Digital Commons Network^™

Fergie's Prescience: The Changing Nature Of Diglossia In Tunisia, Keith Walters

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Despite criticisms it has received, Ferguson's (1959b) account of diglossia should be recognized for its prescience. It offered not only an admittedly idealized characterization of diglossia in Arabic, but also pointed out how and why it might change. Focusing on Tunisia, this article demonstrates the many ways in which Fergie was right. It examines the changing demographics of Tunisians' access to the high variety of Arabic; the complex ways in which Tunisians, and Arabs more generally, deal with the "communicative tensions" diglossia creates; and considers the changing nature of Arabic in what is, in many ways, a postdiglossic Tunisia.

The Interactive Work Of Prosody In The Irf Exchange: Teacher Repetition In Feedback Moves, John Hellermann

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the interactive import of prosody from a perspective of participants' orientation to talk in interaction, taking advantage of data from institutional discourse to focus on the prosodic packaging of recurring turn sequences of the same discourse activity. The analysis focuses on the third slot of a ubiquitous three-part classroom discourse sequence, the IRF exchange (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975), a site in which teachers make repetitive feedback moves following student responses. Examination of more than 25 hours of classroom discourse and more than 300 third-turn teacher feedback types uncovered a systematic use of prosody for these teacher repetitions …

A Memory-Based Approach To Cantonese Tone Recognition, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael Emonts

Faculty Publications

This paper introduces memory-based learning as a viable approach for Cantonese tone recognition. The memorybased learning algorithm employed here outperforms other documented current approaches for this problem, which is based on neural networks. Various numbers of tones and features are modeled to find the best method for feature selection and extraction. To further optimize this approach, experiments are performed to isolate the best feature weighting method, the best class voting weights method, and the best number of k-values to implement. Results and possible future work are discussed.

A Multi-Platform Application Suite For Enhancing South Asian Language Pedagogy, Tao Bai, Christopher K. Chung, Konstantin Läufer, Daisy Rockwell, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This interdisciplinary project explores the potential for handheld/wireless (H/W) technology in the context of language education within and beyond the classroom. Specifically, we have designed and implemented a suite of multi-platform (desktop/laptop, handheld, and browser) applications to enhance the teaching of South Asian languages such as Hindi-Urdu. Such languages are very difficult to learn, let alone write, and H/W devices (with their handwriting/drawing capabilities) can play a significant role in overcoming the learning curve. The initial application suite includes a character/word tracer, a word splitter/joiner, a smart flashcard with audio, contextual augmented stories for reading comprehension, and a poetic metronome. …

Self-Perceptions Of Non-Native English Speaking Teachers Of English As A Second Language, Kathryn Ann Long

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of the present study was to examine the self-perceptions of effective non-native English speaking teachers (non-NESTs) of English as a Second Language (ESL) regarding their teaching behaviors. The study also sought to discover the relationship between effective non-NEST perceptions of their teaching behaviors and stereotypes for those behaviors. It further sought to define what experiences have contributed to their non-conformation if their perceptions do not fit the negative stereotypes of teaching behaviors of non-NESTs.

Implicit Prosody In Silent Reading: Relative Clause Attachment In Croatian, Nenad Lovric

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a relative clause (RC) follows two nouns (N1, N2) in a complex noun phrase such as that contained in the example English sentence below, the preferred interpretation has been found to differ across languages.

(1) Someone shot the servant [N1] of the actress [N2] who was on the balcony [RC].

In some languages (e.g., English), readers preferentially interpret the RC as attaching to (i.e., modifying) N2. In other languages (e.g., Spanish), there is a preference for attachment to N1. This cross-linguistic variation is the only known counterevidence to the claim that the human sentence processing routines are universal, and …

Ethnographic Descriptions Of English Corners In Shanghai, Gary Jones

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study explored the phenomenon of English Comers (EC) in Shanghai. These are informal communities formed for the purpose of practising English. In 1978, just after the death of Mao Ze Dong and the fall of the 'gang of four', many eager Chinese people gathered together to practise their oral English in the Shanghai People's Park. Many of these were old men and had been educated in English at missionary schools in Shanghai in the early 20th century. Today we see many successors to such groups in the ECs which meet in different locations throughout the city and which comprise …

