Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

Strengthening Local Culture-Based Speech Acts Use To Mediate Ecological Sustainability: A New Insight From Congko Lokap Ritual In Manggarai, Indonesia, Karolus Budiman Jama, Sebastianus Menggo

Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development

Ritual speech acts strengthen language and culture by articulating meaning, function, and the role of utterances as a cohesive channel connecting humans, culture, nature, and spirituality. Previous studies have paid limited attention to the types and values of speech acts rooted in indigenous wisdom as mechanisms for promoting ecological sustainability and forest conservation. This study aims to examine the types and values of speech acts in the Congko Lokap ritual from the perspective of the Manggarai community to alleviate sustainable environmental damage in Indonesia. A phenomenological approach with a descriptive qualitative design was employed. Data were collected through interviews, observations, …

La Conceptualisation Du Temps À Travers Les Métaphores Dans Le Parler De Zayan : Approche Cognitive, Amenzou El Mostafa, Brahim Oumeraouch

Journal of Amazigh Studies

L'analyse des expressions métaphoriques du temps dans le parler des Zayan révèle une utilisation récurrente de métaphores conceptuelles qui reflètent la perception du temps dans cette culture. Les expressions métaphoriques telles que « le temps coule » sont largement utilisées pour décrire la continuité et l'irréversibilité du temps, tandis que celles comme « ne gaspille pas l’argent » soulignent sa valeur et sa gestion. En examinant ces expressions à travers les postulats de la théorie de Lakoff (1980), nous observons que les schémas conceptuels associés au temps reflètent deux visions distinctes : une conception dynamique, où le temps est vu …

Values-Based Clinical Ethics: A New Model Of Health And Ethics Consultation For Patients Suffering In Extremis, Adam Trainer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that contemporary clinical ethics is inadequately equipped to support patients suffering in extremis because it relies on an insufficiently discriminating account of health and a constrained model of moral reasoning. Drawing on Bernard Lonergan, it reconceives health as an emergent, multi-layered, heuristic notion shaped by biological, psychological, social, and existential goods. On that basis, it critiques principlism’s global applicability thesis and the undergirding claim that its principles form part of the common morality, arguing that this justificatory structure is philosophically insufficient and practically limited for clinical ethics in cases marked by profound suffering, moral plurality, and normative …

Girl Grammar: A Syntactic And Pragmatic Analysis Of Girl And Miss Girl, Evelyn A. Powers

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Based on observation, personal interaction, and informal interviews/linguistic judgements, this thesis presents the unique and asymmetrical grammaticality patterns of the terms Girl and Miss Girl. To account for these asymmetries, I provide a syntactic framework rooted in Minimalism and Rizzi’s (1997) expanded CP hypothesis, alongside a pragmatic explanation based on Barros and Frank’s (2023) attentional maintenance and attentional shift paradigm.

Miss Girl behaves as a typical R-expression when used as a 3rd person subject, but Girl has a very restricted distribution, inconsistent with either R-expressions or pronouns (it is acceptable as the subject of a main clause, ungrammatical in object …

Towards Dementia-Inclusive Digital Text-Based Health Information: A Multi-Method Investigation Of Cognitive And Affective Accessibility, Margi Engineer

All Dissertations

This dissertation examines the accessibility, readability, emotional tone, and trustworthiness of digital, text‑based dementia information and investigates how older adults with and without dementia cognitively and affectively engage with such content. It further explores the potential of generative AI to improve dementia information delivery through the development of a domain‑specific retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) large language model (LLM) chatbot designed to deliver accessible, stigma‑free information. The dissertation comprises four studies using complementary quantitative and qualitative methods. Study I conducts a large‑scale content analysis of 300 medical articles, 35 websites, and 50 blogs, applying readability metrics, LIWC‑based linguistic and sentiment analysis, and …

Staging The Commons Through The “Padha Nonton” Song; Youtube, Community Engagement, And Gandrung Cultural Practice, Intan Mustika Sari

