Linguistics Commons^™

Fighting 'Stance': The Role Of Conversational Positioning In League Of Legends (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) Discourse, William Breslove

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

For researchers, the study of video game players - how they behave, interact, and cooperate in a virtual world – presents a challenge: what methodologies are best suited to approaching these interactions? From a sociolinguistic approach, how do gamers converse, and what do these conversations reveal about epistemic, affective, and political relationships? This study uses John DuBois’ Stance Theory (2007) and recent modifications of it (Kiesling 2022), to analyze data gathered from the popular multiplayer online battle-arena (MOBA) game League of Legends. It focuses on in-game interlocutors’ conversation samples to show their positioning, intersubjective alignment, and evaluation of a …

Language Contact And Covert Prominence In The Sḥerēt-Jibbāli Language Of Oman, Jarred Brewster

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis reports on a phonetic production study, the results of which support the existence of a complex word-prosodic system for the Sḥerēt-Jibbāli language of Dhofar, Oman. In the language, stress seems to co-occur in some lexical items with a high tone. In the discussion, a mechanism for the emergence of this system is proposed as the reflex of a typological feature held in common with the related language, Soqotri, and as justification for an Eastern Modern South Arabian subgroup consisting of Sḥerēt-Jibbāli and Soqotri.

A Fat Imposter: The Embodied Intersection Between Race, Body Type And Fatness In Margaret Cho’S Comedy, Julia Cox

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Margaret Cho is a comedic goddess who, in her mockery, serves flaming hot social commentary about race, body image, and fatness. Within this thesis, I used critical discourse analysis to understand how Margaret Cho embodies Asianness, whiteness, and the body types and images prescribed respectively. While working on data analysis, I came across a common media trope of fat women: the use of indexically Southern (United States), Appalachian, and Working class indexicals in speech and lexical items. I connected the ideologies surrounding Southern and Appalachian language to the inequalities that fat women face. This voicing had not previously been written …

The Influence Of Socioindexical Information On The Speech Perception-Production Link: Evidence From A Shadowing Task, Kyler B. Laycock

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The body of work on speech perception demonstrates the ability of listeners to utilize both visual and acoustic information in their processing of a given speech signal. More recent studies have established that listeners are sensitive to cues in both these modalities which inform their perception of a speaker's identity in parallel with the linguistic message, but the relationship between social information in perception and production together is unclear. This study reports the results of an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that expectations about a speakers identity is able to influence a listener's perception and production of speech in …

Reality And Ideology: The Use Of Gender Indexing Features In Reality Tv, Steven J. Gerencser

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This article analyzes 4 episodes of the Japanese reality television program Terrace house: Aloha State for instances of gender indexing language to investigate the gap between actual speaker usage of these features and the linguistic ideology surrounding their usage as is perpetrated and perpetuated by media. Specifically, the gender indexing features which will be investigated to accomplish this are sentence final particles and first-person pronouns. Instances of these linguistic features are typically presented as features of gendered language, but as will be demonstrated, this does match their actual usage by speakers. I set out to answer three research questions, (1) …

What You Do Or What You Say? An Examination Of Analyst Reactions To Prototypical And Non-Prototypical Ceos Linguistic And Competitive Behaviors, Courtney Hart

Theses and Dissertations--Management

Non-prototypical CEOs are those that process different demographic characteristics from a target reference group. In the US, a non-prototypical CEO is both white and male. While the negative responses to non-prototypical leaders based on race and gender have been well documented, we know less on what these leaders do that may influence biased evaluations. In this dissertation I took an impression management view to examine analysts’ evaluative bias (AEB) on prototypical and non-prototypical CEOs hiding linguistic behaviors and competitive aggressiveness. Specifically, I examined hiding linguistic behaviors on quarterly conference calls and two attributes of competitive repertoire will be researched. Drawing …

Toward A Century Of Language Attitudes Research: Looking Back And Moving Forward, Marko Dragojevic, Fabio Fasoli, Jennifer Cramer, Tamara Rakić

Communication Faculty Publications

The study of language attitudes is concerned with the social meanings people assign to language and its users. With roots in social psychology nearly a century ago, language attitudes research spans several academic disciplines and draws on diverse methodological approaches. In an attempt to integrate this work and traverse disciplinary boundaries and methodological proclivities, we propose that language attitudes—as a unified field—can be organized into five distinct—yet interdependent and complementary—lines of research: documentation, explanation, development, consequences, and change. After highlighting some of the key findings that have emerged from each area, we discuss several opportunities and challenges for future research.

