Linguistics Commons^™

Learner Concerns At The Missionary Training Center In The Technology Assisted Language Learning Program, Elaine T. Lindsay

Theses and Dissertations

Chapelle (1997) states the following as a vital question to be asked with respect to computer assisted language learning, “How good is the language experience in CALL for L2 learning?” (n.p.) In order to truly answer this question, investigators need to look to the learner and his concerns. In planning curriculum or designing a program, teachers and administrators normally look toward learner needs. However, these educators are also known to fully implement a new program, at times, without consideration of learner concerns. This appears to be especially true with the use of technology in the second language classroom. Research is …

Fronting And Palatalization In Two Dialects Of Shoshoni, Dirk Elzinga

Faculty Publications

In Western Shoshoni, a Uto- Aztecan language spoken in northern Nevada, coronal obstruents are found in distributional patterns which depend on the presence or absence of a preceding front vowel ([i] or [e]). In the pattern I refer to as FRONTING, alveolar stops alternate with dental stops - dental stops occur following front vowels (la), while alveolar stops occur elsewhere (lb); this pattern is common to all dialects:

Implementing A Context-Based Teaching Curriculum For French Learners At The Mtc, Stephanie Wallace Olsen

Theses and Dissertations

Two control groups and two experimental groups of missionaries and teachers participated in a study comparing a grammar-based method of teaching to a context-based method. The study lasted for two weeks during June 1997. Each classroom was recorded using a timing-based observation system that captured 13 missionary and teacher language behaviors. The behaviors were recorded in real time and later evaluated to determine in which classroom setting the most real communication occurred. A second purpose was to determine the effectiveness of teacher training with respect to teachers in the experimental group. Findings revealed that missionaries in the context-based classroom received …

Leveraging Analysis Operators In Incremental Generation, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

This paper discusses the integration of an operator-based generation component with a similarly-designed natural-language comprehension system. It begins by sketching the cognitive theory and modeling system that frame both systems. A brief summary of the comprehension system and its characteristics follows, including the relevant operators. The generation system with its own operators and processing stages is then introduced. The degree to which these two systems exhibit shared functionality is then explored, and ongoing work is mentioned.

Demonstration: A Robust Web Data-Extraction Technique With High Recall And Precision, Deryle W. Lonsdale, D. M. Campbell, Yihong Ding, David W. Embley, K. Hewett, D. L. Jackman, S. S. Jeffries, Y. S. Jiang, D. Lewis, Stephen W. Liddle, Y. K. Ng, A. L. Peacock, D. J. Seer, R. D. Smith, S. H. Yau, M. Xu, L. Xu

Faculty Publications

Our demo shows how to extract and structure data found in data-rich, unstructured, multiple-record Web documents. Users may either apply pre-built extraction applications or build and apply their own. The demo is significant because it (1) attacks an important data-centric problem and (2) uses database technology to produce good results with minimal effort.

The Case For Sound Symbolism, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to sound symbolism that have influenced linguists and anthropologists most. Numerous reports of magnitude sound symbolism in the form of experimental studies and comparative surveys have been integrated into a biologically based theory of its motivation. Magnitude sound symbolism also …

Integrating Translation Technologies Using Salt, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Gerhard Budin, Alan K. Melby, Sue Ellen Wright, Arle R. Lommel

Faculty Publications

The acronym SALT stands for Standards-based Access to multilingual Lexicons and Terminologies. The objective of the SALT project is to develop and promote a range of tools that will be made available on the World Wide Web to various user groups, in particular translators, terminology managers, localizers, technical communicators, but also tools developers, database managers, and language engineers. The resulting toolkit will facilitate access and re-use of heterogeneous multilingual resources derived from both NLP lexicons and human-oriented terminology databases.

