Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

Retórica Intercultural En El Discurso Académico Universitario: Las Funciones Retóricas De La Citación En Los Trabajos De Fin De Máster Escritos En Español Y En Inglés Por Hablantes Nativos Y No Nativos, David Sanchez-Jimenez

Publications and Research

This research derives from the interest in learning the cultural differences in citation practices in the academic genre of Master's thesis of native Spanish (Ee), non-native Filipino writers of Spanish (Fe), native Filipino writers of English (Fi), and American writers of English. A total of thirty-two (32) master´s theses – eight (8) for each group – were analyzed. A quantitative and qualitative methodology was used to study this phenomenon based on the computerized textual analysis of the rhetorical function of citations arranged in typological classification that modified the outline proposed by Petrić in his 2007 article. The results obtained from …

What’S In A Threat: A Corpus-Based, Speech Act And Lexicogrammatical Approach To Threats In English, Natalie Raun Carter

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Threats can be made without using language at all, but previous research on the language of threats is limited and primarily examines threats with a small amount of constructed data. Building on Austin (1962) and Searle (1965; 1969)’s speech act theory and using a corpus of naturally occurring data consisting of 827 threatening texts from publicly available websites and law enforcement, this dissertation determines what constitutes a threat, as well as the interdependence between words and grammar.

Pragmatically, this dissertation identifies four required felicity conditions that must be met to constitute a threat—building on those set by John Searle, Bruce …

The Movie Is On!: Pragmatics Of The Video Joker In Who Killed Captain Alex?, Hunter Hulett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The film Who Killed Captain Alex? (WKCA) is a Ugandan film that provides an opportunity to examine the use of pragmatic and specifically deictic features to study the manipulation of borders between the film and reality. A commentator called the Video Joker (VJ) is the film’s deictic center, constantly destabilizing deictic relations and orienting the internal and external pragmatics of the film around themself. As the film’s ultimate pragmatic force, they occupy a position blurring diegesis and non-diegesis due to originating as real-time film commentators before being edited into the text. In this unique position, they shift the deixis’s organization …

Conceptual Meaning In Phonology: Multimodal Iconic Expressions In Discourse Focus, David Páez Acevedo

Linguistics ETDs

In everyday communication, speakers go beyond words to synchronize speech sounds and gestures, adding nuanced meanings. For instance, in Colombian Spanish, recounting the distant past involves elongating words, modulating pitch, and using expressive hand movements. This dissertation explores this phenomenon, termed Multimodal Iconic Expressions (MMIEs), using Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar. The quantitative study uncovers correlations between verb aspect, nominal quantification, and speech duration, revealing phono-iconic connections. The qualitative study examines construal operations giving rise to MMIEs across semantic domains. MMIEs predominantly appear in discourse Focus, with durative events and mass-like quantities exhibiting pronounced phono-iconic associations. Patterns include stress and …

Chatgpt As Metamorphosis Designer For The Future Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai): A Conceptual Investigation, Amarjit Kumar Singh (Library Assistant), Dr. Pankaj Mathur (Deputy Librarian)

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this research paper is to explore ChatGPT’s potential as an innovative designer tool for the future development of artificial intelligence. Specifically, this conceptual investigation aims to analyze ChatGPT’s capabilities as a tool for designing and developing near about human intelligent systems for futuristic used and developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Also with the helps of this paper, researchers are analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT as a tool, and identify possible areas for improvement in its development and implementation. This investigation focused on the various features and functions of ChatGPT that …

Comentarios Críticos Escritos Por Estudiantes De Medicina Sobre La Evaluación Del Paciente, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

La presente investigación analiza los comentarios críticos producidos por estudiantes chilenos de 3º y 4º de Medicina en la sección Comentario/Reflexión final de la Ficha Clínica con el objetivo de conocer su opinión sobre la experiencia de su estancia hospitalaria y la práctica médica en general, así como de entender los elementos retórico-discursivos que utilizan para posicionar su voz en el texto al evaluar dicha experiencia. Para investigar este fenómeno se realizó un análisis textual computarizado de las categorías gramaticales y los contenidos semántico-funcionales valorativos desde un enfoque cualitativo inductivo-deductivo. Los resultados del estudio mostraron un predominio de los comentarios …