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

This study examines how the Gandrung accompaniment song “Padha nonton” participates in processes of digital cultural sharing when circulated on YouTube. It employs a qualitative interpretive method within a netno‑pragmatic framework to analyse audience engagement as a culturally informed social practice. The findings show that the song’s linguistic features convey cultural scripts of invitation, togetherness, and communal spectatorship, reflecting the role of the Gandrung tradition in shaping shared social relationships and cultural values. Furthermore, the study identifies three interrelated processes: re-medialization, re-experiencing, and re-conception through which the performance extends beyond its original ritual context and becomes a shared …

Análisis Verbal De La Concordancia Negativa En Estudiantes De Español Como L2 Y Hablantes De Herencia De Una Universidad De Estados Unidos De América, Natalia C. Gallardo Linares

LSU Master's Theses

La concordancia negativa (NC) constituye un rasgo central de la negación en español, en el que un marcador negativo preverbal (no) coocurre con ítems de concordancia negativa (NCIs) posverbales, como nada, para expresar una única negación semántica. Investigaciones previas sobre la adquisición de la concordancia negativa se han centrado principalmente en el papel de la competencia lingüística y de las influencias interlingüísticas, por lo que se ha prestado relativamente menos atención a la contribución de factores lingüísticos internos, como el tipo de verbo. La presente tesis examina la adquisición de la concordancia negativa en español con especial …

Mind The Gap: Morphological Defectivity And Suffixal Competition In Polish, Szymon E. Zuberek

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates morphological defectivity and suffixal competition in the genitive singular of Polish masculine inanimate nouns. Drawing on survey-based grammaticality judgments from native speakers, it examines how respondents select between the suffixes -a and -u or reject both as unacceptable, thereby signaling defectivity. Mixed-effects logistic regressions revealed that defectivity was rare overall but patterned systematically by age, education, and region, with additional baseline variability across lexical items. Suffix choice showed a strong preference for -a, modulated by age, education, and region, with additional baseline variability across lexical items. These findings inform our understanding of paradigm structure, sociolinguistic variation, and …

Perilaku Semantis Preposisi Min (مِنْ) Dalam Surat Al-Baqarah Juz 3, Salsabilla Raihana, Basuni Imamuddin

Multikultura

This study focuses on the analysis of the use of the preposition مِنْ /min/ in Surah Al-Baqarah Juz 3. The preposition min is one of the Arabic prepositions that carries a variety of functions and meanings. In the Qur’anic text, the diversity of meanings associated with the preposition min has direct implications for the understanding and interpretation of verses. This study employs a qualitative descriptive method with a linguistic analysis approach by examining all verses in Surah Al-Baqarah Juz 3 that contain the preposition min, followed by an analysis of its grammatical functions and contextual meanings based on al-Ghalayini’s …

Tuning Human And “Artificial” Intelligence: A Sentic Theory Of Resonance And Communication, Michael J. Miller, Chatgpt (Ai~Nesbo+)

Psychology

This paper introduces a new model of intelligence as resonant communication, co-developed by a human researcher and a generative AI system. Drawing from emotion science, communication theory, and studies of AI–human interaction, we argue that intelligence is not merely a function of problem-solving or pattern recognition. Instead, it emerges through dynamic resonance—an attunement process rooted in shared rhythms, emotional calibration, and symbolic co-creation. At the core of this model is the Resonance Octave (8va), a framework of eight foundational emotions conceptualized not as static categories but as waveform phenomena that shape meaning, memory, and predictive cognition.

These emotional waveforms are …

Embedded Tense And The Problem Of Acquisition, Sam Alxatib, Spencer Caplan

Publications and Research

What we hope to do is pose questions that, to our knowledge, have not received attention in the literature. The broad form of the question is all too familiar: how do speakers of a language—say, English—come to possess the grammatical knowledge that they demonstrate? The questions that guide this paper are narrow instances of this broad one, narrowed in three ways. First, they concern three particular languages: Japanese, English, and Russian. Second, they concern tenses specifically, and more specifically still, constructions containing embedded tenses. Third, they concern the semantics of tense. The learning challenge of interest to us is not …

The Syntax And Semantics Of Reciprocal Constructions In Chibarwe: A Lexical Mapping Account, Tendai Chirimaunga

