Linguistics Commons^™

Sicilians In Detroit: How Do They Speak?, Giovanna Brunetti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study focuses on the linguistic analysis of the varieties of the Sicilian dialect spoken in the city of Detroit, Michigan. The city has witnessed, starting from the early 19th century, a steady process of immigration and settlement involving speakers mainly arriving from the two Sicilian coastal towns of Terrasini and Cinisi. The varieties they speak appear to have never been the subject of systematic observation. The present study, thus, focuses on the preservation, attrition and/or loss of the phonological features of the Sicilian dialect spoken by a community of Sicilian immigrants of different generations living in Detroit. Native …

Short-Term Study Abroad And Dialect Acquisition: An Analysis Of The Acquisition Of The Ustedes-Vosotros Verbal Mixing By Study Abroad L2 Learners Of Spanish, Samuel Collins Hearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Study abroad is often idealized as a panacea for language learning. The growth in the popularity of studying abroad has led to the proliferation of programs of various lengths, among which is the short-term study abroad program, typically lasting around one month. Much needed investigation remains regarding the effectiveness of short-term study abroad programs, and this study aims to understand the level of effectiveness through the lens of dialect feature acquisition. Specifically, in southwestern Andalucía, there exists a phenomenon in which local speakers of Spanish mix the pronoun ustedes with the verbal conjugation of the second person plural pronoun, vosotros. …

Understanding Translanguaging And Identity Among Korean Bilingual Adults, Nancy Ryoo

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative study, conducted at a Northern California university, explored how six Korean bilingual adults expressed their unique identities while utilizing both Korean and English in their daily and academic lives. The six study participants shared their journeys as bilingual adults who migrated to the United States from South Korea to attend graduate school. Several will return to South Korea at the conclusion of their graduate studies. Research data included narratives from in-depth personal interviews as well as focus group discussions.

This qualitative study postulated that translanguaging is commonly observed within bilingual/multilingual populations and can be utilized as a source …

Syntactic Change And The Rise Of Transitivity, James Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

This paper analyzes the historical divergence of predicates marked with old passive neuter -no/-to in Polish and Ukrainian. It is argued that the locus of change leading to the rise of the transitivity property involved a rearrangement of morphologically-eroded voice morphology. Despite the surface similarity of the Polish and Ukrainian constructions, their divergent distribution in the modern languages indicates that grammaticalization of the old passive morpheme proceeded along different pathways, implicating the internal structure of vP, and creating new accusative case-assigning possibilities.

Artykuł przedstawia analizę różnic w rozwoju form predykatów z wykładnikami strony biernej w rodzaju nijakim -no/-to w języku …

Developing Sustainable Partnerships To Advance Digital Equity, Jill Castek, Cindy Gibbon, Gloria Jacobs

Presentations and Publications

In the early 2000s, inequities surrounding affordable Internet access brought the digital divide into public consciousness. Over time, practitioners and researchers working to address this divide have revealed a persistent, wider gap that includes inequities in social support networks (DiMaggio & Hargittai, 2001). Jenkins et al. (2006) identified a participation gap in using and interacting with digital tools. Evolving conversations have produced a broader conceptualization of the issues through the lens of digital inclusion and digital equity (Siefer, 2016). Those on the wrong side of the digital divide need digital literacy training, access to technical support, and the applications and …

Gendered And Racialized Language Ideologies At Sdsu, Brooke N. Leetham

The Journal of Undergraduate Research

This research project explores the ways in which South Dakota State University students perceive speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in comparison to how they perceive speakers of Standard American English (SAE). Language ideologies affect these perceptions, and they largely exist on a subconscious level—therefore, I uncover them in order to discover how language ideologies affect SDSU. I conducted a matched-guise test with recordings by four speakers (two African American males, one African American female, and one mixed African American/White female). These speakers each made the first of two recordings in SAE and the second in AAVE. Out of …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

Generating Amharic Present Tense Verbs: A Network Morphology & Datr Account, T. Michael W. Halcomb

