Linguistics Commons^™

Movement, Economy, Orientation 20th Century Shifts In North American Language, Monica Nesbitt, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

How are regional varieties of English faring in the US?

Ample evidence shows that canonical regional variables are undergoing _____

• “reversal” in Cincinnati and Philadelphia (Strassel & Boberg 1996, Fruehwald 2017)

• “decline” and “fall” in Michigan (Rankinen et al. 2019, Nesbitt 2021)

• “rejection” and “retreat” in Raleigh (Dodsworth & Kohn 2012; Dodsworth & Benton 2017)

Nesbitt (2021: 359) observes that “[T]he Baby Boomer–Gen X transition appears to be a pivotal transition throughout the country [and] appears to be of great importance to North American dialects in general.”

Teaching Positive Psychology Lessons In An Intensive English Program, Carolee Rogers, Benjamin L. Mcmurry, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

This article investigates the effectiveness of positive psychology interventions (PPIs) in an intensive English program for non-matriculated university students. Interventions based on the PERMA model were implemented through weekly 65-minute lessons given during the first class of each week. These were followed by short daily activities during the rest of the week. Using positive psychology topics as the content, students concurrently engaged in language learning activities. Each participant was asked to complete a questionnaire at the end of the semester consisting of five open-ended questions relating to the PPIs, the lessons, the activities, the topics, and how they felt the …

Here-, There-, And Every Where-: Exploring The Role Of Pronominal Adverbs In Legal Language, David Chandler, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

Many have claimed that pronominal adverbs, such as hereby, thereafter, and wherein, are a frequent, distinctive, and problematic in their use in legal language (Tiersma, 1999; Mellinkoff, 2004). The purpose of this study is to examine those claims empirically. In the present study, the prevalence of PAs in legal registers is compared to more general registers of contemporary American English to determine the extent to which these words are distinctly legal. The study will also explore why different types of PAs may be (in)frequent in specific legal registers to better understand their use. The frequency of PAs was extracted from …

Expression Of Customer (Dis)Satisfaction In Online Restaurant Reviews: The Relationship Between Adversative Connective Constructions And Star Ratings, Matthew J. Baker, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

Online restaurant reviews contain expressions of customer expectations in prose as well as in star ratings that indicate overall customer satisfaction. In prose, one way customers communicate that expectations are or are not met is through a grammatical construction called adversative connectives (ACs) (i.e., constituents such as but, although, however, and even though). In the present study, we examine the relationship between star ratings and customers’ use of ACs by employing a combination of content analysis, mixed-effects models, and thematic analysis in a corpus of nearly 35,000 online reviews for restaurants located in the United States. The results reveal an …

Immediate Repeated Reading Has Positive Effects On Reading Rate For English Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study, Jennifer Hemmert Hansen, Grant Eckstein, Troy L. Cox, Steven G. Luke, Krista Rich

Faculty Publications

Fluent and skillful reading in English requires efficient and automatic letter and word recognition. Dysfluent reading can affect motivation for reading in English language learners, thereby limiting access to a wealth of language input from written texts. Extensive research of repeated reading in first language (L1) settings has been shown to increase reading rate, while comparatively little research has been done on repeated reading in second language (L2) settings. The objective of this eye-tracking study was to accurately document early and late reading processes in an immediate repeated reading exercise to observe how repeated reading affects reading rate in adult …

Putting Students In Their Place. The Role Of Placement Testing In Language Programs, Troy L. Cox, Matthew P. Wilcox

Faculty Publications

A perennial issue that nearly all language programs face with the arrival of new students is: where is the best place for each student to begin their course of study within our curricular structure given their current language abilities? When students have no previous language learning experience, the decision seems easy: place them in the beginning- level class. But when students have prior experience, deciding where they belong becomes more complicated given the wide range in the quality and quantity of previous exposure and the level of ability attained. Programmatic exigencies and resources may constrain student placement even further.

