Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Doing Catalan Spanish: Pragmatic Resources And Discourse Strategies In Ways Of Speaking Spanish In Barcelona, Robert Vann

Robert Vann

The last decade has seen the publication of many corpus-based studies about Spanish in Catalonia. With an emphasis on the linguistic characteristics that Spanish in Catalonia maintains or has acquired as a result of its prolonged contact with Catalan, these studies have started to catalog the lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax of Spanish in Catalonia. Relatively little attention has been dedicated, however, to the pragmatics of Spanish in Catalonia, that is, to the discourse strategies that constitute Catalan ways of speaking Spanish. The present investigation proceeds in this direction by identifying some of the pragmatic resources employed in Catalan ways of …

Sabbatical Leave Proposal & Report, Raymond Meredith

Sabbaticals

I am applying for sabbatical leave to move to and study in Costa Rica during the spring of 2014 and possibly most of that summer. This sabbatical leave is of both a personal and a professional nature. I will be moving to Costa Rica with my children and spouse, where I will experience day to day family life, take courses toward a master's degree in Latin American Studies, and improve my understanding of the Spanish language and of one of the cultures in which it is spoken.

Do Stress Levels Differ Between First Semester Nursing Student Early In The Semester Vs. The End Of The Semester?, Alissy Heisey

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study intends to determine how stress levels change over time in nursing students in the Baccalaureate program at East Tennessee State University. The instrument utilized for this survey was the Perceived Stress Scale by Mind Garden, Inc. This survey was passed at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester. There was no-significant difference found between the two time spots, leading us to conclude that the level of stress perceived by nursing students is a steady factor during their school semester.

Inadequate Translations: Spanish/English Discrepancies In The Translated Sonnets Of Garcilaso De La Vega, Jessica V. Palmer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The intimate relationship one develops with his or her native language is an experience which cannot be replicated through any amount of education. Diction, vocabulary, intonation and the connotations which accompany the many facets of language all develop along with us as we progress through life's experiences. Because of this deeply ingrained personal understanding, each individual's perspective towards a work of art, namely poetry, is completely unique to his or her experiences with the language in which it is written. Therefore, no amount of diligent translation can make a poem inhabit the same sentiment and effect in any language other …

Cómo Mejorar Las Clases De Idioma Para Los Estudiantes Introvertidos, Katie Burba

World Languages and Cultures

The intent of this project is to research and observe how current language teaching techniques could be improved to better accommodate introverted students. One third of the population identifies as introverted, yet language classes are obviously designed for extroverted students. Introverted students have unique learning styles that are being overlooked, and this project aims to create options that would improve introvert’s language acquisition.

This project consists in three parts: first, an observation of identified introverts and extroverts in beginning and intermediate language classes at Cal Poly. I kept an informal journal on what is working and what isn’t working for …

Linking Language To Latino Turnout, Alexander C. Ervin

Honors Projects

After Latino-Americans demonstrated their power in the 2012 presidential election, securing increased minority support at the polls has become a primary goal for both major U.S. political parties. A reliable bloc of Latino voters on one’s side could mean more wins, yet Latinos have a low voter turnout rate. This paper explores how to increase Latino turnout and argues that the use of the Spanish language in electoral advertising will have a positive effect and actually raise the rate of Latino participation. By comparing statewide Latino turnout data during both the 2002 midterm elections and the 2008 presidential election, I …

Defining The Modeling Standard For 3d Character Artists, Jessica L. Burns

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The focus of this thesis is to find the most modern methods to craft 3D characters for implementation in game engines. The industry is constantly adapting to new software and my study is to cover the most efficient way to create a character from an idea to fully realized character in 3D. The following is my journey in learning new techniques and adapting to the new software. To demonstrate, I will work through the process of creating a character from a 2D concept to a 3D model rendered in real time.

Order Of Acquisition: A Comparison Of L1 And L2 English And Spanish Morpheme Acquisition, Kyle A. Mcferren

Senior Honors Theses

This paper examines the order of acquisition for grammatical morphemes in Spanish and English first and second language learners. Brown’s first morpheme order study, conducted in 1973, laid the foundation for what would become one of the most common types of study conducted within the field of second language acquisition. The four orders of acquisition relevant here are examined and compared in order to support the roles of salience, morphophonological regularity, complexity, input frequency, and native language transfer in first and/or second language acquisition. The conclusion is that these five determinants work interdependently in determining the difficulty of acquiring a …

A Corpus For Investigating English-Language Learners' Dialog Behaviors, Nigel Ward, Paola Gallardo

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We are interested in developing methods for the semi-automatic discovery of prosodic patterns in dialog and how they differ between languages and among populations. We are starting by examining how the prosody of Spanish-native learners of English differs from that of native speakers. To support this work, we have collected a new corpus of conversations among college students. This includes dialogs between a nonnative speaker of English and a native, dialogs between native speakers of English, and Spanish conversations.

