Linguistics Commons^™

Menyoal Rajah Dan Pasaduan Dalam Struktur Teks Carita Pantun Baduy, Endin Saparudin, Atiqotul Fitriyah, M. Yoesoef, Fitria Sis Nariswari, Alfian Siagian

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This article explores the text structure of Kanekes (Baduy) carita pantun, focusing on the presence of rajah, previously understood as the beginning and end of the text (functioning as 'prayers and supplications' to the ancestors). Through analysis of documentation from J.J. Meijer (1891), Wim van Zanten (1977), as well as recent fieldwork (2022-2023), it was found that the rajah was not always in this position. This research uses an ethnographic approach and was conducted in August-October 2022 and September-October 2023 in Kanekes, Leuwidamar, Banten. Nine informants who work as pemantun and responders were recruited. Data were obtained through interview and …

Sikap Bahasa Pembaca Tanda Terhadap Bahasa Jepang Dalam Lanskap Linguistik Little Tokyo Blok M, Abdurrahman Syahid

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

The use of a language in a linguistic landscape outside its native environment tends to evoke attitudinal stances among individuals in the society. This phenomenon can be observed across Little Tokyo Blok M, Jakarta where Japanese language is widely used on restaurant signs. This master thesis discusses the language attitude of sign readers toward the utilization of Japanese in the area to identify the emerged language attitude and to explain the influencing factors. The study is conducted in mixed methods. The quantitative method (societal treatment approach) examines the statistics of language signs found in Japanese restaurant in regards to their …

Sinkretisme Dalam Tradisi Ziarah Keramat Di Banten, Gita Safitri

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This review will analyze a book entitled Sinkretisme dalam Tradisi Ziarah Keramat di Banten by Helmy Faizi Bahrul Ulumi which reflects the richness of local culture in the Banten region, especially on relic sites that become pilgrimage destinations for the community. The popularity of the sacredness of sacred places is an attraction that not only has spiritual value but also sacredness becomes an important point as an inherent local belief. This review will evaluate the depiction of syncretism in pilgrimage practices to the construction of its meaning.

Kongsi Kematian Dan Perubahan Ritual Prosesi Kematian Tionghoa Di Padang, Eniwati Erniwati, Yelda Syafrina, Zulfa Saumia

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This article discusses the changes in the implementation of death rituals organized by ethnic Chinese in Padang city. Documents in the form of photos and bylaws of the death ritual procession, an interview, and observations at the funeral home, crematorium of the Chinese socio-cultural and funeral association Himpunan Tjinta Teman (HTT), Himpunan Bersatu Teguh (HBT), and the Chinese cemetery complex in Bukit Sin Tiong and TPU Bungus Teluk Kabung are the sources of this article. The article's findings show that the performance of death procession rituals is an important part that marks the identity of the deceased and the family …

Seeking Common Ground With A Conversational Chatbot, Judit Dombi, Tetyana Sydorenko, Veronika Timpe-Laughlin

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Conversational AI is advancing rapidly, enabling significant improvements in chatbots’ conversational abilities. Currently, available conversational chatbots (e.g., Snapchat’s MyAI) appear to generate fairly realistic, often human-like output. As collaboration between humans and machines becomes more common, and AI systems are increasingly viewed as more than just tools, understanding human communication in such contexts is crucial. Despite the vast array of applications and the increasing number of human-bot interactions, research on how humans interact with conversational chatbots is scarce. One possible reason for this gap is that studying human-computer communication may require adaptations of existing pragmatic frameworks, due to the unique …

It’S Hella Cool: Investigating The Properties Of Hella, Lydia Lee

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

Hella is known as a strongly characteristic feature of Northern California, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area (Waksler 2000, Boboc 2016). Based on data collected from public Twitter posts from 2013–2020 and examples drawn from Boboc (2016) and Waksler (2000), this paper investigates the origin, syntactic properties, and sociolinguistic aspects of hella. This study also draws on 1,389 responses to sentences (1)–(3), adapted from Boboc (2016), which were included in the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project’s survey work conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk in 2019.