In …

Understanding The Role Of Standardized Exams In Second Language Programs, Troy L. Cox, Alan V. Brown, Margaret E. Malone

Faculty Publications

Standardized language tests are used for many purposes in pK-12 and higher education, including program admission and placement, certification of language attainment and proficiency, and graduation requirements. Despite the many standardized language tests that exist, many administrators and instructors possess limited understanding of how they are designed, what functions they fulfill, and how to interpret and use the results. The influx of AI in the language testing space has only exacerbated this problem. Key program stakeholders often rely on these tests to make pressure-filled and high-stakes decisions but may be doing so without understanding their limitations. However, the issue is …

What Are University Students Doing With Language?: A Proportional Description Of University Student Mode And Register Use, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

The extent to which university students read, write, speak, and listen in a range of registers is not completely understood, but such descriptions could lead to better designed curriculum for English learners. The purpose of this study is to estimate the proportions of time American university students spend reading, writing, speaking, and listening in various registers. The present study combines diary and survey techniques to describe the language use behavior for 53 university students. The results indicated that nearly half of university student language use time is spent listening (49.5 %), followed by reading (20.7 %), writing (18.2 %), and …

From Three-Pillars To Three-Environments: Shifting The Paradigm Of Sustainability In Civil And Construction Engineering, Xiaomei Wang, Andrew South, Clifton Farnsworth, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

This research explores the usage of sustainability in literature and presents ‘three environments’ for addressing sustainability in the Civil and Construction Engineering (CCE) disciplines. Scholars have increasingly studied sustainability and sustainable development across CCE disciplines as the importance of sustainability awareness and action in society has increased. However, the vastness of its conceptual breadth and depth in CCE research is difficult to holistically evaluate. As a result, CCE researchers often focus on specific aspects of sustainability applied to discrete contexts, or address sustainability in broad aspirational terms and guiding motivations. This research utilized a rigorous analytical corpus linguistics approach for …

Language Change At The Intersections Of Movement, Economy, And Orientation, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick, Monica Nesbitt

Faculty Publications

A growing amount of research on North American English varieties shows that many sociolinguistic variables peaked among the Baby Boomer Generation (born approximately 1946–64). By “peak,” we mean that a linguistic phenomenon in one community has reached its point of greatest intensity and is maximally divergent from realizations of that same variable in most other North American communities. Similarly, we also find studies that describe a “cliff” beginning among Generation X (born approximately 1965–82) such that after generations of relative stability, local dialect features are lost. Nesbitt (2021, 359) observes that “the Baby Boomer–Gen X transition appears to be a …

Minority Language Education In Russia: An Example Of Social And Cultural Reproduction And Correspondence Theories, Nadezhda Braun

Russian Language Journal

Russia is an incredibly diverse country, both linguistically and ethnically. However, Russia is often presented, and presents itself, as a monolith. Russia’s approach to minority language teaching further perpetuates this monolithic view by creating a hierarchical language structure with Russian at the top. This hierarchy is created through societal pressure, language requirements in the Russian education system, and the minimization of minority language instruction, in direct contrast to best practices for language instruction. Chuvash in Chuvashia and Nenets, Khanty, and Selkup in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug serve as examples of this linguistic hierarchy. This paper uses social and cultural reproduction …

Cognitive Effects Of Grammatical Gender In L2 Spanish Acquisition: A Study Among Latter-Day Saint Returned Missionaries, Hannah Cagle

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The current study aims to explore the cognitive effects of L2 Spanish acquisition and the role that spending time in the target language country has on L2 learners’ categorization of inanimate objects. Three groups of participants were analyzed: monolingual English speakers, L2 Spanish speakers that learned their Spanish while serving missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) abroad, and L2 Spanish speakers that learned their Spanish while serving LDS missions in the United States. Using a Qualtrics survey, participants were tasked with pairing a list of adjectives stereotypically associated with males or females (Williams & Bennett, …

