Linguistics Commons^™

Defining The Obvious, Or Not, Emily Furner, William Eggington

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When a new word premieres in a publication in the English language, the word is normally followed with a definition (hereafter gloss) that defines or restates its meaning¹. But generally, words will eventually stop being defined as readers come to understand the meaning of the word. In other words, when readers “accept” a word into their vocabulary, the practice of including definitions with newer words becomes unnecessary. In this study, I explored the possibility of using corpora to determine when words stop appearing with definitions, thus signaling when these new words became “accepted” into American English.

Access In The Accent: Career Opportunity Based On Differences In Regional Accents, Stephanie Hedges, David Eddington

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Accents affect employment ratings more when the accent is perceived to be stronger (Carlson & McHenry, 2006). When the accent is strongly perceived by the employer, employment ratings drastically dropped for those speaking Spanish-influenced, Asian-influenced and African American English dialects (Carlson & McHenry, 2006). However, when the accent was only minimally perceived, employment ratings remained high (Carlson & McHenry, 2006). This proposes that accents only negatively impact employment when maximally perceived by the employer (Carlson & McHenry, 2006).

The Systematic Stretching And Contracting Of Ideophonic Phonology In Pastaza Quichua, Joseph A. Stanley, Janis B. Nuckolls, Elizabeth Nielsen, Roseanna Hopper

Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes systematic differences between sounds used in ideophones and sounds used in the non-ideophonic or “prosaic” lexicon of the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonian Ecuador. We compare a digitized corpus of vocabulary items with a list of ideophones identified from field observations. We find that if a sound, syllable structure, or stress pattern is distributionally restricted in Pastaza Quichua, it is likely to be normalized and expanded within ideophones. The overall system is also stretched among ideophones by the addition of new sounds to the obstruents. These expansions are complemented by an overall contraction among sonorant sounds within …

Marginal Models: An Alternative To Mixed-Effects Models In Sociolinguistic Research, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Sociolinguistic studies generally gather multiple instances from a single speaker. This introduces repeated measures that need to be taken into account when carrying out statistical analysis in order for the outcome to be statistically valid. One way of doing this is to apply a mixed-effects model. In the workshop, I present a lesser-known, but equally valid method for dealing with repeated measures—marginal models.

How Inflection Class Systems Work: On The Informativity Of Implicative Structure, Jeffery R. Parker, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

The complexity of an inflection system can be defined as the average extent to which elements in the system inhibit motivated inferences about the realization of lexemes’ paradigm cells. Research shows that systems tend to exhibit relatively low complexity in this sense. However, relatively little work has explored how structural and distributional aspects of the inflectional system produce this outcome. In this paper we use the tools of information theory to do so. We explore a set of nine languages that have robust inflection class systems: Palantla Chinantec, French, Modern Greek, Icelandic, Kadiwéu, Nuer, Russian, Seri, and Võro. The data …

Criteria Language Teachers Use When Selecting Call Technologies, K. James Hartshorn, Benjamin L. Mcmurry, Peter J. Rich, Neil J. Anderson, David D. Williams

Faculty Publications

It is important to identify the criteria that language teachers consider when selecting technologies. Software designers and developers, program administrators, and others need to be aware of adoption issues and practices for CALL technology. The focus of this case study was to look at six language instructors considered to be experts in their use of technology in the classroom and examine the criteria they use when selecting CALL resources or activities in the classroom. Interviews, recorded classroom observations, and analyses of teaching materials resulted in three themes: consideration of pedagogy, consideration of convenience, and consideration of authenticity. These are discussed …

Pragmatic Quality Assessment For Automatically Extracted Data, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Scott N. Woodfield, Stephen W. Liddle, Tae Woo Kim, David W. Embley, Christopher Almquist

Faculty Publications

Automatically extracted data is rarely “clean” with respect to pragmatic (real-world) constraints—which thus hinders applications that depend on quality data. We proffer a solution to detecting pragmatic constraint violations that works via a declarative and semantically enabled constraint-violation checker. In conjunction with an ensemble of automated information extractors, the implemented prototype checks both hard and soft constraints—respectively those that are satisfied or not and those that are satisfied probabilistically with respect to a threshold. An experimental evaluation shows that the constraint checker identifies semantic errors with high precision and recall and that pragmatic error identification can improve results

Business Communication Practices From Employers’ Perspectives, Tina A. Coffelt, Matthew J. Baker, Robert C. Corey

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the meaning of communication skills from employers’ perspectives. Students enrolled in a business communication course were asked to contact potential employers in their fields of interest, requesting information about important communication skills in those fields. Using content analysis, two coders familiar with business communication analyzed 52 of the resulting open-ended responses. The analysis of 165 skills suggests employers recall oral communication more frequently than written, visual, or electronic communication skills. Of oral communication subskills, interpersonal communication was mentioned more than other workplace communication skills.

