Linguistics Commons^™

Spatial Distribution Of Chinese Language Education And Historical Development Of Chinese Language Pedagogy In Higher Education In The United States, Jing Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project includes two major components: an interactive digital map that displays the geographical distribution of Chinese language programs in colleges and universities in the United States, their program starting years, the types of such universities and colleges, and their names and states; and a multimedia essay on the evolution of Chinese language pedagogy in colleges and universities in the United States. Data has been collected on the program start year, school names, states where schools are located, school types, and whether the school had been funded by two federal sponsored language programs: the National Defense Education Act in …

Standard Language Ideology Is Alive And Well In Public Speaking Textbooks, Carlos De Cuba, Poppy Slocum

Publications and Research

For more than 50 years, the field of linguistics has recognized the equality of human languages, including all dialects of all languages. In this study we examine how current popular public speaking textbooks handle issues of linguistic variation in English. We looked specifically at textbook discussions of accent, grammar and pronunciation. Unfortunately, we have found the majority of textbooks we examined serve to maintain the outdated “deficit” model of language variation, to the detriment of students.

The Communicative Function Of Adjective-Noun Order In English, Kelli Hesseltine, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

The problem undertaken here is to account for the relational placement in English of words traditionally known as adjectives and nouns. Two distinct orders are examined as signals of discrete meanings: one where the characterizing word is preposed to the characterized word, as in long hair, and the other where it is postposed, as in hair long. Distribution of the two signals in attested text is accounted for under the hypothesis that an Assertion of Characterization is made WEAKER or STRONGER, respectively, through this word order. With these meanings, a writer draws a distinction between Characterization the writer assumes the …

Lexical Items As Facets Of Identity In Discourse, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

Lexical items are used in discourse not to provide objective direct reference, nor to reflect a language’s system of categorization, nor in accordance with cognitive categories, but rather to communicate different perspectives. Lexical items function as facets of identity, chosen by an author to convey a subjective message. The point is illustrated through an analysis of lexical co-reference in Antonio Tabucchi’s Donna di Porto Pim e altre storie.

The Modern Formulation Of Chinese Art History And The Building Of A Nation In Early Twentieth-Century China, Chennie Huang

Dissertations and Theses

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Chinese formulation of art history underwent dramatic changes. It moved away from the traditional narratives that did not follow a strict chronology to adopt the Western linear model which emphasizes progress and national identity. Based on the premodern tradition, the modern formulations of Chinese art history began as a political strategy for nation building amid the political upheavals, including military attacks on China that led to the end of Qing imperial rule and the beginning of the Republican era (1912-1949).

In the early 1900s, while exiled in Japan, Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873-1929), …

Definitions Of Language And Language Learning., Virginia Valian

Publications and Research

A prevalent view in monolingual first language acquisition is that children acquire their native language. One’s first reaction is, “well, yes, how could it be otherwise?” The study of ‘heritage’ learners suggests a reconsideration of that view. Polinsky and Scontras (Polinsky & Scontras, 2019) present a fascinating review of the phenomena characterizing heritage learners and propose several underlying mechanisms to account for those phenomena. Their review encourages a broader view of language acquisition. To me it suggests that variability is the norm.

La Hispanofonía En Debate: Alternativas, Resistencias, Y Complicidades Reunidas En Córdoba (Arg). Una Conversación Glotopolítica Con José Del Valle, Alejandro Néstor Lorenzetti, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

Entre el 27 y el 30 de marzo de 2019 se realizó en Córdoba, Argentina, el VIII Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española, bajo el lema “América y el futuro del español. Cultura y educación, tecnología y emprendimiento”. El evento, organizado por la Real Academia de la Lengua Española (RAE), el Instituto Cervantes (IC), la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE) y los gobiernos locales, es conocido y criticado por ser la voz oficial del proyecto político-lingüístico panhispánico. De manera paralela, y con un espíritu desafiante, la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidadesde la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC, …

Case Study: An Urban Bilingual [Linguistics], Monika Ekiert, Maria Jerskey

Open Educational Resources

The assignment Interview with a Bilingual: Case Study is a midterm, high-stakes written research paper in ELN101: Introduction to Bilingualism, a course contributing one deposit into the Global Learning Core Competency and Written Communication Ability. The assignment calls for the consideration and application of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic concepts into the discussion of individual multilingualism. By completing this assignment, students gain a deeper understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity in the US society. They learn to position issues in bilingualism against a global backdrop through the consideration of an individual bilingual journey as representative of similar histories and perspectives elsewhere. …

