Linguistics Commons^™

Hilltops And Marches: A Cultural And Semiotic Analysis Of Pepsi And Coca-Cola Advertising Strategies, Samuel Herrmann

Senior Honors Theses

The Coca-Cola Company released an advertisement in 1971 that had powerful themes of unity in a time of significant discord around the world. Almost 50 years later, the Pepsi Company released an advertisement that aimed to accomplish similar values of unity and commonality when the world seemed at odds with itself. While both advertisements sought to convey similar messages, the reception could not have been more different. Coca-Cola has experienced continued praise for their famous “Hilltop” advertisement while Pepsi was forced to take their advertisement down within 24 hours of its release. This paper utilizes semiotic theory to analyze the …

The Role Of Music In The Revitalization Of Faroese In The Faroe Islands, Rachel Manning

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This paper describes the role of music in the revitalization of the Faroese language in the Faroe Islands. It begins with an overview of the linguistic background and history of the Faroe Islands, including an account of how the Faroese people and their language were put at a disadvantage against the politically and economically dominant Norwegians and Danes. Next, the paper introduces non-musical revitalization measures, such as creating a writing system and fighting for the language to be incorporated into education and administration. After this, the paper delves into musical revitalization measures, focusing on how the deep oral and musical …

Grammatical Gender Acquisition In L2 Spanish, Alanna Quinn, Mónica Cabrera

Honors Thesis

Grammatical gender, identified as “one of the most difficult structures that non-native speakers need to acquire” (Alamry & Sabourin, 2017) does not exist in English. L1 English speakers learning L2 Spanish must acquire this new grammatical feature. This thesis investigates this acquisition.

A literature review synthesizes the findings of studies on L2 acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender, and includes an overview of the structure and function of gender within both English and Spanish, as well as a variety of L2 acquisition process hypotheses. An analysis of four introductory Spanish textbooks is offered regarding their presentation of grammatical gender. The findings …

Entgrenzung Der Arbeit Durch „Bring Your Own Device“, Leo Roth

German Journal Sprache Literatur Kultur

Abstrakt

Die ehemals klaren Grenzen zwischen den Sozialsphären „Arbeit“ und „Leben“ verschwimmen immer stärker. So kann sich heute kaum noch jemand dem Prozess der Entgrenzung entziehen, da die derzeit vorherrschenden Phänomene wie „Vermarktlichung“ und „Dezentralisierung“ sowohl eine allgemeine Entgrenzung als auch die spezifische Entgrenzung der Arbeit unaufhaltsam befördern. Nach Belwe (2007) eignen sich im Besonderen die modernen Kommunikationstechnologien dafür, „Einbrüche in den bislang durch natürliche und soziale Rhythmen klar strukturierten sozialen Alltag zu provozieren“ (Belwe, 2007, S. 2). Demnach läuft heute jedes menschliche Individuum einer modernen Gesellschaft Gefahr übergeordneten Ansprüchen aus dem Erwerbsbereich zu unterliegen.

Mit der hier vorgestellten Arbeit …

Nevertheless, She Persisted: A Linguistic Analysis Of The Speech Of Elizabeth Warren, 2007-2017, Matthew Jennings

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A breakout star among American progressives in the recent past, Elizabeth Warren has quickly gone from a law professor to a leading figure in Democratic politics. This paper analyzes Warren’s speech from before her time as a political figure to the present using the quantitative textual methodology established by Jones (2016) in order to see if Warren’s speech supports Jones’s assertion that masculine speech is the language of power. Ratios of feminine to masculine markers ultimately indicate that despite her increasing political sway, Warren’s speech becomes increasingly feminine instead. However, despite associations of feminine speech with weakness, Warren’s speech scores …

Supporting English Language Learners Inside The Mathematics Classroom: One Teacher’S Unique Perspective Working With Students During Their First Years In America, Amy Marie Fendrick

Research and Evaluation in Education, Technology, Art, and Design

Reflecting upon my personal experiences teaching mathematics to English Language Learners (ELL) in a public high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, this essay largely focuses on the time I spent as the only Accelerated Math teacher in my school building. From 2012 – 2017, I taught three different subjects at this high school: Advanced Algebra, Algebra, and Accelerated Math. This essay highlights why I chose to become a math and ELL teacher, as well as the challenges, issues, struggles, and successes I experienced during my time teaching. I focus on the challenges I faced teaching students who did not share my …

The Effect Of Idiomatic Language On Event Processing, Katrina Turick

Honors Scholar Theses

Mental representations of object states are necessary to keep track of changing objects in the world. When the object undergoes change and there are two representations, it creates competition between the object states. This is seen in sentences during which an object changes and is then subsequently referred to again (e.g. “The chef will chop the onion. And then, he will sniff the onion.”). When there is a larger degree of change between the states of the object, there is more competition, which is indicated by an increase in reading time when the object is referred to for the second …

