Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Placing İsmayıllı Lezgi Among The Lezgi Dialects, Jessica Smith

Theses and Dissertations

There is a cluster of three Lezgi villages in the İsmayıllı district of Azerbaijan that is separated by the Caucasus Mountains from the three main Lezgi dialects—Standard (SL), Axti (AL), and Quba (QL) Lezgi. This study places İsmayıllı Lezgi (IL) among the other dialects by comparing many of the varieties' attributes.

Five approaches are taken in this comparison: 1) comparing the similarities and differences of IL's phonological inventory to that of SL and AL; 2) contrasting the noun case system of IL versus that of SL; 3) comparing their verbal morphology; 4) looking for lexical similarities between IL and SL/AL/QL …

Berne, Indiana Swiss German: Lessons Learned From A Small-Scale Documentation Project, Gretta Yoder Owen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a case study of a small-scale language documentation project carried out in Berne, Indiana. The goal of this project was to capture, through audio recording, samples of the Swiss German language that could be presented to the Berne community and preserved for future use. As much as possible, this project was carried out according to best practices for language documentation, so that the data will be accessible to the academic community for further research after there are no more living speakers of the Berne, Indiana Swiss dialect.

The history of the Swiss Mennonites who settled the Berne, …

Motion Events In Seri: Applying Talmy's Typologies, April E. Sachs

Theses and Dissertations

Leonard Talmy's typologies of motion hypothesize that in a language's depiction of Motion events, the semantic components of the event will find characteristic expression in consistent morphosyntactic structures. In the motion-actuating typology, the main verb in an event of Motion will characteristically conflate Motion with either the Path, Figure, or Manner of Motion. In the motion-framing typology, the Path component will characteristically appear in either the verb or the satellite to the verb. These typologies, proposed in their most cited forms in Talmy (1985) and Talmy (1991), have been applied over the years to dozens of languages, with varying degrees …

A Phonological Description Of "Pet Talk" In Arara, Isaac Costa De Souza

Theses and Dissertations

The Arara people of Para, Brazil, as a whole, are remnants or survivors of some larger Cariban groups who descended from the headwaters of the upper Xingu to the mid and low areas of this river by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Now they live in three different villages: Maia, Cachoeira Seca and Laranjal.

The present thesis aims to describe thirteen different ludlings or "play languages" that elderly Arara people from Laranjal know and sometimes use in talking to pets. Play languages are linguistic forms that are purposely manipulated at some level. The strategies which the Arara people use …

The Morphology Of Nouns In The Ugoroŋmo Language (Arara Of Pará), Shirley Dias Cardoso De Souza

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I describe the morphology of nouns in the Ugoroŋmo language (Arara of Pará), which is spoken by just over three hundred people. The Ugoroŋmo people live on the bank of the Iriri river, in two villages (Laranjal and Cachoeira Seca) in the state of Pará, Brazil.

The nouns of this language can be divided in three main groups: those that are not inflected for possession, those that may be inflected for possession, and those that must be inflected for possession (inherently possessed nouns). Possession is marked by two affixes: a possessor prefix and a possessive suffix. Inherently …

Word Order Typology In Modern South Arabian Languages: A Study Based On A Corpus Of Analyzed Texts, David A. Cross Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I present a typological analysis of the Modern South Arabian Languages. Typological research is often based on a six-way typology of dominant word order based on clauses containing nominal subjects, objects and verbs. However, this clause type is extremely rare in this language group, making typological analysis based on a six-way typology problematic.

Dryer's Four-way typology of dominant word order is applied to the Modern South Arabian Languages and they are shown to be VS&VO. Greenberg's universals which refer to dominant word order are then reformulated in terms of the Four-way typology. These reformulated universals are shown …

Syntactic Underspecification In Riau Indonesian, Brendon Yoder

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

Indonesian is known for having a relatively simple morphological and syntactic structure. This is especially true of local varieties of the language, where contrast between categories found in Standard Indonesian is neutralized. In the Indonesian variety spoken in Riau Province, there is almost no morphological marking of grammatical categories and there is relatively free word order. Gil (1994, 2003, 2005b) develops a theory of Riau Indonesian grammar that has only one open grammatical category, which he calls S (Sentence). This means that there are no distinctions between categories like noun, verb, and adjective and no basic word order. In this …

Prenasalization And Trilled Release Of Two Consonants In Nias, Brendon Yoder

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

This paper presents an acoustic study of the phonetic realization of two consonants in Nias (Indonesia), orthographically represented as mb and ndr. These consonants have been analyzed by Catford (1988) and Brown (2001, 2005) as a bilabial trill and an apical trill, respectively. My own cross-dialectal observations indicate that these consonants have multiple realizations in each dialect. This paper presents evidence for four broad phonetic realizations of both mb and ndr: most commonly a plain stop, but also a prenasalized stop, a stop with trilled release, and stop with fricated release. It seems that the variable character of the two …

Isthmus Zapotec Vowel Formants, Julie Martin

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

This paper addresses several questions regarding the acoustic properties of Isthmus Zapotec vowels. Based on earlier recordings of a female, mother-tongue speaker of the language, average formant frequencies for each of the five phonemic vowels are determined for this speaker. I then look at differences in formant frequencies between stressed and unstressed modal vowels. Finally, I compare modal, laryngealized and checked productions of the vowels, to see if there are systematic differences between these three phonation types.

Round Vowel And Dorsal Consonant Epenthesis In Seri, Stephen A. Marlett

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

Recent work on markedness has claimed that round vowels and dorsal consonants are never epenthesized. However, Seri seems to present exactly these types of epenthesis. Relevant data are presented and discussed, and it is claimed that these rules are valid counterexamples that need to be taken into consideration more seriously.