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Vox Et Silentium Dei: A Socio-Cognitive Linguistic Theory Of Religious Violence, Tyler Everett Kibbey

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Contemporary research in the study of language and cognition frequently characterizes religious metaphors as either monoliths of experience or stable synchronic structures, if not both. In addition, by virtue of how the foundational theory of this paper, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, has been situated in the literature, pre-modern theist writing on figurative language has been largely ignored. This has resulted in a general application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to religious language which characterizes religious experience as phenomenologically invalid with the contingent effect of contradicting the basic experiential nature of metaphor. Here, I account for these principal theoretical discrepancies through an exploration …

You Don’T Say... Linguistic Features In Sarcasm Detection, Martina Ducret, Lauren Kruse, Carlos Martinez, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We explore linguistic features that contribute to sarcasm detection. The linguistic features that we investigate are a combination of text and word complexity, stylistic and psychological features. We experiment with sarcastic tweets with and without context. The results of our experiments indicate that contextual information is crucial for sarcasm prediction. One important observation is that sarcastic tweets are typically incongruent with their context in terms of sentiment or emotional load.

Linguistic Ideologies In Fiction Podcasts, Mary Emma Hignite

Senior Honors and Award-Winning Theses

This thesis is a linguistic analysis of fiction podcasts, focused on the research question: how do linguistic ideologies and stereotypes function in fiction podcasts? To this end, I used both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis investigated whether there is a correlation between a character’s role in a show and the type of language variety they speak. The results of this analysis showed no strong relationship between these factors; all character types were made up of majority *SAE speakers, illustrating the effect of the Standard Language Ideology on the podcasts. Additionally, speakers of three regional varieties, Southern English, New …

SociolingüÍStica Urbana, SociolingüÍStica Rural : El Caso De La RegióN Del Cibao, RepúBlica Dominicana, Juanita M. Reyes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Resumen

Effect Of Exposure To L2 Socio-Cultural Background On The L1-Based Conceptual System Of Korean Learners Of English, Hyeyeon Kim

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study explores the conceptual system of adult Korean learners of English with three different levels of exposure to a second language (L2) cultural background. Assuming that different exposure to an L2 socio-cultural backgrounds plays a significant role in modifying a learner’s conceptual system that operates both an L1 as well as an L2 channel, this study examines the influence of L2 cultural background knowledge on (previously developed) L1-based conceptual knowledge of lexical items in production. The cross-cultural difference of lexical-conceptual knowledge is characterized by the lexical items (pairs of L1-L2 lexical items) existing in both in their first language …

Information, Politics And Government Communication : Discourse Analyses Of The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency On Twitter, Nicolau Depaula

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Government communication is an important activity for society, during times of calm and times of crises. Moreover, social media have become widespread information and communication technologies for government agencies around the world. In the U.S. federal government alone, there are thousands of accounts on various platforms broadcasting multiple messages a day. However, there seems to be few analyses of government discourse on social media. Although content analyses of the posts of various types of government agencies around the world abound, the categories are narrow to specific events or are agnostic about details of semantics and language structure. In this study …

Navigating The Binary : Gender Presentation Of Non-Binary Individuals, Sharone Amalia Horowit-Hendler

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Much of linguistic study of gender has focused on the binary: “men’s language” and “women’s language”. Similarly, most of society recognizes only two genders with the assumption that gender is connected to body and that everyone will map onto this binary. How then do non-binary individuals present themselves when they desire to be perceived outside of this dichotomy? This study re-examines the question of which masculine, feminine, and non-binary markers exist, and explores the ways that participants are aware of and utilize these signifiers in performing their gender identities.

Melacak Akar Kreativitas Di Kota Bandung Masa Kolonial, Achmad Sunjayadi

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

In 2007 Bandung was designated as a pilot project for the creative cities of Asia Pacific, and in 2015 Bandung was included in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. It is related to the development of the city of Bandung and the creativity of the population. Its creativity is formed through a process. This article traces the roots of this creativity since the beginning of its formation in the early 19th century to become the city of Bandung in the early 20th century. The method used is the historical method supported by creative cities’ and voluntary organization’s concepts. Primary sources were …

Decolonizing Gender Identities In Indonesia: A Study Of Bissu ‘The Trans-Religious Leader’ In Bugis People, Petsy Jessy Ismoyo

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Bhinneka Tunggal Ika is one of the pillars of Indonesia that has placed our nation and nationess to a diversity of identity, from genders, tribes, religions, to cultures. Indonesia has a long history of gender diversity that recognized various gender identities as part of the culture. Henceforth, In Indonesia, gender is not perceived in a binary way between male or female, masculine and feminine, without giving the ‘third space’ to other genders and sexuality. For example, Bugis people recognize five genders: oroané, makkunrai, calabai, calalai, and bissu, which will be examined further in this paper. In reality, a lively debate …

