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Introduction: Selected Proceedings Of The First Workshop On Spanish Sociolinguistics, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This introduction to the Selected Proceedings of the First Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics includes the background for the conference, descriptions of the papers chosen for the volume, acknowledgments, and references.

La Conservación Del Artículo Definido 'Al' En Las Palabras Españolas De Origen Árabe, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Subject, Étienne Balibar, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This selection is a partial translation of the entry “Subject,” written by Etienne Balibar for the Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, directed by Barbara Cassin and forthcoming from Éditions du Seuil and Le Robert.

Un Estudio Sociolingüístico Sobre La Influencia Castellana En El Orden De Palabras En Sipakapense, Rusty Barrett

Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Protestant Language Use In 17th Century Slovakia In A Diglossia Framework, Mark Richard Lauersdorf

Linguistics Faculty Publications

This article presents a discussion of several issues that are central to the ongoing, larger sociolinguistic investigation of the history of standard language development in pre-codification (15th-18th century) Slovakia. It is, in a sense, a position paper, laying out a basic theoretical framework and methodology for historical sociolinguistic research on Slovak standard language development and outlining an investigation of the 17th century linguistic situation among the Slovak Protestants within this framework and methodology.

The Interactive Work Of Prosody In The Irf Exchange: Teacher Repetition In Feedback Moves, John Hellermann

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the interactive import of prosody from a perspective of participants' orientation to talk in interaction, taking advantage of data from institutional discourse to focus on the prosodic packaging of recurring turn sequences of the same discourse activity. The analysis focuses on the third slot of a ubiquitous three-part classroom discourse sequence, the IRF exchange (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975), a site in which teachers make repetitive feedback moves following student responses. Examination of more than 25 hours of classroom discourse and more than 300 third-turn teacher feedback types uncovered a systematic use of prosody for these teacher repetitions …

Thirty Endangered Languages In The Philippines, Thomas N. Headland

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

There are 6,809 languages spoken in the world today. Conservative estimates are that the world's languages are currently dying at the rate of at least two languages each month, and linguists predict that most of today's languages will die out in the next 100 years. Since 1962, the author has been gathering field data on some of the smallest language groups in the world-the Philippine Negritos. This paper will explain why the thirty-plus Negrito languages in the Philippines are endangered, and what the projected future is for these numerically tiny post-foraging societies in the 21st century. The argument will be …

Lexical Comparisons Of Signed Languages And The Effects Of Iconicity, Stephen J. Parkhurst, Dianne Parkhurst

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

Lexical comparisons of signed languages present new methodological challenges not found in comparisons of spoken languages. Two standards for comparing wordlists are examined using a sample of four European sign languages that are not known to be related to each other and a second sample of different dialects of the signed languages of Spain. The use of different standards is shown to affect the numerical results; comparing signs on the basis of probable historical relatedness typically yields percentages that are 5-10% greater than comparisons on the basis of similarity. The amount of iconicity inherent in signed languages affects the wordlist …

Fergie's Prescience: The Changing Nature Of Diglossia In Tunisia, Keith Walters

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Despite criticisms it has received, Ferguson's (1959b) account of diglossia should be recognized for its prescience. It offered not only an admittedly idealized characterization of diglossia in Arabic, but also pointed out how and why it might change. Focusing on Tunisia, this article demonstrates the many ways in which Fergie was right. It examines the changing demographics of Tunisians' access to the high variety of Arabic; the complex ways in which Tunisians, and Arabs more generally, deal with the "communicative tensions" diglossia creates; and considers the changing nature of Arabic in what is, in many ways, a postdiglossic Tunisia.

"How Many Lesbians Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?", Janet M. Bing, Dana Heller

English Faculty Publications

This paper explores how humor reveals shared aspects of a culture of lesbian communities in the US. For lesbians, jokes and other forms of humor are an active, narrative means of self-construction and community imagining that help lesbians negotiate their positions both inside and outside mainstream culture. Whether consciously or unconsciously, much of lesbian humor challenges the dominant culture by rejecting its definitions of and presuppositions about lesbians, and by making lesbian experience central to its understanding of normalcy. Whereas the term "lesbian joke" usually activates a sex frame for the dominant culture, much humor created by and for lesbians …

Copula Variability In Gullah, Tracey L. Weldon

Faculty Publications

Many researchers have investigated the copula for possible links between African American Vernacular English (aave) and Atlantic Creoles, a connection that has served as the foundation of the Creolist Hypothesis in the on-going debate over the origins of aave. One variety that has been of particular interest in this debate is Gullah, which has been hypothetically linked to aave since some of the earliest statements of the Creolist Hypothesis. To date, however, very little research has been done on copula variability in Gullah itself. This study, therefore, provides an analysis of copula variability in present affirmative contexts in Gullah. Variation …

