Digital Commons Network^™

The Iconicity And Non-Arbitrariness Of Body Locations In Four Unrelated Sign Languages, John Samson

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I show that universally, there is a strong tendency for signs located on the body to have an iconic or non-arbitrary motivation, especially in their original form. I analyze sign language dictionaries from four unrelated sign languages and establish an iconic or non-arbitrary link between the form of the signs and their meaning, and classify those links according to 8 categories of body location iconicity and 3 categories of non-arbitrariness. The strength of this tendency depends on the percentage of signs that are shown to have an iconic or non-arbitrary link. For the data analyzed here this …

Book Review: Intercultural Perspectives On Research Writing, Edited By Pilar Mur-Dueñas And Jolanta Šinkūnienė (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2018), David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Complex Predicates In Southern Turkmen: A Role And Reference Grammar Analysis, Nathaniel Andrew Shaver

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the concepts of nexus and juncture, as articulated by Role and Reference Grammar, to examine complex verbal constructions found in four collected texts. These texts were collected from four Southern Turkmen (or Turkmen of Afghanistan) speakers. Through transcribing, glossing, and analyzing these texts, a number of complex predicates were identified. These were then described according to their various nexus juncture types. Three nexus juncture varieties were represented in the collected texts. These include clausal coordination, clausal subordination, and core cosubordination. Although not represented in the texts, it was possible to elicit three other provisional nexus juncture varieties. …

Collateral Damage: How Expanding Public Charge Policy Influences Adult Esl Enrollment, Allison M. Eckert

Master's Theses

This study used statistical analysis of enrollment records for ESL programs at community colleges throughout California from 2015-2019 to determine whether adult immigrants’ participation in public ESL programs was reduced under President Donald Trump. Immigrant families’ lesser use of public education services and means-tested federal benefits has been widely documented in the wake of Trump’s expansion of the public charge rule, which counted immigrants’ use of a wider array of public benefits against their case for residency in the United States than had any previous iteration of the rule. Failing the public charge test can block an immigrant’s entry into …

The Impact Of Verb Type On The Variability Of The Comp-Trace Effect, Haydee Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The C-t effect has been extensively researched with regards to its variability, however, matrix verbs have not generally been taken into account. The present study investigates whether verbs believe, doubt, know, realize, say and think differ in the strength of the C-t effect they induce— exploring syntactic analyses, epistemicity and grammaticalization to possibly identify what characteristics of verbs dictate the strength of the C-t effect. Subjects (n=44) were asked to complete 1 of 2 Grammaticality Judgement Tasks (GJT), which asked them to rate the grammaticality of items which included matched items with that involving both subject extractions, constructions without extractions, …

The Effects Of Watching Text-Relevant Video Segments On Reading Comprehension Of Culturally Unfamiliar Texts With Adult English Language Learners Supported By The Schematic Information-Processing (Sip) Model Of Reading Comprehension, Amirreza Karami

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed-methods sequential explanatory study was to investigate the effects of watching text-relevant video segments on reading comprehension of a culturally unfamiliar text when technical words are present or absent. Therefore, 44 adult English Language Learners (ELLs) with higher-intermediate to advanced English language proficiency levels from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) School of Languages located in the Dominican Republic were chosen and randomly assigned to two different groups: control vs. experimental.

First, the researcher compared two different types of reading instruction—traditional text-based vs. video-based reading instruction supported by the Schematic Information-Processing (SIP) model of reading …

Everybody Does It: The Pragmatics And Perceptions Of International Chinese Graduate Students And Their American Peers Regarding Gossip, Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth, Timothy John Ebsworth, Chencen Cai

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

Integrating natural observation, interviews, and quantitative analysis, we used a mixed design to compare the socio-linguistic judgments of international Chinese students at a private University on the East Coast of the United States (US) with those of their native English-speaking peers regarding a critical incident involving gossip. Ninety-two participants evaluated alternative sociolinguistic strategies offered in addressing the incident on semantic differential scales. Judgments by each group regarding four alternative responses were surveyed and compared. Twenty participants, ten from each group, participated in semi-structured interviews. Themes were developed through a recursive process: interpretations were validated by a bilingual bicultural expert. Several …

My Skull Has Not Been Crushed: The Lexicography Of Some Ancient Egyptian Cranial Terminology, Ariel Singer

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

La Formation Du Pluriel En Arabe Marocain: Approche Fonctionnelle, Abdelfettah Nacer Idrissi

Dirassat

Plural Training in Moroccan Arab Functional Approach

This article deals with the methods of plural in Moroccan dialect with a functional approach based on the functional grammar as mentioned by DIK through production, rules, regularity, speakers and types of plural for the absent and external.

Legal Corpus Linguistics And The Half-Empirical Attitude, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deployed.

