Digital Commons Network^™

A Grammar Sketch Of Dəməna, Cindy S. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a description of the morphology and syntax of Dəməna, a Chibchan language of northern Colombia. Dəməna is an SOV language with postpositions and genitive-nominal, noun-adjective word orders.

Unusual features of Dəməna include: case marking suffixes which occur as phrasal affixes, a fusion of person marking and deixis in verbal suffixes, and interaction of temporal and special deixis on question suffixes.

Dəməna exhibits more agreement than would be expected. Causative constructions may contain two different direct object person agreement prefixes side by side on a single verb. In cases of advancement to direct object, the same argument may …

Yoknapatawpha County In China: A Study Of Faulkner's Short Stories In Translation., Xian Liu

Theses and Dissertations

Since the meaningful impact of a word is context-dependent, this study investigates the cultural and semantic contexts of William Faulkner's short stories in both English and Chinese to determine whether the original is successfully "echoed." As controversial as Walter Benjamin's theory on translation is, "echoing" the original refocuses a literary translation on the overall effect rather than isolated wording. Despite its questionable practicality, it serves as the basic criterion in this study, which evaluates the quality of a translation through comparing the effect of the original with that of the translated in paralinguistic aspects such as voice, style, and dialect.Faulkner …

The Hakluyt Stage: Travel, Narcissism, And The Narrative., Thomas Palakeel

Theses and Dissertations

In this quincentenary year of the Columbus landfall, as the theorists debate the limitations of Western civilization, my dissertation critiques the narratives collected by Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616) who sought to enter the geographical and ethnographic discourse of the late Renaissance by inscribing the emergent English nation as the custodian of modern civilization. The English rhetoric of civility in the New World has taken the form of a series of monologic narratives, forced inscriptions that seek to normalize the history of colonization, slavery, and imperialism.My study of the narratives in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1598) reveals the cultural narcissism of the English …

The Relationship Between Reading Comprehension And Vocabulary And Success In A Baccalaureate Nursing Program, Margaret Lees

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Multimedia Module Design And Module Development Guidelines, Lisa L. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

General Education Requirements For Elementary Preservice Teachers: A Case Study, Judith K. Mccutchan

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate curricular patterns for general education requirements in elementary teacher education during the period 1970-1990 and to examine the general education of elementary education seniors at the University of North Dakota in 1987-88 within the framework of changing views of the purposes of general education in teacher education.

Students were selected randomly from a list of seniors majoring in elementary education, elementary/early childhood education and elementary/special education during spring semester of 1988. Sixty students were contacted by telephone and interviewed during the final two weeks of the spring semester. Twenty-one faculty members whose …

English For Specific Purposes : Breakdown In Aircraft Radio Communication, Emerson Dale Case

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Writing Apprehension : A Study Of Learning Disabled Students' Anxiety Toward Composing, Andrew T. Freeman

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Saturday's Women: Female Characters As Angels And Monsters In Saturday's Warrior And Reunion, Nola Diane Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Using theories of feminist criticism as explained by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the study concludes that both Saturday's Warrior, a "home literature" style play, and Reunion, a more artistically challenging play, reflect repressive cultural images of women. Both plays cast female characters into the roles of passive Angel, domestic Angel/Monster, and active Monster.

The Social Construction Of Abortion, Alexis Lora Ruffin

Theses and Dissertations

The essential socio-political question abortion raises is twofold: within whose legitimate province is the abortion decision to be made and what are the salient factors in determining subsequent resolutions over access. The answers speak to perceptions of legitimate authority, which are fundamental to the social construction of abortion.

The disparate literature on abortion was examined to develop a typology of perspectives on abortion. Theories from feminist sociology and social psychology were employed to examine the impact abortion access and the subsequent negotiation over legitimate authority have on the social order. The underlying hypothesis of this research is that abortion is …

A Study Of The Adoption And Effectiveness Of Electronic Mail At The Air Force Institute Of Technology, Douglas D. White

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigated the relationship between the adoption and effectiveness of electronic mail at the Air Force institute of Technology's School of Systems and Logistics (LS). In this research, theories concerning innovation adoption and measurement of system effectiveness are discussed. Survey instruments from both areas were selected, tested, and used to collect data from the LS faculty and staff. Correlation analysis was performed using the data collected. Findings indicate a correlation does exist between the adoption of electronic mail and the effectiveness surrogate measurement, user satisfaction. There was a significantly strong negative correlation between electronic mail complexity and user satisfaction.

