Linguistics Commons^™

Confusion Of Tongues: Translation And Transfers Of Attachment In A Post-Monolingual Condition, Hiji Nam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Confusion of Tongues” proposes an intersubjective, dialogic approach to translation, psycholinguistics, and patient and clinicians’ relationships to the “mother tongue” and secondary languages. By tuning in to linguistic and translational shifts, stutters, and gaps, the study presents a consideration of the challenges and rewards presented by what I call a “post-monolingual clinical condition.” An individual’s self-state in a specific language will be shadowed by the emotional history and associations one brings to that language, which will also ripple into the counter-transferential matrix—we might call this the “transference to language,” or attachment styles that manifest and repeat an individual’s forgotten libidinal …

The Relative Cost Of Codeswitching: An Electrophysiological Study Contrasting Language Switching Versus Lexical Predictability, Iris Strangmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neurophysiological sentence processing studies are inconsistent about the additional costs that language switching within sentences (i.e., codeswitching) may bring about (cf. Valdés Kroff et al., 2020; Yacovone et al., 2021). There is discussion about whether there are, in fact, additional costs and, if so, about the origins of those costs, since some findings are consistent with effortful processing when comprehending single-language (not switched) words observed in monolingual studies. Specifically, studies are divided on whether codeswitched words are more difficult to lexically access than single-language equivalents of similar semantic predictability, as indexed by an increased N400 effect. The same studies, however, …

The International Academy Of Language And Culture: The Global (Pre)K-12 Charter School Network, Dree-El Simmons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The International Academy of Language and Culture (IALC) is a charter school based on the original concept of charter schools by Ray Budde and Albert Shanker, as an academic environment dedicated and designed to improving the educational outcomes for its students through innovative pedagogy. Committed to American (and global) education reform, the IALC incorporates elements from higher education into the early childhood and adolescent settings. We accomplish this by utilizing an interdisciplinary approach in our language and culture-based program.

The IALC is a multilingual, full-immersion program. Food Studies (including culinary arts), the Arts, the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Martial Arts …

La Voz De Los Sures: Etnografía Glotopolítica Del Activismo Comunitario, Lara Maria Alonso Pinero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The relevance of the strategic use of language and communication in the consolidation and action of a political subject has not yet been sufficiently analyzed. Drawing on a glottopolitical perspective, this research project aims to incorporate the object of study of the political dimension of voice and point out the importance of mastering linguistic and discursive practices in community activism. Based on the case of the Latino community of Los Sures in Brooklyn, NY, in this dissertation I embark on a journey through the communicative practices through which a group of people begins to conceive of itself as a community, …

Towards Explaining Variation In Entrainment, Andreas Weise

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Entrainment refers to the tendency of human speakers to adapt to their interlocutors to become more similar to them. This affects various dimensions and occurs in many contexts, allowing for rich applications in human-computer interaction. However, it is not exhibited by every speaker in every conversation but varies widely across features, speakers, and contexts, hindering broad application. This variation, whose guiding principles are poorly understood even after decades of entrainment research, is the subject of this thesis. We begin with a comprehensive literature review that serves as the foundation of our own work and provides a reference to guide future …

Retrieval Practice Promotes Learning Of Turkish As A Foreign Language: A Computer-Assisted Language Learning Study, Maya C. Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Adults generally find it difficult to learn a new language, yet exhibit remarkable individual differences in outcomes. Variation in second language (L2) learning is associated with input conditions (Morgan-Short et al., 2010) as well as learners’ aptitude (Dörnyei, 2005). Recent work has demonstrated benefits of retrieval practice in promoting L2 learning of grammatical patterns and vocabulary in both artificial and natural languages (Hopman & MacDonald, 2018; Keppenne et al., 2021). With that said, when retrieval practice is based on oral recall as opposed to a recognition test, it confounds potential benefits of repeated testing (Rowland, 2014) with those associated with …

Predicting Stress In Russian Using Modern Machine-Learning Tools, John Schriner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the Russian language, stress on a word is determined via often complex patterns and rules. In this paper, after examining nearly a century of research in stress rules and methods in Russian, we turn to see if modern machine learning tools can aid in predicting stress. Using A.A. Zaliznyak’s dictionary grammar and over 300,000 word forms, we derived stress codes to aid in predicting which syllable primary stress falls on. We trained an LSTM neural network on the data and conducted eight experiments with added features such as lemma, part of speech, and morphology. While the model performed better …

