Linguistics Commons^™

A Brief Sketch Of Urama Grammar With Special Consideration Of Particles Marking Agency, Aspect, And Modality, Janessa L. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Urama is a Kiwai language spoken by the Urama people of Papua New Guinea. Very little has been published in the Kiwai language family and although Urama has been mentioned in a few papers nothing focusing on the Urama language has been published.

This thesis presents a brief grammar sketch outlining key grammar features. It describes 1) basic word order, 2) nouns, 3) verbs, 4) postpositions, 5) clausal relations and 6) some problematic particles. The particles addressed mark agency, aspect and modality.

The first particle is ro, an agent marker occurring mainly on the subjects of transitive verbs Its …

Palembangese In Print: An Nls Look At Literacies, Linguacies, Communicacies, And Culturacies In South Sumatra, Jacob M. Hall

Theses and Dissertations

People have been interacting with print in the South Sumatran city of Palembang for well over a millennium. Most of this literate activity has been carried out in languages other than the vernacular. Even now, the vast majority of print in the public realm in Palembang is in Indonesian, English, Arabic, and Chinese. And yet there are examples of the local language, Baso Pelembang, in print. This thesis looks for reasons behind these variations from the norm.

After exploring the perspective offered by the New Literacy Studies (NLS), this paper builds upon the foundation provided by these works. Through …

Developing A Teachers' Handbook For Content-Based Instruction At Brigham Young University's English Language Center, Melinda Clement Hardman

Theses and Dissertations

In Winter semester of 2005 the English Language Center (ELC) began plans to implement a content-based program for students at its highest proficiency level in order to provide them with more effective preparation for academic studies in English. Since that time, the program has undergone various changes to provide a more stable, cohesive, and responsive curriculum. There is a need, however, for greater teacher support and training. This paper outlines the process I underwent to create a handbook that would provide needed guidance and training for teachers in this program. This project involved an in-depth needs analysis of teachers and …

Validation Of The Reading Level Achievement Test Of The English Language Center, Marina Vasilyevina Mikhaylova

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the validity of the Reading Level Achievement Test of the English Language Center (ELC) of Brigham Young University. Test validation is a complicated process that involves evaluation of various types of validity. It was beyond the scope of this study to investigate different types of validity of the Reading LAT. The present study was only focused on the exam's construct validity. In an effort to validate the LAT, various models of reading comprehension were examined with the purpose of defining the construct of academic reading comprehension. The TOEFL academic reading framework was chosen to be the construct …

Place Names In Israeli Sign Language, Bettina Revilla

Theses and Dissertations

One of the obstacles in translating the Hebrew Scriptures into sign language is the lack of signs for Biblical places in most sign languages of the world. What solutions are there? One possibility is to borrow existing signs for Biblical places from another sign language, particularly from Israeli Sign Language, since Israeli Deaf already have signs for the places where they live.

There is a trend towards borrowing foreign place name signs (toponyms), especially when a language does not have a sign. This research provides a corpus of Israeli Sign Language (ISL) toponyms for ninety-two place names, documenting in photos …

Developing Writing Fluency Through Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication, Rossana Camacho

Theses and Dissertations

Drawing from sociocultural theory, this research investigated the effects of synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in the development of writing fluency. Likewise, the study aimed at confirming previously cited affective benefits linked to SCMC. Measuring fluency in words per 30 minutes, the study compared pre and post-test essay scores of two groups of ESL learners (a control group and a SCMC group) in two intermediate levels. Two evaluation questionnaires were also administered to the SCMC group in order to obtain students' opinions of this technology-based medium, and to analyze change in their perceptions. The SCMC group outperformed the control group in …

Constituent Order And Participant Reference In Dolnia Hani Narrative Discourse, Karen L. Gainer

Theses and Dissertations

Hani is a language in the Loloish family, spoken primarily in Yunnan Province of southwest China. This thesis presents a description of constituent order and participant reference in written Hani narrative discourse. The primary data source for this thesis consists of three narratives, which are included in the appendices.