Development Of Human Emotions From Neonate To Preschoolers, Edwina Davies Luevanos

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Vision System Model, Erik J. Fretheim

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation provides four major contributions to the field of vision research. The first contribution is a general vision system model. The model, which blends biological as well as technological methods into a coherent approach to vision, will provide a basis for implementing vision systems. The second contribution of this dissertation is to demonstrate particular implementations of portions of the model. These implementations will include methods for using Gabor wavelets in edge detection, in preprocessing images for use as feature vectors in backpropagation neural networks, and as basis functions in a recognition/reconstruction network, as well as methods for integrating color …

Engineers And English Teachers : A Case Study Of Writing Instruction In A Chemical Engineering Course, Roberta K. E Harvey

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Ethnicity And Pregnancy : A Quantitative And Qualitative Study Of Mexican American Migrant Childbirth, Cheryl Briggs Lausch

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Utah Indians And The Indian Slave Trade: The Mormon Adoption Program And Its Effect On The Indian Slaves, Robert M. Muhlestein

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a study of the Mormon adoption program developed by the Mormons in response to the Indian slave trade in Utah, 1850-1880. It focuses on the Mormon justifications, as enumerated by Brigham Young, for the adoption policy and it links those justifications to expected results. Further this thesis compares the Mormon's expected results with the actual results of the adoption program through an analysis of historical accounts and Mormon ordinance records.

Lady, If You Go Into Politics: North Dakota's Women Legislators, 1923-1989, Ann M. Rathke

Theses and Dissertations

Little is known about the seventy-two women who served in the North Dakota legislature between 1923, when women first took seats, and 1989, the state's Centennial year. Their collective story has been absent from major scholarly works about the history of North Dakota, a state which prizes its unique and colorful political heritage. The purpose of this study is to remedy this lack of information.

A variety of published and unpublished sources were consulted, including the records of proposed bills and resolutions. A survey was developed and used to obtain additional biographical and other information about current and former women …

Eros And Thanatos In D. H. Lawrence's "Sons And Lovers" And "Lady Chatterley's Lover" And In John Fowles's "The Collector" And "Daniel Martin"., Salah Ed-Din A. Nefily

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between eros and thanatos in four novels, Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence and The Collector and Daniel Martin by John Fowles. Sons and Lovers and The Collector reflect their authors' early awareness of certain thanatotic forces in modern life. Lawrence criticizes the negative influence of mechanization on human beings whereas Fowles opposes lack of freedom.The two writers' awareness of these negative forces in the early novels is followed in Lady Chatterley's Lover and in Daniel Martin by presentations of salvational plans which liberate or heal the novels' protagonists. In …

Language Use In The Epena District Of Northern Congo, William L. Gardner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, based on two language surveys conducted in 1988 and 1989, addresses the question “What language do you speak?” for the people of the district of Epena in the Likouala Region of the People’s Republic of the Congo. The goals of the study were to: 1) inventory all the languages and dialects spoken in the district; 2) clarify their relationships with each other and neighboring languages; 3) measure the degree of intelligibility between speakers of different language varieties, specifically among the Bomitaba people; 4) investigate in what situations the people use which languages; and 5) provide bases for making …

The Conjunctive Novel: Form And Function, Joanne Ruth Gowey Desotelle

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to identify the function of characters who recur in more than one text by the same author.

Chapter One reviews critical opinions regarding repeating characters. These range from Percy Lubbock who believes that the other lives of a character should be ignored or they will distort the truth of the individual novels, to Michel Butor who recognizes that repeating characters serve a unique function within the texts. The term “conjunctive” novel is coined to identify texts which are conjoined by repeating characters.

Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s terminology, Chapter Two argues that conjunctive novels are double-voiced …

Recent Changes In The Ethnobotany Of Standing Rock Indian Reservation, Shelly Katherene Kraft

Theses and Dissertations

Gathering arid preserving wild fruits and vegetables for food and medicine, especially from the wooded bottomlands, was a traditional part of the Lakota culture. Plant use among the Lakota has been greatly reduced and in some cases, completely eliminated by the damming of the Missouri River by Oahe Dam. This dam, which forced the Lakota of Standing Rock Reservation to give up their homes in the bottomlands in violation of their treaty rights of 1868 had a considerable impact on the biogeography of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, in January I960, almost 200 Indian families were evacuated from their homes …

The "New Age Movement": A Case Study, Zachary Grant Goodell

Theses and Dissertations

Within the last two decades, the United States has witnessed the growth of a phenomenon which the media has referred to as "The New Age Movement". This multi-faceted social pattern includes astrology, meditation, mysticism, and eastern philosophies, the popularity of which have increased significantly in the 1980's. This thesis is a case study of the "New Age Movement". First, I develop a descriptive model of the key ideological themes and organizational structures of this social pattern. Subsequently, I organize this model in terms of several sociologically based theoretical frameworks including activity fads, social movements, and sociocultural shifts, in order to …

The Depiction Of Lakota Culture In Waterlily, Kelly J. Morgan

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Mormon Melting Pot: Ethnicity Acculturation In Cedar City, Utah, 1880-1915, Vida Leigh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the ethnicity of the five ethnic groups found in Cedar City, Utah, during the 1880-to-1915 period. Those five groups were originally sent by Brigham Young to found the Iron Mission, as a two-fold project: (1) developing the iron mining industry, and (2) building a united community of Latter-day Saints.

The demographics, kinship, ties, marriage patterns, occupations, wealth, and elites in church government and society have been examined in detail through US censuses, Iron county assessment records, marriage records, Cedar City municipal records, LDS church records, diaries, histories, and personal histories. By comparing all the ethnic groups within …

Influence Of Mission Statements On Teacher Education Programs At Two Church-Related Undergraduate Institutions, Ann Marie Biermaier

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ways in which stated institutional missions influenced the operation of teacher education programs, and the way that teacher education programs used the institutional mission statement in evaluating their programs as it applied to two private, liberal arts colleges in Minnesota. Institutional missions were expected to guide curricular policy, inform the public, and establish criteria for accountability and subsequent program evaluation.

This study was conducted utilizing the case study method. Data were gathered by reviewing documentation pertaining to the institution and to the teacher education program as well as by interviewing administrators, …

Stress Reduction In Dental Students., Jacqueline Kush Turek

Theses and Dissertations

The current research was designed to compare effectiveness of two widely used stress reduction methods, Progressive Relaxation Training (PRT) and Stress Inoculation Training (SIT). The entire Fall 1987, freshman class of Creighton University School of Dentistry participated (N =.68). Fifty-eight Subjects completed the project. Students were randomly assigned to a treatment, PRT (N = 12) or SIT (N = 17), or to one of two control groups, placebo (N = 13), or no treatment (N = 16). The placebo consisted of a once-only lecture on theory of stress. All subjects were measured for stress related components using paper and pencil …

A Critical Analysis Of Cbs Evening News Coverage Of Two U.S.-U.S.S.R. Summit Meetings: Vienna 1979 And Geneva 1985, James M. Ellis Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

Nearly four hours of CBS Evening News summit reports, loaned by the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, were coded to construct a descriptive analysis and comparison of the coverage of the 1979 and 1985 summit meetings. Variables coded include speaker, language, origin of video and audio content, topic and quoted sources. Soviet speakers and topics were given proportionately more air time in 1985 than in 1979. But despite large differences in several important areas such as Soviet willingness to communicate via television, different leaders and their images, geopolitical factors, and improved video technology, many patterns of coverage showed similarities from 1979 …

Samuel Clemens : The Decline And Fall Of The American Dream, Frank Mccahill

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Subject Status, Setting, And Discourse Partner On The Frequency And Success Of Initiation Of Interaction In Preschool Children, Kathryn J. Jenniges

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

A Hermeneutic Of Sacred Texts: Historicism, Revisionism, Positivism, And The Bible And Book Of Mormon, Alan Goff

Theses and Dissertations

As methods by which texts are to be understood, positivism and historicism have a long tradition and continue to exert wide influence in all academic disciplines. Other approaches to textual concerns have recently emerged to challenge the dominance of these two approaches. Foremost among these new approaches are hermeneutics and deconstruction. Both of the latter approaches recognize that interpretation is inescapable. The latter challenges even the possibility of determinate meaning. A theoretical discussion of historicism and positivism uncovers questionable and troublesome difficulties. Hermeneutics in its conservative or radical variations overcomes the difficulties of interpretation that positivism and historicism can't explain. …