Linguistics Commons^™

Cube Mentalism, Jeremiah Farrell, Ivan Moscovich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Our tour of multidimensional cubes begins with the marking of the eight comers of a 3-cube with the eight words HOT, POT, POD, HOD, HAD, HAT, PAT, and PAD. The figure below shows how these eight inherit the labels of the HOT-PAD).die where the letter H is opposite P, the letter O is opposite T and the letter T is opposite the letter D...

The First Gathering, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The following is a photocopy of a letter I sent to my good friend James P. Fink shortly after the first Gathering in 1993. It is not reqritten or edited in any way in hopes of conveying to you some sense of my awe at how very special this event really way. My son David, then a student in Boston, was also privileged to be invited by Tom Rodgers and David and I still feel overwhelmed by the experience.

There are so many memories- and so many friends. After you have read the letter, I will remark on some of …

The Stenographic Affine Plane, Oscar Thumpbindle, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This square, composed of familiar words, is semimagic because any row or column (the rook sweeps) anagrams into STENOGRAPHIC. "Semi" means the diagonals don't. However, there are four very special diagonals; those that have words with one of the four vowels of STENOGRAPHIC in common. These four bishop sweeps will be important later. Keeping with the chess piece theme, the reader will take notice of the knight 4-tours using the consonants P, H, Rand C. For example one of these is the P-tour SAP, PEG, PIN and TOP. Another set of knight tours traces the letters S, T, G and …

Energy And Symmetry In Language And Yoga, Sally Hess, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

The structures of syllables and of yoga poses are compared. Syllables are tripartite, with sound segments rising in sonority (acoustic energy) to a peak, then falling. Likewise, asanas are tripartite, with symmetrical movements flanking the sustaining, vital energy peak. In both entities, then, symmetric structure flanks energy peaks. This organization is not a physical necessity, but a cognitive preference.

A Bilingual Approach To Reading, D. Deluca, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Anaphor Form And Antecedent Type On Anaphoric Processing, S. M. Callahan, J. Nicol, T. Love, J.D. Witzel, D. Swinney

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (LCNL)

The Verbs Of Esther: A Discourse Analysis Of A Post-Exilic Text, Jill Lynn Riepe

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

The Verbs of Esther: A Discourse Analysis of a Post-Exilic Text seeks to describe the narrative main clause verbs, the quotation formula verbs, and the verbs in quotations found in the text of Esther. These verbs provide key information about the discourse structure of the text. While there are several examples of discourse studies in pre-exilic Biblical Hebrew, there are only a few in post-exilic Biblical Hebrew and none using the text of Esther. The analysis depends on the theoretical backing of Longacre and Miller. While many of their findings and analysis remain true for this post-exilic text, there are …

(Im)Politeness In Casual Conversations Among Female Mandarin Speakers: A Practice-Based Perspective, Hui-Yen Wang

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

The fact that people have the choice to use different words and attitudes to convey messages of various significance has been attributed to politeness concerns. However, what constitutes politeness varies from culture to culture and person to person. Therefore, a universal definition for what politeness is does not seem plausible. Furthermore, using the term `politeness' to indicate the study of all kinds of linguistic behavior is problematic because `politeness' seems to exclude behavior that is inappropriate, aggressive or rude. To provide a more comprehensive account of politeness, this research draws upon the notion of "(im)politeness" (Watts, 2003) to account for …

Language Testing And Assessment In Applied Linguistics: Identifying Reciprocity In Applied Linguistic Research, Pauline Rea-Dickins, Katie Scott, Guoxing Yu

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

The rationale for the seminar was primarily that there are links between language testing and assessment on one hand and applied linguistics on the other which could be mutually beneficial, but are not necessarily perceived as such. Secondly, it was suggested that research in language assessment and applied linguistics have been perceived as distinct, with the roles of language testing and assessment in applied linguistics relatively unexplored, an artificial divide that Bachman & Cohen (1998), for example, argue should be bridged (see also Bachman & Palmer 1996; Shohamy 2001). An additional motivation for proposing this conference was to build on …

Blogging About Feminist Lnterdisciplinarity In The Study Of Communication, Language, And Gender, Cynthia Berryman-Fink, Janet Bing, Deborah Cameron, Amy Sheldon, Anita Taylor

English Faculty Publications

This article provides information about several blog posts discussed during a round-table discussion on feminist interdisciplinary studies in relation to communication, language, and gender. Topics under discussion include the nature of interdisciplinarity and its relevance to feminist studies, intercultural communication, and the study and teaching of gender in women's studies programs in higher education.

Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008 Dit System Descriptions (Dit-Fbi, Dit-Tvas, Dit-Cbsr, Dit-Rbr, Dit-Fbi-Cbsr, Dit-Tvas-Rbr), John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

This papers desibes a set of systems developed at DIT for the Referring Expression Generation challenage at INLG 2008.In Proceedings of the 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG-08)

Scaling Up And Moving In: Connecting Social Practices Views To Policies And Programs In Adult Education, Stephen Reder

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The social practices framework has had a major impact on adult literacy and numeracy research over the past quarter century in the US, the UK and other countries. To date, the social practices view has had far less influence on the development of policies and programs in adult literacy and numeracy education. To help this happen, new kinds of assessment tools aligned with the social practices framework are needed to support appropriate changes in curriculum design, learner assessment and program evaluation.
In this article research is presented that illustrates how measures of adults’ engagement in literacy and numeracy practices can …

“Bridging Activities,” New Media Literacies, And Advanced Foreign Language Proficiency, Steven L. Thorne, Jonathon Reinhardt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article we propose the pedagogical model bridging activities to address advanced foreign language proficiency in the context of existing and emerging internet communication and information tools and communities. The article begins by establishing the need for language and genre-focused activities at the advanced level that attend to the shifting social practices and emerging literacies associated with digital media. Grounded in principles of language awareness and the concept of multiliteracies, the bridging activities model centers on guided exploration and analysis of student selected or created digital vernacular texts originating in Web 2.0 and other technologies/practices such as instant messaging …

Web 2.0, Synthetic Immersive Environments, And Mobile Resources For Language Education, Julie M. Sykes, Ana Oskoz, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In light of the increasingly blurred line between mediated and nonmediated contexts for social, professional, and educational purposes, attention to the presence and use of innovative digital media is critical to the consideration of the future of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). This article reviews current trends in the use of mediated communication and offers a vision for near-future second and foreign language (L2) learning that utilizes emerging media as (a) meaningful contexts for L2 language development and (b) a means for adding real world relevance to in-class uses of internet-mediated communication tools. In this article, we first explore a sampling …

A Comparative Linguistic Application Of The D.O. And The I.O. In Both Spanish And Albanian (Aplicación Lingüística-Comparativa Del Cd Y Ci Del Español Y Del Albanés), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez, Fationa Aliaj

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this research is to compare descriptively the issues arising from comparing the direct and indirect objects in both Albanian and Spanish. Both languages belong to different Indoeuropean groups, however they keep some morphosyntactical similarities in some of the functions of these two cases. In Albanian, five cases are used to indicate relations between words. In Spanish, the morphological difference of cases (inherited from Latin) has only been kept in the third person of the indirect and direct object pronouns. We present here paralellisms and linguistic applications of these two cases: dative (indirect object) and accusative (direct object) …

L1 Acquisition Of Japanese Particles: A Corpus-Based Study, Mari Fujimoto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a comprehensive examination of L1 Japanese particle acquisition using two sets of corpora of naturalistic speech, JCHAT, longitudinal speech data of three Japanese children and the mothers (Miyata 2004a, b, and c, and MacWhinney 2000), and CHJ, adult-to-adult telephone conversation. The analysis reveals that despite differences in their language environment, all three children complete particle acquisition around MLU (m) 3.00 regardless of differences in the threshold of particle use. Further, none of the three children mimicked their mother's frequency of particle use, even as they all conform to a particular sequence of particle acquisition. The first set …

