Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

The Pragmatic Strategy Of Main-Clause Omission In Japanese: Its Contrast With Hebrew, And Its Learnability, Maayan Barkan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Typically, linguists study things that people actually say, but this dissertation focuses on what people do NOT say; specifically, it deals with main-clause omission. This paper presents an empirical study on main-clause omission constraints in Japanese after the concessive particle ga (‘although’/’but’), the first known controlled experiment of its kind in the literature. It investigates, from a pragmatic and discourse-analytic perspective, intuitive judgments regarding the allowance of main-clause omission in Japanese, in an attempt to reveal whether Japanese Native Speakers (JNS) use main-clause omission as a pragmatic strategy, as is suggested in the literature. If they do, then what triggers …

Introduction To Discourse, Structure And Linguistic Choice By T. Price Caldwell, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Hebrew Typography: A Modern Progression Of Language Forms, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Influenced by studies in traditional Ashkenazi and Sephardi scripts. The typeface had been designed for the printing of the Koren Tanakh, a first edition printed Jewish Bible processed through an all-Jewish collaboration for the first time in centuries. Koren’s project was inspired by the revival of Hebrew initiated by Haskalah writers in the 18th century. Haskalah writers utilized the language and scripts of written and printed literary texts. Influenced by philosophical and political ideologies of the European Enlightenment, the Haskalah explored Jewish identity through language by defining the secular context through traditional Jewish symbolism and narratives. The Zionist movement of …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.

Virtual Meatspace: Word Formation And Deformation In Cyberpunk Discussions, Matt Garley, Benjamin Slade

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Event Parsing In Narrative: Trials And Tribulations Of Archaic English Fairy Tales, Rebecca Lovering

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While event extraction and automatic summarization have taken great strides in the realm of news stories, fictional narratives like fairy tales have not been so fortunate. A number of challenges arise from the literary elements present in fairy tales that are not found in more straightforward corpora of natural language, such as archaic expressions and sentence structures. To aid in summarization of fictional texts, I created an class - a template for a digital object, in this case a semantic and story event - that captures elements predicted to help classify events as important for inclusion. I wrote a processor …

Language-Mixing In Discourse In Bilingual Individuals With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Avanthi Paplikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Language-mixing (LM) as defined by Chengappa (2009, p. 417) is an “intra-sentential phenomenon referred to as the mixing of various linguistic units (morphemes, words, modifiers, phrases, etc.), primarily from two participating grammatical systems”. LM is influenced by grammatical, environmental, and social constraints (e.g., Milroy & Wei, 1995; Bhat & Chengappa, 2005). Researchers have suggested that LM in patients with aphasia is a communicative strategy used to achieve successful exchanges between speakers; the effectiveness of this mixing, however, had yet to be demonstrated quantitatively.

In the current study we investigated whether LM is present in bilingual speakers with aphasia, and if …

Hpcnmf: A High-Performance Toolbox For Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Karthik Devarajan, Guoli Wang

COBRA Preprint Series

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a widely used machine learning algorithm for dimension reduction of large-scale data. It has found successful applications in a variety of fields such as computational biology, neuroscience, natural language processing, information retrieval, image processing and speech recognition. In bioinformatics, for example, it has been used to extract patterns and profiles from genomic and text-mining data as well as in protein sequence and structure analysis. While the scientific performance of NMF is very promising in dealing with high dimensional data sets and complex data structures, its computational cost is high and sometimes could be critical for …

Design Research: Typography Within The Israeli Linguistic Landscape, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

A linguistic landscape signifies language used within a physical or virtual public space, in which communication is presented in typographic form, portraying a message to an audience. Within the state of Israel, the linguistic landscape presents a unique situation in which it is common to view municipal and commercial multilingual signs that are designed using Hebrew, English, and Arabic letterforms. By studying the diverse linguistic landscape within Israeli urban environments, the article offers perspectives on the use of multilingual visual language, based on discussions with five Israeli designers in the summer of 2015.

Urdu Resultive Constructions (A Comparative Analysis Of Syntacto-Semantic And Pragmatic Properties Of The Compound Verbs In Hindi-Urdu)‎, Razia A. Husain

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Among Urdu’s many verb+verb constructions, this thesis focuses on those constructions, which combine the stem of a main content verb with another inflected verb which is used in a semantically bleached sense. Prior work on these constructions has been focused on their structural make-up and syntactic behavior in various environments. While there is consensus among scholars (Butt 1995, Hook 1977, Carnikova 1989, Porizka 2000 et al.) that these stem+verb constructions encode aspectual information, to date no clear theory has been put forward to explain the nature of their aspectual contribution. In short, we do not have a clear idea why …

To The Jew First: A Socio-Historical And Biblical-Theological Analysis Of The Pauline Teaching Of `Election' In Light Of Second Temple Jewish Patterns Of Thought, Anthony Thornhill

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Paul's "doctrine" of election has remained a controversial and enigmatic topic for centuries. Few studies, however, have approached Paul's doctrine through the context of Second Temple Judaism. This study examines Paul's view of election through the lens of Second Temple Jewish texts written prior to 70 CE. In doing so, it is argued that the best framework through which to view Paul's discussion of election is through a primarily corporate model of election. While such a model is rooted in Judaism, Paul departs from his Jewish contemporaries in arguing that the locus of election is in God's Messiah, Jesus.

