Digital Commons Network^™

Robust Belief States And The Right/Wrong Dichotomy, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Remarks On The Syntax And Semantics Of Mixed Quotation, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Inheritance Hierarchies And Historical Reconstruction: Towards A History Of Slavonic Colour Terms, Andrew R. Hippisley, Gerald Gazdar

Linguistics Faculty Publications

The last decade has witnessed an interest in inheritance hierarchies for the representation of linguistic knowledge. An obvious application is to historical reconstruction of a language family, but this is largely unexplored territory. We demonstrate the merits of such an approach with a default inheritance treatment of the colour terms of Slavonic: Slavonic because it is uncontroversially a genetic unit, and colour terms both because of their universality and because of the tight constraints on a language's colour term inventory (Berlin & Kay 1969, and subsequent work). In section I we discuss the colour terms of Slavonic and introduce Berlin …

Struggle, Aspiration, And Obsession: The Discourse Of Diet, Emily K. L. Jahn

Masters Theses

Research has shown that members of society are generally dissatisfied with their current weight. This study examines how individuals socially construct meanings of the word diet and the dieting process. Participants (n=443) were males and females who ranged in age from 7 to 68. Each were given a diet questionnaire to complete. The older groups were given the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC) Scale in addition to the survey. The text for analysis was obtained by the surveys and four focus groups. The resulting data indicated that both males and females perceive the word diet means "to lose weight." …

Seri Dictionary: Colors, Mary B. Moser, Stephen A. Marlett

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

A subset of the Seri bilingual dictionary includes terms referring to colors. This version includes English glosses in addition to Spanish glosses, and English-to-Seri and Spanish-to-Seri reversals.

Other excerpts from the Seri dictionary have been published in the 1997, 1998 and 2000 Work Papers. The complete dictionary was published in 2005 and updated in 2010. The second edition is available here: mexico.sil.org/resources/archives/42821

Seri Dictionary: Plants, Mary B. Moser, Stephen A. Marlett

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

A subset of the Seri bilingual dictionary includes terms referring to plants. This version includes English glosses in addition to Spanish glosses, and English-to-Seri and Spanish-to-Seri reversals.

Other excerpts from the Seri dictionary have been published in the 1997, 1998 and 2000 Work Papers. The complete dictionary was published in 2005 and updated in 2010. The second edition is available here: mexico.sil.org/resources/archives/42821

Curriculum Standards In The Foreign Languages, Ana Schwartz, P Duo, M Djamou

Departmental Papers (Psych)

No abstract provided.

How To Say "No" Without Saying "No": A Study Of The Refusal Strategies Of Americans And Germans, Astrid Maria Beckers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cultures have been shown to vary drastically in their interactional styles, leading to different preferences for modes of speech act behavior. Culturally colored interactional styles create culturally determined expectations and interpretative strategies, and can lead to breakdowns in intercultural and interethnic communication.

This dissertation investigated the differences between Germans and Americans in the speech act of rejection which can be explained by the general cultural differences. The native speaker subjects in this study were graduate students enrolled at four American Universities and at four Universities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The elicitation method used for this data collection was …

The Effect Of Usage On Degrees Of Constituency: The Reduction Of Don't In English, Joan Bybee, Joanne Scheibman

English Faculty Publications

In this paper we take the position that there are many degrees of constituency and that these derive in a direct manner from the frequency with which elements are used together: elements that are frequently found next to each other show a tighter constituent structure than those that collocate less frequently. We use both phonological and functional evidence from conversation to argue that repetition conditions chunking (Haiman 1994), sometimes overriding the syntactic and semantic logic of the organization of utterances. Our study examines the reduction of don't in American English conversation. We find that don't is reduced the most in …

Gendered Jokes: Humor As A Subversive Activity, Janet M. Bing

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Brain Sex: How The Media Report And Distort Brain Research, Janet M. Bing

English Faculty Publications

Testosterone gives men a particular advantage in that it is focusing and galvanizing a brain that is already, by its very structure, more focused than the female. Remember that the male brain is a tidier affair, each function in its special place . . . Biology, then, every bit as much as social conditioning, militates against a strongly feminine role in areas traditionally regarded as male preserves.

