Linguistics Commons^™

Community Connections: Digital Literacy Acquisition Policy Brief, Gloria Jacobs, Jill Castek, Drew Pizzolato, Kimberly D. Pendell, Elizabeth Withers, Stephen Reder

Research Briefs and Case Studies

This case study describes how the digital literacy acquisition program in a rural community was sustained through formal and informal connections across a variety of organizations and community institutions. The case study describes the setting, the details of how tutor facilitated, self paced learning was organized, and the various ways connections were made across organizations. Five types of connections are identified: formal top-level partnerships, local connections, library/workforce partnership, school/workforce connections, informal community connections, and lab coordinator/tutor/learner connections. Implications for these findings include how policy makers and other key stakeholders may benefit from recognizing and building on the ways people in …

Corrections And Reentry: Digital Literacy Acquisition Case Study, Elizabeth Withers, Gloria Jacobs, Jill Castek, Drew Pizzolato, Kimberly D. Pendell, Stephen Reder

Research Briefs and Case Studies

This case study investigates the digital literacy acquisition process for learners within a corrections setting. The digital literacy program was part of the reentry program available to some individuals approaching their release date. The case study describes the lab within a prison, and details of how mentor-facilitated, self-paced learning was organized. Examination of the learner path in a corrections setting highlights how learners perceived the relevance of digital literacy in their lives; how they overcame their fears of computers or technology and their self-confidence grew; and potential changes in their self-identity, which often led to imagining new and different possible …

Student Interactions During Study Abroad In Jordan, Dan P. Dewey, Jennifer Brown, R. Kirk Belnap

Faculty Publications

For many years, researchers have assumed that studying abroad produces “fluent” speakers of a given language. However, in the past several decades, researchers have recognized that learners do not always avail themselves of opportunities to interact in the target language, and even when they do, success is not guaranteed. Scholars have begun to recognize that the quality of learners’ interactions during study abroad may be more important for ultimate language gains than the quantity of language use. This qualitative study documents the interactions of 82 students of Arabic studying in Amman, Jordan, as well as the factors that influenced the …

The Effects Of A New Method Of Instruction On The Perceptions Of Appalachian English, Michelle L. Compton

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This paper evaluates whether students’ perceptions of Appalachian English improve through a method of instruction that uses dialect literature in the classroom. Most existing methods of instruction tend to portray dialects as wrong, incorrect, or in some way less rule-governed than Standardized English, despite the numerous studies that have demonstrated otherwise (e.g., Labov 1969, Wolfram 1986). The data from this study derives from two groups of students enrolled in introductory composition and communication at the University of Kentucky. Each group is given a pre-test to determine attitudes toward Appalachian English and Standardized English. An experimental group is then exposed to …

The Shawnee Alignment System: Applying Paradigm Function Morphology To Lexical-Functional Grammar's M-Structure, Nathan Hardymon

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Shawnee is a language whose alignment system is of the type first proposed by Nichols (1992) and Siewierska (1998): hierarchical alignment. This alignment system was proposed to account for languages where distinctions between agent (A) and object (O) are not formally manifested. Such is the case in Shawnee; there are person-marking inflections on the verb for both A and O, but there is not set order. Instead, Shawnee makes reference to an animacy hierarchy and is an inverse system. This thesis explores how hierarchical alignment is accounted for by Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), and also applies Paradigm Function Morphology to …

Urdu Resultive Constructions (A Comparative Analysis Of Syntacto-Semantic And Pragmatic Properties Of The Compound Verbs In Hindi-Urdu)‎, Razia A. Husain

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Among Urdu’s many verb+verb constructions, this thesis focuses on those constructions, which combine the stem of a main content verb with another inflected verb which is used in a semantically bleached sense. Prior work on these constructions has been focused on their structural make-up and syntactic behavior in various environments. While there is consensus among scholars (Butt 1995, Hook 1977, Carnikova 1989, Porizka 2000 et al.) that these stem+verb constructions encode aspectual information, to date no clear theory has been put forward to explain the nature of their aspectual contribution. In short, we do not have a clear idea why …

Perceptual Dialectology Of New England: Views From Maine And The Web, Benjamin Graham Jones

