Linguistics Commons^™

Two Multilingual Regions In Southwestern Amazonia, Hein Van Der Voort

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Southwestern Amazonia is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the Americas. It is possible that traditional Indigenous small-scale multilingualism used to exist in two neighboring regions in what is now Rondônia, on the Brazilian side of the Guaporé River. Permanent contact with representatives of Western society from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards led to great demographic, social, cultural, and economic upheaval among the Indigenous societies in the Rio Branco-Colorado and the Apediá-Corumbiara river basins. Early ethnographic reports suggest that these societies were characterized by traditional small-scale multilingualism. In this article, I summarize the evidence for this …

Ethnicity, Identity, And Conceptualizing Community In Indian Ocean East Africa, Daren E. Ray

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

This volume explores how the people of littoral East Africa imagined and reimagined their communities over two millennia of engagement with Indian Ocean transformations—from the settlement of Bantu speakers near the coast around the first century CE to their participation in transoceanic commerce, imperial rivalries, colonial projects, and decolonization movements in the mid-twentieth century. Like other histories of the Indian Ocean, it emphasizes the circulation of people and ideas, but its cis-oceanic approach demonstrates how these littoral communities continued to integrate strategies from those in Africa’s interior as well as from people who traveled the ocean.

The book also clarifies …

Destigmatizing Working With Dyslexic Learners, Riley N. Dandurand

The Writing Center Journal

In the field of writing center research there is a paucity of information regarding tutoring students with dyslexia. This comes as no surprise considering it is only in the last 50 years that there has been a conscious effort to include those who have exceptionalities in all areas of education. In addition to a lack of research and training there is another issue that arises with disclosing exceptionalities. Those studying dyslexia have found that students are hesitant to disclose their learning disability because of the stigma and feelings of differentiation from their peers (Brizee et al., 2012). The question then …

Conceptual Meaning In Phonology: Multimodal Iconic Expressions In Discourse Focus, David Páez Acevedo

Linguistics ETDs

In everyday communication, speakers go beyond words to synchronize speech sounds and gestures, adding nuanced meanings. For instance, in Colombian Spanish, recounting the distant past involves elongating words, modulating pitch, and using expressive hand movements. This dissertation explores this phenomenon, termed Multimodal Iconic Expressions (MMIEs), using Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar. The quantitative study uncovers correlations between verb aspect, nominal quantification, and speech duration, revealing phono-iconic connections. The qualitative study examines construal operations giving rise to MMIEs across semantic domains. MMIEs predominantly appear in discourse Focus, with durative events and mass-like quantities exhibiting pronounced phono-iconic associations. Patterns include stress and …

Indices Of Narrative Language Associated With Disability, Norah M Almubark, Gabriela Silva-Maceda, Matthew E Foster, Trina D Spencer

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Narratives skills are associated with long-term academic and social benefits. While students with disabilities often struggle to produce complete and complex narratives, it remains unclear which aspects of narrative language are most indicative of disability. In this study, we examined the association between a variety of narrative contents and form indices and disability. Methodology involved drawing 50 K-3 students with Individual Education Programs (IEP) and reported language concerns from a large diverse sample (n = 1074). Fifty typically developing (TD) students were matched to the former group using propensity score matching based on their age, gender, grade, mother’s education, …

The Discussion – Conclusion Section Of Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research Articles In Second Language Writing: Rhetorical Structure And Interactional Metadiscourse, Oksana Bomba

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzed and compared the rhetorical structure of the Discussion – Conclusion sections from quantitative versus qualitative research articles (RAs) in the interdisciplinary field of Second Language Writing (SLW). Although Discussion and Conclusion sections are critical components in the RA genre that present a challenge to novice writers, little is known about the rhetorical organization of RA Discussion – Conclusion sections and how quantitative and qualitative research paradigms may shape the ways RA writers present and discuss their findings.

This corpus-based study analyzed the rhetorical structure of the SLW RA Discussion – Conclusion sections from quantitative and qualitative research …

Grammatical Parallelism In Aphasia: A Lesion-Symptom Mapping Study, William Matchin, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Alexandra Basilakos, Brielle Caserta Stark, Julius Fridriksson, Gregory Hickok

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Sentence structure, or syntax, is potentially a uniquely creative aspect of the human mind. Neuropsychological experiments in the 1970s suggested parallel syntactic production and comprehension deficits in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia, thought to result from damage to syntactic mechanisms in Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe. This hypothesis was sometimes termed overarching agrammatism, converging with developments in linguistic theory concerning central syntactic mechanisms supporting language production and comprehension. However, the evidence supporting an association among receptive syntactic deficits, expressive agrammatism, and damage to frontal cortex is equivocal. In addition, the relationship among a distinct grammatical production deficit in aphasia, …

Executive Order On The Safe, Secure, And Trustworthy Development And Use Of Artificial Intelligence, Joseph R. Biden

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Section 1. Purpose. Artificial intelligence (AI) holds extraordinary potential for both promise and peril. Responsible AI use has the potential to help solve urgent challenges while making our world more prosperous, productive, innovative, and secure. At the same time, irresponsible use could exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation; displace and disempower workers; stifle competition; and pose risks to national security. Harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks. This endeavor demands a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia, and civil society.

