Linguistics Commons^™

The Acquisition Of Bare Nominals By Three Populations Of Spanish-English Bilingual Adults, Lauren Elizabeth Miller

Open Access Dissertations

The present study contributes to our understanding of cross-linguistic influence by studying three different groups of Spanish-English speakers’ knowledge of the distribution of definite articles in both of their languages using a battery of tests that require them to draw on different linguistic abilities. These three groups include native English speakers who learned Spanish after adolescence, native Spanish speakers who learned English after adolescence and simultaneous bilinguals who grew up in the United States speaking both English and Spanish from birth. Specifically, this study explores interpretation, production and intuition regarding the acceptability of definite articles in different contexts. Since the …

Revision And Re-Writing As Adaptation: Using Adaptation Theory To Encourage Student Recognition Of Rhetorical Situations, Alicia Claire Troby

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many students don’t want to revise their writing, or do so in small, surface-level ways. This has been an issue many composition instructors have faced over the years, and there is a large body of scholarship about revision and the writing process by many in writing studies. From Nancy Sommers, Janet Emig, Donald Murray, and others, to more recent publications “post-process,” composition instructors and writing studies scholars are concerned about revision and the role it plays in students’ learning to write. As a strategy for teaching bigger-level revision, I implemented the use of adaptation theory (reading/watching and doing adaptation) as …

Global-To-Local-To-Global: A Model For Tutoring Esl Students In The Writing Center, David Aguilar

Theses and Dissertations

Since its inception, the writing center has always focused on traditional students, and today that tradition is continued in such a way that the overwhelming amount of research dedicated to writing center theory and practice addresses the concerns of those students. However, universities with unique student populations, such as the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley with its majority of Hispanic students, require novel practices within their writing centers. Moreover, much of the linguistic, social, and cultural factors of the region are not well documented and therefore are not addressed by the mainstream theory and practices of other universities. With …

Chinese Undergraduate Students’ Preference For Chinese Tas And American Tas In The U.S. Context, Ruochen Li

Open Access Theses

This study researches and compares Chinese undergraduate students' (N=70) perceptions of and preferences for American TAs and Chinese TAs, and identifies factors that play significant roles in influencing Chinese students' perceptions and preferences. Multiple independent variables were measured, including age; gender; years at Purdue; years in the U.S.; GPA; overall TOEFL score; experiences with Chinese TAs; effectiveness of Chinese TAs; effectiveness of American TAs; English ability of Chinese TAs; and native speaker preference, ethnic identity, and level of acculturation, among which ethnic identity and level of acculturation are the major variables the current study aims to examine. Preference for Chinese …

Attachment Representations And Mother-Child Dialogue, Baiba Barene

Open Access Theses

With the emerging linguistic competencies of the child, dialogue becomes a regular part of mother-child everyday interactions, and may serve as one of the mechanisms of transmission of attachment in early and middle childhood. The goal of this study was to investigate the hypothesis about the co-constructive nature of children's knowledge of secure base script. Formation of the secure base script is a result of child-caregiver interactions that have been consolidated into a unit of knowledge available for use in attachment related situations. Individual attachment narratives and mother-child co-constructed narratives were collected from 86 mother-child dyads when children were 3.7 …

Effects Of Online Oral Practice On Japanese Pitch Accentuation Acquisition, Mayu Miyamoto

Open Access Theses

Even though there is a constant learners' need for pronunciation instruction in a Japanese language classroom, some teachers are hesitant to include pronunciation instruction due to time constrains or lack of knowledge on how to teach pronunciation. These problems occur due to the fact that pronunciation instructions were mostly conducted in classrooms. Computer-Assisted Language Learning is a great way to overcome these problems since learners can practice pronunciation through an online program outside of class. For this reason, this study was conducted outside of class using an online program. This research investigated the effectiveness of online oral practice on Japanese …

Event Structure Of Resultatives In Asl, Ashley Kentner

Open Access Theses

The relationship between the duration and telicity of the causing predicate and the gradability and standard of comparison of the resultant predicate in resultative constructions in American Sign Language (ASL) is investigated. Two homomorphic accounts of resultative constructions are considered, the feature-based approach of Beavers (2008), and the compositional approach of Ramchand (2008). The analysis utilizes morpho-phonological and semantics interface properties in ASL in order to discriminate between the two approaches. These properties are expressed by the Visibility Hypothesis (VH) in Wilbur, Malaia, and Shay (2012), which posits that the ends of semantic scales are phonologically marked in ASL in …

The Effect Of Visual Feedback On Voice Onset Time Productions By L2 Learners Of Spanish, Heather Michelle Offerman