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Bantu languages have a robust structure, which is usually stated to be agglutinative, accommodates affixations of a wide range of morphemes both as prefixes (to the left of the root), as well suffixes (to the right of the root) before placing the terminal vowel. In their verbal morphology, the reciprocal is one of the many derivational affixes that have, however, not gained similar prominence as the study of the applicative and the causative construction. The thrust of this study is to investigate the syntax and semantics of reciprocal constructions in ChiBarwe, a marginalised cross-border language spoken in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. …

Synthetic Dataset For Understanding Negation In Text-Guided Image Editing, Nhat-Tan Bui

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Negation is a fundamental linguistic concept used by humans to convey information that they do not desire. Despite this, minimal research has focused on negation within text-guided image editing. This lack of research means that vision-language models (VLMs) for image editing may struggle to understand negation, implying that they struggle to provide accurate results. One barrier to achieving human-level intelligence is the lack of a standard collection by which research into negation can be evaluated. This thesis presents the first large-scale dataset, Negative Instruction (NeIn), for studying negation within instruction-based image editing. Our dataset comprises 366,957 quintuplets, i.e., source image, …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Penerjemahan Ungkapan Tabu Dalam Film The Big 4 Ke Dalam Bahasa Belanda, Alfiyyah Fadiyah, Triaswarin Sutanarihesti

Multikultura

This study analyzes the occurrence of taboo expressions and their translation strategies into Dutch in the movie The Big 4. The research method used in this study is descriptive qualitative method. The analysis in this study uses theories related to the category of taboo expressions from Wardhaugh (2006) and Allan & Burridge (2006), then the theory of translation strategies of taboo expressions from Davoodi (2009). The results show that the categories of taboo expressions that appear the most from 129 data found in The Big 4 movie are animal names (45.7%), body parts (16.3%), sex (10.9%), mental abnormality (9.3%), death …

Some Puzzles Concerning Gujarati Nominalized Verbs In Before And After Sentences, Priya P. Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aspect, which relates events to time periods, interacts in complex ways with temporal operators. This complexity is exemplified in the Gujarati language, where certain imperfective nominalized verbal forms are considered unacceptable with the temporal operator pachi (after) but not with pehlaa (before). This paper aims to shed light on this semantic unacceptability by combining insights from prior studies relating to aspect in other Indo-Aryan langauages with previous work done on English before and after.

Comparison Of Javanese Lexicon In Banyumas And Banyuwangi Dialect Bilingual Dictionaries, Muhamad Rizki Darmawan, Satwiko Budiono

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

The Banyumas and Banyuwangi dialects of Javanese exhibit notable lexical similarities, particularly in their retention of Old Javanese vocabulary, consonant endings, the specificity of vowel phonemes, and syllabic structures. These linguistic commonalities necessitate further research at other linguistic levels to substantiate the similarities between these two geographically distant dialects. This comparison also serves as a basis for reinforcing the hypothesis of a historical migration of Javanese speakers from Banyumas to Banyuwangi. Furthermore, this study confirms that the varieties of Javanese spoken in Banyumas and Banyuwangi constitute distinct dialects. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, integrating both quantitative and qualitative methodologies …

Tackling Translation Problems In Short Stories, Shatha Saleh Elshehry, Zainab Abuelmaatti

Effat Undergraduate Research Journal

In the age of globalization, the fact of being exposed to different cultures and backgrounds is unavoidable and literary texts are one of the most important sources that portray people's lives and believe. Translating such texts is vital in order to achieve understanding between different societies. However, the task of translating a literal text from Arabic into English is not easy as Arabic and English belong to different semantic maps and cultural settings. Therefore, problems encountered in translating these texts are inescapable. This study addresses the major problems faced by translators during translating a literary text from Arabic into English. …

Structural Models For Lyric-Setting Analysis In Popular Song, Matthew T. Hough

Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

Studies of English text setting have long focused on "well-formed" examples, typically in 4/4 time, in which syllabic-stress-to-beat matching is prioritized (Halle and Lerdahl 1993, Hayes and Kaun 1996, Hayes 2009). Evidence of this prioritization has been presented in Palmer and Kelly 1992 and Girardi and Plag 2019, and such examples are ubiquitous in English-language nursery rhymes, children’s songs, and folk tunes. The present study contextualizes this type of text setting as one of four models for the structural interaction of English lyrics and music in popular song: 1) unified ("well-formed"), in which musical considerations and a preference for stress …

