Language Description and Documentation Commons^™

Bolstering Hyde’S Basic French Conversations I & Ii As A Resource For Missouri French Dialect Learning, Henry Greenstein

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This paper features an analysis of the linguistic features of the Missouri French dialect, such as vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, and specifically how they are presented by Hyde in her Basic French Conversations I & II: Lessons 1-8. The ultimate goal is to bolster Hyde’s textbook’s effectiveness as a dialect teaching tool by providing additional context from other Missouri French academic works, studies of separate French dialects such as Louisiana French, and personal research. The project begins with an overview of the sparse linguistic and cultural inquiry that preceded Hyde’s textbook, then recaps the circumstances that led to Hyde …

Video Killed The Drag Star: Identity Presentation, Language, And Queer Habitus, Hayley Neiling

Graduate Theses

Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus as “the ability to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted” (170). In other words, habitus is the combination of our habits, perceptions, and presentations that are formed from the ingrained ideas of our society. Our habitus is both performed and perceived, and in this way, we gain cultural capital, which is the curating of knowledge, skills, and behaviors which demonstrate our value. Habitus is deeply affected by our position in society, particularly class. …

“So, Literally,…Basically,...It’S Like…”: A Study Into The Generational And Sociological Impact Of American Language Culture, Richard Moreno

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Language is unique to the human species. It serves to communicate thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. Within the context of this capstone I outline the theory that language is much more than this. Words can also serve to bond or reject, based on the level of acceptance within social groups towards the speaker. In seeking to discover what effects specific language utterances have on social interaction and the processes involved in developing cohesiveness collective identity in these groups, I found that they do have a definite impact and this is based mainly within generational parameters. Using a mixed method approach of …

An Instrumental Study Of Front Oral Monophthongs In Kensiu, Azizan Adilah

Student Works (2020-2029)

This paper acoustically examines the front oral vowels of Kensiu, a highly endangered Austroasiatic language spoken in Peninsular Malaysia. Although there have been initial studies on the phonology of Kensiu, (Bishop, 1996; Burenhult, 2001), these are mainly on the variety spoken in Thailand. This far, there is a lack of studies especially those based on the acoustic analysis. The changes in the sounds of Kensiu are likely to have taken place with increasing contact with the local Malay community in Kedah where the only Kensiu village is located. This paper aims to fill the gap by examining the acoustic properties …

Khmer Phonetics & Phonology: Theoretical Implications For Esl Instruction, Alex Donley

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis develops an approach to English teaching for Khmer-speaking students that centers on Khmer phonetics and phonology. Cambodia has a strong demand for English instruction, but consistently underperforms next to other nations in terms of proficiency. A significant reason for Cambodia’s skill gap is the lack of research into linguistic hurdles Khmer speakers face when learning English. This paper aims to bridge Khmer and English with an understanding of the speech systems that both languages use before turning to the unique challenges Khmer speakers must overcome based on the tenets of L1 Transfer Theory. It closes by outlining strategies …

Student Perceptions Regarding The Use Of Purposive English In A Spanish As A Foreign Language Classroom, Kacey Booth

Dissertations

In modern American society, diversity is both challenged and celebrated, and inclusion is imperative. This ideology begins in the classroom. Oftentimes, this celebration of diversity, more specifically linguistic diversity, is most visible in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) classes and similar bilingual educational programs. In TESOL programs, students’ international identities are highlighted and students are often instructed using multilingual educational resources to scaffold their acquisition of English. Historically, foreign language teaching also utilized dual-language instructional methodologies. Such archaic teaching methodologies have since been replaced by more modern and immersive sociopsycholinguistic approaches such as Communicative Language Teaching. Such …

Etymology Of “Ragtime”: Role Of “Tag, Rag, And “Bobtail” (The Rabble) And The 19th Century “Fancy Rag Balls”, Fred Hoeptner

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

Despite abundant speculation about the etymology of “rag” in “ragtime” since the emergence of ragtime music into popular consciousness in 1896, a convincing solution has remained elusive. As OED3 sums up the situation (rag, n. meaning #5): “Origin uncertain and disputed.”