1. This seat reclines hella!
   ‘This seat reclines a lot.’
2. I spoke Spanish today for the …

How Childhood Maltreatment Shapes Brain Regions: Considerations For Speech-Language Pathology, Alexa G. Sees

Honors Thesis

Childhood maltreatment is a pervasive issue that affects millions of children worldwide, leading to alterations in key structures such as the limbic system, basal ganglia, corpus callosum, visual cortex, and language areas. These changes result in significant cognitive, emotional, and neurological consequences, such as learning deficits, emotional regulation issues, memory problems, reduced vocabulary size, speech errors, etc. This thesis explores the neurological effects of childhood maltreatment and their implications for speech-language pathology, highlighting how maltreatment-induced brain changes affect areas within the scope of speech-language pathology, such as social communication, language development, and behavior management. These results underscore the importance of …

Uncovering Language Bias Towards Written Language Use Among Bilinguals And Individuals With Disabilities, Mu'nis Maen Nazzal

Linguistics ETDs

Language is a fundamental tool of social control. Linguistic bias plays a crucial role in social hierarchies and opportunities. While research has extensively documented linguistic bias in spoken language, less attention has been given to bias in written language. This study investigates students' evaluations of three instructors’ writings: a bilingual, an instructor with a disability, and a monolingual. The study employs a matched-guise technique to explore potential biases in students' perceptions of preference, leadership skills, expertise, and professionalism.

The Friedman Test revealed that while participants showed a preference for the instructor with a disability over the bilingual instructor and the …

Feature Typology And L2 Proficiency Matter: L3 Acquisition Of Portuguese, Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva, Danielle Fahey

Faculty Publications

To determine the source of transfer in third language acquisition (L3A), we tested the effects of grammatical feature typology and L2 Spanish proficiency on the comprehension and production of grammatical [gender] and [number] in the early stages of L3A of Portuguese. We distinguish between the two features based on their participation in the lexical-conceptual structure of the lemma and its interaction with the morpho-syntactic derivation. L1 English speakers were tested on their knowledge of the features in both their L2 and their L3 through a grammaticality judgment task and an elicited production task. Results show that L3 learners transfer only …

Iconicity As An Organizing Principle Of The Lexicon, Erin E. Campbell, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Elana Pontecorvo, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, Karen Emmorey, Naomi Caselli

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

The view that words are arbitrary is a foundational assumption about language, used to set human languages apart from nonhuman communication. We present here a study of the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure (systematicity) of American Sign Language (ASL), and for comparison, two spoken languages—English and Spanish. Across all three languages, words that are semantically related are more likely to be phonologically related, highlighting systematic alignment between word form and word meaning. Critically, there is a significant effect of iconicity (a perceived physical resemblance between word form and word meaning) on this alignment: words are most likely to …

Translating Political Cartoons: The Fight For Peace In Central America, Eden Ward

Student Research Symposium

In 1987, the Esquipulas II treaty was established by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. Political cartoonists celebrated the peace it was trying to establish in a variety of different fashions. An olive branch, a suitcase, a white dove and a bag of teddy bears all represent peace in these cartoons.

Critical Language Awareness For Spanish-English Bilingual 5th Graders, Mary Hudgens Henderson

Journal of Multilingual Education Research

Critical Language Awareness (CLA) instruction can and should be a part of K-12 education. This study reports on a CLA unit taught to Spanish-English bilingual 5^th graders enrolled in a dual language bilingual classroom in the southwest U.S. Scores from a pretest and three posttests administered throughout the school year were compared to peer bilingual and monolingual 5^th graders in an English-only classroom who did not participate in CLA instruction. A Mixed ANOVA repeated measures analysis found that bilingual students in the dual language bilingual classroom had high levels of CLA knowledge both before and after participating in …

The Role Of Capital On Literacy And Second Language Acquisition: A Cross-National Comparative Study, Brenda Koumondji

INSPIRE Student Research and Engagement Conference

Key Context:

• Globalization has increased the demand for multilingual skills.
• Yet, language learning opportunities vary based on national education policies and socioeconomic factors.
• Language learning opportunities are shaped by social structures and vary based on economic,social, and cultural capital (ESC) (Bourdieu, 1986).

