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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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Retrieval Processes In Subject-Verb Agreement Computation, Nathaniel James Eversole

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

An important question in psycholinguistics is how subject-verb agreement is computed. One recent proposal is that memory retrieval processes play a key role in subject-verb agreement during sentence comprehension (Wagers et al., 2009). This model holds that when an agreeing verb (e.g., praise-s/-Ø; was/were) is encountered, a search is initiated through the memory representation of the sentence for a noun phrase (NP) with matching agreement features. When a controlling subject with matching features is available, the search ends successfully. However, in instances of a mismatch with this subject, the mechanism may (incorrectly) satisfy the agreement requirements of the verb with …

#Twitterdiscoursemarkers: A Corpora Based Study Of The Pragmatic Functions Of Hashtags, Darcey Nicole Browning

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

In this dissertation, I posit that hashtags can function as discourse markers, where space constraints of 140 characters on Twitter complicate their realization. Through the progression of research questions that shape each chapter, this dissertation analyzes how hashtags assist with felicitous communication to the intended audience of a tweet via four distinct corpora. The first function of discourse markers investigated in this dissertation involves delays; in emotional narratives, we would expect to find discourse markers acting as delays. Starting with a corpus of survivor interviews, I investigate which traditional discourse markers appear frequently when survivors talk about violence and which …

Empirical Examination Of Two Diagnostics Of Korean Unaccusativity, Jungae Lee Allman

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH), intransitive verbs can be divided into two classes: unaccusative verbs (e.g. fall) and unergative verbs (e.g. dance) (Burzio 1986, Perlmutter 1978). Several approaches have been developed to distinguish between these two classes of verbs across languages. Sorace (2000) also developed the Split Intransitive Hierarchy (SIH) which proposes that there is a continuum of intransitive verbs ranging from unaccusative to unergative. Evidence for the Unaccusative Hypothesis has been developed from an empirical perspective. The aim of this dissertation is to complement the linguistic theory of the UH in Korean by examining two Korean unaccusative diagnostics …

Acoustic And Perceptual Correlates Of L2 Fluency: The Role Of Prolongations, Jessica Liane Rohr

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation examines the contribution of lengthened segments/syllables or prolongations to the utterance and perceived fluency of native and non-native speech via three related studies. First, utterance fluency was measured using speech samples collected from a narrative task and along nine temporal variables of fluency (mean length of run, speech rate, mean length of syllable, mean length of silent pause, and rates of silent pause, filled pause, self-corrections, repetitions, and prolongations) (Skehan, 2007; Bosker, 2014). Results showed native speakers spoke significantly faster and with fewer disfluencies than their non-native counterparts. Prolongations were further investigated for frequency, duration, syntactic and phonological …

Plausibility And Structural Reanalysis, Ju-Young Lee

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study examines whether highly proficient comprehenders of English with different language learning profiles -- English native speakers (NSs, N=40), late (Korean-English) learners (LLs, N=32), and early bilinguals (EBs, N=28) -- make comparable use of plausibility information in the online processing of structurally complex sentences. Two sentence types involving temporarily ambiguous structural configurations, subordinate-clause (SC) ambiguity sentences and split/non-split phrasal verb (PV) constructions, were tested using self-paced reading. In SC ambiguity sentences, the pattern of reading times indicated that all three groups were able to use plausibility information to recover from initial structural misanalysis. NSs and EBs were also able …

Independent Sources Of Relative Clause Processing Difficulty: Evidence From Russian, Iya Khelm Price

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study investigates the influence of syntactic, semantic, and frequency-of-occurrence information, as well as role of memory in the comprehension of complex sentences. This was done by examining the processing of Russian subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs) that had the same word order configuration, but different noun phrase (NP) types (descriptive noun vs. pronoun) in the relative clause (RC). In both SRCs and ORCs, this word order was such that an NP argument preceded the RC verb, establishing equivalent linear distance between the modified noun and its integrating verb. A corpus analysis and offline acceptability rating experiment …

