Linguistics Commons^™

The Development Of Two Units For Btr Tesol: "Basic Principles Of Second Language Acquisition" And "Communicative Language Teacher And Information Gap Exercises", Paul A. Scholes

Theses and Dissertations

A team of graduate students from Brigham Young University under the supervision of the main author Dr. Lynn Henrichsen collaborated on creating a book, as well as a website, Basic Training and Resources for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (BTR TESOL). The entire project consists of 10 sections with nearly 50 units addressing topics that novice teachers should know before teaching English to non-native speakers. The BTR TESOL program provides basic material for untrained novice teachers that will help them to be better prepared to face the challenges and responsibilities of teaching English. This write-up describes …

K-12 Teacher Perceptions Regarding Hispanic Family Educational Beliefs And Language And Literacy Practices, Marisa Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Abundant research exists examining what occurs in Hispanic homes regarding educational beliefs and literacy and language practices before and after children enter the school system. What is not known is whether or not teachers are aware of these practices and beliefs. The research questions of this study focus first on what perceptions K-12 teachers have about Hispanic educational beliefs and practices, and second, on determining if those perceptions correlate with teacher training in English as a second language (ESL). To answer these questions, a questionnaire was written based on an extensive review of literature regarding three aspects: Hispanic educational beliefs, …

Research, Development And Application Of A Learning Resource For Enhancing Listening And Spoken Skills In Spanish, Elena Paz Vizcaya

Conference papers

Native speech is directed towards native listeners, not designed for comprehension and analysis by language learners. Speed of delivery - or economy of effort - produce a speech signal to which the native listener can assign the correct words — there are no discrete words in the speech signal itself. Experience of using timescaling with recorded English has highlighted the benefit of making slowED speech available to the language learner or researcher, as opposed to slow speech – i.e delivered slowly. The main contribution to knowledge of this project is to generate a unique research and analysis corpus (audio resource) …

The Development Of Two Units For Basic Training And Resources For Teaching English To Speakers Of Other Languages: Understanding And Adapting In A New Culture And Teaching Culture, Monty A. Colver

Theses and Dissertations

A team of Brigham Young University graduate students working under the supervision of Dr. Lynn Henrichsen, collaborated on the creation of a book as well as a website, Basic Training and Resources for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (BTR-TESOL). The project, which will be developed in phases over the coming years, is intended to provide novice English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers with some introductory material on nearly fifty different topics related to the field. Each unit is not intended to be a comprehensive source and is not to be seen as a replacement for formal training. …

Wording Effects In Moral Judgments, Ross E. O'Hara, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Nicholas A. Sinnott-Armstrong

Dartmouth Scholarship

As the study of moral judgments grows, it becomes imperative to compare results across studies in order to create unified theories within the field. These efforts are potentially undermined, however, by variations in wording used by different researchers. The current study sought to determine whether, when, and how variations in wording influence moral judgments. Online participants responded to 15 different moral vignettes (e.g., the trolley problem) using 1 of 4 adjectives: “wrong”, “inappropriate”, “forbidden”, or “blameworthy”. For half of the sample, these adjectives were preceded by the adverb “morally”. Results indicated that people were more apt to judge an act …

Semantic Enrichment Of Text Representation With Wikipedia For Text Classification, Hiroki Yamakawa, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Text classification is a widely studied topic in the area of machine learning. A number of techniques have been developed to represent and classify text documents. Most of the techniques try to achieve good classification performance while taking a document only by its words (e.g. statistical analysis on word frequency and distribution patterns). One of the recent trends in text classification research is to incorporate more semantic interpretation in text classification, especially by using Wikipedia. This paper introduces a technique for incorporating the vast amount of human knowledge accumulated in Wikipedia into text representation and classification. The aim is to …

Placing İsmayilli Lezgi Among The Lezgi Dialects, Jessica Smith

Theses and Dissertations

There is a cluster of three Lezgi villages in the İsmayıllı district of Azerbaijan that is separated by the Caucasus Mountains from the three main Lezgi dialects—Standard (SL), Axti (AL), and Quba (QL) Lezgi. This study places İsmayıllı Lezgi (IL) among the other dialects by comparing many of the varieties' attributes.