A Study Of Entrainment In Speech As A Possible Predictor Of Perceived Trust, Mariana Graterol Fuenmayor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the possibility of using features of speech as possible predictors of perceived trust. It specifically focuses on entrainment, the tendency of participants in a conversation to unconsciously adapt their manner of talking to become more or less similar to each other. We compile a corpus of interviews conducted in English, with different levels of formality and discussing different topics. With it, we distribute a set of surveys to assess raters’ judgment of the participants, focusing on whether they believe the interviewee is trusted by their conversational partner, and whether they find the interlocutors themselves trustworthy. We also …

From Sesame Street To Beyond: Multi-Domain Discourse Relation Classification With Pretrained Bert, Isaac R. Raff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research efforts in transfer learning have gained massive popularity in recent years. Pretrained language models have demonstrated the most successful results in producing high quality neural networks capable of quality inference after training across domains via transfer learning. This study expands on the domain transfer introduced in \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} exploring neural methods for transfer learning of discourse parsing between a news source domain and a medical target domain. \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} specifically discuss transfer learning from news articles to PubMed medical journal articles. Experiments in transfer learning in the current work expand to include three domains: Wall Street Journal articles previously annotated with …

Does A Neural Network Inflect Spanish Verbs In A Human-Like Way?, Elizabeth Garza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How do children learn that a verb like negar-‘to deny’ / niego - ‘I deny’ diphthongizes the 1st person present indicative, while it’s near minimal pair, pegar-‘to stick’ / pego - ‘I stick’, does not? To pursue this question, three small experiments were conducted in Spanish, given its complex and rich morphology. The first experiment was conducted to determine whether the Tolerance Principle of the Rules & Competition model (Yang, 2018) can accurately determine the productivity of verb classes in Spanish, and whether any irregular verb classes are exhibit subregular productivity. The second experiment was conducted to determine …

Linguistic Abstractions In Children’S Very Early Utterances, Qihui Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances; we use corpora to establish the development of multiword utterances and a probabilistic computational model to account for the quantitative change of early multiword utterances. We find that multiword utterances of different lengths appear early in acquisition and increase together, and the length growth pattern can be viewed as a probabilistic and dynamic process.

Chapter …

Examining The Linguistic Ideology "Throaty Sounds Are Bad For Performers": The History Of Negative Attitudes Towards Glottal Stops And Laryngealization In English, Dayle M. Towarnicky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes explicit metadiscourse (Johnstone et al 2006) on throaty sounds, primarily focused on glottal segments and non-modal constricted voice quality in English. Authors contributing to this metadiscourse are argued to be an offshoot of the speech chain network which valorized and circulated the English accent known as RP or Received Pronunciation, studied by Agha (2003). The evaluated texts center on English-speaking elocution, singing training, voice, speech, and voice care. The analysis shows glottal and guttural articulations are framed negatively and often discouraged by appeals to both health and aesthetics. Many authors in this performance speech chain network …

Methods In Reverse Transliteration Of English Loanwords In Japanese, Yuying Ren

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We introduce the problem of gairaigo hanran ‘loanwords flood’in Japanese and the difficulties of understanding the loanwords by English speakers who also communicate in Japanese and the necessity of converting the loanwords written in katakana back to English, the reverse transliteration. We analyze the issues for this task and propose using computational methods to solve them. We create our own katakana-English loanwords dictionary as the data and use three computational models --- pair n-gram, LSTM and transformer models to work on this reverse transliteration task. We also modify the three models with an English lexicon filter. The six models are …

Covert Determiners In Appalachian English Narrative Declarative Sentences, William Oliver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I explore the syntax and semantics of covert determiners (Ds) in matrix subject determiner phrases (DPs) with definite specific interpretations. To conduct my investigation, I used the Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English (AAPCAppE), a million-word Penn Treebank corpus, and the software CorpusSearch, a Java program that searches Penn Treebank corpora. My research shows that Appalachian English contains a linguistic phenomenon where speakers drop the D, replacing overt Ds with covert Ds, in definite specific DPs. For example, where Standard English speakers say The doctor came by horseback, Appalachian speakers may use a covert D …

Expanding The Pronominal Account Of Tense: A Reexamination Of The Double Access Reading In English, Brynne E. Wilkinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis I will argue that the double access reading in English is not limited to the present-under-past construction but is instead available in the present-under-future construction as well. Unlike the traditional present-under-past construction, however, the double access reading is not the only available reading in the present-under-future construction. I will present data that shows that any context which licenses the double access reading also necessarily licenses a simultaneous reading as a result of a Sequence of Tense rule. Additional data will show that, when interpreted de re, the embedded present tense in the present-under-future construction is constrained …

A Machine Learning Approach To Text-Based Sarcasm Detection, Lara I. Novic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sarcasm and indirect language are commonplace for humans to produce and recognize but difficult for machines to detect. While artificial intelligence can accurately analyze sentiment and emotion in speech and text, it may struggle with insincere and sardonic content, although it is possible to train a machine to identify uttered and written sarcasm. This paper aims to detect sarcasm using logistic regression and a support vector machine (SVM) and compare their results to a baseline.