A Comparative Tone Analysis Of Several Bantu D30 Languages (Dr Congo), Kent Rasmussen

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation presents an analysis of the tonal systems of the Bantu D30 languages. There are 34 Bantu D languages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), few of which have developed orthographies (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig 2013). These languages make use of contrastive pitch (tone), which is a source of difficulty in their analysis. I begin, therefore, with a review of literature arguing for a number of positions regarding the collection, analysis, and representation of tone data. Additionally, I describe the fundamentals of consonant-tone interaction, and some background on the Bantu D30 languages, including their genetic and geographic …

Speech Perception In “Bubble” Noise: Korean Fricatives And Affricates By Native And Non-Native Korean Listeners, Jiyoung Choi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current study examines acoustic cues used by second language learners of Korean to discriminate between Korean fricatives and affricates in noise and how these cues relate to those used by native Korean listeners. Stimuli consist of naturally-spoken consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV) syllables: /sɑdɑ/, /s*ɑdɑ/, /tʃɑdɑ/, /tʃ^hɑdɑ/, and /tʃ*ɑdɑ/. In this experiment, the “bubble noise” methodology of Mandel at al. (2016) was used to identify the time-frequency locations of important cues in each utterance, i.e., where audibility of the location is significantly correlated with correct identification of the utterance in noise. Results show that non-native Korean listeners can discriminate between …

Speaking Sober: Program Language As A Mechanism For Community Creation In Alcoholics Anonymous, Talya Wolf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) is a fellowship of more than two million members in 180 countries worldwide who are joined by their common desire to achieve and maintain sobriety. A.A. is comprised of small, self-sustaining groups of individuals who meet, typically weekly or biweekly, to share their successes and struggles and to provide support to their fellow alcoholics. There are no dues or requirements for membership other than the wish to stop drinking. The organization is not evangelical; it does not recruit, but rather welcomes those who wish to participate. The open nature of this program attracts individuals of all ages, …

Describing Doggo-Speak: Features Of Doggo Meme Language, Jennifer Bivens

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Doggo-speak is a specialized way of writing most commonly associated with captions on Doggo memes, humorous images of dogs shared in online communities. This paper will explore linguistic features of Doggo-speak through analysis of social media posts by Doggo fan pages. It will use the discussed features as inputs to five machine learning classifiers and will show, through this classification task, that the discussed features are sufficient for distinguishing between Doggo-speak and more general English text.

Intergroup Variability In Personality Recognition, Arundhati Sengupta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Automatic Identification of personality in conversational speech has many applications in natural language processing such as leader identification in a meeting, adaptive dialogue systems, and dating websites. However, the widespread acceptance of automatic personality recognition through lexical and vocal characteristics is limited by the variability of error rate in a general purpose model among speakers from different demographic groups. While other work reports accuracy, we explored error rates of automatic personality recognition task using classification models for different genders and native language groups (L1). We also present a statistical experiment showing the influence of gender and L1 on the relation …

Multimodal Depression Detection: An Investigation Of Features And Fusion Techniques For Automated Systems, Michelle Renee Morales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Depression is a serious illness that affects a large portion of the world’s population. Given the large effect it has on society, it is evident that depression is a serious health issue. This thesis evaluates, at length, how technology may aid in assessing depression. We present an in-depth investigation of features and fusion techniques for depression detection systems. We also present OpenMM: a novel tool for multimodal feature extraction. Lastly, we present novel techniques for multimodal fusion. The contributions of this work add considerably to our knowledge of depression detection systems and have the potential to improve future systems by …

Applying The Developmental Path Of English Negation To The Automated Scoring Of Learner Essays, Allen Travis Moore

Theses and Dissertations

The resources required to have humans score extended written response items in English language learner (ELL) contexts has caused automated essay scoring (AES) to emerge as a desired alternative. However, these systems often rely heavily on indirect proxies of writing quality such as word, sentence, and essay lengths because of their strong correlation to scores (Vajjala, 2017). This has led to concern about the validity of the features used to establish the predictive accuracy of AES systems (Attali, 2007; Weigle, 2013). Reliance on construct-irrelevant features in ELL contexts also forfeits the opportunity to provide meaningful diagnostic feedback to test-takers or …

Teachers’ Response To Infants’ Nonverbal Communication And Use Of Response To Facilitate A Dialogue, Stephanie Stephens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Beginning with birth, typically developing children use strategies to communicate, and the functions of their language change with maturation and interaction. Since communication cannot exist if both parties do not participate, it is important to not only study the ability of the child, but also the behavior of the adult. Numerous studies have examined the behavior of the parent or other domestic adult, but few have included the study of teacher behaviors.