Learner Engagement With Written Corrective Feedback: The Case Of Automated Writing Evaluation, Hooman Saeli, Payam Rahmati, Svetlana Koltovskaia

Journal of Response to Writing

The study explored six ESL university students’ behavioral, cognitive, and affective engagement with e-rater feedback on local issues and examined any changes in students’ engagement over two weeks. We explored behavioral engagement through the analysis of screencasts of students’ e-rater usage and writing assignments. We measured cognitive and affective engagement by analyzing students’ comments during the think-aloud protocol and reflection surveys. The findings indicated that the students had varying levels of engagement with the feedback. Behaviorally, all students used a range of revision operations to address errors based on the provided feedback. Cognitively, some students were more engaged than others. …

Corpus Of Founding Era American English: Designing A Corpus For Interpreting The United States Constitution, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

The original meaning of words or phrases is often in dispute in Founding Era legislation, especially the US Constitution. The Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) accurately provides evidence for the meaning of contested terms during the Founding Era. COFEA consists of 126,394 texts and over 136 million words. This corpus has been and is being used by legal researchers and interpreters in scholarly research as well as various courts, including the Supreme Court. This paper describes the motivation for the creation of COFEA and describes the process of designing and collecting the corpus.

The Missionary Voice: Perceptions Of An Emerging Register, Josh Stevenson, Joseph A. Stanley, Wendy Baker-Smemoe

Faculty Publications

Today’s presentation is on a particular way of speaking among certain members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Specifically, today I’ll be telling you about Latter-day Saint missionaries, who you may encountered before. Let’s set aside any preconceived notions you may have about missionaries or their faith and explore what appears to be an emerging missionary-based register.

In essence, missionaries are Latter-day Saint volunteers who dedicate 18 months to two years to tell others about their faith. They’re assigned around the world and often have to learn a new language, are typically college-aged, and adhere to strict …

Enriching Our Understanding Of Language Change With Vowel Formant Trajectories, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

American English vowels are variable in pronunciation

• ban vs. bat, too vs. boo
• feel vs. fill, [bæt] vs. [bæ̞̙ t]

We can categorize these differences:

Shifts:

• I pronounce /u/ fronter than my grandparents do.
• My students pronounce /æ/ as lower and more centralized than I do.

Mergers:

• For me, cot and caught are distinct; for 95% of my students, they’re homophones
• In Utah, feel and fill are often pronounced the same

Language change happens as some variants spread to more and more people.

Rapid Prediction Of Verbs Based On Pronoun Interpretation Is Modulated By Individual Differences In Pronoun Processing, Jeffrey Jack Green

Faculty Publications

How quickly can pronoun interpretation affect the prediction of a following verb? Readers were presented with implicit causality contexts in which a specific pronoun and following verb were predictable. N400 and reaction time results indicated that predictable verbs were facilitated relative to unpredictable verbs when following predicted pronouns, suggesting that verbal predictions were rapidly updated based on pronoun interpretation. There was also some evidence for rapid updating of verb predictions after unexpected pronouns, but this was modulated by individual differences. Some readers appear to have placed higher weight on top–down implicit causality predictions to interpret unexpected pronouns, and others on …

Exploring The Effects Of Cross-Cultural Variation And Tourism In Utah English, Zoe Eldredge, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Emerging Social Meaning

• Eckert (2016): sociolinguistic variation is not just a consequence of social change but helps contribute to it.
• Such changes become enregistered and are linked to groups or personae.
• Fractal recursivity (Irvine & Gal 2000) may contribute to the beginnings of such differences (e.g. Zhang 2021).

Surzhyk: Attitudes & Usage Among Ukrainian People, Kateryna Kravchenko, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

What is Surzhyk?

