Typological Linguistics and Linguistic Diversity Commons^™

Chinese Word Order: A Look Into Svo And Sov Arguments, Shelley E. Tennison

University Honors Theses

In this paper, the issue of Chinese word order is weighed, and findings in the field are presented. First, looking into the historical background and offering a brief introduction to Greenberg's linguistic universals, I will break apart various arguments concerning the word order in Chinese. I will examine many sources, albeit the focus will rest heavily on Sandra Li and Charles Thomson's SOV argument and Timothy Gívon and Chaofen Sun's SVO argument. The two sides of this argument are considered regarding X-bar theory, constituent test, morphological limitations, and syntax.

La Diversidad Lingüística Durante Y Después Del Franquismo En España, Molly L. Taylor

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

La historia lingüística de España es rica y diversa, pero ha sido sofocada por varios gobernantes españoles para promover el uso del castellano, o la lengua de "prestigio". Quizás las políticas lingüísticas más opresivas se promulgaron bajo el dictador Francisco Franco a lo largo del siglo XX. Estas políticas lingüísticas que trabajaron para promover el uso exclusivo del castellano se pueden ver en la educación, las leyes regionales, los paisajes lingüísticos e incluso las actitudes con respecto al idioma. Mientras existen esfuerzos para promover las lenguas y dialectos minoritarios que fueron silenciados durante el franquismo, los efectos de las políticas ...

Resurrecting Gaelic: Modernity And Heritage Language Revival In Scotland In A Comparative Perspective, Sean Coady

Student Research Submissions

Many people from across the world have little or no connection to their heritage languages. Whether this loss is caused by conquest, colonialization, or simply lack of parent-child transmission, many believe that they are missing an integral part of their cultural identity and want to reclaim the languages of their forebearers. There is wide debate about how, why, and if this linguistic reclamation and revitalization should happen because, in the face of modernity and language evolution, the best solutions are not always clear. What constitutes successful language revitalization in the modern world, and why does it happen? Gaelic in Scotland ...

Maxent Learners Are Biased Against Giving Probability To Harmonically Bounded Candidates, Charlie O'Hara

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

One of the major differences between MaxEnt Harmonic Grammar (Goldwater and Johnson, 2003) and Noisy Harmonic Grammar (Boersma and Pater, 2016) is that in MaxEnt harmonically bounded candidates are able to get some probability, whereas in most other constraint-based grammars they can never be output (Jesney, 2007). The probability given to harmonically bounded candidates is taken from other candidates, in some cases allowing Max- Ent to model grammars that subvert some of the universal implications that are true in NoisyHG (Anttila and Magri, 2018). Magri (2018) argues that the types of implicational universals that remain valid in MaxEnt are phonologically ...

Linguistic Complexity And Planning Effects On Word Duration In Hindi Read Aloud Speech, Sidharth Ranjan, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar, Sumeet Agarwal

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Our study investigates the impact of linguistic complexity and planning on word durations in Hindi read aloud speech. Reading aloud involves both comprehension and production processes, and we use measures defined by two influential theories of sentence comprehension, Surprisal Theory and Dependency Locality Theory, to model the time taken to enunciate individual words. We model planning processes using an information-theoretic measure we call FORWARD SURPRISAL, inspired by surprisal theory which has been prominent in recent psycholinguistic work. Forward surprisal aims to capture articulatory planning when readers incorporate parafoveal viewing during reading aloud. Using a Linear Mixed Model containing memory and ...

The Syntax Of Passives And Related Constructions In Mandarin Chinese, Shangyan Pan

Honors Theses

This thesis discusses the Mandarin Chinese passive, a construction that differs in significant ways from its better known, European counterparts. While the passive is one of the most well-studied constructions in syntax, the passive in Chinese remains understudied and not as well understood. The thesis offers an analysis of multiple passive markers in Chinese, focusing on bei and gei. Superficially, the two markers both participate in passive and passive-like constructions. However, upon closer scrutiny, it is demonstrated that only bei qualifies as a true passive marker, while gei is shown to belong to a more general category of Non-Active Voice ...

