Linguistics Commons^™

An Optimality-Theoretic Analysis Of Syllable Structure In Qassimi Arabic, Sarah Soror Al Motairi

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis examines syllable structure in Qassimi Arabic (QA), a Najdi dialect spoken in Al-Qassim region in Saudi Arabia. Syllable-related phenomena in QA have not been fully addressed and understood because QA has not received attention in the available literature on syllable structure within Arabic dialects. Thus, the present study aims to provide an analysis of syllable structure in QA and to contribute to the current research on Arabic syllable structure. Adopting the framework of Optimality Theory, this study explores the effect of high vowel deletion on syllable structure and the treatment of superheavy syllables in QA. Results confirm three …

I Told Him/Her/It/Them?: The Problem Of Epicene Pronouns, Natalie Hall

Undergraduate Research Journal

To determine how Americans have naturally been using epicene pronouns, as opposed to the dictates of prescriptive grammar rules, this study focuses on speech patterns and informal writing. Because of their natural resistance to prescriptions, these two forms of communication tend to be more indicative of the epicenes most commonly used by Americans. 1 In this study, I seek an answer to the question of which epicene is used the most by Americans in speech and informal writing. I will use this information to determine the effectiveness of efforts to change prescriptions and traditions of epicene pronoun usage. After presenting …

Effects Of The First Language On Japanese Esl Learners' Answers To Negative Questions, Kosuke Kanda

Dissertations and Theses

This study investigates how Japanese learners of English respond to English negative questions. Previous research has reported that Japanese learners of English make errors in yes/no responses to English negative questions due to the first language (L1) influence (Kang & Lim-chang, 1998; Takashima, 1989). From the perspective of L1 influence, there are two learning pitfalls: different functions of the yes/no response and different interpretations of negative questions. Both of these influences were examined in this study.

This study involved 8 Japanese learners of English, 4 females and 4 males, attending Portland State University (PSU). In order to elicit data that …

Interpreting Standard Usage Empirically, Jacob F. Frandsen

Theses and Dissertations

Writers, editors, and everyday language users look to dictionaries, style guides, usage guides, and other published works to help inform their language decisions. They want to know what is Standard English and what is not. Commentators have been prescribing and proscribing certain usages for centuries; however, their advice has traditionally been based on the subjective opinions of the authors. Recent works have analyzed usage by relying wholly or partly on statistical and descriptive data rather than traditional opinion alone; however, no work has presented statistical usage data in a user-friendly and consistent format. This study presents a statistically based methodology …

Dialect And Characterization In Mountain Meadows, Adrienne Landes, Dr. David Bowie

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Great writers are often praised for their fine ear for dialogue; Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy all had the talent for recreating discourse that gives their work authenticity and their characters individuality. While I will not be writing about my contemporary neighbors and countrymen, as did these authors, I have studied the language of my characters in an effort both to enrich the body of existing linguistic research, and also as background research for a play about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The best dialogue makes use of the eccentricities unique to a society, thus I have recorded the …

The Problem With Chicago’S Possessives, Betsy Snider, Doris Dant

Journal of Undergraduate Research

American English has no official language rules; rather, it has guidelines of what is acceptable and what is not. These guidelines, or prescriptions, are found in grammar books such as usage books, dictionaries, and style guides. Grammar books are created and maintained by editors and grammarians who base their prescriptions on what they observe as acceptable or unacceptable usage based on what occurs in educated texts. Despite the commonality of method, there is great variety and contradiction between what different grammar books prescribe. Nineteenth century grammarian, Goold Brown, once barbed “Grammarians would perhaps differ less, if they read more.”

