Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Constructing Abe No Seimei: Integrating Genre And Disparate Narratives In Yumemakura Baku's Onmyōji, Devin T. Recchio

Masters Theses

The Onmyōji series has had an incredible impact on Japanese fiction. It has created an entire genre of material called onmyōjimono and sold 5 million copies counting only the novel series. Despite this, it has been woefully understudied by both Japanese and English speaking scholars. The Japanese scholars that do acknowledge it use it as a springboard to launch a survey of Abe no Seimei in written and performed media throughout history, and the English speaking scholars have limited their analyses to the form that oni take in the narrative. My research has revealed that Yumemakura Baku utilizes a complex …

The Phonological Characteritics And The Historical Strata Of The Qianjiang Dialect, Liyan Luo

Masters Theses

The Qianjiang(潛江) city is located not only on the boundary of the Southwestern mandarin and the Gan dialect, but also on the boundary of three different sub-cluster regions of the Southwestern mandarin. Therefore, it is difficult to classify the Qianjiang dialect into any region. As a result, the phonological features of the Qianjiang dialect have not yet been systematically studied so far. In order to provide a thorough understanding of the Qianjiang dialect, this thesis focuses on investigating phonological characteristics of the Qianjiang dialect and in particular the aspiration of the Middle Chinese (MC) voice obstruent. As many ancient phonological …

Inferring Word-Meaning, Morpheme-Based, And Word-Based Second Language Vocabulary Teaching Methodologies, Qingli Liu

Masters Theses

In this study, an experiment was conducted to compare the three teaching methods: the inferring word-meaning method, the morpheme-based teaching method, and the word-based teaching method. The results showed that students taught by the inferring word-meaning method outperformed both the students taught by the morpheme-based method and the word-based method in terms of word retention. The possible reason is that the inferring word-meaning section enabled students to pay attention to and spend more time on each word. On the other hand, the disadvantage of the inferring word-meaning method is that it might not be an efficient way to teach a …

A Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Directional Complements, Lin Lin

Masters Theses

This paper adopted second language acquisition theories and research methods to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners acquire Chinese directional complements (DCs). It included two main parts: a corpus study and a questionnaire survey. The corpus came from the compositions of 47 Chinese learners at intermediate and advanced levels at a New England university. And the data also included the questionnaire survey of 82 novice, intermediate, and advanced levels’ Chinese learners and 15 native Chinese speakers who study in the same university. The corpus study shows that L2 learners at intermediate and advanced level preferred to use DCs with extended …

Acoustic Analysis Of The Tones In The Shantou Dialect, Danni Li

Masters Theses

This paper mainly analyzes the different tones in the Shantou dialect. The Shantou dialect is known as one of the branches of the Chaoshan dialect which is a sub-group of the southern Min. Compared to other sub-group southern Min dialects, one of the distinguishing tonal characteristics of the Shantou dialect is that it has eight tones while the others have seven. Common views have explained that the eight tones in the Shantou dialect are the result of the four Middle Chinese tones further splitting into the upper register and the lower register. Thus, the Shantou dialect has its unique position …

Prison Of The Setting Sun: A Translation Of Ono Fuyumi's Rakushō No Goku, Caitlin F. Orwoll

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In this thesis, I have presented my translation of the novella Rakushō no goku (落照の獄) by Ono Fuyumi, preceded by a critical introduction. In this introduction, I have provided brief biographical information about the author, context for the story and its place in the Twelve Kingdoms series of novels, an analysis of the story's use of the death penalty as allegory, and an explanation for some of my choices in the translation.

In my introduction, my main purpose was to present the author, who has written multiple best-selling, award-winning novels that have received both popular and critical acclaim, yet has …