Second Language Benefits

• Economic (Brown & Lauder, 1991; Foreman-Peck & Wang, 2014)
• Cognitive and Psychological (Bialystok, 2011; Dewaele & Wei, 2012; Graham, 2017)
• Social and Cultural (Marboua et al., 2024)

Research Focus:

• Cross-national comparison of South Korea, Norway, Chile, and the U.S.

From Adversarial Attacks To Robust Classifiers - A Study In Social Media Spam Detection - Black Box & White Box, Jonathan Jose Penaloza Rumie

Undergraduate Theses

Adversarial attacks pose a significant threat to the reliability of machine learning-based spam detection systems in social media. This undergraduate thesis, "From Adversarial Attacks to Robust Classifiers: A Study in Social Media Spam Detection – Black Box & White Box," systematically examines the impact of both black-box and white-box adversarial attacks on a range of spam classifiers, including Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forests, K-Nearest Neighbors, Bagging, Gradient Boosting, and Support Vector Machines. Leveraging a novel dataset derived from Twitter spam messages and enhanced with adversarial perturbations such as synonym replacement and character-level modifications, this study evaluates classifier performance under …

Using Sound Change To Study Phonological Representations: The Case Of American English Diphthongs, Eitan Price

Lawrence University Honors Projects

The question of diphthong phonematicity —do diphthongs consist of two monophthongs in one nucleus, or a single, dynamic vowel phoneme —is an important question when analyzing the phonemic inventory of a language with diphthongs. American English has a dearth of synchronic phenomena that could be used to test diphthong phonematicity, and phonetic studies have suffered from a lack of direct reference to phonological structures. This study takes a novel approach to diphthong phonematicity by examining the acoustic signature of American English sound changes. Specifically, it compares the vowels of speakers from the North and Midlands regions. When analyzed as biphonematic, …

Exploring Efl Teachers’ Beliefs About Strategy, Scope And Focus In Written Corrective Feedback, Jiahe Gu, Erhan Aslan

Journal of Response to Writing

Effective written feedback is crucial to student learning and fostering writing skills. Responding to student writing is a multi-faceted and complex process which requires a more nuanced understanding in second language writing research. This study explored teachers’ beliefs and practices about written feedback may be influenced by a range of factors. Data were collected from four middle-school English teachers in China via stimulated recall tasks and semi-structured interviews reflecting retrospectivly on how and why teachers gave feedback to student writing. Findings revealed intersections between feedback strategy and learner proficiency level; feedback scope and time constraints and teacher workload; and feedback …

Dissecting Sentence Anatomy A Baseline Morpho-Syntactic Analysis Between English And Japanese [Condensed], August Tartamella

Student Scholarship

I would like to preface this essay by explaining the environment in which it was born. After meeting fellow student-linguistic, Utano Imada, the two of us began discussing the differences and fun aspects of our respective languages from the perspectives of both a native and non-native of each language. We then both discussed wanting to teach both languages and how we believed both perspectives on a language (those from a native and those from a learner) are important to those wishing to learn the language. From here we had the idea to do a long-term research project on the differences …

Muzibogun Research Symposium Poster, Serena Parra, Maurissio Gonzalez, Renee Alonzo, Cj Spears

Team - Muzibogun - Documents

This is the research poster which we presented at the 2025 Research Symposium

Vital Language Practices And Attitudes Among The Lumbee, Deven A. Hull

Senior Theses

The longstanding interest among linguists and linguistic anthropologists in Indigenous languages has increasingly adopted a Critical Indigenous framework, which has been promoted by Indigenous scholars and community leaders as a means of decolonizing “salvage” collection of Indigenous language materials. An important aspect of Critical Indigenous theory is the framework of vitality—that is, an emphasis in literature and community practice on the everyday living and lived elements of culture. One means of promoting Indigenous language within this Critical framework of vitality that is community-centered is centering vital language practices in community-based archives, which seek not to document the language as it …

Articulation As A Predictor Of Cognitive Decline, Sarah G. Hammons

Senior Theses

Background: Speech production is facilitated by motor neural networks that are proximal to neural substrates of general cognitive functions in the frontal lobe. However, the precise relationship between these brain networks supporting articulatory control and more general cognitive functioning has not been determined. A relation may be expected due to the anatomical proximity of specific networks, or due to more global aspects of brain health in individuals, affecting cognitive and motor functions across the board. Lower motor function is expected to affect the stability of speech production, but the extent to which this is also associated with lower cognitive functioning …