Analysis Of Electrophysiological Markers And Correlated Components Of Neural Responses To Discourse Coherence, Kurt M. Masiello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Constructing meaning from spoken language is invaluable for learning, social interaction, and communication. In clinical populations with developmental disorders of speech comprehension, the severity of disruption can persist and vary from limiting occupational opportunities to lower performance outcomes. Previous research has reported an event-related potential (ERP) neural positivity over right hemisphere lateral anterior sites in response to semantic and discourse processing. Although useful as a marker for clinical populations of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developmental language disorder (DLD), little is understood about the dynamics and neural sources of this biological marker. In addition to traditional methods of ERP analysis, …

La Descortesía En Los Comentarios Digitales De La Prensa Deportiva. El Tenis, Mucho Más Que Un Juego, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Comments on sports news published on the digital platforms of newspapers have turned these spaces into forums for debate in which homogeneous social communities are established. The aim of this research is to find out how the participants of these platforms interact in the sports press and what impoliteness strategies they use when evaluating the text of the news and the comments of other users. For this purpose, a qualitative textual analysis of a corpus of 1,000 digital comments produced on the Australian Open 2022 final in four of the most widely distributed Spanish newspapers with the highest national circulation, …

El Metadiscurso En La Escritura Académica: Singularidades E Investigaciones En Lengua Española, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Dentro de la disciplina lingüística de la Pragmática, el estudio del metadiscurso ha sido uno de los temas más investigados en el mundo anglosajón en las últimas décadas. Este fenómeno se refiere al componente del discurso que sirve para hablar del discurso sin añadir significado proposicional. El metadiscurso facilita la comunicación y juega un rol central en el discurso para transmitir las ideas del autor y hacer partícipes a los lectores de estas ideas en su texto de manera efectiva, guiando al lector en la debida interpretación del texto, aumentando su legibilidad y permitiendo construir una relación más cercana con …

Text Contention Behind Sharia Supervisory Board Reports: A Critical Discourse Analysis, Ari Ermawati, M Nur A Birton, Irfan Tarmizi, Muhammad Muttaqin

Jurnal Akuntansi dan Keuangan Indonesia

Sharia Supervisory Board Reports (SSBRs) have an interest in convincing the public that entities supervised by a Sharia Supervisory Board (SSB) are sharia-compliant and reflective of Good Corporate Governance (GCG) practices. Failure in public convincing will be detrimental to Islamic banks’ reputation as well as the SSB’s image and credibility. This study aimed to critically assess how the SSB produces reports as texts to persuade the public using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). We analyzed four SSBRs from two Islamic Commercial Banks (ICBs) and two Islamic Business Units (IBUs) owned by other ICBs as well as interviews for data triangulation. We …

Does Justice Have A Syntax?, Steven L. Winter

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Language As The Medium: A Literature Review. Harnessing The Prolific Power Of Dramatic Language As A Therapeutic Tool In Drama Therapy, Edward Freeman

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Language in and of the theatre, with its palate of variegated writing styles and playwrights from throughout time, has the potential to be harnessed, focused, and systematized for use as a therapeutic tool within drama therapy – the field’s artistic medium. Drama therapy could benefit from having a specific medium germane to its artform which has the potential to provide practitioners with a common resource and means of communication, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning, as well as align the field with other creative arts therapies. Language encompasses all forms of human communication – speaking, writing, signing, gesturing, expressing facially – …

Fable In Action: A Discourse Analysis Approach To The Life Of Aesop, Martha Hamilton Mccafferty