Since Joseph Smith's Time: Lexical Semantic Shifts In The Book Of Mormon, Renee Bangerter

Theses and Dissertations

In the years since Joseph Smith completed the translation of the Book of Mormon, the English language has changed; some common phraseologies and word meanings are dissimilar to today's. Often, in reading the Book of Mormon, we impose our current definitions onto terms that in 1830 had a different meaning. Our interpretation of these words, as well as the passages in which they are found, is skewed by our modern definitions. These words, when they occur in the Book of Mormon, demonstrate dialectal and obsolete senses. In the case of some words, the dialectal or obsolete sense is so far …

Learning To Learn: The Training Of Missionaries In Language Learning Strategies At The Missionary Training Center, D. Brian Kohler

Theses and Dissertations

Language learning strategies (LLS) are specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that learners use to improve their rate and level of L2 development. This thesis details the development and validation of a LLS training program designed to measure if training in LLS increases LDS missionaries' awareness of LLS as potential language learning tools. Specifically, it explores the question as to whether missionaries trained in LLS use and intend to use LLS more frequently, more appropriately, and with a greater range than those not trained in LLS.

The development of the LLS training program involved selecting a set of 48 specific …

Spanish Diphthongization As A Non-Derivational Phenomenon, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

In a previous study on derivational morphology (Eddington 1996), the alternation between the unstressed mid-vowels /e/ and lo/, and the stressed diphthongs /je/ and /we/ was seen to escape straigh tforward explanation in rule-based a nalyses. Diphthongization in Spanish was instead attributed to the influence of other lexical items which contain the same derivational suffix.

The purpose of the present study is twofold. First, an experiment was carried out to test the validity of the findings of the previous study. Spanish speakers completed a questionn aire in which they decided between neologisms containing mid-vowels or diphthongs (e.g. hielo 'ice'+ -azo …

The Effect Of The Book Of Mormon Diglot Reader: A Study Of The Vocabulary Acquisition, Reading Comprehension, And The Reduction Of Negative Affective Variables In Missionaries, Melinda Silver

Theses and Dissertations

This study addresses the following questions;
1) How does reading The Book of Mormon Diglot Reader compare with reading the Spanish translation of The Book of Mormon in terms of degree of anxiety, frustration, and discouragement experienced by the reader?
2) Will the missionaries using the Diglot Reader experience a greater increase in the amount of Book of Mormon vocabulary acquired as compared with the vocabulary increase experienced by the missionaries who only read from the standard Spanish translation of The Book of Mormon?
3) Does the use of the Diglot Reader increase the missionaries' ability to understand sentences …

Diphthongization In Spanish Derivational Morphology: An Empirical Investigation, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The alternation between the mid-vowels / e/, /o/ and the diphthongs /je/ and /we/ is widespread in Spanish, and several rule-based analyses claim to account for it. However, they are founded on a small body of evidence. These analyses are evaluated against data from a large corpus, and cannot account for the non-discrete nature of diphthongization as evidenced in the corpus. The corpus data suggest that diphthongization has a gradient relationship to the derivational suffixes. · A nonderivational account, based on Bybee's model (1985, 1988, 1991), better embodies the scalar relationship between diphthongization and the suffixes. This relationship was tested …

The Psychological Status Of Phonological Analyses, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

This paper casts doubt on the psychological relevance of many phonological analyses. There are four reasons for this: 1) theoretical adequacy does not necessarily imply psychological significance; 2) most approaches are nonempirical in that they are not subject to potential spatiotemporal falsification; 3) phonological analyses are established with little or no recourse to the speakers of the language via experimental psychology; 4) the limited base of evidence which most analyses are founded on is further cause for skepticism.

Historical Roots Of Structural Ambiguities In English: A Survey Of Some Selected Grammatical Features, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

English is a language with many possibilities for wordplay, and word lay has been exploited by entertainers and advertisers. At times it involves simple puns, and at other times complex structural plays on words. Important developments in the history of the English language contribute to the current possibilities for word play. This article will examine some of these developments that have contributed specifically to wordplay involving structural ambiguities.

The Psychological Relevance Of Phonological Generalizations In Spanish: An Experiment, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

A psycholinguistic experiment aids in determining if the phonological generalizations which appear in the literature on Spanish phonology are psychologically significant for Spanish speakers. The experiment focuses on whether common phonological alternations play a role in native speakers' perceptions of whether two words share a morpheme. The results indicate that they are a significant factor in speakers' perceptions of morphemic relatedness. Therefore, these findings provide some evidence that these phonological generalizations are psychologically valid, and not merely descriptive in nature.