Education For Nyc Bilinguals [Linguistics], Maria Jerskey, Monika Ekiert

Open Educational Resources

The assignment Education for NYC Bilinguals is a final, high-stakes written research paper in ELN101: Introduction to Bilingualism, a course contributing one deposit into the Global Learning Core Competency and Written Communication Ability. The assignment calls for the consideration and application of social, political, educational, and psycholinguistic concepts into the discussion of global and local multilingualism. By completing this assignment, students gain a deeper understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity in the US society and learn to position issues in bilingualism against a global backdrop. The assignment asks students to approach the challenges of education for multilingual New Yorkers …

Reseña De Manual De Escritura Académica_Prat Ferrer Y Peña Delgado, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Ser Equipo Con Las Comunidades De Costa Rica: Entrevista A Carlos Sánchez Avendaño, Silvia Rivera Alfaro, Antonio Tudela Martí

Publications and Research

Entrevista a Carlos Sánchez Avendaño. El Dr. Sánchez Avendaño es catedrático de la Universidad de Costa Rica. Trabaja con diversas comunidades etnolingüísticas, particularmente con comunidades indígenas, en procesos de revitalización y revalorización de lenguas que han sido minorizadas y desplazadas en el país. Su libro más reciente es La cola de la iguana. El pueblo malecu ante el desplazamiento de su lengua y su cultura tradicional.

Cue-Based Reflexive Reference Resolution: Evidence From Korean Reflexive Caki, Namseok Yong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to reveal cognitive mechanisms and factors that underlie the reflexive dependency formation. In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to the question of how our mind works in building linguistic dependencies (including an antecedent-reflexive dependency) because relevant research has proved promising and illuminating in regard to the properties (e.g., system architecture, computational algorithms, etc.) of human language processor and its close connection with other cognitive functions such as memory (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006; McElree, 2000; McElree, Foraker, & Dyer, 2003; Van Dyke & Johns, 2012; Wagers, Lau, & …

Heritage Speaker And Late Bilingual L2 Relative Clause Processing And Language Dominance Effects, Leeann S. Stevens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traditionally, heritage speakers are recognized as a heterogeneous group whose skills in their heritage language are unlike those of monolinguals or L2 learners of that language. Indeed, much evidence confirms the cognitive and linguistic uniqueness of this population. However, highly proficient heritage speakers may pattern more similarly to another bilingual population than typically assumed: first-generation late bilinguals.

The present study examines group-level processing differences between Spanish heritage speakers and Spanish-English late bilinguals in English, the second-learned and current societal majority language of these populations. Dominance is also analyzed as a possible effect of group processing differences, since traditionally and definitionally …

This Is What A Feminist Tweets Like: "Women's Language" And Styling Activist Identities In A #Yesallwomen Twitter Corpus, Eleanor A. Morikawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents results of a study of linguistic practice in the context of feminist activism on Twitter. Twitter has become a primary medium for social and political activism and a rich venue for study of the relationship between digitally mediated language and identity production. The focus of this study is the viral Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen, a hashtag that rose in popularity following a misogyny-motivated terrorist attack in the spring of 2014. This dissertation treats the #YesAllWomen hashtag as an imagined space and a Discourse (Gee, 2015) where language serves as a site for the production of gender and feminist …

Demographic Factors As Domains For Adaptation In Linguistic Preprocessing, Sara Morini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Classic natural language processing resources such as the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al. 1993) have long been used both as evaluation data for many linguistic tasks and as training data for a variety of off-the-shelf language processing tools. Recent work has highlighted a gender imbalance in the authors of this text data (Garimella et al. 2019) and hypothesized that tools created with such resources will privilege users from particular demographic groups (Hovy and Søgaard 2015). Domain adaptation is typically employed as a strategy in machine learning to adjust models trained and evaluated with data from different genres. However, the present …

Do It Like A Syntactician: Using Binary Gramaticality Judgements To Train Sentence Encoders And Assess Their Sensitivity To Syntactic Structure, Pablo Gonzalez Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The binary nature of grammaticality judgments and their use to access the structure of syntax are a staple of modern linguistics. However, computational models of natural language rarely make use of grammaticality in their training or application. Furthermore, developments in modern neural NLP have produced a myriad of methods that push the baselines in many complex tasks, but those methods are typically not evaluated from a linguistic perspective. In this dissertation I use grammaticality judgements with artificially generated ungrammatical sentences to assess the performance of several neural encoders and propose them as a suitable training target to make models learn …

