Linguistics Commons^™

Teachers Believe Singing Will Scaffold, Mediate, And Facilitate Oral Language Acqusition: Place Arts Back In The Curriculum, Alicia Rubio

Theses Digitization Project

The objective of this qualitative study was to explore if elementary school teachers who teach English Language Learners (ELLs) believe that singing used as an instructional tool would facilitate the development of oral English language acquisition.

Whatever: Prosodic Context Cues And Their Influence On Pragmatic Meaning, Pamela Kathleen Wahler

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines real language in use to observe the different intonation contours associated with the discourse marker "whatever" to see if or how these contours contribute to the pragmatic meaning associated with the different functions. Interactional sociolinguistic and conversational analysis approach to investigate the different pragmatic meaning associated with the discourse marker "whatever" were employed to carry out the analysis. In addition, corpus linguistic methodology was used to gather data to investigate the different pragmatic meanings of the word "whatever."

Prospective Teachers Of English Learners' Error Detection In Oral Output Of Nonnative English Speakers, Begüm Yengel

Theses Digitization Project

This project is designed to present the extent to which native English speakers (NESs) and nonnative English speakers NNESs) detect errors in NNESs' oral output. It also aims to shed light on the error of perception of participants from different first-language (L1) backgrounds, and intends to uncover the possible underlying reasons of the variations in their detection rates.

Mani: Buk 2, George Tucker Childs, Meghan Oswalt, Dan Oswalt, Hannah Sarvasy

Mani, a Disappearing Language of Sierra Leone and Guinea

Book 2 in a series of 4 primers for the Mani language, created by G. Tucker Childs. Based on fieldwork in the coastal Samou region of Guinea (Conakry) and Sierra Leone, beginning in 2000.

Illustrated by Hannah Sarvasy, with contributions from Meghan Oswalt and Dan Oswalt.

Introduction To The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary In Philosophy, Maite Ezdurdia, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

An introductory survey of the nature and importance of the semantics-pragmatics boundary.

In Defense Of Public Languages, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

My modest aim in this note is to sketch three interrelated critiques of public languages, and to respond to them. All allegedly support the same conclusion: that, insofar as they even exist, the study of public languages is not a viable scientific project. (Related critiques of semantics, understood as involving word-world relations, will be touched on as well.)

Being Physically Active: Perceptions Of Recent Mexican Immigrant Women On The Arizona-Mexico Border, Donna Hartweg, Christina Isabelli, Marylyn Mcewen, Rosie Piper

Scholarship

Mexican immigrant women report being physically active prior to arrival in the United States. However, with increased years of U.S. residency, this positive lifestyle behavior diminishes, increasing their risk of obesity and chronic disease. A qualitative descriptive design was used to elicit recent Mexican immigrant women’s perceptions of “being physically active” and to describe how living in the United States has influenced their perceptions of being physically active. Three themes were inductively generated: (a) purposeful exercising, (b) being active, and (c) being active with purposeful exercising. Overall, being physically active was described within the context of daily living well below …

Compression Effects In English, Jonah Katz

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This paper reports the results of an English experiment on vowel-shortening in different contexts. The data concern compression effects, whereby, in syllables with a greater number of segments, each one of the segments is shorter than in syllables with fewer segments. The experiment demonstrates that the amount of vowel compression found in English monosyllabic words depends in part on which consonants occur adjacent to the vowel in that word, how many consonants occur, and in which position they occur. Consonant clusters drive more vowel shortening than singletons when they involve liquids, but not when they involve only obstruents. Clusters involving …

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 …

Repair Negotiation By English L2 Learners, Yujeong Choi

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

It is widely accepted that L2 learners often face communication problems due to lack of competency in the target language and familiarity with its culture of origin. One way to resolve miscommunication problems is to seek clarification of the utterance; this process is called repair negotiation (Nakahama et al. 2001). Repair negotiation has been studied as a subset of Long's (1996) Interaction Hypothesis in second language acquisition (SLA). Existing research has solely focused on repair negotiation which is initiated by the native speaker or teacher rather than the L2 learner, thus resulting in other-initiated repair (OIR). However, it has also …

Binding Accessibility And Online Anaphora Processing, Michael P. Mansbridge, Jeffrey Witzel

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

No abstract provided.

Evaluating The Similarity Estimator Component Of The Twin Personality-Based Recommender System, Alexandra Roshchina, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

With the constant increase in the amount of information available in online communities, the task of building an appropriate Recommender System to support the user in her decision making process is becoming more and more challenging. In addition to the classical collaborative filtering and content based approaches, taking into account ratings, preferences and demographic characteristics of the users, a new type of Recommender System, based on personality parameters, has been emerging recently. In this paper we describe the TWIN (Tell Me What I Need) Personality Based Recommender System, and report on our experiments and experiences of utilizing techniques which allow …

Testing The Viability Of Web Dmdx For Masked Priming Experiments, Samantha Cornelius, Jeffrey Witzel, Naoko Witzel, Kenneth Forster, Jonathan Forster

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

Purpose: • Evaluate the viability of a web-based version of the DMDX software package (web DMDX). • It was unclear whether web DMDX allowed for the consistent and accurate display of experimental stimuli. Research Question: • Is web DMDX a reliable tool for psycholinguistic experiments? Are display times in web DMDX comparable to those in the original lab-based version of this software (lab DMDX)?