Practical Understandings: Teachers' Beliefs And Practices In Pronunciation Teaching, Hsing-Hui Winnie Chiu

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

Recent discussion regarding pronunciation teaching and the global expansion of English use have encouraged formal English education in the EFL/expanding circle countries.The present study involved three native English speaking teachers (NEST) and three non-native English speaking teachers (NNEST) in an elementary school of a EFL/Expanding Circle country. The study explores teachers' practices and beliefs of pronunciation teaching in terms of the teaching context (i.e. ESL, EFL or EIL), the teaching component: segmentals or suprasegmentals, their teaching approaches, and the differences between NESTs and NNESTs. The results revealed the teachers' EFL norm-bound beliefs and practices with little EIL inclination. Moreover, the …

Identity In Second Language Learning: Access To The Target Language Group, Stephanie J. Marra

Graduate Research Papers

In recent years the role of identity in SLA has emerged in the literature as the linguistic community develops an understanding of the significance of identity in language learning (McKay & Wong, 1996). Norton (2000) refers to identity as “how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future” (p. 5). An understanding of identity in language learning and the relationship of the language learner to the learning environment helps to illuminate what previous theories about the role of affective variables …

Signs And Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, And Arts, K. A. Lindgren, D. Deluca, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

This collection, carefully chosen from the recent Signs and Voices Conference, the Presidential Forum on American Sign Language at the Modern Language Association Convention, and other sources, addresses all of the factors now changing the cultural landscape for deaf people. "Taken together, the essays in this book and the accompanying DVD point to new directions in a broad range of fields, including cognitive science, deaf studies, disability studies, education, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology. This showcase of innovative and rigorous cross-disciplinary study will prove invaluable to everyone interested in the current state of the Deaf community.

Access: Multiple Avenues For Deaf People, D. Deluca, I. W. Leigh, K. A. Lindgren, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

The companion to Signs and Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts, this volume presents an accomplished group of contributors who address the major technological, institutional, and societal advances in access for deaf people, as well as the remaining hurdles.

Ho And The Other Kherwarian Languages, G. D. S. Anderson, T. Osada, K. David Harrison

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Euskera As A Defining Feature Of Euskadi, Whitney Blake Dennis

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on the role of the Basque language (Euskera or Euskara) in the national identity of the Basque people. I looked at the history of Basque education, from the beginnings of the ikastola movement of the early 20th century to the current bilingual education system. I examined the use of Euskara in education from the primary school level to the university level in the Basque Autonomous Community. This research involved looking at the BAC government’s detailed studies on students in the various linguistic models of education in the BAC. Other areas I discuss in this paper are the …

Participant Positioning And The Positioning Of Participatory Pronouns In The Academic Lecture, Robert Thomas Connor

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Through a research approach of emergence applied to a corpus of academic letures, I developed a theory to explicate the referents of a class of frequently used pronouns (I, you, and we), which I term the Participatory Pronouns. My theory of the Positioning of Participatory Pronouns resolves the main practical concern of the research participants, which is to place their utterances in contexts for authoritative, intellectually sound, and socially relevant interpretation. At the theoretical level, my theory is a specification of Relevance Theory and resolves disparate previous analyses of pronouns. Overall, my work provides a new paradigm for how referents …

Assessing The Costs Of Machine-Assisted Corpus Annotation Through A User Study, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Eric K. Ringger, Marc A. Carmen, Robbie A. Haertel, Kevin Seppi, Peter J. Mcclanahan, James Carroll, Noel Ellison

Faculty Publications

Fixed, limited budgets often constrain the amount of expert annotation that can go into the construction of annotated corpora. Estimating the cost of annotation is the first step toward using annotation resources wisely. We present here a study of the cost of annotation. This study includes the participation of annotators at various skill levels and with varying backgrounds. Conducted over the web, the study consists of tests that simulate machine-assisted pre-annotation, requiring correction by the annotator rather than annotation from scratch. The study also includes tests representative of an annotation scenario involving Active Learning as it progresses from a naïve …