Five approaches are taken in this comparison: 1) comparing the similarities and differences of IL's phonological inventory to that of SL and AL; 2) contrasting the noun case system of IL versus that of SL; 3) comparing their verbal morphology; 4) looking for lexical similarities between IL and SL/AL/QL …

Study Of Stemming Algorithms, Savitha Kodimala

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Automated stemming is the process of reducing words to their roots. The stemmed words are typically used to overcome the mismatch problems associated with text searching.

In this thesis, we report on the various methods developed for stemming. In particular, we show the effectiveness of n-gram stemming methods on a collection of documents.

The Effect Of Content Revision Logs And Student-Teacher Conferences On Esl Student Writing, Urim Yi

Theses and Dissertations

Research has demonstrated the need for both teachers and students to find appropriate types of feedback for meaning-level (content) issues for English as a second langauge (ESL) writing (Kepner, 1991). The current study examines the use of a content revision log (where students monitor their revisions in such content issues as organization, paragraph development and use of topic sentences). Adding to the effect of applying the content revision log, the effect of holding conferences was also examined in the hope that referencing the content revision log during a conference session would bring the most positive results. There were three types …

Iconic Semantics In Phonology: A Corpus Study Of Japanese Mimetics, Joshua Marrinor Caldwell

Theses and Dissertations

Recent research on Japanese mimetics examines which part of speech the mimetic occurs as. An individual mimetic can appear as a noun, an adjective, an adverb, or a verb (Tsujimura & Deguchi 2007, 340). It is assumed by many scholars that mimetic words essentially function as adverbs (Inose 2007, 98). Few data-based studies exist that quantify the relative frequency of mimetic words in different word categories. Akita (2009) and Caldwell (2009a) have performed small scale or preliminary studies of this aspect of Japanese mimetics. The use of mimetics in other grammatical function categories has been attributed to the polysemous nature …

Pyaline: Automatically Growing Language Family Trees Using The Aline Distance, Paul A. Huff

Theses and Dissertations

Several methods for determining a numerical distance between languages have been proposed in the literature. In this thesis I implement one of them, the ALINE distance, and develop a methodology for comparing its results with other language distance metrics. I then compare it with a leading distance metric, the LDND distance, proposed by the ASJP project.

Speech Act, Evidentiality, And Implicature In The Korean Topic-Construction, Jung Sun Son

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

Is it possible to map pragmatic or discourse-oriented features onto the syntax level? The Korean topic marker -(n)un has a contrastive reading that induces conventional implicature, and is closely associated with a modal morpheme that can be regarded as a kind of agreement with evidentials. This paper attempts to represent such pragmatic features (implicature and evidentiality) as being involved in the topic-construction at the syntax level. To accomplish this, the paper introduces a Speech Act Projection (SAP), whose head encodes illocutionary force, and an Evidentiality Projection (EvidP), which is headed by a modal morpheme or evidential marker. The conventional implicature …

We Shall Be Watching You, You're Going To Die, And Other Threats: A Corpus-Based Speech Act Approach, Natalie Raun Carter

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

Using a speech act approach, this paper examines the similarities and differences between English-language threats made by terrorists and those made by non-terrorists, with a focus on pronoun use and sentence-type. Both groups employ a variety of sentence-types in their threats, but use declarative statements most often. 1st person nominative pronouns occur as subjects of clauses much more frequently than 2nd person pronouns in both the terrorist and non-terrorist threat data. Non-terrorist threats, however, make significantly more use of the 1st person singular nominative pronoun, while terrorist threats use the 1st person plural nominative pronoun more frequently.

Interactional Entanglements: A Frame Analysis Of Negotiated Identities In Ethnographic Research On The Language Classroom, Mark A. Ouellette

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

This study examines interactional entanglements that occurred during ethnographer-participant interactions in a language classroom. It draws upon Goffman's notion of framing to analyze how research participants use deixis to position the ethnographer vis-à-vis themselves within classroom speech events. The analysis shows that the teacher and students negotiated identities by appealing to the researcher's allegiances within an underlying judicial trial frame. As a marginal native, the ethnographer is particularly susceptible to others' social positioning, which raises questions concerning the very personal involvement of the ethnographer conducting research in an educational setting. This article underscores the argument that impression management is not …

Nous And On In Semi-Formal French: Pragmatic Uses Of Institutionality And Distancing, Deborah King

