Digital Commons Network^™

Einführung In Die Deutsche Linguistik / Introduction To German Linguistics, Christopher D. Sapp

Textbooks and Open Educational Resources

This book is an introduction to the study of German linguistics, for students whose native language is not German. Although there are many introductions to German linguistics, this is the first one that is written with intermediate-level second-language learners in mind. The book, therefore, has two primary goals: to introduce students to formal linguistics as it applies specifically to German, and to foster second language acquisition of German by connecting linguistic analysis to practical exercises in pronunciation, grammar, sociolinguistics, etc.

Language Contact And Divergent Paths Of Variation: Bilingual Rhotics In Two Island Communities, Falcon Restrepo-Ramos

World Languages & Cultures Department Publications

In the Caribbean Archipelago of San Andres, Colombia, Spanish coexists with an English-based creole known as Islander. This paper examines the outcomes of language contact in terms of the variable production of bilingual rhotics in two settings where contact with Spanish has taken place differently: the island of San Andres was declared a free-duty port in 1953, thus encouraging commercial expansion and greater contact with Continental Spanish, the immigrant language; on the other hand, Old Providence, its sister island, has far less day-to-day interaction with Spanish speakers, and as such Islander is still prevalent in most life aspects of native …

Differential Responses To Constraints On Naming Agency Among Indigenous Peoples And Immigrants In Canada, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation.

Quasi-Factives And Cognitive Efficiency, Axel Barcelo Aspeitia, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

We introduce the notion of a "quasi-factive" -- sentences such as 'It isn't widely known that Obama has been arrested', which is true because he hasn't been arrested -- and offer an explanation of why we hear them as if they were factives.

Slurs And Register: A Case Study In Meaning Pluralism, Justina Diaz-Legaspe, Chang Liu, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always includes [-polite] and [+derogatory]. Thus, e.g., what distinguishes ‘Chinese’ from ‘chink’ is neither a peculiar sort of descriptive nor …

Deaf Children, Humor And Education Policy, Donna Jo Napoli, R. L. Sutton-Spence

Linguistics Faculty Works

Deaf children need true inclusion to learn, entailing consistent, pervasive use of visual-learning techniques. This is achieved via bilingual education policies that enforce deaf children’s rights to use sign language, permitting teachers to engage in deaf pedagogy using sign language. Educational policies advocating inclusion via an interpreter in the mainstreamed classroom create the “illusion of inclusion” (Glickman 2003). We argue that, in either case, humor can aid inclusion. Understanding humor is a developmental ability, related to cognitive, social, linguistic, and metalinguistic competence. Additionally, learning how humor is understood and expressed contributes to language mastery. However, we find little discussion of …

Ideological Analysis Of Colorblindness In Get Out, Danielle Goldstein

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This ideological analysis of the horror film, Get Out, directed by Jordan Peele investigates three major ideological aspects that are poignant to the film. The main ideology that will be examined is “colorblindness” also known as colorblind racism, which is the belief or attitude that denying the existence of race will cure racism and achieve racial equality. The two other sub-ideologies that will be examined are multicultural racism and post-racism, as they are both facets of colorblindness and work together to reinforce one another in society. Colorblindness is apparent in the film’s dialogue that reveal attitudes regarding interracial dating …

Designing A Russian Idiom-Annotated Corpus, Katsiaryna Aharodnik, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper describes the development of an idiom-annotated corpus of Russian. The corpus is compiled from freely available resources online and contains texts of different genres. The idiom extraction, annotation procedure, and a pilot experiment using the new corpus are outlined in the paper. Considering the scarcity of publicly available Russian annotated corpora, the corpus is a much-needed resource that can be utilized for literary and linguistic studies, pedagogy as well as for various Natural Language Processing tasks.