Constituent order in Hani is largely constrained by the principle of natural information flow. In order to conform to this principle, some constituents may appear in two or more different positions in the clause, depending on the information structure of the assertion being made. Information structure also influences the use and …

Verbal Tone In Mpyemo, Bradley D. Festen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes the tonal patterns and alternations present in the Mpyemo language (Bantu A.86c – ISO code mcx), with special attention to the verbal system. Rules and autosegmental representations are used to clarify and provide a formal analysis. A tone raising rule causes the underlying two-tone system to display three phonetic levels at the surface. This thesis explores nominalized verbs and verbs in the imperative. In addition, inflected verbs are described, although only a limited set of inflectional morphemes are treated. Thus, I look at verbs with inflectional prefixes for subject agreement, the perfect, and a single verbal auxiliary …

Subordination, Grounding And The Packaging Of Information In Gojri, Kara Suzanne Fast

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is based on a collection of narratives told by Gujar women in northern Pakistan. It majors on the structure of subordinate clauses, the discourse functions of relative clauses and conjunctive participial clauses, and the function of the most common connectives: tɛ, fir, bas and ǰī.

The position of the relative pronoun indicates whether a relative clause is referring to an activated or a new participant. Relative clauses that appear superfluous indicate that the referent has a significant role to play in the subsequent discourse.

Conjunctive participial clauses may convey information of the same storyline status …

The Phonology And Morphology Of The Dar Daju Daju Language, Arthur J. Aviles

Theses and Dissertations

A recurring theme among linguists is the need for more languages to be analyzed and more descriptions to be available for a variety of reasons. The main purpose of this thesis is to provide essential information on the Daju Dar Daju language of Chad, Africa that will assist in future language development work among the Daju Dar Daju people as well as to provide additional information for possible future work among related languages.

Very little work has been done on the Daju languages as a whole and to date almost nothing on the Dar Daju Daju. The Dar Daju Daju …

Effects Of Lexical Simplification And Elaboration On Esl Readers' Local-Level Perceived Comprehension, Beth Ann Brewer

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the effects of single word modification on the perceived comprehension of individual sentences. A test was created by randomly selecting sentences from a college level American history textbook. Each sentence was analyzed using Nation's Range program, and the lowest frequency verbs were selected for modification. Each target verb was simplified (replaced with a higher frequency equivalent) or elaborated (left in the sentence, but followed by a parenthetical definition). Subjects received both treatment types and unmodified control items in a fifty-sentence test. Each sentence was rated by the subjects, as it was read, according to the amount of …

The Effects Of Homography On Computer-Generated High Frequency Word Lists, Athelia Graham

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the significance of semantics in computer-generated word frequency counts in response to a call for new word lists (Read, 2000; Gardner, 2007). Read claims that no corpus projects to date have produced any "definitive, stand-alone word-frequency lists" (p. 226). Many researchers are wary of the fact that the concept of a word is never clearly defined in most studies that have dealt with word frequency counts. It is clear from the research that one universally acceptable construct for the concept of word does not exist. In fact, many past word frequency counts only examine word forms without …

The Influence Of Production Accuracy On Suprasegmental Listening Comprehension, Adriana Romanini

Theses and Dissertations

One of the major questions in second language (L2) phonological learning is whether perception precedes (and therefore guides) production. This question is important for knowing what types of training most benefit L2 learners. While most theories assume that perception always precedes production (e.g., Best, 1995; Flege, 1995), several recent studies have found that production may precede perception (e.g., Baker & Trofimovich, 2006; Beach, Brunham, & Kitamura, 2001; Goto, 1971; Sheldon & Strange, 1982; Underbakke, 1993), demonstrating that this complex relationship may differ depending on how and when the L2 is learned. The current study seeks to further explore this relationship …

Semantic Role Agency In Perceptions Of The Lexical Items Sick And Evil, Nathan G. Simmons

Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by an ongoing debate in the clinical sciences concerning the value of evil as a label for human behavior (Mowrer 1960, Staub 1999, Wellman 2000, Williams 2004 etc.), this thesis examines the semantic role of AGENT in the lexical items sick and evil. Williams makes the argument that the label evil removes responsibility from the doctor, whereas, the label sick empowers the doctor in bringing about a cure. While this view is not universally accepted in the field, it does bring to light an interesting question in applied linguistic semantics as to the assignment of agency with respect to …

Acoustic Correlates Of Fortis/Lenis In San Francisco Ozolotepec Zapotec, Anita J. Leander

Theses and Dissertations

Analyses of the Zapotec family of languages often divide consonants into categories of strong and weak consonants, more commonly known as fortis and lenis. These given categories usually correspond to voiceless and voiced, respectively. In San Francisco Ozolotepec Zapotec (SFOZ) and Santa Catarina Xanaguía Zapotec (SCXZ), prior analyses describe the fortis/lenis distinction in terms of duration, voicing, and articulatory force. This description parallels other impressionistic descriptions in Isthmus-Valley and Southern Zapotec variants. However, no study has objectively identified the acoustic patterns of the fortis/lenis contrast in SFOZ or in any Southern, Valley, or Isthmus Zapotec language. A previous instrumental study …