Songs With Political Purpose: The Catalan Nova Cançó And Its Social Movement, Brooke Moschetto

Senior Theses and Projects

This thesis is a study of the interaction of music and politics during the social movement in Catalonia, Spain, the nova cançó. This interaction demonstrates the importance of a cultural identity, imagined communities, and cultural planning for a nation. In the case of Catalonia, the nova cançó played an immediate crucial role in the transformation of society during the last years of the extremely repressive dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). Franco controlled Spain ideologically through censorships and power over the media in order to spread his values of a unified, homogenous, nationalist fatherland. In this way, he destroyed the …

Bailamos Juntos: Salsa En Los E.E.U.U. Y El Mundo, Betty Tran

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

This composition traces the history of Cuban-American cultural identity formation through the lens of music and dance. As the author explains, Cuban immigrants cultivated a rich music and dance culture in New York City by creating a series of Latin and Afro-Cuban music genres and dances that brought diverse groups of people together. As a Vietnamese-American woman, Tran sees several connections between her family’s Vietnamese heritage and the cultural histories of Cubans who came to the United States as refugees seeking asylum from political oppression. As a first-generation college student, Tran believes it is important to share this composition as …

Verbal Agreement In The L2 Spanish Of Speakers Of Nahuatl, Alma Ramirez-Trujillo, Joyce Bruhn De Garavito

Alma P Ramirez-Trujillo

This paper examines the production of subject/verb agreement in the L2 Spanish of Nahuatl L1 speakers in light of the debate on whether problems with morphology are evidence for a deficit at the functional level in second language acquisition. In particular, it focuses on whether age of acquisition is the determining factor in the production of agreement, or whether quantity and quality of input are. Results show that there was no difference in the rate or type of error according to age of acquisition, but there was an important difference in rate between those participants who had little or no …

Professor Pilar Munday Honored For Digital Teaching Initiatives, Pilar Munday

Pilar Munday

Spanish Professor Pilar Munday has won an international award for integrating social media (Instagram) in a global context as part of her digital teaching initiatives. This first-time award was given by Difusión, a publisher of Spanish as a foreign language teaching materials, and the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain.

España Ante El Mundo: Spain's Colonial Language Policies In North Africa, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

During its presence in Northern Morocco and the Western Sahara, Spain lauded its colonial policies, and relations with the native populations in general, as being more successful than those of the other colonial power present in the region, France. While it is true that France’s educational policies were narrowly aimed at forming acquiescent elites of the Maghrebi societies, Spain’s policies in turn were severely conditioned by a hyper-awareness of existing ethno-religious divisions, a product of the prominence of religion in the historical relations between Iberia and the Maghreb. In this essay, I discuss the differences in Spain’s educational policies between …

The Effect Of Short-Term Study Abroad On Second Language Spanish Phonetic Development, Silvina Bongiovanni, Avizia Y. Long, Megan Solon, Erik Willis

Faculty Publications

This study explores the impact of study abroad (SA) on second language Spanish phonetic development. Twenty-seven English-speaking learners of Spanish, 15 who were participating in a 4-week SA program in the Dominican Republic and 12 who were studying at their home (AH) institution, were recorded 5 weeks apart (at the approximate beginning and end of their respective programs). Recordings were analyzed acoustically, and four groups of segments were examined: word-initial /p t k/, intervocalic /b d ɡ/, intervocalic /ɾ/ and /r/, and word-final /l/. Productions at Time 1 and Time 2 as well as between the SA and AH groups …

Span 202: Intermediate Spanish Ii (Focus On Literature & Culture)—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Kelly Kingsbury Brunetto

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

During Spring 2015 I undertook a curricular revision of UNL's fourth-semester Spanish course (SPAN202) with the objective of improving the materials to help the course better achieve its stated goal of moving students "away from knowledge about the language and expertise in using isolated skills into a practical and fluid use of the language in which [they] synthesize [their] isolated skills." As it existed at the time, in theory SPAN202 focuses on synthesis and helping students negotiate higher levels of discourse, but in practice it tended to get bogged down in a comprehensive grammar review. In reality, some grammar topics …

Tuteo O Ustedeo: Un Estudio De Las Formas De Tratamiento En Las Publicidades De Escaparates / Tutoiement Ou Vouvoiement: Une Etude Des Formes D'Adresse Dans Les Publicités Des Vitrines, Charlotte M. Klein

Senior Independent Study Theses

In both French and Spanish, there exist two pronouns of the second person singular form of address: tu/vous and tú/usted, respectively. While the first of each pair is typically considered the ‘informal’ pronoun of address, the second is more ‘formal’, creating a complicated distinction that every person must resolve when speaking. This project analyzes the difficulty of choosing between the two forms of address through the lens of politeness theory, emphasizing the concepts of solidarity and power as well as other important factors that contribute to this complex decision. To show how the pronouns are …