Masked Onset Priming In Korean: Evidence For Syllable- And Phoneme-Level Effects, Yujeong Choi, Naoko Witzel, Jeffrey Witzel

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

No abstract provided.

Deeper Than Shallow: Evidence For Structure-Based Parsing Biases In Second-Language Sentence Processing, Naoko Witzel, Jeffrey Witzel, Janet Nicol

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

This study examines the reading patterns of native speakers (NSs) and high-level (Chinese) nonnative speakers (NNSs) on three English sentence types involving temporarily ambiguous structural configurations. The reading patterns on each sentence type indicate that both NSs and NNSs were biased toward specific structural interpretations. These results are interpreted as evidence that both first-language and second-language (L2) sentence comprehension is guided (at least in part) by structure-based parsing strategies and, thus as counterevidence to the claim that NNSs are largely limited to rudimentary (or “shallow”) syntactic computation during online L2 sentence processing.

Narrativity And Involvement In Online Consumer Reviews: The Case Of Tripadvisor, Camilla Vasquez

World Languages Faculty Publications

Drawing on recent work on digital narratives of personal experience in online genres such as email, social networking sites, and blogs, the present study explores narrative features in 100 online consumer reviews of hotels. Focusing on negative reviews, or “Rants,” from popular consumer travel platform, TripAdvisor, the article examines both canonical and genre-specific structural features of narratives, as well as some of the discursive resources used by online narrators to engage their audiences, and to draw them into their stories. Specifically, the study explores the use of story prefaces and related forms of second person address, represented speech and mental …

The Gift: Synesthesia In Translingual Texts, Natasha Lvovich

Publications and Research

This article explores the relationship between multilingualism and synesthesia (neuro-psychological blend of senses). In the absence of research in any of the related fields, the author (a multilingual, a L2 scholar, a writer, and a synesthete all at once) views synesthesia through the lens of “translingual texts” written in L2 by multilingual authors and takes an interdisciplinary perspective, fusing L2 scholarship, cognitive theory, neuroscience, literary theory, and semiotics to investigate the complexities and subjectivities of the multilingual mind. ‘Translingual synesthesia’ appears to represent an idiosyncratic form of language emotionality and creativity, allowing translingual authors to transcend cognitive and linguistic realms …

Children’S Acquisition Of Subject Markers In Isixhosa, Mantoa Smouse, Sandile Gxilishe, Jill De Villiers, Peter A. De Villiers

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

The study of African languages is a rapidly growing area of investigation in linguistics. It has become clear that there is a rich fund of information in the large number of African languages falling into several families that can inform the science of the universal and particular features of human language. Although the Bantu language family has no historical relation to the family of Romance languages, fruitful discussion has begun among researchers seeking to illuminate some of the special features that are shared (De Cat and Demuth 2008), especially in the area of concern here, namely clitics. But the definition …

Beefmoves: Dissemination, Diversity, And Dynamics Of English Borrowings In A German Hip Hop Forum, Matt Garley, Julia Hockenmaier

Publications and Research

We investigate how novel English-derived words (anglicisms) are used in a German-language Internet hip hop forum, and what factors contribute to their uptake.

A Comparative Linguistic Study Between Sicilian And Spanish (Estudio Lingüístico-Comparativo Del Siciliano Y El Español), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez, Raven Chakerian

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study proposes a linguistic-comparative analysis of both Spanish and Sicilian. While numerous linguistic studies have been done on Romantic languages, very few deal with Sicilian, isolated as a dialect of Italian. According to some linguists, Sicilian, as well as Sardinian (spoken in Sardinia), is not a dialect but an independent language per se. It lost its language status when the Italian parliament decided to assign a national language. This research, independently of Sicilian being a language or a dialect, analyses the most important phonetic, lexical, spelling and morphological differences with his sister-language, Spanish. At the same time, some parallelisms …

Partial Word Knowledge: Frontier Words In The L2 Mental Lexicon, Alla Zareva

English Faculty Publications

The study set out to examine the partial word knowledge of native speakers, L2 advanced, and intermediate learners of English with regard to four word features from Richards' (1976) taxonomy of aspects describing what knowing a word entails. To capture partial familiarity, the participants completed in writing a test containing low and mid frequency content words, accompanied by a word knowledge scale. The analysis showed that there were three distinctive patterns of partially familiar vocabulary but their distribution across the three groups was quite different, which indicated that partial knowledge was linked to different word features across the three proficiency …

Kasabi Cε Ŋɔ Amani Acε (Mani History), George Tucker Childs, Morlay Boyo Keita, Foday Jd Camara

Mani, a Disappearing Language of Sierra Leone and Guinea

This account of Mani history, as spoken by Morlay Boyo Keita and Foday JD Camara, was recorded in Palatougou in 2005 as part of the Mani Documentation Project (MDP), Dr. G. Tucker Childs P.I.