But at least some new insight may now be possible. The present study is the first to use digitized newspaper archives to track “rag” and “ragtime” from their sources to full maturity, and the following picture emerges:

1. The starting point is tag, rag, and bobtail “the common herd, the rabble”; the word appears in OED3 under bob-tail.
2. Rag as …

Unique N170 Signatures To Words And Faces In Deaf Asl Signers Reflect Experience-Specific Adaptations During Early Visual Processing, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Katherine J. Midgley, Phillipp J. Holcomb, Karen Emmorey, David C. Plaut, Marlene Behrmann

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Previous studies with deaf adults reported reduced N170 waveform asymmetry to visual words, a finding attributed to reduced phonological mapping in left-hemisphere temporal regions compared to hearing adults. An open question remains whether this pattern indeed results from reduced phonological processing or from general neurobiological adaptations in visual processing of deaf individuals. Deaf ASL signers and hearing nonsigners performed a same-different discrimination task with visually presented words, faces, or cars, while scalp EEG time-locked to the onset of the first item in each pair was recorded. For word recognition, the typical left-lateralized N170 in hearing participants and reduced left-sided asymmetry …

A Data-Driven Approach To The Semantics Of Iconicity In American Sign Language And English, Bill Thompson, Marcus Perlman, Gary Lupyan, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Karen Emmory

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use of data-driven semantic vectors derived from English. Our analyses show that models of spoken language lexical semantics drawn from large text corpora can be useful for predicting the iconicity of signs as well as words. Compared to English, ASL has …

The Synchronic And Diachronic Phonology Of Nauruan: Towards A Definitive Classification Of An Understudied Micronesian Language, Kevin Hughes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nauruan is a Micronesian language spoken in the Republic of Nauru, a small island nation in the central Pacific. Lack of data and difficulty in analysis has hindered progress in better understanding Nauruan for decades, particularly regarding its phonology and its classification within the Micronesian family. Because of these challenges, earlier researchers have presented their work on Nauruan as highly tentative. This dissertation establishes more confident analyses of Nauruan phonology, sound change and classification, which have been made possible through original fieldwork.

Approximately one hundred hours of digital recordings have been collected as part of this research, including wordlists, phrases, …

P’Urhépecha Classifier Morphemes, Matthew Ball

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

The Perceived Mapping Between Form And Meaning In American Sign Language Depends On Linguistic Knowledge And Task: Evidence From Iconicity And Transparency Judgments, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Karen Emmorey

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Iconicity is often defined as the resemblance between a form and a given meaning, while transparency is defined as the ability to infer a given meaning based on the form. This study examined the influence of knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) on the perceived iconicity of signs and the relationship between iconicity, transparency (correctly guessed signs), ‘perceived transparency’ (transparency ratings of the guesses), and ‘semantic potential’ (the diversity (H index) of guesses). Experiment 1 compared iconicity ratings by deaf ASL signers and hearing non-signers for 991 signs from the ASL-LEX database. Signers and non-signers’ ratings were highly correlated; however, …

A Jewel Inlaid: Ergativity And Markedness In Nepali, Luke S. Lindemann

Linguistics Graduate Dissertations

Nepali presents with a complex case marking pattern in which ergative case is obligatory in perfective transitive clauses, disallowed in unaccusative intransitive clauses and copular clauses, and varies with the nominative elsewhere. Where ergative marking is variable, its usage correlates with a variety of semantic and pragmatic factors. The purpose of this investigation is to precisely delineate the grammatical domains for which ergative marking is variable and to provide a unified analysis of the semantic and pragmatic factors that correlate with its expression.

The study of pragmatic phenomena requires the implementation of multiple strategies for collecting language data. The data …

Second Language Acquisition Of American Sign Language Influences Co-Speech Gesture Production, Jill Weisberg, Shannon Casey, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Karen Emmorey

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Previous work indicates that 1) adults with native sign language experience produce more manual co-speech gestures than monolingual non-signers, and 2) one year of ASL instruction increases gesture production in adults, but not enough to differentiate them from non-signers. To elucidate these effects, we asked early ASL–English bilinguals, fluent late second language (L2) signers (≥ 10 years of experience signing), and monolingual non-signers to retell a story depicted in cartoon clips to a monolingual partner. Early and L2 signers produced manual gestures at higher rates compared to non-signers, particularly iconic gestures, and used a greater variety of handshapes. These results …

American And British Speech Differences In Low Socioeconomic Status Homes, Jennifer Markfeld

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Background: Infants living in low socioeconomic status (SES) homes display lower developmental functioning by 12 months than mid- and high-SES infants, and speak fewer words on average as they grow older. Maternal speech is especially important for language development and has been found to be the largest predictor of SES-related differences in children’s vocabulary. Although there are documented differences between British and American infant language development, for example American infant lexicons are typically larger than age matched British infants, there is little research looking at caregiver speech across these countries in low SES groups.

