Morphology Commons^™

Pinky Extension In American Sign Language: Evidence For A Lexically Restricted Morphological Process, Laurel Whitsett

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations

This study investigates pinky extension (PE) in American Sign Language (ASL). PE involves extending the pinky finger in signs, even though this feature is not present in standard dictionary representations of those signs. Although PE has been previously described as conveying emphasis, this account does not fully explain its distribution. This study asks whether PE reflects a meaningful part of how signs are structured in ASL, rather than a matter of individual style or variation. Focusing on adjectives, it examines whether PE interacts with sentence position. In ASL, certain adjectives may appear either before (prenominally) or after (postnominally) the noun …

Phonology, Geoffrey S. Nathan

English Faculty Research Publications

This paper explores the ways in which phonology is both structured by the same principles as other aspects of language but is also different, because the interaction between the substance of phonology and the human bodies used to produce and perceive it are much more tightly integrated than is the case with the structures of words, sentences and other aspects of language. Cognitive Grammar holds that the structure of language is abstracted from its use (the theory is ‘usage-based’), and this has resulted in views of the nature of language that differ radically from the dominant generative paradigm. However, the …

Memetic Epidemiology: A Mathematical Model For Tracking The Spread Of Linguistic Features Across Western Europe, Benjamin Shavitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a powerful new method for demonstrating the role of contact in potential cases of linguistic contact spread, Memetic Epidemiology, that can facilitate extensive future research. This dissertation introduces and demonstrates the use of this method on examples from Western and Central Europe.

Part I begins by providing theoretical background for Memetic Epidemiology using understandings, including Memetics, and Evolutionary Phonology and its extensions. Part I proceeds to lay out the objective of Memetic Epidemiology: to provide a new means of demonstrating that contact influenced the rise of linguistic features in certain languages during …

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 …

Kultúrna Slovenčina Administratívno-Právnych Textov Zo 16. Storočia „Čo S Fonológiou A Morfológiou?“, Mark Richard Lauersdorf

Linguistics Faculty Publications

It is generally accepted that the present-day Slovak standard language was codified in its basic form in the mid 19th century by the Slovak scholar Ľudovít Štúr. A similar, but unsuccessful, attempt to create a standard Slovak language was made by Anton Bernolák in the late 18th century. There is not general agreement, however, on the degree or type of standardization, or better, normalization, exhibited by Slovak texts in the pre-codification period (15th-18th centuries). The present study outlines a new methodological framework for the investigation of the issue of standard language development in early pre-codification Slovak texts, providing selected phonological …