Linguistics Commons^™

Valence Sensitivity In Pamirian Past-Tense Inflection: A Realizational Analysis, Gregory Stump, Andrew R. Hippisley

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Puerto Ricans' Evaluations Of Dominicans And Dominican Spanish As Reflected In Inter-Personal Interviews, Eva-Marie Suarez Budenbender

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

The present study investigates the connection between linguistic perceptions, speaker identification, and speaker attitude and examines the attitudes of speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish towards Dominican Spanish in sociolinguistic interviews. Although both varieties are linguistically very similar (Lipski 1994), the participants report being attuned to a range of linguistic differences between their variety and Dominican Spanish, while confirming widespread stigmatization of Dominicans and Dominican Spanish on the island. Their evaluations of Dominican Spanish are positive, indicating some degree of solidarity towards speakers of other Caribbean variety speakers. It is hypothesized that reported stigmatization of Dominicans and Dominican Spanish (Duany 2005) …

Introduction, Jose Esteban Hernandez

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

Introduction to the Special Issue on Spanish Dialect Contact in the Americas

Analogical Imperfects And The Fate Of Iberian Verbal Morphology In Latin American Spanish, Israel Sanz-Sanchez

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

This paper examines the interaction of language-internal and language-external triggers in the formation of Latin American Spanish varieties. The focus of the paper is a scarcely studied morphological variant, namely the non-standard imperfects of the 2nd- and 3rd-conjugation: comer ‘to eat’ → comiba-, caer ‘to fall’ → caiba-, traer ‘to bring’ →traiba-, etc. The study first features a comprehensive dialectal and historical survey of these forms in Spain and Latin America. Later, it focuses on the factors that contributed to their success in traditional Latin American Spanish dialects vs. their relative infrequency in Spain. It will be argued that these …

American Sign Language Verb Categories In Constructed Action, K. Larry Rogers

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

The American Sign Language construction commonly known as "role-shift" superficially resembles mimic forms, however unlike mime, role-shift is a type of depicting construction in ASL discourse (Roy 1989). The signer may use eye gaze, head shift, facial expression, stylistic variation, and use of signing space to convey information (Lee 1997). While this construction may involve a level of gesture, it is linguistic in nature (Padden 1990). "Role-shift may be used to recreate the action in a narrative, thus the term: constructed action” (Metzger 1995). This aspect to depict action is the particular focus of this study. Participants were videotaped telling …

Table Of Contents

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

Table of contents, Volume 30, Number 2

Variation And Change In Peruvian Spanish Word Order: Language Contact And Dialect Contact In Lima, Carol A. Klee, Daniel G. Tight, Rocio Caravedo

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

Previous studies have revealed that the direct object/verb (OV) word order typical of Quechua and Aymara is also prevalent in Andean Spanish. The current study examines the frequency of such structures in Lima, Peru, where massive migration over the past 60 years has brought speakers of Andean indigenous languages and rural Andean Spanish into close contact with speakers of limeño Spanish. Goldvarb analysis of data from 34 participants (seven first-generation migrants, six 1.5-generation migrants, 10 second-generation migrants, and 11 native limeños) indicates that the pragmatic functions that motivated OV order among the participants include those found in noncontact varieties of …

Dialects And Borders: Face-To-Face And Back-To-Back In Latin American Spanish, John M. Lipski

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

This essay explores a relatively underrepresented facet of Latin American Spanish, namely dialect contact along national borders. It is well known that Spanish American dialect zones rarely coincide with national boundaries, but also that prevailing dialectal traits often evoke nationalistic sentiments. The extent to which these tendencies interact is explored through a series of vignettes involving speech communities along the borders between nations whose principal (e.g. capital city) dialect traits differ substantially. Among the proposed factors that influence linguistic behavior in border communities are physical and political ease of border crossing, inter-nation economic imbalances, proximity of major urban areas, trans-border …

Argument Encoding And Pragmatic Marking Of The Transitive Subject In Shiwilu (Kawapanan), Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a nearly extinct Kawapanan language from Peruvian Amazonia. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it investigates the obligatory cross-referencing of arguments in the complex Shiwilu verb. This system is predominantly nominative accusative, with the caveat that main clause object markers coincide with those conveying subject in one type of clause involving nominal predicates, as well as subject and object of dependent clauses. Second, this article provides a first analysis of the enclitic =ler, which may attach to transitive subjects and thus exhibits an ergative-like distribution. Unlike the situation in languages with syntacticized ergative systems, …

Social Media At Academia's Periphery: Studying Multilingual Developmental Writers' Facebook Composing Strategies, Kevin Eric Depew

English Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the writing strategies second-language students use to compose on social media sites. These alternative and unconventional sites for learning provide language learners opportunities to acquire language by using multiple modalities to respond to various rhetorical situations. In comparison to these sites, academic writing contexts, particularly the developmental-writing course, impose monolingual norms and deficient identities on students. Where these courses articulate these language learners as possessing inadequate skills to perform well in mainstream writing courses, the students' social-media compositions demonstrate that these students have the potential to respond to communicative situations in rhetorically complex ways. This study …

International Graduate Student Powerpoint Presentation Designs: A Reality Check, Alla Zareva

English Faculty Publications

The present study set out to examine what novice international graduate student presenters consider to be effective PowerPoint slide design practices and the extent to which these practices are in agreement with experts’ advice. The analysis focused on three main features of students’ PowerPoint presentations – organisation, style and typography. The general conclusion is that we can mostly rely on students’ intuitions concerning ‘relevance’ and ‘simplicity’ of PowerPoint presentation designs, but we should draw their attention to ‘consistency’, i.e., the systematic application of the organisation, style and typological features to their PowerPoint presentations.

Morphological Typology, Andrew R. Hippisley

Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Gendering French In Tunisia: Language Ideologies And Nationalism, Keith Walters

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper seeks to describe and account for a common ideology among Tunisians and North Africans more broadly that associates the use of French with women, thereby symbolically associating the use of Arabic with men. In this regard, the use of French can be said to be "gendered" there. In an effort to historicize this phenomenon, I sketch the social history of French in Tunisia, particularly in regards to the access female and male Tunisians would historically have had to it through the institution of schooling. I then consider the different relationships contemporary Tunisian men and women have with French. …

Social Capital And Language Acquisition During Study Abroad, Dan P. Dewey, M Smith, Christophe G. Giraud-Carrier, D. Gore

Faculty Publications

We study the role of social capital in language acquisition during study abroad. Using data collected from 204 participants in Japanese study abroad programs, we show that students who leverage social capital through bridging relationships feel they achieve higher levels of language improvement. Furthermore, an analysis of the topics participants discuss with locals suggests that there are significant differences between students who have a tendency to build close-knit networks and students who cast a broader net.

Una Aproximación Teórica A La Definición Del Modo Verbal Español, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Seris And The Comcaac: Sifting Fact From Fiction About The Names And Relationships, Stephen A. Marlett

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

This paper discusses the names that have been used in the literature for the Seri people and the language that they speak, including meanings of those names. It also sorts through proposals that have been made for the relationship of their language to other languages. These topics are presented from a historical perspective so that a non-specialist can understand the facts and see the reasons for the confusion.

Corrections To And Clarifications Of The Seri Data In Greenberg & Ruhlen's "An Amerind Etymological Dictionary", Stephen A. Marlett

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

Seri data have been included in comparative studies of Native American languages of North America, especially those that relate to the putative Hokan family and the putative Amerind family. Since the publication in recent years of much more analyzed Seri data, including those found in the 2005 dictionary, it is important to reassess the data that has been used in earlier comparative studies. This paper examines the data included in Greenberg & Ruhlen's (2007) An Amerind Etymological Dictionary, corrects mistakes and clarifies the data generally.

The Contribution Of Set Switching And Working Memory To Sentence Processing In Older Adults, Mira Goral, Manuella Clark-Cotton, Avron Spiro Iii, Loraine Obler, Jay Verkuilen, Martin Albert

Publications and Research

This study evaluates the involvement of switching skills and working memory capacity in auditory sentence processing in older adults. The authors examined 241 healthy participants, aged 55 to 88 years, who completed four neuropsychological tasks and two sentence-processing tasks. In addition to age and the expected contribution of working memory, switching ability, as measured by the number of perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, emerged as a strong predictor of performance on both sentence-processing tasks. Individuals with both low working-memory spans and more perseverative errors achieved the lowest accuracy scores. These findings are consistent with compensatory accounts of …

Castilian Transcodic Markers In Internet Catalan : Analysis Of Generic, Regional And Linguistic Factors, Craig Stokes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is a study of Castilian transcodic markers in the Catalan written on the Internet. Thirty Castilian transcodic markers representing five categories were run through the interface of the Corpus d'Ús del Català a la Web (CucWeb) to collect information in order to conduct both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The major research questions to be answered deal with the absolute and relative frequencies of these transcodic markers in the CucWeb and the factors behind the production of these non-standard forms. In addition to the frequency of the Castilian transcodic markers in the CucWeb, the initial study provides qualitative analysis …

Expression Of Possession In Spanish In Contact With English : A Sociolinguistic Study Across Two Generations In The Greater New York Metropolitan Area, Maria Cristina Montoya

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACT

Phonetic Adaptations Of Spanish Loanwords In Triqui, Ruth E. Scipione

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study focuses on the results of increased language contact on Spanish loanword adaptation in Copala Triqui at the segmental and prosodic levels. Data from field notes and publications from the 1960s and 1970s were compared to modern 21st century loanword adaptations in 80+ hours of radio broadcasts and recorded elicitations in personal fieldwork in Mexico, Central California and Albany, NY. The overarching goal is to identify a wide range of possible phonetic adaptations at the segmental and prosodic levels and track the possible effects of increased bilingualism on these adaptations. From there it attempts to hypothesize what phonetic variation …

