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2013

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Articles 1 - 14 of 14

Full-Text Articles in Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics

Terror From The Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues To The Negrito Past, Robert Blust Nov 2013

Terror From The Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues To The Negrito Past, Robert Blust

Human Biology

Within recorded history. most Southeast Asian peoples have been of "southern Mongoloid" physical type, whether they speak Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Austronesian, Tai-Kadai, or Hmong-Mien languages. However, population distributions suggest that this is a post-Pleistocene phenomenon and that for tens of millennia before the last glaciation ended Greater Mainland Southeast Asia, which included the currently insular world that rests on the Sunda Shelf, was peopled by short, dark-skinned, frizzy-haired foragers whose descendants in the Philippines came to be labeled by the sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers as "negritos," a term that has since been extended to similar groups throughout the region. There are three …

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Time And Place In The Prehistory Of The Aslian Languages, Michael Dunn, Nicole Kruspe, Niclas Burenhult Nov 2013

Time And Place In The Prehistory Of The Aslian Languages, Michael Dunn, Nicole Kruspe, Niclas Burenhult

Human Biology

The Aslian language family, located in the Malay Peninsula and southern Thai Isthmus, consists of four distinct branches comprising some 18 languages. These languages predate the now dominant Malay and Thai. The speakers of Aslian languages exhibit some of the highest degree of phylogenetic and societal diversity present in Mainland Southeast Asia today, among them a foraging tradition particularly associated with locally ancient, Pleistocene genetic lineages. Little advance has been made in our understanding of the linguistic prehistory of this region or how such complexity arose. In this article we present a Bayesian phylogeographic analysis of a large sample of …

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Who Are The Philippine Negritos? Evidence From Language, Lawrence A. Reid Nov 2013

Who Are The Philippine Negritos? Evidence From Language, Lawrence A. Reid

Human Biology

This article addresses the linguistic evidence from which details about Philippine "negritos" can be inferred. This evidence comes from the naming practices of both negrito and non-negrito peoples, from which it can be inferred that many negrito groups have maintained a unique identity distinct from other groups since the dispersal of Malayo-Polynesian languages. Other names, such as Dupaningan and Dumagat, reference locations, from which it is assumed the negritos left after contact with Malayo-Polynesian people. Evidence also comes from the relative positions of negrito groups vis-à-vis other groups within the subfamily with which their current language can be grouped. Many …

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Accent In Uspanteko, Ryan Bennett, Robert Henderson Aug 2013

Accent In Uspanteko, Ryan Bennett, Robert Henderson

English Faculty Research Publications

Uspanteko (Guatemala; ∼2000 speakers) is an endangered K’ichean-branch Mayan language. It is unique among the K’ichean languages in having innovated a system of contrastive pitch accent, which operates alongside a separate system of non-contrastive stress. The prosody of Uspanteko is of general typological interest, given the relative scarcity of ‘mixed’ languages employing both stress and lexical pitch. Drawing from a descriptive grammar and from our own fieldwork, we also document some intricate interactions between pitch accent and other aspects of the phonology (stress placement, vowel length, vowel quality, and two deletion processes). While pitch accent is closely tied to morphology, …

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Participation Framework And Footing Shifts In An Interpreted Academic Meeting, Annie R. Marks May 2013

Participation Framework And Footing Shifts In An Interpreted Academic Meeting, Annie R. Marks

Journal of Interpretation

Students training to become sign language interpreters are often faced with the challenge of negotiating boundaries with the deaf and hearing consumers with whom they interact. Many interpreter-training programs have traditionally taught students that it is most appropriate to maintain “neutrality” in our interactions and in our interpretations. (Metzger, 1999). The objective of this study is to add to limited amount of research that examines footings in interpreted interaction. Metzger (1999) performed one of the only studies of participation framework and footings in American Sign Language-English interpreted encounters. This study is a replication of her initial work and aims to …

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Language Shift And Development: A Case Study Of Zhongdian Southern Khams Language Vitality, Simon Peters Apr 2013

Language Shift And Development: A Case Study Of Zhongdian Southern Khams Language Vitality, Simon Peters

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The fields of language endangerment and maintenance address language shift overwhelmingly in the context of a local language being replaced by that of a surrounding oppositional dominant cultural group. There are, though, situations in which a local language is competing with the dominant variety of the wider cultural group to which it belongs. How a situation like this is dealt with by linguists and language planners depends largely on the recognition of participant tongues as their own languages or one as a dialect of another. Reversing language shift for a “dialect” is difficult to garnish institutional and financial support for …

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Migration For Education: Haitian University Students In The Dominican Republic, Jenny Miner Apr 2013

Migration For Education: Haitian University Students In The Dominican Republic, Jenny Miner

Pomona Senior Theses

Haitian university students represent a part of the increasing diversity of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic. Using an ethnographic approach, I explore university students’ motivations for studying in the Dominican Republic, their experiences at Dominican universities and in Dominican society, Haitian student organizations, and their future plans. Additionally, I focus on Haitian students’ experiences with discrimination and how they relate to other Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic. I find that most students come to the Dominican Republic due to the difficulty of gaining entrance to affordable Haitian universities and logistical convenience. The university is a unique setting where …

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“But That Actually Happened!” Exploring The Speech Genre Of Brainstorming, Jennifer Herbert Jan 2013

“But That Actually Happened!” Exploring The Speech Genre Of Brainstorming, Jennifer Herbert

Slavic Studies Student Projects and Publications

No abstract provided.

