Linguistics Commons^™

The Waldo Dataset, Mary E. Koone, Rosie Kallie, Vassilis Athisos, Laurel S. Stvan

Computer Science and Engineering Datasets - Archive

Distinct from the task of predicting the author of a document (authorship attribution), we focus on addressing the issue of how to estimate the similarity between the written language styles of authors. To do so, we present a dataset of metadata derived by asking human annotators, who were presented with three documents, to identify which two were written by the same author and which was written by a different author. The dataset has over 400 such annotations, creating a companion to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer review dataset, laying the groundwork for crowdsourcing applications to other natural language processing …

Phonetic Attrition As An Outcome Of L1-L2 Phonetic Interaction: Effects Of L2 Exposure In Arabic-English Bilinguals, Dema Smadi

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how length of second language (L2) exposure shapes the phonetic relationship between the first language (L1) and the L2 in adult Arabic-English bilinguals. Focusing on the production of voiced stops /b/ and /d/, the study examines how L1 Arabic and L2 English interact within a shared phonetic system and how this interaction develops as a function of increasing L2 exposure. Building on the Speech Learning Model and its revised version (SLM, SLM-r), the study adopts a relational perspective in which L1 and L2 are not treated as independent systems, but as dynamically interacting components of a shared …

Pinky Extension In American Sign Language: Evidence For A Lexically Restricted Morphological Process, Laurel Whitsett

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations

This study investigates pinky extension (PE) in American Sign Language (ASL). PE involves extending the pinky finger in signs, even though this feature is not present in standard dictionary representations of those signs. Although PE has been previously described as conveying emphasis, this account does not fully explain its distribution. This study asks whether PE reflects a meaningful part of how signs are structured in ASL, rather than a matter of individual style or variation. Focusing on adjectives, it examines whether PE interacts with sentence position. In ASL, certain adjectives may appear either before (prenominally) or after (postnominally) the noun …

The Machine And The Masses: A Sociolinguistic Study Of Ai Political Rhetoric, Yaseen Tasnif

2026 Spring Honors Capstones Projects

With increased use of and access to generative Artificial Intelligence, or AI, political communications have begun to see its influence, leading to the question of how this AI generated political rhetoric is received. In previous research, AI output has been extensively researched and indexed, highlighting specific qualities such as overly polished speech as indicators of use. Research has also been done on perception and detectability of AI, showing that people can accurately identify AI-generated text, but tend to be overconfident. However, such research has not been done in the context of political rhetoric, which is consumed in different ways than …

How Self-Perceptions Relate To Recorded Proficiency: An Action Research Project Aimed At Implementing A Supplemental Reading Program For Balinese Students, Katherine L. Johnson

2025 Fall Honors Capstones Projects - Archive

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education has had a complex history globally. This is especially true for Bali, Indonesia, where tourism is the main driver of the local economy. Learning English is highly valued, yet many students are left struggling to build the skills needed to rise above the local poverty line. In this action research study, the primary goal was to analyze students’ reading proficiencies to recommend the implementation of a reading program that could be appropriately tailored to individual students. This was done through administering a reading test, tracking both comprehension and reading speed, and a survey …

Indirect Requests: Sociopragmatic Aspects Of Non-Conventionalised Indirect Directives, Hammed Mohammadpanah

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Directives are divided into three types, corresponding to different levels of explicitness. To get a hearer who has left the front door open on a cold winter night while taking off their shoes, one can use a direct directive (e.g., Close the door!), a conventionalised indirect directive (e.g., Can you close the door?), or a non-conventionalised indirect directive (e.g., It’s –15 outside.). Inherently implicit in nature, non-conventionalised indirect directives (NCIDs) have been understudied due to being the most context-dependent and form-independent type of directives, which underscores the central role of context-based inferencing and contextual salience in processing and studying them. …

Viral Peer Advice: Health Memes Used As Speech Acts Of Advising In English, Laurel Smith Stvan

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

To better represent online health communication modes, an English-language corpus of lay health discourse was expanded to include health-related memes. Using these forms of peer-to-peer lay communication, I propose ways to categorize the illocutionary force of memes when they function as speech acts of advice. The subcorpus contains 200 English-language health-related memes gathered during 2018-2023 through Google image searches. I found the affiliative and disaffiliative strategies that Placencia (2012) noted within Yahoo! Respuestas advice exchanges; with meme multimodality, however, additional versions of these strategies appeared: characters used as sympathetic or encouraging affiliative features, but also chastising or disapproving characters as …

L2 Acquistion Of Korean: Phonology And Prosody, Angel M. Ray

2024 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Learning Korean as a second language (L2) has many challenges for a native (L1) non-native speaker. There is a new alphabet, word order, and new sounds that English does not have. Additionally, pronunciation and prosody are among the hardest aspects of the language to learn and master. Especially if one's native language is not tonal or does not have similar sounds in their inventory. The new sounds that a new language introduces can be too subtle to pick up when listening, making it difficult for non-native speakers to replicate in their speech. The language's flow of speech and rising and …