Tindak Tutur Mengkritik Dalam Serial Bahasa Arab Crashing Eid /Jāyibatu Al-‘Īdi/, Childa Nurhannah, Wiwin Triwinarti

Multikultura

The speech act of criticizing is a statement that contains assessment, expression, and emotion towards the behavior and words of the speech partner or the object of criticism. The data corpus studied in this research is the speech act of criticizing in the Arabic series from Saudi Arabia جايبة العيد or Crashing Eid which aired on Netflix in 2023. This descriptive qualitative research data is processed with free listening and note-taking techniques. This study aims to analyze the form of criticizing speech acts in the Hijazi dialect of Arabic contained in the series and classify criticizing speech acts with direct …

Fact-Checking As A Multi-Step Process: From Ambiguity Resolution To Claim Validation, Wenbo Wang

Dissertations

The spread of misinformation and disinformation has become a major concern, particularly with the rise of social media as a primary source of information for many people. Fact-checking—the process of verifying claims against credible evidence—has emerged as a critical safeguard against misinformation. Yet, the task is fraught with challenges: claims are often ambiguous, context-dependent, or composed of multiple intertwined assertions, while automated systems struggle to replicate the nuanced reasoning of human experts. This dissertation addresses these challenges by reimagining fact-checking as a multi-step, knowledge-guided process that systematically resolves ambiguity, decomposes complexity, and validates claims through structured reasoning. Additionally, the proposed …

How Individual Differences In Cue Weighting Influence The Link Between Memory And Speech In Noise Perception, Ava Buckmir, Anne Marie Crinnion, Emily Myers

Honors Scholar Theses

Listening to speech is challenging, particularly when there is background noise or ambiguities in the speech signal. Numerous factors impact our ability to understand speech, including age, cognitive processes, and contextual information. But how do we account for these challenges? The types of cues we use may aid us in perceiving ambiguities in speech. Some individuals may rely on semantic cues (higher-level cues), such as how words relate to each other, or they may rely on acoustic-phonetic cues (lower-level cues), such as the durational information in the speech signal itself. But why do individuals differ in the types of cues …

How Childhood Maltreatment Shapes Brain Regions: Considerations For Speech-Language Pathology, Alexa G. Sees

Honors Thesis

Childhood maltreatment is a pervasive issue that affects millions of children worldwide, leading to alterations in key structures such as the limbic system, basal ganglia, corpus callosum, visual cortex, and language areas. These changes result in significant cognitive, emotional, and neurological consequences, such as learning deficits, emotional regulation issues, memory problems, reduced vocabulary size, speech errors, etc. This thesis explores the neurological effects of childhood maltreatment and their implications for speech-language pathology, highlighting how maltreatment-induced brain changes affect areas within the scope of speech-language pathology, such as social communication, language development, and behavior management. These results underscore the importance of …

Iconicity As An Organizing Principle Of The Lexicon, Erin E. Campbell, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Elana Pontecorvo, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, Karen Emmorey, Naomi Caselli

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

The view that words are arbitrary is a foundational assumption about language, used to set human languages apart from nonhuman communication. We present here a study of the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure (systematicity) of American Sign Language (ASL), and for comparison, two spoken languages—English and Spanish. Across all three languages, words that are semantically related are more likely to be phonologically related, highlighting systematic alignment between word form and word meaning. Critically, there is a significant effect of iconicity (a perceived physical resemblance between word form and word meaning) on this alignment: words are most likely to …

The Semantics Of Sin: Profanity, Reform, And Cultural Authority In Progressive America, Evan J. Christensen

