Linguistics Commons^™

A Variationist Sociolinguistic Study Of /R/ Deletion In Turkish, Sevda Rahymov

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Variable /r/ deletion in word final position has been explored in several languages such as English and different dialects of Spanish. This study will investigate /r/ deletion in Turkish, an Altaic language that belongs to Ural-Altaic languages family. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to explore the influence of linguistic and social factors in the variation of /r/ in the progressive affix, /-yor-/ in the dialect of Turkish spoken in Istanbul. I hypothesize that the variability in the deletion of /r/ is not random, but can be accounted for by the study of linguistic and social factors.

Phonetic Realization Of /P, T, K/ In Spanish-English Code-Switching, Gisela Simental

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The aim of this investigation is to contribute to the relatively unexplored area of phonetic realization of sounds during code switching. The present study will focus on the analysis of voice onset time of voiceless stops in stressed word initial position. Spanish and English are ideal languages to test how bilinguals process and produce the low-level phonetic properties of stops during CS. Both languages have the same set of voiceless stops: /p, t, k/, yet these stops have different phonetic (or acoustic) characteristics in each language. Data was collected from the naturalistic speech of balanced bilinguals who were exposed to …

A Corpus-Based Study Of The Use Of Prepositional Verbs In Second Language Emergent Academic Writing, Elizabeth Wilcoxon

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In this paper, the author reports on a corpus-based study of prepositional verbs in L2 emergent academic writing using data collected from English as a Second Language [ESL] and English for Academic Purposes [EAP] classrooms in a Hispanic-serving university in the US. Prepositional verbs are relatively common in academic prose (lacking the informal overtones of phrasal verbs) and draw on the full set of prepositions (Biber et al., 1999). They are also difficult to acquire given the challenges posed by prepositional usage for most ESL/EAP learners. The literature in this area highlights the importance of prepositional verbs in L2 learning …

Online Writing Labs: Resources For Second Language Writers, Joshua Paiz, Ghada Gherwash

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

This presentation at the 2014 TESOL Developer's Showcase discusses best practices and special considerations for using Online Writing Labs as L2 writing support tools. This discussion is grounded both in recent OWL/Writing Center theory, as well as from the presenter's experiences working on a large­scale OWL in a variety of capacities. To add to the discussion on special considerations when using OWLs, this presentation also provides a discussion of a recently completed research project involving the Purdue OWL and how it is used to support EFL writing. It will highlight how, even in resources labeled as "ESL," can be overly …

Encouraging The Growth Of Owls Worldwide: Utilizing Intercultural Rhetoric To Inform Best Practices, Joshua Paiz

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

This presentation for the 8th Intercultural Rhetoric and Discourse Conference discusses work on the Purdue OWL, focusing on the resources targeting L2 writers writing for particular contexts (e.g., Writing for the Chinese Business Context), as these resource-types tend to be some of the early Purdue OWL spaces where the findings of intercultural rhetoric maybe more readily applied. This discussion will also provide an overview of recent research looking at the place of and practitioner attitudes towards OWLs in general and, more specifically, the Purdue OWL. The presenter will conclude by discussing new content development initiatives at the Purdue OWL and …

Maternal Perceptions Of Agency In Intergenerational Transmission Of Spanish: The Case Of Latinos In The U.S. Midwest, Isabel Velázquez

Spanish Language and Literature Papers

This article examines the ways in which a group of first-generation Latino immigrants to the U.S. Midwest conceptualized their role in their children’s bilingual development. Respondents were asked to identify the individuals or institutions on which their children’s language and academic development depended, as well as household practices perceived as conducive to Spanish maintenance, and perceived obstacles to their children’s use of Spanish in the domains of home, school, and community. Discussion centers on maternal perceptions of agency because of the centrality of the mother in intergenerational minority language transmission. It is argued here that immigrant mothers’ perceptions of agency …

Combining Elicited Imitation And Fluency Features For Oral Proficiency Measurement, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen

Faculty Publications

The automatic grading of oral language tests has been the subject of much research in recent years. Several obstacles lie in the way of achieving this goal. Recent work suggests a testing technique called elicited imitation (EI) that can serve to accurately approximate global oral proficiency. This testing methodology, however, does not incorporate some fundamental aspects of language, such as fluency. Other work has suggested another testing technique, simulated speech (SS), as a supplement or an alternative to EI that can provide automated fluency metrics. In this work, we investigate a combination of fluency features extracted from SS tests and …