What’S In A Threat: A Corpus-Based, Speech Act And Lexicogrammatical Approach To Threats In English, Natalie Raun Carter

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Threats can be made without using language at all, but previous research on the language of threats is limited and primarily examines threats with a small amount of constructed data. Building on Austin (1962) and Searle (1965; 1969)’s speech act theory and using a corpus of naturally occurring data consisting of 827 threatening texts from publicly available websites and law enforcement, this dissertation determines what constitutes a threat, as well as the interdependence between words and grammar.

Pragmatically, this dissertation identifies four required felicity conditions that must be met to constitute a threat—building on those set by John Searle, Bruce …

A Perceptual Investigation Of Speech Rhythm Based On A Continuum Of Durational Change, Matthew Benton

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Speech rhythm is a complicated prosodic feature of spoken languages. Being a suprasegmental feature, it is not a clear cut difference between tonal (Chinese) and non-tonal (English) languages. The popularization of defining languages in terms of their speech rhythms was popularized in the mid 1900’s. Terms like syllable-timed and stress-timed were coined and ever since then there has been much debate on what is a speech rhythm and why particular languages have different rhythms. While speech rhythm was initially a study based on how a listener perceived a spoken language, it became much more focused on measurements and attempts to …

Gaps And Overlaps In Conversation: Analyses Of Differentiating Factors, David W. Edwards

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Human social behavior relies on communication, and much of that communication occurs in conversation. A crucial feature of conversation is turn-taking, the (usually) orderly pattern of listening and speaking that humans employ in conversation. In analyzing details of actual conversations, Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) launched the field of Conversation Analysis by outlining a set of observations of turn-taking behavior and by proposing a list of rules to explain that behavior. They noted that the vast majority of transitions from one speaker to another happen with very little gap or overlap (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974: 700–701). More recently, researchers …

Attraction Effects In Referential Dependencies, Emily Graham

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation explores the differences in the real-time processing of long-distance dependencies and how the processing of these dependencies functions within a cue-based retrieval model. During subject-verb agreement (SVA) comprehension, the processing of the verb is influenced by attractor noun phrases (NPs) that cannot control agreement. Referential dependencies, however, are less susceptible to such attraction effects. Many studies examining ungrammatical sentences in which a reflexive or pronoun mismatches with its antecedent in number/gender have indicated that the processing of these referentially dependent elements is largely uninfluenced by grammatically unavailable attractor NPs. These disparities have been taken to indicate that SVA …

Streamlining Public Engagement In Transportation Projects Using Text Analytics, Alireza Shamshiri

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Infrastructure projects impact a broad range of stakeholders, particularly local communities, whose engagement is critical for successful outcomes. Despite the importance of public engagement in these projects, traditional methods of capturing and analyzing public opinion often fail to fully represent the diverse, genuine perspectives involved. This has led to conflicts between community members and project sponsors. On the other hand, despite advancements in text analytics, including natural language processing (NLP) and its subfields such as topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and neural networks, their functionalities and effectiveness in analyzing public opinion in the domain of infrastructure projects have not been fully …

Processing Visual Form Information During L1 And L2 Lexical Access, Xinwen Zhang

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study investigates visual word recognition in the first language (L1) and second language (L2). Several studies in this area have reported L1/L2 processing differences at the lexical form level; however, the nature of these differences remains a matter of theoretical debate. The present study examines the extent to which these differences might relate to disparities in orthographic processing in the L1 and L2. Specifically, it uses masked identity priming to investigate whether skilled L2 readers differ from skilled L1 readers in terms of the efficiency with which they access abstract lexical representations during the early stages of visual word …

Perceptual Salience And Structural Ambiguity Resolution, Jeffrey Witzel, Naoko Witzel

Cambridge University Press Open Access Agreement Publications-Archive

This study investigates whether the perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes influences the online processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences during adult first- language (L1) comprehension. In a bidirectional self-paced reading task, adult L1 English participants (N = 44) read sentences with time adjuncts that were in a structural position in which they could attach either to the most recent verb phrase (VP) or to a VP in a higher clause. Consistent with previous findings, the reading times on these sentences indicated processing difficulty when this adjunct allowed only for high attachment. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the perceptual salience of …

Semantico-Pragmatic Aspects Of The Metalinguistic Uses Of Comparatives In Mandarin Chinese And English, Meng Yang