The models are trained on headlines from a Kaggle dataset containing headlines from the satirical news website The Onion and serious news website Huffpost (formerly …

Gender-Informed Features Of Film Reviews: A Statistical Linguistic Analysis, Matthew Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project analyzes how language is used differently in movie reviews based on both the gender of the author of the review as well as the gender of the director of the reviewed film. In doing so, it aims to gain a better understanding of what contexts evoke a typically “masculine” use of language vs. a typically “feminine” use of language within the genre of film criticism, and what implications this has for the state of the film criticism with respect to gender. The results of this study seem to indicate that a critic’s language use takes on the characteristics …

Incomplete Neutralization In Articulatory Phonology, Sejin Oh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous studies have found small but significant phonetic traces of underlying distinctions for phonologically “neutralized” contrasts. This phenomenon, often called incomplete neutralization, has been found for final devoicing in many languages, (e.g., German; Port, Robert F. & O’Dell, 1985), but has also been reported for other neutralizing phenomena, including flapping in American English (Herd et al., 2010), monomoraic lengthening in Japanese (Braver & Kawahara, 2016), vowel deletion in French (Fougeron & Steriade, 1997), vowel epenthesis in Levantine Arabic (Gouskova & Hall, 2009), among others.

In my dissertation, I explore the (in)completeness of Russian palatalization in the Articulatory Phonology framework, implementing …

"A Fallen Woman": The Use Of Metaphor In Psychoanalysis, Matthew Schneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study sought to understand the use of a central metaphor in a psychoanalytic treatment and its relationship to the process of change for the analysand. In linguistics, a metaphor is a word, phrase or idea that stands in for another idea. In psychoanalysis the relationship between conscious and unconscious conflictual material can share similar metaphorical connections as conscious thoughts or behavior often stands in for an unconscious wishes. The presence of a word or phrase that appears in speech in the context of particular affective moments in an analysand’s experience could be understood to be linked to unconscious processes …

Non-Argumental Clitics In Spanish And Galician: A Case Study Of The Distribution Of Solidarity And Ethical Clitics, Susana Huidobro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the properties of what traditional grammars call “superfluous elements” or non-arguments, so-called Ethical Dative Clitics (Bello 1954, Seco 1962 among others) and Solidarity Clitics (Álvarez, Rosario, X.L. Regueira & H. Monteaguedo 1986) in Spanish and Galician. This research fills an important gap in the existing formal literature on these forms, providing the first thorough syntactic and typological investigation of the latter phenomenon.

The study of non-argumental datives encounters difficulties at different levels: at a descriptive/empirical as well as at a theoretical level. From a descriptive point of view, there are no, so far in the literature, clear …

From An Art To A Science: Features And Methodology In Computational Authorship Identification, Jonathan I. Manczur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nearly thirty years ago, the United States Supreme Court revaluated the criteria for accepting forensic science and expert testimony, challenging Forensic Linguistics to assert itself as a reputable science. Much work has been produced in the interim to that end, but much still needs to be accomplished to satisfy the judicial standards. Computational linguistics has the potential to provide that necessary analytical framework. This paper’s intent is two-fold. First, there are two competing theories on the proper features necessary to identify an unknown author. Four features were drawn from the syntactic computational linguistics tradition and four from computational stylometry to …

Lexical Stress Realization In Mandarin Second Language Learners Of English: An Acoustic And Articulatory Study, Boram Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigated the acoustic and articulatory correlates of lexical stress in Mandarin second language (L2) learners of English, as well as in first language (L1) speakers. The present study used a minimal pair respective to stress location (e.g., OBject versus obJECT) obtained from a publicly available Mandarin Accented English Electromagnetic articulography corpus dataset. In the acoustic domain, the use of acoustic parameters (duration, intensity, F0, and vowel quality) was measured in stressed and unstressed vowels. In the articulatory domain, the positional information from tongue tip (TT), tongue dorsum (TD), upper lip (UL), lower lip (LL), and jaw (JAW) were …

The Effect Of Speaking Rate On Vowel Variability Based On The Uncontrolled Manifold Approach And Flow-Based Invertible Neural Network Modeling, Jaekoo Kang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant (“good”) and task-relevant (“bad”) parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token variability in articulation and acoustics can be decomposed into “good” and “bad” parts and how speaking rate changes the pattern of these two from the Haskins IEEE rate comparison database. Furthermore, it is examined whether the “good” part of variability, or flexibility, can be modeled directly from speech data using the flow-based invertible neural networks framework. The …