Facilitating Second Language Acquisition (Sla) Through Computer-Mediated Communication (Cmc) In An English For Civil Engineering (Ece) Environment, Masputeriah Hamzah

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study explores the application of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in an English for Civil Engineering (ECE) learning setting. The aim is to examine the interactional opportunities present in the computer-mediated environment for evidence of conditions deemed facilitative of second language acquisition, based on the tenets prescribed by the Interaction Hypothesis. This theory emphasizes the importance of interaction in language learning and the necessity for learners to have access to meaningful and comprehensible input. It is based on the premise that acquisition will occur through interaction where learners arc provided opportunities to negotiate meaning in order to develop mutual understanding. In …

Ellipsis In Science And Technology Textbooks In English: Implications For Thai Students, Sripen Srestasathiern

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This is an analytical study which attempted to investigate Thai students' ability to interpret elliptical sentences and to recover and recognise ellipted elements in a science and technology context in English. Students' awareness, understanding, perceptions, problems and strategies in relation to ellipsis were also examined. The subjects for the study were 60 first year students from King Mongkut's Institute of Technology North Bangkok (KMITNB) who had enrolled in two compulsory English courses in KMITNB, Bangkok, Thailand. The instruments for this study were three 20 item ellipsis tests based on 5 ellipsis types classified by Quirk, et al. (1985). Items of …

Automated Rating Of Esl Essays, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Diane Strong-Krause

Faculty Publications

To date, traditional NLP parsers have not been widely successful in TESOLoriented applications, particularly in scoring written compositions. Re-engineering such applications to provide the necessary robustness for handling ungrammatical English has proven a formidable obstacle. We discuss the use of a nontraditional parser for rating compositions that attenuates some of these difficulties. Its dependency-based shallow parsing approach provides significant robustness in the face of language learners’ ungrammatical compositions. This paper discusses how a corpus of L2 essays for English was rated using the parser, and how the automatic evaulations compared to those obtained by manual methods. The types of modifications …

Transformation Based Learning For Specialization Of Generic Event Extractions, Mary D. Taffet, Nancy Mccracken, Eileen Allen, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

As part of our Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) project, we proposed to use Transformation Based Learning (TBL) to learn domain-specific specializations for generic event extractions. The primary goal of our learning task was to reduce the amount of human effort required for specializing generic event extractions to domains that are new and specific. Three initial annotation cycles and one annotation review and correction cycle involving a total of 70 documents were completed, with slightly over 32 hours required for the entire annotation effort; where possible, the annotation cycles started with bootstrapped files resulting from the application of TBL …

Jeux De Miroirs : Kourouma L'Interprete?, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Critics have often tended to show how Ahmadou Kourouma has expressed the disillusionment of the African "suns of the independences," ''tropicalized" the French language by bending its syntax to fit that of Malinke, and produced novels for "occidental importation" on the basis of oral texts. From a standpoint of sociopragmatics, in contradistinction, I would like to detail the internal specificity of Kourouma's fictional text by its means of production by analyzing it with respect to its cycle of production in terms of strategies, the writer's itinerary, its placement at the center of the literary field, etc. In addition, I will …

Continuity And Given-New Status Of Discourse Referents In Adzera Oral Narrative, David Edward Howard

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

This thesis analyzes the encoding of discourse referents in oral narratives in Adzera, an SVO Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea. First, it classifies overt referents on a given-new continuum according to Prince's (1981) taxonomy of assumed familiarity, looking at the forms and positions used to introduce new entities into a discourse. Then it applies Givón's (1983, 1995) quantitative approach to measure the continuity of referents, whether overtly manifested or semantically implied as verb arguments. This study largely confirms the findings and predictions of Prince and Givón regarding the introduction of new information and the relative continuity of various forms …

Secondary Palatalization In Isthmus Mixe: A Phonetic And Phonological Account, Julia Irene Dieterman