"Do They Know The Normal Language?": Language Attitudes And Ideologies In German Hip Hop Culture, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

This article presents a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language ideologies and language attitudes and builds on previous work by providing an organized framework connecting these notions. This framework is evaluated with reference to online and offline ethnographic work surrounding attitudes and ideologies about anglicisms, or English loanwords, among German hip hop fans and artists. Language attitudes are theorized as individual thoughts and expressions about language, and are often, but not always, informed by individual reproductions of language ideologies, which are conceived of as systematic, shared over groups of individuals, enduring, and mediated. Language ideologies can then be organized …

Choutouts: Language Contact And Us-Latin Hip Hop On Youtube, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

This paper presents a corpus-sociolinguistic analysis of lyrics and com-ments from videos for four US-Latinx hip hop songs on YouTube. A‘post-varieties’ (Seargeant and Tagg 2011) analysis of the diversity andhybridity of linguistic production in the YouTube comments finds thenotions of codemeshing and plurilingualism (Canagarajah 2009) usefulin characterizing the language practices of the Chicanx community ofthe Southwestern US, while a focus on the linguistic practices of com-menters on Northeastern ‘core’ artists’ tracks validate the use of namedlanguage varieties in examining language attitudes and ideologies asthey emerge in commenters’ discussions. Finally, this article advancesthe sociolinguistics of orthography (Sebba 2007) by examining thesocial …

Beyond A Language Boundary: Encounters With Silence And L1 Spanish-Speakers' Willingness To Communicate In English, John Turnbull

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The descriptive multi-case study asks three adult migrants, first-language (L1) Spanish-speakers from México, about their interpretations of their own and others’ silences as they navigate daily life, jobs, family, and English-language learning in the United States. Subjective opinions about silence, their second-language (L2) acquisition processes, comfort levels in various speaking situations, functions of L2 communication, and affective and social dimensions of language learning are related to participants’ willingness to communicate (WTC), a construct that measures a predisposition to talk, rather than stay silent, in L2 interaction.

The research, through daily language-use surveys and semi-structured Spanish-language interviews with the three English-language …

Morphometric Analysis Of Subfossil Macronycteris Spp. (Chiroptera: Hipposideridae) From Madagascar, Jamie Lynn Alumbaugh

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Macronycteris bats are morphologically conservative between species but demonstrate intraspecific morphological variation between geographic locations and sexes. Two of the four living species of Macronycteris are found on Madagascar, where they are broadly distributed and demonstrate a trend in body size correlated with the latitudinal precipitation cline on the western side of the island. The presence of an extinct species, M. besaoaka, from Anhjohibe Cave in northern Madagascar suggests that Macronycteris was once more diverse, at least with respect to morphology. Since its description, taxonomic and phylogenetic revisions have reshaped our understanding of this genus. On Madagascar, these include the …

Leveraging Nlp And Social Network Analytic Techniques To Detect Censored Keywords: System Design And Experiments, Christopher S. Leberknight, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Internet regulation in the form of online censorship and Internet shutdowns have been increasing over recent years. This paper presents a natural language processing (NLP) application for performing cross country probing that conceals the exact location of the originating request. A detailed discussion of the application aims to stimulate further investigation into new methods for measuring and quantifying Internet censorship practices around the world. In addition, results from two experiments involving search engine queries of banned keywords demonstrates censorship practices vary across different search engines. These results suggest opportunities for developing circumvention technologies that enable open and free access to …

Designing And Developing An Online Self-Regulated Learning Course, Grant Eckstein, Mariah Krauel-Nix, Norman W. Evans, Benjamin L. Mcmurry

Faculty Publications

The concept of self-regulated learning has been a prominent topic in education and has been researched and applied to various educational fields. In the field of TESOL, self-regulation has been categorized into dimensions and linked with possible application tools to help ESL/EFL students better apply and develop related skills (Andrade and Evans 2013, 2015). Although these applications have seen some success, the administration of one intensive English program felt that its center's self-regulated learning program was ineffective for teachers and students. Therefore, curriculum designers evaluated the center's program, compiled data, and formed design specifications for an improved program. Their specifications …

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

Verbs In Egyptian Arabic: A Case For Register Variation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael G. White

Faculty Publications

The limited availability of Egyptian Arabic (EA) corpus resources, especially speech corpora, has left open opportunity for research into such dialect phenomena as register. In this paper we introduce a new two-millionword EA corpus, CALM. We perform a register analysis on EA between two subcorpora of CALM (i.e. Movies and Blogs), showing several features that vary between the two. A discussion follows about how annotation was carried out automatically, how it was handcorrected, and what the prospects are for carrying out similar studies using CALM.

