Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Nominal Possession In Daakaka: Transitivizing Vs. Linking, Kilu Von Prince

Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA)

No abstract provided.

A Study On Social Media's Influence Upon The Evolution Of Slang

Symposium of Student Scholars

As social media platforms become increasingly prevalent in our society, they have begun to heavily influence the ways in which we communicate with each other. Particularly fascinating is the effect of social media sites and texting upon slang, which has evolved significantly over the past few decades. Therefore, I am researching why slang is so prevalent in our society, as well as how and why it has changed as a result of social media. My project also explores the phenomena of how online platforms have influenced the connotations of certain words so that they later become slang terms. Because both …

Sociolinguistic Analysis Of Asian American English

Symposium of Student Scholars

According to the United Stated Census Bureau, the population of Asians in the United States has increased from 12 million in 2005 to 17 million in 2016. As populations of minority races in the U.S. grow, so does the representation of them in popular culture and mass media. From ABC’s TV show Fresh Off the Boat to the rising generation of Asian American Youtubers, a wave of Asian American linguistic and languaging presence in today’s entertainment is higher than ever before. In my presentation, I will discuss a close analysis of sociolinguistics connected to these representations spoken by contemporary Asian …

Conjunction Function: How Grammatical Categories Are Organized In Language, Ariana Bancu

Faculty Research and Creative Activities Symposium

The purpose of my talk is to discuss how conjunctions function in different languages and to show how they contribute to a better understanding of the implicit knowledge we have as speakers of a language. In English, coordinating conjunctions such as ‘and’ can link a diverse range of grammatical categories: noun phrases (NP), verb phrases (VP), adjective and adverb phrases (AP), clauses, etc. Cross-linguistically, however, there are many languages that have category specific coordinating conjunctions, and such languages show that the function of coordinating conjunctions extends beyond organizing discourse. Matras (1996:178), for example, points out that “(…) coordinating conjunctions assume …

Evidentiality In The Colombian “Diálogos De Paz”: An Analysis Of Quotations And Presuppositions In Colombia’S Peace Talks, Maria Alejandra Prieto Mendoza

Faculty Research and Creative Activities Symposium

Buscar la paz con justicia social por medio del diálogo” (‘to find peace with social justice through dialogue’): was the goal that Colombia purported to achieve during its peace talks 1 . Nevertheless, this type of political discourses usually carries within it more information than the main goal their words suggest, as they can transmit a particular ideology and a hidden agenda that wants to be accepted by the audience. The problem is that, in moments of conflict, a peace dialogue can be the beacon of hope, and as a consequence, every speech that came from the “mesa de diálogo” …

Silently Struggling In A New World: Exploring English Language Learners With Language Disabilities

Symposium of Student Scholars

With the awareness that Spanish speaking households compose a significant number of students in English language learning (ELL) programs, this researcher will be illuminating areas of academic ambiguity where language learning overshadows learning disabilities in the United States— a country with no official language. This phenomenon will be thoroughly examined using textual methodologies such as secondary analysis, theoretical study, and an extended literature review to describe how these correlations negatively impact students with English as a secondary way of expression. By emphasizing this gap within academia, it is the hope of the author that additional teacher-created resources will be readily …

Spanish Nominalizations And Case Assignment, Dr. Jeff Renaud, Tania Leal

Celebration of Learning

Nominalizations are syntactic structures wherein verbal roots co-occur with verbal and nominal properties, classifying them as verbal (VN) (El andar el niño tan tarde) or nominal (NN) (El andar errabundo del niño). While NNs mark agents genitive (del niño), VNs require nominative agents (el niño). NNs co-occur with adjectives (errabundo), whereas VNs co-occur with adverbs (tan tarde). Alexiadou et al. (2011) posit separate syntactic structures for the two. In this study, we investigate via self-paced reading task the types of case available in each structure, providing evidence of …

Lightning Talk: The Language Archive: Migrating To An Easier, Sustainable Open-Source Solution., Jeroen Geerts

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The Language Archive at the Max Planck Institute Nijmegen (https://archive.mpi.nl) is an extensive online repository of language resources. The archive was developed using in-house solutions, including metadata creation tools, depositing tools and an archive-browser. Development had been going on for more than 15 years, but was difficult and expensive to maintain. Additionally, some of these tools had were fairly complex to use, not meeting current user needs. Therefore, the choice was made to migrate to a more sustainable open-source solution, easier to use, maintain and to develop upon.

This presentation will provide insight in choosing a new repository solution, …

The Pin/Pen Merger, Isaiah Solorzano

Kansas State University Undergraduate Research Conference

The Sound Change Across Kansas: PEN/PIN Merger

Isaiah Solorzano, Mary Kohn

Department of English

College of Arts & Sciences

Mergers, a sound change that present themselves in the background of everyday conversations, usually going unnoticed and uninterrupted across speech communities. I am interested in the sound change of short vowels found in word pairs like pen-pin, shown to be changing ^[1]. In 2014, Strelluf suggested the low-back merger is present in Kansas City due, in part, to a large initial population of South Midland speakers. This study indicates the merger should be advancing ^[1]. We do not understand, …

How To Attract African American College Students To Study Spanish: A Model For Virginia State University, Erika M. Neal

Virginias Collegiate Honors Council Conference

Being culturally aware and able to communicate with people from different regions of the world is one of the most critical skills a student of color can obtain during their educational career. Not only will a student’s perspective of the world be altered, but their market value will skyrocket by 5-10% on average according to Forbes. Being bilingual or multilingual is a skill that can be applied to any career field in today’s society. Unfortunately, many African American students have had little to no exposure to foreign languages and cultures specifically Spanish. Even for those who have had some exposure …

Enhanced Explicit Vocabulary Learning Compared To Implicit Grammar Learning In Adults, Leah Brainin, Marc Joanisse

Western Research Forum

Compared to young children, the language learning process is much more difficult and less successful in adulthood. Little is known about how non-linguistic cognitive processes contribute to these age-dependent differences. We argue that language learning involves both explicit declarative memory processes to learn vocabulary and implicit procedural memory processes to learn grammatical patterns. In this preliminary study, we aimed to quantify the relative contribution of declarative versus procedural learning in adults via an artificial language learning task. Participants ages 18 to 29 heard novel singular and plural words associated with images of common objects. The grammar of the language consisted …

Text-Speech Alignment: A Robin Hood Approach For Endangered Languages, Claire Bowern, Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, Hunter Craft, Anelisa Fergus, Dolly Goldenberg

Yale Day of Data

Forced alignment automatically aligns audio recordings of spoken language with transcripts at the level of individual sounds, greatly reducing the time required to prepare data for linguistic analysis. However, existing algorithms are mostly trained on a few well-documented languages. We test the performance of three algorithms against manually aligned data on data from a highly endangered language. At least some tasks, unsupervised alignment (either based on English or trained from a small corpus) is sufficiently reliable for it to be used on legacy data for low-resource languages. Descriptive phonetic work on vowel inventories and prosody can be accurately captured by …