Production Of Bangla Stops By Native English Speakers Learning Bangla: An Acoustic Analysis, Dustin D. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Differences in the phonetic and phonological systems of Bangla and English result in negative transfer in the Bangla stop productions of native English speakers. The phonetic realizations of Voice and Aspiration and their interactions with each other are the key factors in this. A production study was carried out focusing on sixteen of the twenty Bangla stops that are distinguished by a four-way voice/aspiration contrast at four different places of articulation, providing a contrastive acoustic analysis of the pronunciation of L1 and L2 adult speakers. Data containing these stops in an intervocalic environment in word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions was …

Semantic Role Labeling With Analogical Modeling, Warren C. Casbeer

Theses and Dissertations

Semantic role labeling has become a popular natural language processing task in recent years. A number of conferences have addressed this task for the English language and many different approaches have been applied to the task. In particular, some have used a memory-based learning approach. This thesis further develops the memory-based learning approach to semantic role labeling through the use of analogical modeling of language. Data for this task were taken from a previous conference (CoNLL-2005) so that a direct comparison could be made with other algorithms that attempted to solve this task. It will be shown here that the …

Religious Networks As A Sociolinguistic Factor: The Case Of Cardston, Benjamin Joseph Chatterton

Theses and Dissertations

Religious affiliation and its inherent membership in an associated social network as a sociolinguistic factor is examined in the community of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in Cardston, Alberta. Building on Meechan's 1998 findings that the LDS community in the area used Canadian Raising in a different set of phonotactic environments than the surrounding non-LDS English speakers, the study aims to determine if the LDS community uses other Canadian speech features differently or less frequently and if any Utah features (defined as Utah English in the literature, being the language of LDS English speakers in Utah) have continued from the settling of …

The Effects Of Second Language Status On The Comprehension And Perception Of Direct And Indirect Speech In Written Teacher Feedback, Rachel E. Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores how native and nonnative English speakers understand and perceive directness types in written teacher feedback (WTF). Currently research suggests that indirect speech in WTF will encourage students to think and maintain politeness between teacher and student (Benkendorf, 2001; Riley, 2003; Thonus, 1999; Vassileva, 2000). However, research also indicates that indirect speech may be more difficult to interpret than direct speech (Champagne, 2001; Holtgraves, 1999), which suggests that indirect speech used in WTF may be difficult for students to interpret and use to improve their compositions (Ferris, 2007; Hyland & Hyland, 2001). This difficulty may be even more …

Biliteracy And Skills Transfer: Literacy Skills Transfer From Arabic To English Focusing On Lexical Access, Henry J. Hauser

Theses and Dissertations

This research was designed to gain understanding of literacy skills transfer from a first language involving a particular writing system to a second language which uses another, divergent writing system. The author has worked in adult literacy in an area of the Sahara desert where the people's first language is Arabic and the majority of adults were illiterate. The present research utilized this setting to study literacy skills transfer from Arabic to English. Specific questions addressed in the research were: what skills transfer from L1 to L2, at what point should instruction in L2 begin, and can lexical access be …

Impact Of Language Immersion Programs On Foreign Language, Jean-Paul Chaussé

Theses and Dissertations

Communicating with other nations in their native language is an important and necessary aspect of a successful United States’ foreign policy. Critical to this success is the ability of military personnel to communicate clearly when in contact with foreign nationals, whether in peace-time or war. The Air Force has made great strides in the past 10 years to improve its foreign language capability, particularly through its application of the Language and Area Studies Immersion (LASI) program. The LASI program has significantly improved the foreign language capability of the Air Force, specifically those with previous language scores in the mid-tier range. …

Mayanwiki: An Online, Consensus-Based Linguistic Corpus Of The Mayan Hieroglyphs, Robbie A. Haertel

Theses and Dissertations

The writing system used by the ancient Maya civilization has intrigued researchers and aficionados for centuries. Now that it has mostly been deciphered, the emphasis in the field of Mayan epigraphy has shifted to a study of the system of phonological, morphological, and grammatical rules that once governed the language that the hieroglyphs encode. One of the most important resources for linguistic study of this type is a comprehensive, electronic corpus of texts to investigate phraseology, frequency information, and collocations. Because Mayan linguistic epigraphy is in the early stages, a publicly available, editable corpus would be an invaluable resource in …