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation examines a group of Metalinguistic Comparatives (MCs) in Mandarin Chinese, exploring what they suggest about the universality of comparatives. I show that Chinese MCs encode a more fine-grained scalarity of the subjective attitude conveyed, which varies in orientation, i.e., positive or negative, and strength, i.e., subtle or strong. By analyzing their uses in conversational settings, I claim that MCs are pragmatical devices for speakers to reject or rectify an utterance. In examining the shared Chinese ‘than’ marker in both Negative MCs (NegMCs) and Rhetorical Comparatives (RCs), I show that both subtypes are comparatives with a contrastive and negative …

Competing Targets In English Sibilant Imitation, Ivy Hauser, Emily Graham, Xinwen Zhang

Open Initiatives Grant Funded Publications-Archive

This study investigates imitation of English /s/ to determine whether speakers converge toward normalized or raw acoustic targets. Participants exposed to increased spectral mean (SM) raised SM, converging toward both the raw acoustics of the model talker (who had high baseline SM) and the pattern of increased SM. However, after exposure to decreased SM, direction of shift depended on participant baseline. All participants converged to the raw acoustic values of the model talker, increasing or decreasing their own SM accordingly. These results suggest imitation is not necessarily mediated by perceptual normalization to different talkers, and raw acoustics can be the …

Who Builds It, Who Benefits? Deepening Student And Faculty Knowledge About Wikipedia’S Scholarly Value, Laurel Smith Stvan

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

Students and faculty can jointly play a role in how Open Educational Resources are created and deployed by assigning students to expand Wikipedia pages. By producing re-usable OER materials, these assignments provide students with transferable research skills and collaborative learning opportunities, face-to-face or remotely. By taking part in the production of open-access materials, students practice sharing knowledge with a larger community and receive feedback from interested readers beyond their instructor and classmates. In addition, introducing more students to Wikipedia editing tools can increase the diversity of editors and topics in gender, language, ethnicity, and region. At the same time, learning …

Deliberations Before Running Another Wikipedia Editing Assignment, Laurel Smith Stvan

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

In assessing a popular Open Educational Resource that instructs and is shaped by students, I weigh the costs for both instructors and students in using classroom Wikipedia editing assignments. Based on experiences from before and during the Covid era, I assess the ROI in instructor time and attention, reviewing what has worked best or been a struggle for editing projects aimed at expanding linguistics stubs. Successfully launching these engaged learning tasks encompasses two areas: filling Wikipedia content gaps and building student skills. Content gap concerns include finding relevant page topics for students to work with; recognizing constraints on biography pages …

Artificial Operators: Function And Use In English, Emily Ae Williams

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation provides a descriptive account of the use of ‘artificial operators’ on Reddit. I adopt the term artificial operators to refer to written symbols (e.g., #, ™, ©, ®) with overlapping linguistic and metadiscursive properties that are leveraged for a pragmatic effect (e.g., I love her even though she’s problematic™). I employ a mixed-methods approach, using a combination of corpus, experimental, and machine learning methods. Using a 1.2 billion word diachronic corpus of comments from the popular forum website, Reddit, I demonstrate that these operators are used in a small percentage of Reddit communities. Operator usage is therefore often …

Employing A Parallel Corpus-Based Approach In Teaching Semantic Prosody And Collocational Behavior To Arabic Efl Learners, Alhassan Abdullah J Alzahrani

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation is intended to investigate if, and to what extent, a web-interface parallel corpus known as Reverso Context can assist Arabic EFL learners in addressing two aspects of word knowledge: semantic prosody and collocational behavior. A convergent mixed method design is adopted in this study in which one group of undergraduate L1 Arabic students are asked to do a pretest that is followed by a pedagogical intervention over the course of three 3-hour sessions and then a posttest is administered again with the same group of students. The posttest is followed by a one-on-one interview with the students and …

On The Syntax Of West Kalimantan: Asymmetries And A'-Movement In Malayic And Land Dayak Languages, Carly Joann Sommerlot

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation focuses on five Malayic and five Land Dayak languages of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, exploring voice, A’-movement, and extraction asymmetries through a Minimalist framework. The main goal of this dissertation is to bridge the gap between documentation and syntactic analysis in a few ways: a) by using data from all underdocumented, and several undocumented languages; b) by providing syntactically motivated description of ten different languages; and c) by using contemporary syntactic principles, Case licensing and Phase Theory, to explain microvariation found in the voice system of these ten languages. Specifically, I offer an analysis of voice in West Kalimantan …

Automatic Processing Of Tonal Information During Visual Word Recognition In L2 Chinese Learners, Rongchao Tang

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation investigates the automatic tonal processing in a second language (L2) and a first language (L1) during visual word recognition. Four experiments were conducted to examine -- (i) whether tonal information can be automatically processed in a similar manner in L2 learners and native speakers of Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2 in Chapter 2), and (ii) whether the processing of tonal information is influenced by the involvement of the production system during L1 and L2 visual word recognition (Experiments 3 and 4 in Chapter 3). Native speakers and L2 learners of Chinese were tested using a naming Stroop task …

