Linguistics Commons^™

Co-Constructing The Common Ground: Responses In American Sign Language Conversation, Deborah Wager

Linguistics ETDs

Common ground between two people consists of the things they both know, that they know they both know. This body of knowledge grows in conversation, through both verbal and nonverbal responses. Responses communicate whether what has been said was accepted into the common ground, and return responses acknowledge this acceptance in turn (H. H. Clark, 1996). In addition to the semantic content of utterances, stance is communicated through a variety of means, and alignment with that stance is also communicated through responses.

This study explores ways in which responses are used in American Sign Language (ASL) conversation to co-construct the …

Documenting Regional And Individual Variation In Taiwan Sign Language, Devin Alexander Tankersley

Linguistics ETDs

Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) has been characterized by a north-south dialectal divide since the beginning of its development in the early twentieth century, further complicated by contact with Chinese Sign Language and with Mandarin. Considering increased interconnectivity across Taiwan, this dissertation asks: does the traditional north-south dialectal distinction still hold? To address this question, fieldwork was conducted across six areas of Taiwan to develop a data set consisting of word elicitations and sociolinguistic interviews. Findings from quantitative and qualitative analyses of these data suggest that TSL is not undergoing straightforward dialect leveling, but rather convergence towards a mixed variety shaped …

Torá: A Description Of A Dormant Chapacuran Language From Legacy Materials, Akasha Synclair

Linguistics ETDs

Torá, an Amazonian language of the Chapacuran family, went dormant as the Torá people survived colonization. Yet, in the early 1920’s, over 600 Torá words, phrases, and sentences were documented. Despite interest by today’s Torá community in language revitalization, no comprehensive analysis of the data has been undertaken. This project used methods of linguistic reconstitution, cross linguistic comparison, and the creation of an open-access database to produce a phonological and morphosyntactic analysis of Torá. Phonological findings of particular interest include evidence for vowel harmony and variable oralization of nasals. In structure, Torá is very similar to related languages, displaying a …

The Role Of Cumulative Usage In Language Learning And Language Variation: Evidence From Spanish Voiced Stops, Sarah Lease

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation investigates the cumulative repercussions of a word’s typical context of use on lexical representations and speech production, both in cases of language learning and language variation, through the lens of Usage-Based Linguistics. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-speaking children and adults of Mexican heritage living and working in the Pacific Northwestern United States. Each study examines Spanish word-initial /bdɡ/ productions using a myriad of statistical approaches. The dissertation adds to our understanding of the long-term storage of variation in lexical representations, as well as its nuanced impact on children’s and adults’ speech production. The dissertation also …

Challenging The Universality Of Poplack’S Syntactic Constraints: Insights From Arabic-English Code-Switching Among Saudi Arabian Women, Sharifa Bahri

Linguistics ETDs

This study investigates the applicability of Poplack's (1980) syntactic constraints, the free morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint, to Arabic-English code-switching among Saudi Arabian women. Based on 886 intra-sentential code-switching utterances drawn from naturalistic podcast speech, the analysis reveals substantial violations of both constraints: 306 utterances (34.5%) violated the free morpheme constraint, and 601 utterances (67.8%) violated the equivalence constraint, occurring across a wide range of syntactic categories. While violations of the free morpheme constraint were exclusively unidirectional, involving Arabic bound morphemes attached to English free morphemes, equivalence constraint violations were bidirectional, though predominantly shaped by Arabic grammar. Crucially, many …

Emotional Metaphors In Mandarin And English: Fear And Surprise, Jing Yang

Linguistics ETDs

This paper explores the relationship between emotion and experience from a cognitive perspective to fulfill two purposes. First, it seeks to identify the commonalities and differences in emotional metaphors across vastly different languages and the reasons behind these variations. Second, it aims to contribute to typological research in emotion studies beyond established areas such as color, time, and space using innovative approaches. Specifically, this study focuses on fear and surprise to categorize their source domains using lexical and corpus-based methods. Examples were collected from constructions and the corpus, and patterns of FEAR and SURPRISE metaphors in Mandarin were compared with …

Uncovering Language Bias Towards Written Language Use Among Bilinguals And Individuals With Disabilities, Mu'nis Maen Nazzal

Linguistics ETDs

Language is a fundamental tool of social control. Linguistic bias plays a crucial role in social hierarchies and opportunities. While research has extensively documented linguistic bias in spoken language, less attention has been given to bias in written language. This study investigates students' evaluations of three instructors’ writings: a bilingual, an instructor with a disability, and a monolingual. The study employs a matched-guise technique to explore potential biases in students' perceptions of preference, leadership skills, expertise, and professionalism.