Identifying Facets Of Reader-Generated Online Reviews Of Children’S Books Based On A Textual Analysis Approach, Yunseon Choi, Soohyung Joo

Information Science Faculty Publications

With the increasing popularity of social media, online reviews have become one of the primary information sources for book selection. Prior studies have analyzed online reviews, mostly in the domain of business. However, little research has examined the content of online book reviews of children’s books. Book reviews generated by book readers contain different aspects of information, such as opinions, feedback, or emotional responses, from the perspectives of readers. This study explores what aspects of the books are addressed in readers’ reviews, and then it intends to identify categorical features or facets of online book reviews of children’s books. We …

Toward "English" Phonetics: Variability In The Pre-Consonantal Voicing Effect Across English Dialects And Speakers, James Tanner, Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith, Josef Fruehwald

Linguistics Faculty Publications

Recent advances in access to spoken-language corpora and development of speech processing tools have made possible the performance of “large-scale” phonetic and sociolinguistic research. This study illustrates the usefulness of such a large-scale approach—using data from multiple corpora across a range of English dialects, collected, and analyzed with the SPADE project—to examine how the pre-consonantal Voicing Effect (longer vowels before voiced than voiceless obstruents, in e.g., bead vs. beat) is realized in spontaneous speech, and varies across dialects and individual speakers. Compared with previous reports of controlled laboratory speech, the Voicing Effect was found to be substantially smaller in …

Vox Et Silentium Dei: A Socio-Cognitive Linguistic Theory Of Religious Violence, Tyler Everett Kibbey

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Contemporary research in the study of language and cognition frequently characterizes religious metaphors as either monoliths of experience or stable synchronic structures, if not both. In addition, by virtue of how the foundational theory of this paper, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, has been situated in the literature, pre-modern theist writing on figurative language has been largely ignored. This has resulted in a general application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to religious language which characterizes religious experience as phenomenologically invalid with the contingent effect of contradicting the basic experiential nature of metaphor. Here, I account for these principal theoretical discrepancies through an exploration …

Relevant Angry Affect Slows Response Time To Commands, Aleah Combs

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Previous research has found that emotional prosody can interact with speech perception and listeners’ processing of the meaning of particular word/emotion pairings(Kim and Sumner, 2017). What remains unclear is how this interactive processing can affect behavioral responses such as responses to imperatives. To answer this question,71 participants were presented with a series of commands given in a relevant affect.Commands were read either with angry prosody, happy prosody, or neutral prosody (control) and the participants were instructed to press the requested button on a response box as quickly and accurately as possible. All emotional states were simulated and normed for perceived …

Pmkns For Pie: Parsed Morphological Katr Networks Of Sanskrit For Proto-Indo-European, Ryan Mark Mcdonald

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis, I construct two computational networks for Sanskrit to test theories of nominal accentuation as a way of examining the simplicity of each theory. I will be examining the Paradigmatic Approach and the Compositional Approach to nominal accentuation. For the Paradigmatic Approach, nominals are categorized into mobile and static categories based on how the accent appears in the paradigm (Fortson 2010). For the Compositional Approach, accent mobility is a result of the combination of morphemes and their inherent accent states (Kirparsky 2010). To construct these networks, I use the KATR extension to the DATR language for lexical knowledge …

An Intonational Description Of African American Language In Princeville, Nc, Christopher M. Dale

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis uses data from the Princeville, NC section of the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) in order to address two topics concerning language: first, what the intonation of the Princeville participants of the CORAAL looks like acoustically; and second, if intonation is the salient feature that categorizes a speaker as Black or non-Black. The acoustic analysis software, Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2019), is used to take average, minimum, and maximum f0 measurements for 16 participants (9 women and 7 men) across three age groups. From these measurements, the rate of change is calculated in Hz/second to determine …

The Mothman And Other Strange Tales: Shaping Queer Appalachia Through Folkloric Discourse In Online Social Media Communities, Brenton Watts

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Little work has been conducted on the intersections of queer and Appalachian identities, in part because these two identities are viewed as incompatible (Mann 2016). This study uses a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach to examine the Instagram posts of the Queer Appalachia Project, which represent a substantial body of discourse created by and for queer Appalachians. Of specific interest to this analysis are those posts which employ folkloric figures, such as West Virginia’s Mothman, to do identity work that is queer, Appalachian, and queer-Appalachian. Often, this act is accomplished through juxtaposition with Appalachian imagery and the reclamation of homophobic …

“Home Is More Than Just A Place”: Oral Personal Narrative Storytelling In Central Appalachia, Brandon Jent

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This project seeks a linguistic understanding of oral personal narrative storytelling in Central Appalachia, particularly as it manifests in Eastern Kentucky, with aims of providing insight into the Appalachian storyteller trope (e.g., Montgomery 1998). Structural and discursive elements of oral personal narrative were identified and positioned within their sociocultural context through discourse analysis and narrative studies. Data were collected from story circles, a methodology first implemented in cultural and community organizing spaces in the South and throughout Appalachia (Roadside Theater 2014, Junebug Productions n.d.). The collected stories were transcribed and analyzed through a discourse analysis framework that combines discourse pragmatics, …

