Digital Commons Network^™

Lishmah: An Exploration Of Syntactic Ambiguity And Biblical Exegesis Through The Jewish Calendar Year, Shani Tzoref

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lishmah (Hebrew, meaning “for its own sake”) is a digital resource for exploring syntactic ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible and traditional Jewish biblical interpretation. Hosted on CUNY Manifold, it currently features twelve curated cases of syntactic ambiguity, each linked to a month of the Hebrew calendar, accompanied by annotated medieval Jewish commentaries.

The project employs digital tools for data compilation, presentation, and user interaction. While in its early stages, Lishmah aims to contribute to digital humanities by bridging traditional close reading with computational approaches and highlighting discourse analysis in biblical studies.
Future plans include developing Lishmah into a collaborative research …

Does Treatment Setting In Ati Matter? An Examination Of Completion Rates And The Role Of Violent Charges Among Individuals With Co-Occurring Disorders, George J. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the proliferation of alternatives to incarceration (ATI) for individuals with co-occurring disorders in recent decades, little is known about comparative styles of treatment used in this context. The following study uses data from a case management service in a large urban city (n=273) where several types of treatment are utilized in the ATI landscape. Specifically, this study compares ATI completion rates and time to completion or failure for several styles of treatment: clinic-based outpatient, residential, assertive community treatment (ACT) and personalized recovery-oriented services (PROS) programs. Results of a logistic regression indicate that individuals initially referred to residential treatment had …

Back To The Margins: The Re-Marginalization Of Feedback Research In Composition And Rhetoric, Robert A. Greco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation applies content analysis, both quantitative and thematic, to publications exploring feedback on student writing by analyzing two corpora of texts published from 2000 to 2019: a systematic sample of 114 articles from 5 journals and excerpts from 5 guides for new instructors. For the journals’ corpus, the most significant emergent themes included error; affect, both instructors’ and students’; and technology. In the guides’ corpus, this study focused on guides’ assumptions about their audiences and discussed the “cycle of correction”—a pattern where guides have focused on cultivating and reinforcing core field values about feedback established between the mid-1980s and …

Unifying Comprehension And Competence Through Merge: A New Linking Hypothesis Connecting Electrophysiological Data To Linguistic Intuitions, Kevin Patrck Guzzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation integrates neuroscience and linguistics to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying syntactic processing. To do this, we focus on Early Syntactic Negativities (ESNs) which are rapid negative electrophysiological responses known to be elicited by phrase structure violations due to an unexpected lexical category. We examine ESNs elicited in two previously undocumented elliptical constructions, sluicing and swiping, employing event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral acceptability judgments. Our investigation builds upon Collins and Stabler’s (2016) formalization of minimalist syntax, proposing a novel Merge Hypothesis of ESNs. This hypothesis posits a direct link between ESNs and violations of the Merge operation, a fundamental …

Freedom Pedagogy: Black Educators In The Urban North During The Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Milagros Seraus-Roache

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black educational history has been told through a predominantly Southern lens. This dissertation highlights the experiences of Black educators in the urban North during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Northern Black educators confronted the challenges of freedom—including the constant need to protect it—using a set of approaches influenced by the various intersecting social movements and intellectual currents of their day. While these educators represented a small minority of African Americans, their contributions were profound, leaving legacies that provide a lens for understanding and improving issues facing urban Black youth and their communities today.