The Friedman Test revealed that while participants showed a preference for the instructor with a disability over the bilingual instructor and the …

Form-Meaning Mappings Of Cyclic Gestures, Wilho Macneil

Linguistics ETDs

Hirrel (2018) examines form-meaning mappings between speech and co-articulated cyclic gestures, identifying meanings associated with such gestures. To test replicability, this thesis analyzes two functional-semantic domains: modification (adverbs, quantifiers) and morphosyntactic constructions (complex sentences, English Progressive) and their relationship to cyclic gestures. About 12 hours of video was coded in ELAN for cyclic gestures (n=586) and analyzed textually for speech instances (n=1919) of target constructions. Contrary to Hirrel’s predictions, cyclic gestures were not more commonly co-articulated with adverbs than quantifiers and were also not more commonly co-articulated with complex sentences than the English Progressive Construction. Neither pattern reached statistical significance …

Negation In Dene Languages, Cormac League

Linguistics ETDs

This thesis uses a typologically informed approach to investigate the strategies used for negation in Dene languages. This study illuminates aspects of the development of negation by examining the complex interplay between the lexical forms and morphosyntactic strategies employed to encode negative polarity in declarative and prohibitive constructions. The theoretical frameworks of the Jespersen Cycle and the Negative Existential Cycle are utilized to discuss negators in relation to their possible origins. Particular attention is given to the Pacific Coast and Southern Dene languages to propose an origin for the bipartite negation strategies used in the later. Through examination of synchronic …

A Usage-Based Account Of Ongoing Structural Changes In Sanapaná: Grammar Sketch And Case Studies, Jens E. L. Van Gysel

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation presents three case studies on sociolinguistic variation in Sanapaná, an Enlhet-Enenlhet language spoken by around 1000 people in Paraguay. It investigates the impact of the process of language shift towards Paraguayan Guarani and Spanish that Sanapaná is undergoing. Specifically, it attempts to disentangle the effects of speakers’ multilingualism in Spanish and/or Guarani, their frequency of use of Sanapaná, and structural factors internal to Sanapaná on phonetic, morphological, and syntactic variation. It finds that Spanish/Guarani proficiency is correlated with L1-to-L2 convergence in Sanapaná vowel productions and use of different motion framing strategies, while frequency of Sanapaná usage is a …

Articulation Of The Tongue Back In American English And Seoul Korean, Daejin Kim

Linguistics ETDs

The articulation of the tongue back in bilabial and velar obstruents in American English (AE) and Seoul Korean (SK) was examined using ultrasound, and the findings are discussed in terms of phonetic and phonological theories. AE voiced and SK aspirated and fortis bilabial obstruents were articulated with longer, larger, and more frequent tongue back displacement than voiceless and lenis ones. Speakers produced AE voiced and SK aspirated and fortis velar obstruents with longer and larger tongue back displacement than voiceless and lenis ones. These obstruents were further contrasted in relation to the timing of laryngeal actions. The finding that lingual …

Topics In Wappo Phonology, Aaron W. Marks

Linguistics ETDs

This work examines various topics in the phonology and phonetics of the Wappo language (ʔonaʔcáṭis), an Indigenous American language spoken in Northern California. Utilizing both published written sources and the large audio corpus of spoken Wappo compiled by linguist Jesse Sawyer and housed at the California Language Archive at UC Berkeley, this work addresses several fundamental questions in Wappo phonology, including phoneme inventory structure, phonotactics, phoneme frequency, phonetics and allophony, word-level prosody, morphophonemics, and a detailed discussion of the context of Wappo phonology within the California Linguistic Area, including the question of a localized linguistic sub-area around the …