Communication During Perimmigration: A Life-Line Interview Method Study, Giada Roberta Rossi

Communication & Theatre Arts Theses

This thesis examines the communication challenges faced by migrants and their impact on acculturation using a new approach. The study analyzed autobiographical memories of immigrants’ communication to explore both positive and negative experiences over time. The study extends previous intercultural communication research by using the Life-Line Interview Method (LIM) (Assink & Schroots, 2010) to collect autobiographical narratives from twelve participants about their communication journeys. The findings reveal consistencies with past intercultural communication research insofar as uncertainty and identity problems were pervasive, but also positively extends past research arguing that supportive environments, characterized by culturally responsive educators and peer networks, play …

Letic Poem, Alexis L. Campos, Ixchel Mireles, Byron Haynes, David Kamal, Zachariah Gonzalez

Team - Mere Wudu - Documents

A poem written by Mere Wudu in Ietic and translated into English

Syntax And Grammar, Alexis L. Campos, Ixchel Mireles, Bryon Haynes, David Kamal, Zachariah Gonzalez

Team - Mere Wudu - Documents

Sentence examples written in Ietic and translated to English. Descriptions of how transformations, nouns, conjunctions and verbs are used in our language.

Swadesh List Dictionary, Alexis L. Campos, Ixchel Mireles, Bryon Haynes, David Kamal, Zachariah Gonzalez

Team - Mere Wudu - Documents

An Ietic dictionary.

Research Poster Ietic: The Language Of Mere Wudu, Alexis L. Campos, Ixchel Mireles, Bryon Haynes, David Kamal, Zachariah Gonzalez

Team - Mere Wudu - Documents

2025 Research Poster of The Language of Mere Wudu, Ietic.

Crusading Against Vice In The Progressive Era: American Anti-Profanity Leagues And Their Legacy, Evan J. Christensen

Roland D. Sawyer Scholarship Papers

During the Progressive Era in the United States, the rise of Anti-Profanity Leagues—such as those led by Roland D. Sawyer and Arthur S. Colborne—mirrored a growing national moral sentiment against profanity that aligned with broader ideals of social reform and public virtue. These leagues responded to widespread concerns about the perceived erosion of public decency and sought to promote “clean speech” through grassroots organizing, religious engagement, and civic advocacy. This paper situates the Anti-Profanity Leagues within the larger framework of Progressive Era moral reform movements, including temperance, anti-vice campaigns, and social purity efforts. Drawing on period newspapers, archival materials, and …

The Semantics Of Sin: Profanity, Reform, And Cultural Authority In Progressive America, Evan J. Christensen

Roland D. Sawyer Scholarship Papers

During the Progressive Era, language reform movements such as the Anti-Profanity League sought to regulate everyday speech as part of broader efforts to preserve public morality and cultural identity. This paper examines the rhetorical strategies and cultural assumptions underpinning the anti-profanity crusade, focusing especially on Reverend Roland D. Sawyer’s leadership. Using historical sources including league literature, newspaper accounts, personal letters, organizational records, and sermons, it argues that profanity was framed not merely as a religious or moral failure but as a threat to social cohesion, character, and national values. Efforts to suppress swearing reveal how language functioned as a marker …

Theshrahk Thwath Phonological Inventory, Mary Arnolds, Sofia Farias, Alexandra Renteria, Nicholas Denmark

Team - Theshrahk Thwath - Documents

This document contains all of the phonemes present in Theshalshe with their corresponding glyphs.

Theshrahk Thwath Legend, Mary Arnolds, Sofia Farias, Alexandra Renteria, Nicholas Denmark

Team - Theshrahk Thwath - Documents

This document contains the origin myth of Theshrahk Thwath’s vegetarianism and relationship with nature. It is presented line-by-line in Theshalshe, the orthography, the romanized form, a transliteration, and an English translation.

Muzibogun The Bells Of St. Mary’S, Serena Parra, Maurissio Gonzalez, Renee Alonzo, Cj Spears

Team - Muzibogun - Documents

This is a portion of our school song translated to Muzibogun