My Administration places the highest urgency …

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes: Children And The Formation Of The Rio De La Plata Spanish Address System, Israel Sanz-Sánchez, María Irene Moyna

Languages & Cultures Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes the effects of child language acquisition as a critical factor in a morphological change, namely, the replacement of the etymologically singular second person paradigm (tuteo) by its plural counterpart (voseo) in 19th century Rio de la Plata Spanish. The account applies a sociohistorical model which proposes that young children can function as language change agents in environments characterized by unpredictable input variation, lack of normative mechanisms, and the emergence of peer networks among young learners. The model is then applied to explain the rapid generalization of voseo in the late 1800s, a well-documented but poorly understood process. …

Critical Analysis Of Anti-Asian Hate In The News, Benardo Douglas Relampagos

Dissertations and Theses

Since 2019, the United States has had an increase in violence against Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities along with an increase of mainstream anti-Asian racist rhetoric. Between 2021 and 2022, The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism reported an overall 164% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. While racism against black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities has been the topic of an ever-growing body of critical discourse, prior to 2019 few publications had addressed racism and injustice regarding language choices and discourse in the context of anti-Asian rhetoric in the US, specifically regarding the intersection of language …

Perceptual Salience And Structural Ambiguity Resolution, Jeffrey Witzel, Naoko Witzel

Cambridge University Press Open Access Agreement Publications-Archive

This study investigates whether the perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes influences the online processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences during adult first- language (L1) comprehension. In a bidirectional self-paced reading task, adult L1 English participants (N = 44) read sentences with time adjuncts that were in a structural position in which they could attach either to the most recent verb phrase (VP) or to a VP in a higher clause. Consistent with previous findings, the reading times on these sentences indicated processing difficulty when this adjunct allowed only for high attachment. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the perceptual salience of …

Artificial Intelligence Applications For Social Science Research, Megan Stubbs-Richardson, Lauren Brown, Mackenzie Paul, Devon Brenner

SSRC Publications

Our team developed a database of 250 Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications useful for social science research. To be included in our database, the AI tool had to be useful for: 1) literature reviews, summaries, or writing, 2) data collection, analysis, or visualizations, or 3) research dissemination. In the database, we provide a name, description, and links to each of the AI tools that were current at the time of publication on September 29, 2023. Supporting links were provided when an AI tool was found using other databases. To help users evaluate the potential usefulness of each tool, we documented information …

The Language Of Nuclear Security: New Case Studies Exploring Online Open-Source Information From Turkey, India, And Jordan, Zenobia S. Homan, Shraddha Rane, Yara Shaban, Fadime Ö. Özkan, Eunha Yun

International Journal of Nuclear Security

This paper presents a novel internet search methodology and new data on the language of nuclear security. Through three case studies (Turkey, India, and Jordan), it describes what openly accessible information exists about nuclear security in a given national context, where more information is needed, and why. In doing so, the paper highlights the importance of documenting the social and geopolitical context of key nuclear concepts. It also examines the role of language and publicly available information on nuclear security and safety to facilitate the articulation and adoption of international best practices.

The case studies demonstrate how someone may acquire …

Exploring Strategies For Modeling Sign Language Phonology, Lee Kezar, Riley Carlin, Tejas Srinivasan, Zed Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, Jesse Thomason

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Like speech, signs are composed of discrete, recombinable features called phonemes. Prior work shows that models which can recognize phonemes are better at sign recognition, motivating deeper exploration into strategies for modeling sign language phonemes. In this work, we learn graph convolution networks to recognize the sixteen phoneme “types” found in ASL-LEX 2.0. Specifically, we explore how learning strategies like multi-task and curriculum learning can leverage mutually useful information between phoneme types to facilitate better modeling of sign language phonemes. Results on the Sem-Lex Benchmark show that curriculum learning yields an average accuracy of 87% across all phoneme types, outperforming …

The Sound Of Dzongkha: Recent Changes To Its Tonal Paradigm, Qiyou (Ark) Lu , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis explores the evolving phonetics and phonology of Dzongkha, a Tibetic language spoken in Bhutan, a small landlocked country in the eastern Himalayas, with a particular focus on the transformation of its tonal system over the past three decades. The country has seen noticeable changes to its official language in recent decades due to language policies and migration. This research aims to provide an updated analysis of the language's sound system based on newly collected field data.