Open Access Theses

Research suggests that pronunciation instruction should be developed and taught in the second language classroom (Derwing & Munro, 2005; Elliott, 1997; Simões, 1996) in order to facilitate intelligible and comprehensible utterances in the L2 (Derwing & Munro, 1997). Although accentedness does not always create intelligibility issues, it can be the catalyst to negative native speaker perceptions of second language learners' speech (Derwing & Munro, 2009). One distinctive marker of accent among native speakers of English and Spanish is the duration of aspiration values for the voiceless plosives /p/ /t/ /k/ (Lord, 2005). The present study proposes the use of visual …

Software Architecture And Development For Controlling A Hubo Humanoid Robot, Anne Giulia Pellicciotti

Open Access Theses

This study considers the level of involvement of participants viewing bilingual and English language TV commercials. It analyzes results from 295 non-Hispanic participants studying at a Midwestern university. In the study, participants were asked to view four commercials. Using Zaichkowsky's (1994) 10-item Personal Involvement Inventory (PII), participants scaled the advertisements on a 7-level scale. The scale evaluated participants' emotional and cognitive involvement with the ad. This between-subjects design required that participants be randomly separated into viewing all-English or all-bilingual advertisements. Findings showed no significant difference in involvement levels between bilingual or English commercials within this demographic group. Those with higher …

Patterns Of Language Use And Language Choice Among The Cuban Community In Russia, Maria Yakushkina

Open Access Theses

The multiculturalism of a modern society involves constant interrelations of minority and dominant linguistic communities, which are reflected in language. Within this context patterns of language use and choice, language attitudes and language and identity connection have received special attention from a sociolinguistic perspective to better understand the outcomes of such language contact

The aim of the present study is to analyze patterns of language use, language choice, and language identity issues of two groups of Cuban immigrants in Russian society: individuals born in Cuba with both parents of Cuban origin (CC group) and individuals born in Cuba from mixed …

Honorific Usage In Educational And Medical Institutions, Shohko Yanagisawa

Open Access Theses

Obana (2000) and Inoue (1979) state that professors/doctors receive exalting language from administrative staff members when they refer to professors/doctors with people from outside. Similarly, Kego no Shishin (2007) suggests that administrative staff members in educational/medical institutions can use an honorary title with professors/doctors. Obana's and Inoue's claims and Kego no Shishin's recommendation is not in line with the concept of relative honorifics. Considering the fact that Obana's and Inoue's claims have yet to be supported by an empirical study, this study attempted to investigate honorific usage in educational and medical institutions in order to 1) test Obana's and Inoue's …

The Case Of Capaz In Argentina: An Epistemic Adverb With Mood Variability, Boris Yelin

Open Access Theses

This thesis examines mood selection in Argentine Spanish with epistemic adverbs considering the independent variables of certainty, temporal reference, and epistemic adverb. It is the first known study to investigate mood selection with the epistemic adverb capaz . A sentence completion task included 24 written contexts, each followed by a sentence with an epistemic adverbial to be completed with a verb, either in the indicative or subjunctive. The contexts contained information that made participants Certain (N = 12) or Not Certain (N = 12). Within the Certain and Not Certain contexts, four contexts expressed events in the future, four in …

Clausal Complements To Attitude Predicates Cross-Linguistically: Being Glad About What You Thought You Knew, Eric Anthony Follett

Open Access Theses

In this thesis I explore the syntactic structure of emotive factive predicates in Spanish, English, Tatar, and Mayangna. I analyze emotive factive predicates of the glad type, such as (1). (1) I'm glad you liked the cake.

First, I analyze the basic structural configuration of these predicates, claiming that the clausal Source of Experience argument is a complement to the lexical head glad. This is similar to the configuration of canonical transitive attitude predicates like semi-factive know and intensional think. Second, I claim, following Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970) and Krapova (2010), that factive heads select complements headed by a (null) …

Preschool Language And Phonological Proficiencies In Predicting Stuttering Recovery Or Persistence, Caroline E. Spencer

Open Access Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between expressive and receptive language, phonological, and verbal working memory proficiencies in the preschool years and eventual recovery from or persistence in stuttering. Participants included 40 children who stutter (CWS). At ages 3-5 years, participants were administered the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language, 3rd edition (TACL-3), the Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test, 3rd edition (SPELT-3), Bankson-Bernthal Test of Phonology--Consonant Inventory subtest (BBTOP--CI), Test of Auditory Perceptual Skills--Revised (TAPS--R) auditory number memory and auditory word memory subtests, and the Dollaghan & Campbell Nonword Repetition Test (NRT). Stuttering behaviors were tracked …