Method: This retrospective study compared 10 …

Text-Speech Alignment: A Robin Hood Approach For Endangered Languages, Claire Bowern, Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, Hunter Craft, Anelisa Fergus, Dolly Goldenberg

Yale Day of Data

Forced alignment automatically aligns audio recordings of spoken language with transcripts at the level of individual sounds, greatly reducing the time required to prepare data for linguistic analysis. However, existing algorithms are mostly trained on a few well-documented languages. We test the performance of three algorithms against manually aligned data on data from a highly endangered language. At least some tasks, unsupervised alignment (either based on English or trained from a small corpus) is sufficiently reliable for it to be used on legacy data for low-resource languages. Descriptive phonetic work on vowel inventories and prosody can be accurately captured by …

Final Vowel Devoicing In Blackfoot, Samantha Leigh Prins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a study of final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot, an indigenous language of Montana and Alberta. Previous research on final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot variously suggests word-final, phrase-final, and utterance-final vowel devoicing processes (e.g. Taylor 1965, Bliss & Gick 2009, Frantz 2017), though, the conditioning environment for this phenomenon had not been a research focus prior to this study. The present study investigates intonation units (IUs) as the conditioning domain for final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot.

Final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot is investigated here by examining the common word-final suffixes –wa (3SG.AN) and –yi (4SG) in two recordings …

La Influencia Del Quechua En El Castellano De La Isla De Taquile / The Influence Of Quechua In The Castilian Of The Island Of Taquile, Gianna Macri

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Esta investigación explora el español de la gente que vive en la isla de Taquile. Esta población habla quechua principalmente, pero es importante aprender la lengua española para comunicarse con los turistas, y el español se enseña en la escuela. En una situación como esta de contacto entre dos lenguas, ambas pueden cambiar su estructura, sus características gramaticales y su vocabulario. En otras comunidades quechuahablantes, se describe una variedad de la lengua, el “castellano andino”. Los resultados muestran que el español de Taquile también tiene variaciones similares por la influencia del quechua: el orden de las palabras más común en …

Anti-Queer Microaggressions Towards Queer Black Men, Camisha D. Fagan, Anna Smedley-López

McNair Poster Presentations

Microaggressions are reoccurring derogatory messages that degrade and/ or discredit one’s identity. While invisible and unknown to many, they remain visible and apparent to those impacted by them. The research questions for this project are: (1) What microaggressions do Queer Black men experience within larger society? (2) To contrast with larger society, what microaggressions do Queer Black men experience within Black communities? By conducting focus groups, I will examine the intersectional microaggressions that Queer Black males experience in their own community, as well as document microaggression that they experience in larger society. After conducting my focus groups, I will be …

The Sound Patterns Of Kachok In The Context Of Bahnaric And North-Bahnaric Studies, Emily L. Olsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a description of the sound patterns of Kachok, Austroasiatic language spoken in northeastern Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The language is spoken by approximately 3000 people and is considered endangered (Simons & Fennig, 2018). Kachok is undocumented, and this dissertation is the first attempt to describe the language and its sound patterns. The goals of this dissertation are twofold: to contribute to linguistics and the science of phonetics and phonological typology, as well as increase the body of work on Austro-Asiatic languages, and to create resources for the Kachok language, culture, and people that have the potential to outlive …

The Variable Expression Of Transitive Subject And Possesor In Wayuunaiki (Guajiro), Andres M. Sabogal

Linguistics ETDs

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. …

Purepecha Aspirated Consonants And Their Phonetic Variants, Lluvia Camacho Cervantes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study describes phonetic realizations of aspirated phonemes in Purepecha [pua] from Azajo. The distribution of aspiration in Purepecha is limited to roots, a small number of spatial suffixes, one argument structure changing suffix, and clitics. Aspiration is never contrastive for inflexional suffixes, which occur in word final position. There are three basic allophones of aspirated segments: (i) post-aspirated; (ii) unaspirated, (iii) pre-aspirated, with pre-aspiration showing 4 distinct phonetic forms, depending on dialect, and phonetic context. Strengthening of pre-aspiration has been documented in the Lake and Sierra dialects as well as vowel lengthening in the Lake dialect. In Azajo Purepecha …

Referring Strategies In American Sign Language And English (With Co-Speech Gesture): The Role Of Modality In Referring To Non-Nameable Objects, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Brenda Nicodemus, Jennifer Petrich, Karen Emmorey

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

American Sign Language (ASL) and English differ in linguistic resources available to express visual–spatial information. In a referential communication task, we examined the effect of language modality on the creation and mutual acceptance of reference to non-nameable figures. In both languages, description times reduced over iterations and references to the figures’ geometric properties (“shape-based reference”) declined over time in favor of expressions describing the figures’ resemblance to nameable objects (“analogy-based reference”). ASL signers maintained a preference for shape-based reference until the final (sixth) round, while English speakers transitioned toward analogy-based reference by Round 3. Analogy-based references were more time efficient …