The study covers various aspects of Dzongkha’s sound system, including its vowel and consonant inventories, phonotactics and tones. In particular, the language …

Floor Organization In Dungeons And Dragons, Arlowe E. Willingham , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

The floor as a concept of conversational organization is investigated in the context of the tabletop gaming environment Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Building from Carole Edelsky’s 1981 article “Who’s Got the Floor”, I recorded and analyzed one online D&D session to explore collaborative characteristics of floor organization in a recreational, social, entertainment-focused game environment. Due to the unique power dynamic established by the role of Dungeon Master (DM) in a D&D game, a comparison is made to classroom environments to investigate similarities between the floor organization of teachers in academic settings. I observe how the environment of D&D promotes traits …

Beyond The Binary: L1 Strategies For Spoken Non-Binary French, Kate Carlyle , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

French, like other Romance languages, operates on a largely binary morphological gender system, leading to many potential linguistic complications when it is used to index social genders that fall outside of said binary (Michele 2016, Kaplan 2022). Certain morphosyntactic features of French specifically make accomplishing many non-binary (NB) marking strategies in speech all the more challenging. This paper presents an interview-based study conducted with 7 L1 French speakers living in France to assess what strategies are most commonly used in practice to describe a non-binary referent in speech. Through an elicitation exercise that prompted speakers to describe various stick figure-based …

Towards Agile Academia: An Approach To Scientific Paper Writing Inspired By Software Engineering, Tyler Procko

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The construction of scientific papers is performed in service of the greater scientific community. This iterative process is, in effect, an academic economy, where all members benefit from well-written papers. However, many published scientific papers are poorly written; they often lack sufficient detail to allow replication, there is improper usage of citations or a lack of regard to relevant work, reporting is vague or without linked empirical data to allow verification, figures do not correspond to text or are non-sensical, literary elements, e.g., bulleted lists, are used ineffectively, formatting renders certain sections unreadable, and grammatical errors abound. The issues of …

Requirement Of Variable-Introducing Elements On Event Quantification In Chinese: A Case Study Of 每 Měi–Vp Sentences, Guilherme Zeus Dantas E Moura , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

Connecting With The Outside World: Psychosocially Supportive Aspects Of Operational Communication Between Isolated Crews In Space And Mission Control On The Ground, Dennis J. Frederiksen

Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments

Radio-based communication between crew members in space and mission control centers on the ground has the operational purpose of supporting the safe and effective execution of missions in space. Space-to-ground communication also, however, constitutes one of the relatively few interpersonal relationships astronauts have during missions and in addition to its operational purpose, this communication can support astronauts’ wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to identify psychosocially supportive aspects of operational space-to-ground communication between astronauts in space and spacecraft communicators on the ground. Through qualitative analysis of authentic mission communication, this paper identifies two supportive aspects and develops a terminology …

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Nasa's Instagram Account, Danica Lynn Tomber

Dissertations and Theses

In an increasingly interconnected society where science and technology are advancing at a rapid pace, knowledge dissemination, specifically in terms of public engagement and popularization, must be both encouraged and critically evaluated. As an internationally recognized government agency that is dedicated to the advancement of space exploration and present on several social media platforms, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) provides a useful lens from which to analyze large-scale messaging of multimodal scientific information. Although there is a substantial amount of linguistic research into political and government-based messaging in social media, there is not much literature on the …

Adults’ Reading Engagement And Wellbeing In Aotearoa New Zealand, Stephen Reder

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Education and literacy have long been associated with a range of economic and social outcomes in industrialized societies. Recent research based on large-scale national and international surveys has examined effects of education and literacy on individuals’ social and economic outcomes. This paper takes a further step in understanding the importance of literacy for individuals’ economic and social outcomes by disentangling the effects of two different aspects of literacy, literacy proficiency as measured by standardized tests and reading engagement as measured by self-reports of everyday reading activities. Using recent nationally representative survey data from New Zealand, multivariate regression models estimate the …

Towards Interpretable Machine Reading Comprehension With Mixed Effects Regression And Exploratory Prompt Analysis, Luca Del Signore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We investigate the properties of natural language prompts that determine their difficulty in machine reading comprehension tasks. While much work has been done benchmarking language model performance at the task level, there is considerably less literature focused on how individual task items can contribute to interpretable evaluations of natural language understanding. Such work is essential to deepening our understanding of language models and ensuring their responsible use as a key tool in human machine communication. We perform an in depth mixed effects analysis on the behavior of three major generative language models, comparing their performance on a large reading comprehension …

