Other Linguistics Commons^™

Sound Effects: Age, Gender, And Sound Symbolism In American English, Timothy Krause

Student Research Symposium

This mixed-method study investigated the correlation of sound symbolic associations with age and gender by analyzing data from a national survey of 292 American English speakers. Subjects used 10 semantic differential scales to rate six artificial brand names that targeted five phonemes. Subjects also described the potential products they imagined these artificial brand names to represent. Quantitative analysis alone provided insufficient evidence to conclude that age or gender affect sound symbolism in American English. While 26 out of 60 scales showed a monotonic shift among the means of the three age groups, only three were statistically significant. The evidence of …

Cognitive Influences On Constituent Order: Priming Evidence, Lee Prunier

Honors Scholar Theses

In spoken as well as signed language, a shift over time from the use of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order to Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order has been observed. The use of pantomimed gesture and priming can help determine the extent to which this shift comes from pressures specific to language, as opposed to existing as a more broad feature of communication. Participants took turns matching images to videos showing gestured event descriptions primed in SVO or SOV order, and gesturing event descriptions to a camera. Results show a strong preference for orders consistent with SVO across prime types, and an increase …

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 …

Use And Perception Of Taboo Language In College-Age Females, Kathleen M. Uhlman

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Expanding Audiences For Online Writing Labs: Owls In The English As A Foreign Language Context, Joshua Paiz

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

This presentation from the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) discusses online writing labs (OWLs), specifically the Purdue OWL, in the traditionally-defined English as a foreign language (EFL) context. The ELF context often presents unique challenges for the teaching of English writing, including challenges of finding appropriate resources. This may lead EFL writing practitioners to rely on the information presented by OWLs to supplement their teaching. However, many OWLs were originally designed for the so-called native speaker (North American, UK, Australian, New Zealand) audience. This raises the question of whether or not OWLs are meeting the needs of …

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer

Faculty Articles

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …

Online Writing Labs: Resources For Second Language Writers, Joshua Paiz, Ghada Gherwash

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

This presentation at the 2014 TESOL Developer's Showcase discusses best practices and special considerations for using Online Writing Labs as L2 writing support tools. This discussion is grounded both in recent OWL/Writing Center theory, as well as from the presenter's experiences working on a large­scale OWL in a variety of capacities. To add to the discussion on special considerations when using OWLs, this presentation also provides a discussion of a recently completed research project involving the Purdue OWL and how it is used to support EFL writing. It will highlight how, even in resources labeled as "ESL," can be overly …

Encouraging The Growth Of Owls Worldwide: Utilizing Intercultural Rhetoric To Inform Best Practices, Joshua Paiz

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

This presentation for the 8th Intercultural Rhetoric and Discourse Conference discusses work on the Purdue OWL, focusing on the resources targeting L2 writers writing for particular contexts (e.g., Writing for the Chinese Business Context), as these resource-types tend to be some of the early Purdue OWL spaces where the findings of intercultural rhetoric maybe more readily applied. This discussion will also provide an overview of recent research looking at the place of and practitioner attitudes towards OWLs in general and, more specifically, the Purdue OWL. The presenter will conclude by discussing new content development initiatives at the Purdue OWL and …

Pedagogía De Hablantes De Herencia: Implicaciones Para El Entrenamiento De Instructores Al Nivel Universitario, Lina M. Reznicek-Parrado

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study researches the differences in pedagogical needs between learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language (FL learners) and learners of Spanish as a Heritage Language (HL learners) at the university level. By using the UNL Modern Languages and Literatures Department as an illustrative case and based on an analysis of the Heritage Language student profile in the context of the United States, this study seeks to explore arguments in favor of providing training for university-level instructors of Spanish that responds to the specific pedagogical needs of Heritage Language Learners.

The relevancy of this study is not only based on …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Se Habla Inglés Aquí: Las Dificultades En El Tratamiento De La Depresión En Latinos En Los Estados Unidos, Melissa Kim Dundas

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to identify and bring to light the issues relating to treatment of Latinos and native Spanish speakers in the United States. The stigma surrounding depression is already strong in the U.S., and when minorities, who tend to have their own views of mental health disorders and who are less likely to seek treatment for any mental health disorder they might have, are added to the picture, the rates of treatment go drastically down. There are many factors that play into whether or not Latinos will seek treatment for depression, many of which revolve around language and culture, …

An Owl Abroad: A Descriptive Study Of Owl Use In The Efl Context, Joshua Paiz

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

The project reported on in this presentation at the 2013 East Central Writing Centers Association conference will provide some preliminary findings from a research survey carried out by Purdue OWL staff regarding attitudes towards OWLs in the EFL context. It will conclude with tentative recommendations, as well as by discussing the next steps required for to complete data analysis.