Grammar Enhanced Biliteracy: Naskapi Language Structures For Facilitating Reading In Naskapi, William Joseph Jancewicz

Theses and Dissertations

The Naskapi language is the language of instruction in the early primary grades of the school in the Naskapi community. Only recently have Naskapi-speaking teachers received formal instruction in pedagogy, with a cohort of Naskapi teachers following courses for their Bachelor of Education degree towards careers teaching in the Naskapi language in their local school. These adults are highly motivated to become literate in their mother tongue in order to teach or prepare curriculum materials in the Naskapi language. This thesis explores how basic grammatical structures can be mastered, and provides insight into the form that pedagogical grammatical instruction should …

"At The Coal-Face Of Standardization": Uncovering The Role Of Copy Editors In Standardizing The English Language, Jonathon R. Owen

Theses and Dissertations

Though much work has been done on the definition of Standard English and on the standardization process, little attention has been paid to the role of copy editors in that process. Editors comprise a class of craft professionals employed to remove errors from texts and make them more consistent, but when editors speak about editors at all, they generally rely on anecdotes rather than hard data about what editors do. Since formal written English is often used as a baseline for determining what is standard, and since corpora of published writing are increasingly used to research questions of usage, it …

The Interaction Of Theory, Philosophy, And Practice In Esl Writing Conferences, Grant Eckstein

Faculty Publications

TESOL theory is intended to inform teacher practice, but studying what teachers actually do in a given teaching context can sometimes lead to better theory. This report illustrates an area in which practice informed theory in the context of 1-on-1 writing conferences for prematriculated ESL writers. This report describes the creation and implementation of a writing conference program for 250 prematriculated students at an Intensive English Program (IEP) with language proficiencies ranging from high-beginning to low-advanced. The theory-driven philosophy of conferencing encouraged teachers to meet 1-on-1 with their writing students 5 times during a semester to provide holistic, nondirective, level-appropriate …

The History Of Foreign Language Pedagogy: From Methodology To Psychology, Alyssa Pilli '12

Honor Scholar Theses

This thesis investigates the history of studies performed regarding foreign language pedagogy in an attempt to investigate how well the information gained from these studies influences the teaching practices that are in use. The first half looks at earlier studies which focused on the specific teaching methods employed in the language classroom. While the Immersion method is the only method displaying significant benefits in comparison to the others, this method is rarely used in the public school domain for political reasons such as funding and alternate agendas. With inconclusive evidence favoring any other method, research switched focus to the individual …

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."

Expression Of Possession In Spanish In Contact With English : A Sociolinguistic Study Across Two Generations In The Greater New York Metropolitan Area, Maria Cristina Montoya

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACT

Phonological Awareness And Its Affect On Second Language Acquisition, Mallory Ann Ruiz

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the role phonological awareness plays in the second language (L2) classroom among English as Second Language (ESL) learners. In order to better understand the reasons behind second language (L2) student's phonological improvements, phonological awareness was tested to see what affect, if any, it had on student's intelligible speech. Six English as Second Language (ESL) college students participated in the study in which they provided three audio recordings of their English speech over the course of ten weeks.

The Perception Of Arabic-Accented English Vowels., Zhang Fan

Student Works (2010-2019)

Evaluation of speech perception is one of the highly focused research areas in the field of phonetics and phonology. However, there is limited research on the perception of the language produced by the Arabic-speakers of English. Since Arabic is the dominant language, it can be assumed that there is an L1 interference in the English produced by the Arabic speakers. Moreover, with the internationalization of education, there has been an increase in the number of foreign students pursuing their higher education in Malaysia. This provides the rationale for conducting a study on the intelligibility of the English spoken by the …

Rule And Meaning In The Teaching Of Grammar, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

While the construct of rule as a manipulation of purely formal properties of language has been widely abandoned in both formal and functional linguistics, it persists, though with diminished importance, in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This is true even in Form-Focused Instruction (FFI), including Focus-on-Form (FonF), which emphasizes meaning as both classroom focus and element of language structure. This paper illustrates the meaningfulness of grammar, even where treatment has often appealed to such rules; identifies areas of overlap between what is identified by the term rule and what is identified by the terms meaning (semantics) and form …