Investigating The Use Of The Actfl Can-Do Statements In A Self-Assessment For Student Placement In An Intensive English Program, Maria M. Summers, Troy L. Cox, Benjamin L. Mcmurry, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

In this study, the authors use a validation framework to evaluate the usefulness of a self-assessment instrument based on the ACTFL Can-Do Statements for student placement in an Intensive English Program. The authors evaluated (a) the design of the instrument by investigating how well the intended item difficulties aligned with the actual item difficulties (ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines) and how well the scale functioned; (b) the assessment instrument itself through evaluating how reliably it distinguished between students with different levels of self-perception, and (c) the interpretation of scores that examined how well the results could be used as a proxy measure …

Are Beg And Bag-Raising Distinct? Regional Patterns In Prevelar Raising In North American English, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Conditioned raising of TRAP and DRESS before /g/.

BAG (~84 lexemes*)

flag, magnet, rag, flag, coagulate, antagonist, snag, tag, fragment, jagged, lag, shaggy, brag, scraggy, wag, stagnant, nag, gag, wagon, drag, dragon, agony, sag, zigzag, aggregate, scallywag, magnificent, haggle, octagonal, straggle, pragmatic, haggard, Pythagorean, Baghdad, aggravate…

BEG (~60 lexemes*) Regulate, leg, negative, egg, megaphone, pregnant, negligent, segregate, Greg, peg, segment, renege, tegument, keg, regnant, legate, stegosaur, interregnum, dregs, Megan, segue, JPEG, legacy, nutmeg, regolith, Regulus, omega, oregano, integrity, allegro, Pegasus, eglantine, telegraphy…

VAGUE (~16 lexemes*) bagel, fragrant, flagrant, plague, vague, vagrant, rutabaga, bodega, Prego, the Hague, Copenhagen, Reagen, San Diego, …

Extended Abstract: Comparison Of Peer And Instructor Qualitative Feedback On Presentations, Matthew J. Baker, William H. Baker

Faculty Publications

New presentation-feedback technologies enable peers and instructors to provide real-time qualitative feedback on oral presentations. Previous research suggests that summative quantitative ratings of peers and instructors tend to be moderately reliable, but no research exists on how substantive qualitative ratings compare. Analyzing the substantive qualitative feedback from 10 students and 10 instructors on two professional presentations, this study analyzes differences in the message- and messenger-related comments of peers and instructors. Findings suggest that instructors provide proportionally more messenger-related feedback.

Variation In Interrogative Abverbials: Cuán, Qué Tan, Cómo De, And Lo+ Adj./Adv.+ Que, David E. Eddington

Faculty Publications

Cuán, qué tan, and cómo de are used to modify adverbs and adjectives in interrogatives. They are also used in embedded clauses along with lo+adj./adv.+que. Instances of these expressions were extracted from the Corpus del Español. In interrogatives, qué tan was the most frequent. The idea that cuán is archaic or limited to literary usage is not supported by these data. Cómo de is extremely infrequent except in Peninsular Spanish. In embedded clauses the frequency of these expressions appear in this order of frequency: lo+adj./adv.+que > qué tan > cuán > cómo de. In an experiment, speakers from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, …

Dialogic Feedback And Its Effects On English Language Learners’ Writing Development: A Case Study, Shokhsanam Djalilova

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This exploratory case study aimed to investigate the meanings that second language (L2) learners derive from their writing purposes revising processes and their engagement with dialogic feedback. The goal was to grasp the meaning that revision experiences had for L2 learners (n=17) and to understand the context within which they were operating and its influence on their revision behavior. In order to gain a better understanding of L2 learner engagement and investment in the revision processes which were bound to time and context the case study was built upon an ecological-semiotic approach to learning. The case study aimed to construct …

What's In A Name: Obamacare V. The Affordable Care Act In The 2016 Election, Connor De Haan

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

While Obamacare and Affordable Care Act refer to the same essential policy, the social implications of each term varies greatly. In this work I present these terms as naming strategies, a class of referentially synonymous terms differing only in their form and social/political meaning. Specifically, I conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the distribution of Obamacare and Affordable Care Act in the 2016 presidential debates and platforms. Considering the form, history and connotations of each term, I explain the motivations behind their distributional differences. I find that Obamacare is the more frequent term overall, likely due to it's short …

Brechas En La Enseñanza De La Cultura Del Español Como Segunda Lengua, Elizabeth Mary Maldonado

Master's Theses

Esta investigación analiza el contenido cultural de cuatro libros de texto de español como L2 (segunda lengua) a nivel principiante publicados en los últimos siete años. La cultura suele estar presentada con poca profundidad por dos razones: hay más enfoque en conceptos de gramática y vocabulario y es un reto encontrar recursos auténticos a nivel principiante. Para investigar este problema, uso como guía las directrices del Método Comunicativo (MC) de Lee y VanPatten (2003) de la enseñanza de cultura. Además investigo si los libros presentan actividades con la cultura integrada, si es material que enseña "Cultura" o "cultura" y si …