Quechua Texts Of Perception, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

Recent work by anthropologists, folklorists, and semioticians has made significant strides in our understanding of the dynamics and poetics of spoken utterances. Such work has been motivated, generally, by the goal of understanding verbal expression in terms of its own unique structures and expressive modalities. The following paper will contribute to this line of inquiry. It offers an analysis of a form of expression, sound symbolism, that is widely used by people whose languages have not been written down. The main advantage of this analysis is that it rescues sound symbolism from the irrational abyss into which it has often …

Structural Ambiguities And Written Advertisements: An Inventory Of Tools For More Resourceful Advertisements In English, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

Competent writers usually avoid ambiguity, but there are some types of writing tasks such as advertising in which a writer might actually want to create ambiguous wordplays. Among the most interesting of the wordplays are those which involve structural ambiguities. In the natural course of brainstorming, advertisers will occasionally generate structural ambiguities, but a more conscious understanding of the structure of a language could make the generation of such ambiguities easier. The English language contains some characteristics and patterns which contribute significantly toward creating structural ambiguities. And if ad writers know where to focus their attention, structurally ambiguous wordplays can …

Extraction D'Un Vocabulaire Bilingue: Outils Et Methodes, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Cet articele presente les efforts lics a l'elaboration d'un vocabulaire bilingue pour un systeme de traduction. Nous presentons la methodologic suivie pour identifier, normaliser et mettre en correspondance les vocabulaires anglais et francais, puises dans un corpus de textes prealablement traduites: analyse du texte source, compilation d'un index (mots simples et syntagmes), identification et traitement des composes nominaux, integration des ressources terminologiques du client, alignement atomatique des textes source et cible, extraction des traductions du vocabulaire source, redaction du vocabuleire et son recodage en forme de donnees lexicales. Nouse decrivons aussi les outils que nous avons concus et developpes pour …

A Reasoned Interlingua For Knowledge-Based Machine Translation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, John R. R. Leavitt, Alexander M. Franz

Faculty Publications

Research in machine translation (MT) has resulted in a number of Machine Translation systems that are based on the interlingua approach. This paper reports the results of designing an interlingua for a large-scale, practical MT system designed to translate technical information from English into a number of target languages. After an analysis of the main features of the translation problem faced by this system we describe the principles underlying our design decisions. We address issues such as the design and development methodology, the grain size of the representation, and our efforts to endow the interlingua representation with the ability to …

Large-Scale Machine Translation: An Interlingua Approach, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Alexander M. Franz, John R. R. Leavitt

Faculty Publications

In this paper we discuss the design and development of an interlingua for a large-scale MT project. We also discuss how the resulting KANT interlingua constrains complexity, supports staged development, evolves in a balanced fashion, and seeks maximal coverage. We address issues such as granularity of the data representation, its specification, the types of information it encodes, and how it supports a modular system architecture. Our experience shows that through a careful, reasoned design and implementation effort, it is possible to achieve multilingual target-language generation for extensive technical domains.

The Semantics Of Certainty In Quechua And Its Implications For A Cultural Epistemology, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

This article contributes to attempts on the part of Quechua scholars to understand the evidential system of this language family, and thereby paves the way for a more complex understanding of Quechua speakers' language and culture. The author opposes the position that the most general meaning of the -mi suffix is to indicate a direct or first-hand experience; and she holds that specific claims about Quechua speakers' epistemological orientations, based on such an analysis, cannot be supported. Evidence from speakers' use of -mi indicates that it encodes two paradigmatic contrasts: one is status-like or modal, the other evidential. The patterning …

"Good Heavens!": An Old English Euphemism?, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

It is commonly assumed that the expression good heavens! is a euphemistic one, originally coined to avoid a more direct reference to God. The OED, for example, seems to regard the word heavens as a "substituted expression" for God in the exclamation good heavens! While this substitution may in fact characterize how speakers use the expression now, it may not reflect the original meaning behind this expression.