Effect Of Age, Education, And Bilingualism On Confrontation Naming In Older Illiterate And Low-Educated Populations, Sameer Ashaie, Loraine Obler

Publications and Research

We investigated the effects of age as well as the linked factors of education and bilingualism on confrontation naming in rural Kashmir by creating a culturally appropriate naming test with pictures of 60 objects.We recruited 48 cognitively normal participants whose ages ranged from 18 to 28 and from 60 to 85. Participants in our study were illiterate monolinguals (� = 18) and educated Kashmiri-Urdu bilinguals (� = 30). Hierarchical multiple regression revealed that younger adults performed better than older adults (� < 0.01) and the age effect was quadratic (age²). It also showed Age X Education and Age X L2 Speaking interactions predicted naming performance.The Age X …

The Variable Effect Of Form And Lemma Frequencies On Phonetic Variation: Evidence From /S/ Realization In Two Varieties Of Colombian Spanish, Earl K. Brown, Micheal S. Gradoville, Richard J. File-Muriel

Faculty Publications

Research has shown that frequency conditions the variable realization of sounds. However, the literature has not addressed whether the frequency of the individual word forms, or form frequency, has a larger conditioning effect than the combined frequencies of the members of the paradigm to which the forms belong, or lemma frequency. Monofactorial correlation tests and monofactorial and multifactorial linear regression analyses are performed on 2,734 tokens of Spanish /s/ in sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Cali and Barranquilla, Colombia. Two findings are highlighted: (1) frequency is only significant in the variety of Spanish that has low overall rates of /s/ reduction, …

Exploring The Explanatory Power Of Semitic And Egyptian In Uto-Aztecan, Dirk Elzinga, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The factors that influence English speakers to classify a consonant as ambisyllabic are explored in 581 bisyllabic words. The /b/ in habit, for example, was considered ambisyllabic when a participant chose hab as the first part of the word and bit as the second. Geminate spelling was found to interact with social variables; older participants and more educated speakers provided more ambisyllabic responses. The influence of word-level phonotactics on syllabification was also evident. A consonant such as the medial /d/ in standard is attested as the second consonant in the coda of many English words (e.g. lard), as well …

Evaluating Lemmatization Models For Machine-Assisted Corpus-Dictionary Linkage, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Kevin Black, Eric K. Ringger, Paul Felt, Kevin Seppi, Kristian Heal

Faculty Publications

The task of corpus-dictionary linkage (CDL) is to annotate each word in a corpus with a link to an appropriate dictionary entry that documents the sense and usage of the word. Corpus-dictionary linked resources include concordances, dictionaries with word usage examples, and corpora annotated with lemmas or word senses. Such CDL resources are essential for many tasks including assisting language learners, linguistic research, philology, and translation. Lemmatization is a common approximation to automating corpus-dictionary linkage, where lemmas stand in for the headwords of an actual dictionary. In our machine-assisted CDL system design, data-driven lemmatization models provide machine assistance to human …

Earthy Concreteness And Anti-Hypotheticalism In Amazonian Quichua Discourse, Janis B. Nuckolls, Tod D, Swanson

Faculty Publications

This paper attempts to weave together a number of strands of research conducted by the authors among Amazonian Quichua-speaking people in the Napo and Pastaza provinces of eastern Ecuador. We are attempting to elucidate something that we have both observed, which we are calling an earthy concreteness in the orientation of Runa, which privileges the contextualization of utterances, thoughts, and ideas to such an extent that statements about typical behaviors and generalizations are perceived to be both morally and aesthetically objectionable. This orientation is therefore highly problematic for hypothetical questioning, which is a major tool for social scientific research. In …

Language Use In Six Study Abroad Programs: An Exploratory Analysis Of Possible Predictors, Dan Dewey, Jennifer Brown, Wendy Baker, Rob A. Martinsen, Carrie Gold, Dennis Eggett

Faculty Publications

A common predictor of language gains during study abroad (SA) is amount of language use. Yet little attention has been given to determining what factors influence the extent of language use while abroad. Studies in this area have mainly been case studies of learners in single locations. In this larger study, we seek to determine variables connected with language use by examining 118 learners studying abroad in Madrid, M´erida (Mexico), Paris, Moscow, Nanjing, or Cairo. These learners reported their second language (L2) use over a 1-week period during their stay. Significant predictors of reported L2 use include SA program, age, …

French Ideology Of English As A World Language And American Second Language Speakers, Sarah Price Wright