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis I attempt to model, that is, computationally reproduce, the natural transmission (i.e. inflectional regularities) of twenty present tense Amharic verbs (i.e. triradicals beginning with consonants) as used by the language’s speakers. I root my approach in the linguistic theory of network morphology (NM) and model it using the DATR evaluator. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of Amharic and discuss the fidel as an abugida, the verb system’s root-and-pattern morphology, and how radicals of each lexeme interacts with prefixes and suffixes. I offer an overview of NM in Chapter 2 and DATR in Chapter 3. In …

Linguistic And Conceptual Metaphors Of ‘Heart’ In Learner Corpora, Aurora Mathews Adams

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This corpus-based study examined English and Spanish learner language for ‘heart’ metaphors. Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) compared ‘heart’ metaphors across five languages and that study served as a reference framework for the work presented here. This work intended to find evidence of metaphor transfer and/or new metaphor learning in second language writing. Conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and linguistic or lexical metaphors (Falck, 2012) from both languages were considered in the analysis. This work analyzed ‘heart’ metaphors taken from two learner corpora, the Cambridge Learner Corpus and the Corpus de Aprendices de Español. Results were compared to the findings of …

The Declensions Of Modern Eastern Armenian: A Paradigm Function Morphology Approach, Malachi W. Oyer

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In traditional grammar, the inflection of a word’s different forms based on the possible morphosyntactic property combinations of the language can be ordered into a tables. Words of the same part of speech often can be grouped together when they inflect in similar fashions. These similar groups are represented by a single word that expresses the morphosyntactic property set possible for that part of speech. These groups are called declensions. These declensions are not always complete sometimes there is a particular morphosyntactic property set that does not have a corresponding form (word). This is known as defectiveness. One approach that …

Laki Verbal Inflection, Sahar Taghipour

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis mainly examines inflectional morphology of verbal paradigms in Laki, which is considered as one of the Southern varieties of Kurdish language. The association of form and content of morphological markings are viewed from a realizational angle, in which exponents (morphological forms) are associated with the morphosyntactic properties via the application of rules of exponence, appealed by paradigm functions (Stump 2001) and ordered into rule blocks (Anderson 1992). In particular, I applied the paradigm linkage theory proposed and fully developed by Stump (2002 and 2016) to account for Laki verbal paradigms. In this study, it is claimed that alignment …

Language, Rhetoric, And Politics In A Global Context: A Decolonial Critical Discourse Perspective On Nigeria’S 2015 Presidential Campaign, Yunana Ahmed

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this dissertation, I conceptualize a rhetorical and linguistic analysis of politics from a decolonial framework (Mignolo, 2011; Smith, 2012). My analysis draws on classical rhetoric (Aristotle, 2007), cultural rhetoric (Mao, 2014; Powell, et al., 2014; Yankah, 1995), and linguistics (Chilton, 2004) to reveal the different ways ideological and hegemonic struggles are discursively constructed in Nigerian political campaign discourse. The data for this study come from two speeches delivered by former President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan during the 2015 electoral campaign. This includes his declaration-of-intent speech and his speech marking the commencement of his formal campaign activities. My …

Suggestions For A Parametric Typology Of Dance, Donna Jo Napoli, L. Kraus

Linguistics Faculty Works

Dance and language are produced/performed by the body and governed by cognitive faculties. Yet regrettably little scholarship applies tools of formal analysis in one field to the other. This paper aims to enrich dialogue between the two fields. We introduce an approach to dance typology formed on analogy with the parametric theory of language analysis, useful in typologizing languages. This initial exploration paves the way for a physiological typology of dance, without reference to culture.

Iconicity Chains In Sign Languages, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Syllable-Aware Neural Language Models: A Failure To Beat Character-Aware Ones, Z. Assylbekov, R. Takhanov, B. Myrzakhmetov, Jonathan North Washington

Linguistics Faculty Works

Syllabification does not seem to improve word-level RNN language modeling quality when compared to character-based segmentation. However, our best syllable-aware language model, achieving performance comparable to the competitive character-aware model, has 18%-33% fewer parameters and is trained 1.2-2.2 times faster.

