Digital Commons Network^™

The Use Of Occitan Dialects In Languedoc-Roussillon, France, Virginia Jane Geddie

Honors Theses

Since the medieval period, the Occitan dialects of southern France have been a significant part of the culture of the Midi region of France. In the past, it was the language of the state and literature. However, Occitan dialects have been in a slow decline, beginning with the Ordinance of Villers-Coterêts in 1539 which banned the use of Occitan in state affairs. While this did little to affect the daily life and usage of Occitan, it established a precedent that is still referred to in modern arguments about the use of regional languages (Costa, 2). In the beginning of the …

A Phonetic Basis For The Sonority Of [X], Jonah Katz

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Online Writing Labs: Resources For Second Language Writers, Joshua Paiz, Ghada Gherwash

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

This presentation at the 2014 TESOL Developer's Showcase discusses best practices and special considerations for using Online Writing Labs as L2 writing support tools. This discussion is grounded both in recent OWL/Writing Center theory, as well as from the presenter's experiences working on a large­scale OWL in a variety of capacities. To add to the discussion on special considerations when using OWLs, this presentation also provides a discussion of a recently completed research project involving the Purdue OWL and how it is used to support EFL writing. It will highlight how, even in resources labeled as "ESL," can be overly …

Encouraging The Growth Of Owls Worldwide: Utilizing Intercultural Rhetoric To Inform Best Practices, Joshua Paiz

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

This presentation for the 8th Intercultural Rhetoric and Discourse Conference discusses work on the Purdue OWL, focusing on the resources targeting L2 writers writing for particular contexts (e.g., Writing for the Chinese Business Context), as these resource-types tend to be some of the early Purdue OWL spaces where the findings of intercultural rhetoric maybe more readily applied. This discussion will also provide an overview of recent research looking at the place of and practitioner attitudes towards OWLs in general and, more specifically, the Purdue OWL. The presenter will conclude by discussing new content development initiatives at the Purdue OWL and …

The Adaptation Of Native Language Construal Patterns In Second Language Acquisition, Loraine Obler, Eve Higby

Publications and Research

First language attrition occurs when a bilingual’s native language shows evidence of language change due to the predominant use of a second language. Recent research in first language attrition has shown that lexical retrieval and word choice are more vulnerable to reduced native language use than are grammatical constructions. However, some research has shown that grammar can also be affected, especially for constructions which exist in both languages but have different distributions in their usage. Taking concepts from cognitive linguistics, we attempt to describe how this research may provide insight into how language construal from the second language can affect …

Maternal Perceptions Of Agency In Intergenerational Transmission Of Spanish: The Case Of Latinos In The U.S. Midwest, Isabel Velázquez

Spanish Language and Literature Papers

This article examines the ways in which a group of first-generation Latino immigrants to the U.S. Midwest conceptualized their role in their children’s bilingual development. Respondents were asked to identify the individuals or institutions on which their children’s language and academic development depended, as well as household practices perceived as conducive to Spanish maintenance, and perceived obstacles to their children’s use of Spanish in the domains of home, school, and community. Discussion centers on maternal perceptions of agency because of the centrality of the mother in intergenerational minority language transmission. It is argued here that immigrant mothers’ perceptions of agency …

French Ideology Of English As A World Language And American Second Language Speakers, Sarah Price Wright

Honors Theses

French Ideology of English as a World Language and American Second Language Speakers compares French ideology of American English and French ideology of the American accent in French to investigate if the two correlate. The study seeks to answer the question: Is ideology linked to the speech community represented or is it linked to the language forms themselves? The study includes a literature review of previously published studies on the subjects of French ideology of English as a World Language, the competition between French and English as a lingua franca, French perceptions of second language speakers, and the American accent …

Language Difference Between Peer And Professional Drug And Substance Abuse Counselors: What Can It Tell Us?, Lizzeth Celeste Jensen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Language studies that explore the human mind are not new. In recent years new techniques have opened new areas of investigation. One such is whether different professional groups do not merely use language in different ways, but a) "think" differently, or b) may be professionally more effective.