Reconstraining Massive Pied-Piping In English: A Non-Interrogative Cp Analysis, Daniel Garrett Amy

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation focuses on the distribution of "massive pied-piping" (Heck 2008) constructions in English. Compared to other forms of wh-movement and pied-piping, broadly speaking, massive pied-piping is limited in the environments in which it may occur. The primary goals of this dissertations are to examine (i) whether massive piped-piping is restricted to non-subordinated clauses (cf. wh-movement), (ii) what effect prosody has on relative clause interpretations, and (iii) how the distribution of massive pied-piping can be explained given a wider pattern of acceptability. To address these questions, I combine traditional syntactic and semantic judgments with two psycholinguistic experiments that utilize a …

The Place Deixis Of Modern Standard Arabic: A Closer Look At The Dimensional System And The Factors That Control The Choice Of Place Deictic Expressions, Ibrahim A. Alluhaybi

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation investigates place deixis in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) focusing primarily on two issues, 1) examining the dimensional system of place deixis in MSA as opposed to Classical Arabic, and 2) exploring the factors that control the choice of place deictic expressions in MSA: Distance (traditional factor), Visibility, and Contact/Control. While the previous literature focused on one-to-one comparison between Distance and one of the other factors (Imai, 2003; Jarbou, 2010; Peeters, Azar, & Ozyurek, 2014), this dissertation offers a more comprehensive comparison in which all of these factors are compared to each other in different contexts and settings. To …

“‘Well I Don’T Like Abortion’ Well Then Don’T Have One”: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis Of The Stance Functions Of Some Discourse Markers In Mediated Abortion Debate, Kristen Fleckenstein

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation examines the use of discourse markers as a stance-taking resource in written discourse on abortion. Drawing from four corpora collected from editorials, blogs, Twitter, and Reddit, I focus on the discourse markers I mean, of course, okay, and well and their use in concessive repair sequences, as prefaces to constructed dialogue, and as interpersonal stance markers. Within the corpora, both concessive repair and constructed dialogue serve to reinforce a positive-self, negative-other evaluative split, although they differ in the types of stance objects that writers position themselves in relation to. Writers use concessive repair to evaluate distal stance objects …

Morphological Decomposition In Heritage Language Speakers, Juliet Thuy Phuong Huynh

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation investigates the grammatical processing in a heritage language (HL), or the first language (L1) in a home or minority setting that has become a non-dominant language, and a more dominant second language (L2). Five experiments were conducted to examine (i) whether grammatical processing in L1 Vietnamese (Experiments 1 and 2) and L2 English (Experiments 3, 4, and 5) is different in Vietnamese HL speakers from those who are late Vietnamese-English bilinguals, and, if there is a difference, (ii) how it differs between these two types of bilingual speakers. In order to test the grammatical processing, morphological decomposition of …

Processing L2 Scripts In Highly-Proficient Bilinguals, Ehsan Shafiee Zargar

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation explores second language (L2) word recognition in different-script bilinguals (i.e., bilinguals whose first language (L1) is written in a different script than their L2). Previous examinations of L2 word recognition in different-script bilinguals have indicated that these bilinguals may deal with L2 orthographic similarities differently compared to L1 speakers and same-script bilinguals. Masked form priming studies testing L1 speakers (e.g., Davis & Lupker, 2006) and same-script L2 speakers (Bijeljac-Babic et al., 1997) have found evidence for a lexical competition mechanism during word recognition, through which formally-similar lexical representations compete for selection by inhibiting each other’s activation. Consistent with …

Prosodic Phonology In Oklahoma Cherokee, Samantha Cornelius

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

In this dissertation, I provide an analysis for word level prosody in Cherokee, a Southern Iroquoian language spoken in Northeastern Oklahoma and Western North Carolina. Focusing on Cherokee as it is spoken in Oklahoma, I analyze right edges of Cherokee words, showing that the boundary tone is predictable, though its distribution is conditioned by lexical tonal phonology and other word-final phenomena. In order to account for the distribution of the boundary tone, I must first provide an analysis of lexical tone in Cherokee. There have been previous comprehensive tone analyses (Lindsey 1985; Wright 1996; Uchihara 2013), which argue for a …

A Comparative Tone Analysis Of Several Bantu D30 Languages (Dr Congo), Kent Rasmussen

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation presents an analysis of the tonal systems of the Bantu D30 languages. There are 34 Bantu D languages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), few of which have developed orthographies (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig 2013). These languages make use of contrastive pitch (tone), which is a source of difficulty in their analysis. I begin, therefore, with a review of literature arguing for a number of positions regarding the collection, analysis, and representation of tone data. Additionally, I describe the fundamentals of consonant-tone interaction, and some background on the Bantu D30 languages, including their genetic and geographic …