Raising (And Control), William D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Self-Perceptions Of Non-Native English Speaking Teachers Of English As A Second Language, Kathryn Ann Long

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of the present study was to examine the self-perceptions of effective non-native English speaking teachers (non-NESTs) of English as a Second Language (ESL) regarding their teaching behaviors. The study also sought to discover the relationship between effective non-NEST perceptions of their teaching behaviors and stereotypes for those behaviors. It further sought to define what experiences have contributed to their non-conformation if their perceptions do not fit the negative stereotypes of teaching behaviors of non-NESTs.

Emergent Behavior In Phonological Pattern Change, M. Dras, K. David Harrison

Linguistics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Ethnographic Descriptions Of English Corners In Shanghai, Gary Jones

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study explored the phenomenon of English Comers (EC) in Shanghai. These are informal communities formed for the purpose of practising English. In 1978, just after the death of Mao Ze Dong and the fall of the 'gang of four', many eager Chinese people gathered together to practise their oral English in the Shanghai People's Park. Many of these were old men and had been educated in English at missionary schools in Shanghai in the early 20th century. Today we see many successors to such groups in the ECs which meet in different locations throughout the city and which comprise …

Facilitating Second Language Acquisition (Sla) Through Computer-Mediated Communication (Cmc) In An English For Civil Engineering (Ece) Environment, Masputeriah Hamzah

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study explores the application of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in an English for Civil Engineering (ECE) learning setting. The aim is to examine the interactional opportunities present in the computer-mediated environment for evidence of conditions deemed facilitative of second language acquisition, based on the tenets prescribed by the Interaction Hypothesis. This theory emphasizes the importance of interaction in language learning and the necessity for learners to have access to meaningful and comprehensible input. It is based on the premise that acquisition will occur through interaction where learners arc provided opportunities to negotiate meaning in order to develop mutual understanding. In …

Ellipsis In Science And Technology Textbooks In English: Implications For Thai Students, Sripen Srestasathiern

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This is an analytical study which attempted to investigate Thai students' ability to interpret elliptical sentences and to recover and recognise ellipted elements in a science and technology context in English. Students' awareness, understanding, perceptions, problems and strategies in relation to ellipsis were also examined. The subjects for the study were 60 first year students from King Mongkut's Institute of Technology North Bangkok (KMITNB) who had enrolled in two compulsory English courses in KMITNB, Bangkok, Thailand. The instruments for this study were three 20 item ellipsis tests based on 5 ellipsis types classified by Quirk, et al. (1985). Items of …

Doing Loshootseed Morphology By Analogy, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Analogical modeling (AM) is an exemplar-based general modeling theory that is being applied to an increasing range ofnatural language processing problems. This paper introduces AM as a viable approach to morphological analysis for Lushootseed, and shows results from applying the system to analyze the contents of the transcription of a well-known Lushootseed story. Subsequent discussion mentions the strengths and current weaknesses of the approach. Possible improvements and future applications are also sketched.

Implicit Prosody In Silent Reading: Relative Clause Attachment In Croatian, Nenad Lovric

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a relative clause (RC) follows two nouns (N1, N2) in a complex noun phrase such as that contained in the example English sentence below, the preferred interpretation has been found to differ across languages.

(1) Someone shot the servant [N1] of the actress [N2] who was on the balcony [RC].

In some languages (e.g., English), readers preferentially interpret the RC as attaching to (i.e., modifying) N2. In other languages (e.g., Spanish), there is a preference for attachment to N1. This cross-linguistic variation is the only known counterevidence to the claim that the human sentence processing routines are universal, and …

The Literary Structure Of The Song Of Songs Redivivus, Richard M. Davidson

Journal of the Adventist Theological Society

No abstract provided.

The "Kinds" Of Genesis 1: What Is The Meaning Of Min?, A. Rahel Schafer

Journal of the Adventist Theological Society

No abstract provided.