This is an exploratory study that uses secondary data analysis to see if difference in approach to providing help by Peer versus Professional substance use counselors, are reflected in differences of language use. For the purpose of this study Peer will stand for those counselors which, during the interview, stated they were ex-addicts …

A Corpus-Based Study Of The Use Of Prepositional Verbs In Second Language Emergent Academic Writing, Elizabeth Wilcoxon

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In this paper, the author reports on a corpus-based study of prepositional verbs in L2 emergent academic writing using data collected from English as a Second Language [ESL] and English for Academic Purposes [EAP] classrooms in a Hispanic-serving university in the US. Prepositional verbs are relatively common in academic prose (lacking the informal overtones of phrasal verbs) and draw on the full set of prepositions (Biber et al., 1999). They are also difficult to acquire given the challenges posed by prepositional usage for most ESL/EAP learners. The literature in this area highlights the importance of prepositional verbs in L2 learning …

A Variationist Sociolinguistic Study Of /R/ Deletion In Turkish, Sevda Rahymov

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Variable /r/ deletion in word final position has been explored in several languages such as English and different dialects of Spanish. This study will investigate /r/ deletion in Turkish, an Altaic language that belongs to Ural-Altaic languages family. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to explore the influence of linguistic and social factors in the variation of /r/ in the progressive affix, /-yor-/ in the dialect of Turkish spoken in Istanbul. I hypothesize that the variability in the deletion of /r/ is not random, but can be accounted for by the study of linguistic and social factors.

Educating Students Who Do Not Speak The Societal Language: The Social Construction Of Language-Learner Categories, Guadalupe Valdés, Luis E. Poza, Maneka Deanna Brooks

Faculty Publications

On 21 September 2012, California Assembly Bill 2193 was approved by Governor Jerry Brown. The bill added sections to California’s Education Code defining the terms long-term English learner and English learner at risk of becoming a long-term English learner. It mandated that the Department of Education collect data on the number of students corresponding to both new categories and report those data to school districts. This specific example of the construction of categories and labels matters because it is a clear example of how coexisting discourses and language ideologies provide a set of cultural rules, conditions, practices, and power …

Norms And Varieties Of English And Tesol Teacher Agency, M. Obaidul Hamid, Lingyan Zhu, Richard B. Baldauf Jr.

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The growing recognition of the plurality of English underling the World Englishes (WE) paradigm has problematised the conventional second language acquisition (SLA) views of errors. If English use in emerging English-speaking contexts is to be judged by local norms, as argued by WE scholars, applying exocentric norms in these contexts can be inappropriate. On the other hand, despite the significant growth of WE, varieties of new Englishes have yet to develop widely acceptable endocentric norms. These developments have raised a critical question: How can TESOL teachers distinguish between errors in the SLA sense and varietal features in the WE sense? …

Rhetorical Ripples: The Church Of The Subgenius, Kenneth Burke & Comic, Symbolic Tinkering, Lee A. Carleton

Theses and Dissertations

Humor has long been an effective way to engage difficult sociopolitical topics in a way that avoids polemical confrontation and provides opportunity for pleasure, catharsis and self-knowledge. In the context of today’s polarized politics and protest, creative satirical performance that deploys “symbolic tinkering” can provide a “comic frame of reference” that, according to Kenneth Burke, more effectively conveys its message while providing reflexive insight. The satirical Church of the SubGenius naturally practices this rhetorical frame in their multimedia creations. Using the lens of Burke’s Attitudes Toward History, this essay is an analysis of SubGenius rhetoric with a focus on …

Old English And Old Norse: An Inquiry Into Intelligibility And Categorization Methodology, Eric Martin Gay

Theses and Dissertations

To say that the Old English and Old Norse languages have an interesting history with one another is a declaration of utter understatement. So intertwined were these languages and their people that we, some 1,000 years later, are still attempting to discern the extent of their relationship with one another. As new evidence and the reevaluation of old evidence emerges, research in the historical Germanic languages continues to paint a clearer picture. However, the study of possible Old English and Old Norse mutual intelligibility is a subject that is comparatively new within the field, and as such is still exploring …

Perception Based Misunderstandings In Human-Computer Dialogues, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Articles

In a situated dialogue, misunderstandings may arise if the participants perceive or interpret the environment in different ways. In human-computer dialogue this may be due the sensor errors. We present an experiment system and a series of experiments in which we investigate this problem.