This study investigated teachers’ response to four types of nonverbal communication attempts made by infants. The gestures included: deictic, affect signaling, object-related, and conventional. The type of response …

The Pragmatic Strategy Of Main-Clause Omission In Japanese: Its Contrast With Hebrew, And Its Learnability, Maayan Barkan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Typically, linguists study things that people actually say, but this dissertation focuses on what people do NOT say; specifically, it deals with main-clause omission. This paper presents an empirical study on main-clause omission constraints in Japanese after the concessive particle ga (‘although’/’but’), the first known controlled experiment of its kind in the literature. It investigates, from a pragmatic and discourse-analytic perspective, intuitive judgments regarding the allowance of main-clause omission in Japanese, in an attempt to reveal whether Japanese Native Speakers (JNS) use main-clause omission as a pragmatic strategy, as is suggested in the literature. If they do, then what triggers …

Purepecha Aspirated Consonants And Their Phonetic Variants, Lluvia Camacho Cervantes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study describes phonetic realizations of aspirated phonemes in Purepecha [pua] from Azajo. The distribution of aspiration in Purepecha is limited to roots, a small number of spatial suffixes, one argument structure changing suffix, and clitics. Aspiration is never contrastive for inflexional suffixes, which occur in word final position. There are three basic allophones of aspirated segments: (i) post-aspirated; (ii) unaspirated, (iii) pre-aspirated, with pre-aspiration showing 4 distinct phonetic forms, depending on dialect, and phonetic context. Strengthening of pre-aspiration has been documented in the Lake and Sierra dialects as well as vowel lengthening in the Lake dialect. In Azajo Purepecha …

Worlds With Words: Discourse And Frame Analysis Of Performance Storytelling, Chelise Fox

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I explore how performance storytellers create intense focus on imaginal realities through language—a phenomenon sometimes called “transport” or “realm-shift.” To this end, recordings of performances by two professional storytellers were transcribed and examined through the lens of frame theory and discourse analysis. Examination of these transcripts shows that storytellers employ clusters of linguistic involvement strategies around frame transitions, facilitating realm-shift. Additionally, it shows that throughout a telling, tellers shape discourse around frame shifts that draw attention to significant elements, particularly those that establish a story’s relevance to the occasion of its telling and those that contribute to …

Perspectives From The Streets And The Classrooms In The Same 'Hood: Linguistic Landscapes Of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Luis Guzman Valerio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the linguistic landscape of the neighborhood of Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, New York by taking into account both a main commercial avenue and a public school with a dual language bilingual program in English and Spanish. Sunset Park is a multi-ethnic and immigrant neighborhood (Hum, 2014). While research has been done into the linguistic landscape of streets, cities, and communities, on the one hand, and about the linguistic landscape in education, on the other, the co-existence of these two in the same context has barely been studied (cf. Maldonado, 2015). This dissertation makes a contribution to the …

English Influence On L2 Speakers’ Production Of Palatalization And Velarization, Jennifer C. Gabriele

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Irish is a Celtic language spoken in Ireland. It is currently endangered with only 73,803 people using the language on a daily basis as of 2016 (Official Office of Statistics, 2016). The reason for the decline is that English is the dominate language, pushing Irish to the periphery. Revitalization efforts have been put into place in an attempt to revitalize the language. There has been a growth in L2 speakers of Irish. The position of English as the dominate language, and high amounts of L2 speakers creates an environment where English is likely to influence the Irish language. The purpose …

The Social Perception Of Three Features Of New York City English, Giacomo Castronovo Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the late 19^th Century, the accent particular to New Yorker City natives of European descent has been negatively perceived by both the American general public and the speakers themselves. The stereotypification of New York City English speakers has largely been the cause of this negative evaluation, in that the features of the accent, as well as the unique New York discourse style, have long been utilized by actors and comedians to create characters of uneducated, uncultured provenance, as well as, all too often, unscrupulous behavior. Thus, the features of European-American New York City English appear to be inextricably …

Context Of Learning And Second Language Development Of Spanish Vowels, Avizia Long, Megan Solon, Silvina Bongiovanni

Faculty Publications

The present study explored development in Spanish vowel production during a short-term study abroad program. The production patterns of a group of learners studying abroad in a 4-week program in the Dominican Republic were compared in terms of overall vowel quality, tendency to diphthongize /e/ and /o/, and vowel duration to those of a similar group of learners studying in the at-home context. Results revealed no significant changes or differences between groups in vowel quality or diphthongization, but a significant improvement (i.e., reduction) in vowel duration for /a/, /o/, and /u/ for the at-home group only. Findings are discussed in …