About The Leading For Diversity Research Project, Rosemary C. Henze

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Curricular Approaches To Developing Positive Interethnic Relations, Rosemary C. Henze

Faculty Publications

This article examines whether and in what ways curricular approaches can be helpful in building positive interethnic relations in a large, ethnically diverse high school. Through this case study of curricular reform, the author documents four curricular approaches teacher leaders used to explicitly address issues of race and ethnicity and explores the impact of these approaches on student learning. By tracing the process of curricular change, the case illuminates how teacher leaders and administrators created the conditions for these curricular reforms to be sustainable.

A View From The West: Perceptions Of U.S. Dialects From The Point Of View Of Oregon, Laura Hartley

Faculty Publications - Department of Sociology

No abstract provided.

Integrating Translation Technologies Using Salt, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Gerhard Budin, Alan K. Melby, Sue Ellen Wright, Arle R. Lommel

Faculty Publications

The acronym SALT stands for Standards-based Access to multilingual Lexicons and Terminologies. The objective of the SALT project is to develop and promote a range of tools that will be made available on the World Wide Web to various user groups, in particular translators, terminology managers, localizers, technical communicators, but also tools developers, database managers, and language engineers. The resulting toolkit will facilitate access and re-use of heterogeneous multilingual resources derived from both NLP lexicons and human-oriented terminology databases.

Chinese And Australian Conversational Styles: A Comparative Sociolinguistic Study Of Overlap And Listener Response, Xudong Deng

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study compares the use of overlap and listener response by Chinese and Australian speakers in their respective intracultural conversations, that is, in conversations between Chinese interlocutors in Mandarin Chinese and between Australians in Australian English. The main purpose of this study is to locate similarities and differences between these two groups of speakers in their use of the two conversational strategies. Another major theme of the thesis is to examine the role of gender in the use of overlap and listener response in conversations of the two languages. The study is based upon the theoretical premise of interactional sociolinguistics …

Conversational Code-Switching Among Japanese-English Bilinguals Who Have Japanese Background, Yoshiko Morishima

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The aim of this study is to investigate the code-switching of native speakers of Japanese in an English-speaking context. The languages involved in code-switching therefore are English and Japanese. This is an instance of communication in the participants' first language, in a setting where the speakers' second language is dominant. The research focused on a sample of twelve Japanese people. These participants were born in Japan, and their parents' native language is Japanese. Even though the length of time each has spent in residence in an English-speaking country varies, the minimum is two years. Further, all have previously studied English, …

The Case For Sound Symbolism, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to sound symbolism that have influenced linguists and anthropologists most. Numerous reports of magnitude sound symbolism in the form of experimental studies and comparative surveys have been integrated into a biologically based theory of its motivation. Magnitude sound symbolism also …

Demonstration: A Robust Web Data-Extraction Technique With High Recall And Precision, Deryle W. Lonsdale, D. M. Campbell, Yihong Ding, David W. Embley, K. Hewett, D. L. Jackman, S. S. Jeffries, Y. S. Jiang, D. Lewis, Stephen W. Liddle, Y. K. Ng, A. L. Peacock, D. J. Seer, R. D. Smith, S. H. Yau, M. Xu, L. Xu

Faculty Publications

Our demo shows how to extract and structure data found in data-rich, unstructured, multiple-record Web documents. Users may either apply pre-built extraction applications or build and apply their own. The demo is significant because it (1) attacks an important data-centric problem and (2) uses database technology to produce good results with minimal effort.

