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 …

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 …

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 …

Do Deaf Readers Pre-Activate Phonology During Sentence Comprehension?, Danielle Moraga, Lauren Fillet, Eva Gutierrez-Sigut, Zed Sehyr

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Readers can use linguistic and contextual clues to predict upcoming words in a sentence. This predictive processing allows for more efficient recognition of upcoming words, particularly when the context of a sentence is predictable (Federmeier & Kutas, 1999; Metusalem et al., 2012). Evidence suggests that for hearing readers, preactivation of word semantics and phonology facilitates the recognition of upcoming words in a sentence (Ito et al., 2016). Readers who became deaf/hard-of-hearing before learning a language rely primarily on visual rather than auditory input, and it is unclear if they engage in similar predictive processes. The study aims to investigate the …

Exploring The Efficacy Of Transcutaneous Auricular Vagal Nerve Stimulation On Post-Stroke Aphasia: A Single-Subject Design Study, Aswathy Anakkathil Pradeep

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Background: Anomia or word-retrieval difficulty is a common long-term language impairment for individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Several behavioral interventions like semantic feature analysis (SFA) have shown positive results in naming outcomes, but continue to face difficulty in generalizing the treatment effects to untreated items. With recent advancements in technology, researchers are developing newer neuromodulation devices that aim at promoting neuroplasticity and neural reorganization in post-stroke individuals. Transcutaneous auricular vagal nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a relatively new technology that aims at stimulating the auricular branch of the vagal nerve to promote neuroplasticity. Studies have shown taVNS to potentially facilitate positive improvements …

The Elusive Endonym, Thomas Eccardt

Publications and Research

The term ‘exonym’ was coined in 1957 by Marcel Aurousseau, an Australian geographer, to denote a place name used in a non-native language. ‘Endonym’ was later coined analogously as its counterpart, meaning the native name for a place. An example exonym would be the English word Germany, referring to the country whose inhabitants know it as its endonym Deutschland. These terms are useful to cartographers and also the United Nations, since it publishes documents in its six official languages, referring to places all over the world.

The topic of endonyms and exonyms would seem to fall into the …

Exploring Etymology Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

The English language is a borrowed language, a blend of words from many languages from around the world. We see this in the various ways sounds are represented by letters and letter combinations. In transparent or shallow orthographies, there is high predictability and consistent letter-sound correspondence whereas in opaque or deep orthographies, there are many ways to spell the same sound as well as there are many sounds for the same spellings (Burkins & Yates, 2021; Moats, 2020). This assignment description is a guided inquiry for preservice teachers to explore the concept of etymology by watching and reflecting on six …

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 …

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 – …

Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguities In Declarative And Interrogative Contexts: Oral Reading Data, Tyler J. Peckenpaugh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Certain English sentences containing multiple prepositional phrases (e.g., She had planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase) have been reported to be prone to mis-parsing of a kind that is standardly called a “garden path.” The mis-parse stems from the temporary ambiguity of the first prepositional phrase (PP1: in the drawer), which tends to be interpreted initially as the goal argument of the verb cram. If the sentence ended there, that would be correct. But that analysis is overridden when the second prepositional phrase (PP2: into her briefcase) is encountered, since the …

The Anonymity Heuristic: How Surnames Stop Identifying People When They Become Trademarks, Russell W. Jacobs

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article explores the following question central to trademark law: if a homograph has both a surname and a trademark interpretation will consumers consider those interpretations as intrinsically overlapping or the surname and trademark as completely separate and unrelated words? While trademark jurisprudence typically has approached this question from a legal perspective or with assumptions about consumer behavior, this Article builds on the Law and Behavioral Science approach to legal scholarship by drawing from the fields of psychology, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

The Article concludes that consumers will regard the two interpretations as separate and unrelated, processing surname …

Non-Manual Articulators In Irish Sign Language Verbs: An Analysis With Data Mining Association Rules, Robert G. Smith, Markus Hofmann

