Linguistics Commons^™

Nonstandard Languages: The Outcasts Of The Language Revitalization Movement, Whitney Snowden

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis compares the failures of the creolization movement with the success of the language revitalization movement and seeks to determine which elements are missing from the former to make it as successful as the latter. Education policy, identity, and language ideology are all examined as contributors to the future success of creole inclusivity in education and society, as well as the potential benefits such a movement would include. Specifically examined are Siegel’s research on creole education and Armstrong’s work on language ideology.

Talking Back, With Reawakened Voices: Analyzing The Potential For Indigenous California Languages Coursework At California Polytechnic State University, Logan Cooper

Ethnic Studies

The legacy of colonialism in the United States, including genocidal practices and cultural assimilation, has left Indigenous languages endangered. Native peoples, scholars, and activists have been working to revive and heal the languages of America’s first peoples, and the cultures those languages speak to, yet more work remains in the field of language revitalization. California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo currently does not offer any course specifically teaching or discussing Indigenous languages, even those of the Chumash people who know the San Luis Obispo area as their ancestral homelands.

By synthesizing revitalization and Indigenous activist literature with the narratives …

Modern Spoken Coptic And Community Negotiation Of Linguistic Authenticity, Jeremy Toomey

Linguistics ETDs

The pronunciation of the Coptic language in the liturgies of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria according to the Greco-Bohairic and Old Bohairic pronunciation standards is investigated, together with the sociolinguistic narratives constructed by two Coptic communities surrounding the use of either standard. Field recordings of the liturgy as recited according to both standards are analyzed in order to describe the phonology of the standards, and interviews with users of both standards are analyzed in order to describe the language attitudes of the users of the language. Points of similarity and difference between the narratives constructed by users of the …

Solving Russian Velars: Palatalization, The Lexicon And Gradient Contrast Utilization, Jeffery R. Parker

Faculty Publications

Палатализованные («мягкие») задненебные согласные в русском языке имеют особый статус, поскольку их появление можно предсказать лишь частично. Эти согласные являются примером часто встречающихся фонологических отношений, в которых звуки могут быть словоразличительными, но используются лишь в некоторых контекстах и/или словоформах. Такие «промежуточные фонологические отношения» (ОоШзткЬ 1995) представляют собой проблему для традиционных фонологических теорий, в которых звуки делятся на предсказуемые (аллофоны; содержатся в грамматике) и непредсказуемые (фонемы; содержатся в лексиконе). Таким образом, для научно-теоретической классификации вышеуказанных промежуточных фонологических отношений необходимо будет пересмотреть существующие предположения о природе и количестве информации, содержащейся в лексиконе. В данной статье я показываю, что и мягкие, и твердые …

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 …

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.

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 …

Comparing Student Assessments And Perceptions Of Online And Face-To-Face Versions Of An Introductory Linguistics Course, David M. Johnson, Chris C. Palmer

Faculty Articles

This article examines the issue of whether linguistics is better suited for a face-to-face (F2F) environment than an online teaching environment. Specifically, it examines assessment scores and student perceptions of the effectiveness of an introductory linguistics course at an undergraduate state university that has been taught multiple times in both online and F2F modes. To study this issue data was collected about the types of students enrolled in either version of the course, including their GPAs and course grades. A survey with both closed- and open-ended questions was also used to ask students about their experiences and perceptions of the …

Stance Taking In Japanese Newspaper Discourse: The Use And Non-Use Of Copulas Da And Dearu, Michiko Kaneyasu

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

The present study aims to demonstrate how writers display their stances in information-oriented written discourse. In particular, the paper analyzes nominal sentences in three newspaper subgenres, and explicates how the Japanese copulas da and dearu , which are normally considered stylistic variants in written language, are used by journalists as important grammatical resources for expressing their epistemic and evaluative stances toward certain types of information conveyed in nominal sentences. Da in newspaper discourse is used as a marker of the writer’s commitment to the relevance of the information in the given discourse context. Dearu, on the other hand, marks …

Statistical Literacy Among Applied Linguists And Second Language Acquisition Researchers, Shawn Loewen, Elizabeth Lavolette, Le Anne Spino, Mostafa Papi, Jens Schmidtke, Scott Sterling, Dominik Wolff

Language Resource Center

The importance of statistical knowledge in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research has been emphasized in recent publications. However, the last investigation of the statistical literacy of applied linguists occurred more than 25 years ago (Lazaraton, Riggenbach, & Ediger, 1987). The current study undertook a partial replication of this older work by investigating (a) applied linguists’ general experiences with statistics, (b) underlying factors that constitute applied linguists’ knowledge about and attitudes toward statistics, and (c) variables that predict attitudes toward statistics and statistical self-efficacy. Three hundred thirty-one scholars of applied linguistics and SLA completed a questionnaire. Eighty percent …

