Other Linguistics Commons^™

Paratum Fuit: Double Perfect Marking In Classical Latin Passives, James F. Epperson Ii

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Despite thousands of years of study, certain constructions in Latin remain insufficiently described in modern Latin linguistics. One such construction is the double perfectum, an analytic verbal construction comprising the perfect passive participle and a perfectum forms of the auxiliary esse. These forms are rare, largely absent from educational Latin materials, and receive limited attention in scientific descriptions of Latin, often focusing on their evolution into the modern Romance verbal systems. Pinkster (2015) identifies them within a broader class of resultative constructions, but acknowledges their inconsistent usage. Earlier scholars, such as Riemann (1927), interpreted them as stative, while others, like …

A Computational Investigation Of English Spelling, John Winstead

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis examines the predictability and regularity of English orthography through computational methods. The primary objective is to use n-gram models to predict missing letters in English words by exploiting contextual information from adjacent letters. The study evaluates the impact of dataset size, word length, letter position, and vowel presence on the predictive accuracy of these models, uncovering patterns and structures inherent to English spelling.

The research utilizes a range of datasets, including the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary, the Brown Corpus, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, and the Open …

‘A Category Of Their Own’: Quantitative Methods In The Use Of Pile-Sort Data In Perceptual Dialectology, Zachary Ty Gill

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Mississippi Gulf Coast Creoles perceive language differences in their home area. A pile-sort task was carried out in which respondents were given stacks of cards with local communities written on them and instructed to stack together the regions where people “talk the same.” Once the piles were made, the fieldworker discussed their sortings with the respondents. The stacks were analyzed by means of a hierarchal agglomerative cluster analysis and non-parametric multidimensional scaling with k-means cluster analysis overlays to extract the perceived dialect areas. The groupings reveal that respondent strategies are based …

The Effects Of A New Method Of Instruction On The Perceptions Of Appalachian English, Michelle L. Compton

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This paper evaluates whether students’ perceptions of Appalachian English improve through a method of instruction that uses dialect literature in the classroom. Most existing methods of instruction tend to portray dialects as wrong, incorrect, or in some way less rule-governed than Standardized English, despite the numerous studies that have demonstrated otherwise (e.g., Labov 1969, Wolfram 1986). The data from this study derives from two groups of students enrolled in introductory composition and communication at the University of Kentucky. Each group is given a pre-test to determine attitudes toward Appalachian English and Standardized English. An experimental group is then exposed to …