Linguistics Commons^™

Finding Pockets Of Social Variation In The Digital Archive Of Southern Speech, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Potential outcomes of Southern shifting:

Southern Vowel Shift:

• Increased overlap or “swapping” of /i ɪ/, /eɪ ɛ/; overlap of /æ ɛ/
• Decreased acoustic distance between /u i/, /oʊ i/

African American Vowel Shift:

• Increased overlap of /i ɪ/, /eɪ ɛ/, /æ ɛ/ (swapping less likely)

SVS vs. AAVS

• Front vowels positioned differently
• Back vowels positioned differently …in European American vs. African American speech

Does shifting strengthen over time? - Age effects

Do European American and African American speakers shift differently? - Race effects

Do women and men shift differently? - Sex effects

Do speakers in different parts of the South …

The Gazetteer Of Southern Vowels, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick, William A. Kretzschmar Jr., Rachel M. Olsen, Michael Olsen

Faculty Publications

The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) is a collection of archival recordings of interviews with 1121 speakers across the southern United States (Pederson, McDaniel & Adams 1986) which has been digitized by the Linguistic Atlas Project at the University of Georgia. The Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) is a 64-speaker subset of LAGS, compiled by Lee Pedersen, that was designed to be socially balanced across 16 sectors of the South (Kretzschmar Jr. et al. 2013). DASS is currently being transcribed, processed, and analyzed at the University of Georgia (Olsen et al. forthcoming), and vowel formant measurements from …

/Ɛɡ/-Raising Is Straightforward? I Beg To Differ!, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

This Study

Remaining questions:

• BEG is only studied in areas with BAG-raising.
• What about other places?
• Short, common words have only been studied.
• What about other words?

Anecdotal observation:

• I’m from St. Louis and I have BEG-raising in most words, except a few like integrity, segregate, negligent, and regulate.
• St. Louis is not known to have BEG-raising, and these words have not been included in other studies.

Hypotheses:

1. BEG-raising without BAG-raising is more widespread than Nevada.
2. BEG-raising is less common when it is followed by a sonorant.

A Bayesian Investigation Of Factors Shaping The Network Structure Of Inflection Class Systems, Jeffery R. Parker, Robert Reynolds, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

In this paper we use a Bayesian, agent-based model to explore the emergence of allomorph distributions in inflection class (IC) systems. It has long been understood that irregular inflection occurs mainly among high token frequency lexemes because high frequency leads to word-specific learning, allowing certain lexemes to resist analogical pressure. Over time, these lexemes become ‘stranded’ in low type frequency classes as less frequent lexemes shift class membership. Crucially, these classes partly overlap but do not collapse with high type frequency classes, and as a result detract from speakers’ ability to predict a word’s inflection class membership. Stump and Finkel …

Good, Better, Best: English Language Development Practices In Graduate Business Programs, K. James Hartshorn, Maureen Snow Andrade, Norman W. Evans, Shaylana Davis

Faculty Publications

Business is the top field of study for international students in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Yet, evidence suggests that not all international students who speak English as a second language are adequately equipped with the language skills they need to succeed. At the same time, the number of international students seeking business training in English-medium universities continues to rise. Thus, this study sought to fill an increasingly important gap in the literature by examining the strategies, innovations, challenges, and outcomes for U.S. schools of business who admit large concentrations of international ESL students at the …

Effectiveness And Impact Of The Sheltered Instruction Observational Protocol On Ell Student Academic Achievement, Gladymar Soto-Huertas

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to determine the effectiveness of using the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol with fidelity for English Language Learners (ELL) and its impact on student academic achievement through FCAT Reading and FSA scores. In a high school located in Central Florida that served approximately 2,244 students there were 1,129 (50.6%) students classified as English Language Learners (ELLs), by the 2016-17 school year the school expected to have 62% of their entire student body passing state mandated assessments in order to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) (PCSB, 2013).

In order for the aforementioned to take place it was …

The Role Of Cohesion In Second Language Reading Comprehension, Alisha Biler

Theses and Dissertations

Reading in a second language (L2) is a critical aspect of language acquisition, yet gaps remain in the literature regarding the extent to which textual factors impact reading difficulty. There is consensus that complex vocabulary and grammar affect L2 comprehension (Koda, 2005), and this is evidenced through the numerous traditional readability formulas, such as Flesch-Kincaid (FKGL). However, critics argue that discourse-level features, such as cohesion, also impact reading difficulty and must be included in difficulty analyses (Carrell, 1987).