Language Use In Six Study Abroad Programs: An Exploratory Analysis Of Possible Predictors, Dan Dewey, Jennifer Brown, Wendy Baker, Rob A. Martinsen, Carrie Gold, Dennis Eggett

Faculty Publications

A common predictor of language gains during study abroad (SA) is amount of language use. Yet little attention has been given to determining what factors influence the extent of language use while abroad. Studies in this area have mainly been case studies of learners in single locations. In this larger study, we seek to determine variables connected with language use by examining 118 learners studying abroad in Madrid, M´erida (Mexico), Paris, Moscow, Nanjing, or Cairo. These learners reported their second language (L2) use over a 1-week period during their stay. Significant predictors of reported L2 use include SA program, age, …

On The Interaction Of Implicative Structure And Type Frequency In Inflectional Systems, Jeffery R. Parker, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

How do sources of information minimize the uncertainty associated with predicting unknown inflected forms?

Finding Genealogy Facts With Linguistic Analysis, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Peter Lindes, David W. Embley

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wicked Intense: The Grammaticalization Of Wicked And Other Intensifiers In New Hampshire, Emma M. Brown

Honors Theses and Capstones

This article presents a synchronic study of wicked and other intensifiers in Southern New Hampshire. Two sets of data were collected: one from the social media website Twitter, and the other from spoken casual interviews conducted by students at the University of New Hampshire. In all, more than 9000 intensifiable adjectives and verbs were collected, with rates of 22 and 24 per cent intensification for the Twitter and spoken data, respectively. The first goal of this paper is to show that one intensifier in particular, wicked, is in the process of grammaticalizing through the mechanisms of desemanticization and extension …

Split-Intransitivity In Swahili And Hittite: An Optimality-Theoretic Perspective, Tina M. Villa

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Much research on unaccusativity has been done over the past three-and-a-half decades since the formulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978). Researchers have examined the semantics of intransitive verbs as well as their syntax to account for the classification of a verb as either unaccusative or unergative; however, for the most part, a similar conclusion across researchers has been reached that neither the semantics of the verb nor the syntactic structure is sufficient by itself to satisfy certain diagnostics of unaccusativity (Legendre and Sorace 2003). Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) argue that the syntactic classification of all verbs is semantically …

The Variable Effect Of Form And Lemma Frequencies On Phonetic Variation: Evidence From /S/ Realization In Two Varieties Of Colombian Spanish, Earl K. Brown, Micheal S. Gradoville, Richard J. File-Muriel

Faculty Publications

Research has shown that frequency conditions the variable realization of sounds. However, the literature has not addressed whether the frequency of the individual word forms, or form frequency, has a larger conditioning effect than the combined frequencies of the members of the paradigm to which the forms belong, or lemma frequency. Monofactorial correlation tests and monofactorial and multifactorial linear regression analyses are performed on 2,734 tokens of Spanish /s/ in sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Cali and Barranquilla, Colombia. Two findings are highlighted: (1) frequency is only significant in the variety of Spanish that has low overall rates of /s/ reduction, …

Student Achievement And French Sentence Repetition Test Scores, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Benjamin J. Millard

Faculty Publications

Sentence repetition (SR) tests are one way of probing a language learner’s oral proficiency. Test-takers listen to a set of carefully engineered sentences of varying complexity one-by-one, and then try to repeat them back as exactly as possible. In this paper we explore how well an SR test that we have developed for French corresponds with the test-taker’s achievement levels, represented by proficiency interview scores and by college class enrollment. We describe how we developed our SR test items using various language resources, and present pertinent facts about the test administration. The responses were scored by humans and also by …

Evaluating Lemmatization Models For Machine-Assisted Corpus-Dictionary Linkage, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Kevin Black, Eric K. Ringger, Paul Felt, Kevin Seppi, Kristian Heal

Faculty Publications

The task of corpus-dictionary linkage (CDL) is to annotate each word in a corpus with a link to an appropriate dictionary entry that documents the sense and usage of the word. Corpus-dictionary linked resources include concordances, dictionaries with word usage examples, and corpora annotated with lemmas or word senses. Such CDL resources are essential for many tasks including assisting language learners, linguistic research, philology, and translation. Lemmatization is a common approximation to automating corpus-dictionary linkage, where lemmas stand in for the headwords of an actual dictionary. In our machine-assisted CDL system design, data-driven lemmatization models provide machine assistance to human …