Honors Theses

In this essay, I examine instances of fable-telling throughout the Life of Aesop in a new light by using linguistic theories from the subfield of Pragmatics in my analysis. I suggest that the author’s purpose in composing the Life of Aesop is to instruct his audience on how to use fable effectively, and that Aesop serves as both the positive and negative example for this lesson. I begin by considering the nature of fable and demonstrate why it is necessary to define fable in reference to the social action which it performs. I then address the complex position of fable …

Gendered Use Of Language In Facebook Status Updates Among Jordanian And American Youths: A Sociopragmatic Study, Ashraf Wenas Al Sad

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The study examines the types of speech acts of Facebook status updates that are posted by Jordanian and American youth. The participants were from Yarmouk University which is located in northern Jordan and from West Virginia University which is located in the US. The data was elicited from 50 American males, 50 American females, 50 Jordanian males, and 50 Jordanian females. Searle’s taxonomy was used to do the content analysis of the data. Searle’s taxonomy and additional speech acts were found: directive, expressive, assertive, God’s invocation, humor, and quotation. The findings of the study indicate that the religious and cultural …

La Dialogicidad En La Tesis Doctoral Y El Artículo De Investigación Escritos En Inglés Y Español En Medicina, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Resumen

Esta investigación presenta una perspectiva intercultural (español e inglés) en el ámbito de la escritura científica médica sobre la interacción que ocurre entre el escritor y la audiencia que recibe el texto. De modo más específico, se estudian las diferencias dialógicas que ocurren en los géneros de la tesis doctoral y el artículo de investigación en Medicina desde el modelo metadiscursivo interpersonal propuesto por Hyland (2005, 2008). El corpus se compone de 40 textos, divididos en 20 escritos expertos (artículos) y 20 de posgrado (tesis). Se analizan los rasgos pragmalingüísticos que contribuyen a la construcción y la negociación de …

The Grammatical Systems Of Attentionworthiness: Positional Signals And Invariant Meanings In Spanish Word Order, Eduardo Ho-Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a Columbia School analysis of word order phenomena in Spanish. The data was sourced from a corpus of manually collected utterances extracted from six volumes of Latin American short stories written in the twentieth century. The study employs various qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to test the various hypotheses offered as explanations of the distributional problems selected for the study. The observations roughly correspond to word orders that the grammatical tradition describes as having to do with either verbs with one argument (SV, VS, OV, VO) or verbs with two arguments (SVO, OVS, VSO, VOS, SOV, …

A Semantic Prosody Analysis Of Swear Words In A Corpus Of English Songs, Hashim Hazri Shahreen

Student Works (2020-2029)

This study looks at the semantic prosody of swear words found in a corpus of English songs by looking at their collocations using a corpus software; AntConc. A total of 545 songs were chosen based on the Billboard year-end chart from 2011 to 2016 with 243,689 number of tokens and 8,139 number of word types. Word lists and concordance lines were generated from the corpus for the data analysis. The analysis on the concordance lines showed that not all swear words with negative-based meaning possessed negative semantic prosody. Despite possessing negative semantic prosody, 10 out of 15 swear words possessed …

Intercultural Rhetoric In The Written Academic Discourse: The Rhetorical Functions Of Citation In English And Spanish By College Students And Expert Writers, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This research studies the practice of citation in two cultural communities, the American and the Spanish, in an academic setting. The main objective of this research is to determine what are the rhetorical functions of citations in the master’s thesis of 12 American and 12 Spanish students written in their native language, as well as in scientific articles of 12 American and 12 Spanish professional writers in Applied Linguistics, and to identify the differences found among these groups.