Ud Annotatrix: An Annotation Tool For Universal Dependencies, F. M. Tyers, M. Sheyanova, Jonathan North Washington

Linguistics Faculty Works

In this paper we introduce the UD Annotatrix annotation tool for manual annotation of Universal Dependencies. This tool has been designed with the aim that it should be tailored to the needs of the Universal Dependencies (UD) community, including that it should operate in fully-offline mode, and is freely-available under the GNU GPL licence. In this paper, we provide some background to the tool, an overview of its development, and background on how it works. We compare it with some other widely-used tools which are used for Universal Dependencies annotation, describe some features unique to UD Annotatrix, and finally outline …

Monolingualism In A Multicultural Nation: The Impact Of Nationalism And Color-Blind Racial Ideologies On Support For English-Only Policies, Anna Benker

Departmental Honors Projects

The United States is one of few nations yet to name an official language. However, the desire to make English the official language of the US has been prevalent throughout history and remains strong to this day. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that are related to greater support for English-Only policy. Previous studies have found that ideas of nationalism, specifically holding ethno-cultural criteria of national membership, is correlated with greater support for English-Only policy (Citrin et al, 1990; Frendreis and Tatalovich, 1997; Garcia and Bass, 2007; Schildkraut, 2003). This study will retest some of these …

Phonetic Complexity Affects Children’S Mandarin Tone Production Accuracy In Disyllabic Words: A Perceptual Study, Puisan Wong, Winifred Strange

Publications and Research

This is the first study to examine the effect of phonetic contexts on children’s lexical tone production. Mandarin tones in disyllabic words produced by forty-four 2- to 6-year-old children and twelve mothers were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Native Mandarin speaking adults categorized the tones based on the pitch information in the filtered stimuli. All mothers’ tones were categorized with ceiling accuracy. Counter to the findings in most previous studies on children’s tone acquisition and the prevailing assumption in models of speech development that children acquire suprasegmental features much earlier than segmental features, this study found that children as …

Similarities And Differences Between Simultaneous And Successive Bilingual Children: Acquisition Of Japanese Morphology, Yuki Itani-Adams, Junko Iwasaki, Satomi Kawaguchi

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper compares the acquisition of Japanese morphology of two bilingual children who had different types of exposure to Japanese language in Australia: a simultaneous bilingual child who had exposure to both Japanese and English from birth, and a successive bilingual child who did not have regular exposure to Japanese until he was six years and three months old. The comparison is carried out using Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann 1998, 2005) as a common framework, and the corpus for this study consists of the naturally spoken production of these two Australian children. The results show that both children went through …

V[Ɛ]Ry V[E]Ried Vowel Mergers In The Pacific Northwest, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

MARY-MERRY-MARRY historically variable, but likely merged today

Status of pre-lateral mergers is unknown, though impressionistically less clear cut

Hypothesis 1: complete MARY-MERRY-MARRY merger

• Not only distinct, but unusual pattern of MARY being the different one

Hypothesis 2: separation of POOL, PULL, POLE, and PULP

• PULL-POLE most merged, and POOL becoming less distinct in apparent time

Vowel mergers are indeed v[ɛ]ry v[e]ried in the Pacific Northwest

• Not all of the Pacific Northwest is the same (urban/rural divide)

• Don’t make assumptions about a community’s speech

Changes In The Timber Industry As A Catalyst For Linguistic Change, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Researchers have noticed the linguistic consequences of major social events in a community. Events that cause dramatic changes in demographics or sudden exposure to a new varieties such as World War II (Bailey et al. 1996), the rapid increase of island tourism (Wolfram, Hazen & Schilling-Estes 1999), or the start of daily trips to the mainland (Schilling 2017) often lead to the rapid spread of innovative linguistic variables and the recession of traditional features (cf. Herold 1990; Johnson 2010). The effects of these “catastrophic events” are typical of external factors in language change (Labov 2001). In this paper, I show …

Lexicography In-Your-Face: The Active Semantics Of Pastaza Quichua Ideophones, Janis B. Nuckolls, Tod D. Swanson, Diana Shelton, Alexander Rice, Sarah Hatton

Faculty Publications

English:

We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language’s ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts …