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

French linguists have long noted the substitution of the indefinite pronoun on for the 1st person plural pronoun nous, in both formal and informal situations. Studies of informal conversation have found this replacement to be nearly categorical (Laberge and Sankoff 1980; Coveney 2000). By contrast, this study found a much higher percentage of nous compared to on in interviews and speeches with political or business-related themes (roughly 60% nous to 40% on). The data suggest that many speakers use nous and on in pragmatically distinct ways: nous for institutionality, on for distancing. However, nous can underscore institutionality even in potentially …

Situating Spatial Templates For Human-Robot Interaction, John D. Kelleher, Robert J. Ross, Brian Mac Namee, Colm Sloan

Conference papers

People often refer to objects by describing the object's spatial location relative to another object. Due to their ubiquity in situated discourse, the ability to use 'locative expressions' is fundamental to human-robot dialogue systems. A key component of this ability are computational models of spatial term semantics. These models bridge the grounding gap between spatial language and sensor data. Within the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics communities, spatial template based accounts, such as the Attention Vector Sum model (Regier and Carlson, 2001), have found considerable application in mediating situated human-machine communication (Gorniak, 2004; Brenner et a., 2007; Kelleher and Costello, 2009). …

Visual Salience And Reference Resolution In Situated Dialogues: A Corpus-Based Evaluation., Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

Dialogues between humans and robots are necessarily situated and so, often, a shared visual context is present. Exophoric references are very frequent in situated dialogues, and are particularly important in the presence of a shared visual context - for example when a human is verbally guiding a tele-operated mobile robot. We present an approach to automatically resolving exophoric referring expressions in a situated dialogue based on the visual salience of possible referents. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach and a range of different salience metrics using data from the SCARE corpus which we have augmented with visual information. The …

Bessire, Henry Edward (Sc 2394), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2394. "Needed: Reorganization of the Executive Branch of Kentucky: A Study Presenting a Framework for Progress in Kentucky Governmental Organization," by Henry Edward Bessire, a senior thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the Bachelor of Arts degree, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 1957.

Collecting Legacy Corpora From Social Science Research For Text Mining Evaluation, Bei Yu, Min-Chun Ku

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

In this poster we describe a pilot study of searching social science literature for legacy corpora to evaluate text mining algorithms. The new emerging field of computational social science demands large amount of social science data to train and evaluate computational models. We argue that the legacy corpora that were annotated by social science researchers through traditional Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) are ideal data sets to evaluate text mining methods, such as text categorization and clustering. As a pilot study, we searched articles that involve content analysis and discourse analysis in leading communication journals, and then contacted the authors regarding …

Análisis De “Proyecto Mirlo”: Aprendiendo A Acoger Al “Desconocido”, Abigail Bissette

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

During the fall and early winter of this year, I volunteered with a program called, “Proyecto Mirlo,” which is a small part of a larger organization, “Caritas,” whose focus is providing support to marginalized groups of people in Spanish society. Proyecto Mirlo is a subsection that provides free language classes for immigrants, as well as food and, in extreme cases, financial help. In my volunteer work, I taught basic Spanish classes to an eighteen-year-old immigrant from Senegal. As my student grew in his language proficiency, I grew in my teaching proficiency, especially on the discovery of teaching resources that I …

Mental Models Of The Nature Of Language In Kunming, China, Ellie Ash

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The focus of this study is laypeople's mental models of the varieties of Chinese language. Chinese contains many varieties, primarily dividable into Putonghua (Standard Mandarin; hereafter PTH) and Fangyan (“topolect” 1). The Fangyan are traditionally considered “dialects of Chinese” by both Chinese and Western sources. Many Western linguists note that the dialects span a linguistic range that compares with the range of the Romance languages, but concede the label “dialects” because they share a written standard and because China is considered to be a single country, and especially because the Chinese themselves consider all the Fangyan to be varieties of …

New Trends In Automatic Assessment: Ontology Matching, Maria Mitina, Patricia Magee, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

Instant individual feedback represents a result of assessment which allows for considerable improvements in both teaching and learning. In this paper we present the application of ontology matching techniques in automatic correction of students’ answers for SQL tests, which will provide teachers with instant feedback to facilitate manual correction and marking and which they can pass to the students. Students experience many problems learning SQL due to the necessity to memorise database schemas, unclear feedback from the database engine on the execution of the query, etc. The program environment utilising the described approach is designed to solve the abovementioned problems …

La Hispanización Y La Identidad Hispana En Filipinas, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Blogs & Glogs: Revitalizing Class Projects, Krista Bittenbender Royal