Variation In Past Counterfactual Constructions, Victoria Zencak

All Master's Theses

The two past counterfactual constructions under investigation in this study are the past counterfactual conditional (Type 3) and the past counterfactual wish complement clause (PCWCC). Each of these has both a standard and variant form. The verb in the standard forms is had + past participle; the verb in the variant forms is would have + past participle. Although reference books and textbooks acknowledge variant forms, generally describing them as informal or conversational, they have not received serious scrutiny. It was the goal of this study to see whether variant forms are currently common in usage and to understand more …

Kratylos: A Tool For Sharing Interlinearized And Lexical Data In Diverse Formats, Daniel Kaufman, Raphael Finkel

Publications and Research

In this paper we present Kratylos, at www.kratylos.org/, a web application that creates searchable multimedia corpora from data collections in diverse formats, including collections of interlinearized glossed text (IGT) and dictionaries. There exists a crucial lacuna in the electronic ecology that supports language documentation and linguistic research. Vast amounts of IGT are produced in stand-alone programs without an easy way to share them publicly as dynamic databases. Solving this problem will not only unlock an enormous amount of linguistic information that can be shared easily across the web, it will also improve accountability by allowing us to verify analyses across …

Understanding A Discourse Marker In Quito, Ecuador, Hannah Jesberger

Honors Projects

The present research project examines the possible factors to explain the word-final /f/ in Ecuadorian Spanish including but not limited to: where it is used, who uses it (gender, age ranges, social class), and with which words it is most commonly used. As the first extensive research study on the word-final /f/, the project may lead to other investigations of this phenomenon and other features of Ecuadorian Spanish. In addition, if there are other variations of the marker pues in the Spanish varieties spoken in different regions and/or countries, researchers can use this present study as basis to analyze the …

Student Expectations And Motivation In Spanish For Heritage Speakers Programs, Sergio A. Guzman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The changing demographics in the United States and the growing need for multilingual individuals originated by globalization, among other reasons, have contributed to the emergence of a new field within the area of Applied Linguistics: The Teaching and Learning of Heritage Languages. Due to historical and geographic causes, Spanish for Heritage Speakers (SHS) is currently the largest and most established of these programs. However, the curricula, like those of most college courses, has been developed from professors’ perspectives, largely ignoring what students want to learn and/or their motives for enrolling in these classes. The lack of student input is especially …

Studies In Words: Laborious Ben Jonson's Lexicon, Steven Hrdlicka

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation examines significant words in Ben Jonson’s poetic lexicon that the poet inherited, borrowed, and shaped from antiquity and through the Middle Ages. Jonson used etymology as a means to rhetorical inventio, a common practice in the Renaissance. Etymology comprehended more than mere word derivation in the Renaissance but also notably included philological study. Ben Jonson’s extensive knowledge of language, history, architecture, the plastic arts, and philosophy is well known, but the extent to which Jonson’s knowledge of these subjects contributed to his understanding and use of poetic language is not. Thus this dissertation seeks to explore the intellectual …

The N170 Erp Component Differs In Laterality, Distribution, And Association With Continuous Reading Measures For Deaf And Hearing Readers, Karen Emmorey, Katherine J. Midgley, Casey B. Kohen, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Phillipp J. Holcomb

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

The temporo-occipitally distributed N170 ERP component is hypothesized to reflect print-tuning in skilled readers. This study investigated whether skilled deaf and hearing readers (matched on reading ability, but not phonological awareness) exhibit similar N170 patterns, given their distinct experiences learning to read. Thirty-two deaf and 32 hearing adults viewed words and symbol strings in a familiarity judgment task. In the N170 epoch (120–240 ms) hearing readers produced greater negativity for words than symbols at left hemisphere (LH) temporo-parietal and occipital sites, while deaf readers only showed this asymmetry at occipital sites. Linear mixed effects regression was used to examine the …

Phenomenal Marks, Ruptured Spaces, Relearning Language, Crossing Cultures, Meelee Ahn

Graduate School of Art Theses

The form of my thesis is one of interruptions, or “Ruptures,” as I call them. These are events of my personal history, or stories from the lives of artists, that intervene against my narrative through graphic and language devices meant to be understood as equivalent to the material affects in my painting. Important artists and movements mentioned are Gerhard Richter, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenhauler, Lee Ufan, Doho Suh, and Abstract Expressionism. Writers and philosophers Maurice Merlou-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Joan Banach, Sigmund Freud, John Gage, Brian Massumi, Allen Weiss, Clement Greenburg, Shin-Chulgyu, and Yoon-Dongju are also discussed. The idea discussed include …