Nominalized Adverbs In Spanish: The Intriguing Case Of Detrás Mío And Its Cohorts, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Instances of adverbs modified by adjectives (e.g. detrás mío, delante tuyo) were extracted from the Corpus del Español. The corpus analysis reveals that these constructions are attested in all 21 Spanish-speaking countries to varying degrees, but are most frequent in Argentina and Uruguay. Adjectives following the adverbs in questions are predominantly masculine; however, in Peninsular varieties feminine forms are quite common. Although alrededor and lado are both adverbs as well as masculine nouns, they are occasionally followed by feminine adjectives (e.g. al lado suya), which is arguably due to the use of the feminine in other constructions such as encima …

Automated Large-Scale Phonetic Analysis: Dass, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Joseph A. Stanley, Katherine Kuiper

Faculty Publications

DASS:

• 64 interviews available on a portable USB drive
• 370 hours of sound files--c. 200Gb, about 5000 files in all—plus metadata
• LICHEN user interface software

Why DASS?

• LAGS already widely used in analyses of Southern speech (e.g. Dorrill 2003, Feagin 2003, Schönweitz 2001, and Thomas 2005).
• Thomas (2001) has demonstrated successful acoustic analysis of our old recordings.
• The Atlas web site gets about a million accesses per year in recent years, so it is already a dataset that people want to use
• DASS makes a good sample across the South

Volcanic Vocalic Changes, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

HYPOTHESES

pre-velars:

• Hypothesis 1: Longview is like the rest of Washington

back vowels:

• Hypothesis 2: /o/ is fronted
• Hypothesis 3: /o/ is monophthongized

Volcano:

• Hypothesis 4: These three changes have to do with a volcano

A Comparative Discourse Analysis Of Spanish Past Narrations From The Actfl Opi And Opic, Alan V. Brown, Troy L. Cox, Gregory L. Thompson

Faculty Publications

The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and accompanying proficiency guidelines have become a mainstay in academic foreign language assessment. In 2006, an asynchronous electronic interface of the OPI was made available in which candidates are asked to record themselves responding to questions delivered aurally via computer, labeled the Oral Proficiency Interview-computer (OPIc). Thompson, Cox, and Knapp (2016) found that both instruments produced similar results but that many students in their sample who scored at the Advanced Low level on the traditional OPI scored one sublevel higher on the OPIc. The primary objective of the present study is to analyze lexical …

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., the comparative) is sensitive to the location of prosodic prominence. Machine learning algorithms (support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis) and human perception experiments are used to cross-validate the web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. Results con rm the theoretical predictions for location of prominence in comparative clauses and the advantages using both web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. The most robust …

Consonantal Variation In Utah English: What El[T]Se Is Happening[K]?, Joseph A. Stanley, Kyle Vanderniet

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to assess the frequency of consonantal variables characteristic of Utah English, and to shed light on several linguistic features yet to be analyzed in depth in this region. Because of its unique settlement history and predominantly Mormon population today, Utah is an outlier linguistically and culturally compared to other Western states. But research on Utah English has been focused primarily on vowel mergers (for example Di Paolo & Faber 1990; Baker & Bowie 2010), leaving variation in consonants relatively understudied.

The consonantal feature of contemporary Utah English that is probably most salient, both to …

English-Swahili Code Switching: An Intersection Between Stance And Identity, Gorrety Nafula Wawire

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current study seeks to answer the questions of how and why bilinguals code switch as this are the essential questions that need to be addressed when looking at linguistic patterns of bilinguals. This study also incorporates stance, as a great tool for analysis of ways in which we can predict motivations for CS in bilinguals. In an endeavor to explain the language patterns in English-Swahili bilinguals in Memphis and Tallahassee Florida in the United States of America. The following study address how and why bilinguals code switch, and how different stance taking measures brings out the speaker identities. The …

Vowels Of Beryozovka Ewen: An Acoustic Phonetic Study, Kang Hijo, Yun Jiwon, Seongyeon Ko

Publications and Research

This study acoustically analyzes 13,540 vowel tokens of Beryozovka Ewen with the aid of automated post-transcriptional processing technique. The focus of the analysis is on the acoustic correlates of [RTR], which is the harmonic feature of the language. In addition to the first three formants, acoustic values representing spectral tilt such as H1−H2, H1−A2, and B1 are measured as potential acoustic cues of [RTR]. The results show that F1, F3, and B1 are the most reliable cues of the feature and that H1− H2 and H1−A2 are nearly reliable. These acoustic cues are also shown to interact with length and …