Linguicide In The Digital Age: Problems And Possible Solutions, Michael Adelson

Modern Languages Presentations

This project aims to assess the relative success of revitalization efforts for seven languages: Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Hopi, Navajo, Breton, and Occitan. The success of linguistic revitalization is determined through comparative analysis of minority languages in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and France as seen through each country’s history, melting pot experiences, traditions, language protection laws, education system, in addition to the differing levels of diffusion via the Internet. A key point of analysis is the strength of language protection laws in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, and France. Language is the most primordial expression ...

Linguicide In The Digital Age: Problems And Possible Solutions, Michael Adelson

French Summer Fellows

This project aims to assess the relative success of revitalization efforts for seven languages: Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Hopi, Navajo, Breton, and Occitan. The success of linguistic revitalization is determined through comparative analysis of minority languages in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and France as seen through each country’s history, melting pot experiences, traditions, language protection laws, education system, in addition to the differing levels of diffusion via the Internet. A key point of analysis is the strength of language protection laws in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, and France. Language is the most primordial expression ...

Creating A Theoretical Framework To Underpin Discourse Assessment And Intervention In Aphasia, Lucy Dipper, Jane Marshall, Mary Boyle, Deborah Hersh, Nicola Botting, Madeline Cruice

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Discourse (a unit of language longer than a single sentence) is fundamental to everyday communication. People with aphasia (a language impairment occurring most frequently after stroke, or other brain damage) have communication difficulties which lead to less complete, less coherent, and less complex discourse. Although there are multiple reviews of discourse assessment and an emerging evidence base for discourse intervention, there is no unified theoretical framework to underpin this research. Instead, disparate theories are recruited to explain different aspects of discourse impairment, or symptoms are reported without a hypothesis about the cause. What is needed is a theoretical framework that ...

Prosody And Intonation In Formosan Languages, Benjamin K. Macaulay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Formosan languages are the languages of the Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. These languages are part of the Austronesian language family, and represent all but one primary branch of this family of 1,200+ languages. The Formosan languages are endangered, some critically so. While these languages have seen attention in the literature for their syntactic and phonological systems, little work has been done on their prosodic structure or intonation.

This dissertation analyzes the prosodic structure and intonational phonology of Mantauran Rukai, Budai Rukai, Tsou, Kanakanavu, Hla’alua, Sandimen Paiwan, Piuma Paiwan, Kavalan, Amis, Bunun, Tgdaya Seediq, Truku Seediq, and Pazeh ...

Information Flow, Artificial Phonology And Typology, Adamantios Gafos

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

In the context Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) experiments, it is possible to quantify how effectively a stimulus has conveyed information and specifically the information the experimenter thinks it was designed to convey. At the most basic level, this can be done if one has access to the response variability of independent responses to the same stimulus (or subparts of the stimulus). The variability of these responses serves as an index of the amount of information that flows from the source of the stimulus to the perceiver. Quantifying information flow in this way, it is shown that under conditions where participants ...

Consonant Harmony, Disharmony, Memory And Time Scales, Adamantios Gafos

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

I argue that properties of memory offer an appropriate grounding for a number of characteristics of long distance consonantal co-occurrence restrictions whose basis had so far remained unclear.

A Data-Driven Approach To Crosslinguistic Structural Biases, Alex Kramer, Zoey Liu

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Dependency Lengths In Speech And Writing: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison Via Youdepp, A Pipeline For Scraping And Parsing Youtube Captions, Alex Kramer

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Recording, transcribing, and annotating naturalistic spoken data is typically difficult and time-intensive. Online sources, however, are a rich and relatively untapped source of naturalistic speech. Using corpora of 7 languages gathered via YouDePP, a pipeline for scraping and dependency-parsing pre-transcribed speech from YouTube, I investigate how dependency length minimization (DLM) varies across written and spoken modalities. I compare the dependency length growth rates in these corpora to those in Universal Dependencies 2.6 and find that dependency lengths in writing are not consistently longer than those in speech. Rather, the dependency lengths of more head-initial, SVO languages grew at a ...