Talkin' Black: African American English Usage In Professional African American Athletes, Kaela Fong

Scripps Senior Theses

Sports play an important role in the culture of the United States as does language, so the choice to use non-Standard dialects in a nation that privileges the Standard and negatively judges dialectical differences, especially those spoken by mostly people of color, is not undertaken lightly. Because of this privileging of Standard American English, it is assumed that only professional African American athletes are allowed to keep their native dialect if it is African American English (AAE) and still be successful. However, this is complicated by the historical and present increased criticisms women face in both sport and language. To …

Shifting Personas: A Case Study Of Taylor Swift, Lela R. Lyon

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis analyzes how Taylor Swift has changed the way she expresses her Southern identity, specifically her dialectal features, over the course of her career and through her switch from country music to pop music. There were two processes to assess the change in Swift’s speech: the production of /ai/ tokens in interviewed speech and the perception of dialectal change by fans in the comment sections of the interviews on YouTube. Seven interviews on YouTube and their comment sections were used as the data source for this study. Production of /ai/ was measured through an auditory analysis to determine whether …

The Anonymity Heuristic: How Surnames Stop Identifying People When They Become Trademarks, Russell W. Jacobs

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article explores the following question central to trademark law: if a homograph has both a surname and a trademark interpretation will consumers consider those interpretations as intrinsically overlapping or the surname and trademark as completely separate and unrelated words? While trademark jurisprudence typically has approached this question from a legal perspective or with assumptions about consumer behavior, this Article builds on the Law and Behavioral Science approach to legal scholarship by drawing from the fields of psychology, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

The Article concludes that consumers will regard the two interpretations as separate and unrelated, processing surname …

Bilingualism, Executive Function, And Beyond: Questions And Insights, Irina A. Sekerina, Lauren Spradlin, Virginia V. Valian

Publications and Research

The papers in this volume continue the quest to investigate the moderating factors and understand the mechanisms underlying effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They grew out of a 2015 workshop organized by two of us (Irina Sekerina and Virginia Valian) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, funded by NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences and Linguistics Programs (grant #1451631). The workshop’s goal was to bring together researchers whose fields did not always overlap and who could learn from each other’s insights. In attendance were linguists working on …

San Millán De La Cogolla Y La Celebración Pública Del Idioma: Memorialización Prospectiva De La Lengua En La Transición Española, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

Este artículo tiene por objeto contribuir al cuestionamiento de las políticas consensuales que presidieron el periodo transicional en España empleando para ello un ángulo de análisis glotopolítico. Para ello, toma como caso de estudio el metalenguaje desplegado en las celebraciones y efemérides transicionales relacionadas con las famosas glosas custodiadas en San Millán de la Cogolla. Este revela su apropiación nacionalista por parte de distintos poderes académicos, políticos e institucionales.

Language Planning And Its Discontents: Lines Of Flight In Haugen’S View Of The Politics Of Standardization, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

In this article, I claim that, while placing his theory of language, language planning, and standardization within a conceptual and historical framework inspired by Modernity, the emergence of the nation-state and liberal democracy, Haugen carefully mapped sociolinguistic phenomena onto their political treatment. And it was this careful and honest cartography—unafraid of generating internal tensions—that revealed aspects of language planning practice and scholarship in need of a critical treatment. Ultimately, Haugen embraced an understanding of linguistics that revolves around normativity and accepts language’s fundamentally political nature.

"I Have A Scream" Enunciaciones Disidentes En Torno Al 15m En España, José Del Valle, Natalia Castro Picón

Publications and Research

En este artículo analizaremos el primer Grito Mudo, gesto colectivo de desobediencia realizado por el movimiento de los Indignados en la Puerta del Sol de Madrid en mayo de 2011, como escena glotopolítica. En esta acción, que consistió en que la multitud auto-convocada guardase un minuto de silencio justo antes de la medianoche, cuando entraba en vigor la sentencia que ilegalizaba la concentración, convergen diferentes formas discursivas (que incluyen el lenguaje, el silencio y los cuerpos) que ponen en conflicto los regímenes normativos que limitan el sentido de la participación política y los límites de la democracia. Este tipo de …