Linguistics Commons^™

Proximity And Journalistic Practice In Environmental Discourse: Experiencing “Job Blackmail” In The News, Barbara Johnstone, Justin Mando

Barbara Johnstone

No abstract provided.

Open Educational Resources In The United States: Insights From University Foreign Language Directors, Joshua J. Thoms, Becky L. Thoms

Joshua J. Thoms

This study reports the results of a survey completed by 155 university foreign language (FL) directors in the United States (US) during Fall 2012. Survey respondents come from a variety of institutions and direct a range of FL programs. The objectives of the study are to (a) determine what FL directors know about open educational resources (OER), (b) understand respondents’ perceived benefits and challenges of using OER, and (c) determine what resources and support are critical to establish or expand the use of OER in FL courses in the US. Results indicate that while 66% of FL directors do not ...

Knowledge Of Adjective Reference By Monolingual Spanish- And English-Speaking Children, Martha Elizabeth Rayas Tanaka

Entrehojas: Revista de Estudios Hispánicos

Previous studies (Waxman, Senghas and Benveniste, 1997 and Waxman and Guasti 2009) have concluded that there are crosslinguistic differences in the interpretation of adjectives by English, French, Spanish and Italian- monolingual speaking children. Their results show that only Spanish and Italian-speaking children categorized a novel adjective as an object responding in the same way for the categorization of a noun. According to the authors this is due to the Determiner-Adjective syntactic constructions in these languages that refer to the named objects or entities and to other members of that object category (e.g. los pobres). The present study looks more ...

Evidence Of A "Hearing" Dialect Of Asl While Interpreting, Campbell Mcdermid

Journal of Interpretation

Little is know about the characteristics of fluent hearing signers and their ultimate attainment of ASL as a second language. To address this, a study was conducted with 12 ASL-English interpreters who were native English speakers to examine their use of ASL while interpreting. Each subject was asked to simultaneously interpret a short English narrative into ASL and a panel of three Deaf native signers assessed their fluency. Though the group included both novice and expert interpreters, the results revealed many similarities in their work. These included a reduction in pronouns between the English source and ASL target text, the ...

Naming Practices In J.R.R. Tolkien's Invented Languages, Wendy Baker Et Al.

Journal of Literary Onomastics

No abstract.

Understanding The Misunderstandings In Pilot-Controller Dialogue, Jason M. Newcomer

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Misunderstandings in any environment can be detrimental, if not counterproductive, to the intentions, expectations, or objective(s) of any communication, but in complex airspace congested by heavy traffic, pilot-controller transmissions, and various meteorological phenomena, they can be catastrophic. Barshi and Farris combine 45 years of aviation experience, 20 years of related research, and advanced education with sound methodology to deliver a well-balanced combination of theoretical and practical work to the fields of aviation, human factors, and psychology. Though Misunderstandings in ATC Communications, the authors guide readers through a series of experiments, literature, and transcribed air traffic control recordings to explore ...

Translation Of Legal Texts Between Arabic And English: The Case Study Of Marriage Contracts, Mohammed H. Al Aqad

Mohammed H. M. Al Aqad

Over decades, there used to be a number of studies on Legal translation since it was one of the most challenging issues for translators and it still a critical and authoritative translation produced by legal bodies. Actually, translating legal texts might raise some problems in translation pertaining to the differences between the Source and Target Texts. Thus, it can result in a certain amount of ambiguity with respect to the legal texts, as it belongs to people‟s beliefs and cultures. This study investigates the quality of the translated message from Arabic into English. Hence, the focus is on the ...

Philosophy Of Linguistics, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

Rather than attempting to survey the rich array of topics within Philosophy of Linguistics, this article focuses on two questions: “What kind of thing is Linguistics about?” and “What is the proper evidence-base for Linguistics?” After describing various exclusionary answers, it argues for Pluralism on both fronts: the objects of study in Linguistics are metaphysical hybrids, with physical, mental, abstract and social facets; and evidence from every domain should in principle be welcomed.