Mani: Buk 1, George Tucker Childs, Meghan Oswalt, Dan Oswalt, Hannah Sarvasy

Mani, a Disappearing Language of Sierra Leone and Guinea

Book 1 in a series of 4 primers for the Mani language, created by G. Tucker Childs. Based on fieldwork in the coastal Samou region of Guinea (Conakry) and Sierra Leone, beginning in 2000.

Illustrated by Hannah Sarvasy, with contributions from Meghan Oswalt and Dan Oswalt.

Mani: Buk 3, George Tucker Childs, Meghan Oswalt, Dan Oswalt, Hannah Sarvasy

Mani, a Disappearing Language of Sierra Leone and Guinea

Book 3 in a series of 4 primers for the Mani language, created by G. Tucker Childs. Based on fieldwork in the coastal Samou region of Guinea (Conakry) and Sierra Leone, beginning in 2000.

Illustrated by Hannah Sarvasy, with contributions from Meghan Oswalt and Dan Oswalt.

Developing Social Networks And Language Learning: Japanese Esl Students In A Study Abroad Context, Michiyo Fujimoto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current study investigates the relationship between the English language proficiency of Japanese students in a short term study abroad (SA) context and the structure of their social networks. Their personal social networks were investigated through individual interviews. Analyzing their investment in English along with examining their construction of social networks, the purpose of this study is to investigate if there are any relationships between their type of social network and their English proficiency. The data was collected through individual interviews. Their oral English proficiency was evaluated by the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) developed by the Educational Testing …

On The Disambiguation Of Meaning: The Effects Of Perceptual Focus And Cognitive Load, Lynne Kennette

Wayne State University Dissertations

Most research supports a non-selective (or exhaustive) account of activation whereby multiple meanings of a word are initially activated (as discussed in Degani & Tokowicz, 2009). But what happens to the non-selected meaning of an ambigious word (e.g., bark) and how is the decision made to select one meaning over the other? A great deal research by Gernsbacher and colleagues suggests that the non-selected meaning is "discarded" via active suppression, but a competing activation-only account is also proposed by Gorfein's research group. The present dissertation examines meaning-selection in ambiguous words using a word to elicit meaning context (rather than a …

How To Ask For A Favor: An Exploration Of Speech Act Pragmatics In Heritage Russian, Irina Yevgenievna Dubinina

Bryn Mawr College Dissertations and Theses

Heritage language (HL) is a linguistic system that arises in the context of early childhood bilingualism, both sequential and simultaneous, when one of the languages is not fully acquired. The performance of speech acts in HLs is yet to be understood, and this dissertation is a first step in this direction. The study investigates the pragmatic competence of adult Heritage Russian (HR) speakers dominant in American English by focusing on their ability to comprehend and produce requests for favor that appeal primarily to the addressee's good will.

The data were collected through a questionnaire and role-play enactments in nativespeaker (NS) …

El Uso De Las Funciones De Las Citas En La Estructura Retórica De Las Introducciones De Memorias De Máster Escritas En Español Por Estudiantes Nativos Españoles Y No Nativos Filipinos, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This article analyzes the correlation between the use of functions of citations and the organizational structure of the Introduction section of a corpus of sixteen (16) master´s theses written in Spanish in the field of Applied Linguistics by native and non-native writers. The quantitative and qualitative analysis in this study arises from the model proposed by Carbonell- Olivares et al. (2009) which aims to define the organization of the Introduction section of the doctoral thesis in Spanish and the classification of the functions of citations made by Sánchez Jiménez (2011). The research results show that there is a direct relationship …

A Relevance-Based Analysis Of Two Multifunctional Discourse Particles: Indus Kohistani Hum And –Ãĩ, Beate Lubberger

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

Relevance theory claims that words encode different types of meaning: concepts or procedures. Within this framework, discourse connectors are understood as encoding procedural instructions for the inferential part of utterance comprehension. This analysis allows for a unitary account of particles with seemingly diverse functions. Following Blass (1990) in her study of Sissala ma, English also and German auch, I examine the two discourse particles hum and –ãĩ of Indus Kohistani, a language spoken in Northern Pakistan. Both of them encode procedural meaning in that they exclude backwards contradiction as a possible way of utterance interpretation, but allow backwards confirmation and …

Fundaments Of Morfo-Syntactical Ergativity (Fundamentos De Ergatividad Morfológico-Sintáctica), Eva Núñez-Méndez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The main goal of this research paper is to clarify the concept of ergativity, which has been used as a modern term in recent grammar studies, from a morpholo gicalsyntactical approach. This term, nonexistent in the traditional linguistic studies on romance languages, has been newly applied to values of transitivity where the participant roles in the action may or may not have the agent function. latin and his daughter-languages have a syntactical accusative profile where the subject of the action is also the agent, different in form from the direct object. in latin, the correspondence subject-agent is marked morphologically in …