Language Contact And Covert Prominence In The Sḥerēt-Jibbāli Language Of Oman, Jarred Brewster

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis reports on a phonetic production study, the results of which support the existence of a complex word-prosodic system for the Sḥerēt-Jibbāli language of Dhofar, Oman. In the language, stress seems to co-occur in some lexical items with a high tone. In the discussion, a mechanism for the emergence of this system is proposed as the reflex of a typological feature held in common with the related language, Soqotri, and as justification for an Eastern Modern South Arabian subgroup consisting of Sḥerēt-Jibbāli and Soqotri.

Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation develops a formal and psycholinguistic theory of person-based prominence effects, the finding that certain categories of person such as "first" and "second" (the "local" persons) are privileged by the grammar. The thesis takes on three questions: (i) What are the possible categories related to person? (ii) What are the possible prominence relationships between these categories? And (iii) how is prominence information used to parse and interpret linguistic input in real time?

The empirical through-line is understanding obviation — a “spotlighting” system, found most prominently in the Algonquian family of languages, that splits the (ani- mate) third persons into two ...

La Dialogicidad En La Tesis Doctoral Y El Artículo De Investigación Escritos En Inglés Y Español En Medicina, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Resumen

Esta investigación presenta una perspectiva intercultural (español e inglés) en el ámbito de la escritura científica médica sobre la interacción que ocurre entre el escritor y la audiencia que recibe el texto. De modo más específico, se estudian las diferencias dialógicas que ocurren en los géneros de la tesis doctoral y el artículo de investigación en Medicina desde el modelo metadiscursivo interpersonal propuesto por Hyland (2005, 2008). El corpus se compone de 40 textos, divididos en 20 escritos expertos (artículos) y 20 de posgrado (tesis). Se analizan los rasgos pragmalingüísticos que contribuyen a la construcción y la negociación de ...

Copulative Compound Words Formed By Using The Interfix In The Pashto Language, Ugiljon Abduvaliyeva

The Light of Islam

Questions about word formation remain one of the most pressing problems of modern linguistics. The relevance of this issue is increasing, especially for less-studied languages such as the Pashto language, since the vocabulary of the language is constantly being enriched under modern requirements. The need to express new concepts arising from
progress in various spheres of life gives rise to the need to create new lexical units based on the language’s capabilities and resources. The study of this process on a scientifc basis, the defnition of its directions, the defnition of its specifcs based on the analysis of language ...

A Lexical Frequency Analysis Of Irish Sign Language, Robert G Smith, Markus Hofmann

Other Resources

Word frequency has a significant impact on language acquisition and fluency. It is often a point of reference for the teaching and assessing of a language and indeed, as a control for psycholinguistic studies. This paper presents the results of the first objective frequency analysis of lexical tokens from the Signs of Ireland corpus. We investigate the frequency of fully lexical, partly lexical and non-lexical signs in Irish Sign Language as they are presented in the corpus. We confirm the accuracy of the lexical gloss frequency data with a supplementary corpus subset that is tagged for grammatical class and additional ...

On The Temporal Interpretation Of Epistemic Modals: Evidence From Palestinian Arabic, Alaa M. Sharif

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of temporal interpretation of epistemic modals in Palestinian Arabic (PA), and develop a cross-linguistic analysis. The epistemic necessity modal akeed and the epistemic possibility modal yimkin in PA exhibit similar temporal configurations to English epistemic modals must and might, respectively. We argue for a unified underlying structure to account for the temporal configurations. The linearized combination of the epistemic modal, a silent present tense morpheme and an aspectual head morpheme derive either a present-oriented reading when the aspectual head is empty, or a future-oriented reading in presence of a silent prospective aspect ...