The Importance Of Shared Language In Rural Behavioral Health Interventions: An Exploratory Linguistic Analysis, Michele Staton, Jennifer Cramer, Robert Walker, Claire Snell-Rood, Athena Kheibari

Behavioral Science Faculty Publications

A focus on the use of shared language to enhance congruence in interventionist-client dialogue is missing from traditional research on evidence-based practices and rural behavioral health. This study incorporates qualitative interactional sociolinguistics, which includes discourse analysis (typically written or audio recordings of face-to-face encounters with 11 clients and a study interventionist), to describe those speech patterns in a broad sense (dialect), as well as more specific use of communicative strategies to increase parity in the interaction between a rural interventionist delivering an evidence-based practice in the context of a research study with rural women opioid users in a non-therapeutic context. …

Shifting Personas: A Case Study Of Taylor Swift, Lela R. Lyon

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis analyzes how Taylor Swift has changed the way she expresses her Southern identity, specifically her dialectal features, over the course of her career and through her switch from country music to pop music. There were two processes to assess the change in Swift’s speech: the production of /ai/ tokens in interviewed speech and the perception of dialectal change by fans in the comment sections of the interviews on YouTube. Seven interviews on YouTube and their comment sections were used as the data source for this study. Production of /ai/ was measured through an auditory analysis to determine whether …

Application Of Boolean Logic To Natural Language Complexity In Political Discourse, Austin Taing

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Press releases serve as a major influence on public opinion of a politician, since they are a primary means of communicating with the public and directing discussion. Thus, the public’s ability to digest them is an important factor for politicians to consider. This study employs several well-studied measures of linguistic complexity and proposes a new one to examine whether politicians change their language to become more or less difficult to parse in different situations. This study uses 27,500 press releases from the US Senate between 2004–2008 and examines election cycles and natural disasters, namely hurricanes, as situations where politicians’ language …

Advanced Recurrent Network-Based Hybrid Acoustic Models For Low Resource Speech Recognition, Jian Kang, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Wei-Wei Liu, Jia Liu, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown an ability to model temporal dependencies. However, the problem of exploding or vanishing gradients has limited their application. In recent years, long short-term memory RNNs (LSTM RNNs) have been proposed to solve this problem and have achieved excellent results. Bidirectional LSTM (BLSTM), which uses both preceding and following context, has shown particularly good performance. However, the computational requirements of BLSTM approaches are quite heavy, even when implemented efficiently with GPU-based high performance computers. In addition, because the output of LSTM units is bounded, there is often still a vanishing gradient issue over multiple layers. …

A Markedly Different Approach: Investigating Pie Stops Using Modern Empirical Methods, Phillip Barnett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis, I investigate a decades-old problem found in the stop system of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). More specifically, I will be investigating the paucity of */b/ in the forms reconstructed for the ancient, hypothetical language. As cross-linguistic evidence and phonological theory alone have fallen short of providing a satisfactory answer, herein will I employ modern empirical methods of linguistic investigation, namely laboratory phonology experiments and computational database analysis. Following Byrd 2015, I advocate for an examination of synchronic phenomena and behavior as a method for investigating diachronic change.

In Chapter 1, I present an overview of the various proposed phonological …

Going Gaga: Pop Fandom As Online Community Of Practice, John D. N. Carter

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Among various fan sites dedicated to pop stars, GagaDaily is one prominent online collective that centers around Lady Gaga. This study is a piece of ethnographic research focused on two claims – GagaDaily constitutes a Community of Practice (Eckert, 2006) in an online setting, and the regular use of humor by users fulfills social and pragmatic roles in the discourse. Communicative phenomena (both textual and graphic) that characterize the linguistic repertoire of GagaDaily members were catalogued from the first 100 pages of one thread within the forums. These data were grouped into categories corresponding to different dimensions of language use …

Constraints On Izāfa In Sorani Kurdish, Ali Salehi

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study examines the distribution and the status of the izāfa particle in Sorani Kurdish (Central Kurdish). It uses a corpus-based analysis to investigate the forms and the pattern of distribution of the izāfa particle in Sorani, a dominant dialect of Kurdish among the Western Iranian languages. The study details an investigation of the appearance of izāfa in various NPs using a variety of data mostly from the corpus but supplemented by the grammaticality judgments of native speakers. I show that next to parallel properties seen in other Western Iranian languages, Sorani Kurdish izāfa shows a form alternation. I examine …