To study this pragmalinguistic phenomenon, I used the computational text analysis of the rhetorical functions of citations via the Antconc 3.2.4w concordance …

The Objectives Of Public Higher Education In New York City Through The Lens Of Language, John-Nicholas Parker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper displays the objectives of public higher education in New York City and their relation to changes in the city. Public higher education in New York City relies on the support of the public. This paper details adjustments to the lexicon of the school in response to changing demographics and historical events by examining statements provided by the school during different periods. Changes to the lexicon relating to class, gender, race, ethnicity, and military service are examined in relation to their historical context. Sources examined in this paper include commission reports, student newspapers, and mission statements. The paper finds …

The Rhetoric Of “Faith” In The Malaysian Media’S Representation Of Football, Abas Nadhratunnaim

Student Works (2020-2029)

The present study investigates rivalry discourse in football news of the Malaysian media, The Star which has been produced by local news authors who also refer to themselves as the faithful fans of football teams. As they express faith in their team, these news authors tend to compare their team against the others by highlighting their superiority and inferiority. Hence, the study intends to examine the use of “faith” in rhetorically influencing the media representation of football and the social actors involved in the news (the local and international football teams). Corpus-assisted analysis and approaches in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) …

A Jewel Inlaid: Ergativity And Markedness In Nepali, Luke S. Lindemann

Linguistics Graduate Dissertations

Nepali presents with a complex case marking pattern in which ergative case is obligatory in perfective transitive clauses, disallowed in unaccusative intransitive clauses and copular clauses, and varies with the nominative elsewhere. Where ergative marking is variable, its usage correlates with a variety of semantic and pragmatic factors. The purpose of this investigation is to precisely delineate the grammatical domains for which ergative marking is variable and to provide a unified analysis of the semantic and pragmatic factors that correlate with its expression.

The study of pragmatic phenomena requires the implementation of multiple strategies for collecting language data. The data …

Slurs And Register: A Case Study In Meaning Pluralism, Justina Diaz-Legaspe, Chang Liu, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always includes [-polite] and [+derogatory]. Thus, e.g., what distinguishes ‘Chinese’ from ‘chink’ is neither a peculiar sort of descriptive nor …

Estudio Contrastivo Intercultural De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas: La Producción De Textos Académicos En El Nivel De Posgrado Escritos En Español E Inglés, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

The main objective of this research is to discover which rhetorical functions were used in the Master´s thesis writing written by eight (8) American and eight (8) Spanish postgraduates in their na-tive language. A computerized tex-tual analysis of the rhetorical func-tion of citation was used to study this phenomenon (Petrić, 2007). The results obtained from the re-search showed that the different cultural conventions in the thesis writing indicate that when com-pared with native Spanish writers, the American writers of English use the highest number of cita-tions, and write a relatively longer Introduction and Conclusion parts. On the other hand, the …

Aproximación Didáctica Al Apendizaje De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas En El Discurso Académico Universitario, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

El presente estudio investiga cómo conciben la práctica de la citación en el contexto académico dos comunidades sociales de distinta nacionalidad (estadounidense, española). Para estudiar este fenómeno se realizó un análisis contrastivo utilizando la metodología del análisis textual computarizado de las funciones retóricas de las citas en la escritura de un trabajo de investigación universitario de máster realizado por 8 estudiantes estadounidenses y 8 españoles en su lengua nativa, ordenadas estas en una tipología clasificadora de 9 categorías.

Los resultados obtenidos en la investigación mostraron que las diferentes convenciones culturales implicadas en la composición de las memorias estudiadas responden a …

New Use Of An Old Discourse Marker: The Interface Of Implicit Attitudes, Explicit Attitudes, And Rapid Language Change Of "So", Syelle Graves

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates a linguistic feature called “backstory so,” defined as discourse marker so when it prefaces the answer to a question or request for information from an interlocutor. The motivation for its investigation is a collection of highly negative internet comments expressing irritation and insulting attitudes toward this use of so and the people who say it, calling them annoying, inarticulate, and condescending, for example. I also examine controversy in the (limited) literature about whether or not this language feature is new.

I therefore first present findings that this use of so is an instance of rapid language …

The Variable Expression Of Transitive Subject And Possesor In Wayuunaiki (Guajiro), Andres M. Sabogal

Linguistics ETDs

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. …