Conference Papers

The Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus (Leeson et al., 2006) deploys a complex multi-tiered temporal data structure. The process of manually analyzing such data is laborious, cannot eliminate bias and often, important patterns can go completely unnoticed. In addition to this, as a result of the complex nature of grammatical structures contained in the corpus, identifying complex linguistic associations or patterns across tiers is simply too intricate a task for a human to carry out in an acceptable timeframe. This work explores the application of data mining techniques on a set of multi-tiered temporal data from the SOI corpus. Building …

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., the comparative) is sensitive to the location of prosodic prominence. Machine learning algorithms (support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis) and human perception experiments are used to cross-validate the web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. Results con rm the theoretical predictions for location of prominence in comparative clauses and the advantages using both web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. The most robust …

Second Occurrence Focus And The Acoustics Of Prominence, Jonathan Howell

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Partee (1991) challenged the significance of the observation that certain adverbs (e.g., only) reliably associate with phonologically prominent words to truth‐conditional effect, noting second occurrence (i.e., repeated or given) focus (SOF) appears to lack a phonological realization. Rooth (1996), Bartels (2004), Beaver et al. (2004), Jaeger (2004), and Fry and Ishihara (2005) argued that, while not intonationally prominent, an SOF word can be marked by increased duration and/or increased rms intensity. An acoustic study of verb‐noun homophone pairs is reported. Three sophisticated speakers uttered five repetitions of the targets, embedded in discourses, in first occurrence (FOF), SOF, and unfocused (NF) …

A Study Of The Variant Forms Of Chinese Characters In Jiyun, Lye Hin Lee

Student Works (2000-2009)

This thesis attempts to give an initial etymological, semantics and phonological analysis of the variant forms of the Chinese characters found in a phonology lexicon, Jiyun. The focus of this study is on the comparison among the above-mentioned variant forms and the relevant scripts listed in the ancient Chinese etymological and phonological works, namely, Erya (EY), Shuowen Jiezi (SW), Fangyan (FY), Guangya (GYa), Yupian (YP), Longkan shuojing (LKSJ), Guangyun (GY) and other classical literary works. In the introduction, a brief elaboration of JY with its praises and disparages by the scholars through the ages is given, followed by the scope …

The Effect Of Usage On Degrees Of Constituency: The Reduction Of Don't In English, Joan Bybee, Joanne Scheibman

English Faculty Publications

In this paper we take the position that there are many degrees of constituency and that these derive in a direct manner from the frequency with which elements are used together: elements that are frequently found next to each other show a tighter constituent structure than those that collocate less frequently. We use both phonological and functional evidence from conversation to argue that repetition conditions chunking (Haiman 1994), sometimes overriding the syntactic and semantic logic of the organization of utterances. Our study examines the reduction of don't in American English conversation. We find that don't is reduced the most in …

A Resource And Idea Book ( For Teachers Of English To Speakers Of Other Languages ), Eleanor C. Boone, Rick Gildea, Pat Moran

MA TESOL Collection

This is a resource manual for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Those teachers who should find the manual most useful are Peace Corps EFL teachers in host country secondary schools.

This manual is divided into two parts. The first part consists of seven chapters, the first six of which deal specifically with resources (teaching ideas, techniques and suggestions) for HOW to present, develop and reinforce Pronunciation, Grammar, Vocabulary, Reading, Writing and Conversation. There is an additional chapter on games as techniques for reviewing the language skills already taught.

The second part of the manual, the appendices, contains …

Strategies With The Rods, Joseph Barrett

MA TESOL Collection

Silent Way is an intriguing approach to ESL teaching. Dr. Caleb Gattegno and Educational Solutions have developed a wide range of materials to accompany the techniques they suggest for helping people learn languages. Prior to my student teaching, however, I recognized the need to prepare myself to use these materials effectively. This report is a summary of my self-preparation.