Representaciones Ideológicas Del Lenguaje Entre La Población Mexicana En Nueva York, Maria Del Rocio Carranza Brito

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the linguistic ideologies that Mexican migrants bring when migrating and reproduce in their daily interactions with other Spanish and English speakers, as well as the representations of the language presented in their linguistic behaviors. This work presents an intersectional analysis where the factors of gender, migratory status, education, and work are determining factors in the adoption, maintenance, and reproduction of language ideologies, which affect the linguistic decisions of the speakers in their use of Spanish, learning of English and the support of bilingualism. Based on the stereotypical idea of Spanish as the …

"How" As A Signal Of An Invariant Meaning, Andrew S. Mccormick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to explain why speakers and writers use how in the communicative contexts in which they do, and its central claim is that how is a signal of one invariant meaning. The form’s diverse communicative contributions can be explained by hypothesizing a single meaning that contributes to different message effects, or contextual interpretations, on different occasions of its use.

The present analysis rests on the crucial distinction in Columbia School (CS) linguistics, the theoretical framework guiding this project, between meaning and message. A meaning is a signal’s invariant semantic contribution, while messages are the context-unique interpretations that …

Broadcasting La Presencia Latina: Tracing Identities Across Fields Of Interaction In Rural Minnesota, Anthony J. Harb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation project traces the concerted efforts of an emergent Latinx immigrant community in Westplain, Minnesota to construct and assert their individual and collective identities within the public sphere through a range of multimodal and face-to-face communicative resources. I address enduring questions within the fields of linguistic anthropology, language education, and Latinx (media) studies through a multi-sited ethnography centered around three focal field sites: (1) a Spanish-language community radio program I call La Gran Comunidad Latina (LGCL); (2) a college-level civic engagement Spanish conversation course titled Noticias Comunitarias (NC) designed and taught in partnership with LGCL; and (3) an antiracist …

The Marginalised Nativism Strikes Back: Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Afd Party’S Anti-Refugee Campaign In Germany, Raihanna Athaayaa Ari Sudjono, Aditya Batara Gunawan

Jurnal Politik

Born as a Eurosceptic party in 2013, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party shifted its agenda to anti-refugee and anti-Islamic issues after the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. This shift is evident in the discourse of traditional campaign posters distributed during the 2017 federal election in Germany. This article aims to map and conduct a critical discourse analysis of the refugee crisis issues constructed by the AfD Party through traditional campaign posters. The author argues that the AfD Party's anti-refugee and anti-Islam discourse is significantly influenced by factors such as interests, ideology, and social, economic, and political conditions. This research …

Toponim Wilayah Kota Pekanbaru: Etnisitas, Penggunaan Bahasa, Dan Campur Kode, Satwiko Budiono, Yenni Febtaria Wijayatiningsih, Imelda Yance

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Urban areas have developed rapidly in terms of demography and culture. This is because urban areas attract people who are searching for higher income and a better life than those in rural areas. Demographical and cultural development in urban areas often affects local culture. One example can be found in Pekanbaru City, Riau Province, Indonesia. The Riau Malays, the city’s native ethnic group, no longer dominates the city’s demographical landscape. In fact, the Minangkabaus as a migrant ethnic group actually dominate Pekanbaru City. However, there is still a limited body of documentation of and research on the language and culture …

Rekonstruksi Sejarah Dalam Kumpulan Puisi Dari Batavia Sampai Jakarta Melalui Pembacaan Jauh Berbasis Korpus, Ananda Bintang Purwaramdhona, Mochamad Irfan Hidayatullah, Lina Meilinawati Rahayu

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

By applying the mixed research methods combining new historicism and digital humanities with AntConc-assisted distant reading techniques, this research aims to explore a reconstruction of Jakarta's history offered in From Batavia to Jakarta (1619–1999), a collection of poems by Zeffry J. Alkatiri. Results show that history can be reconstructed through the physical structure of narrative poetry represented by the dominant usage of pronoun "they" and intra-sentence conjunctions and prepositions such as "and", "in", and "the" instead of licentia poetica which can violate language rules. However, in the structural analysis, AntConc was not able to detect several linguistic aspects such …

Permainan Alegori Dalam Novel O Karya Eka Kurniawan, Indah Fadhilla

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Fables typically attach human attributes to animal characters to convey moral messages and teachings, but a number of modern authors use animal characters in their literary works to criticize current sociocultural phenomena. One famous literary work that contains many forms of allegory about relationships between human and animal characters is O, a novel by Eka Kurniawan. Allegories in O are used to exhibit contradictions between humans and animals. Animal characters are presented as possessing human traits, bringing up the idea that animals can become ideal human beings (the concept of “being human”). Meanwhile, human characters are presented as possessing …