The Effects Of Gender On Interruption Among Peers, Kelsey R. Stubbs

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Studies of mixed-gender conversation have established that the gender of speakers plays a role in talking power, conversational dominance, topic control, and perception of the speaker’s communicative ability. The purpose of this study was to expand upon previous research of interruption by examining its function and frequency in conversation among peers. While previous research in this area has focused on interruption in the workplace or the home, this research examines its place in mixed-gender conversation between university students. Participants in this study were recorded in group conversation and the transcription was later analyzed for general trends of interruption with relation …

Implications Of Autosegmental Analysis In The Exploration Of Prosodic Phonology In Mandarin Chinese, Kristen Frazier

Senior Honors Theses

Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith, 1979) is a theoretical framework for understanding the phonological effects of suprasegmentals such as tone, stress, etc. Using data taken from an experiment in which Mandarin Chinese tone sandhi (the acknowledged rules governing specific tone shifts across segments) is explored, a number of phonologists, specifically Kenstowicz (2003), have shown that the relationship between the segment and the tone is autonomous. In the experiment, non-sense words with a potential tone sandhi rule are presented to the Mandarin speakers. The speakers automatically apply the tone sandhi rule which is then analyzed using an autosegmental framework. The speakers consciously separate …

Tshiluba Language Structures, Vanessa Rosenbaum, Kelli Billings, Janessa Gohn, Libby Holcomb, Jessica Lahey, Jessica Milanez, Kelly Nuttall, Tyler Scoggins, Kristen Smith, Stephanie Todd, Jake Young, Albert Romain Bantumbakulu Mukuna, Daniel Miko-Mikyene

College of Arts and Sciences Presentations

This poster provides a preliminary description of the linguistic features of Tshiluba (also known as Luba-Kasai), a major language spoken in the south-central, Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and by several refugee families in the Boise area. Tshiluba is characterized as an Atlantic-Congo, Narrow Bantu, Central language (L31) within the Niger-Congo language family and, although it is spoken by over 6 million people and enjoys national language status in DRC, it has not received extensive recent attention in the linguistic literature. Over the course of a semester, our group has met with native speakers of Tshiluba …

Stress Management: Corpus-Based Insights Into Vernacular Interpretations Of "Stress", Laurel Smith Stvan

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

Examination of the term stress in naturally occurring vernacular prose provides evidence of three separate senses being conflated. A corpus analysis of 818 instances of stress from non-academic texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of American Discourses on Health (CADOH) shows a negative prosody for stress, which is portrayed variously as a source outside the body, a physical symptom within the body and an emotional state. The data show that contemporary speakers intermingle the three senses, making more difficult a discussion between doctors and patients of ways to ‘reduce stress’, when stress might be …

Summary Of The Creative Language Modeling Project, Trent M. Pehrson, Dr. Cynthia Hallen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Creative language modeling (CLM) is a method of teaching linguistics principles to high school level students. In CLM, students learn about language principles by systematically designing an artificial language. The premise of CLM is that students can learn and retain language principles more readily when such principles are associated with creative experiences that give the student a personal stake in the learning process.

Linguistics And Law: An Assessment Of Linguistic Contributions In The Courtroom, Jordan Toone, Dr. Cynthia Hallen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Linguistics has provided critical and clarifying evidence in the courtroom for decades. Not only have linguists and linguistic theory assisted the upholding of U.S. law but both have provided professional expertise in disputes throughout the world. The exciting correlation between linguistics and law has long been developing, while the assessment and evaluation of the relationship is in its infant stage and is yet to be fully established in professional research and publication.

The Signs We Speak: An Exploration Of The Loss Of Precision And Meaning In Language Today., Emilie Finney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My interest is in the beauty and power of language. I have sought to understand language on a systemic level. I have broken language down to alter signified meaning, exalted extinct words, mourned the loss of formal language, and explored the confines of common vernacular. My artwork addresses meaning within the context of Semiotics and Linguistics. I have investigated the Semiotic theories and philosophies of Roland Barthes, Jacques Ranciere, Pierre Guiraud, and Erving Goffman. As outlined by Roland Barthes, our language is a semiotic system used to communicate meaning. My work is also informed by the rules of Linguistics and …

Wicked Intense: The Grammaticalization Of Wicked And Other Intensifiers In New Hampshire, Emma M. Brown

Honors Theses and Capstones

This article presents a synchronic study of wicked and other intensifiers in Southern New Hampshire. Two sets of data were collected: one from the social media website Twitter, and the other from spoken casual interviews conducted by students at the University of New Hampshire. In all, more than 9000 intensifiable adjectives and verbs were collected, with rates of 22 and 24 per cent intensification for the Twitter and spoken data, respectively. The first goal of this paper is to show that one intensifier in particular, wicked, is in the process of grammaticalizing through the mechanisms of desemanticization and extension …

Needed Research On The Englishes Of Appalachia, Bridget L. Anderson, Jennifer Cramer, Bethany K. Dumas, Beverly O. Flanigan, Michael Montgomery

English Faculty Publications

Information about the 79th annual meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) organized by Jennifer Cramer at the University of Kentucky on April 2012 in Lexington, Kentucky. Topics discussed at the meeting includes current state of research studies on linguistic processes in Appalachia, traditional dialectological and ethnographic. The meeting also featured panel experts including Bridget L. Anderson, Michael Montgomery and Walt Wolfram.