Sound Symbolic Involvement, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

This article examines an iconic form of communication, sound symbolism, which has been associated with oral cultures and implicated in paradigms of primitive mentality, I argue that Lowland Ecuadorean Quechua speakers use sound symbolic iconicity to create interlocutionary involvement. A speaker's performative foregrounding of a sound symbolic form simuhtes the salient qualities of an action, event, or process, and thereby invites a listener to project into an experience. This projected involvement, in turn, points the listener to deeper kinds of imaginative, intellectual, and emotional engagement with the narrative. The argument is based on an analysis of the formal and semantic …

Distancing As A Casual Factor In The Development Of /0/ And /X/ In Spanish, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The evolution of the Spanish sibilant system has been an object of study since the late nineteenth century. Since that time, a myriad of books and articles have been published on the subject whose major focus has been to determine the exact nature of the sibilant changes and the chronology of each change. As is the case in most historical work, the question of why phonological systems evolve usually takes on only secondary importance. Among those theories proposed in order to explain why phonetic changes occur is the functionalist idea that there needs to be an optimal acoustic distance between …

The Test Of English As A Foreign Language Sample Test As A Measure Of Adolescent Language Ability, Paul Gardiner Osborn

Theses and Dissertations

Relative performance on the Test of English as a Foreign Language Sample Test (TOEFL-ST) was explored in sixty native English speaking high school students. Subjects also were administered the Fullerton Language Test for Adolescents and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test Revised. The TOEFL-ST was not difficult for this population, indicating that TOEFL tests taken by foreign speaking college students probably assess a level of native English competency well below the high school level. The three tests, including subtests, appear to measure a wide array of subdomains of language competency. The data do not support the conclusion that any of these …

Pronouns Of Address In The Book Of Mormon, Lyle L. Fletcher

Theses and Dissertations

The first section of this thesis is a diachronic examination of second person pronouns in English with special focus on variations in usage such as pronominal shifting between thou (and related forms) and ye (and related forms), as well as an examination of the second person pronoun usage in the English Bible (especially the King James Version) with a similar focus. From the thirteenth century on variations in usage have been common.

The second section is a synchronic examination of second person pronouns as used by Joseph Smith and some of his contemporaries, followed by an analysis of these pronouns …

A Burkean Logological Analysis Of Doctrine And Covenants Section 88, Joann Farias

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies Kenneth Burke's method of logology as exemplified in The Rhetoric of Religion to analyze the Mormon text Doctrine and Covenants Section 88. This method of logology is based on the assumption that what is said about God in theology reveals a religion's use of language to influence human motives. The logological method uses six analogies to discover the motives implicit in religious terminologies. These six analogies are as follows: words-Word, Matter-Spirit, the Negative, the Titular, Time-Eternity, and the Formal.

This study revealed that the terminology contained in Doctrine and Covenants uses motives far diferent from the motives …

Lds Language Teaching And Learning: Highlights From 1830 To 1982, Cynthia L. Hallen

Theses and Dissertations

Since the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its leaders and members have been commanded and encouraged to learn foreign languages. With the gift of tongues and diligent effort Latter-day Saints have made great progress in the last 152 years in meeting the challenge of learning and teaching languages. This paper is an attempt to compile what has been done by Church members, programs, and organizations to promote language in a world where international communication is increasingly important. It will also be a resource for the LDS Church, the Missionary Training Center, Brigham Young University, and …

Attitudes And Attained Esl Proficiency Among First Generation Swedish Mormon Immigrants, Cecilia Nihlen

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis project, the relationship between attitudes toward target and native culture groups and attained ESL proficiency among immigrants was evaluated. The subjects were thirty adult native Swedes, all members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who had spent an average of 29 years in the United States. Fourteen were members of a Swedish-speaking branch, while sixteen were members of English-speaking wards. Significant differences were found in immigrants' attitudes toward the culture groups. High English proficiency related positively with a more positive attitude toward the target culture group. Those demonstrating high proficiency viewed the general native …

Measuring The Reading Level Of Lds Materials: A Supplement To The Dale Word List, Linda Stahle

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to supplement the Dale word list with a list of terms that are familiar to most members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and thus increase the precision of the Dale-Chall readability formula when it is applied to LDS materials. The Dale word list consists of 3,000 words that are familiar to 80 percent of fourth graders. The procedure involved identifying non-Dale words that occur frequently in LDS church publications and testing them on LDS fourth graders in a three-alternative multiple-choice format.

Of the 850 words tested, 249 were identified correctly …