First, legal corpus linguistics neglects the relevant legal context—the conditions that give legal language authority. Because of this, legal corpus studies’ evidence about language use perversely obscures and misstates …

Implementing A Deliberate Neologism About The Filipino-American Identity Crisis, Gabrielle Sarah Punzalan, Rochelle Harris Cox Dr., Angela Brill

Symposium of Student Scholars

Neologisms are words that have recently entered our language but are only just beginning to be accepted as part of daily usage. As the English language evolves, new neologisms are formed while the usage of certain words may fade into relative obscurity. New words are coined to reflect the changing moods and cultural needs of the time. When it comes to critical race theory, neologisms can be used as a method of spreading awareness and addressing a problem. The Filipino American community is a marginalized group that experiences identity disturbance from the duality of both their nationality and ethnicity. Furthermore, …

Oppression, Resistance, And Empowerment: The Power Dynamics Of Naming And Un-Naming In African American Literature, 1794 To 2019, Melissa "Maggie" Romigh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Oppression, Resistance, and Empowerment: The Power Dynamics of Naming and Un-naming in African American Literature, 1794 to 2019 researches and discusses the way African American authors both discuss naming and un-naming in their works and the way they use naming in their works to illustrate the dynamics of power in relationships—racial, familial, gender-related, work-related, etc. Chapter 1 focuses on the earliest forms of African American literature, memoirs in particular, also known as “slave narratives.” In their memoirs, many of those men and women who were formerly enslaved wrote about having their names taken from them and replaced with names chosen …

Persian Naco Manual, Denise Soufi, Nora Avetyan, Shelton Henderson, Juliet Sabouri-Yaghoobi Nasab, Cyrus Ford Zarganj, Neda Zeraatkar

Library Faculty Research

The guidelines in this manual apply to the creation of authority records for names which appear in the Perso-Arabic script on a manifestation written in the Persian language. In this manual, such names are referred to as “Persian names,” regardless of the origin of the name. Guidance is also provided for names of Iranian origin that appear in other scripts. This manual focuses on personal names, although some examples pertaining to corporate bodies, conferences, and works have been provided.

Considering Who Has Opportunities For Training And Advancement, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

The three working learners featured in this blog post represent contrasting experiences that help us to understand the level and quality of support from such mediators as has become evident in our research, and the resu Its on the careers of these learners. Al I names used are pseudonyms.

Try Come Look At This Construction!, Kento Tanaka

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

The try get construction, used by some speakers of Hawai‘i English, consists of the bare form of the verb try immediately followed by the bare form of another verb, as in We’ll try get some coffee tomorrow. In this paper, I first describe the usage of this construction, showing that it behaves essentially identically to the widespread go get construction described most notably by Zwicky (1969) and Pullum (1990). I then analyze the syntax of the try get construction adopting Bjorkman’s (2016) proposal for the go get construction.

Does Diacritics-Based Lexical Disambiguation Modulate Word Frequency, Length, And Predictability Effects? An Eye-Movements Investigation Of Processing Arabic Diacritics, Ehab W. Hermena, Sana Bouamama, Simon P. Liversedge, Denis Drieghe

All Works

In Arabic, a predominantly consonantal script that features a high incidence of lexical ambiguity (heterophonic homographs), glyph-like marks called diacritics supply vowel information that clarifies how each consonant should be pronounced, and thereby disambiguate the pronunciation of consonantal strings. Diacritics are typically omitted from print except in situations where a particular homograph is not sufficiently disambiguated by the surrounding context. In three experiments we investigated whether the presence of disambiguating diacritics on target homographs modulates word frequency, length, and predictability effects during reading. In all experiments, the subordinate representation of the target homographs was instantiated by the diacritics (in the …

Japanese-English Code-Switching By Postwar Speakers In Contemporary America, Andre John Shepherd

Dissertations and Theses

In her examination of Japanese-English bilingualism in Toronto, Nishimura (1995b) demonstrated that second-generation Japanese-Canadians varied their speech dependent on the audience they were addressing. According to her, the Japanese-Canadians spoke primarily in English to fellow second-generation speakers, while maintaining conversations in Japanese with those who had spent their formative years in Japan. However, when addressing audiences composed of both groups, they switched back and forth evenly between the two languages.

Following research done by Woolard (1989) on the effects of societal influences on language, the state of the Japanese-Canadians can be related to the breakup of the ethnic enclaves in …

The French-English Bilingual Mind, Quinlan Bovee Dulaney

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Vowel Pronunciation As An Ethnic Marker: Pacific Islander Teens In Utah, Lisa M. Johnson

Faculty Publications

Despite the growing numbers and visibility of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (NHPIs) in the U.S., these Americans are generally overlooked in the research on language variation. American dialectology tends to focus on speakers of European descent, and most research on minority ethno-racial groups has concentrated on larger demographic groups, such as African American and Latinx American groups. This combination of research deficits limits our understanding of linguistic variation and the social forces that influence it. In addition, it may reinforce stereotypes of “ethnolects” as nonstandard and wholly separate from regional and stylistic influence. (See Eckert, 2008.) Many of …

Psychological Status Of High School Students 1 Year After The Covid-19 Emergency, Cong Zhou, Rongqin Li, Mingchuan Yang, Shanshan Duan, Chuanming Yang

Faculty and Student Publications

Background: With the control of the epidemic, adolescents' mental outlook might have improved. However, little evidence existed with regard to the psychological status of adolescents in post-COVID-19 era. This present study aimed to explore the psychological status of high school students after the epidemic getting eased. Methods: A web-based cross-sectional survey was used to obtain data from three high schools, including the demographic information, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), the Self-Rating Scale of Sleep (SRSS), and self-designed general recent-status questionnaire. Correlation analysis was performed to explore potential associations between the depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and …

Notes Sur I'Insertion Lexicale, Mohamed Balboul

Dirassat

Notes on Lexical Insertion

Our objective in this article is to present a theory which questions the operation of lexical insertion considered as a substitution operation. We will show that this operation is intimately linked to the formal organization of grammar, to such an extent that calling it into question would lead to a profound reorganization of the model of representing linguistic knowledge.