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation is a study of the process of palatalization in Isthmus Mixe, in which every consonant in the inventory has a palatalized counterpart. This type of palatalization occurring as a secondary [i]-like articulation, simultaneous to the primary articulation of the consonant (Bhat 1974, Ladefoged 1993), is defined as secondary palatalization by Keating (1993). Occurring word initially in Isthmus Mixe, the feature of secondary palatalization alone represents the grammatical third person morpheme, palatalizing the initial consonant of the noun or verb. There are also verbal suffixes that consist solely of secondary palatalization, indicating clause-type markers (Dieterman 1995, 1998), and a …

News From Cart, Michael A. Krol, Julia Stakhnevich

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

The African Contribution To Brazilian Portuguese: To What Extent Did The Speech Of Slaves Influence The Mother Tongue?, Fernanda Ferriera

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

The Awara Verbal System, Susan R. Quigley

Theses and Dissertations

Awara is a language in the Wantoat family spoken by the Awara people of Papua New Guinea. Though it has been mentioned in papers written about the Finisterre-Huon languages and about the Wantoat language (another language in the Wantoat family), it has not been described in depth.

This paper presents a description of the verbal system of the Awara language. The major grammatical constructions described are 1) the verbal morphology, 2) serial-verb constructions, 3) clause chaining, and 4) subordination.

Interesting aspects of the language shown here are 1) the variety of clause types based on the type of subject-indexing suffix, …

Oroko Orthography Development: Linguistic And Sociolinguistic Factors, Dan T. Friesen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the variety of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors that need to be considered in order to develop a good Oroko orthography. Oroko is a Bantu A language of the Southwest Province of Cameroon, Africa. The thesis starts with an overview of the Oroko's location, population, classification, and language development status. The linguistic factors discussed are based largely on analyses of two lists: a 118-word list of nine Oroko dialects and an 821-word list of four Oroko dialects (included in the appendix). Consistent phonetic and phonemic alternations are examined in detail. The next chapter discusses the sociolinguistic issues that …

Ossetian: Revisiting Inflectional Morphology, Bela G. Hettich

Theses and Dissertations

Ossetian, a language of the Northeastern group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European stock of languages, has not received as much linguistic attention as it deserves. A few major studies on Ossetian were written in the 19th and 20th centuries, most of them in Russian. While these works are a solid foundation in the study of Ossetian, its description is not complete.

The present work, written in English, offers Ossetian to a wider international audience. Relying on new developments in linguistic theory, it reexamines phenomena in the inflectional morphology of Ossetian.

The preliminary chapter on phonology provides an overview …

Valence Change And Oroko Verb Morphology (Mbonge Dialect), Lisa Friesen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the valence changing processes that are indicated by Mbonge verbal morphology. Mbonge (Mbóñgá) is a dialect of Oroko (Orókó), an agglutinative Bantu A language of Cameroon with very rich morphology. After a brief overview of the structure of Mbonge verbs, attention is concentrated on the verbal suffixes which affect valence. Five suffixes—passive, stative, reflexive, reciprocal, and anticausative—are used to decrease valence. Five other suffixes—causative, indirect agent causative, indirect effector causative, applicative, and instrumental—are used to increase valence, as is the syntactic combination of bola 'do/make' plus another verb.

Suffixes which do not affect valence are also briefly …

基督教中文聖經性別內包語言研究, Sin Nga So

Lingnan Theses

過去三十年，西方在女性主義思潮的帶動下，掀起了對語言性別主義的批判，同一時期，翻譯學朝文化研究的方向發展，使性別、語言與翻譯成為了互相影響、經常互相指涉的研究領域。本文採用描述性的研究進路，探討自由主義女性主義者所倡導的內包語言在基督教中文聖經譯本中的使用情況。

八十年代中，內包語言被引進到英文聖經翻譯，掀起了連串的討論。本文會在西方（尤其美國）學者的研究基礎上，從女性主義切入，釐清內包語言在聖經翻譯的語境中的本質，以及衍生出來的概念，然後將聖經主要的中文譯本 界分為傳統版本和內包版本。最後借用安德烈‧勒菲弗爾（André Lefevere）的理論，分析贊助者的意識形態如何支配中文聖經的內包版本。

Trends. Husbands, Wives, And Terrorism: The Validity Of Beliefs And The Threat Of Interpretive Strategies, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article discusses threat assessment via linguistic analysis.

