Other Linguistics Commons^™

The Symbolic Work Of Prices, Akash Miharia, Jan Osborn, Bart J. Wilson

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We posit that prices are signs, not just signals, that work in the same symbolic way as words. Both are complex, generative systems of shared meaning that rely on a web of intricate symbolic references. Just like the meaning of a word is a product of our social and linguistic action, the meaning of a price is a product of our relationship to the physical world phenomena of people in markets. The fundamental conception of both is to communicate and construct worlds with ourselves and others, enabling us to act in the world. Prices, like words, do symbolic work.

Legislative Language For Success, Sanjana Gundala

Master's Theses

Legislative committee meetings are an integral part of the lawmaking process for local and state bills. The testimony presented during these meetings is a large factor in the outcome of the proposed bill. This research uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to analyze testimonies from California Legislative committee meetings from 2015-2016 in order to identify what aspects of a testimony makes it successful. A testimony is considered successful if the alignment of the testimony matches the bill outcome (alignment is "For" and the bill passes or alignment is "Against" and the bill fails). The process of finding what …

Corpus Linguistics Criticisms Of Heller Misuse Corpus Linguistics, Michael Showalter

SMU Law Review Forum

A number of linguistics experts have asserted that new corpus-linguistics evidence undermines the U.S. Supreme Court’s conclusion in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment phrase keep and bear arms means to possess and carry weapons. At the time of ratification, the term bear arms carried both an idiomatic sense meaning “to serve as a soldier” and a literal sense meaning “to carry weapons.” The Heller majority concluded that the Second Amendment uses the literal sense, partly because the idiomatic reading has the absurd implication of causing the Amendment to protect a right to serve as a soldier. …

Amplifying Arab American Heritage Language Students' Voices: A Multiple Case Study On Translanguaging Practices And Identity Negotiation In University Arabic Classrooms, Lina Gomaa

Dissertations and Theses

Little research has been conducted on Arab American students at universities and specifically, in the heritage language studies field. The experiences of Arab American heritage language (AAHL) students are significantly less examined than those of other heritage language students. Arabic language curricula and instructional practices in universities tend to privilege the teaching of Modern Standard Arabic over dialects, which marginalizes heritage learners' prior knowledge of the Arabic culture and its language, specifically Arabic dialects used in their home communities. These phenomena can create a non-affirming learning experience for these students. As such, in this study, I addressed these questions:

• To …

Nominal Incorporation In Shiwilu (Kawapanan): Nouns, Classifiers And The Deceased Marker =Ku’, Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Shiwilu is a good representative of the Andes-Amazonia transitional zone, in that it exhibits a mixture of phonological and grammatical traits that are typical of the languages of these two regions (Valenzuela 2015, 2018). The present article addresses a phenomenon that is common in Amazonian languages but absent in the Central Andean families Quechuan and Aymaran: nominal incorporation (Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999: 10; Adelaar with Muysken 2004; Aikhen- vald 2017: 296). In this work, ‘nominal incorporation’ is a cover term to designate the process of inserting into the verb a noun, a classifier, or the deceased marker =ku’."

"A Fallen Woman": The Use Of Metaphor In Psychoanalysis, Matthew Schneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study sought to understand the use of a central metaphor in a psychoanalytic treatment and its relationship to the process of change for the analysand. In linguistics, a metaphor is a word, phrase or idea that stands in for another idea. In psychoanalysis the relationship between conscious and unconscious conflictual material can share similar metaphorical connections as conscious thoughts or behavior often stands in for an unconscious wishes. The presence of a word or phrase that appears in speech in the context of particular affective moments in an analysand’s experience could be understood to be linked to unconscious processes …

Contextual Inference Reading Comprehension Skill Activities As Determinants Of Reading Comprehension Performance, Joyce Njiiri

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

Reading comprehension is one of the most important features in the learning process for second language learners because texts are the means through which most concepts are learnt. However, it is one of the least developed linguistic skills as manifested in the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC 2010; 2011; 2013;2015;2017;2018). KNEC attributes poor performance in reading comprehension of passages to inadequate reading comprehension skill activities of contextual inference, note-making, paraphrasing, and summary writing among others during the reading comprehension lessons. Additionally, there is notable lack of exposure to reading comprehension skill activities to secondary school learners. The purpose of this …

Trademark Fame And Corpus Linguistics, Jake Linford, Kyra Nelson

Scholarly Publications

Trademark law recognizes that the same word can mean different things in different commercial contexts. Legal protection might extend to two or more owners who use the same symbol (like Delta) to indicate different sources of disparate goods or services, such as airlines and faucets. Generally, only those uses that threaten to confuse consumers-the use of similar symbols on identical or related goods-are subject to legal sanction.

But the law extends special protection to famous trademarks, not only against confusing use, but also against dilution: non-confusing use that blurs or tarnishes the distinctiveness of the famous mark. The result of …

A Critical Biography Of John Algeo: From Historical Linguist To Dialectologist, Lindy Sipes

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This critical biography of lexicographer, linguist, and dialectologist Dr. John Algeo delves into his corpus of research data and notes and seeks to analyze his methods and the resulting wealth of publications derived from their compilation. It also aims provide a succinct overview of his life and career. Algeo experienced many changes within these fields; perhaps most notably, the advent of technological advances that made data collection and storage easier, such as the Internet and computer processes. As a result, his work lends itself as an incredible historic model and, as such, will be compared to current techniques of dictionary-making. …

Indigenous Language Revitalization: Success, Sustainability, And The Future Of Human Culture, Grace Lewis

