Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Semantic And Acoustic Voice Features Differentiating Neutral And Traumatic Narratives, Yosef Shimon Amrami

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a quantitative and qualitative exploration of how one linguistically communicates emotions through an autobiographical narrative. Psycholinguistic research has affirmed that linguistic features of a narrative, including semantic and acoustic features, indicate a narrator’s emotions and physiological. This study investigated whether these linguistic features could help differentiate between trauma and neutral narratives and if they can predict autobiographical narratives’ subjective trauma ratings (STR). Qualitative analyses of the positive and negative evaluative statements were also conducted, which indicated the narrators’ thought processes during recall. Twenty-two Spanish-English college students participated in this study and narrated both traumatic and neutral narratives. …

Poetics, Not Pragmatics: Understanding Metaphors In A Poetic Context, Savannah Marciezyk

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this paper is to explain why the leading theories of metaphor fail when applied to metaphors which appear in poems. The ability to understand the true meaning of a metaphor in conversations relies on understanding speaker intention and extralinguistic context. This paper argues that because such material is not available to the reader of a poem, theories which rely heavily on pragmatics to explain metaphors cannot be successfully applied to metaphors which appear in poems. This paper makes use of the views on metaphor by John Searle and Paul Grice, and discusses how meaning is constructed in …

Deixis In Shughni: Grammatical And Semantic Considerations, Katja S. Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

Shughni is one of the best documented and described languages of the Pamirs. Linguistic research so far has focused on the verbal system of Shughni grammar but no detailed study has been done on the deictic system of the language. In this thesis I will describe grammatical and semantic aspects of the deictic system in Shughni.

During the course of the project I observed natural conversations, and listened to stories and discussions, and additionally I elicited sentences or conversations in order to clarify structures or understanding of previous observations.

In this thesis I describe the grammatical structures of Shughni deixis …

Non-Native Speaker Attentional Capacity And The Processing Of English Phrasal Verb Constructions, Aubrey Dillard

Theses and Dissertations

The effect of syntactic and semantic complexity on attention and processing in second language acquisition (SLA) has long been of interest to both practitioners and researchers of SLA. Theoretical models of attention in SLA (Schmidt 1990, Tomlin and Villa 1994, Robinson 1995) have spurred a great deal of empirical research in the field, and VanPatten's (1994, 2004, 2007) work on the effect of attention to form and meaning on comprehension of input has been very influential in the field. From a language processing viewpoint, Clahsen and Felser (2006, 2009) have hypothesized that the different ways in which native and nonnative …

Resemblance-Oriented Communication Strategies: Understanding The Role Of Resemblance In Signed And Spoken Languages, Daniel R. Eberle

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to propose that resemblance plays an important role in human communication. Saussure proposed a characteristic principle of the linguistic sign: that connections between linguistic codes and the objects they signify are arbitrary; however, I intend to show that resemblance, which I define as the visual or aural similarity between a stimulus, the thought it is intended to activate, and the real world target that utterance is about, is an important part of human communication and should be taken into consideration when defining language and proposing theories of human communication.

I have chosen Relevance Theory …

Borrowing The Essentials: A Diachronic Study Of The Semantic Primes Of Modern English, Karen Esther Swan

Theses and Dissertations

In order for communication to take place, there must be a set of core concepts that are universal to all speakers. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) has proposed an inventory of these concepts, called semantic primes, and uses them as universal concepts in the explication and exploration of cultural values. The English semantic primes, while the majority are Anglo-Saxon, contain words that have been borrowed from Latin, Old Norse, and French. Borrowing lexical items into core vocabulary has many implications. First, the primes are not entirely stable or immune to foreign influence, even the Anglo-Saxon primes have been susceptible to the …

Using A Cognitive Architecture In Incremental Sentence Processing, Jeremiah Lane Mcghee

Theses and Dissertations

XNL-Soar is a specialized implementation of the Soar cognitive architecture. The version of XNL-Soar described in this thesis builds upon and extends prior research (Lewis, 1993; Rytting,2000) using Soar for natural language processing. This thesis describes the updates made to operators creating syntactic structure and the improved coverage of syntactic phenomena. It describes the addition of semantic structure building capability. This thesis also details the implementation of semantic memory and describes two experiments utilizing semantic memory in structural disambiguation. This thesis shows that XNL-Soar, as currently instantiated, resolves ambiguities common in language using strategies and resources including: reanalysis via snip …

Since Joseph Smith's Time: Lexical Semantic Shifts In The Book Of Mormon, Renee Bangerter

Theses and Dissertations

In the years since Joseph Smith completed the translation of the Book of Mormon, the English language has changed; some common phraseologies and word meanings are dissimilar to today's. Often, in reading the Book of Mormon, we impose our current definitions onto terms that in 1830 had a different meaning. Our interpretation of these words, as well as the passages in which they are found, is skewed by our modern definitions. These words, when they occur in the Book of Mormon, demonstrate dialectal and obsolete senses. In the case of some words, the dialectal or obsolete sense is so far …