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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Redefining Nairobi's Streets: Study Of Slang, Marginalization, And Identity, Mungai Mutonya Jun 2010

Redefining Nairobi's Streets: Study Of Slang, Marginalization, And Identity, Mungai Mutonya

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

This study attempts an analysis of a restructured Swahili variety spoken by Nairobi's street community: Kinoki. Adapting tools of sociolinguistic inquiry and focusing on Kinoki's divergence from the dominant urban slang, Sheng, the study discusses attitudes toward divergent terms referencing the street community, street activities, and law enforcement officials. Results indicate that street children, unlike their school-going peers living in the city's low-income neighborhoods, redefine pejoratives that devalue and stigmatize street people and their lifestyle. Instead, Kinoki empowers the marginalized community to construct a positive identity, to ameliorate representations of street lifestyle, and to redefine neologisms that reference in-group ( …


Sources Of Non-Conformity In Phonology: Variation And Exceptionality In Modern Hebrew Spirantization (Dissertation), Michal Temkin Martinez May 2010

Sources Of Non-Conformity In Phonology: Variation And Exceptionality In Modern Hebrew Spirantization (Dissertation), Michal Temkin Martinez

Michal Temkin Martinez

This dissertation investigates the integration of two sources of non-conformity – exceptionality and variation – in a single phonological system. Exceptionality manifests itself as systematic non-conformity, and variation as partial or variable non-conformity. When both occur within the same phenomenon, this is particularly challenging for the linguistic system. Modern Hebrew spirantization provides an apt case study for the investigation of the interaction of these two sources of non-conformity where exceptional (non-alternating) segments are frequent, and variation in alternating segments has been reported (Adam 2002). This dissertation makes contributions in the forms of both data and analysis. Its goals are to …


Sources Of Non-Conformity In Phonology: Variation And Exceptionality In Modern Hebrew Spirantization (Dissertation), Michal Temkin Martinez May 2010

Sources Of Non-Conformity In Phonology: Variation And Exceptionality In Modern Hebrew Spirantization (Dissertation), Michal Temkin Martinez

Mary Ellen Ryder Linguistics Lab

This dissertation investigates the integration of two sources of non-conformity – exceptionality and variation – in a single phonological system. Exceptionality manifests itself as systematic non-conformity, and variation as partial or variable non-conformity. When both occur within the same phenomenon, this is particularly challenging for the linguistic system. Modern Hebrew spirantization provides an apt case study for the investigation of the interaction of these two sources of non-conformity where exceptional (non-alternating) segments are frequent, and variation in alternating segments has been reported (Adam 2002). This dissertation makes contributions in the forms of both data and analysis. Its goals are to …


A Longitudinal Study Of Language And Ideology In Congress, Bei Yu, Daniel Diermeier Apr 2010

A Longitudinal Study Of Language And Ideology In Congress, Bei Yu, Daniel Diermeier

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents an analysis of the legislative speech records from the 101st-108th U.S. Congresses using machine learning and natural language processing methods. We use word vectors to represent the speeches in both the Senate and the House, and then use text categorization methods to classify the speakers by their ideological positions. The classification accuracy indicates the level of distinction between the liberal and the conservative ideologies. Our experiment results demonstrate an increasing partisanship in the Congress between 1989 and 2006. Ideology classifiers trained on the House speeches can predict the Senators' ideological positions well (House-to-Senate prediction), however the Senate-to-House …


Terminological Reflections Of An Enlightened Contextualist, Robert J. Stainton Feb 2010

Terminological Reflections Of An Enlightened Contextualist, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

No abstract provided.


Really Intriguing, That Pred Np!, Ileana Paul, Robert Stainton Feb 2010

Really Intriguing, That Pred Np!, Ileana Paul, Robert Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

No abstract provided.