A Corpus Of Second Language Attrition Data, Derrell R. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This report addresses the lack of progress in the field of Second Language Attrition (L2A). Review of L2A history and literature show this to be cause by lack of appropriate data. Five criteria for appropriate data are suggested and a corpus of L2A data (57,000 words, spoken Spanish) which meets the criteria is presented. The history of the corpus is explained in detail, including subject selection, instruments and methods of collection, and markup -- XML was used to annotate the corpus with nineteen categories of speech errors, adapted from Nation's (2001) "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language." An example analysis of …

The Noun Class System Of U̱T-Ma'in, A West Kainji Language Of Nigeria, Rebecca Dow Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This present work provides a comprehensive overview of the noun class system of u̱t-Ma'in, a Benue-Congo (West Kainji) language of Northwestern Nigeria. The u̱t-Ma'in language is characterized by a complex noun classification system and a robust agreement system that permeates the language. While an understanding of the noun classes is essential to an understanding of the language as a whole, discussion includes the division of nouns into thirteen distinct classes, marked by prefixes on the nouns themselves and by agreement elements on other clause constituents. The relationship of the noun classes of u̱t-Ma'in to historical reconstruction work available for the …

The -Ing Suffix In French, Joëlle C. Lewis

Theses and Dissertations

One striking characteristic of modern French is the increasingly large number of words that contain the English -ing suffix. This phenomenon stands in contrast to the stereotype of the French being purists with regards to language choice and use. Indeed, there is a variety of evidence that this suffix has been integrated into French as a productive derivational suffix, and does not simply occur as an accident resulting from the borrowing of English words that happen to include it. Though many studies have been carried out on loanwords in French, and certain ones have brought specific attention to the importation …

The Relationship Between Reported Out-Of-Class English Use And Proficiency Gains In English, Denisa Krizanova Cundick

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the relationship of out-of-class English use and proficiency gains. It also explored the relationship of gender, proficiency level and native language and the possible effect of these demographics on out-of-class English use and language gains in English. Though some studies have shown that those who spend more out-of-class time using the target language have higher language gain (Seliger, 1977), other studies have not found this to be true (Day, 1985; Freed 1990; Spada, 1986). Some reasons for the discrepancy in findings may be differences in the length of the time data is collected, samples of study participants …

Grice's Conversational Implicature Revisited: A Discourse Analysis Of Reproductive Loss In Women's Talk, Barbara Hauser

Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis, Grice's Conversational Implicature Revisited: A Discourse Analysis of Reproductive Loss in Women's Talk, it is my intent to explore the discursive modalities of reproductive loss narrated by women, who, at different stages of gestation, have lost one or more children. Rooted in a theoretical framework in discourse analysis, my thesis seeks to analyze how women, having participated in an interview with a female interlocutor who lost a child herself, narrate their experiences of reproductive loss.

My hypothesis is that the more personal information about the experience of reproductive loss the participant is supposed to share, the …

A Family Literacy Curriculum For Community Esl Courses, George William Clair Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

This project describes the piloting of a family literacy curriculum developed for use in a community ESL course. The purpose of this curriculum was to teach family-literacy-oriented English to students in the community ESL courses that are part of Brigham Young University's TESOL Teacher Training Course (TTTC) held at the University Parkway Center on BYU's campus. Students in BYU's TESOL Graduate Certificate program are required to complete a one-semester teaching practicum in the TTTC program. This program regularly offers English courses that enroll approximately 100 ESL students from the local community who are non-native speakers of English. These ESL students …

An Evaluation Of Brigham Young University's Local Tesol Internship Program, Laura Kathleen Steeby

Theses and Dissertations

An evaluation of BYU's Local TESOL Minor Internship program shows the strengths and weaknesses of this academic internship program. Students are required to complete 150 hours of TESOL-related work outside of their courses. The interns volunteer in different English-teaching programs in the area. Internship hours include the time in the classroom, preparation, materials development, as well as the time in the Linguistics 496R course. The interns are required to have most of their minor classes finished before they complete their internship so that their internship can be a capstone to and an application of what they have learned thus far. …

A Correlation Of Pronunciation Learning Strategies With Spontaneous English Pronunciation Of Adult Esl Learners, Grant Taylor Eckstein

Theses and Dissertations

In the last thirty years, language learning strategies have been used in the field of English as a Second Language (ESL) to help learners autonomously improve their English listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, language learning strategies have not been applied to pronunciation learning in a large scale manner. This study attempted to bridge this gap by investigating the usage of pronunciation learning strategies among adult ESL learners. A strategic pronunciation learning scale (SPLS) was administered to 183 adult ESL learners in an Intensive English Program. Their scores on the SPLS were compared with their scores of spontaneous pronunciation on …