قيد الختام أو قيد الفراغ محاولة لدراسة في ضوء علم المخطوطات, عبد الواحد جهداني

Dirassat

Under Conclusion or in Space an Attempt to Study in the Light of Manuscript Science

This research deals with the definition of the term “conclusion or space constraint” and defining its concept, searching for the verb indicating the end of the transcription, the multiplicity of space constraints, standing at the copyist, the copy, the original copied from, the place of transcription and the accompanying checks.

خاصة وولائدها في الاستعمال العام ، نظرة لسانية حول مسألة من صور التوسع في العربية, عبد الحميد الأقطش

Dirassat

“Khassa” and its Origins in General Use, a Linguistic View on an Issue of One of the Forms of Expansion in Arabic.

This research discusses a grammatical linguistic phenomenon, which was limited, which is the expansion with the accompanying differences in understanding and deduction, through research in language and usage, and standing through examples of the various uses of the term“Khassa” and its origins.

The Discourse/Pragmatic Functions Of Japanese Okkē, Peter Fodor

Dissertations and Theses

Okay is one of the most commonly used words in the English language. It is also one of the most commonly borrowed English-origin loanwords across all of the world's languages. Although there is a wealth of research on the communicative functions of English okay, there is comparatively little research on the many borrowings of the word in various other languages. In order to address this gap in the literature, this study explores the differences in discourse/pragmatic function between the English word okay, and the Japanese borrowing of the word, okkē.

Extensive research in discourse analysis, pragmatics, and …

Integrating Dance And Language Education: A Pedagogical Epiphany, Nan Zhang, Jane Southcott, Maria Gindidis

The Qualitative Report

Dance fulfils several educational purposes, particularly in the context of second language teaching and learning. Nevertheless, challenges to implementing dance as an approach to teach and learn a second language do exist. For teachers, it is essential to develop varied pedagogical approaches to suit different student cohorts. But it is not reasonable to expect that every language teacher is a born expert and connoisseur of dance or every dance teacher a born expert and connoisseur of the target language. Moreover, we have not seen studies focus on the development of the pedagogy of using dance as an approach for teaching …

اللسانيات في الثقافة العربية، بحث في إشكالات التلقي, حافيظ إسماعيلي علوي

Dirassat

Linguistics in the Arab Culture

Investigating the Problems of Reception

This research deals with the issue of Arabic linguistics from the crisis to the problems of reception, objective obstacles and their psychological and urban factors, subjective obstacles for linguists. It also explains the problem of the linguistic term in Arab culture, and the problem of Arabization.

أسباب حدوث الاكتساب، ملاحظات حول تعلم اللغة العربية, يوسف باش

Dirassat

Reasons for Acquisition: Notes on Learning Arabic

The research deals with the issue of acquisition and learning theory from multiple angles such as linguistics, philosophy, psychology, biology, issues of acquisition and instinct, characteristics of acquisition in modern theories, and generative grammar.

رهانات إدماج الأمازيغية في المنظومة التعليمية, أحمد بوكوس

Dirassat

The Stakes of Integrating Tamazight into the Educational System

This lecture aims at answering the question: why integrating the Tamazight language into the Moroccan educational system? It attempts to discuss the discourse of the authority on Tamazight, the principles of integrating it, and some practical suggestions and conclusions on the subject.

Black Lives Matter In Teaching English As A Second Language!, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

The Winter 2020 issue of theIllinois Reading Council Journal published a special issue focusing on “action for equity,” with thoughtful articles and abundant family and classroom resources. This issue of the “wELLcome”column, which is dedicated to topics regarding English language learners (ELLs), continues in that same vein. In this issue, we place the spotlight on ELLs of African descent, their teachers, and their schools.

Final Project: “Language As A Tool For Social Justice, Racial Equity, And Cultural Learning” Grant Proposal, David Malinowski

Assignment Prompts

You can apply for up to $10,000 in grant funds to support a project addressing a social justice, racial equity, and/or cultural learning goal that is based upon linguistic/language awareness, knowledge, and action. First, please think about communities and institutions that you're familiar with. You can propose a topic addressing an issue that you perceive in one of these:

• Your hometown and/or San José or another city/town close by
• A public institution/organization in one of these places
• A company or work environment you're familiar with
• A general or particular organization or administrative area of SJSU
• Another school you're very familiar …