Owls Across Borders: An Exploratory Study On The Place Of Online Writing Labs In The Efl Context, Joshua Paiz

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

The study reported on in this presentation at the 2013 Symposium on Second Language Writing (SSLW) examined the content creation best practices of four content development teams working on the Purdue OWL. Utilizing focus group methods the study sought to examine what strategies developers utilized to overcome the challenges faced while developing L2 instructional content for a global audience. By examining the various drafts of resources before they finally went live on the Purdue OWL, this study investigated the linguistic and rhetorical choices that developers made in an attempt to create content that would be of maximal user to L2 …

Langue Et Identité Chez Leïla Sebbar. Vers Une Filiation Renégociée, Cécilia W. Francis

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (2003), L’arabe comme un chant secret (2010a), as well as in other components of her intimate prose, Leïla Sebbar reflects on her sense of dispossessed identity due to linguistic exile and an unknown heritage, resulting from ruptures in her paternal filiation. Drawing from the works of Jacques Derrida, Régine Robin and Simon Harel, which form the basis of our argumentation, we examine various dimensions of the severed parental bond. The article proposes to examine how Sebbar’s autobiographical writings, which incorporate scenarios dealing with legacy transmission expressed in terms of auditory …

Signs And Symbols: Art And Language In Art Therapy, Malissa Morrell

Journal of Clinical Art Therapy

This paper is a preliminary attempt at theory building by exploring the use of art and language in art therapy through a theoretical inquiry model. Inductive and deductive processes are used to explore literature from the fields of psychology, art philosophy (particularly aesthetics), and linguistics. Concepts common to each of these disciplines are then further explored through the lens of bilingual therapy. Practical applications are discussed, along with suggestions for future research.

Resolutions And Their Incongruities: Further Thoughts On Logical Mechanism, Christian F. Hempelmann, Salvatore Attardo

Faculty Publications

This paper is a contribution to the study of the resolution of incongruities in humor. We reject some criticisms of logical mechanisms and analyze three different types of incongruities in humorous texts: completely backgrounded, backgrounded, and foregrounded. Only the latter are addressed by logical mechanisms. We identify a mechanism of “incongruity shifting” which may be a candidate for “deep” logical mechanism (along the lines of “parallelism” in Attardo et al. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 15: 1–44, 2002). We finally discuss the similarities between Oring's (Engaging humor, University of Illinois Press, 2003) “appropriate incongruity” theory and our approach, which …

Timing In The Performance Of Jokes, Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering

Faculty Publications

The notion of timing in humor is often mentioned as a very significant issue, and yet very little has been written about it. The paper reviews the scant literature on the subject and narrows down the definition of timing as comprising pauses and speech rate. The discussions of timing in the literature see it either as a speeding up or slowing down of speech rate. Using data collected from twenty joke performances, we show that speakers do not significantly raise or lower their speech rate at and around the punch line. The other common assumption is that punch lines are …

Rhetorical Weapons: The Social And Psychological Influences Of Language And Labeling In Instances Of Genocide, Emma C. Jones

CMC Senior Theses

It is difficult to understand why genocide continues to occur, even when the international community pledges never to let it happen in the future. Techniques such as moral disengagement and dehumanization have consistently resulted in genocide. These techniques can be greatly amplified through the careful use of language and labeling. The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles that language and labeling play in genocide. Social and psychological influences that use language will be investigated through the examination of the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide and the Rwandan genocide. These influences are many times unintentionally or unknowingly exercised and …

Cover Puzzle, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Crossword Puzzle featured on the cover of "The Playful Brian: The Surprising Science of How Puzzles Improve your Mind".

Dit’S Dynamic Speech Corpus, Dermot Campbell, Ciaran Mcdonnell, Marty Meinardi, Charles Pritchard, Bunny Richardson, Yi Wang

Articles

The Technological University Dublin’s FLUENT Dynamic Speech Corpus is aimed at learners, teachers, authors and researchers. When the prototype is complete (target: July 2009) it will afford access to a unique audio resource based on dialogues. Users will be able to find samples of native-to-native speech on a chosen topic, listen to phonetically interesting sections and explore the dynamic environment which gave rise to the spoken features studied. At all stages the user will be able to slow down sequences for heightened intelligibility.