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Linguistic Minorities And The Right To Languages (Minorías Lingüísticas Y Derecho A Las Lenguas), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez Jan 2013

Linguistic Minorities And The Right To Languages (Minorías Lingüísticas Y Derecho A Las Lenguas), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Resumen: Esta contribución se centra en la noción de minorías lingüísticas y en el derecho a las lenguas desde una perspectiva sociopolítica y cultural. Se ofrece una definición de lo que se considera “minoría lingüística” con ejemplos representativos de lenguas bajo esta consideración así como datos que ratifican la existencia, vitalidad y extinción de éstas según el contexto moderno de la globalización. Además se incluyen situaciones de multilingüismo y diglosia y cómo el estado ha respondido constitucionalmente a las necesidades de estas comunidades, incluyendo programas educativos, legislaciones internas y derecho de lenguas. Para ello se han escogido una selección de …

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Shiwilu (Jebero), Pilar Valenzuela, Carlos Gussenhoven Jan 2013

Shiwilu (Jebero), Pilar Valenzuela, Carlos Gussenhoven

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia and one of the two members of the Kawapanan linguistic family. Most of its nearly 30 remaining fluent speakers live in and around the village of Jeberos (District of Jeberos, Province of Alto Amazonas, Loreto Region), at approximately 5° S, 75° W. The documentation of Shiwilu is scarce and no survey grammar is available. Until very recently, the only trained linguist who had worked on Shiwilu was John Bendor- Samuel, who carried out fieldwork in 1955–1956 and completed a doctoral thesis in 1958 (see Bendor-Samuel 1981 [1958]). An abridged …

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The Acquisition Of Sociolinguistic Variation By Study Abroad Students : The Case Of American Students In Madrid, Kathryn Lee Ringer-Hilfinger Jan 2013

The Acquisition Of Sociolinguistic Variation By Study Abroad Students : The Case Of American Students In Madrid, Kathryn Lee Ringer-Hilfinger

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The current investigation seeks to contribute to the emerging body of research on second language variation in Spanish. A range of dialect-specific variables is considered, both morphological and phonological. Learner acquisition of these variables is measured within a study abroad context through oral and written longitudinal data over the course of an 8-month period. Previous studies conducted in this area have considered pronoun use (Geeslin and Gudmestad 2008a; Salgado-Robles 2012) the use of /theta/ (Geeslin and Gudmestad 2008b; Willis et. al. 2009; Ringer-Hilfinger 2012; Knouse 2012), intonation strategies (Henriksen et al. 2010), and perfective past time reference (Geeslin et al. …

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Contemporary English In The Usa, Melissa Axelrod, Joanne Scheibman Jan 2013

Contemporary English In The Usa, Melissa Axelrod, Joanne Scheibman

English Faculty Publications

Indigenous and immigrant speakers from a variety of linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds have in different ways contributed to the development of present day American English, as have the geographical and social dimensions of the country. This paper provides a survey of contemporary usage of American English by describing and illustrating linguistic features documented for social and regional groups in the United States. The focus on variation in pronunciation, grammar, and meaning in American English highlights the diversity of dialects and styles in the U.S. as well as the centrality of sociocultural identities to language use. We group examples of variation …

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The 'X It Up' Verb Construction: A Syntactic And Sociolinguistic Approach, Ryan Hubble Jan 2013

The 'X It Up' Verb Construction: A Syntactic And Sociolinguistic Approach, Ryan Hubble

Open Access Theses

This thesis focuses on a unique and, as of yet, unstudied particle verb construction in English, referred to as the `X it up' construction (e.g. I partied it up last night). Syntactic and sociolinguistic perspectives are taken to explore this phenomenon. In the area of syntax, it is proposed that the `it' in the construction is non-referential and that `it' is an (object) expletive. It is further proposed that the construction is unergative. These hypotheses are confirmed via syntactic tests, and a potential syntactic representation based on Basilico's (2008) particle verb analysis is offered as a structure in which the …

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Pragmatic Transfer In Japanese Requests In Emails, Takako Noda Jan 2013

Pragmatic Transfer In Japanese Requests In Emails, Takako Noda

Open Access Theses

The speech act of request is known as a face threatening act (FTA) in the sense of Brown and Levinson (1987) and is considered a speech act that may negatively affect human relationships when it is used against cultural norms and constraints. Requests have been investigated in various languages, including English and Japanese (e.g., Hill et al., 1986; Fukushima, 1996; Gagné, 2010). Studies about interlanguage pragmatics, such as Matsuda et al. (2008) and Wada et al. (2008), showed characteristics of requests made by learners of Japanese. However, these studies all focused on the oral speech act, and there are few …

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