Capstone Showcase

This thesis looks at different styles of Indigenous language revitalization programs and seeks to delineate the three most successful characteristics seen across differing designs in an effort to promote the presence of these characteristics in existing programs. The literature analyzed outlines three main schools of thought: first, that language-based education is the most effective program design, second, that language-based education is only effective if it is directed and driven by the community it serves, and third, that culture-based education is the most effective design. The data rejects the idea that one design is superior to another, and instead presents three …

Functional Differentiation In The Language Network Revealed By Lesion-Dymptom Mapping, William Matchin, Alexandra Basilakos, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Brielle C. Stark, Gregory Hickok, Julius Fridriksson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Theories of language organization in the brain commonly posit that different regions underlie distinct linguistic mechanisms. However, such theories have been criticized on the grounds that many neuroimaging studies of language processing find similar effects across regions. Moreover, condition by region interaction effects, which provide the strongest evidence of functional differentiation between regions, have rarely been offered in support of these theories. Here we address this by using lesion-symptom mapping in three large, partially-overlapping groups of aphasia patients with left hemisphere brain damage due to stroke (N = 121, N = 92, N = 218). We identified multiple measure by …

Animal Communication And Sustainability Project, Reiko Kataoka, Tridha Chatterjee

Assignment Prompts

This assignment is for the Ling 123 course. This is a GE course under Area R, and it is a large course (about 10 sections, max 25 students in each section) taught by multiple instructors.

The assignment is designed as a term project. With one or two preparatory class meetings, this two-part project (three-part including the learning) could be completed in 4-5 weeks, culminating in group presentations. The assignment would be best given toward the end of the semester as a capstone project after students have gained in-depth knowledge on mechanisms and adaptive functions of animal communication systems and the …

Entre Mundos Y Fronteras: An Exploration Of Linguistic Visibility And Value In Libraries, Denisse Solis, Jesus Espinoza

University Libraries: Faculty Scholarship

In Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library, author and library historian Wayne A. Wiegand describes how the mass migration of seven million southern and eastern European migrants between 1893 and 1917 shaped public libraries. “As neighborhoods changed ethnic and racial profile, the public library – main or branch- often became a place where newcomers assimilated.”1 This assimilationist praxis, specifically when it comes to the conscription of the English language, is problematic for library workers and patrons for whom English is not their first or only language and who want to see themselves reflected in …

Otrouha: A Corpus Of Arabic Etds And A Framework For Automatic Subject Classification, Eman Abdelrahman, Fatimah Alotaibi, Edward A. Fox, Osman Balci

The Journal of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although the Arabic language is spoken by more than 300 million people and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (UN), there has been less research done on Arabic text data (compared to English) in the realm of machine learning, especially in text classification. In the past decade, Arabic data such as news, tweets, etc. have begun to receive some attention. Although automatic text classification plays an important role in improving the browsability and accessibility of data, Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) have not received their fair share of attention, in spite of the huge number …

Creating A Theoretical Framework To Underpin Discourse Assessment And Intervention In Aphasia, Lucy Dipper, Jane Marshall, Mary Boyle, Deborah Hersh, Nicola Botting, Madeline Cruice

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Discourse (a unit of language longer than a single sentence) is fundamental to everyday communication. People with aphasia (a language impairment occurring most frequently after stroke, or other brain damage) have communication difficulties which lead to less complete, less coherent, and less complex discourse. Although there are multiple reviews of discourse assessment and an emerging evidence base for discourse intervention, there is no unified theoretical framework to underpin this research. Instead, disparate theories are recruited to explain different aspects of discourse impairment, or symptoms are reported without a hypothesis about the cause. What is needed is a theoretical framework that …

A Computational Study In The Detection Of English–Spanish Code-Switches, Yohamy C. Polanco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Code-switching is the linguistic phenomenon where a multilingual person alternates between two or more languages in a conversation, whether that be spoken or written. This thesis studies the automatic detection of code-switching occurring specifically between English and Spanish in two corpora.

Twitter and other social media sites have provided an abundance of linguistic data that is available to researchers to perform countless experiments. Collecting the data is fairly easy if a study is on monolingual text, but if a study requires code-switched data, this becomes a complication as APIs only accept one language as a parameter. This thesis focuses on …

Public Perceptions Of Language Education In Taiwan: English In A Multilingual Context, Isabel Eliassen

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Language policy in Taiwan has been a focus of the government since the days of the Kuomintang (KMT) dictatorship, when languages other than Mandarin were ruthlessly suppressed. After democratization, local languages were allowed again, but soon English became Taiwan’s top language education priority. However, not all Taiwanese agree with the decision to prioritize English. Despite claims that English is important for economic and diplomatic reasons, my survey found that most Taiwanese did not support English education when it threatened local Taiwanese languages. The survey also found that despite a significant amount of debate in academic literature about the role of …

Yolkkh: The Story Of My People, Amna Zelimkha Yandarbin

Theses and Dissertations

The name of my project is: Yolkkh, The Story of My People. With this project I present a series of scarves each one bearing an illustrated scene in order to tell a story – my story and the story of the Noxci people. Noxci are the people who are referred to as “Chechens” by Russians and are generally known by that title. As a Muslim, I have witnessed the way Western media tend to dehumanize my community. In order to contrast this dehumanizing process, I thought that telling the story of my family would help reverse Islamophobic tendencies and raise …

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 …

Interpreting The Data: Reflections On Asl-English Cross Language Research, Serena Johnson

The Qualitative Report

Cross language research typically ignores the role the translator and translation play in the research process. This paper adds to the literature by examining some of the challenges experienced during the translation and interpretation aspect of research. This autoethnography explores the positionality of a non-native user of American Sign Language who conducted research with native American Sign Language users. Findings indicate that translation and interpretation in research is not simply a matter of rote process and deserves more attention as an integral aspect of cross-language research.