Digital Commons Network^™

From The Bx To A Ba: Latino Male Students And The Transition From High School To College, Alejandro Eduardo Carrion

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aims to provide a counter narrative to the deficit filled discourse surrounding Latino males by informing teachers, policymakers and researchers of the barriers and resources encountered by this population as they make the transition from high school to college. A qualitative research design was utilized for this study, which focused on 10 Latino males who mainly identified as Puerto Rican and Dominican, from the Bronx. Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, and his theoretical tools of field (structures), habitus (dispositions) and capital (social, cultural and economic), was used as the theoretical framework guiding this study. Participants shared the nuances of …

Automated Classification Of Argument Stance In Student Essays: A Linguistically Motivated Approach With An Application For Supporting Argument Summarization, Adam Robert Faulkner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study describes a set of document- and sentence-level classification models designed to automate the task of determining the argument stance (for or against) of a student argumentative essay and the task of identifying any arguments in the essay that provide reasons in support of that stance. A suggested application utilizing these models is presented which involves the automated extraction of a single-sentence summary of an argumentative essay. This summary sentence indicates the overall argument stance of the essay from which the sentence was extracted and provides a representative argument in support of that stance.

A novel set …

Moral Motivation And The Authority Of Morality: A Defense Of Naturalist Moral Realism, Lily Eva Frank

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Moral realism has been continuously accused of positing the existence of queer properties, facts, judgments, and beliefs. One of these queer features is supposed to be the normative force of morality-that is the way in which morality guides our actions. Critics of moral realism argue that nothing else in the world has this feature. This is a reason to doubt that moral facts and properties exist at all. This objection can be interpreted in at least two ways. One way to interpret it has to do with moral motivation, this is the internalism objection. The other has to do with …

Yes We Can: A Dyadic Investigation Of Cognitive Interdependence, Relationship Communication, And Optimal Behavioral Health Outcomes Among Hiv Serodiscordant Same-Sex Male Couples, Kristine Elizabeth Gamarel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research suggests that couples who adopt a "we" orientation in relation to illness demonstrate greater resiliency and an increased capacity to cope with stressors. HIV serodiscordant couples (one partner is HIV-positive, the other is HIV-negative) have been identified as a critical mode of HIV transmission. The present study integrates dyadic coping models and interdependence theory to examine whether cognitive interdependence (i.e., the extent to which couples include aspects of their partner into their self-concept) and communication strategies are associated with sexual behavior, antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence, depressive symptoms, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction. The study also tested whether the associations …

Speech Act Theoretic Semantics, Daniel W. Harris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics-pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and dynamic semantics.

Translator, Traitor: A Critical Ethnography Of A U.S. Terrorism Trial, Maya Hess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Historically, the role of translators and interpreters has suffered from multiple misconceptions. In theaters of war, these linguists are often viewed as traitors and kidnapped, tortured, or killed; if they work in the terrorism arena, they may be prosecuted and convicted as terrorist agents. In United States v. Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a/k/a "Abu Omar," a/k/a "Dr. Ahmed," Lynne Stewart, and Mohammed [sic] Yousry, 02 Cr. 395 (JGK) (S.D.N.Y. 2003), Yousry, an Arabic linguist and scholar of Middle Eastern history, was labeled such an agent, his work as translator/interpreter construed as material support to terrorism, and his expertise recast as dangerous …

Assembling Autism, Kate Suzanne Jenkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Autism is a growing social concern because of the epidemic-like growth in diagnoses among children. The lives and experiences of adults who have an autism diagnosis, however, are not as well documented. This dissertation project seeks to resolve that dearth of research. I conducted a year of participant observation at four locations of social, self-advocacy, and peer to peer support groups. I also conducted interviews with leaders and participants. I also participated (as a researcher) in an experiment in social skills acquisition led by participants from my ethnographic field work, fulfilling the planned participatory action research component of my original …

"We Are Refugees In Our Own Homeland": Land Dispossession And Resettlement Challenges In Post-Conflict Teso, Uganda, Matt Kandel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is based off of fieldwork that I conducted in post-conflict Teso region in northeastern Uganda from 2012-2013. It focuses primarily on land dispossession and challenges to resettlement. Conflicts over land intensified in the early 1990s, coinciding with the early stages of resettlement in southern Teso after a period of regional civil war and large-scale cattle rustling. In contrast to the large-scale "land grabs" in Sub-Saharan African that have occurred since the 2007-08 global commodities crisis, land expropriations occur mainly on a small-scale in Teso. I argue that there are a number of drivers to land dispossession in the …