Pragmatic Transfer In Japanese Requests In Emails, Takako Noda

Open Access Theses

The speech act of request is known as a face threatening act (FTA) in the sense of Brown and Levinson (1987) and is considered a speech act that may negatively affect human relationships when it is used against cultural norms and constraints. Requests have been investigated in various languages, including English and Japanese (e.g., Hill et al., 1986; Fukushima, 1996; Gagné, 2010). Studies about interlanguage pragmatics, such as Matsuda et al. (2008) and Wada et al. (2008), showed characteristics of requests made by learners of Japanese. However, these studies all focused on the oral speech act, and there are few …

A Discourse Analysis Of 1 Peter, Ervin Ray Starwalt

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

The study focuses on two problems. The first concerns the structure of the text. The text is considered to be notoriously difficult to outline. The second problem is the function of the participle in 1 Peter. The letter is considered to contain some of the classical examples in the New Testament of the imperatival participle (e.g. 2:18; 3:1, 7, 9), the participle used independently in place of a finite imperative verb. The text is analyzed in terms of salience. Generally, commanding clauses, primarily indicated by the presence of imperative verbs, are those clauses which move the argument along. Locally, other …

The Ertirean English Curriculum: Grades 2-6 Assessing Academic Readiness, Kelly Walter

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

This study is an examination of the 2002 Eritrean English curriculum from Grades 2–6. In the Eritrean educational system, the nine languages of Eritrea are the languages of education until Grade 6, when students are expected to make a transition to an all-English curriculum. The purpose of the study is to ascertain whether students are prepared at the end of Grade 5 for the academic English of Grade 6. The criteria for preparedness is mastery of vocabulary. Data from the Eritrean National Reading Survey and the vocabulary counts from the curriculum of Grades 2–5 and Grade 6 were compared. The …

Consonant Cluster Simplification In Korean Codas: Language-Internal And Language-External Constraints Interface With Reference To Optimality Theory, Youn-Jeoung Choi

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

In Korean, when a morpheme contains a coda cluster in its underlying form (such as /salm/‘life,’ /hulk/‘soil’), we observe two outcomes in its surface representation. In cases when the morpheme followed by either another consonant or by a word boundary, the cluster is simplified by deleting one consonant. However, if a vowel-initial morpheme follows the underlying cluster, the second member of the cluster assumes the role of a syllable onset. Contrary to prescriptive accounts in which both the deleted consonant and the results of resyllabification are claimed to be completely predictable, observation of contemporary Korean usage suggest that there is …

Interlanguage Lexicology Of Arab Students Of English A Computer Learner Corpus-Based Approach, Mousa Abdelghani Al-Btoosh

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Since the very early emergence of machine-readable corpora into the linguistics scene in the 1960s, the direction of a considerable body of linguistic research began to shift from syntax and phonology, the, by then, focus of linguistic research, to a number of domains that remained mostly neglected under the umbrella of traditional approaches. Fortunately, lexicology, the target of this research, was a major beneficiary of that dramatic shift. By employing a computer learner corpus-based approach, this study addresses multidimensional lexical aspects of a machine-readable corpus of the writing of Arab students of English as a foreign language. Lexical investigation of …

Native Language And Non-Linguistic Influences On The Production Of English Vowels By Speakers Of Korean: An Acoustic Study, Ji-Eun Kim

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study investigates the production of Korean and English front vowels by ninety-one Koreans, based on their arrival age to the U.S., length of residence in the U.S. and degree of motivation. Subjects' Korean and English productions were analyzed by measuring F1, F2 and duration. Additionally, this study observed other phonological and phonetic features, such as the number of front vowel categories, the distance between the highest and lowest front vowels (Korean /i/~/?/ and English /i/~/æ/), the distance between the lowest two vowels (Korean /e/~/?/ and English /?/~/æ/) and the lengthening effects based on the voicing of the following consonants. …

Aspects Of The Kam Language, As Revealed In Its Narrative Discourse, Tongyin Yang

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Discourse analysis has long been understudied in Kam. This research aims to initiate the exploration of this new field by examining various aspects of Kam narrative discourse and reveal its structural properties through a functional approach within Schiffrin's discourse model. A newfound morpheme /e/ leads to discussion of phonological and syntactic variations from discourse perspective. The reduction of components in rhymes in directional verbs is related to not only semantic manifestation, but more importantly, to the building-up of narrative discourse. The classifier variants in the types CLSa and CLSb encode number difference, though not identical to numbers in Indo-European languages. …

Language Death In Mesmes: A Sociolinguistic And Historical-Comparative Examiniation Of A Disappearing Language, Michael Bryan Ahland

