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Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Linguistic Variation From Cognitive Variability: The Case Of English 'Have', Muye Zhang
Linguistic Variation From Cognitive Variability: The Case Of English 'Have', Muye Zhang
Linguistics Graduate Dissertations
In this dissertation, I seek to construct a model of meaning variation built upon variability in linguistic structure, conceptual structure, and cognitive makeup, and in doing so, exemplify an approach to studying meaning that is both linguistically principled and neuropsychologically grounded. As my test case, I make use of the English lexical item ‘have' by proposing a novel analysis of its meaning based on its well-described variability in English and its embed- ding into crosslinguistically consistent patterns of variation and change.
I support this analysis by investigating its real-time comprehension patterns through behavioral, electropsychophysiological, and hemodynamic brain data, thereby incorporating …
Try Come Look At This Construction!, Kento Tanaka
Try Come Look At This Construction!, Kento Tanaka
Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity
The try get construction, used by some speakers of Hawai‘i English, consists of the bare form of the verb try immediately followed by the bare form of another verb, as in We’ll try get some coffee tomorrow. In this paper, I first describe the usage of this construction, showing that it behaves essentially identically to the widespread go get construction described most notably by Zwicky (1969) and Pullum (1990). I then analyze the syntax of the try get construction adopting Bjorkman’s (2016) proposal for the go get construction.
Anymore Once More: Geographical And Syntactic Distribution, Laurence R. Horn
Anymore Once More: Geographical And Syntactic Distribution, Laurence R. Horn
Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity
Occurrences of non-polarity anymore (NPAM) or so-called “positive anymore” with the approximate meaning of ‘nowadays’ have long been collected by North American dialectologists. The name of the construction is misleading, however, since mainstream anymore, as a garden-variety negative polarity item, is acceptable (like ever or anyone) in a range of grammatically “positive” but downward entailing environments. After touching on the semantic characterization of mainstream and non-polarity anymore and the “stigma enigma” presented by the variable social diagnosis of the construction by those familiar and unfamiliar with it, we present the results a study of the grammatical and …
Variations On Defining A Dialect Region, Sasha Lioutikova
Variations On Defining A Dialect Region, Sasha Lioutikova
Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity
This paper explores various methods of defining a dialect region, using syntactic constructions characteristic of the American South. We consider three important characteristics of such a method: place, feature, and measure. ”Place” details how data points should be grouped, ”feature” details which data points should be used, and ”measure” details how the data should be analyzed. While we may not claim one method as superior to any other, this research can provide insight into how different techniques of characterizing geographic variation may affect the resulting dialect regions.
Get My Syntax On, Heidi Lei
Get My Syntax On, Heidi Lei
Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity
In this paper, I describe and analyze an instance of micro-syntactic variation in American English, a construction I refer to as get my X on. There is considerable flexibility in the construction, involving the types of determiners allowed, the phrasal verbs used, and most notably, the structure of the DP my X. In Standard American English, the X following a possessive pronoun is generally restricted to nouns. However, in this construction, X can be a lexical verb like sing, teach, or even celebrate. Some speakers of African American English accept only the bare verb, rejecting …
The Morality Of Pronoun Flexibility: Connections Between Language And Cognitive Identity Alignment, Mafalda Von Alvensleben
The Morality Of Pronoun Flexibility: Connections Between Language And Cognitive Identity Alignment, Mafalda Von Alvensleben
The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal
The power of words we use to refer to one another is gaining recognition in contemporary socio-political discourse. Yet, interplay between language and complex cognitive processes, including moral judgments and identity formation, largely remains a subject of philosophical and theoretical debate. In order to begin examining the existence of such interactions empirically, this paper investigates the syntactic shift of the third person plural pronoun they/them to the third person singular, used to refer to gender non-binary/gender nonconforming individuals. Using grammaticality acceptance ratings and the Worthen 2016 moral attitudes test, administered under timed pressure, this study measures both intuitions surrounding the …
Environmental Determinism And Spurious Correlation: Just-So Stories In Phonology, Jeremiah Jewell
Environmental Determinism And Spurious Correlation: Just-So Stories In Phonology, Jeremiah Jewell
The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal
The sounds and sound structures of languages often pattern in geographic clusters. Most accounts of this phenomenon rely on language contact and common descent as the principal causes of areal features. Modern linguistics rejects the notion that the nature of the location in which a language is spoken affects its phonological system. Nonetheless, some have argued that climate, topography, and other aspects of the ambient environment causally affect phonologies. The aim of this paper is to assess recent attempts in linguistics literature to broaden the view of what motivates geographically correlated phonological structures. I focus on the realms of phonology …
The Structural Grammaticalization Of The Biblical Hebrew Ethical Dative, Oliver Shoulson
The Structural Grammaticalization Of The Biblical Hebrew Ethical Dative, Oliver Shoulson
The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal
This paper offers a structural analysis of the evolution of a grammatical phenomenon in Biblical Hebrew known as the Ethical Dative (ED). My analysis is rooted in the grammaticalization chain proposed by Talmy Givón wherein the Ethical Dative evolves incrementally from other dative forms, accounting for its lopsided distribution across the Bible. Via its similarity to the Personal Dative in Appalachian English, I propose a derivation for the ED whose locus is the specifier of a high Applicative Phrase, allowing us to account for Givón’s progression through the gradual reduction of merge-operations and feature-valuation at that node. My analysis bolsters …
What Two Canonical Novels Tell Us About Linguistic Prejudice In United States Courts, Charlotte Van Voorhis
What Two Canonical Novels Tell Us About Linguistic Prejudice In United States Courts, Charlotte Van Voorhis
The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal
In this senior essay, I reflect on how African American English (AAE) is represented and perceived in our society. I establish that it is a regular and systematic variety of English. I investigate two novels, To Kill A Mockingbird and Their Eyes Were Watching God and whether their depictions of AAE accurately reflect its systematicity. I equate inaccurate representation in the novels with the disrespectful treatment of AAE and its speakers in the United States currently. I compare the treatment of AAE in the novels’ trials to its treatment in State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman (2013), in which Rachel …
Deep Learning In Musical Lyric Generation: An Lstm-Based Approach, Harrison Gill, Daniel Lee, Nick Marwell
Deep Learning In Musical Lyric Generation: An Lstm-Based Approach, Harrison Gill, Daniel Lee, Nick Marwell
The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal
This paper explores the capability of deep learning to generate lyrics for a designated musical genre. Previous research in the field of computational linguistics has focused on lyric generation for specific genres, limited to Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or Gated Recurrent Units (GRU). Instead, we employ a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network to produce lyrics for a specific genre given an input sample lyric. In addition, we evaluate our generated lyrics via several linguistic metrics and compare these metrics to those of other genres and to the training set to assess linguistic similarities, differences, and the performance of our …