Cologne Carnival's "Alternative" Stunksitzung: Carnivalization? Meta-Carnival? Or Bakhtinian Restoration?, Erik Abbott

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 1820s, Carnival in Cologne, Germany, underwent a series of reforms, ostensibly to bring the festival back to the people. Among the traditions that developed was the Sitzung, a theatrical variety-show event, with music, comic speeches and sketches, dance troupes, and various additional Carnival-related entertainments. The shows, and Carnival itself were, and largely have been since that time, mostly overseen by a Festival Committee and the official Carnival Societies it recognizes.

In 1984, a group of mostly students decided to create their own version of a Sitzung, an alternative version, the Stunksitzung. From three inaugural performances, it has grown …

The Influence Of Pseudo-Relatives On Attachment Preferences In Spanish, David Branco-Moreno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper presents the results from an off-line experiment on the extent to which the availability of pseudo-relatives modulates attachment preferences in Spanish. Participants were presented with sentences in which different syntactic and semantic factors had been manipulated to allow for either both a pseudo-relative (PR) and a relative-clause (RC) reading or a RC reading only. All the experimental items included two potential antecedents with which the constituents of interest could be associated. The experimental items can be divided into four groups: group 1 consists of stimuli allowing for a double reading in direct object position, and groups 2, 3 …

Temporal Information Extraction And Knowledge Base Population, Taylor Cassidy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Temporal Information Extraction (TIE) from text plays an important role in many Natural Language Processing and Database applications. Many features of the world are time-dependent, and rich temporal knowledge is required for a more complete and precise understanding of the world. In this thesis we address aspects of two core tasks in TIE. First, we provide a new corpus of labeled temporal relations between events and temporal expressions, dense enough to facilitate a change in research directions from relation classification to identification, and present a system designed to address corresponding new challenges. Second, we implement a novel approach for the …

The Sound Patterns Of Camuno: Description And Explanation In Evolutionary Phonology, Michela Cresci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a linguistic study of the sound patterns of Camuno framed within Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2004, 2006, to appear). Camuno is a variety of Eastern Lombard, a Romance language of northern Italy, spoken in Valcamonica. Camuno is not a local variety of Italian, but a sister of Italian, a local divergent development of the Latin originally spoken in Italy (Maiden & Perry, 1997, p. 2). It is an oral language with no writing system, and it is endangered. The language is understudied (Bonfadini, 1995, p. 26), and this thesis appears to be the first detailed study of Camuno …

Huu-Fa Thesis Dat?: A Syntactic Analysis Of Possessive Jamaican Creole Possessive Wh-Elements, Toni Ashlie Foster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis discusses the differences between the Jamaican Creole expressions huu-fa and fi-huu. Jamaican Creole is a language that was born from a combination of the lexifier language English and the substrate language Twi, therefore it is reasonable to check whether the features of JC were derived from these languages. The distribution of huu-fa and fi-huu resembles the distribution of English whose. Fi-huu and huu-fa are WH-elements that show possession, similar to the English word whose. They are made of a WH-pronoun and a form of the preposition fi "for". Both terms differ in internal structure, and distribution. The difference …

The Relative Impact Of Identity On Lgbt Api Outness: A Quantitative Analysis, Jessica Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, the intersecting relationship among race, sex, gender, and sexuality plays a significant role in one's identity development and socialization. Especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Asian Pacific Islander (API) individuals, such interplay presents a continuous task of processing and presenting different identities. Employing a national sample of over 500 LGBT API individuals and utilizing multivariate regression analysis, this thesis explores how LGBT API individuals' sexual and racial identities affect their decisions in coming out to family, friends, co-workers, and other community members. Findings indicate that the level of discomfort in racial/ethnic and/or LGBT community …

Reading Nation In Translation: The Spectral Transnationality Of The Malaysian Racial Imaginary, Fiona Hsiao Yen Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, literary studies has experienced a global turn, often understood as a move beyond national paradigms of analysis, which are deemed to be narrow and particularistic. Although wary of the tacit universalizing tendencies of global frames, scholars of race and postcoloniality have critically embraced the global by arguing for the need to theorize transnationalism from marginalized perspectives. However, casting the global and the national in oppositional terms ignores the fact that national racial ideologies both actively shape and are shaped by globally circulating ideas about race. An understudied site in postcolonial studies, Malaysia--formerly known as Malaya--is an exemplary …