Proceedings Of The 9th Pla Symposium, Charles Bradley, Charles Lam, Mengxi Lin

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

This is the combined conference proceedings of the 9th annual Purdue Linguistics Association (PLA) Symposium.

The Syntax Of The Arabic Determiner Phrase, Mohamed Cheikh Beina

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to analyze the syntactic structure of the Arabic determiner phrase (DP) within the confines of Chomsky's minimalist program. Attention is drawn to a number of the misconceptions many linguists have about this constituent. Some of the issues that linguists overlook include the existence of an indefinite article as well as a possessive determiner that heads the genitive phrase. A new analysis of agreement within DP is presented, as well as an argument against the construct state analysis and analyses of other related issues.

Language Ideologies And Orthographies: Developing A Writing System For Than Ówîngeh, Evan Ashworth

Linguistics ETDs

The use of writing to represent the heritage language represents a contentious issue for many members of Puebloan societies in the American Southwest. Many community members resist the use of writing for this purpose on the grounds that it acts as a form of colonialism, while others accept the use of writing in the heritage language because it is seen as valorizing the heritage language itself. This study seeks to address three research questions: 1) What factors motivate either a resistance to or acceptance of the use of writing to represent a heritage language? 2) If the use of writing …

Resemblance-Oriented Communication Strategies: Understanding The Role Of Resemblance In Signed And Spoken Languages, Daniel R. Eberle

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to propose that resemblance plays an important role in human communication. Saussure proposed a characteristic principle of the linguistic sign: that connections between linguistic codes and the objects they signify are arbitrary; however, I intend to show that resemblance, which I define as the visual or aural similarity between a stimulus, the thought it is intended to activate, and the real world target that utterance is about, is an important part of human communication and should be taken into consideration when defining language and proposing theories of human communication.

I have chosen Relevance Theory …

Automatic Identification Of Metaphoric Utterances, Jonathan Edwin Dunn

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the problem of metaphor identification in linguistic and computational semantics, considering both manual and automatic approaches. It describes a manual approach to metaphor identification, the Metaphoricity Measurement Procedure (MMP), and compares this approach with other manual approaches. The dissertation then describes an implemented and simplified version of the procedure, Measuring and Identifiying Metaphor-in-Language (MIMIL), and compares the premises of this system with other automatic metaphor identification systems. MIMIL and three existing metaphor identification systems are then evaluated on a common data set. Finally, the dissertation looks at difficulties which face attempts to automatically identify metaphors caused by …

Not A Hearing Loss, A Deaf Gain: Power, Self-Naming, And The Deaf Community, David J. Thomas

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

Self-naming has long stood as the primary assertion of power for disenfranchised communities in the western world. While person first language (e.g. person who is deaf) has been the preferred language of disability and disability services for the last 20 years, members of the Deaf community have asserted their cultural capital, and indeed, their Deafhood, or defining the experience of being ‘deaf in the world’, through the power of self-naming. This research examines attitudes toward language, self-naming, and disability in the Deaf community and seeks to move toward a more attentive, sensitive, and responsive language policy in the academy.

Historically, …

Development Of A New Experiment Demonstrating Categorical Perception, Kelsey Montzka

Student Research Initiative

In this project, we have created an online portal containing a multi-faceted demonstration of categorical perception. We utilized the 2I2AFC (two-interval, two alternative forced choice) stimulus presentation method which should elicit more categorical results from students, helping to better demonstrate the phenomenon (Gerrits & Schouten, 2004), and provided different acoustic cues illustrating CP. In addition to illustrations of CP for F2 formant transition, the new online portal is used to illustrate voice onset timing (VOT; the cue that distinguishes between the sounds [b] and [p]), as well as how contextual factors and participants’ linguistic backgrounds affect CP. The contextual factors …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Delay Of Principle B In Spontaneous Speech, Kelcie Burns Reid

Honors Scholar Theses

There is a debate over whether children exhibit a delay in the development of Principle B, one of three chief binding principles. The present study examines spontaneous speech data from nine children and identifies Principle B errors in third person pronouns. The study uses spectrographic analysis on a sample of utterances to determine the frequency of cliticized pronoun use. The results found that children do not make Principle B errors in spontaneous speech, and that they do not use shortened pronoun forms more often than fully pronounced pronouns.