In the absence of a comprehensive …

Cueing Motions In A String Quartet, An Exploratory Study Of Motion Trajectories, Maren Rothfritz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A string quartet performance involves an array of different body movements which serve many functions, including sound production, expression, and communication. This dissertation examines the ways string quartet players execute specific communicative body motions called cues, which are anticipatory gestures meant to communicate tempo and timing as well as the musical intentions such as dynamics, articulation, and character to the co-performers. Some scholarly research exists on cueing, but a formalized description of the cueing motions involved has not yet been developed. This dissertation serves as an exploratory study examining the motion trajectories of cueing motions employed by the Argus Quartet, …

Where The Landscape Inspires The Lines: Python-Based Workbooks And Digital Tools For Reading Yoshino Ki, Miaoling Xue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Where the Landscape Inspires the Lines (https://yoshinoki.info/) explores the intersection of premodern Japanese literature and digital humanities (DH) through an innovative online platform for reading, annotating, and coding. Centered on Yoshino ki 吉野記 (A Record of Yoshino), a seventeenth-century Japanese poetic travelogue authored by the poet and courtier Asukai Masaaki 飛鳥井雅章 (1611–1679), this project offers an interactive and immersive experience designed to meet the academic and research needs of a diverse group of scholars and students while advocating for a multilingual approach that challenges anglophone-centric biases often found in DH. To ensure consistency, the project uses Yoshino ki as a …

Féminas Speaking Up: Three Papers On Feminine Transgender Identities, Gender Identity Activism, And Language Reform In Lima, Peru, Ernesto Cuba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this three-paper dissertation, I explore the linguistic and discursive practices of Féminas, a leading transgender rights activist organization based in Lima, Peru. Building on scholarship on language ideologies (Irvine & Gal, 2000), queer linguistics (Motschenbacher, 2011), and socio-onomastics (Ainiala & Östman, 2017), I analyze the role that language beliefs and language-in-use plays in performing local (trans)gender identities and shaping grassroots politics within this specific community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992). Based on an extensive corpus of semi-structured interviews and ethnographic material gathered during my long-term investigation with Féminas, I present three studies exploring distinct –though related– ideologically-driven sociolinguistic …

Careful Compositions And Careless Constructions, Timothy Dalton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses digital methods to analyze a digitized archive of life writing by disabled Civil War veterans through lenses of care ethics and rhetorical genre theory. Autobiographical letters by more than 370 disabled men respond to a contest prompt open to Union veterans injured in their right arms who had to relearn penmanship. This dissertation introduces the hybrid genre of “specimens of left-hand penmanship” through several critical lenses. It critiques the rhetoric of vocational rehabilitation and examines this archive as a site for early examples of concepts from contemporary disability studies. Finally, it turns explicitly to care ethics, and …

Education Crowdfunding Success: Studies On Information Asymmetry And Information Overload In Online Platforms, Mingyan Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Online education crowdfunding attracts public school teachers with its enormous outsourcing opportunities, but its success is constantly challenged by information asymmetry and information overload. To assist the teachers in successfully collecting teaching funds in crowdfunding, three studies are conducted to address the two challenges.

Information asymmetry exists between the fundraising teachers and the potential donors and challenges the education crowdfunding success. Virtual communication setting of online context further exacerbates this issue. Following signaling theory, it is critical for the informed teachers to create and send quality signals to the less-informed donors to enhance communication and establish mutual understanding. To understand …

Claiming The Right To Belong: Diversity And The Politics Of Inclusion In Queens, New York, Susan J. Tanenbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines social integration in a diverse civic and political mainstream. The social science research on intergroup contact in U.S. cities undergoing significant demographic change tends to focus on encounters between members of majority “in-groups” and minority “out-groups” in the context of workplaces, neighborhoods, and families. I contend that civic politics is another compelling strategic site for observing intergroup contact between emerging and established players. My study presents three cases of claims-making activity during the post-9/11 period in New York City’s borough of Queens, where close to 50% of the population is foreign-born and no single racial group predominates. …

Intuitionism, Justification Logic, And Doxastic Reasoning, Vincent A. Peluce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this Dissertation, we examine a handful of related themes in the philosophy of logic and mathematics. We take as a starting point the deeply philosophical, and—as we argue, deeply Kantian—views of L.E.J. Brouwer, the founder of intuitionism. We examine his famous first act of intuitionism. Therein, he put forth both a critical and a constructive idea. This critical idea involved digging a philosophical rift between what he thought of himself as doing and what he thought of his contemporaries, specifically Hilbert, as doing. He sought to completely separate mathematics from mathematical language, and thereby logic. In chapter 3, we …

