Linguistics Commons^™

Diphthongization And Underspecification In Kɔnni, Mike Cahill

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

The problems of analyzing vowels of Gur languages are well-known to those who work among them. The bulk of the difficulty in K?nni comes in the analysis of the mid vowels, which manifest themselves in diverse and initially confusing ways. In this paper, I demonstrate that phonetic vowel sequences in K?nni can be analyzed as a diphthongization of long mid vowels. Evidence from phonetics, phonological rules, and tone is cited to support this conclusion. In the remainder of Section 1, I present the vowel harmony system of K?nni. In Section 2, I introduce the question of how putative vowel sequences …

The Variable (Th) In Dallas African American Vernacular English, Virginia C. Vinton

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

It is well-known that African American Vernacular English (hereafter AAVE) displays regional variation. In the case of the (th) variable, Wolfram (1969) found that AAVE speakers in Detroit used the nonstandard variants [f], [t], and Ø. In New York City, Labov (1972a) observed the use of [t] and [t?] as the nonstandard variants. In both of these studies conducted in the northern U.S. the variants used by speakers were stratified differently with regard to social factors. Given regional variation of this sort, we might well expect further interesting differences in southern cities of the U.S. The present study, conducted in …

Predicting Near-Native Pronunciation In Spanish As A Foreign Language, A. Raymond Elliott

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

The objective of the present study is to examine the acquisition of pronunciation by 66 undergraduate students enrolled in three sections of an intermediate Spanish course. The data were collected during the Fall semester of the 91-92 academic year at Indiana University, Bloomington. Thirty-two males and thirty-four females served as the subjects. Using a control and two experimental groups, three separate regression analyses examined: 1) variables related to the subjects’ accuracy of pronunciation, 2) the effect of formal instruction in pronunciation, and 3) the relationship between “production” or pronunciation and the subjects’ knowledge of formal pronunciation rules, termed “metalinguistic awareness.” …

The Variable Elision Of Unstressed Vowels In European Portuguese: A Case Study, David J. Silva

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

European varieties of Portuguese exhibit a process whereby unstressed vowels, particularly schwa, optionally undergo elision: an item such as idade ‘idea’ can be realized as [ida'd] and para Maria ‘for Maria’ may surface as [pr?m?rí'?]. While previous research in the study of phonological variation of this sort has typically focused on syntactic, morphological, functional, and segmental factors as the primary linguistic conditions for accurately characterizing variable processes (Guy 1980; Poplack & Walter 1986, among many others), less work has been done investigating the role of prosodic factors in this respect. Yet if one believes (along with Nespor and Vogel 1986, …

Anaphora, Pragmatics And Style In German, Helga H. Delisle

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

German uses two sets of anaphoric pronouns, the personal pronoun set (PP) er, sie, es and the demonstrative pronoun set (DP) der, die, das. The latter set has been largely neglected in the literature, possibly because it mainly occurs in informal conversations. In this paper, I will investigate how a basic concept like the deictic one is exploited for various functions, and to what extent these functions are integrated into the different styles of spoken and written German. It will be shown that the DP is used by the speaker to signal to the hearer not only referential but also …

Conflict In Russian Genitive Plural Assignment: A Solution Represented In Datr, Dunstan Brown, Andrew R. Hippisley

Linguistics Faculty Publications

Inflectional endings are assigned in languages by general principles, but these can come into conflict. We address the question of how such conflict is resolved. A particularly complex example is the Russian genitive plural, where we find that with soft-stem nouns there is a conflict between exponent assignment according to declension class and a default exponent assignment for soft-stem nouns. What is specially interesting is that the conflict here can be resolved by reference to subsystems over and above the paradigm, such as stress. We present an explicit account of the conflict and its mediation by basing our study on …