A Corpus Study Of Requests In Naturally Occurring Spoken American English: A Context Analysis Approach, Lynnelle Rhinier Brown

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Given the variety of ways that speakers of American English can make requests, relatively little has been discovered on why speakers choose the forms they do. Using data from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, this study investigates what requestive forms American speakers use as well as the contextual conditions that occur with these forms. The study identifies categories of requestive forms, including let statements, if statements, modal statements, need/want statements, imperatives and modal interrogatives and the contextual parameters that occur with them, including social distance, social power, contingency, entitlement, sequential positioning, among others. These forms demonstrate patterns …

Swahili Word Order Choices: Insights From Information Structure, Mohamed Yusuf Mwamzandi

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Cross-linguistic pragmatic studies have shown non-canonical word order can often be explained if information structure is taken into consideration. This dissertation explores word order variation in Swahili (SVO, Bantu) adnominal demonstratives and reciprocal constructions under the auspices of information structure. I investigate how the notion of topic may explain word order variation in these two structures.The term `adnominal demonstrative' refers to demonstratives that co-occur with nouns such as huyu mtu `this person' as distinguished from pronominal demonstratives such as huyu `this'. The issue to be determined is what influences the demonstrative use in pre or postnominal position. The data consists …

Politeness Devices In The Tuvan Language, Vitaly Voinov

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Whereas a few core areas of the Tuvan language (such as phonology and morphology) have been fairly well described by linguists, pragmasemantic topics in the language, including politeness, have until now not been probed deeply. Using insights from theories of linguistic politeness proposed by Brown & Levinson (1978, 1987) and by their numerous critics (e.g., Ide 1989; Nwoye 1992; Watts 2003; Lakoff & Ide 2005; LPRG 2011), in this dissertation I investigate the morphosyntactic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects of some of the primary verbal means that Tuvans use in conversation to express politeness to each other. The language material is …

The Structure Of Jarai Clauses And Noun Phrases, Joshua Martin Jensen

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation provides a syntactic account for the Jarai noun phrase and for the three regions of the Jarai clause: the operator domain, the inflectional domain, and the theta domain. Within the noun phrase, I argue that demonstrative-final word order involves phrasal movement of the demonstrative's complement into Spec,D, where it identifies null definite D. Jarai classifiers, rather than being heads in the functional spine of the DP, are shown to form a constituent with numerals, and this classifier--numeral phrase merges as the specifier of a number (plurality) head. In the operator domain, three head positions can be identified: a …

A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Discourse Anaphora In English And Korean: A Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Approach, Sok-Hun Kim

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation explores discourse anaphora in English and Korean by using a neo-Gricean pragmatic approach with corpus-based data. Very little study of Korean discourse anaphora has yet taken place at the inter-sentential level, except works looking at zero anaphor and a logophoric reflexive pronoun caki`self'. This research fills this gap by examining two types of discourse anaphora at the discourse level: discourse anaphoric patterns (by order of mention of the referent and by placement of the paragraph) and sentential anaphors. Two quantitative methods were adopted to verify the distribution and the selection of anaphora: natural data collection and a survey. …

Subgrouping Of Nisoic (Yi) Languages: A Study From The Perspectives Of Shared Innovation And Phylogenetic Estimation, Ziwo Qiu-Fuyuan Lama

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

In southwest China and neighboring countries, including Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar, there live over 100 ethnic groups who speak languages known as Nuosu, Naxi, Hani, Lisu, Lahu, etc. These languages belong to the Nisoic Branch or the Loloish Branch of Tibeto-Burman (TB) subfamily of Sino-Tibetan. Though the Nisoic affiliation to TB is unquestionable, its internal subgrouping has not been settled. This dissertation aims to study the internal relationship of 34 Nisoic and three Burmic languages from two perspectives shared innovation and phylogenetic estimation. Shared innovation has been regarded as the most reliable criterion in determining subgroups of language descent …