Helpful Intentions? Impact Of Intentionality On Children's Memory For Forensically-Relevant Information, Ella P. Merriwether

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rationale: When a child is a witness or victim of a crime, they are often asked a barrage of questions regarding when the crime took place, how many times it occurred, and how the abuse unfolded (Cross & Whitcomb, 2017; Sullivan et al., 2022). These questions can be problematic because they rely on concepts for which children may lack memory or linguistic ability to answer (Fenson et al., 2000; Friedman, 1993). One fundamental element missing from the copious research (e.g., Brubacher et al., 2012; Stolzenberg et al., 2017a; Wylie et al., 2021) on children’s ability to recount forensically-relevant information is …

Preschoolers’ Generation Of Quantity Implicatures, André Eliatamby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses the developing child as a window into the mechanisms and representations that allow us to understand the meaning of utterances in their contexts. I present three studies investigating 4- and 5-year-olds’ ability to generate two types of “quantity implicatures,” classic scalar implicatures with some that imply not all, and free choice inferences that arise with sentences like “Larry is allowed to have cake or ice-cream.” Together, the studies suggest a close relationship between pragmatic development and word learning, something not appreciated in existing literature. In the first study investigating some, I show that preschoolers interpret …

Loneliness And The Urban American (Non-)Romantic, Sarah C. Cook

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Loneliness, also known as ‘perceived social isolation,’ is an increasingly common feeling among Americans. It can be critically unhealthy when chronic, and recent revelations about its health effects have garnered a significant amount of media attention. Although statistical evidence tells us that marriage is the strongest defense against loneliness, over a third of Millennials and Gen-Zers say marriage is outdated; and census data shows that living alone is both one of the fastest-growing demographics in America, as well as a relatively stable housing arrangement. After examining existing research and media reports on loneliness itself in some depth, including factors that …

Cognitive Flexibility And Stability In Bilingual Older Adults, Lia Pazuelo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lifelong bilingual individuals develop expertise in language-switching, requiring a delicate balance between cognitive stability—safeguarding goals from interference—and cognitive flexibility—adapting goals to changing demands. While some studies demonstrate the transferability of these skills to non-linguistic tasks, signifying bilingualism's impact on cognitive processes, others find no direct correlation between non-linguistic task-switching and bilingualism. Our study investigated the cognitive processes underlying bilingual speakers' performance on a switching task, exploring whether varying degrees of bilingual experience in older adults result in different tendencies towards stability (e.g., lower mixing cost and response congruency effect) or flexibility (e.g., smaller switching costs). By treating the bilingual experience …

“Hattak Vpi Homma” Mvt Miha Nanta Fehna? What Does “Native American” Really Mean?, Alex R. Steers-Mccrum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indigenous identities in North America are much more complex than generally assumed. No single definition of “Native (American),” “(American) Indian,” or related terms provides a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that accurately or usefully describe all and only the right individuals and communities. I argue that understanding Native identities in the contemporary context requires examining multiple interconnected dimensions of Nativeness, articulated here as Enrollment and Recognition, Tribal Ethnicities, Native Race, Indian Panethnicity, and Indigenous Nationhood.

