Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons^™

Cuasi Nomás Inglés: Prosody At The Crossroads Of Spanish And English In 20th Century New Mexico, Jackelyn Van Buren

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation investigates prosodic change in the long-term language contact setting of Traditional New Mexican Spanish (NMS). NMS prosody is perceptually distinct from other contemporary varieties of Spanish (Hills 1906, Bowen 1952, Lipski 2011), yet the features which make it unique have not been acoustically examined. This study hypothesizes that bilingualism with English has affected NMS prosody and analyzes three features which are known to differ between Spanish and English and therefore provide a quantitative point of comparison: pitch peak alignment, pitch variability, and rhythmic timing. These variables have been demonstrated to be susceptible to transfer in contact situations, including …

Spanish In Contact With Islander Creole, Falcon Restrepo-Ramos

World Languages & Cultures Department Publications

No abstract provided.

A Sentiment Analysis Of Language & Gender Using Word Embedding Models, Ellyn Rolleston Keith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Robin Lakoff started the conversation around language and gender with her 1975 essay “Language and Woman’s Place,” extensive work has been done on analyzing sociolinguistics associated with gender. While much work has been done on the differences between how men and women use language, there is less research to be found on language about women as opposed to language about men. In this work, I build a word embedding model from a corpus of Wikipedia film summaries and use this model to create lists of words associated with men and words associated with women. I then use sentiment analysis …

Cross Crossings Cautiously: Uses Of African American Vernacular English In American Literature, Emily Crnkovich

English Honors Projects

This project uses sociolinguistics to theorize the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in literature across three time periods: the Antebellum era, the post-bellum/Reconstruction era, and the Harlem Renaissance. Different dialects of English encode different power structures, and in order to interrogate those power structures I track how white and black authors represent the language of African American characters on the page and how audiences interpret that language. I find that African American authors tend to embrace the variability and diversity of natural language better than their white counterparts, whose use of literary dialect often falls into essentialist clichés.

Socio-Cultural Models Of Second Language Learning In Immigrants In Canada., Fanli Jia, Alexandra Gottardo, Aline Ferreira

Fanli Jia

Sociophonetic Accommodation As A Function Of Interlocutor Target Language Competence : The Case Of New York Dominican Spanish, Cecily Corbett

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation contributes to the variationist understanding of the process of phonetic accommodation through the analysis of syllable-final consonant weakening in the speech of native speakers of New York Dominican Spanish (NYDS) during their interactions with second language learners of Spanish. The principal objective is to examine the inner workings of the accommodation phenomenon by using Dominican Spanish as a medium. The data analyzed in this dissertation come from conversations between the informants—native speakers of NYDS—and four different interlocutors, one of whom is a fellow native speaker of NYDS and three who are second-language learners of Spanish with varying degrees …

VariacióN Y Cambio En El EspañOl De Bogotá : AnáLisis De Dos Variables SociofonéTicas, Leonardo Correa

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

RESUMEN

Code Switching, Lexical Borrowing, And Polylanguaging In Valencian Spanish : An Analysis Of Data From Conversational Corpora And Twitter, Andrew Jordan Lavender

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study examines lexical borrowing, code switching, and polylanguaging in Valencian Spanish to better understand how each is used differently in oral conversation in comparison with online communication on Twitter. This study compares data collected from three published corpora of oral interviews of speakers of Valencian Spanish with data collected from Twitter profiles of individuals residing in Valencia. In each of the sources Spanish is the preferred code into which Valencian material is inserted. A unique feature of data from the published corpora is the high frequency of code switching (CS) into Valencian in instances of reported speech. With regard …

A Study Of Sociolinguistic Variation In A Small Community : Puerto Rican Spanish In Amsterdam, New York, Zahir Mumin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New York based on the duration of time that they have lived on the Island of Puerto Rico. Previous research on Puerto Rican Spanish in the US has focused particularly on final /s/ deletion (Poplack, 1980b, 1980c), final liquid production of /l/ and /ɾ/ (Ramos-Pellicia, 2007), …