‘People With Disabilities,’ ‘Disabled People,’ Or ‘The Disabled’: A Corpus Analysis Of Disability Labeling Constructions, Eliza Forrest

Linguistics ETDs

The way language shapes perceptions about disability is a complex and long-debated topic within popular disability discourse. With the rise of “person-first” language in recent decades, this debate has shifted toward a grammatical, rather than lexical one, contrasting forms such as people with disabilities, disabled people, and the disabled. While these different construction types—prepositional, attributive, and nominalized, respectively—refer to the same entity, the purported connotations of each have been highly contested. Despite this, research on the topic has been limited and mixed, particularly for studies focusing on actual usage. By analyzing these constructions in the Corpus of …

Stable Complexity: Verbal Inflection In Prominent And Frequent Environments, Lukas Denk

Linguistics ETDs

Despite presenting challenges for speakers, complex linguistic features such as lexically conditioned inflection (LCI) persist across different languages. LCI forms part of not entirely predictable paradigms which require lexeme-specific knowledge to master. Moreover, LCI remains one of the oldest morphological phenomena in certain languages. Previous research has linked the persistence of such complexity to language-external factors like geographic and social circumstances of speech communities.

This dissertation delves into the question whether language-internal properties are associated with the distribution of inflectional complexity. LCI is compared with other inflectional paradigms across 41 genetically and geographically distant languages. The study shows that LCI …

Conceptual Meaning In Phonology: Multimodal Iconic Expressions In Discourse Focus, David Páez Acevedo

Linguistics ETDs

In everyday communication, speakers go beyond words to synchronize speech sounds and gestures, adding nuanced meanings. For instance, in Colombian Spanish, recounting the distant past involves elongating words, modulating pitch, and using expressive hand movements. This dissertation explores this phenomenon, termed Multimodal Iconic Expressions (MMIEs), using Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar. The quantitative study uncovers correlations between verb aspect, nominal quantification, and speech duration, revealing phono-iconic connections. The qualitative study examines construal operations giving rise to MMIEs across semantic domains. MMIEs predominantly appear in discourse Focus, with durative events and mass-like quantities exhibiting pronounced phono-iconic associations. Patterns include stress and …

Lucky Chile In The Land Of Enchantment: Mapping Perception Of Signed Language Varieties In New Mexico, David Player

Linguistics ETDs

There are no known published studies documenting the linguistic variation of American Sign Language in New Mexico. We applied the Perceptual Dialectology approach to gain insights into how ASL variation is perceived by the Deaf and Hard of Hearing population in New Mexico. Participants reported 60 signs associated with a historical variety of ASL used at NMSD, and many more signs that are linked to regional and cultural relevance in New Mexico. Four participants provided highly descriptive maps that identify themes related to the sources of variation. Comparisons to studies of Black ASL are discussed to identify parallels in the …

Social Verbs: A Force-Dynamic Analysis, Pavlina Kalm

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation provides a semantic analysis of verbs that describe social events, i.e., events in which participants interact with each other on a social level. The following broad semantic categories of verbs are discussed: verbs of communication (e.g., tell, say, advise), transfer of possession verbs (e.g., own, give, buy), social role verbs (e.g., work, hire, imprison), verbs of interpersonal interactions (e.g., fight, meet, bully), and verbs that denote conceptual relations between entities (e.g., differ, symbolize, indicate). Despite their prominent status in the lexicon and frequent use in everyday situations, linguistic accounts of social verbs are …

Seeing Is Believing: The Role Of The Visual Stimulus In Cognitive Knowledge Of Sound Structure, John M. Sances

Linguistics ETDs

Usage-based Phonology proposes that language users’ knowledge is stored in the form of exemplars reflecting experience of language usage. Exemplars encompass all visual and auditory information perceived during a language interaction, but few studies have examined the role that visual information plays. This dissertation addresses this question through two experiments. Experiment 1 tested perceptions of rounding via the visual signal (lip protrusion) in native French speakers. Participants perceived rounding in both visual and auditory signals, suggesting they may store the visual stimulus in their exemplars. Experiment 2 tested native American English speakers learning French on perceptions of rounding using audio …