Send For Success: A Descriptive Look At Prescriptive Manuals For Email, Jean Reid Norman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Email has existed for almost forty years, but in the past ten, it has become a dominant form of communication in the business world. A sign of the maturation of email and its dominance in commerce is the rise of how-to books on writing effective emails. This paper analyzes six of those recent texts to develop a taxonomy of current prescriptive advice for email. It examines contextual issues as well as issues of content, such as structure and tone; format, such as length of paragraphs, forms of salutation and farewell, and use of emoticons and abbreviations; and grammar and correctness. …

Topics In Action Sources Of Definiteness Of Topic Noun Phrases In Thai Interactive Discourse, Prakaiwan Vajrabhaya

English Theses & Dissertations

The notion of topic has been widely discussed in past literature; however, the use of naturally occurring data in these studies, especially in Thai, has been lacking. This study approaches topic from a functionalist standpoint. It uses definiteness, a feature of topics generally agreed upon by scholars, to investigate topic noun phrases (NPs) in the topic with a clausal comment construction in naturally occurring data in Thai. The main objectives are to identify the sources of definiteness of topic NPs and demonstrate their functions. The data for this study was obtained from the Chulalongkorn University Linguistics Department corpus which …

A Web-Based Tool For Oral Practice And Assessment Of Grammatical Structures, Heather Colleen Torrie

Theses and Dissertations

The grammar course objectives at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC) are a list of grammar structures for each level that students are expected to be able to master. These objectives currently are only measured by pencil-paper grammar tests, providing information regarding receptive grammar ability only. Therefore, there is a need for an oral grammar assessment to measure productive grammar ability, providing diagnostic and achievement information about the specific grammar objectives. This project is a web-based oral grammar assessment tool that enables teachers to assess students' mastery of the structures covered in the ELC grammar classes. The core of …

Preliminary Tone Analysis Of Possessed Nouns In Chicahuaxtla Trique, Kosuke Matsukawa

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

Chicahuaxtla Trique is one of the Trique languages spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. Among three Trique languages, Chicahuaxtla Trique has the most complicated tone system and its tone system has not been fully understood yet. When a noun is possessed, a contrastive tone on the final syllable of a noun stem is often changed with a post-clitic pronoun and, less frequently, with an independent pronoun in Chicahuaxtla Trique. In this paper, I will analyze the tone patterns for possessed nouns in Chicahuaxtla Trique based on my fieldwork data. Although the analysis is still at the preliminary stage and more comprehensive data …

Structural Ambiguity Collecting As A Tool For Teaching Grammar, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

Structural ambiguities can be a valuable resource for grammar students. Because structural ambiguities present more than one possible grammatical interpretation, authentic examples of such ambiguities lend themselves well to meaningful grammatical discussions. One particularly useful way for involving students in the recognition and analysis of structural ambiguities is to assign them to find designated ambiguity types. This paper will consider some benefits of structural ambiguity study and will provide some ideas and suggestions related to a specific type of assignment that involves students in collecting structural ambiguities.

A Grammatical Description Of The Early Classic Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Daniel A. Law

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to describe the grammatical system of Classical Ch'olti', the language of the Classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, as attested in inscriptions of the Early Classic (approximately AD 200-600). Around 300 Lowland Maya Hieroglyphic inscriptions have been dated to the Early Classic or before, nearly one third of these remain unpublished. Previous work on the monumental inscriptions of the Early Classic (Mathews 1985; Proskouriakoff 1950) has examined Early Classic monuments primarily as works of art. Mora-Marin (2001) examined the language of inscriptions found on early portable texts, a small subset of the corpus here examined. In …

Learning By Heart: Using An Interactive Tutorial On Idioms To Model Acquisition Strategies And Tools, Andrianna Kirsten Jobin

Theses Digitization Project

This project is an interactive tutorial on idioms for a unit in a multi-level English as a second language (ESL) class. The purpose of the tutorial was to develop a resource to consolidate various aspects of idiom learning (e.g., pronunciation, definitions, and usage) into a few easily referenced pages and practice exercises which students can go over at their own pace.

