Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Institution
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Semantics and Pragmatics
Finding The Means : The Bilingual Disparity In Semantic Context Use For Processing, Iyad Ghanim
Finding The Means : The Bilingual Disparity In Semantic Context Use For Processing, Iyad Ghanim
Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects
Early and late bilinguals both differ in the speed with which they comprehend language or in their processing of sentences compared to monolinguals. This is possibly a result of crosslanguage interference, differential allocation of cognitive resources, or some other difference in language-dependent processes. This dissertation presents research and review focusing on one such language dependent process — the use of sentential context and lexical-associative semantic information — to process sentences. In a series of studies, 34 bilinguals and 28 monolinguals complete a retroactive masked priming task, which provides an isolated measure of the use of semantic information to backwards recognize …
Processing Coercion In A First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals, Christina N. Dadurian
Processing Coercion In A First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals, Christina N. Dadurian
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Recent work in heritage language grammars has shown variability in L1 competence, despite high proficiency in both languages. While sources of variation have been debated, little attention has been given to the role of language dominance. This thesis uses a self-paced listening task to explicitly investigate the roles of language dominance and pragmatic competence in how heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese process aspectual coercion in their non-dominant home language, as compared to late bilinguals. Specifically, constructions that vary in acceptability and salience in input between Mandarin and English are tested: Iterative coercion, complement event coercion of entity NPs, and perfective …
Whatever: Prosodic Context Cues And Their Influence On Pragmatic Meaning, Pamela Kathleen Wahler
Whatever: Prosodic Context Cues And Their Influence On Pragmatic Meaning, Pamela Kathleen Wahler
Theses Digitization Project
This thesis examines real language in use to observe the different intonation contours associated with the discourse marker "whatever" to see if or how these contours contribute to the pragmatic meaning associated with the different functions. Interactional sociolinguistic and conversational analysis approach to investigate the different pragmatic meaning associated with the discourse marker "whatever" were employed to carry out the analysis. In addition, corpus linguistic methodology was used to gather data to investigate the different pragmatic meanings of the word "whatever."