Mood Choice And Context Availability: A Variationist Approach To The Subjunctive In New York City Spanish, Joanna Birnbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the variable treatment of the Subjunctive in Spanish in New York City. Both Mood choice (Subjunctive versus Indicative) and Linguistic context availability (the presence and absence of Subjunctive-inducing contexts in speech) are studied. Data are from sociolinguistic interviews with 142 informants, stratified with respect to immigrant generation, gender, age, socio-economic status, national origin, etc. Subjunctive rates are analyzed, at the macro-level, in nine linguistic contexts and, at the micro-level, in the four most popular contexts (Modal, Protasis Si, Temporal, and Apodosis Si). Results of bivariate Pearson correlations and Chi-square tests reveal consistent usage patterns of …

‘Its Something You Do Bro’: Language And Identity On A Male Erotic Hypnosis Messageboard, Eric Chambers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on a seven-year corpus of data (total words N = 86,881) on a publicly-accessible messageboard on which self-identified gay men discuss their experiences undergoing erotic hypnosis, this study applies Critical Discourse Analysis methods to understand how posters understand their sexual identities and those of others. This study identifies the emergence of two main identity-types at-play on OnYourKnees: the jock and the coach. Jocks are generally characterized by a focus on sports and body-consciousness, a disinterest or inability to engage in scholarly/academic pursuits, and a desire to be submissive to others to achieve sexual pleasure. Coaches, on the other hand, …

The Effects Of Language Background And Foreign Accent On Listening Comprehension, Sita Carraturo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The act of listening to a linguistic signal is an involved process, and, rarely occurs in absolute silence. A person trying to listen and comprehend speech is likely in an environment that has some sort of additional noise: white noise from a fan, passing traffic, construction, or just other talkers. Each of these additional auditory signals creates an unfavorable environment for the listener who is trying to capture the target signal. Research has been able to quantify and describe the effects of noise on the comprehension of linguistic signals, and has also shown that that bilinguals and monolinguals — though …

Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguities In Declarative And Interrogative Contexts: Oral Reading Data, Tyler J. Peckenpaugh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Certain English sentences containing multiple prepositional phrases (e.g., She had planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase) have been reported to be prone to mis-parsing of a kind that is standardly called a “garden path.” The mis-parse stems from the temporary ambiguity of the first prepositional phrase (PP1: in the drawer), which tends to be interpreted initially as the goal argument of the verb cram. If the sentence ended there, that would be correct. But that analysis is overridden when the second prepositional phrase (PP2: into her briefcase) is encountered, since the …

Cruzar Fronteras Em Espaços Acadêmicos: Transgressing “The Limits Of Translanguaging”, Brendan H. O’Connor, Katherine S. Mortimer, Lesley Bartlett, María Teresa De La Piedra, Ana Maria Rabelo Gomes, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Gabriela Novaro, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Char Ullman

Publications and Research

Scholarship on translanguaging and related concepts has challenged traditional assumptions about how people use their multiple languages, urging us to move beyond the boundaries of named linguistic codes and toward conceptualizations of multilingual language use as flexible use of a speaker’s whole linguistic repertoire. Critiques of this theoretical shift have included assertions of translanguaging’s conceptual and practical limits—limits to its transformative potential as well as limits to its practical use. This paper takes up, in particular, the question of why we academics may assert the value of translanguaging in schools and communities while still largely failing to move beyond monoglossic …

Heritage Speakers Can Actively Shape Not Only Their Grammar But Also Their Processing, Irina A. Sekerina, Anna K. Laurinavichyute

Publications and Research

In this commentary, we provide psycholinguistic evidence that supports Polinsky and Scontras’ idea of how important it is for psycholinguistics and the linguistic theory of heritage languages to feed each other. We show that (a) heritage speakers’ processing can diverge from the baseline in online but not offline measures, (b) transfer from the dominant language does not always happen, and (c) heritage speakers can actively shape their processing that can contribute to heritage language restructuring in a chain reaction fashion.