An Ewp Model Of Quechua Agreement: Further Evidence Against Dm, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

In this paper we first describe the Quechua verbal agreement paradigm using two generative morphological theories and then argue that Anderson’s EWP accounts for the data better than Distributed Morphology (DM). Kerke (1996) has already shown evidence against DM using this paradigm, and we provide additional support for this.

The Quechua verbs conjugate to agree with the subject and the object of the VP in one of three tenses (Table 1). Each cell contains up to five morphemes, from a selection of twelve, which appear consistently in the same order. Though there is some semblance of regularity in the paradigm, …

Mormon Metaphors Of Restoration: Pathways To Identity And Understanding, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

The important role of metaphors in interfaith understanding has received significant attention. The pervasiveness of certain metaphors in the lives of members of a religious community is especially significant when they are incorporated into sacred texts. This would seem to be the case not only for Judaism, Islam, and mainline Christianity, but also for Mormonism, a distinctive branch of Christianity. Officially known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Mormonism shares some root metaphors with other Christians but differs in important ways in its development and use of these metaphors. In this paper we discuss the journey, …

Comparing The Academic Word List With The Academic Vocabulary List: Analyses Of Frequency And Performance Of English Language Learners, K. James Hartshorn, Judson M. Hart

Faculty Publications

Although use of the Academic Word List (AWL) has been successful and extensive in English as a second language (ESL) materials development and pedagogy (Coxhead 2000, 2011), some scholars have raised concerns about possible flaws. In an effort to overcome limitations, Gardner and Davies (2014) have presented a "new Academic Vocabulary List" (AVL). While their description suggests a number of potential advantages of the AVL over the AWL, these lists have yet to undergo ecologically valid comparisons based on actual ESL learner performance. Thus, this study compares the AWL with the AVL in an effort to identify some of the …

Phonetic Shift /Ɔr/ Phonemic Change? American English Mergers Over 40 Years, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

In this paper we analyze the vowel formants of a speaker over four decades to show phonemic change through time. Other real-time studies (Harrington, Palethorpe & Watson 2000; Harrington & Reubold 2015) have found that the vowel spaces of UK English speakers shift over the lifetime, likely as a consequence of interaction with speakers of other dialects or social classes. We focus on an understudied variety of English, spoken in the western United States, to investigate a pair of phonological mergers, the cord-card merger and the hoarse-horse merger.

The cord-card merger is a result of a historical three-way contrast of …

Constructing A Russian Elicited Imitation Exam, Troy L. Cox, Jennifer Brown, Jacob Burdis

Faculty Publications

A Russian student wants to know if it is worth the expense to pay for an official ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI). The director of a flagship program wants to measure the improvement of the oral proficiency of students returning from their in-country experience. A university department needs to provide evidence that their students are meeting learning objectives as part of accreditation. In each of these cases, a cost-effective, scalable solution to measuring oral proficiency would be helpful.

Assessing speaking ability in a foreign language has traditionally been a difficult and time-intensive task. A traditional method of measuring oral language …

A Qualitative Analysis Of The English Language Teaching Practices Of Latter-Day Saint Missionaries, Rachel Tui Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the teaching practices of recently returned Latter-day Saint (LDS) missionaries who voluntarily taught the English language on their full-time missions' serving for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout various parts of the world. The analyses performed in this research offer an insider's perspective by looking at a large selection of qualitative data gathered directly from these missionaries to provide evidential insight into what those practices are, including the most effective and the most ineffective teaching practices as principally perceived by the missionaries themselves. Thus far, there has been no research reported or data gathered …

The Development Of An Esp Vocabulary Study Guidefor The Utah State Driver Handbook, Kirsten M. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project details research conducted and the method employed to create a tool for acquiring the technical vocabulary from the Utah Driver Handbook. Technical terms were compiled into a vocabulary tool for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. ESL programs within the state have noted the need for materials to help learners acquire this vocabulary. The tool will assist ESL learners preparing for the written driving exam by reinforcing the vocabulary through various iterations, including flash cards, simplified definitions, and an L1 gloss. Learners preparing for the exam will be able to study difficult vocabulary terms using the …