Music And Language: Exploring An Artificial Music Grammar, Erica R. Knowles

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Research regarding the brain mechanisms that underlie music and language processing supports two main interpretations: domain-specificity and domain-generality. Evidence from neuropsychology literature, specifically from amusia research, supports domain-specific mechanisms (Peretz & Coltheart, 2003) but recent neuroimaging and behavioral evidence supports overlapping mechanisms, especially for syntax processing (Patel, 2008). The present study used an artificial music grammar in order to test participants' ability to learn a new music grammar as well as to observe a possible interaction between music and language syntax processing. Although participants were able to learn the artificial music grammar, a language task was not affected by errors …

Dit’S Dynamic Speech Corpus, Dermot Campbell, Ciaran Mcdonnell, Marty Meinardi, Charles Pritchard, Bunny Richardson, Yi Wang

Conference papers

Given the current focus of language learning on learner autonomy, the Technological University Dublin is using its FLUENT project (commencement date 7/1/’08) to produce a Dynamic Speech Corpus, which will be a valuable resource for learners, teachers, authors and researchers. The resultant database will afford access to a unique audio resource based on unscripted dialogues between friends, characterized by industry-standard audio quality (for analysis purposes) and a high degree of naturalness. By means of search string and/or tags such as speaker intention, users will be able to find samples of native-to-native speech (various L1 varieties) on a chosen topic, particularly …

Introduction: Humor In Contemporary American Poetry, Denise Duhamel, Salvatore Attardo

Faculty Publications

Introduction piece to a special issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research.

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 …

Bailey's Hexameters, Jeremiah Farrell, Al Shapiro

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Nat. Bailey was the most important English lexicographer before Samuel Johnson. Our interest in this essay is to report on some of the 1730 dictionary's entries for the "Entertainmen of the Curious".

The Asteroid Puzzle And Games, Jeremiah Farrell, Karen Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Each of our two-person games is a word version variation from the tic-tac-toe or noughts and crosses family. It is well known that classic tic-tac-toe is a draw when expertly played. It is also clear that not all of its plays are equal- a strong move for the first player is to initially take the powerul center square. ASTEROID and ASTEROID II, on the other hand, are both completely symmetric (in the sense that all letters are used equally) and each have rather suble forced wins for either the first or second player.

Cube Mentalism, Jeremiah Farrell, Ivan Moscovich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Our tour of multidimensional cubes begins with the marking of the eight comers of a 3-cube with the eight words HOT, POT, POD, HOD, HAD, HAT, PAT, and PAD. The figure below shows how these eight inherit the labels of the HOT-PAD).die where the letter H is opposite P, the letter O is opposite T and the letter T is opposite the letter D...

The First Gathering, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The following is a photocopy of a letter I sent to my good friend James P. Fink shortly after the first Gathering in 1993. It is not reqritten or edited in any way in hopes of conveying to you some sense of my awe at how very special this event really way. My son David, then a student in Boston, was also privileged to be invited by Tom Rodgers and David and I still feel overwhelmed by the experience.

There are so many memories- and so many friends. After you have read the letter, I will remark on some of …

The Stenographic Affine Plane, Oscar Thumpbindle, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This square, composed of familiar words, is semimagic because any row or column (the rook sweeps) anagrams into STENOGRAPHIC. "Semi" means the diagonals don't. However, there are four very special diagonals; those that have words with one of the four vowels of STENOGRAPHIC in common. These four bishop sweeps will be important later. Keeping with the chess piece theme, the reader will take notice of the knight 4-tours using the consonants P, H, Rand C. For example one of these is the P-tour SAP, PEG, PIN and TOP. Another set of knight tours traces the letters S, T, G and …

The Use Of English Determiners In Dialogue Journals By Japanese Second Language Learners, Adriana Rodrigues Bridger

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The purpose of this study was to describe the use of English determiners in dialogue journals by Japanese second language learners. The entries of the journals of six Japanese students in an ESL class collected over an eight-week period served as the main source of data for this research project. Three analyses wert! performed: the accuracy order of the articles (the. al an. and@). possessives. and other determiners: the accuracy order of predeterminers. central determiners. and postdeterminers: and an error analysis of the articles a/an. the. and the@ article. The following major findings emerged: the accuracy order of the English …