Linguistic Features Of False Confessions And Confessions Not In Dispute: A Corpus Analysis, Lucrezia Rizzelli

Student Theses

Confessions are considered the gold standard of evidence, and yet many cases of false confessions causing wrongful convictions have come to the surface in the past decades. Currently, a method to identify false confessions does not exist and studies focusing on the content of the confessions have found similarities rather than points of distinction. In this study, we approached confessions from a stylistic rather than qualitative point of view, utilizing corpus analysis to outline the linguistic features of two samples of confessions: false confessions (n=37) and confessions not in dispute (n=98). Subsequently, we created a model …

'Lui' And 'Egli' In Il Gattopardo, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

A semiotic, discourse-based linguistic hypothesis that bypasses the syntactic category subject and proposes instead contrasting meanings for the pronouns lui and egli provides empirical support for the critical interpretation of the novel Il Gattopardo as being anti-teleological. The hypothesis, which applies to large body of twentieth-century Italian literature, is that egli but not lui bears a linguistic meaning that ties its relevance to a verb. This linguistic hypothesis reveals a significant difference in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s portrayals of the novel’s two characters Don Fabrizio and Don Calogero: one as a character defined by who he is, the other as a …

Analyzing Prosody With Legendre Polynomial Coefficients, Rachel Rakov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This investigation demonstrates the effectiveness of Legendre polynomial coefficients representing prosodic contours within the context of two different tasks: nativeness classification and sarcasm detection. By making use of accurate representations of prosodic contours to answer fundamental linguistic questions, we contribute significantly to the body of research focused on analyzing prosody in linguistics as well as modeling prosody for machine learning tasks. Using Legendre polynomial coefficient representations of prosodic contours, we answer prosodic questions about differences in prosody between native English speakers and non-native English speakers whose first language is Mandarin. We also learn more about prosodic qualities of sarcastic speech. …

The Perception Of Mandarin Tones In "Bubble" Noise By Native And L2 Listeners, Mengxuan Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous studies have revealed the complexity of Mandarin Tones. For example, similarities in the pitch contours of tones 2 and 3 and tones 3 and 4 cause confusion for listeners. The realization of a tone's contour is highly dependent on its context, especially the preceding pitch. This is known as the coarticulation effect. Researchers have demonstrated the robustness of tone perception by both native and non-native listeners, even with incomplete acoustic information or in noisy environment. However, non-native listeners were observed to behave differently from native listeners in their use of contextual information. For example, the disagreement between the end …

Estudio Variacionista Sobre Las Formas De Tratamiento En Buga, Colombia, Diego Vargas Barona

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

En el español actual existen variedades que exhiben un sistema tripartito compuesto por las formas de tratamiento tú, usted y vosque abreviamos FTt, FTv, FTu. En Colombia se muestra una variación mayor en el uso de estas formas de tratamiento. En este estudio se examinan las formas de tratamiento en el español que se habla en Buga, Colombia, particularmente las variables sociolingüísticas externas e internas que influyen en el uso de la FTu y la FTv. Los datos para el presente trabajo fueron recogidos a través de grabaciones de emisiones de habla espontánea y real. El Paquete Estadístico y data …

Stabilizing Forces In Acoustic Cultural Evolution: Comparing Humans And Birds, Daniel C. Mann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Learned acoustic communication systems, like birdsong and spoken human language, can be described from two seemingly contradictory perspectives. On one hand, learned acoustic communication systems can be remarkably consistent. Substantive and descriptive generalizations can be made which hold for a majority of populations within a species. On the other hand, learned acoustic communication systems are often highly variable. The degree of variation is often so great that few, if any, substantive generalizations hold for all populations in a species.

Within my dissertation, I explore the interplay of variation and uniformity in three vocal learning species: budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus), …

The Practice Of Mainland Chinese Students Adopting English Names And Its Motivations, T. Leo Schmitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the Chinese practice of adopting English names in the context of Chinese international students studying at American institutions of higher education. This work adopts the position of Bourdieu (1991) that there is a fundamental unity of the market, in that economic and political capital is connected to linguistic and cultural capital. Prosperity in one area is linked to others; people who have wealth and power tend to use language and have names that are similarly valued. In this situation, we are able to make choices about our linguistic and cultural stances based on our status within society. …

Neural Indices Of Vowel Discrimination In Monolingual And Bilingual Infants And Children, Yan H. Yu, Carol Tessel, Henry Han, Luca Campanelli, Nancy Vidal, Jennifer Gerometta, Karen Garrido-Nag, Hia Datta, Valerie L. Shafer

Publications and Research

Objectives: To examine maturation of neural discriminative responses to an English vowel contrast from infancy to 4 years of age and to determine how biological factors (age and sex) and an experiential factor (amount of Spanish versus English input) modulate neural discrimination of speech.

Design: Event-related potential (ERP) mismatch responses (MMRs) were used as indices of discrimination of the American English vowels [ε] versus [I] in infants and children between 3 months and 47 months of age. A total of 168 longitudinal and cross-sectional data sets were collected from 98 children (Bilingual Spanish–English: 47 male and 31 female …