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Research into the dialects of the New England states (Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont) has traditionally split the region into distinct geographic regions based upon variations in production, primarily along an East-West border. Generally, such regions have been considered relatively stable in terms of their variation (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006); however, recent work in the area has found that the traditional dialect boundaries have begun to shift (c.f. Stanford, Leddy-Cecere and Baclawski 2012). Such research has focused on very specific regional changes in production, ignoring the perceptual salience of the features observed to be in …

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

Program Design: The Learner Path, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Kimberly D. Pendell, Drew Pizzolato, Stephen Reder, Elizabeth Withers

Research Briefs and Case Studies

The Learner Path Brief describes the steps learners took as they acquired digital literacy, including key moments of transition. Tutors supported learners on the road to becoming independent, confident technology users. The Research Briefs series highlight key findings about how underserved adults acquire digital literacy skills, and include quotes from participants and practitioners. The Briefs are designed to be accessible by practitioners, program administrators, and policy makers to inform and enhance digital literacy programs.

Job Seeking Learners: Digital Literacy Acquisition Case Study, Elizabeth Withers, Gloria Jacobs, Drew Pizzolato, Jill Castek, Kimberly D. Pendell, Stephen Reder

Research Briefs and Case Studies

This case study investigates the experience of digital literacy acquisition among adult job seekers, offering an overview of the various lab settings accessed by job-seeking learners, as well as the different ways that tutor-facilitated, self-paced learning was organized. Examination of the learner path as experienced by job seekers reveals the challenge for learners of seeing the relevance of digital literacy acquisition when faced with the urgent need of having to find employment. Also discussed in the case study are the significant impact of the relationships that developed between learners and tutors, the role that tutors play in building relevance for …

Mississippi Asl Project, James Corey Blount

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

American Sign Language (ASL) is a manual language used by many deaf people in the United States and Canada. For much of its existence, ASL was believed to be a system of rudimentary gestures and signs based on the English language. However, studies that analyzed the linguistic properties of this signed ‘mode’ (Stokoe, 1960) legitimized that it was a language independent of spoken language, with its own system of principles and elements to construct meaningful utterances. Like any language, ASL is influenced by the social demographics of its users. Social demographics such as ethnicity, geographic location, age, gender, and socioeconomic …

Stories From The Old West End Of Boston: An Analysis Of Evaluative Devices In Oral Narrative, Melanie N. Platt

Honors Theses and Capstones

The following presents an overview of various evaluative devices found in a series of oral narratives from former residents of the West End of Boston, Massachusetts. In working with an archivist at the West End Museum, I was able to read through interviews, each conducted with residents that were displaced from the West End after the urban renewal project of the late 1950s. These interviews were recorded for the purpose of collecting each resident’s experience growing up in the neighborhood. After reading through each interview I found several instances of narrative speech. I conducted a narrative analysis, based on Labov …

Hip-Hop Rhymes Reiterate Phonological Typology, Jonah Katz

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Language Processing And The Artificial Mind: Teaching Code Literacy In The Humanities, Jerry Scott Weltman

LSU Master's Theses

Humanities majors often find themselves in jobs where they either manage programmers or work with them in close collaboration. These interactions often pose difficulties because specialists in literature, history, philosophy, and so on are not usually "code literate." They do not understand what tasks computers are best suited to, or how programmers solve problems. Learning code literacy would be a great benefit to humanities majors, but the traditional computer science curriculum is heavily math oriented, and students outside of science and technology majors are often math averse. Yet they are often interested in language, linguistics, and science fiction. This thesis …

I Accidentally This Thesis Because East: The Influence Of The Internet On Spoken Language In Eastspeak, Emma S. Manning

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the variety of English spoken in East Dorm at Harvey Mudd College. It describes aspects of the syntax and phonology of Eastspeak, focusing in particular on how Eastspeak has been influenced by the language of the internet. This includes tendencies toward brevity and language play, as well as the use of specific constructions used on the internet, and playful pronunciations that are influenced by creative misspellings used online. Specific Eastspeak phenomena discussed include conversion, deletion, and unusual determiner and quantifier use.