Spanish /S/ Reduction In Cíbola County, New Mexico, Brandon Martinez

Linguistics ETDs

The extent to which /s/ reduces in both onset and coda positions varies greatly across Spanish varieties, with Traditional New Mexican Spanish showing significant reduction rates in past research. However, to-date there has been no in-depth linguistic study of Spanish in Cíbola County. The current work presents an analysis of variable /s/ reduction in Cíbola Spanish, using data from the New Mexico-Colorado Spanish Survey. The results demonstrate that reduction in this dialect is conditioned primarily by linguistic rather than extralinguistic factors, which vary based on syllable position. The manuscript also briefly introduces the history of Cíbola, Hispanic identity & …

Spanish-Origin Verbal And Grammatical Borrowing In Paraguayan Guaraní, Josefina Bittar Prieto

Linguistics ETDs

Previous work on language change in contact situations has treated lexical borrowing and grammatical borrowing as discrete phenomena (Appel and Muysken 1987, Thomason 2001, Campbell 2013). Claims that lexical borrowing needs to occur before grammatical borrowing (e.g. Thomason and Kaufmann 1988) or that grammar can be borrowed without any lexicon (e.g. Aikhenvald 2002) are often mentioned in the literature. This dissertation explores the interplay between grammatical constructions (in the sense of Goldberg 2006) and lexical elements in intense contact situations. More specifically, it addresses the following research question: Are grammatical constructions borrowed independently from the elements contained in said constructions? …

Language Co-Activation In Novice And Intermediate L2 Learners, Nicholas Sulier

Linguistics ETDs

One of the most intriguing aspects of bilingual speakers and signers is their ability to access both languages simultaneously. Though much research has been dedicated to understanding how two languages interact, or co-activate, within proficient bilinguals, less is understood about how and when novice and intermediate learners develop similar cross-language interactions. Thus, the current study aimed to uncover at what stages during novice and intermediate L2 development co-activation can be detected. It also investigated possible mechanisms behind co-activation. Specifically, the study attempted to clarify if any detected co-activation amongst L2 learners is dependent on associations between lexical and conceptual representations, …

Wordhood Issues: Typology And Grammaticalization, Tim Zingler

Linguistics ETDs

This work investigates the distribution of “wordhood issues,” in which a morpheme behaves like a word on one subset of wordhood parameters but like a bound item on another. The empirical focus is on the exponents of definiteness, case, indexation, and tense in 60 unrelated languages from five macro-areas. The methodological basis for the wordhood analyses is a set of eight parameters of phonological and morphological wordhood.

The main result is that grammatical markers (“grams”) retain the ability of morphological words to co-occur with members of different syntactic categories even after being integrated into larger phonological word domains. Meanwhile, grams …

Exploring Language Endangerment And Language Change In Tohono O'Odham, Keiko F. Beers

Linguistics ETDs

Endangered languages are often assumed to undergo grammatical losses. Grammaticalization – which is concerned with how grammar evolves – has been largely overlooked in such contexts. In this dissertation, I address two questions: 1) Do grammaticalization processes in endangered languages look as they do in more robustly spoken languages, and 2) are there other changes that require explanations outside of grammaticalization?

The language that I consider is Tohono O'odham (Uto-Aztecan), spoken in Arizona (US) and Sonora (Mexico), which has become endangered over the last century due to coercive assimilationist policies. I conduct a comparative analysis of pre-existing oral data over …

Treatment Intervention For Social Functioning And Social Cognition In Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asd): Utilizing Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (Tdcs) At The Right Temporoparietal Junction (Rtpj), Joan Esse Wilson

Linguistics ETDs

Social deficits are a key diagnostic feature for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) may be a promising treatment modality to enhance interventions that are currently extremely time- and labor-intensive. This three-article dissertation investigates tDCS applied over the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) paired with social functioning and social cognition interventions with adults with ASD, examining measures of social functioning, verbal fluency, social skills, empathy, and facial emotion recognition and processing. Results of these studies show significant differences in performance on several measures after receipt of verum, anodal tDCS over the rTPJ. Theoretical implications are examined within a …