In the U.S., Indigenous identities are usually oversimplified as either Enrollment in a Recognized Tribe or as Native Race. While both of these aspects …

Radical Co-Teaching: How Building Relationships Creates Radical Co-Teaching Partnerships, Meagan L. Serrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the development of co-teaching relationships in K-12 classrooms in New York City. More than half of all teachers in New York City will be placed in co-taught classrooms, but they are not directly instructed on how to co-teach–and the relational aspects of co-teaching are largely ignored. This study uses New York public school teacher insights and experiences to understand what really goes into building strong co-teaching partnerships. Using a grounded theory framework for analysis, the research project examines the aspects of successful co-teacher relationships from the co-teacher perspective. The goal of this project is to understand how …

Henry James And The Act Of Speech From Drama To Dictation, Mary Claire Brunelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the idea of speech as an act in the writings of Henry James for the purpose of analyzing the author’s relationship to drama and how it influenced his practice of typewriter dictation. It traces the intersections of biography and bibliography within James’s notebooks, letters, and fiction produced during the years between his dismissal of playwriting after the public rejection of Guy Domville in January 1895 and his adoption of dictation due to writer’s cramp in the fall of 1896, as he worked on What Maisie Knew. In advancing an affective methodology to discover the embodied reality …

Digital Environments Of Reception And Governance: A Landscape Analysis Of Immigration-Related Webpages On U.S. State Websites, Orunima Chakraborti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American state governments occupy unique political roles when it comes to critical public-facing policy areas like education, health, transportation, and commerce, and therefore they administer many public services and benefits that affect immigrants and their communities. This study expands the existing knowledge of the ways in which U.S. state governments digitally engage with their immigrant populations, doing so through a landscape analysis that maps the information and resources provided for and about immigrant communities on 413 immigration-related webpages across all 50 U.S. state governments’ official websites. Data was collected in four categories for each webpage: its bureaucratic orientation, the government …

Prurient Nature: Sex Work And Ethics At The Margins Of Finance, Esra S. Padgett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an ethnographic and semiotic examination of the relationship between payment processing, transactional technologies, and the US adult industry. Based on twenty-four months of fieldwork in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, and Washington D.C., the dissertation demonstrates that transactional infrastructures, including payment processors, credit card systems, financial institutions like banks, as well as novel technologies like cryptocurrency, have become a key site for an ongoing ethical war around the politics of sex and sex work in the United States. On one hand, ethical fears around sex work have become qualifications for economic exclusion by financial institutions and private …

Factors Affecting Pretonic Deletion In English Syllables: A Corpus Study, Whitney Barnett-Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One type of variation in pronunciation that is associated with fast and/or conversational speech is massive reduction, in which entire syllables are deleted. We focus on a subtype of massive reduction, pretonic vowel deletion, where the vowel in an unstressed syllable is deleted and the flanking consonants form an onset cluster, V --> φ / C__C, such as the word Columbus reduced to the two-syllable pronunciation [klʌmbəs], resulting in the onset cluster [kl]. The main question asks what predictors are associated with pretonic vowel deletion. Furthermore, we evaluate the Lexicalist Hypothesis and Sonority Projection as explanations of the phenomenon. …

Relationship Interventions For Autistic Children And Their Non-Autistic Siblings, Susan Vanessa Mchugh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Relationships between children with autism and their non-autistic siblings are often characterized by great warmth, empathy, and affection. However, because of core deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, autistic children and their siblings often experience difficulties with communication, play, and associated mental health problems. Interventions aimed at improving relationships in these sibling dyads historically have involved teaching non-autistic children to behave similarly to interventionists for autistic siblings, and support groups for children with broad chronic illnesses. More recent interventions have shifted focus to improvement of play between siblings, and support groups for siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder. Some are naturalistic …

A Mute Pleasure: Novelistic Poetics In The Nineteenth-Century, Ryan Everitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through special attention to the non-narrative, descriptive, lyrical, or even boring passages that interrupt the story, this dissertation explores what happens when the nineteenth-century British novel envelops experiences that were traditionally (or since Romanticism) in the domain of poetry: longings for escape, exhilarating affects of freedom, opaque moments of revelation. In most cases, I characterize the novel discourse as representing a prosaic consciousness that wrestles with its more visceral yet vital “other,” poetic consciousness. To articulate how poetry survives within novelistic discourse, this dissertation is organized around sets of opposing terms, whose unresolved tension becomes the basis of my analysis …