Bilingual Versus Monolingual Performance Within Memory Suppression, Santiago David

CMC Senior Theses

Bilingual participants have been argued to have a cognitive inhibitory advantage over monolinguals resulting in a faster ability to inhibit information. However, the advantage has not been studied using the item-method within the Directed Forgetting (DF) paradigm, which is suggested to cause inhibition through remember and forget instructions. As the DF paradigm uses a recall and then recognition task format, the current study also investigated the possibility of retrieval-practice effects of the recall task on recognition. By utilizing the item-method with recall and no-recall conditions, the possible bilingual cognitive advantage, role of inhibition in DF, and potential retrieval-practice effects were …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of The Training And Supervision Provided To Spanish/English Bilingual Graduate Students, Sonia Venegas Mezquita

Theses and Dissertations

Spanish/English bilingual graduate students (n = 7) completed interviews evaluating language variables, training variables, and supervision related experiences. Experiences were gathered through the use of open-ended questions which focused on participants' linguistics abilities, program coursework, training experiences, and supervision experiences. A phenomenological research design was applied to analyze the collected data from the qualitative interviews. A phenomenological research design uses the collection of qualitative (open-ended) data in response to the research question (Mruk, 2010). Results indicated that the most common areas in the program which graduate students identified as most helpful in preparation for working with Spanish-speaking Latinx clients were …

Measuring Language Development Through Self-Assessment, Troy L. Cox, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

Talk to any cyclist or runner, and they can name instances when the universe seems to conspire against them with headwinds that hinder their progress. It is easy to identify and often blame external forces for causing us to fail. Conversely, we often attribute success to our own ability, being blissfully unaware of the tailwinds that assist us. This blindness to headwind/tailwind asymmetry (Davidai & Gilovich, 2016) in viewing one’s own performance is not limited solely to endurance athletes but can be found in other areas of self-assessment. Performance rarely occurs in a vacuum. There are typically external forces that …

The Absence Of A Religiolect Among Latter-Day Saints In Southwest Washington, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

The term religiolect was coined by Benjamin Hary (1992, xiii) to describe a variety of language used by a distinct religious community, originally within the context of the Jewish linguistic spectrum. Religion has been shown to play an important role in various aspects of language, such as Arabic loanword adoption among Telugu speakers (Salami 2010), Persian loanwords and greetings among English-speaking Bahá’is (Masumian 2015), fluency in Sanskrit (Christian 1976), language choice among Hindus in the United States (Pandharipande 2010), maintenance of Hakka in East Malaysia (Ding and Goh 2020), and prevalence of linguistic fossils in Jewish Malayalam (Gamliel 2017). “Christianese,” …

Back Vowel Distinctions And Dynamics In Southern Us English, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

We investigate low/back vowels /u, oʊ, ʊ, ɔ, ɑ/ in Southern American English (SAE).

Research on SAE has analyzed changes in position over generational time.

Most work on trajectories is limited to impressionistic coding (“loss of upgliding”) or reduces trajectories to summary statistics (vector length, rate of change).

We analyze both the position and the shape of back vowels’ formant trajectories in apparent time, using new data from the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS).

Contextual Information In Social How-To Questions That Initiate Documentation, Matt Baker

Faculty Publications

This study introduces social question-and-answer (SQA) documentation to technical and professional communication scholarship. It conceptualizes SQA as interactive, user-generated documentation and describes contextual information types within social how-to questions that initiate documentation. It also explores whether contextual information associates with answers that complete the interactive documentation. Results reliably describe 15 information types based on content analysis of 3,529 contextual information types from 500 questions. Exploratory statistical analysis suggests that askers may increase answerability by including less speculative thought, more error messages, and less general situation information. To facilitate complete SQA documentation, the study calls for additional research into question content …

Locations, Programs, And Content Of Graduate Education In Business Communication, Stephen A. Carradini, Matt Baker, Matthew R. Sharp, Elise Davidson

Faculty Publications

This study explored locations, programs, and content of graduate education in business communication to provide guidance for prospective graduate students interested in becoming business communication faculty.

The researchers conducted a survey of business communication scholars, drawing on the backgrounds and knowledge of those who currently teach and research business communication.