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

Mesmes is a recently extinct language within the Peripheral West Gurage subgroup of the Ethio-Semitic Gurage cluster in southwestern Ethiopia. While Leslau (1979) and Hetzron (1972 and 1977), among many others, have examined the history of this cluster, little is known about the Mesmes language. The Mesmes speakers completed a shift to Hadiyya (a Cushitic language) roughly sixty years ago. This thesis considers the social history of the Mesmes in relation to the shift and death of their language and also examines the comparative evidence linking Mesmes with the Gurage cluster and, more specifically, with the Peripheral West Gurage subgroup. …

Linguistic Variation Within Gumuz: A Study Of The Relationship Between Historical Change And Intelligibility, Colleen Anne Ahland

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

The Gumuz language is spoken by roughly 160,000 people across the Blue Nile region of Ethiopia and Sudan (Grimes 2004). Gumuz is the sole member of the Gumuz family which is part of the larger Nilo-Saharan super-family (Bender 1996a) and is considered to be a single language whose several varieties are mutually intelligible (Bender 1975, Unseth 1984). Recent studies regarding intelligibility, however, suggest the latter is not the case, documenting various levels of intelligibility between varieties, some of which are asymmetrical (Ahland et al. 2002). This thesis provides an historical analysis of Gumuz spoken in eight locations within Ethiopia and …

Code-Switching In The Speech Of Spanish-English Bilinguals, Brianna Grohman Rauschuber

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

The purpose of this study is the investigation of (a) the motivations for code-switching; and (b) the process by which bilinguals perceive code-switching as meaningful. The empirical basis for the study is data gathered from Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. The results suggest that the motivations for code-switching and the conversational functions that code-switching often serves are the same. Speakers code-switch because doing so allows them to convey some meaning beyond the information contained in the proposition of an utterance. The author proposes that the communicative value of code-switching among balanced bilinguals can be explained in relation to Grice's (1975) …

Palatalization In Albanian: An Acoustic Investigation Of Stops And Affricates, Julie M. Kolgjini

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Palatalization is a very common process cross-linguistically; it has been widely attested in both Indo-European (e.g. Slavic) and non-Indo-European languages (e.g. Bantu and Chinese). Palatalization can be broken down into velar palatalization (e.g. k, g > t?, dy/_ i, j) and coronal palatalization (e.g. t, d > t?, dy/__ j), whereby the targets tend to be velar and alveolar stops and the triggers are frequently non-back vowels and glides. The outputs of palatalization are often sounds formed in a different place of articulation than the original target segment and with a different manner of articulation than the target, which frequently results in …

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 …

Transparency And Spreading Of Tense, Aspect, And Mood In Kuche Narrative Discourse, Janet E. Wilson

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Though clauses of Kuche can be grammatically marked—usually by verb prefixes or auxiliary verbs—for tense and/or aspect and/or mood (TAM), in discourse, very few clauses are actually marked for these categories. Instead, TAM is often marked only once in a stretch of text and is assumed to apply to every subsequent clause up to a delimiting construction. This paper describes how certain grammatical indicators of TAM are used in Kuche narrative discourse. Four chapters of an oral history and one folk tale are tabulated for the frequency of various TAM markings and interpretations. Number grids and bar graphs indicate how …

A Sociolinguistic Comparison Of The Syntax Of Modern Standard Arabic And Jordanian Arabic, Ahmad Mahmoud Saidat

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

This thesis investigates some of the syntactic differences between two forms of Arabic, the standard and the local vernacular of Petra. This vernacular has not been looked at from a syntactic perspective. The attempt here is to bring attention to some of the features characterizing this vernacular by comparing it with Standard Arabic. It attempts also to find reasons for having two forms of the language in one society as well as people's reaction towards that. It also compares and contrasts the grammatical features each form has and tests them against X-bar theory to see the syntactic difference from a …

Word Order In Biblical Hebrew Poetry, Sherry Lynn Fariss

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Syntacticians generally focus on prose texts of a language when studying word order rather than examining poetry. The general consensus is that the stylization of poetry exercises too great an influence on the text to allow for regular word order. In their study of pragmatics, particularly in obsolete languages, Herring (2000) and Hock (2000) demonstrate that even in poetry syntactic patterns can be seen in different genres or text types. Herring's contention in Old Tamil poetry is that the more poetic the genre, the more word order variation can be expected. By the same token, the more informational the genre, …

The Structure Of Nominalization In Burmese, Paulette M. Hopple

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Nominalized sentential elements have long been observed in Tibeto-Burman languages, but the role and extent of nominalized patterns have not been explored as a base of formative structuring. This dissertation examines nominalization patterns in Burmese from the word to text level and posits a complex information packaging role of postposition particles in erecting a structure of predictable and iteratively patterned nominals which function to reduce information overload and facilitate online parsing. Burmese has been characterized as a predominantly verbal language (U Pe Maung Tin 1956). A complementary view is presented in which ontological objects created via a grammatical system of …