The Distribution And Properties Of Babole Prenasalized Segments, Myles Leitch

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

Babole, a Bantu language of Congo, has both voiced and voiceless prenasalized consonants. While the consonants of the voiced series have free distribution as segments, those of the voiceless series occur only stem-initially following a prefix. In the case of unprefixed imperatives, stem-initial voiceless prenasals drop the prenasalization. Adopting the ranked-constraint approach of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), the paper shows that both the skewed distribution of voiced and voiceless prenasals, and the phenomenon of nasal-dropping follow from the intersection of three constraints. One constraint, ClusterVoi, reflects the grammar's preference for voiced prenasals. A second, ALIGN, insists that prefixes …

Vowel Features In Madija, Patsy Adams Liclán, Stephen A. Marlett

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

No abstract provided.

Switch Reference In Seri, Stephen A. Marlett, Mary B. Moser

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

No abstract provided.

Nasalization In Huajuapan Mixtec, Stephen A. Marlett

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

No abstract provided.

Seri Vowels And The Obligatory Contour Principle, Stephen A. Marlett, Mary B. Moser

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

No abstract provided.

Writing, Teacher Training, And Grammar, Jim Meyer

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

In many English syntax courses aimed at future middle and high school teachers of English, we perpetuate grammar separated from any meaningful context. We ought instead to use the students' own writing as the basis for the syntactic analysis of English; this allows them to break out of the workbook mode of teaching and learning and encourages them to see syntax as a dynamic field of research.

The Paragraph: Towards A Richer Understanding, Jim Meyer, Brendan Cooney

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

Paragraph analysis has typically proceeded by doing autopsies on polished final texts. In a fuller analysis, however, we must consider the choices the writer made before arriving at the final text. In this paper we examine a college student's paper, first examining an analysis based on vocabulary changes (Vocabulary Management Profile) and second referring to an interview with the writer about her paragraphing choices.

Dakota Sioux Objects, Thomas M. Pinson

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

This article is a study of certain syntactic and morphological processes in Dakota Sioux within the Relational Grammar framework. There are three main topics dealt with as they relate to verb agreement: advancements to direct object, Possessor Ascensions, and Clause Union. All three of these topics distinguish between direct objects, indirect objects and obliques.

Verb agreement is examined and shown to consist of two distinct systems: person agreement and number agreement. These two systems give empirical evidence to the support of the multilevel relational network of Unaccusative and Reflexive clauses. It is also shown that an analysis which posits advancements …

Nontonal Floating Features As Grammatical Morphemes, James S. Roberts

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

The concept of floating tones is no longer controversial in tonal analysis; important insights into the morphology of numerous tonal languages have relied on the positing of morphemes that are composed simply of prosodically unlicensed tones. Employing data from three of Africa's four major language families, this paper builds on this notion by recognizing the existence of nontonal floating features -- morphemes composed solely of phonological features that have no segmental support. The first example, from Kanembu (Nilo-Sarahan, Chad), shows that the [+ATR] feature is the sole marker of incompletive aspect in the verb. Again, in Mafa and Podoko (Chadic, …

The Existential Use Of Positional Verbs In Texmelucan Zapotec, Charles H. Speck

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

In Texmelucan Zapotec there is no single verb with just an existential meaning. Rather, eleven positional verbs cover the same range of meaning that one verb covers in other languages. Each of these eleven verbs may occur as predicate of the locative clause, the existential clause or the possessive clause, and none of them occur as predicate of the attributive clause or of the identifying clause. This article explores the syntax of clauses determined by these predicates and the semantic parameters by which the Zapotec speaker controls their use. The results are then compared with what is known about existential …

Variability In Negation In African American Vernacular English, Tracey L. Weldon

Faculty Publications

For quantitative sociolinguists, one of the goals of investigating variability in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is to understand better the nature of the grammar. Specifically, researchers have been interested in whether the variation observed in AAVE is inherent to a single system or the result of interaction between two separate systems of AAVE and Standard English (SE). Variability in negation is an area of the AAVE grammar that has received minimal attention, but one that may offer some interesting insights into the nature of the system or systems at work. This article provides a framework to describe the variability …