• refers to a range of macaronic (mixed) sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages
• originally meant mixing of two different types of flour (wheat and rye), which is considered a lower grade flour
• there is no unifying set of characteristics
• the term is used for norm-breaking, non-obedience to or non-awareness of the rules of the Ukrainian and Russian standard languages
• it is not Russian-accented Ukrainian

Solving The Cherry-Picking Problem In Legislative History Use – A Corpus-Based Approach For Empirical Intentionalist Legal Interpretation Analysis, Brett James Hashimoto, James Heilpern

Faculty Publications

The use of legislative histories under intentionalist/purposivist theories of statutory interpretation is frequently criticized because it can be easily biased (see, e.g., Scheppele, 2012). To date, corpus-based statutory interpretation has relied almost exclusively on textualist theory of legal interpretation. However, corpus linguistic methods are not necessarily bound to any one theory (e.g., Biber & Reppen, 2015). The present study analyses two legislative histories as corpora and compares them against a general corpus of English to determine if interpretative theory makes a meaningful difference in two example cases (Costello v. United States, 2012; Taniguchi v. Kan Saipan Pacific, 2012). Senses of …

Is Idaho English Really “The Epitome Of Average English”?, Joseph A. Stanley, Katrina Jackson

Faculty Publications

“Epitome of Average English”?

Preston (1989:64–65) chapter 3: “Where they speak correct English”

• Indianans ranked all 50 states’ English from most correct to least correct
• Mississippi’s ratings clustered low.
• Indiana’s ratings clustered high
• New York’s was bimodal.
• Florida’s was uniform.
• Idaho’s was normally distributed, centered around the middle.

“Idaho… [shows] a remarkably normal histogram… It is, apparently, the epitome of average English for these raters. Perhaps it is a least-caricatured state, meeting the negative definition of Standard English – the variety which displays no known non-standard elements.”

Teaching And Researching Revision: Introducing A Tool To Extract Edits From Word Documents, Matthew Baker, Jordan Smith, Scout A. Mcmillan

Faculty Publications

As instructors consider the technologies that will disrupt the future of business communication, writing tools enhanced by artificial intelligence (Al)-such as ChatGPT -are probably at the top of the list. Researchers have already begun proposing teaching strategies to overcome the challenges and embrace the opportunities of Al. For example, one study analyzed the performance of Al-generated business writing (AIAfnan, Dishari, Jovic, & Lomidze, 2023). Based on evaluations produced by human graders and plagiarism-detection software, the researchers recommended that business writing instructors use casebased assignments and adjust rubrics to more heavily weight content that Al fails at generating well (e.g., detailed …

Utahns Sound Utahn When They Avoid Sounding Utahn, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Today’s sociolinguistic variable: realization of post-tonic, unstressed /tən/ – e.g. mountain, button, kitten, satin – Hereafter, a Wellsesque inspirated label: MOUNTAIN – Three main variants:

1. [tʰɨn] • aspirated alveolar stop + reduced vowel + nasal • AmE citation form, formal, careful • Probably accessible by most speakers.

2. [ʔn̩] • glottal stop + syllabic nasal • AmE standard, casual, typical. • The most common for probably all speakers.

3. [ʔɨn] • glottal stop + reduced vowel + nasal • Non-mainstream: found in Utah, New York, and scattered elsewhere (Roberts 2006, Freeman et al. 2012, Eddington & Brown 2021, Davidson …

An Analysis Of Ukrainians’ Language Attitudes And Ideology: A Conflict-Catalyzed Identity Shift, Kateryna Kravchenko, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Literature Review:

• Positions of Russian language have traditionally been strong
• “The State has to ensure the comprehensive development and functioning of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of social life throughout the entire territory of Ukraine” (Constitution of Ukraine, art. 10)
• The majority of Ukrainians (74%) have never experienced discrimination against Russian speakers by Ukrainian speakers, and 67% have never experienced discrimination against Ukrainian speakers by Russian speakers (Masenko, 2009, pp. 117-119).
• After 2014, slight changes in attitudes: more positive views towards Ukrainian, worsening of attitudes towards Russian (Kulyk, 2016)

Perceptions Of “Southern” Utah English, Chad Huckvale, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Utahns generally have negative perceptions of their own speech (Savage 2014, Eddington & Brown 2021, Stanley 2023).