INTO Faculty and Staff Publications

This workshop looks at two technologies that can be used to energize traditional poster and writing assignments to bring them beyond text: Glogster and Blogger. Both are free, easy to use websites with which students can create web pages with images, text, and audio to share with their classmates and the world. In the workshop, intended for instructors and curriculum coordinators, we will look at each of these platforms, discuss examples of project assignment guides using each of the sites, and talk about other ways they could be integrated into courses. I will also share some student feedback and some …

Limitations On Simultaneity In Sign Language, Donna Jo Napoli, R. Sutton-Spence

Linguistics Faculty Works

When we converse, information is often conveyed in multiple ways. For those using spoken language, we have, besides the vocal tract, nonverbal articulators as well, including eye gaze (Hanna & Brennan 2007), gesture (Kendon 2004), facial expression (Busso & Narayanan 2007), lip pointing (Sherzer 1983), and puffed cheeks (Sherzer 1993). Likewise, for those using a sign language, we have, besides the hands, nonmanual articulators as well, including facial expressions, eye gaze, mouth, and body posture (Baker & Padden 1978). In this short report we investigate how much information can be simultaneously expressed in sign language (by counting ‘propositions’) and conclude …

Wacana Tradisi Pela Dalam Masyarakat Ambon, Frans Thomas

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

The study is aimed to describe pela tradition discourse in Ambonese so-ciety. Qualitative Study with hermeneutical design is applied in this study. The data from oral discourse can be used as the primary data that focus on analysis, and other data in translating the meaning of oral discourse. Hermeneutical model is used in analyzing the data. The four aspects of the study were comprehended carefully through the semantic, reflective and existential levels. The findings of the study have both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it has implication on the culture study, discourse analysis, oral action and sociolinguistics. Practically, it is …

Konstruksi Semantis Kata Pada Perkembangan Bahasa Indonesia Anak, Wahyu Sukartiningsih

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

The aim of this study is to determine the semantic construction in Indone- sian language by pre-school-age children. The present research consisted of a longitudinal study of five pre-school-age children. The study of these five children is based on the developmental psycholinguistic and semantic-pragmatic studies. To collect the data, we used the observation, recording, and interview technique. The results show that the semantic construction of word meaning in Indonesian language by pre-school-age children consisted of: (1) over-specification, (2) overgeneraliza- tion, (3) intersection, (4) towards meaning spesification, and (5) meaning associa- tion. Overgeneralization and intersection dominated language development by child- ren …

Languages Lost And Found – A New Role For Language Educators, Beverly Burkett Mat, Visiting Assistant Professor, Elka Todeva Phd, Professor, Leslie Turpin Phd, Adjunct Faculty

Fostering Multicultural Competence and Global Justice: an SIT Symposium

For a number of years there has been growing concern about the loss of the world’s linguistic diversity and the connection between language loss, culture loss, and environmental degradation. In part this has been linked to the effects of globalization and the spread of English as a lingua franca. This unprecedented phenomenon has given rise to further concerns that English is turning into a ‘killer language’ and that teachers of English are agents of imperialism, western thought and ideology. This has been countered with the notion that English is a tool for empowerment and as such should be viewed as …

The Design Of Specifications For The Development Of Broadcast English Materials In Academic Listening/Speaking Courses, Amy Barlow

Theses and Dissertations

ESL students in academic listening/speaking courses often listen to long audio recordings similar to a lecture or other academic passages. When listening to these passages, students can lose their interest which impedes their learning of new strategies for understanding academic language. Students in the Level Four Listening/Speaking classes at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC), under the previous curriculum, would experience this challenge. All of the passages were available only in audio and were long in duration. The students would lose interest and improve little in their listening skills. Under the new curriculum at the ELC, students in Academic …

A Hybrid System For Glossary Generation Of Feature Film Content For Language Learning, Ryan Arthur Corradini

Theses and Dissertations

This report introduces a suite of command-line tools created to assist content developers with the creation of rich supplementary material to use in conjunction with feature films and other video assets in language teaching. The tools are intended to leverage open-source corpora and software (the OPUS OpenSubs corpus and the Moses statistical machine translation system, respectively), but are written in a modular fashion so that other resources could be leveraged in their place. The completed tool suite facilitates three main tasks, which together constitute this project. First, several scripts created for use in preparing linguistic data for the system are …