Finding The "Two" In Diglossia, John C. Paolillo

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

Sociolinguists generally agree that a diglossic situation is one in which a single speech community employs two or more varieties of language, a H(igh) variety and a L(ow) variety, for different communicative purposes. Ferguson’s (1959) classic definition also includes a structural component: the two forms of language are varieties of the same language, and hence related, but “highly divergent” from one another, more so than a dialect in relation to its standard language. However there is little agreement on this point, and different researchers give different characterizations of how divergent H and L must be. The theoretical status of intermediate …

Lexical Borrowing, Creolization And Basic Vocabulary, George L. Huttar

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

This paper is concerned with two sets of questions, one from semantics and cognitive linguistics, one from diachronic linguistics and in particular creole studies. From the cognitive-semantic side, we are dealing with issues of “basic” vocabulary: what sorts of lexical items, or, more precisely, what sorts of concepts, are, in some useful sense or other (say, psychologically more salient), more “basic” than others? From the diachronic linguistics side, the issues concern likelihood of change through contact: “For what sorts of concepts are lexical items most readily replaced by items from new sources, and which ones are more resistant to such …

Primary Stress Assignment In Brazilian Portuguese, Susan Gary Walters

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

Brazilians display a great interest in the prosody of their own language. Much classroom time is spent counting syllables, enumerating detailed rules for stress assignment and memorizing rules of diacritics used in the orthography (e.g., Cegalla 1991). Stress assignment and its rules are one of the topics covered on the vestibular, the nationwide university entrance exam (Savioli 1991:131ff). Students in elementary schools study syllable structure and division. Even by the second grade they know such words as paroxítono ‘a word whose stress falls on the next to last syllable’ and antepenúltimo ‘antepenultimate’. The problem is that many of the rules …

Phonetic Emphasis In Tamil, James E. Vinton

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

The present paper is based on a study conducted following Balasubramanian’s (1981) method: a native speaker was asked to emphasize a given item in a sentence and instrumental measurements were made as to which phonetic cues the speaker used to accomplish that task. While Balasubramanian asserted that emphasis is marked mainly by an increased length of certain segments, the findings in the present paper indicate that Tamil emphasis is marked by a combination of several phonetic correlates. Some of the confusion about Tamil stress arises from a failure by several authors to distinguish clearly between word-level stress, sentence-level emphasis, and …

Subjectless Sentences In English, Patricia Willess Reiman

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics - Archive

One of the goals of modern linguistics is to develop a model of Universal Grammar which captures natural language features that are universal, while also accounting for variation among languages. Thus a much-discussed phenomenon in Government and Binding theory is pro-drop (Jaeggli and Safir 1989). Pro-drop is the parameter which determines whether the subject of an independent clause must be overt or may be left empty (Crystal 1991:279). According to the definition given above, it would appear that English is a pro-drop language. However, Crystal (1991:279) cites English as an example of a non-pro-drop language. If this is correct and …

Scientific Text Structure Awareness: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Of Tertiary Students From Different Language Backgrounds, Catherine Mcloughlin

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Research in both first and second language reading has shown that awareness of text structure, or rhetorical organisation is related to superior recall of main ideas from expository prose passages. The present study investigates awareness of scientific text structure among tertiary students from different language backgrounds. In this investigation, four reading passages containing two rhetorical text structures found in scientific discourse, comparison/contrast and problem/solution are employed. Meyer’s (1975) hierarchical content structure analysis was used to analyse the texts into top, high, mid and low level ideas corresponding to main and supporting ideas. The research questions were centred around three major …

Picking Up The Principles: An Applied Linguistic Analysis Of The Legal Problem Genre, Colin J. Beasley