Utahns are aware of certain features in their speech, namely pronunciation of “mountain” (Eddington & Savage 2012; Stanley & Vandiernet 2018; Eddington & Brown 2021, Stanley 2023).

Previous dialectology research (Lillie 1998; Eddington 2022; Stanley 2022) indicates that speech in some areas of Utah are described as “Southern”; this is generally found to differentiate urban vs. rural regions.

Sample Size Matters In Calculating Pillai Scores, Joseph A. Stanley, Betsy Sneller

Faculty Publications

Since their introduction to sociolinguistics by Hay, Warren, and Drager [(2006). J. Phon. (Modell. Sociophon. Var.) 34(4), 458–484], Pillai scores have become a standard metric for quantifying vowel overlap. However, there is no established threshold value for determining whether two vowels are merged, leading to conflicting ad hoc measures. Furthermore, as a parametric measure, Pillai scores are sensitive to sample size. In this paper, we use generated data from a simulated pair of underlyingly merged vowels to demonstrate (1) larger sample sizes yield reliably more accurate Pillai scores, (2) unequal group sizes across the two vowel classes are irrelevant in …

Sociophonetics And Dialectology, Dominic Watt, Margaret E. L. Renwick, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

In this chapter we explore how the investigation of phonetic detail in speech seen through a sociolinguistic lens can inform and enhance our understanding of dialectal variation in languages. We begin by examining how sociophonetics can be considered an offshoot of dialectology, later to mature into a free- standing discipline during the late twentieth century. We next discuss the reconvergence of sociophonetics and dialectology as it became clearer that the two approaches to the study of language variation are, in combination, greater than the sum of their parts, even if their agendas may place different emphases on what should be …

Does Text Entry Method Make A Difference On Chinese Writing Test Scores?, Dana Scott Bourgerie, Troy L. Cox, Steven L. Riep

Faculty Publications

Should the writing construct be assessed through handwriting or keyboarding? As the only major language entirely without a syllabary or alphabet, the Chinese writing system is unique among modern languages, thus the question of writing proficiency is complicated by character recall. Most of the testing research comparing text entry methods has been conducted in English and has found that keyboarding and handwriting can be used interchangeably. This paper reports the outcome of a study comparing the results of handwritten and typed versions of the Chinese ACTFL Writing Proficiency Test (WPT). L2 Chinese students (n=25) with Intermediate to Superior speaking skills …

Qualitative Oral-Presentation Feedback: Comparisons From Business Professionals, Instructors, And Student Peers, Matt Baker, William H. Baker

Faculty Publications

Previous studies compare quantitative feedback ratings of student peers and instructors, but new presentation-feedback technologies enable qualitative-feedback comparison. This study extends previous research by comparing qualitative feedback and business professionals’ feedback. Compared to the professionals, the instructors provided similar feedback types and sentiment; students, however, de-emphasized message delivery and made fewer suggestions for improvement. The results suggest that students may need additional practice in critiquing message delivery and in suggesting needed improvements in their peers’ oral presentations. The study also provides a methodology using the new technologies for instructors to calibrate their own and their students’ feedback with professionals’ feedback.

Multiple-Choice Reading Behaviors Of Esl Students: An Eye-Tracking Study, Juan Escalante, Grant Eckstein, Troy L. Cox, Steven Luke

Faculty Publications

Only recently has eye-tracking been used to investigate test-taker reading behavior, and results have been primarily used to confirm a range of cognitive tasks elicited by test items. This study explores test taker reading behavior for its own sake by describing how ESL readers of different proficiency levels behaviorally view multiple-choice passages and test items at different difficulty levels. Data were gathered from 51 students at three proficiency levels attending a university-sponsored intensive English program (IEP). Participants read eight validated reading comprehension items at varying difficulty levels while their eye movements were recorded on the passage, multiple-choice stem, correct answer, …