Honors Theses

French Ideology of English as a World Language and American Second Language Speakers compares French ideology of American English and French ideology of the American accent in French to investigate if the two correlate. The study seeks to answer the question: Is ideology linked to the speech community represented or is it linked to the language forms themselves? The study includes a literature review of previously published studies on the subjects of French ideology of English as a World Language, the competition between French and English as a lingua franca, French perceptions of second language speakers, and the American accent …

Split-Intransitivity In Swahili And Hittite: An Optimality-Theoretic Perspective, Tina M. Villa

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Much research on unaccusativity has been done over the past three-and-a-half decades since the formulation of the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978). Researchers have examined the semantics of intransitive verbs as well as their syntax to account for the classification of a verb as either unaccusative or unergative; however, for the most part, a similar conclusion across researchers has been reached that neither the semantics of the verb nor the syntactic structure is sufficient by itself to satisfy certain diagnostics of unaccusativity (Legendre and Sorace 2003). Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) argue that the syntactic classification of all verbs is semantically …

Domestication And Foreignization Strategies In Translating Sinbad Of The Arabian Nights, Safa M. Elnaili

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Over the centuries translation theories have provided strategies to help the translator overcome various linguistic and cultural obstacles that arise in any intercultural exchange between different languages and cultures. Idioms and culturally-bound expressions are among prominent translation problems, especially when the translation is between two completely different languages like Arabic and English which diverge both linguistically and culturally. The most debated translation strategies are Domestication and Foreignization. This research examines the use of these two strategies in four English translations of one of the world`s most famous cultural collections, The Arabian Nights. The study specifically investigates the use of domestication …

Digital Diagramming: Adapting A Tried And True Pedagogy To A Digital Environment, Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill

Faculty Publications

With the move away from formal grammatical instruction in many US primary and secondary schools over the past thirty years, college writing teachers often find themselves dealing with student papers riddled with basic syntactic errors. Sentence diagramming, which requires students to parse a sentence into its most basic components, provides a method to assist students in mastering syntactic fundamentals.

Old English And Old Norse: An Inquiry Into Intelligibility And Categorization Methodology, Eric Martin Gay

Theses and Dissertations

To say that the Old English and Old Norse languages have an interesting history with one another is a declaration of utter understatement. So intertwined were these languages and their people that we, some 1,000 years later, are still attempting to discern the extent of their relationship with one another. As new evidence and the reevaluation of old evidence emerges, research in the historical Germanic languages continues to paint a clearer picture. However, the study of possible Old English and Old Norse mutual intelligibility is a subject that is comparatively new within the field, and as such is still exploring …

Educating Students Who Do Not Speak The Societal Language: The Social Construction Of Language-Learner Categories, Guadalupe Valdés, Luis E. Poza, Maneka Deanna Brooks

Faculty Publications

On 21 September 2012, California Assembly Bill 2193 was approved by Governor Jerry Brown. The bill added sections to California’s Education Code defining the terms long-term English learner and English learner at risk of becoming a long-term English learner. It mandated that the Department of Education collect data on the number of students corresponding to both new categories and report those data to school districts. This specific example of the construction of categories and labels matters because it is a clear example of how coexisting discourses and language ideologies provide a set of cultural rules, conditions, practices, and power …

Norms And Varieties Of English And Tesol Teacher Agency, M. Obaidul Hamid, Lingyan Zhu, Richard B. Baldauf Jr.

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The growing recognition of the plurality of English underling the World Englishes (WE) paradigm has problematised the conventional second language acquisition (SLA) views of errors. If English use in emerging English-speaking contexts is to be judged by local norms, as argued by WE scholars, applying exocentric norms in these contexts can be inappropriate. On the other hand, despite the significant growth of WE, varieties of new Englishes have yet to develop widely acceptable endocentric norms. These developments have raised a critical question: How can TESOL teachers distinguish between errors in the SLA sense and varietal features in the WE sense? …

The Effects Of Explicit Listening Strategy Instruction On The Listening Comprehension Of English As Second Language (Esl) Community College Students, Yi Guan

Doctoral Dissertations

This mixed methods study explored the effects of explicit listening strategy instruction on the beginning-level ESL learner's listening comprehension at a community college in Northern California. Most previous studies measured the effectiveness of listening strategy instruction by comparing students' test scores, but little research explored the students' listening strategy development and their perceptions of the strategy instruction. Furthermore, no prior research exists on the effects of listening strategy instruction among community college students.