Syriac Rhetorical Particles: Variable Second-Position Clitic Placement, Patrick Brendon Pearson

Theses and Dissertations

Investigation on second-position clitic phenomena has steadily increased since Wackernagel’s (1892) observations. Researchers have applied contemporary clitic typology to various Semitic languages though Syriac has received little attention. This thesis identifies a group of Syriac rhetorical particles and describes their categorization as clitics, versus words or affixes. It establishes each of the Syriac particles as second-position clitics and provides evidence of this conclusion from a state-of-the-art digitized corpus of Syriac literature. Extending previous Syriac analyses, this thesis describes the nature of attachment of these second-position clitics as enclisis to either the first word or the first constituent/phrase of their domain. …

A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Russian Word Order Patterns, Stephanie Kay Billings

Theses and Dissertations

Some scholars say that Russian syntax has free word order. However, other researchers claim that the basic word order of Russian is Subject, Verb, Object (SVO). Some researchers also assert that the use of different word orders may be influenced by various factors, including positions of discourse topic and focus, and register (spoken, fiction, academic, non-academic). In addition, corpora have been shown to be useful tools in gathering empirical linguistic data, and modern advances in computing have made corpora freely available and their use widespread. The Russian National Corpus is a large corpus of Russian that is widely used and …

The Vocabulary Research Database: A Compilation Of State-Of-The-Art Academic Vocabulary Research, Melissa Ann Young

Theses and Dissertations

The Vocabulary Research Database (VRD) is a research tool comprised of a compilation of state-of-the art academic research in the field of vocabulary acquisition and pedagogy. The VRD has flexible search features that allow users to obtain higher granularity than is possible with other free databases and online search options currently available, making the results more relevant and manageable. These features include the ability to constrain results by date, author, publication, sub-topics, keywords, citation numbers, journal impact factors, and participant ages. It is anticipated that the ability to manipulate results, combined with relevant and current content, will provide language professionals …

Idioms As A Measure Of Proficiency, Kyle Hugh Vanderniet

Theses and Dissertations

This purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationship between idiomatic knowledge and second language proficiency. As the amount of research directly related to this topic is sparse, an in-depth discussion of relevant research and definitions comprises the first part of this paper. Two studies are then presented here that test the relationship between idiomatic knowledge and second language proficiency. A new definition for idioms proposes that all non-compositional phrases, popularized by usage, that is stored, retrieved, and employed as a single lexical unit. The results from more than 400 participants across two studies indicate that the two constructs …

Paradigms And (Semi)Predictability: Implications For Measuring Complexity Typologically, Jeffrey R. Parker

Faculty Publications

What aspects of (complex) inflectional systems make them usable for speakers?

• How do our analytic assumptions about these systems shape our assessment of their complexity and its implications for speakers?
• To what extent are different aspects of the system more/less useful for speakers

Early Documentation Of The Orang Seletar And Sugut Sungai Languages, Kevin Blissett, Dr. Dirk Elzinga

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Orang Seletar and Sugut Sungai languages are endangered languages indigenous to Malaysia. With every generation there are fewer speakers of the language, and, perhaps more worryingly, the language is less frequently taught to children. It is increasingly urgent for linguists to document the languages before they vanish completely. The purpose of this project was to begin that documentation effort by translating a list of common vocabulary, known as the Swadesh list, into each of these two languages.

Corrections Around The World: An International Survey Of Oral Corrective Feedback, Andrew Bashford, Dr. Mark Tanner

Journal of Undergraduate Research

English teachers’ primary goal is to help their students use English as a means of communication, self-expression, and transaction. Of course, learning a second language is not a spontaneous process: it requires study, practice, and meaningful feedback. In fact, one of the teacher’s most essential roles is that of providing feedback to students, often in order to correct errors and guide the students’ learning. This current study deals with the feedback that teachers provide when their students make errors in speaking—oral corrective feedback, or OCF. While much work has been done to investigate the most effective ways of giving OCF …

Learning Armenian And English Pronunciation, Anna Mcconner-Hughes, Dr. Wendy Baker-Smemoe

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this study is to examine the learning of English consonants by native Armenian speakers. In particular, we examined how the native Armenian speakers perceive and produce English voiced and voiceless ‘th’ sounds (as in the words thy and thigh (/ð/ and /θ/ in IPA)). These sounds are difficult for learners to acquire, in part because they are often confused with each other. The results of this study will help us better understand the relationship between first and second language sound systems and will hopefully lead to training materials to help native Armenian speakers better learn English.