Findings indicate that 93 universities offer programs supporting graduate business communication education. This number dwarfs the 12 previously documented programs. These 93 programs are rarely called “business communication.” More respondents received training in business communication practice in master’s programs than in doctoral programs, while more respondents received training in pedagogy …

Improving Nmt Quality Using Terminology Injection, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Duane K. Dougal

Faculty Publications

Many organizations use domain- or organization-specific words and phrases. This paper explores the use of vetted terminology as an input to neural machine translation (NMT) for improved results: ensuring that the translation of individual terms is consistent with an approved multilingual terminology collection. We discuss, implement, and evaluate a method for injecting terminology and for evaluating terminology injection. Our use of the long short-term memory (LSTM) attention mechanism prevalent in state-of-the-art NMT systems involves attention vectors for correctly identifying semantic entities and aligning the tokens that represent them, both in the source and the target languages. Appropriate terminology is then …

Discourse Analysis Of Nyt’S Headlines On Terrorism And Climate Change: How Media Reflects Our Conceptualization Of Security, Helena Gabrielle Ong

Pomona Senior Theses

Although climate change and terrorism are both considered national security threats by U.S. military experts, the American public views these threats differ- ently, with climate change at lower risk and priority in comparison to terror- ism. This reflects a difference in how the public conceptualizes security threats. This paper aims to address that gap through media coverage. This study ex- amines the language of newspaper headlines for terrorism and climate change in order to identify the dominant representations of these issues in the media. I analyze the discourse of two security issues—terrorism and climate change– by comparing news headlines from …

Lexical Items As Facets Of Identity In Discourse, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

Lexical items are used in discourse not to provide objective direct reference, nor to reflect a language’s system of categorization, nor in accordance with cognitive categories, but rather to communicate different perspectives. Lexical items function as facets of identity, chosen by an author to convey a subjective message. The point is illustrated through an analysis of lexical co-reference in Antonio Tabucchi’s Donna di Porto Pim e altre storie.

Relevant Angry Affect Slows Response Time To Commands, Aleah Combs

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Previous research has found that emotional prosody can interact with speech perception and listeners’ processing of the meaning of particular word/emotion pairings(Kim and Sumner, 2017). What remains unclear is how this interactive processing can affect behavioral responses such as responses to imperatives. To answer this question,71 participants were presented with a series of commands given in a relevant affect.Commands were read either with angry prosody, happy prosody, or neutral prosody (control) and the participants were instructed to press the requested button on a response box as quickly and accurately as possible. All emotional states were simulated and normed for perceived …

Pmkns For Pie: Parsed Morphological Katr Networks Of Sanskrit For Proto-Indo-European, Ryan Mark Mcdonald

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis, I construct two computational networks for Sanskrit to test theories of nominal accentuation as a way of examining the simplicity of each theory. I will be examining the Paradigmatic Approach and the Compositional Approach to nominal accentuation. For the Paradigmatic Approach, nominals are categorized into mobile and static categories based on how the accent appears in the paradigm (Fortson 2010). For the Compositional Approach, accent mobility is a result of the combination of morphemes and their inherent accent states (Kirparsky 2010). To construct these networks, I use the KATR extension to the DATR language for lexical knowledge …

An Intonational Description Of African American Language In Princeville, Nc, Christopher M. Dale

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis uses data from the Princeville, NC section of the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) in order to address two topics concerning language: first, what the intonation of the Princeville participants of the CORAAL looks like acoustically; and second, if intonation is the salient feature that categorizes a speaker as Black or non-Black. The acoustic analysis software, Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2019), is used to take average, minimum, and maximum f0 measurements for 16 participants (9 women and 7 men) across three age groups. From these measurements, the rate of change is calculated in Hz/second to determine …

The Mothman And Other Strange Tales: Shaping Queer Appalachia Through Folkloric Discourse In Online Social Media Communities, Brenton Watts

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Little work has been conducted on the intersections of queer and Appalachian identities, in part because these two identities are viewed as incompatible (Mann 2016). This study uses a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach to examine the Instagram posts of the Queer Appalachia Project, which represent a substantial body of discourse created by and for queer Appalachians. Of specific interest to this analysis are those posts which employ folkloric figures, such as West Virginia’s Mothman, to do identity work that is queer, Appalachian, and queer-Appalachian. Often, this act is accomplished through juxtaposition with Appalachian imagery and the reclamation of homophobic …

“Home Is More Than Just A Place”: Oral Personal Narrative Storytelling In Central Appalachia, Brandon Jent

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This project seeks a linguistic understanding of oral personal narrative storytelling in Central Appalachia, particularly as it manifests in Eastern Kentucky, with aims of providing insight into the Appalachian storyteller trope (e.g., Montgomery 1998). Structural and discursive elements of oral personal narrative were identified and positioned within their sociocultural context through discourse analysis and narrative studies. Data were collected from story circles, a methodology first implemented in cultural and community organizing spaces in the South and throughout Appalachia (Roadside Theater 2014, Junebug Productions n.d.). The collected stories were transcribed and analyzed through a discourse analysis framework that combines discourse pragmatics, …