Linguistic Realization Of Refusals In Persian By Iranian Farsi Speakers., Farzaneh Zilaie

Student Works (2010-2019)

This study investigates variations in the linguistics realization of the speech act of refusal in Persian language. It also aims at exploring the role of two social variables; namely ‘social distance’ and ‘power’ in the production of refusals. The data were collected using ethnographic observation, and were both field noted and recorded wherever possible. The results yielded 208 acts of refusals. These refusals were classified according to the refusal classification semantic formulae proposed by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss- Weltz (1990). The results showed that Iranian Farsi speakers employed indirect strategies and a combination of direct and indirect strategies more than …

Impact Of Imagine Learning English In Two Northern Mississippi Schools, Dawn M. Waddell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study, Impact of Imagine Learning English in Two Northern Mississippi Schools, describes an effectiveness study of the impact that the computer program Imagine Learning English (ILE) has on English language learning. The study sought to determine the impact of ILE on the annual yearly progress and reading skills of mid-level English language learners (ELL). The objective of the study was to see if ILE was successful in raising the reading comprehension skill scores of English Language Learners (ELL) who worked the program as a language training tool. This study is the result of data that was collected from students …

The Present Past - A Middle Swabian Dialect In The 21st Century, Stefanie Hirscher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dialects throughout the Federal Republic of Germany not only vary greatly among themselves, but also tend to show internal variations with regard to dialect speaker groups, due to the influence of Standard German along with other regional factors. Medium-sized towns seem to be at the center of this dialect-standard continuum, as speakers from both rural and more urban areas come together in these towns. This study sought to investigate the state of the Middle Swabian dialect as spoken in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a medium-sized town in Southwestern Germany. Previous studies of this dialect have focused on rural areas and found only …

Speaking The Part - Is Black English In The Workplace A Detriment To Climbing The Corporate Ladder? A Sociolinguistic Study Regarding Black English In The Workplace, Kanika Nicole Jackson

Wayne State University Theses

This study aims to explore how African Americans who speak Black English (BE), particularly members of Generation X, function communicatively in corporate America, where the dominant language spoken is Standard American English (SAE). Much of the literature theorized African Americans as being resistant to speaking SAE in mainstream settings in fear of compromising their identities or "acting white." Using in-depth interviews with six African Americans across the country who work in corporate America, this study examines their lived communicative experiences in the workplace and how they learned language balance (the ability to codeswitch).

With data compiled into case studies and …

A Weighted Finite State Transducer Implementation Of Phoneme Rewrite Rules For English-To-Korean Pronunciation Conversion, Hahn Koo

Faculty Publications

Words change their phonetic as well as orthographic form when they are borrowed and used by speakers of another language. A formal model that properly captures this change has theoretical implications in phonology and practical applications in speech processing and machine transliteration. This paper describes a method for developing a finite- state model that predicts how English words and named entities are pronounced in Korean. The model predicts nativized pronunciation using weighted finite-state transducers implementing context-dependent phoneme rewrite rules derived from English-to-Korean pronunciation pairs and syllable phonotactics in Korean.

Second Language Development Theories And Technology-Mediated Language Learning, Steven L. Thorne, Bryan Smith

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Information and communication technologies have never been more interesting due in large part to their intimate integration into everyday life. Second and foreign language researchers and educators have long recognized ...

Resetting Vot In A Bilingual Region, Dan William Morgan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In order to test the claims that English speakers have an advantage over Spanish while learning their L2, a study of comparative and contrastive data from native English L2 Spanish speakers and native Spanish L2 English speakers was initiated. This study attempted to prove if in fact and to what extent such an advantage exists for either group of people.

Linguistics As Structure In Computer Animation: Toward A More Effective Synthesis Of Brow Motion In American Sign Language, Rosalee Wolfe, Peter Cook, John C. Mcdonald, Jerry Schnepp

Visual Communications and Technology Education Faculty Publications

Computer-generated three-dimensional animation holds great promise for synthesizing utterances in American Sign Language (ASL) that are not only grammatical, but well tolerated by members of the Deaf community. Unfortunately, animation poses several challenges stemming from the necessity of grappling with massive amounts of data. However, the linguistics of ASL can aid in surmounting the challenge by providing structure and rules for organizing animation data. An exploration of the linguistic and extra linguistic behavior of the brows from an animator’s viewpoint yields a new approach for synthesizing nonmanuals that differs from the conventional animation of anatomy and instead offers a different …

Sign Language Humor, Human Singularities, And The Origins Of Language, Donna Jo Napoli, R. Sutton-Spence

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.