The researcher employed the concurrent triangulation approach, collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data simultaneously. Data sources included interviews, a listening test, background surveys, and classroom …

Rhetorical Ripples: The Church Of The Subgenius, Kenneth Burke & Comic, Symbolic Tinkering, Lee A. Carleton

Theses and Dissertations

Humor has long been an effective way to engage difficult sociopolitical topics in a way that avoids polemical confrontation and provides opportunity for pleasure, catharsis and self-knowledge. In the context of today’s polarized politics and protest, creative satirical performance that deploys “symbolic tinkering” can provide a “comic frame of reference” that, according to Kenneth Burke, more effectively conveys its message while providing reflexive insight. The satirical Church of the SubGenius naturally practices this rhetorical frame in their multimedia creations. Using the lens of Burke’s Attitudes Toward History, this essay is an analysis of SubGenius rhetoric with a focus on …

Hykss: Hybrid Keyword And Semantic Search, Andrew J. Zitzelberger, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Del T. Scott

Faculty Publications

Keyword search suffers from a number of issues: ambiguity, synonymy, and an inability to handle semantic constraints. Semantic search helps resolve these issues but is limited by the quality of annotations which are likely to be incomplete or imprecise. Hybrid search, a search technique that combines the merits of both keyword and semantic search, appears to be a promising solution. In this paper we describe and evaluate HyKSS, a hybrid search system driven by extraction ontologies for both annotation creation and query interpretation. For displaying results, HyKSS uses a dynamic ranking algorithm. We show that over data sets of short …

Teachers And Teacher Aides Initiating Five-Year-Olds Into Science, Anne M. Thwaite

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Apprenticing children into discourses necessary for success at school begins at a very early age. In this paper I look at five-years-olds being introduced to Science and Technology while at the same time being involved in talk around literacy. The various adults who surround the children engage differentially in talk and action while merging the discourses of literacy and science. Data for this study were obtained during the course of the project ‘Early literacy through science in Indigenous and culturally diverse communities’, funded by Edith Cowan University in Australia from 2009–2010, in which the author was involved as a researcher. …

Perception Based Misunderstandings In Human-Computer Dialogues, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Articles

In a situated dialogue, misunderstandings may arise if the participants perceive or interpret the environment in different ways. In human-computer dialogue this may be due the sensor errors. We present an experiment system and a series of experiments in which we investigate this problem.

Study Abroad: An Essential Part Of Language Acquisition, Emillie Kenne

Honors Program Theses

The present qualitative study will demonstrate and provide evidence from personal interviews that other students had similar invaluable experiences after studying abroad. Two direct quotes from these interviews portray the impact studying abroad had on them. Lisa, a participant in the present study, stated, “It is impossible to explain to someone the emotions of living in a strange place with strange people and learning to love them in such a short amount of time.” Another participant, Rachel, expressed that, “You have lived experiences nobody here can ever understand, and you made memories you can try to share with people, and …

Time, Perspectives, Verbs, And Imagining Events, Jeffrey P. Hong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

During the processing of verbs, readers form internal representations of the events described by those verbs. Two key elements in the construction of event representations are temporal information, given by the verbs that describe the represented events, and the visual perspective from which the events are represented. The current study is composed of two experiments aimed at examining the roles these two factors play in event representation. Specifically, the study aimed to determine how temporal information and visual perspective are represented during event imagination.

Experiment 1 investigated the role of temporal information associated with verbs, given by grammatical aspect (GA) …

Assessing The Validity Of Can‐Do Statements In Retrospective (Then‐Now) Self‐Assessment, N. Anthony Brown, Dan Dewey, Troy L. Cox

Faculty Publications

In this study, the authors evaluated the strengths and limitations of a self assessment based on ACTFL Can‐Do statements (ACTFL, 2013) as a tool for measuring linguistic gains over an internship abroad in Russia. They assessed its reliability, determined how its items mapped with the ACTFL scale, and measured the degree to which students’ self‐evaluations matched oral proficiency interview (OPI) test results (i.e., predictive validity). Data revealed a high level of reliability. Furthermore, self assessment items ascended in the order of difficulty expected (i.e., Superior items were the most difficult, followed by Advanced), but differences between the means for items …

On The Interaction Of Implicative Structure And Type Frequency In Inflectional Systems, Jeffery R. Parker, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

How do sources of information minimize the uncertainty associated with predicting unknown inflected forms?