A Cross-Linguistic Typology Of ‘Take’ Serial Verb Constructions, Taegyeong Lee

Linguistics ETDs

Serial verb constructions (SVCs) are multiple verbs forming a single predicate in a single clause (Aikhenvald 2006a, 2018). Serial verbs do not exhibit syntactic dependency between the verbs. Each of these verbs must occur on its own. The verb ‘take’ is one of the common verbs that occur in SVCs, and it tends to grammaticalize following numerous different paths. Yet, there are no studies with a considerable sample of ‘take’ SVCs. Moreover, the polysemy of ‘take’ SVCs has not been explored in detail. Based on Aikhenvald (2018)’s functional framework, the present study aims to examine ‘take’ SVCs in 45 languages …

Medieval Narratives As Meta-Constructions Used In Creating Socio-Cultural Identity, Laurie A. Price

Linguistics ETDs

This study of the distribution and function of Historical Present (HP) in Old French, Old English, and Old Norse narratives combines the methods of cognitive linguistics and corpus-based discourse analysis with insights from work in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and medieval studies. I show that HP, in combination with those other features, is a strategy to establish stance, a strategy that both constructs and reinforces a cultural persona. Although previous research on HP in narratives focused on the use of HP to foreground events and contrast marked vs unmarked events in narratives, my analysis shows that HP has an additional range …

He Spoke, I Spoke: A Usage-Based Examination Of Homophony In The Navajo Verb Complex, Michael Peter Drinkwater

Linguistics ETDs

This study examines homophony between first and third person verbs and between second and third person verbs in Navajo. The typical paradigm for person-marking in Navajo has a sh- prefix for first person, a ni- prefix in second person, and a zero-marked third person. In some phonological environments, however, the first and second person pronouns are elided, producing cases of homophony between first and third and between second and third persons.

I examine all cases of this in Navajo and also provide data from Jicarilla Apache, Hupa (a Pacific Coast Athabaskan language), and three Northern Athabaskan languages: Chilcotin, Koyukon, and …

The Interaction Of Domain-Initial Effects With Lexical Stress: Acoustic Data From English, Spanish, And Portuguese, Ricardo F. Napoleão De Souza

Linguistics ETDs

The phonetic implementation of domain-initial boundaries has gained considerable attention in the literature. However, most studies of the phenomenon have investigated small samples of articulatory data in which target syllables were lexically prominent and/or phrasally accented, introducing important potential confounds. This dissertation tackles these issues by examining how domain-initial effects operate on the acoustic properties of fully unstressed word-initial CV syllables in phrasally unaccented words. Similar materials were designed for a reading task in which 14 speakers of English, Spanish and Portuguese, languages that differ in how lexical prominence affects segmental makeup, took part. Results from the acoustic analyses show …

Using Electrophysiology To Investigate Changes In Brain Activation In Individuals With Chronic Stroke, Sarah G. Dalton

Linguistics ETDs

Many individuals who have experienced a stroke also experience persistent decrements in several domains, such as sensorimotor, language, and cognition. While rehabilitation for these deficits is helpful even decades after a stroke, there is limited information available to determine the most effective pairing of treatment with individual deficits. Further, despite decades of neuroimaging research, our understanding of optimal recovery patterns following stroke is relatively poor. In order to improve outcomes for individuals living with chronic deficits due to stroke, neurophysiological biomarkers corresponding to recovery patterns and treatment response are needed. Electroencephalography (EEG) holds great potential for identifying biomarkers as it …

Simulated Manual Interaction As The Conceptual Base For Reference And Predication: A Cognitive Grammar Analysis Of The Integration Between Handling Gestures And Speech, Ryan D. Smith

Linguistics ETDs

Prior research on representational hand gestures has shown that an object’s affordances influence both the likelihood that it will be indexed in a representational gesture, and the form of the gesture used to refer to it. Objects which afford being held are associated with higher gesture rates than objects which do not afford being held. Further research has shown that the ways humans prototypically interact with an object also influence the reference technique used to refer to that object through a hand gesture. An object that people interact with manually will tend to be indexed through a gesture imitating the …