A Multi-Platform Application Suite For Enhancing South Asian Language Pedagogy, Tao Bai, Christopher K. Chung, Konstantin Läufer, Daisy Rockwell, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This interdisciplinary project explores the potential for handheld/wireless (H/W) technology in the context of language education within and beyond the classroom. Specifically, we have designed and implemented a suite of multi-platform (desktop/laptop, handheld, and browser) applications to enhance the teaching of South Asian languages such as Hindi-Urdu. Such languages are very difficult to learn, let alone write, and H/W devices (with their handwriting/drawing capabilities) can play a significant role in overcoming the learning curve. The initial application suite includes a character/word tracer, a word splitter/joiner, a smart flashcard with audio, contextual augmented stories for reading comprehension, and a poetic metronome. …

A Memory-Based Approach To Cantonese Tone Recognition, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael Emonts

Faculty Publications

This paper introduces memory-based learning as a viable approach for Cantonese tone recognition. The memorybased learning algorithm employed here outperforms other documented current approaches for this problem, which is based on neural networks. Various numbers of tones and features are modeled to find the best method for feature selection and extraction. To further optimize this approach, experiments are performed to isolate the best feature weighting method, the best class voting weights method, and the best number of k-values to implement. Results and possible future work are discussed.

Automated Rating Of Esl Essays, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Diane Strong-Krause

Faculty Publications

To date, traditional NLP parsers have not been widely successful in TESOLoriented applications, particularly in scoring written compositions. Re-engineering such applications to provide the necessary robustness for handling ungrammatical English has proven a formidable obstacle. We discuss the use of a nontraditional parser for rating compositions that attenuates some of these difficulties. Its dependency-based shallow parsing approach provides significant robustness in the face of language learners’ ungrammatical compositions. This paper discusses how a corpus of L2 essays for English was rated using the parser, and how the automatic evaulations compared to those obtained by manual methods. The types of modifications …

Transformation Based Learning For Specialization Of Generic Event Extractions, Mary D. Taffet, Nancy Mccracken, Eileen Allen, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

As part of our Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) project, we proposed to use Transformation Based Learning (TBL) to learn domain-specific specializations for generic event extractions. The primary goal of our learning task was to reduce the amount of human effort required for specializing generic event extractions to domains that are new and specific. Three initial annotation cycles and one annotation review and correction cycle involving a total of 70 documents were completed, with slightly over 32 hours required for the entire annotation effort; where possible, the annotation cycles started with bootstrapped files resulting from the application of TBL …

Jeux De Miroirs : Kourouma L'Interprete?, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Critics have often tended to show how Ahmadou Kourouma has expressed the disillusionment of the African "suns of the independences," ''tropicalized" the French language by bending its syntax to fit that of Malinke, and produced novels for "occidental importation" on the basis of oral texts. From a standpoint of sociopragmatics, in contradistinction, I would like to detail the internal specificity of Kourouma's fictional text by its means of production by analyzing it with respect to its cycle of production in terms of strategies, the writer's itinerary, its placement at the center of the literary field, etc. In addition, I will …

Continuity And Given-New Status Of Discourse Referents In Adzera Oral Narrative, David Edward Howard

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

This thesis analyzes the encoding of discourse referents in oral narratives in Adzera, an SVO Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea. First, it classifies overt referents on a given-new continuum according to Prince's (1981) taxonomy of assumed familiarity, looking at the forms and positions used to introduce new entities into a discourse. Then it applies Givón's (1983, 1995) quantitative approach to measure the continuity of referents, whether overtly manifested or semantically implied as verb arguments. This study largely confirms the findings and predictions of Prince and Givón regarding the introduction of new information and the relative continuity of various forms …

Secondary Palatalization In Isthmus Mixe: A Phonetic And Phonological Account, Julia Irene Dieterman

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation is a study of the process of palatalization in Isthmus Mixe, in which every consonant in the inventory has a palatalized counterpart. This type of palatalization occurring as a secondary [i]-like articulation, simultaneous to the primary articulation of the consonant (Bhat 1974, Ladefoged 1993), is defined as secondary palatalization by Keating (1993). Occurring word initially in Isthmus Mixe, the feature of secondary palatalization alone represents the grammatical third person morpheme, palatalizing the initial consonant of the noun or verb. There are also verbal suffixes that consist solely of secondary palatalization, indicating clause-type markers (Dieterman 1995, 1998), and a …

News From Cart, Michael A. Krol, Julia Stakhnevich

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Oroko Orthography Development: Linguistic And Sociolinguistic Factors, Dan T. Friesen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the variety of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors that need to be considered in order to develop a good Oroko orthography. Oroko is a Bantu A language of the Southwest Province of Cameroon, Africa. The thesis starts with an overview of the Oroko's location, population, classification, and language development status. The linguistic factors discussed are based largely on analyses of two lists: a 118-word list of nine Oroko dialects and an 821-word list of four Oroko dialects (included in the appendix). Consistent phonetic and phonemic alternations are examined in detail. The next chapter discusses the sociolinguistic issues that …