of a particular virtual speech community, I engage three frames of linguistic analysis in order to recognize the communicative strategies that constitute speech community building. Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) accounts for the individual cognitive work involved …


The Interdependence Of Modality And Theory Of Mind, Danielle Rachel Alfandre Jan 2010

The Interdependence Of Modality And Theory Of Mind, Danielle Rachel Alfandre

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Modality is traditionally defined as the expression of possibility or necessity. In English, modality is expressed by the modal auxiliaries such as can, would, should, or might; adjectives and adverbs such as possible, necessary, maybe, and absolutely; or phrasal verbs such as going to or have to. Theory of Mind (ToM) is broadly defined as the ability to attribute thoughts and beliefs to other people. ToM is usually expressed using propositional attitude verbs such as think as in Mary thinks that it will rain. Hegarty (2006, 2010) proposes that propositional attitude verbs are covertly modalized and can be analyzed using …


Extraversion And Oral Proficiency In Esl, Joshua Boyd Howard Jan 2010

Extraversion And Oral Proficiency In Esl, Joshua Boyd Howard

LSU Master's Theses

Extraversion has been proposed as an influence on the success of a second language learner, although studies in this area have produced mixed results (Dewaele & Furnham, 1999; Marin-Marin, 2005; Wakamoto, 2007). Through a narrative retell task, the current study investigated the effects of extraversion on the spoken English performance of 25 native speakers of Spanish. Extraversion was measured with a Spanish version of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire or EPQ (1975). Narratives were elicited using the wordless picture story Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). Drawing on the work of Dewaele (1998), Dewaele and Pavlenko (2002), and Oya, Manalo, and …


A Study Of The Aspectual Complements Of 'Begin' And 'Start', Xinzheng Zhao Jan 2010

A Study Of The Aspectual Complements Of 'Begin' And 'Start', Xinzheng Zhao

LSU Master's Theses

Abstract The main purpose of this thesis is to study the aspectual complements of the aspectualizers begin and start. Aspectualizers are verbs that give aspectual readings to the sentence. I started with a summary of Freed’s (1978) analysis. In this summary, semantic differences among seven aspectualizers that take to V and V-ing complements were explained. The semantic distinction between to V and V-ing was also discussed. Following the summary, a brief research on aspectual complements was conducted. Based on Freed’s analysis, I first examined the difference in meaning and in frequency of occurrence between the to V and the V-ing …