Guatemalan Spanish As Act Of Identity: An Analysis Of Language And Minor Literature Within Modern Maya Literary Production, Kenneth Yanes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My study approaches the use of Guatemalan Spanish in modern Maya literary works through a theoretical framework drawn on theories of "purity" and mestizaje, the concept of minor literature, and "image" and ideology of language. I problematize the "major"/"minor" dichotomy of language based on a Eurocentric view of the dominance of national languages as the extremely diverse linguistic ecology of Latin American lends itself to the deterritorialization of hegemonic discourse, but without sustaining a neat categorization of language. Guatemalan Spanish is a heavily Maya-inflected interlanguage share by all Guatemalans. Mayan writers chose purposefully to counter the ladino ethnocentrism of the …

Foreseeing Identity In Blank Interstices: New-Wave African Migration To The United States And A New Theory Of Diaspora, Bernard D. Lombardi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I explore the ways by which new-wave black African immigrants confront and negotiate American tropes of blackness for individual and collective identity formations. Specifically, I focus on the memory of slavery as it is used for black collectivity in the United States. I argue that, although new-wave black African immigrants do not share the same memory of slavery with the descendants of slaves, they experience the racism perpetuated from the period of slavery because of their phenotypical blackness. In addition, these immigrants bring to the United States new memories and understandings of Africa that transform the ways …

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach To The Mega-Novel, David J. Letzler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ("cruft"), which it uses to challenge its readers' abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it …

Access To Healthcare For Vulnerable Asian Subgroup Populations In The United States, Deborah Kim-Lu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objectives: This dissertation examines the barriers for access to healthcare for the top four most uninsured Asian American subgroups (Bangladeshi, Cambodian, Korean, and Pakistani communities). Methods: Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study consisted of: (1) an in-depth review of the Health Services Research literature; (2) qualitative interviews with 24 national health experts and advocates on Asian American health; (3) a survey of a non-probability sample of 107 Koreans in the tri-state region (Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York) using the Access to Healthcare Survey for Koreans in the U.S. instrument, which includes a Likert scale with 21 barrier questions …

Ethnic Language Maintenance: A Case Study Of Second-Generation Iranian Americans In The Northeastern States, Maryam Moeini Meybodi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a relatively new, highly educated and professional group, Iranian Americans show distinctive language usage patterns. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and 48 interviews with East Coast Iranian Americans, this thesis explores the attitudes and behavior of children of Iranian immigrants and their parents toward learning and preserving their native language: Persian. Although the literature points to the erosion of parental language among the second generation and its extinction by the third generation, the results of this study suggest otherwise, at least for young children. Findings show that parents and children had positive attitude and behavior toward …

Paris And Havana: A Century Of Mutual Influence, Laila Pedro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to trace the history of exchange and influence between Cuban, French, and Francophone Caribbean artists in the twentieth century. I argue, first, that there is a unique and largely unexplored tradition of dialogue, collaboration, and mutual admiration between Cuban, French and Francophone artists; second, that a recurring and essential theme in these artworks is the representation of the human body; and third, that this relationship ought not to be understood within the confines of a single genre, but must be read as a series of dialogues that are both ekphrastic (that is, they rely …

Analysis And Performance Suggestions For Witold Lutoslawski's Grave: Metamorphoses For Cello And Piano, Marta Reilly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation gives an analysis and performance suggestions for Witold Lutoslawski's Grave: Metamorphoses for Cello and Piano. The analysis is grounded in set-class theory, while the performance suggestions are based on my own experience as a concert cellist. The introduction describes background, circumstances of the composition, editions, publications, performance, reception history, and summarizes other Lutos³awski compositions for cello. The analysis describes the melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, articulation, agogic, texture, and compositional techniques. Sketches of Grave are used for further analysis and comparison. The dissertation also explores connections with other compositions, such as Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande and Lutoslawski's Funeral Music.