The Impact Of E-Mail Use On Fourth Graders' Writing Skills, Carole Greb Nix

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

The growing interest in computer use at home and in the workplace has led to the incorporation of computer skills into school curricula. Numerous claims assert the benefit of computers, but questions remain concerning the nature of that benefit. The increasingly widespread use of telecommunications raises further questions regarding the effect of computer-mediated communication on language development. Unfortunately, few rigorous studies have been conducted to provide evidence of the actual effect of e-mail on children's writing skills. The data for this study are handwritten compositions, e-mail messages, and surveys/interviews collected from two schools, matched for demographic and academic variables. The …

Innovation In The Writing Center: A Diffusion Study, Talisman Kate Benton Saunders

Dissertations and Theses

An innovation is an idea, object, or practice that is perceived by a certain group as being new. To study the process by which an innovation is introduced to a certain target group and the results of the effort to convince the group to adopt the innovation is to study the diffusion of that innovation. This often involves examination of the social events and communication patterns among and between the stakeholders, change agents, and target group(s). The diffusion model is relevant and useful to many disciplines. It has many practical uses and applications for policymakers in that it offers the …

Complaint Patterns Of Japanese English As A Second Language Students, Eriko Matsuda

Dissertations and Theses

This study investigates cross-cultural production of speech acts of complaints. Speech acts are considered culture-specific. Speakers of different cultural background may have different ways of dealing with speech act situations. It is important for language educators to be aware of such differences. Previous studies show that second/foreign language learners tend to transfer their first language habits when performing speech acts in a target language. In this study, the complaint speech act performance of Japanese English as a second language students was compared to the performance of native speakers of English and native speakers of Japanese to see if first language …

Beyond Mystification: Reconnecting World-System Theory For Comparative Education, Thomas Clayton

Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Epithets As Antilogophoric Pronouns, Stanley William Dubinsky, Robert Hamilton

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Terrorist Explosions In East Africa: An Asynchrony Among Language, Thought, And Action?, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes an asynchrony among the language of foreign leaders responding to an event of terrorism, the inferred thought underlying the language, and the action necessary to effect successful antiterrorism and counterterrorism programs.

Since Joseph Smith's Time: Lexical Semantic Shifts In The Book Of Mormon, Renee Bangerter

Theses and Dissertations

In the years since Joseph Smith completed the translation of the Book of Mormon, the English language has changed; some common phraseologies and word meanings are dissimilar to today's. Often, in reading the Book of Mormon, we impose our current definitions onto terms that in 1830 had a different meaning. Our interpretation of these words, as well as the passages in which they are found, is skewed by our modern definitions. These words, when they occur in the Book of Mormon, demonstrate dialectal and obsolete senses. In the case of some words, the dialectal or obsolete sense is so far …

Šawaš Ili?I-Šawaš Wawa -- 'Indian Country--Indian Language' : A Participant Observation Case Study Of Language Planning By The Confederated Tribes Of The Grand Ronde Community Of Oregon, Gregry Michael Davis

Dissertations and Theses

The Kwelth Tahlkie Culture and Heritage Board (KTC&HB) of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon (CTGR) have made it a priority to revitalize one of the languages which historically has been associated with being a Grand Ronde Indian-Chinook Jargon, referred to as činuk wawa 'Chinook talk' or simply činuk.

The purpose of the present study was to observe the language planning process as executed by the KTC&HB. Initial guiding questions were: (i) What stages is the KTC&HB going through in the process of planning for činuk revitalization? (ii) How do these efforts compare with theory and …

Syntactic Theory And The Structure Of English: A Minimalist Approach, By A. Radford, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Language And The State: Revitalization And Revival In Israel And Eire, Edited By Sue Wright; The Language Question In The Census Of Population, By Mícheál Ó Gliasáin, Nancy C. Dorian

German Faculty Research and Scholarship

Language and the state contains two formal papers, plus the questions and answers that followed each. The occasion was a Current Issues in Language and Society seminar held at the University of Birmingham in September 1995; the speakers were Bernard Spolsky of the Language Policy Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Israel (“Conditions for language revitalization: A comparison of the cases of Hebrew and Maori”), and Muiris Ó Laoire of the Irish Language Department, University College Galway, Ireland (“An historical perspective on the revival of Irish outside the Gaeltacht, 1880–1930, with reference to the revitalization of Hebrew”). Perhaps because Israel and Ireland …

Differences On The Alphabet, The Ideograph, And Political Difference: Commentary And Reply, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article presents the commentary of a reader and an IBPP editorial board reply concerning the consequences of language differences for political differences among populations.