Investigating English Teachers' Perceptions Of Intercultural Communicative Competence In The Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Hazem Ahmed Osman

Doctoral Dissertations

This mixed-method study examines the perceptions of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) by English teachers in the Preparatory Year (PY) program at King Saudi University. Studies that aim to investigate teachers’ perception of ICC and its implementation in a foreign language classroom are relatively scarce. Additionally, the majority of the studies that generally targeted the concept of ICC in a foreign-language learning context were studies that either relied on online blogs, discussion forums, and chat rooms to allow students to communicate cross-culturally, or examined ICC development during sojourns or study abroad periods in the target country. Relatively fewer studies have addressed …

Classifying Idiomatic And Literal Expressions Using Vector Space Representations, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman, Hamza Jazmati

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We describe an algorithm for automatic classification of idiomatic and literal expressions. Our starting point is that idioms and literal expressions occur in different contexts. Idioms tend to violate cohesive ties in local contexts, while literals are expected to fit in. Our goal is to capture this intuition using a vector representation of words. We propose two approaches: (1) Compute inner product of context word vectors with the vector representing a target expression. Since literal vectors predict well local contexts, their inner product with contexts should be larger than idiomatic ones, thereby telling apart literals from idioms; and (2) Compute …

The Competency Pivot: Introducing A Revised Approach To The Business Communication Curriculum, Jacob D. Rawlins, Kristen Lucas

Faculty Publications

In this article, we outline a competency-based approach to teaching business communication. At the heart of this approach, classroom instruction, assignments, and evaluation center on a goals-oriented and receiver-centric understanding of communication in which students are taught strategies for meeting five core competencies of business communication: professional, clear, concise, evidence driven, and persuasive. This is not a reinvention of the curriculum but instead a pivot that positions existing disciplinary knowledge and best practices into a clear, memorable, and professionally oriented framework to help students build critical communication skills that can be applied strategically across a range of business situations.

Death, Maintenance And Revitalization Of The Quechua Language In Peru: A Case Study With A Focus On San Pedro De Cajas, Madeline Fumi

Honors Theses

I would like to express my gratitude to several individuals who continuously supported me throughout the process of my thesis research and writing. I am very grateful to my advisor, Dr. Maria Fionda, whose constructive criticism helped challenge and develop my critical thinking and writing skills. A special thanks goes to my second reader, Dr. William Schenck, and my third reader, Dr. Felice Coles, who gave me useful feedback regarding how to incorporate my qualitative findings in my thesis to support my main arguments. I would also like to thank Maria Teresa Alvarado for her help with numerous Spanish translations …

Epistemic Modal Disagreement, Jonah Katz

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

At the center of the debate between contextualist versus relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims is an empirical question about when competent subjects judge the presence of epistemic modal disagreement. John MacFarlane’s relativist claims that we judge there to be epistemic modal disagreement across the widest range of cases. We wish to dispute the robustness of his data with the results of two studies. Our primary conclusion is that the actual disagreement data is not consistent with relativist predictions, and so, that the primary motivation for relativism disappears. Our study differs from a related study by Knobe and Yalcin (2014) …

An Attentional Effect Of Musical Metrical Structure, Jonah Katz

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Theories of metrical structure postulate the existence of several degrees of beat strength. While previous work has clearly established that humans are sensitive to the distinction between strong beats and weak ones, there is little evidence for a more fine grained distinction between intermediate levels. Here, we present experimental data showing that attention can be allocated to an intermediate level of beat strength. Comparing the effects of short exposures to 6/8 and 3/4 metrical structures on a tone detection task, we observe that subjects respond differently to beats of intermediate strength than to weak beats.