Provisional Fictions: Discontinuous Selves And The Making Of Meaning, Tara Roeder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My project is an exploration of trauma-based meaning-making practices and reader response across a variety of sites. By teasing out some of the complex connections among trauma, narrative, and audience that may occur in spaces ranging from non-linear memoir to courtroom testimony to the writing classroom, I engage with the inherently dialogic nature of making meaning from trauma, and examine some of the ways in which women who engage in recursive, embodied rhetorical practices can productively disrupt conventional expectations of the function of trauma narratives. Chapter One examines the formal, linguistic, and philosophical choices made by women memoirists who challenge …

Echolocation: Using Word-Burst Analysis To Rescore Keyword Search Candidates In Low-Resource Languages, Justin Richards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

State of the art technologies for speech recognition are very accurate for heavily studied languages like English. They perform poorly, though, for languages wherein the recorded archives of speech data available to researchers are relatively scant. In the context of these low-resource languages, the task of keyword search within recorded speech is formidable. We demonstrate a method that generates more accurate keyword search results on low-resource languages by studying a pattern not exploited by the speech recognizer. The word-burst, or burstiness, pattern is the tendency for word utterances to appear together in bursts as conversational topics fluctuate. We give evidence …

Some Complexities In English Article Use And Acquisition, Victoria Somogyi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Along with preposition use, native-like article use is one of the greatest difficulties for learners of English, particularly for those learners whose first languages do not have articles. And unlike many other areas involved in the mastery of the language, articles continue to present a challenge for advanced learners. A significant number of article usages are complex in that they are neither simple to explain (in that the does not encode definiteness or contextual uniqueness) nor strictly idiomatic. This paper a) provides an overview and critique of the scholarship on articles and their acquisition, b) takes a detailed look at …

The Possibility For Peaceful, Global, Participatory Governance: A Political Evolution Enabled By The Internet And Manifested By Crowds, Frederick Thomas Tucker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper argues that peaceful, global, participatory governance is possible in the 21st century with the aid of the Internet and other forms of abundant, instantaneous, recorded communication (AIRC). Such a polity, however, must replace militarized republics and autocracies to be realized. No historical precedent exists for militarized governments to disband voluntarily. The realization of peaceful, global, participatory governance depends on popular resistance in its most potent, yet least militaristic form--political crowds. On the basis of professional and independent research, analysis of primary and secondary sources, and participant observation, this thesis details the historical development of AIRC, the political systems …

On The Same Page: The Strong Teacher Professional Community At The Heart Of A Good New York City Public Middle School, Nathan Warner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes how one high-functioning, public, non-selective middle school in New York City, the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS/MS348), consistently gets strong student achievement gains. For the past three years, WHEELS has ranked near the top of all middle schools on the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) School Progress Reports, which measure student academic growth and performance in each school. At the same time its students, assigned randomly and coming from the neighborhood catchment zone, rank in the bottom decile in terms of economic advantage, and the bottom quartile in terms of elementary school academic performance …

Mind, Media, And Techniques Of Remediation In America, 1850-1910, Dominique Zino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation describes the way a renewed interest in picturesque aesthetics engaged the imaginations of writers, visual artists, philosophers, landscape designers, and collectors during the second half of the nineteenth century, reinvigorating a mode of inquiry that sanctioned the act of composing representations--mental, visual, and verbal--as a suitable response to social, political, and philosophical problems. The chapters that follow describe the understanding of the relationship between language, visual representation, and feeling that picturesque aesthetics formalized alongside the surface discourse of picturesqueness that was circulating through everyday genres, such as illustrated viewbooks, by the second half of the century. This dynamic …

The Degree Of Certainty System In Written Spanish In Mexico, Jaseleen Ruggles

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Practitioners in threat assessment have considered direct threats as being high-level threats of future violence (O'Toole 2000: 9), but empirical studies testing the predictive validity of direct threats have contradicted this intuition (Dietz, Matthews, Martell et al. 1991; Smith 2006). Studies that include analyses of the deployment of English verbal roots (such as kill, hurt, etc.) have failed to show significant correlations between lexical choices and the occurrence of realized outcomes (Dietz, Matthews, Martell et al. 1991; Scalora, Baumgartner, Zimmerman et al. 2002a: 1360; Scalora, Baumgartner, Zimmerman 2002b: 46, Smith 2006). This analysis focused on inflectional affixes, rather …

Effects Of Phonological Neighborhood Density On Lexical Access In Adults And Children With And Without Specific Language Impairment, Diana Almodovar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study was designed to examine how adults, children with typical language development (TLD), and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) process words from sparse and dense phonological neighborhoods, using the Cross Modal Picture-Word Interference Paradigm. The participants were asked to label a picture presented on a computer screen, while ignoring auditory distractors (interfering words or IWs) presented over headphones. The target items were manipulated according to neighborhood density (high and low density words), and the auditory distractors were either identical to the target, a neutral distractor (good), phonologically related (by rhyme), or unrelated to the target item. The …