The Phonetic Context Of American English Flapping: Quantitative Evidence, Dirk Elzinga, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The phonetic context in which word-medial flaps occur (in contrast to [th]) in American English is explored. The analysis focuses on stress placement, following phone, and syllabification. In Experiment 1, subjects provided their preference for [th] or [ɾ] in bisyllabic nonce words. Consistent with previous studies, flaps were preferred before stressless syllables and [th] before stressed syllables, but the following phone also exerted a small degree of influence. Experiments 2 and 3 tested whether [th] or [ɾ] are associated with a particular syllable position in bisyllabic words. They demonstrate that [th] is favored in onsets, while [ɾ] is not consistently …

Designing And Evaluating A Russian Tagset, Serge Sharoff, Mikhail Kopotev, Tomaž Erjavec, Anna Feldman, Dagmar Divjak

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper reports the principles behind designing a tagset to cover Russian morphosyntactic phenomena, modifications of the core tagset, and its evaluation. The tagset and associated morphosyntactic specifications are based on the MULTEXT-East framework, while the decisions in designing it were aimed at achieving a balance between parameters important for linguists and the possibility to detect and disambiguate them automatically. The final tagset contains about 600 tags and achieves about 95% accuracy on the disambiguated portion of the Russian National Corpus. We have also produced a test set of tagging models and corpora that can be shared with other researchers.

Tagset Design, Inflected Languages, And N-Gram Tagging, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper explores the relationship between the tagset design and linguistic properties of inflected languages for the task of morphosyntactic tagging. Some information theoretic measures and statistics on these languages are reported which show, unsurprisingly, that the tagsets for morphologically rich languages are larger than tagsets for English and the average tag/token ambiguity is higher. The surprising outcome of the experiments is that for Catalan, Czech, Polish, Portuguese,and Russian – which are considered to be “word order” free languages (to various degrees) – the knowledge about the preceding tag reduces the uncertainty about the tag in question if the detailed …

Elicited Imitation As An Oral Proficiency Measure With Asr Scoring, Deryle W. Lonsdale, C. Ray Graham, Casey Kennington, Aaron W. Johnson, Jeremiah Lane Mcghee

Faculty Publications

This paper discusses development and evaluation of a practical, valid and reliable instrument for evaluating the spoken language abilities of second-language (L2) learners of English. First we sketch the theory and history behind elicited imitation (EI) tests and the renewed interest in them. Then we present how we developed a new test based on various language resources, and administered it to a few hundred students of varying levels. The students were also scored using standard evaluation techniques, and the EI results were compared to more traditionally derived scores. We also sketch how we developed a new integrated tool that allows …

Teaching Cultural Prototypes And Detecting Prototypical Errors Of L2 Learners, Tina Bennett Mowrey

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The focus of this study is the problem of first language (L1) transfer of cultural prototypes to specific L2 lexical items. This paper will provide a method for identifying and understanding cultural nuances in the meaning of words during the process of learning. An explanation of the learning process will be presented and the iconic or the prototypical level of cross-cultural communication will be analyzed. The APP will present a teaching approach on how to ascertain the L1 cultural prototypes being transferred to specific L2 lexical items. How to negotiate the meaning of these cultural prototypes of lexical items will …

Japanese Vocabulary Acquisition By Learners In Three Contexts, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

This study is an investigation of the development of vocabulary knowledge during study abroad (SA), intensive domestic immersion (IM) and academic year formal classroom (AY) learning. Freed (1999) has emphasized the importance of knowing how stateside IM and AY experiences compare with SA and of determining the specific shared and unique linguistic benefits of each of these contexts. While few in number, comparisons between these contexts have been made (e.g., DeKeyser, 1986; Dewey, 2004; Freed, 1995b; Freed, Segalowitz & Dewey, 2004; Lafford, 1995; Milton & Meara, 1995). Only one study was found (Freed et al., 2004) comparing all three contexts …