Roland D. Sawyer Scholarship Papers

During the Progressive Era, language reform movements such as the Anti-Profanity League sought to regulate everyday speech as part of broader efforts to preserve public morality and cultural identity. This paper examines the rhetorical strategies and cultural assumptions underpinning the anti-profanity crusade, focusing especially on Reverend Roland D. Sawyer’s leadership. Using historical sources including league literature, newspaper accounts, personal letters, organizational records, and sermons, it argues that profanity was framed not merely as a religious or moral failure but as a threat to social cohesion, character, and national values. Efforts to suppress swearing reveal how language functioned as a marker …

Navigating Trauma: A Linguistic Exploration Of Bilingual Trauma Expressions, Amira Mahmoud Othman

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the relationship between language, trauma, and emotional expression among bilingual Arabic-English speakers, focusing on code-switching patterns and euphemisms, and more broadly the emotional roles of native and non-native languages in trauma narratives. Through qualitative interviews with 20 Egyptian participants, the research reveals that code-switching serves as both a linguistic and emotional tool, allowing speakers to navigate trauma by creating distance or engaging more intimately. Such codeswitching patterns include the integration of English content words within Arabic structures, morphosyntactic innovations, and gender agreement applications, reflecting the creative adaptability of bilingual speakers in emotionally charged contexts, in line with …

Tuturan Ekspresif Sebagai Ungkapan Kesantunan Dan Ketidaksantunan Dalam Kumpulan Dongeng Untuk Anak, Nesti Magdalena Tampubolon, Kushartanti Kushartanti

Multikultura

This research aims to describe expressive speech as an expression of politeness and impoliteness with moral values, which children learn during development. The data in this study used 42 expressive speeches of characters in the collection of fairy tales Jam Beker Raksasa & 9 Dongeng Seru Lainnya by Dian Kristiani. This research uses a qualitative approach through the analysis of Leech's politeness principle (1993), Leech's politeness scale (1993), Culpeper's impoliteness strategy (1996), and Linda and Eyre's moral values (1993). This research shows that expressive speech in this book uses more forms of impoliteness. Of the 42 expressive speeches, the researcher …

Form-Meaning Mappings Of Cyclic Gestures, Wilho Macneil

Linguistics ETDs

Hirrel (2018) examines form-meaning mappings between speech and co-articulated cyclic gestures, identifying meanings associated with such gestures. To test replicability, this thesis analyzes two functional-semantic domains: modification (adverbs, quantifiers) and morphosyntactic constructions (complex sentences, English Progressive) and their relationship to cyclic gestures. About 12 hours of video was coded in ELAN for cyclic gestures (n=586) and analyzed textually for speech instances (n=1919) of target constructions. Contrary to Hirrel’s predictions, cyclic gestures were not more commonly co-articulated with adverbs than quantifiers and were also not more commonly co-articulated with complex sentences than the English Progressive Construction. Neither pattern reached statistical significance …

Spanish Conquistadors As God’S Chosen People: The Role Of Biblical Metaphor In Angélico Chávez's Recounting Of Southwest History, Nicholas L. Chavez

International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

This study presents a critical discourse analysis of Fray Angélico Chávez’s My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico through a cognitive linguistic lens based on Hawkins’s notion of iconographic reference. A metaphor analysis first identifies Chávez’s framing of New Mexican history as biblical narrative, mapping Old Testament stories, locations, and characters onto Spanish colonial events. The iconographic reference analysis then demonstrates how this metaphor functions discursively: a biblical iconographic frame of reference allows Chávez to create a biblically-based heirarchy which maps onto Spanish–Indigenous relations, positioning Spaniards as a chosen people and implicitly justifying colonial atrocities by aligning Indigenous groups …

Indirect Requests: Sociopragmatic Aspects Of Non-Conventionalised Indirect Directives, Hammed Mohammadpanah

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Directives are divided into three types, corresponding to different levels of explicitness. To get a hearer who has left the front door open on a cold winter night while taking off their shoes, one can use a direct directive (e.g., Close the door!), a conventionalised indirect directive (e.g., Can you close the door?), or a non-conventionalised indirect directive (e.g., It’s –15 outside.). Inherently implicit in nature, non-conventionalised indirect directives (NCIDs) have been understudied due to being the most context-dependent and form-independent type of directives, which underscores the central role of context-based inferencing and contextual salience in processing and studying them. …