The Relationship Between English Language Learners And Reading Disabilities Profiles: Language Acquisition Vs. Reading Disabilities, Emily S. Hartz

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

School psychologists are asked to determine whether or not a student’s limited English proficiency affects his or her eligibly for special education services. Scores from language proficiency tests, such as the WIDA ACCESS for ELLs English Language Proficiency Test, are often the only data available that speak to a student’s language proficiency. There is little research that speaks to how scores on these tests relate to performance on diagnostic testing for special education, specifically achievement testing. In this sample of data drawn from a population of English language learners, who also qualify for special education services under the disability of …

Ontology-Based Information Extraction With A Cognitive Agent, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David W. Embley, Peter Lindes

Faculty Publications

Machine reading is a relatively new field that features computer programs designed to read flowing text and extract fact assertions expressed by the narrative content. This task involves two core technologies: natural language processing (NLP) and information extraction (IE). In this paper we describe a machine reading system that we have developed within a cognitive architecture. We show how we have integrated into the framework several levels of knowledge for a particular domain, ideas from cognitive semantics and construction grammar, plus tools from prior NLP and IE research. The result is a system that is capable of reading and interpreting …

Use And Perception Of Taboo Language In College-Age Females, Kathleen M. Uhlman

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Being Japanese In English: The Social And Functional Role Of English Loanwords In Japanese, Shalina Omar

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates native speaker attitudes towards English loanwords in Japanese and the ways in which these loanwords are used. The imperialism and hegemony of English can often cause anger or worry for the preservation of the cultural identity of the borrowing language. However, the results from a 9-page sociolinguistic questionnaire suggest that English loanwords are overwhelmingly seen as useful and necessary and are generally associated with positive attitudes. Additionally, many native Japanese speakers feel that loanwords provide more options for expression, both functionally and as a possible pragmatic tool for performing Japaneseness. On the other hand, overuse of loanwords—especially …

Overcoming Gender: The Impact Of The Persian Language On Iranian Women’S Confessional Literature, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

[From the Introduction] The idea that language embodies patriarchal thought processes, severing women writers from the written language and from their own words, was first elaborated by the French feminist theorists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Irigaray argues, for example, that language generally denies women a distinct subjectivity, with the result that the voice of women has largely been excluded from mainstream cultural discourse (Donovan). In this chapter, I juxtapose this theory to the obstacles faced by Iranian women writers of life narratives. Is it possible that Persian could have impeded Iranian women’s literary aspirations, especially in the genre of …

The Impact Of Accented English On Speech Comprehension, Benigno Valles

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

In the context of shifting demographics in the United States and with an increasing multicultural workforce, the verbal exchange of information is vital especially between health care providers and patients. Although English is the official language in the United States, many individuals from different national origins speak English with some degree of accent. Before we can address health care provider/patient communication, it is necessary to investigate the potential impact of accented English on speech comprehension and its implications on basic communicative interactions. The verbal exchange of information between health care providers and patients is important in diagnostics, treatment, patient …

Arabic Pro-Drop, Mansour Ibrahim Altamimi

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to analyze pro-drop in Arabic in terms of its syntactic properties and the nature of its optionality in discourse. The paper begins with a comprehensive review of five syntactic properties assumed to be universal to pro-drop languages, and discusses the status of each in both Standard Arabic and the Saudi Najdi dialect--the latter having seen little previous research in this area. The conclusion is that Najdi is very nearly syntactically identical to Standard Arabic with regard to the null subject parameter. The topic then shifts to discourse, and what factors may trigger pro-drop usage. …

Variabilidad Lingüística En Las Lenguas De Especialidad, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

El presente trabajo revisa desde un punto de vista teórico algunos de los aspectos fundamentales en los que se ha manifestado la variabilidad dentro de las lenguas de especialidad: desde la misma nomenclatura de este enfoque, pasando por la metodología empleada a lo largo de su evolución, las características de la lengua de especialidad o la variabilidad entre los géneros de las distintas disciplinas dentro del ámbito profesional y académico. La armonía con la que se viene integrando esta variabilidad en las distintas etapas de este enfoque desde hace más de un siglo, hace presagiar un avance al mismo tiempo …

The Influence Of Interventions On Reading Comprehension In A Second And Foreign Language, Anna Velezheva

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reading comprehension is one of the crucial skills for the students enrolled or planning to enroll in language learning courses at North American universities. In order to be able to read academic texts, the students need to develop strong comprehension skills. The present study plays an important role in the field of second/foreign language (L2/FL) acquisition due to its attempt to investigate those classroom practices that can foster reading comprehension among international students learning English as a second language and American students learning German as a foreign language. The present study analyzes the influence of two interventions on reading comprehension …