Language Transfer Between English And German: A Phonetics-Based Study Of Interactions Between Speakers' Native And Second-Language Vowel Systems, Emelia Bensonmeyer

Scripps Senior Theses

The present study addresses language contact processes in which the phonetic systems of the languages that bilinguals speak interact. Specifically, language transfer with respect to English and German was examined, focusing on native German speakers (L1) who learned English as a second language (L2). It employed as its central method an analysis of their vowel systems, both language-specifically and cross-linguistically. Extralinguistic variables were also considered, ranging from speakers’ age of acquisition (AOA) of English to their length of residence in an English-speaking environment to their consideration of home. Results indicated statistically significant differences between speakers’ production of /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ …

Murdoch Murdoch: A Case Study In Threats To Ontological Security In Far-Right Propaganda, Julian Morein

Capstone Showcase

Adapting the Ethnographic Discourse Analysis method developed by Stanton Wortham and Angela Reyes this thesis traces the language employed in the ethno-nationalist web series Murdoch Murdoch. While not as widely known as other examples of the burgeoning landscape of far-right internet content such as news sites like InfoWars or Brietbart, Murdoch Murdoch can still reveal crucial details about how far right propaganda seeks to radicalize its viewers. This thesis argues that Murdoch Murdoch uses its visual and discursive indexicals to present a near absolute dichotomy between a Positive Self that consists of white ethno-nationalism, and a Negative Other that …

“We’Re Here, We’Re Queer, We Will Not Live In Fear!”: A Content Analysis Exploring Gender Disparity In The Public Reappropriation Of Lgbtq+ Slurs, Nicolas Hall

Capstone Showcase

As minorities, members of the LGBTQ+ community have faced many hardships throughout history, such as the use of language as a weapon against them. However, this research explores the public display of linguistic reappropriation of LGBTQ+ derogatory language and terms within the community. Throughout history, the use of slurs (e.g. faggot and dyke) and their social definitions have shifted from having no connection to the community to directly affected these individuals. These terms have been used to demonize members of the LGBTQ+ community for decades. Despite this reality, there are some scholars who suggest that these terms are being reappropriated, …

The Power Of Language: An Analysis Of Language Use And Attitudes In Moroccan Universities, Mikaela K. Thomas

Honors Theses

This study examines the connections between language use and attitudes in Moroccan universities. Morocco is a North African country that is historically multilingual, with communities speaking Moroccan Arabic (Darija), indigenous Amazigh, French, and English, in addition to the Standard Arabic used in government and by the Muslim community. The French Protectorate from 1912 to 1956 ushered in colonial language policies and imposed the French education system that enforced linguistic hierarchies. While the subsequent Arabization period attempted to reestablish the importance of Standard Arabic in Morocco, the policies failed to promote true multilingualism by ignoring the Amazigh and Darija languages. Today, …

The Effects Of Chinese And Spanish Writing Systems On L2 English Learners’ Vocabulary Acquisition, John Mitchell

All Master's Theses

Writing systems vary in how they relate graphemes to phonology and meaning. Consequently, each writing system makes unique demands on native speakers, resulting in different cognitive processes. This research examines the visual and phonological processes used by native Spanish and Chinese speakers and how these processes affect their acquisition of English vocabulary and spelling. Experiments 1 and 2 investigate how native Chinese and Spanish speakers associate graphemes to phonology. Experiments 3 seeks to differentiate visual processing from phonological processing when acquiring vocabulary. Experiment 4 assesses the efficacy of those processes. Six native Chinese speakers (NCS) and six native Spanish speakers …

Practice Makes Perfect: Practice Engagement Theory And The Development Of Adult Literacy And Numeracy Proficiency, Stephen Reder, Britta Gauly, Clemens Lechner

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Practice engagement theory (PET) posits that individuals’ literacy proficiencies develop as a by-product of their engagement in everyday reading and writing practices and, reciprocally, that literacy proficiencies affect levels of engagement in reading and writing practices. This suggests that literacy training which increases engagement in meaningful practices might generate proficiency growth. Research has shown that this approach does indeed seem to be effective in improving (adult) learners’ literacy proficiency. A number of cross-sectional comparisons of participants’ and non-participants’ performance in various training activities, as well as quantitative modelling of adults’ proficiency growth in longitudinal studies have confirmed the theoretical assumptions …