Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Measuring Cross-Cultural Engagement Of Those Using The Growing Participator Approach, Cheryl Lea Cross

Theses and Dissertations

The Growing Participator Approach (GPA) is a language-learning approach used among global professionals living cross-culturally. Developer Greg Thomson claims that through the GPA, learners grow as active participants in their new culture by learning language primarily in relationship. Because cultural participation is central to GPA, measuring social engagement is the most appropriate form of evaluation. This research seeks to answer the questions: (1) Does focused language learning using the GPA correspond with a high degree of social integration in the host community? (2) Does the use of scales from other academic fields help evaluate social engagement for language learners?

For …

Klon Pronouns In Their Typological And Linguistic Context Within Wallacea, Eastern Indonesia, Johnny Marshel Banamtuan

Theses and Dissertations

Klon is a typologically SOV Timor-Alor-Pantar (Papuan) language, spoken by around 10,000 people on the islands of Alor and Pantar in eastern Indonesia. Like most SOV languages, Klon has postpositions, possessor before possessed, and sentence-final question particles. NPs are left-headed, with attributive modifiers, numerals, quantifiers, relative clauses, and demonstratives following the head noun. Klon has both pre-verbal and post-predicate verb modifiers. Preverbal modifiers can only modify verbal predicates. The language is aspect-prominent, with no grammatical tense. Like many SOV languages, Klon has clause-final standard negation, often occurring as bipartite negation.

Klon syntax pivots around the Undergoer. Only Undergoers are indexed …

Investigating Information Structure And Word Order In Latin Poetry: An Analysis Of Epigrams, Justin Riley Soderholm

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the epigrammatic verses of the Latin poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (Martial). The emphasis is on the order of basic constituents and information structure, in particular, the concepts of sentence articulation and focus structure as modelled by Lambrecht (1994).

I categorize clauses from roughly 200 lines of epigrammatic verse by the sentence articulations topic-comment, in which propositions have predicate focus, identificational, in which propositions have argument focus, and thetic, in which whole propositions are in focus. For each articulation, I also present various examples demonstrating the variety of word orders in each. Additionally, this study examines some patterns …

Complex Predicates In Southern Turkmen: A Role And Reference Grammar Analysis, Nathaniel Andrew Shaver

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the concepts of nexus and juncture, as articulated by Role and Reference Grammar, to examine complex verbal constructions found in four collected texts. These texts were collected from four Southern Turkmen (or Turkmen of Afghanistan) speakers. Through transcribing, glossing, and analyzing these texts, a number of complex predicates were identified. These were then described according to their various nexus juncture types. Three nexus juncture varieties were represented in the collected texts. These include clausal coordination, clausal subordination, and core cosubordination. Although not represented in the texts, it was possible to elicit three other provisional nexus juncture varieties. …

The Iconicity And Non-Arbitrariness Of Body Locations In Four Unrelated Sign Languages, John Samson

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I show that universally, there is a strong tendency for signs located on the body to have an iconic or non-arbitrary motivation, especially in their original form. I analyze sign language dictionaries from four unrelated sign languages and establish an iconic or non-arbitrary link between the form of the signs and their meaning, and classify those links according to 8 categories of body location iconicity and 3 categories of non-arbitrariness. The strength of this tendency depends on the percentage of signs that are shown to have an iconic or non-arbitrary link. For the data analyzed here this …

Just A Little Respect: Authority And Competency In Women's Speech, Bridget Anne Carroll

Theses and Dissertations

Young women have conflicting motivations directing how they use pitch, vocal fry, and uptalk intonation. High pitch and uptalk may emphasize their femininity, but low pitch and vocal fry are associated with better leadership. Thus, it is difficult to predict how young women will speak in a particular situation. This thesis measures how 16 young women used pitch, vocal fry, and uptalk in three different speech styles collected through videoconferencing calls. Surveys determined how the changes in speech affected the listener's judgments of the speaker. The lowest average pitch was in interview style speech and the largest range of pitch …

Participant Reference In Colombian Sign Language Narrative, Martha Lois Gateley

Theses and Dissertations

Much of the research on discourse in sign languages thus far has been carried out on American Sign Language. With this thesis, I add to the current research by comparing what is known about participant reference in American Sign Language with Colombian Sign Language.

This thesis analyzes six separate stories totaling 72 minutes, signed by 5 different native signers of Colombian Sign Language. ELAN (a computer software for annotation) was used to mark all of the referring terms in the subject position and categorize the terms by type (nominal reference, pronominal reference, zero-anaphor, and classifier) and by function (introduction, reintroduction …

Information Structure In Mangghuer: A Narrative Text Analysis Of Topic And Focus In A Mongolic Language Of Northwestern China, Cory Christopher Coogan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes information structure in Mangghuer, a Mongolic language spoken in northwestern China. My analysis relies on a set of twenty-three narrative texts published in the 2005 volume, Folktales of China's Minhe Mangghuer (Chen et al. 2005), and I also draw from the text "Lu Buping," published in the 2001 Mangghuer Folktale Reader (Stuart & Zhu 2001). I rely on Lambrecht's (1994) approach to information structure as a theoretical framework to analyze these texts. I also apply methods from Levinsohn's (2015) "Self Instruction-Materials on Narrative Discourse Analysis." Default information structure in Mangghuer is the topic-comment sentence. The default form …

Language Archive Records: Interoperability Of Referencing Practices And Metadata Models, Hugh J. Paterson Iii

Theses and Dissertations

With the rise of the digital language archive and the plethora of referenceable content, a critical question arises: “How easy is it for authors to use existing tools to cite the content they are referencing?” This is especially important as people use archived materials as evidence within published language descriptions.

Archived resource metadata is well discussed in language documentation circles; however, bibliographic metadata and its accessibility are less discussed. Discoverability metadata, a subset of archived resource metadata, serves aggregators like OLAC by declaring a resource exists. In contrast, bibliographic metadata functions within documents by declaring where to find a resource …

A Typology Of Morphological Argument Focus Marking, Aidan Alexander Aannestad

Theses and Dissertations

One of the methods that languages use to indicate which argument (if any) is in focus is morphological; however, there seems to be a major gap in the literature when it comes to understanding the variety and classification of morphological argument focus marking constructions. This thesis is an attempt to fill that gap. I present here both an overview of the types of morphological focus marking constructions found in the world's languages, and a taxonomic classification of said constructions based on the grammaticalisation pathways that result in their genesis. Such constructions include not only the traditional `particle focus' constructions, but …

Exploring Aspects Of Reported Speech In Vehicular Jula Of Burkina Faso, Susan Marie Locklin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a systematic description of reported speech in vehicular Jula of Burkina Faso as well as the degree to which several recent models of reported speech would account for the two distinct variations of reported speech found in Jula. The descriptive and theoretical aspects of this thesis speak into the fields of typology, discourse, and pragmatics. Some of the interesting typological aspects of Jula reported speech are the use of logophoric pronouns in one category of reported speech, the fact that a quotative particle is present with both categories of reported speech, and the fact that pronominal cataphors …

An Analysis Of The Privileged Syntactic Argument In Three Sayula Popoluca Texts, Corey Havlicek

Theses and Dissertations

Sayula Popoluca is a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The data in this thesis was collected by Lawrence Clark and published in Clark (1961). Using Role and Reference Grammar as described in Van Valin (2005), I show that Sayula Popoluca marks the Privileged Syntactic Argument (PSA) in a clause based upon whether it is the single argument of an intransitive verb (S), the actor of a transitive verb, or the undergoer of a transitive verb. It does this through an increasing markedness in the combination of pronominal prefixes and aspect/mood suffixes, with S being the least …