Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Anglo And Hispanic Vowel Variation In New Mexican English, Susan Brumbaugh

Linguistics ETDs

This study examines vowel formant differences between English speakers in New Mexico that self-identify as Anglo versus those that self-identify as Hispanic. Audio recordings were made of 16 New Mexicans reading short stories and carrier phases with embedded target words. F1 and F2 measurements were compared at the 50% point for monophthongs and at the 20% and 80% points for diphthongs. Mixed effects models assessed statistical significance of ethnicity, gender, and interactional effects on vowel formants and trajectory length.

All speakers showed a near-complete overlap of BOT and BOUGHT tokens, supporting a merger. Hispanic men and women patterned together to …

Cuasi Nomás Inglés: Prosody At The Crossroads Of Spanish And English In 20th Century New Mexico, Jackelyn Van Buren

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation investigates prosodic change in the long-term language contact setting of Traditional New Mexican Spanish (NMS). NMS prosody is perceptually distinct from other contemporary varieties of Spanish (Hills 1906, Bowen 1952, Lipski 2011), yet the features which make it unique have not been acoustically examined. This study hypothesizes that bilingualism with English has affected NMS prosody and analyzes three features which are known to differ between Spanish and English and therefore provide a quantitative point of comparison: pitch peak alignment, pitch variability, and rhythmic timing. These variables have been demonstrated to be susceptible to transfer in contact situations, including …

A Longitudinal Cross-Sectional Study On The Acquisition Of Navajo Verbs In Children Aged 4 Years 7 Months Through 11 Years 2 Months, Melvatha R. Chee

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation presents an analysis of child acquisition and production of the Navajo verb construction. My data shows that Navajo children extract meaningful verb units that do not adhere to the linguistic boundaries normally ascribed to the Navajo verb. Through my data, I have observed that children use morphologically and phonologically reduced units. They produce verb constructions that exhibit fusion with units outside the verb such as postpositions. As the children acquire larger units, or chunks, morphophonological interactions are preserved.

This dissertation is a longitudinal cross-sectional analysis of child language data collected from four Navajo speaking children. The children, all …

Intensifiers And The Construction Of Identity In New Mexican English, Frances Jones

Linguistics ETDs

In traditional sociolinguistic analyses, one or more linguistic variables are examined in terms of their correlation with broad social categories, such as gender or ethnicity. If a correlation is found, it can be argued that the variable is indexical of the speaker’s membership within the relevant social category (Labov 1972, 2001; Mesthrie et al 2000; Tagliamonte 2005, 2008). The use of intensifiers in English is one linguistic variable which has been extensively analyzed in terms of its variation in multiple populations, with noted differences in intensifier use between male and female speakers, older and younger speakers, and speakers in different …

Highly Complex Syllable Structure: A Typological Study Of Its Phonological Characteristics And Diachronic Development, Shelece Easterday

Linguistics ETDs

The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language. Strong cross-linguistic tendencies in syllable size and shape are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure, a type which is also privileged in abstract models of the syllable. Syllable patterns such as those found in Itelmen qsaɬtxt͡ʃ ‘follow!’ and Tashlhiyt tsskʃftstt ‘you dried it (f)’ are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized. This dissertation is an investigation of the properties of languages with highly complex syllable patterns. The aims are (i) to establish whether these languages share other linguistic features in common such that …

From Physical Motion To ‘Come And Go’: A Spoken Corpus Based Analysis Of Kata ‘Go’-Specific Constructions In Korean, Jin Hee Kim

Linguistics ETDs

I analyze one of the motion verbs in Korean, kata ‘go,’ and its argument structure constructions. The verb shows an extremely high token frequency and its argument structure constructions have been subject to a great degree of variation in terms of its emergent semantics and syntax. However, there have been recurring issues across the previous studies. First, there is the problem of the so-called “written language bias in linguistics” (Linell, 1982), such that most studies on kata have drawn upon mostly invented sentences or written language data. Secondly, previous studies on kata have focused on the verb itself and have …

Evolution Of Complex Predicates With Cuenta Expressing Semantic Events Of Cognition In Spanish, Aubrey N. Healey

Linguistics ETDs

This research offers insight into the way linguistic constructions develop new meanings by examining a group of semantically and structurally related form-meaning pairings in Spanish, all of which contain a verb and the word cuenta ‘count/account’. Five constructions which now all have cognitive meanings, dar(se) cuenta ‘realize’, caer en la cuenta ‘realize’, hacer (de) cuenta ‘pretend’, tener en cuenta ‘consider’, and tomar (en) cuenta ‘consider’, are examined from the 1200s to the 1900s. The data come from the Historical Corpus del Español (Davies 2002). 5,301 examples of these constructions were coded for factors based on two pilot studies (Healey 2012, …