An Experimental Approach To Ambisyllabicity In English, David Eddington, Dirk Elzinga

Faculty Publications

The factors that influence English speakers to classify a consonant as ambisyllabic are explored in 581 bisyllabic words. The /b/ in habit, for example, was considered ambisyllabic when a participant chose hab as the first part of the word and bit as the second. Geminate spelling was found to interact with social variables; older participants and more educated speakers provided more ambisyllabic responses. The influence of word-level phonotactics on syllabification was also evident. A consonant such as the medial /d/ in standard is attested as the second consonant in the coda of many English words (e.g. lard), as well as …

Experiencias De Discriminación Lingüística En Contra De Inmigrantes De Primera Generación En El Paso, Tx, Maria Asuncion Gutierrez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El poder simbólico del idioma, la racialización y la discriminación lingüística, no sólo afectan la forma en que las personas son tratadas dentro de una sociedad, también influencian la identidad de éstas y la manera en que son tratadas como parte de un determinado grupo. Este estudio revela las diferentes formas en que el idioma inglés es usado como poder simbólico en contra de la gente, racializándola y discriminándola porque no lo habla o lo habla con acento mexicano, ejerciendo de esta manera violencia simbólica. En este sentido, las/los inmigrantes de primera generación que no saben hablar inglés o lo …

Evolución Y Desarrollo Conceptual Del Texto De Especialidad Desde El Análisis Del Discurso Hasta Las Lenguas Con Propósitos Específicos, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Writing evolves in society and so do kinds of text in a discourse community in specific ways. The disciplines involved in the analysis of these written texts follow these changes and explain these adjustments. This article reviews the idea of texts when discourse analysis began. Its objective is to look at how this concept has evolved within each discourse community through the several changes that have occurred in the society during the last few decades.

Phonetic Realization Of /P, T, K/ In Spanish-English Code-Switching, Gisela Simental

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The aim of this investigation is to contribute to the relatively unexplored area of phonetic realization of sounds during code switching. The present study will focus on the analysis of voice onset time of voiceless stops in stressed word initial position. Spanish and English are ideal languages to test how bilinguals process and produce the low-level phonetic properties of stops during CS. Both languages have the same set of voiceless stops: /p, t, k/, yet these stops have different phonetic (or acoustic) characteristics in each language. Data was collected from the naturalistic speech of balanced bilinguals who were exposed to …

Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Linguistic uses of ‘sisterhood’ provide a window into disparate understandings of relationality among virtual and actual interlocutors in women’s development across vectors of caste, class, ethnicity and nationality. In this essay, I examine the trope of ‘sisterhood’ as it was employed at a women’s development project in Janakpur, Nepal, in the 1990s. I demonstrate that the use of this common signifier of kinship with culturally disparate ‘signifieds’ created a confusion of meaning, and differential readings of the politics of relationality. In my view, ‘sister,’ as used at this project, was a multivalent, strategically deployed, and divergently interpreted term. In particular, …

Domestication And Foreignization Strategies In Translating Sinbad Of The Arabian Nights, Safa M. Elnaili

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Over the centuries translation theories have provided strategies to help the translator overcome various linguistic and cultural obstacles that arise in any intercultural exchange between different languages and cultures. Idioms and culturally-bound expressions are among prominent translation problems, especially when the translation is between two completely different languages like Arabic and English which diverge both linguistically and culturally. The most debated translation strategies are Domestication and Foreignization. This research examines the use of these two strategies in four English translations of one of the world`s most famous cultural collections, The Arabian Nights. The study specifically investigates the use of domestication …

The Effects Of Explicit Listening Strategy Instruction On The Listening Comprehension Of English As Second Language (Esl) Community College Students, Yi Guan

Doctoral Dissertations

This mixed methods study explored the effects of explicit listening strategy instruction on the beginning-level ESL learner's listening comprehension at a community college in Northern California. Most previous studies measured the effectiveness of listening strategy instruction by comparing students' test scores, but little research explored the students' listening strategy development and their perceptions of the strategy instruction. Furthermore, no prior research exists on the effects of listening strategy instruction among community college students.

The researcher employed the concurrent triangulation approach, collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data simultaneously. Data sources included interviews, a listening test, background surveys, and classroom …