Teachable Articles: A Practical Approach To Teaching English Articles To Japanese Learners, Kayo Fujito

MA TESOL Collection

This dissertation is about English articles and specifically the difficulties that non-native speakers, particularly Japanese learners, face in mastering their use. In this dissertation, I will mainly focus on;

1. An investigation on teaching articles and the use of articles including a survey completed by teachers of English

2. Two charts for determining articles and categories with examples including my adaptation of the chart

3. Some ideas and practical suggestions for teaching articles

The findings from this study have led me to a belief that there are ways for Japanese learners to improve their ability to use articles and by …

A Phonological Grammar Of Northern Pame, Scott Charles Berthiaume

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation describes the phonology and morphology of Northern Pame, an Otomanguean language of Central Mexico. Furthermore, it explains the grammatical relationship of these domains from an Optimality Theoretic perspective. In terms of description, Northern Pame has a complex phonological inventory of 40 consonants, which distinguish among glottalized, aspirated, voiceless and voiced segments, as well as 6 vowels, which contrast for nasalization. In addition, a claim is made for two Northern Pame tones, in contrast to earlier suggestions of a three-tone system (Avelino 1997). Regarding Otomanguean laryngeally complex vowels (Silverman 1997b, Herrera 2000), this research provides phonological, as well as …

“Making Teaching Lexis And Structures To Adult Efl Learners More Effective Through Creating A Learning Community And Fostering Some Specific Learning Skills.” (A Curriculum For A Short-Term Development Course For Non-Native Speaker Efl Teachers), Oleksandr Klyevanov

MA TESOL Collection

Nowadays, EFL teachers are exposed to a large number of different approaches to teaching English. All of them, no matter how much they differ, focus on the objectives shared by all teachers regardless of their theoretical background, namely teaching lexis and structures. However, some approaches ignore what I have come to believe are necessities: creating a learning community, teaching strategies for retention and recycling lexical and structural items. By learning community I mean a group of learners who are focused on learning the target subject of knowledge, who expend their energies on learning, who feel secure being together and working …

Blending As A Central Process Of Grammar, Mark Bernard Turner

Faculty Scholarship

Constructions are long-term memory associations of form and meaning. How are they formed and learned, how do they change, and how do they combine into new utterances (constructs, communicative performances) in working memory? This chapter analyzes the role and process of conceptual integration (blending) in the creation and use of constructions.

Historical Roots Of Structural Ambiguities In English: A Survey Of Some Selected Grammatical Features, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

English is a language with many possibilities for wordplay, and word lay has been exploited by entertainers and advertisers. At times it involves simple puns, and at other times complex structural plays on words. Important developments in the history of the English language contribute to the current possibilities for word play. This article will examine some of these developments that have contributed specifically to wordplay involving structural ambiguities.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Eight), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

Robinson reviews the progress of punctuation between 1850 and 1900, showing how - admidst the ongoing (but increasingly sophisticated) contest between the demands of the eye and the ear, of grammar and rhetoric-writing in English reached new expressive heights in the work of Pater, Dickinson, and others.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Seven), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

Though eighteenth-century grammarians had brought light to the profundities of our subject, their erudition and philosophical remove more often than not disqualified their ideas for popular application. Nineteenth-century scholars were a more practical breed. Their goal was to preserve the integrity of English in afar-flung and diversifying Empire. A standardized language was imperative for perspicuity in communication: for the lingua communis ofpoets and philosophers, as well asfor commerce, science, mass education, and government. In the drive for clarity and uniformity, discussions ofthe values ofthe stops and how they should be appliedformed apart of virtually every nineteenth-century grammar textbook.

Role Of Imitation In Language Assessment Tests, Abha Gupta

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

A study investigated whether imitation plays a significant role in the acquisition of grammar. Three 6- to 8-year-old hearing-impaired children were administered the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), which is designed to evaluate hearing-impaired children's use of grammatical aspects of spoken and/or signed English. Subjects' verbal responses to the "imitated" component (in which subjects were asked to say just what the tester said) of the GAEL were transcribed and analyzed. Results indicated that imitated speech is neither longer nor grammatically more advanced than non-imitated, spontaneous speech. Findings suggest that the children produced "unique" language structures to …