Konsep Lanskap Linguistik Pada Papan Nama Jalan Kerajaan (Râjamârga): Studi Kasus Kota Yogyakarta, Fajar Erikha

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Linguistic landscape (LL) refers to a set of linguistic objects which signifies a public space (Ben-Rafael, Shohamy et al., 2006). This concept encompasses a number of topics such as social, political, cultural, and economic ones. Using the concept of LL, the author examined the names of the main streets (râjamârga) around the Yogyakarta Palace in terms of their function as the identifiers of place names (informational function) and as carriers of certain messages (symbolic function). In order to generate comprehensive results, the author used qualitative approach through the analysis of visual data (photographs) of street name plates. The findings reveal …

Akulturasi Dalam Turisme Di Hindia Belanda, R Achmad Sunjayadi

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

As a form of cultural process, acculturation serves as an important factor in tourism. Usually, the hosts borrow the results of acculturation generated from tourism activities more than the tourists or guests do. Acculturation in tourism occurs not only in tourism practices today, but also in those in the past, including the tourism practices in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial era. This article discusses acculturation which became part of tourism activities in the Dutch East Indies by applying historical methods and Nunez’s concept of acculturation in tourism. By using guidebooks, newspapers, magazines, postcards, photographs, and travelogues as data sources, this …

Nusantara Interaction The Case Of Joget As A Trans-Cultural Entertainment, Julianti Parani

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

The focus of discussion in this paper is joget as a dance which embodies the concept of Nusantara (Indonesian archipelago), which has undergone much development from the past to the present. Beginning as an entertaining social dance in various Southeast Asian countries, joget became a customary form of entertainment in the whole context of Nusantara as a region. Surprisingly, it has also inspired new genres and types of traditional dances for centuries. Around 1920s to 1930s, it was the most popular form of dance in many halls of entertainment in Indonesia, Singapore, and the Malay Peninsula. Joget was the most …

Raga Kayu, Jiwa Manusia: Wayang Golek Sunda, Dwi Woro Retno Mastuti

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

No abstract provided.

Efek Narasi Cagar Budaya Pada Intensi Dan Kebanggaan Remaja Akan Majapahit Dan Indonesia, Agi Ginanjar

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This paper discusses the dissemination of information about cultural heritage to the young generation, particularly about the kingdom of Majapahit whose ancient sites are situated in Trowulan, East Java, Indonesia. In the context of public archaeology, heritage information is no longer communicated to the public in mind-numbing ways; instead, it is presented in such a way as to increase positive attitude and behavior toward the cultural heritage. In the context of marketing communication, the dissemination of information which is in accordance with the consumers’ or visitors’ tastes can no longer be performed by presenting raw facts only, but by presenting …

Perempuan Atau Wanita? Perbandingan Berbasis Korpus Tentang Leksikon Berbias Gender, Susi Yuliawati

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Amidst the debates over the most appropriate Indonesian term for ‘woman’, the present research examines the use of the gendered terms perempuan and wanita. The aim of this research is to reveal which term is more preferable and how the terms are used to talk about women. Using corpus-based approach, this study compared the frequency and pattern of word usage of perempuan and wanita obtained from two corpora, namely IndonesianWac and ind_mixed_2013. The research used a mixed-method design in which quantitative analysis was used to identify word frequency and to measure significant collocation, while qualitative analysis was used to determine …

Penerjemahan Kata Budaya Dari Novel Entrok (2010) Ke Dalam The Years Of The Voiceless (2013), Dewi Khairiah

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This research on translation problems aims to examine the translation of cultural words in the novel Entrok (2010) into The Years of the Voiceless (2013). This research was conducted by applying qualitative and functional approaches, while the data were analyzed by applying Williams and Chesterman’s causal comparative model to identify the translation procedures which were applied to fulfill the available skopos. Based on Newmark’s categorization of cultural words, the researcher identified 80 cultural words which were categorized into three general groups: (1) material culture; (2) social culture and leisure; and (3) organization, customs, procedure, activity, and concept. The data were …

Abroad Perspective: Conceptualizing The Relationship Between Language And Identity, Rita Louise Ewing

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

In the field of migration studies, research on transnationalism has been well established. By applying an intersectional framework of post-colonial narrative and sociolinguistics to research on transnational migration, this research allows us to better understand how the transnational immigrant deploys language. Through a nostalgia studies approach, this study is able to analyze how transnational immigrants place value on their heritage and second languages, and reflexively deploy their language sets to reflect their unique positionality. This paper is a case study examination of five adult members of the 1.5-Generation of Filipino American immigrants, who immigrated to the U.S. before the age …