Establishing The Viability Of The Multidimensional Quality Metrics Framework, Tyler A. Snow

Theses and Dissertations

The Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework is a new system for creating customized translation quality assessment and evaluation metrics designed to fit specific translation needs. In this study I test the viability of MQM to determine whether the framework in its current state is ready for implementation as a quality assessment framework in the translation industry. Other contributions from this study include: (1) online software for designing and using metrics based on the MQM framework; (2) a survey of the typical, real-world quality assessment and evaluation practices of language service providers in the translation industry; and (3) a measurement scale …

The Language And Cross-Cultural Perceptions Of Deception, Brent Logan Laing

Theses and Dissertations

While much research has shown that some linguistic features can indicate a person is lying, this line of research has led to conflicting results. Furthermore, very little research has been done to verify that these supposed linguistic features of deception are universal. In addition, few studies have researched the cross-cultural perceptions of deception, which knowledge could greatly improve the detection of deception across cultures. The current study addresses these gaps in the literature by analyzing and comparing truthful and deceptive discourse of eight native English-speaking Americans and eight non-native English-speaking Ghanaians. The discourse was elicited in one-on-one interviews where each …

Teaching Practice And Motivation Among Albanian And Japanese Missionaries, Rebekah Susan Hoopes

Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the relationship between the use of motivational strategies by Albanian and Japanese teachers and the observed and reported motivation of missionaries at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Provo, Utah. The aim of this study was to collect baseline data about the motivational strategies already employed by teachers in the Albanian and Japanese areas of the MTC and to explore the relationship that the teachers' use of these strategies has with the motivation of the respective missionaries. The data for this study was collected from seven teachers and …

English To Asl Gloss Machine Translation, Mary Elizabeth Bonham

Theses and Dissertations

Low-resource languages, including sign languages, are a challenge for machine translation research. Given the lack of parallel corpora, current researchers must be content with a small parallel corpus in a narrow domain for training a system. For this thesis, we obtained a small parallel corpus of English text and American Sign Language gloss from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We cleaned the corpus by loading it into an open-source translation memory tool, where we removed computer markup language and split the large chunks of text into sentences and phrases, creating a total of 14,247 sentence pairs. We …

Botheration And Recognition Of Prescriptive Rules, Sara D. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Passions flare up around the use and “misuse” of prescriptive rules. Where there is variation in language use, language judgment usually follows—attaching value judgment to linguistic variants forms the foundation of prescriptive ideology in English. Prescriptive attitudes prevail among speakers and writers of English, who feel some pressure to use these forms to avoid a negative judgment. This study surveyed American English speakers using Mechanical Turk to determine which types of rules—spelling, syntactic, morphological, and lexical—bother people the most and inspire the harshest judgments when violated. The surveys asked participants to identify a violated prescriptive rule in a sentence, found …

Grammatical Features Of Structural Elaboration And Compression Common In Advanced Esl Academic Writing, Gyusuk Yang

Theses and Dissertations

The present study replicated the research framework of a previous study (Biber, Gray, & Poonpon, 2011) that identifies the grammatical complexity of L1 professional academic prose as strongly favoring a dense use of phrasal nominal modifiers such as prepositional phrases as postmodifiers, attributive adjectives, and nouns as premodifiers which characterize its unique structurally compressed discourse style. The main purpose of the present study was to explore syntactic similarities and differences between L1 professional and L2 student academic writing in terms of their reliance on phrasal/nominal compression features to determine characteristics of the grammatical complexity of advanced ESL academic writing. To …

Motivational Strategies For Second Language Teaching And Learning, Neil J. Anderson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The academic objectives centered around five primary research questions:

1. What is the relationship among (a) teachers’ view of the importance of motivational teaching strategies, (b) the frequency with which they report using motivational teaching strategies, and (c) the actual use of motivational teaching strategies in second language classrooms?
2. How does the teacher’s motivational teaching practice affect learners’ classroom motivation in terms of the levels of their alertness, participation, and volunteering?
3. Can teachers guide learners to take more responsibility for monitoring and maintaining their levels of motivation in second language classrooms?
4. Can learners play a multiplier effect role in motivating their …