The Relationship Between Implicit And Explicit Processing In Statistical Language Learning, Nicolette B. Noonan

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Statistical language learning is an implicit process wherein language learners track sequential statistics in fluent speech, and may it facilitate the learning of word boundaries. This process is well studied, however, the cognitive mechanisms supporting it remain poorly understood. The present thesis investigated whether domain-specific or cross-domain explicit working memory engagement would impair implicit statistical learning of word boundaries in fluent speech. Participants (n = 110) were exposed to an implicit statistical word segmentation paradigm while concurrently engaged in no other task (control), or an explicit domain- specific (verbal) or cross-domain (visuospatial) working memory task of either low- or high- demand ...

The Transition From Participation To Facilitation Of Supervision: An Autoethnography, Daniel V. Maffia

Master's Theses

This autoethnography examines the journey from being a participant of supervision to a facilitator of supervision. The researcher documents his journey using journals to express his experiences facilitating supervision for a group of medical interpreters working in the hospital setting. The purpose of this study is to gather data that could guide future trainings for facilitators of supervision. The supervision group consisted of both American Sign Language/English and Spanish/English medical interpreters. As a newer interpreter to the field with limited medical interpreting experience, it was expected that the researcher might face difficulties successfully facilitating supervision sessions for that ...

Cosine Similarity For Article Section Classification: Using Structured Abstracts As A Proxy For An Annotated Corpus, Arthur T. Bugorski

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

During the last decade, the amount of research published in biomedical journals has grown significantly and at an accelerating rate. To fully explore all of this literature, new tools and techniques are needed for both information retrieval and processing. One such tool is the identification and extraction of key claims. In an e ort to work toward claim-extraction, we aim to identify the key areas in the body of the article referred to by text in the abstract. In this project, our work is preliminary to that goal in that we attempt to match specific clauses in the abstract with ...

The Influence Of Pseudo-Relatives On Attachment Preferences In Spanish, David Branco-Moreno

Dissertations and Theses, 2014-Present

This paper presents the results from an off-line experiment on the extent to which the availability of pseudo-relatives modulates attachment preferences in Spanish. Participants were presented with sentences in which different syntactic and semantic factors had been manipulated to allow for either both a pseudo-relative (PR) and a relative-clause (RC) reading or a RC reading only. All the experimental items included two potential antecedents with which the constituents of interest could be associated. The experimental items can be divided into four groups: group 1 consists of stimuli allowing for a double reading in direct object position, and groups 2, 3 ...

Automated Classification Of Argument Stance In Student Essays: A Linguistically Motivated Approach With An Application For Supporting Argument Summarization, Adam Robert Faulkner

Dissertations and Theses, 2014-Present

This study describes a set of document- and sentence-level classification models designed to automate the task of determining the argument stance (for or against) of a student argumentative essay and the task of identifying any arguments in the essay that provide reasons in support of that stance. A suggested application utilizing these models is presented which involves the automated extraction of a single-sentence summary of an argumentative essay. This summary sentence indicates the overall argument stance of the essay from which the sentence was extracted and provides a representative argument in support of that stance.

A novel set of document-level ...

The Sound Patterns Of Camuno: Description And Explanation In Evolutionary Phonology, Michela Cresci

Dissertations and Theses, 2014-Present

This dissertation presents a linguistic study of the sound patterns of Camuno framed within Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2004, 2006, to appear). Camuno is a variety of Eastern Lombard, a Romance language of northern Italy, spoken in Valcamonica. Camuno is not a local variety of Italian, but a sister of Italian, a local divergent development of the Latin originally spoken in Italy (Maiden & Perry, 1997, p. 2). It is an oral language with no writing system, and it is endangered. The language is understudied (Bonfadini, 1995, p. 26), and this thesis appears to be the first detailed study of Camuno phonology. The goal of this dissertation is linguistic and cultural. It will assess, characterize and explain the most striking properties of the sound patterns of Camuno as spoken in the upper part of the low valley; and it will provide a lasting documentation of an endangered language that may soon disappear. Notable sound patterns in Camuno discussed in this work include: a unique system of stress-dependent height harmony; final obstruent devoicing; and nasal/zero ...