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Legal study requires not only the learning of new content, but also the learning of a new academic discourse with its own lexico-semantic, syntactic, and discoursal features. This thesis explores the answering of legal problem questions as an important and distinct new genre that undergraduates studying law units need to achieve competence in. In order to delineate the general features of this genre, systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analyses were performed on a series of texts (a tutorial question, an assignment question, and an examination question) written by lecturers in the introductory Commerce course Principles of Commercial Law as exemplars of …

Factors Affecting The Learning Of English As A Second Language Macroskills Among Tongan Secondary Students, Mele F. Latu

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study aimed at determining factors which might have impact on the learning of English as a second language macroskills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) by Tongan secondary learners. The study was correlational in design and it worked from a synthetic perspective in that it looked at the way in which many aspects of language are interrelated to make the whole language system. The study looked at learning English language macroskills from a multiple interdisciplinary perspective taking into consideration linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic factors and classroom and bilingual education perspectives. The framework for language use required the learner to know the …

English As An International Language: A Sociolinguistic Analysis Of The Japanese Experience, Marek M. Koscielecki

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study was designed to investigate the nature of English as an International Language (ElL) in Japan from both a diachronic and a synchronic point of view, drawing some comparison with countries in South East Asia and Africa. Using comparative material from socio-historical and sociolinguistic literature from other countries it was possible to examine the use and cultivation of English in Japan and compare it with that in other countries where English fulfils different roles. The material on Japan was supplemented by research based on data obtained from questionnaires both at the high school level and within business corporations. From …

Large-Scale Machine Translation: An Interlingua Approach, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Alexander M. Franz, John R. R. Leavitt

Faculty Publications

In this paper we discuss the design and development of an interlingua for a large-scale MT project. We also discuss how the resulting KANT interlingua constrains complexity, supports staged development, evolves in a balanced fashion, and seeks maximal coverage. We address issues such as granularity of the data representation, its specification, the types of information it encodes, and how it supports a modular system architecture. Our experience shows that through a careful, reasoned design and implementation effort, it is possible to achieve multilingual target-language generation for extensive technical domains.

Extraction D'Un Vocabulaire Bilingue: Outils Et Methodes, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Cet articele presente les efforts lics a l'elaboration d'un vocabulaire bilingue pour un systeme de traduction. Nous presentons la methodologic suivie pour identifier, normaliser et mettre en correspondance les vocabulaires anglais et francais, puises dans un corpus de textes prealablement traduites: analyse du texte source, compilation d'un index (mots simples et syntagmes), identification et traitement des composes nominaux, integration des ressources terminologiques du client, alignement atomatique des textes source et cible, extraction des traductions du vocabulaire source, redaction du vocabuleire et son recodage en forme de donnees lexicales. Nouse decrivons aussi les outils que nous avons concus et developpes pour …

A Reasoned Interlingua For Knowledge-Based Machine Translation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, John R. R. Leavitt, Alexander M. Franz

Faculty Publications

Research in machine translation (MT) has resulted in a number of Machine Translation systems that are based on the interlingua approach. This paper reports the results of designing an interlingua for a large-scale, practical MT system designed to translate technical information from English into a number of target languages. After an analysis of the main features of the translation problem faced by this system we describe the principles underlying our design decisions. We address issues such as the design and development methodology, the grain size of the representation, and our efforts to endow the interlingua representation with the ability to …

Linguistic Theory Applied To Teaching Practice: Looking Through Linguists' Eyes At An Urban Esl Classroom, Caroline Mary El-Kadi

Theses and Dissertations in Urban Services - Urban Education

The quality of instruction in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs is of utmost concern to urban educators as more and more non-native speakers settle in urban areas and need better language skills to participate fully in American society. Training of ESL instructors is often difficult, given the limited resources of most programs. In ESL, a close study of classroom discourse has long been considered particularly useful, but undirected classroom observation is of limited use because what novices notice in the classroom is often inaccurate or irrelevant. Ways are needed to focus beginning teachers' observations. Over several decades, discourse analysts have devised methods …