Tohono O'Odham Stress In A Single Ranking, Colleen M. Fitzgerald

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

No abstract provided.

Western Attitudes Toward The Korean Language: An Overview Of Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth-Century Mission Literature, David J. Silva

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

Descriptions of Korea’s linguistic situation written by Westerners during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only reveal native and foreign attitudes toward the Korean language but also provide insight into language-focused evangelization tactics embraced by Christian missionaries. Upon their arrival in Korea during the 1800s, Westerners encountered a long-standing system of diglossia: socio-historical relations between China and Korea gave rise to the use of various Korean “lects” in which the degree of Chinese elements differed. Moreover, the nation’s indigenous writing system, han’g1l, was widely regarded by Koreans as culturally subordinate to Chinese script, an attitude that garnered much attention …

Nl-Soar And Lg-Soar: Ongoing Work, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Goals:

Expand Soar knowledge and explore possible uses on-campus

Provide and support an NL capability to the Soar research community

Toolkits, resources, knowledge repositories

Carry out research into the cognitive modeling of linguistic performance

Bi-Consonantal Reduplication In Amharic And Ethio-Semitic, Peter Edward Unseth

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation is a study of the consonant reduplication process in Amharic, a process which is herein named “Bi-Consonantal Reduplication.” In this process, the last two consonants of a root are repeated, a process that has never been studied in a systematic way in Amharic or any other Semitic language. Previous authors have used a variety of labels for this process, too often writing their definitions in ways that include other types of reduplication or that exclude some genuine examples of this reduplication pattern. This dissertation provides a more precise definition for this process that includes all and only genuine …

Making The Connection Between Teaching And Learning, Pierre Babineau

MA TESOL Collection

In this paper I describe as well as analyze how I learn compared to how I teach. It provides a history of my language learning of Japanese as well as a description of my studies about teaching in the SMAT program at SIT. An analysis of how my language learning and English teaching changed is included, along with how I was able to make connections between the two. The paper concludes with a list of things I have learned from such a study.

Writing Gojri: Linguistic And Sociolinguistic Constraints On A Standardized Orthography For The Gujars Of South Asia, Wayne E. Losey

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

This study presents descriptions of the phonology and morphology of the two major dialects of Gojri spoken in Pakistan, and compares them with the Gojri spoken in Punch District of Indian-administered Kashmir. In light of this comparative data and the implications for Gojri-to- Urdu literacy, it evaluates various orthographic conventions currently used by leading writers and institutions. It explores Urdu-based spellings which are linguistically sound and otherwise conducive to transitional literacy, and which lend themselves to orthographic standardization across the east-west dialect continuum. It also includes an extended treatment of the challenge of representing Gojri tone.

This study will provide …

The Structural Status Of Bora Classifiers, David J. Weber

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

I claim that Bora classifiers have the structural status of (bound) nouns, based on facts like the following:

• Some classifiers also occur as independent nouns (possibly with minor phonological differences).
• Classifiers have the referential properties typical of nouns. Like typical nominals, they denote classes of objects and may refer to a member of the class they denote. They are never used to attribute properties to another referring expresssion.
• Classifiers have the distribution typical of nouns: they may be a clausal subject, they may be modified by a relative clause, they may have a prepositional complement, and so forth.

And classifiers …

A Breadth Of Nlp Applications, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP) was founded in September 1999 in the School of Information Studies, the “Original Information School”, at Syracuse University. CNLP’s mission is to advance the development of human-like, language understanding software capabilities for government, commercial, and consumer applications. The Center conducts both basic and applied research, building on its recognized capabilities in Natural Language Processing. The Center’s seventeen employees are a mix of doctoral students in information science or computer engineering, software engineers, linguistic analysts, and research engineers.