Phonetic Contrast In New York Hasidic Yiddish Vowels: Language Contact, Variation, And Change, Chaya R. Nove

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the acoustic correlates of the length contrast in New York Hasidic Yiddish (HY) peripheral vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/, and compares them across four generations of native speakers for evidence of change over time. HY vowel tokens are also compared to English vowels produced by the New York-born speakers to investigate the influence of language contact on observed changes. Additionally, the degree to which individual speakers orient towards or away from the Hasidic community is quantified via an ethnographically informed survey to examine its correlation with /u/-fronting, a sound change that is widespread in the non-Hasidic English-speaking …

Cross-Linguistic Morphosyntactic Influence In Bilingual Speakers Of Jamaican Creole And Jamaican English, Taryn R. Malcolm

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingualism in Jamaica is of considerable consequence, as most individuals are early bilinguals, speaking both a variety of Jamaican Creole (JC) from birth and having standardized English (sE) as the language of instruction in education. Immigrants from Jamaica to the United States are an ideal population to examine how cross-linguistic influence (CLI) impacts morphosyntax as JC and sE differ in morphosyntactic constructions, including verb tense- marking, subject-verb agreement, and copula use. While much of the work in the field of CLI has examined spoken language pairs with varying degrees of similarity (or difference) between the languages, examining CLI in a …

Label Imputation For Homograph Disambiguation: Theoretical And Practical Approaches, Jennifer M. Seale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents the first implementation of label imputation for the task of homograph disambiguation using 1) transcribed audio, and 2) parallel, or translated, corpora. For label imputation from parallel corpora, a hypothesis of interlingual alignment between homograph pronunciations and text word forms is developed and formalized. Both audio and parallel corpora label imputation techniques are tested empirically in experiments that compare homograph disambiguation model performance using: 1) hand-labeled training data, and 2) hand-labeled training data augmented with label-imputed data. Regularized, multinomial logistic regression and pre-trained ALBERT, BERT, and XLNet language models fine-tuned as token classifiers are developed for homograph …

Evaluating The Role Of Gender In Dementia-Related Language Deficiencies, Kelsey Bourque

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Typically, about 60% of dementia patients are women. Researchers have historically dismissed this imbalance as a result of the life expectancy for women being longer, and since age is the primary risk factor associated with dementia, and women’s longer lifespan equates to a higher percentage of the dementia patient population (Mielke, 2018). While the exact cause of dementia is unknown, researchers and clinicians have historically treated male and female populations the same, asserting that there is no significant difference between the two sexes in regards to detecting dementia. The present study aims to address this potential gap in dementia research, …

Detection And Morphological Analysis Of Novel Russian Loanwords, Yulia Spektor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper investigates recent English loanwords in Russian and explores ways in which computational methods can help further theoretical research. The goal of the study is two-fold: to find new, previously unattested loanwords borrowed over the last decade and to examine the rate of adaptation of the new borrowings, attested by the degree to which they conform to the constraints of the Russian language. First, we train a finite-state pipeline that combines character n-gram language models, which encode phonotactic and lexical properties of loanwords, with a binary classifier to detect loanwords. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance results during evaluation, surpassing …

Fighting Words: Slurs, Semantics, And The Law, Richard Stillman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Oppressive slurs like the n-word are fighting words par excellence. Their power to incite conflict and inflict emotional injury is unmatched by that of other, more commonplace insults. But what is it that makes oppressive slurs such potent verbal weapons? A commonplace view among both philosophers and legal theorists is that slurs make such potent insults because their uses convey extremely offensive, bigoted attitudes. This dissertation argues that this view is mistaken, and that its falsity has important implications for hate speech jurisprudence. I argue that, to grasp what makes slurs such potent verbal weapons, we ought conceive …

Counterstories Of Black High School Students And Graduates Of Nyc Independent Schools: A Narrative Case Study, Kahdeidra M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public youth resistance movements in 2019 and 2020 exposed the entrenchment of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and classism across New York City independent schools (NYCIS). In order to support the imminent need for schools to provide effective diversity, inclusion, and equity supports that address broad issues of school climate, relationships, and pedagogy, there is a need to better understand the specific, hyperlocal experiences of Black/African Descendant (BAD) students, who occupy several unique, unexplored spaces in educational research. The following four research questions helped to conceptualize the experiences that support and hinder the academic success and long term well-being of BAD students …