An Application Of Discourse Analysis Methodology In The Exegesis Of John 17, Thomas W. Hudgins

Liberty Theological Review

This study applies discourse analysis methodology to the study of the seventeenth chapter of John. Instead of adopting the typical three-fold division of Jesus' prayer based upon the three referents (Jesus, the immediate disciples, and future disciples), greater attention is given to Jesus' requests and final commitment, the mainline verbs. By giving more structural significance to the mainline verbs, the structural division and natural outline of Jesus' prayer become more evident.

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 …

Proceedings Of The Sixth International Natural Language Generation Conference (Inlg 2010)., John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee, Ielka Van Der Sluis

Conference papers

No abstract provided.

Communication Strategies Of International Students : A Study Of Service Encounters., Suo Yan Ju

Student Works (2010-2019)

Communication strategies are important in helping L2 learners to communicate successfully when they are faced with a problem in speech production. This study looked at one of the components in Communication Competence, i.e strategy competence or the use of Communication Strategies (CS) in oral interactions among Middle Eastern students and counter staff in institute of postgraduate studies (IPS) at University of Malay.  Data collected from video-tape and interviews were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. It was found that the most frequently used communication strategy was the use of „modification devices‟. The other strategies used in order of frequency were „interaction strategies‟, …

Investigating Gricean Maxims In Conversations Among Malaysian Women., Lee Pei Ling

Student Works (2010-2019)

In this investigation into the conversations of Malaysian women friends, H.P. Grice’s conversational maxims are analyzed in terms of fulfillment and non-fulfillment. Included are the theoretical aspects and findings of both foreign and local researchers who have done studies pertaining to all female conversations (Coates, 1996; Hafizah Ahamad, 2004) and Grice’s maxims (Rundquist, 1992; Kulasingam, 2004; Brumark, 2006). Data is drawn from audio-tape recordings of different groups of women friends, transcribed and instances of fulfillment and non-fulfillment were singled out in the analysis process. To strengthen the validity of the findings, the recordings were triangulated with onsite observations, field notes, …

Cohesion And Coherence Shifts In Chinese Argumentative Texts Translated From English., Soh Bee Kwee

Student Works (2010-2019)

this study focuses on the shifts of cohesion and coherence in argumentative texts translated from English into Chinese.  This  research aims to substantiate theoretical assumptions by testing them against authentic data. Firstly, the study discusses the shift of cohesion by comparing the use of third person pronoun and conjunction based on the bottom-up approach proposed by Baker (1992). Secondly, it shows how micro-level coherence affects macro-level coherence of argumentative texts in terms of text-type. Adopting Hatim and Mason’s text-type model (1990), this study highlights the ways in which overall discoursal relations evolve in the 29 unit ‘texts’ used as data. …

A Study Of Epistemic Modality In A Television Interview., Papiya Chakrabarty

Student Works (2010-2019)

This research explores the use of modals such as will, would and shall which are epistemic in nature in an interview from America’s MTP (Meet the Press) of the present millennium which involves five politicians as speakers. It applies a qualitative approach and is a corpus based lexico-grammatical research which plans to identify the modality and its frequency in only one type of discourse. The research tests aims to test why speakers use epistemic modality and how committed they are towards their views, opinions which become truth propositions when involved in a question and answer session with other participants of …

Proceedings Of The 4th Acl-Sigsem Workshop On Prepositions At Acl-2007., Fintan Costello, John D. Kelleher, Martin Volk

Conference papers

This volume contains the papers presented at the Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions. This workshop is endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (ACL-SIGSEM), and is hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, taking place on 28th June, 2007 in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Analisis Tautan Dan Runtutan Dalam Teks Klasik Dan Moden, Hasnah Mat Adnan

Student Works (2000-2009)

Research in this field has touched beyond grammatical barrier, which is specification of traditional about Malay discourse and modern type. The to two main aspects, being the base of text, which are cohesion and coherence will be the main focus in this investigation. One who investigates the aspect of cohesion without studying the aspect of coherence in a discourse is not complete as both are linked to one another. Although both are different concepts, they are revealing continuous interplay at the level of textual structure. Cohesion, being the form and coherence as the function of meaning should not be ignored …

Perkamusan Melayu : Sumbangan Data Korpus Berkomputer, Norliza Haji Jamaluddin

Student Works (2000-2009)

This study is on the definition aspect in Malay lexicography with the focus on kamus Melayu Inqqeris Dewan. The definition aspect being discussed in this thesis is on the way the definition is done based on the COBUILD definition practice. The elaboration of every word entry is based on the analysis of the computer corpus data. There are six chapters in this thesis . The first chapter provides the background of the study, the objectives, scope and methodology. Chapter II is on the lexicographic convention and definition practice by the COBUILD and kamus Dewan projects. Chapter III presents the computer …

Struggle, Aspiration, And Obsession: The Discourse Of Diet, Emily K. L. Jahn

Masters Theses

Research has shown that members of society are generally dissatisfied with their current weight. This study examines how individuals socially construct meanings of the word diet and the dieting process. Participants (n=443) were males and females who ranged in age from 7 to 68. Each were given a diet questionnaire to complete. The older groups were given the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC) Scale in addition to the survey. The text for analysis was obtained by the surveys and four focus groups. The resulting data indicated that both males and females perceive the word diet means "to lose weight." …

An Adaptation Of Reading Materials For Students Of Science In English As A Second Language, Susan Maguiro

MA TESOL Collection

This project is an udating of the reader Scientific English Practice. Its purpose is to substitute outdated subjects, and expand others with more recent scientific information.

Vocabulary lists, comprehension questions, and grammar exercises were written to accompany several substituted essays. Vocabulary lists and exercises thereof were developed for the remaining essays, some of which were expanded upon.