Other Linguistics Commons^™

What’S In A Name? How Toponyms Connect Language And Society Through Place, Lisa Radding

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This is a study of place, meaning, society, and language, all of which interact through names. Although names are an essential part of human language, they remain on the periphery of linguistic studies. This study situates names in linguistics through an analysis of the meaning in a toponym, or place name.

According to lexical theory words are arbitrary. Yet we bestow names based on how they sound or what they have already come to represent; names are not arbitrary. Furthermore, a name becomes opaque when we can no longer see through its form to understand its meaning. Then it picks …

Interference Of L1 English In L2 French Lexical Processing, Sarah Kuhn

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This study examines the interference, if any, caused by a first language (specifically English) in the processing of lexical items in a second language (French). Participants performed a computer-based translation recognition task where they were asked whether a pair of words, one French and the other English, represented an acceptable translation. Six different types of critical pairs were randomly alternated with actual translation pairs and unrelated distractor pairs. Each of the different categories of critical pairs had a different relationship with the L1 word, the L2 word, or both. Participants’ scores on this task were then analyzed to determine the …

Acquisition Of Violations Of English Principle B By Native Speakers Of Japanese Or Chinese, Clarion C. Mendes

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This work focuses on Principles A and B of Binding Theory as applied to English. While English has a very strict interpretation of Binding Theory, it has a violation of Principle B with sentences with locative prepositional phrases and verb phrases of caused movement or perception.

In contrast, Chinese and Japanese have a very liberal interpretation of Binding Theory. The study is involved with investigating whether or not Japanese or Chinese speakers adapt to the English violation which is typically not taught in a classroom setting, but something acquired through natural exposure.

A custom survey was designed to see if …