The Origin Of The Gilaki Causative Suffix -Be(ː)-, Zia Khoshsirat

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The Proto-Indo-European causative/iterative suffix *-ei̯e- was inherited by Old Iranian and persists in almost all Middle and Modern Iranian languages as -aya- and -ēn- (-Vn-) respectively. Comparably, in the Indic branch -aya- functions as a causative suffix in Sanskrit beside another suffix -āpaya which became the productive causative suffix -āvē- in Middle Indic and still used in Modern Indic today. Evidence shows eight Eastern Iranian languages- †Khotanese, †Khwarazmian, Parachi, Wakhi, Munji, Pashto, Ormuri, and Yidgha- using the morphological causative suffix in addition to the expected Iranian one -aya- or -Vn-. This alternative causative suffix is …

#Hashtags: A Look At The Evaluative Roles Of Hashtags On Twitter, Leah Rose Schaede

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Social media has become a large part of today’s pop culture and keeping up with what is going on not only in our social circles, but around the world. It has given many a platform to unite their causes, build fandoms, and share their commentary with the world. A tool in helping group posts together or give commentary on a thought is the hashtag. In this paper I explore the evaluative roles of hashtags in social media discourse, specifically on Twitter. I use a sample of randomly selected tweets from the Twitter API stream I collected and compiled myself. I …

Pragmatic Functionality Of Punctuation On Twitter, Elizabeth M. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work presents an analysis of punctuation use in computer-mediated communication (CMC); in particular, the present study aims to describe the pragmatic functions of nonstandard punctuation on Twitter, providing a corpus-driven overview of the distribution and frequency of nonstandard punctuation use, and an analysis of sampled tweets at the individual tweet level to estimate noise levels in the overall corpus. A survey was also conducted which aimed to identify user understanding of the affective content of nonstandard punctuation strings and to identify any possible effects of character repetition. Survey results indicate that linguistic content was the strongest indicator of affective …

“Listening With An Attitude”: The Role Of Attitude On Native And Non-Native Intergroup Communication, Aidah N. Aljuran

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

People tend to draw their own conclusions about similarities and differences between who they are and the “other.” Having perceptions of being similar to the in-group and being different from the out-group “satisfies psychological needs” (Robbins & Krueger, 2005). Based on this social perception, individuals show communication variations as a way of expressing their identities (Giles 1973). This study implements quantitative and qualitative methods in order to examine the attitude of native speakers (NSs), as well as the potential impact of these attitudes on their communication with non-native speakers (NNSs). The potential impact of NSs’ interactions on NNSs’ interactions was …

Single Versus Concurrent Systems: Nominal Classification In Mian, Greville G. Corbett, Sebastian Fedden, Raphael Finkel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Papuan language Mian allows us to refine the typology of nominal classification. Mian has two candidate classification systems, differing completely in their formal realization but overlapping considerably in their semantics. To determine whether to analyse Mian as a single system or concurrent systems we adopt a canonical approach. Our criteria – orthogonality of the systems (we give a precise measure), semantic compositionality, morphosyntactic alignment, distribution across parts of speech, exponence, and interaction with other features – point mainly to an analysis as concurrent systems. We thus improve our analysis of Mian and make progress with the typology of nominal …

Cloud‐Based Text Analytics Harvesting, Cleaning And Analyzing Corporate Earnings Conference Calls, Michael Chuancai Zhang, Vikram Gazula, Dan Stone, Hong Xie

Commonwealth Computational Summit

No abstract provided.

Cloud-Based Text Analytics: Harvesting, Cleaning And Analyzing Corporate Earnings Conference Calls, Michael Chuancai Zhang, Vikram Gazula, Dan Stone, Hong Xie

Commonwealth Computational Summit

Does management language cohesion in earnings conference calls matter to the capital market? As a part of the research on the above question, and taking advantage of the modern IT technologies, this project:

• harvested 115,882 earnings conference call transcripts from SeekingAlpha.com
• parsed and structured 89,988 transcripts using regular expressions in Stata
• analyzed 179,976 text files using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which
• saved almost 2 years (675 days) of the project time

Book Review: Talking Conflict: The Loaded Language Of Genocide, Political Violence, Terrorism, And Warfare, Jennifer A. Bartlett

Library Faculty and Staff Publications

The language used to describe conflict situations, whether military, political, or personal, has the potential to help resolve or escalate. Terms such as “collateral damage,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “final solution” often refer to historical events, but can also be used to condemn or endorse particular points of view in political speeches, the media, and local debate. Euphemisms, oxymorons, propaganda, jargon: all come into play. The nuanced and powerful rhetoric of conflict is the topic of Talking Conflict, an interesting and wide-ranging encyclopedia discussing the impact of linguistics, political science, journalism, and other fields on the language of conflict.