Guatemalan Spanish As Act Of Identity: An Analysis Of Language And Minor Literature Within Modern Maya Literary Production, Kenneth Yanes

Dissertations and Theses, 2014-Present

My study approaches the use of Guatemalan Spanish in modern Maya literary works through a theoretical framework drawn on theories of "purity" and mestizaje, the concept of minor literature, and "image" and ideology of language. I problematize the "major"/"minor" dichotomy of language based on a Eurocentric view of the dominance of national languages as the extremely diverse linguistic ecology of Latin American lends itself to the deterritorialization of hegemonic discourse, but without sustaining a neat categorization of language. Guatemalan Spanish is a heavily Maya-inflected interlanguage share by all Guatemalans. Mayan writers chose purposefully to counter the ladino ethnocentrism of ...

Huu-Fa Thesis Dat?: A Syntactic Analysis Of Possessive Jamaican Creole Possessive Wh-Elements, Toni Ashlie Foster

Dissertations and Theses, 2014-Present

This thesis discusses the differences between the Jamaican Creole expressions huu-fa and fi-huu. Jamaican Creole is a language that was born from a combination of the lexifier language English and the substrate language Twi, therefore it is reasonable to check whether the features of JC were derived from these languages. The distribution of huu-fa and fi-huu resembles the distribution of English whose. Fi-huu and huu-fa are WH-elements that show possession, similar to the English word whose. They are made of a WH-pronoun and a form of the preposition fi "for". Both terms differ in internal structure, and distribution. The difference ...

Speech Act Theoretic Semantics, Daniel W. Harris

Dissertations and Theses, 2014-Present

I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics-pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and dynamic semantics.

Effects Of Phonological Neighborhood Density On Lexical Access In Adults And Children With And Without Specific Language Impairment, Diana Almodovar

Dissertations and Theses, 2014-Present

The present study was designed to examine how adults, children with typical language development (TLD), and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) process words from sparse and dense phonological neighborhoods, using the Cross Modal Picture-Word Interference Paradigm. The participants were asked to label a picture presented on a computer screen, while ignoring auditory distractors (interfering words or IWs) presented over headphones. The target items were manipulated according to neighborhood density (high and low density words), and the auditory distractors were either identical to the target, a neutral distractor (good), phonologically related (by rhyme), or unrelated to the target item. The ...

The Academic And Cultural Adaptation Of Chinese International Students At Umass Boston: The Struggles And Progress From The Perspectives Of Students And Professors, Pingping Chen, Theodora Chocos, Lorena Fuentes

English Faculty Publication Series

This panel will articulate the struggles and progress of Chinese international students in their learning processes at UMass Boston. Additionally, the challenges some professors have faced in teaching Chinese international students and the pedagogical practice they have used to engage these learners in their courses will be addressed.

This panel was presented as part of the 2014 8th Annual University Conference on Teaching, Learning, and Technology on May 15, 2014. The theme of the conference was "Teaching both What and How for Deep Learning at Every Level."

Towards An Optimal Representation Of Tones In The Orthographies Of African Languages, Ettien N. Koffi Dr.

Linguistic Portfolios

Tone is a conundrum for linguists attempting to reduce African languages to writing. Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental data indicate that not marking tone at all leads to reading difficulties. The converse is also true, namely marking tone exhaustively reduces fluency, leads to false starts, and repairs. This article proposes an elegant but simple solution to get out of this catch twenty-two situation. First, a historical overview of various tone marking schemes is discussed. Second, the concept of Tone Optimality Model (TOM) is introduced and exemplified. The proposed model succeeds in reducing tonal density in texts without affecting readability. The main ...