Liberal Attitude Reports, Tomasz Zyglewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Attitude reports are sentences such as “Tomasz thinks the Earth is flat” or “Susan wantsvice cream.” It is commonly assumed that the main reason people use them is to make sense of the reportee’s behavior: to explain their past actions, or predict future ones. To play this role effectively, attitude reports have to accurately describe what is going on in the reportee’s head. Let’s call attitue reports that do not meet this condition “Liberal attitude reports.” For example: Alice is a vegan doctor who thinks that every vegan should take a B12 supplements. It is felicitous to say to your …

Dante’S Volgare And The Pastoral Presence: An Analysis Of The Concept Of Language In The Divina Commedia, Paola M. Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dante’s conception of the Italian vernacular, the “volgare illustre”, is a central concern of his work and one which catalyses and nurtures, both overtly and covertly, his creation of the Commedia. Although Dante positions himself in his writings as the continual defender and most prolific poet of the vernacular, isolating a specific linguistic use and structure, a coherent definition of what vernacular Dante privileges or what appropriate usage he adheres to, is a difficult and often confusing task. The existence of two eclogues, the only works by Dante to have been written after the majority of the Commedia had been …

Controlling Emotional Text To Speech Using Complex Adverbial Phrases, Zainab T. Akande

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates the usage of adverbial modifiers from audiobook data as a resource for training speech synthesizers with a greater range of speech descriptions. The Tacotron2 text-to-speech (TTS) model was used for the purposes of this study. Utilizing the LibriTTS dataset, the Tacotron2 model is trained under two experimental conditions: one incorporating adverbial modifiers into the input text and the other without. The dataset preprocessing involves embedding descriptions using word embeddings and encoding speaker IDs with machine learning techniques. Additionally, the model architecture includes a prosody encoder inspired by prior research. Evaluation of the trained models involves subjective assessments …

Singing Petrarch In The Cinquecento: Embodied Reading And The Italian Madrigal, Thomas A. Hedrick Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how composers of sixteenth-century Italian madrigals highlighted poetic line rhythm, repeated vowel sounds (or assonance), and word repetition in figures of speech—all elements of the verse that have been previously overlooked by scholars, who have traditionally focused on musical depictions of the text’s semantics. The analysis in chapters 2, 3, and 4 shows that composers used a consistent set of techniques from the madrigals of Arcadelt to those of Monteverdi, and musical examples draw from large collection of madrigals on Petrarch sonnets. The analytical methodology is built on the premise that Cinquecento encounters with poetry can be …

Self-Perceived Cognitive Functioning In Motoric Cognitive Risk Syndrome: Enhancing Risk Detection In Health Disparity Older Adults, Caroline O. Nester

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Motoric Cognitive Risk Syndrome (MCR) is a predementia condition that combines two clinical presentations associated with dementia: slow gait speed and subjective cognitive concerns (SCC). MCR diagnosis is associated with increased risk for dementia over its individual components of SCC or slow gait alone, making it a valuable marker of early neurodegenerative changes. MCR does not require expensive, time-consuming assessments to be diagnosed, broadening accessibility in remote or under-resourced settings. At present, there is no consistent method to assess SCC in MCR – a key diagnostic feature of the syndrome. The lack of understanding about SCC in MCR may limit …

Musical Semiotics In Kate Soper’S Ipsa Dixit (2010–2016), Scott A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the six parts of Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit (2010–2016). While individual parts have received some music theoretical attention, this is the first analysis of the entire Pulitzer Prize-nominated work. Ambiguity and contingency are major themes of Ipsa Dixit, and by treating each part independently and in combination, I hope to honor Ipsa’s contingent status as a unified work comprised of six complete works. Soper’s libretto unifies an assemblage of texts with adaptations of Aristotle to investigate the intersections of language and music with authority, veracity, and (un)intelligibility.

I theorize that Soper’s “philosophy-opera” dramatizes the formation of …