One aspect of cohesion is content word overlap, or the number of content words repeated in a text; this measure is included …

Towards A Typographical Linguistics: The Semantics-Pragmatics Of Typographic Emphasis In Discourse, Jefferson Maia

Theses and Dissertations

The standard view of the effects of typographic emphasis in English is that type styles (e.g., capitals, italics) enhance memory for emphasized information to the detriment of reading speed and without contributing semantically or pragmatically meaningful information to the text. Fewer emphasis studies that have concerned themselves with reference questions offer off-line evidence that typography interacts with linguistic variables and, more specifically, that it adds a modulatory or a contrastive layer of meaning to the interpretation of referential expressions. No study to date has investigated, however, whether typographic emphasis can bring a referent into discourse focus and consequently affect the …

Memory And The Realization Of The Nothingness. On A Letter Of Vittorio Sereni To Giuseppe Ungaretti, Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

The problematic relationship of Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) with Alexandria of Egypt – his city of birth – sheds light on the interplay between memory and oblivion in his poetry and prose. The shuttling back and forth between these poles marks the nature of his unfulfilled desire to recreate a lost Alexandrian atmosphere. In Ungaretti’s works, language opacity is coupled with his attempts to represent a city—as he writes—that is suffocated by the sun and whose hidden ancient port is submerged in the depth of the sea. Blinding light and the darkness of the deep waters make the understanding of Ungaretti’s …

Judicial Conflicts And Voting Agreement: Evidence From Interruptions At Oral Argument, Tonja Jacobi, Kyle Rozema

Faculty Articles

This Article asks whether observable conflicts between Supreme Court justices—interruptions between the justices during oral arguments—can predict breakdowns in voting outcomes that occur months later. To answer this question, we built a unique dataset based on the transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments and justice votes in cases from 1960 to 2015. We find that on average a judicial pair is seven percent less likely to vote together in a case for each interruption that occurs between them in the oral argument for that case. While a conflict between the justices that leads to both interruptions and a breakdown in …

Auditory Distraction On Visual Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence

No abstract provided.

Auditory Distraction On Visual Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Digital Repository: Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence

No abstract provided.

Effective Characteristics Of Rural English Learner Programs, Sarah Huseby

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine specific characteristics of English learner programs in a rural areas in order to determine possible factors that promoted higher English language proficiency growth for English learners. The subjects in this study were English learner teachers and administrators from five micropolitan school districts in a rural Midwestern state. The school districts in this study were identified and recruited based on two specific criteria: a mircopolitan community and a student population of English language learners. The study utilized both survey and archival data. The survey was administered to all EL teachers and administrators …

Cross-Modal Distraction On Simultaneous Translation: Language Interference In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Violet A. Young

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Bilingualism has been studied extensively in multiple disciplines, yet we are still trying to figure out how exactly bilinguals think. A bilingual advantage has been observed in various experimental studies, but also has not been observed in many other studies. A bilingual advantage has been shown in tasks using selective attention. These tasks study the effects of language interference, where two types of interference are observed: interlingual (between-languages) and intralingual (within one language). This study examined language interference in Spanish-English bilinguals, using an auditory-visual simultaneous translation experimental setup. 16 college English monolinguals and 17 college Spanish-English bilinguals were tested. The …

Spooky Grammatical Effects, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

Linguistic constructs often correspond to nothing concrete: Descriptivists’ zero morpheme, generativists’ trace, variationists’ null instantiation, and Columbia School’s null signal. These represent structural relations with no phonetic substance. Columbia School has posited, moreover, three types of relatively insubstantial semantic structure: The residual member and the including member are semantic value oppositions within a grammatical system, each defined by the system’s other members. In the opposition of substance, in my own work, two signals share a value from one semantic substance but only one of them bears a meaning from an additional semantic substance. All of these …

Blueprint For Designing Digital Problem Solving Tasks, Jill Castek, Cindy Gibbon, Gloria Jacobs, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Digital Problem Solving Toolkit

This document explains how the research team developed tasks and an observational protocol that allowed for the examination of individuals’ digital problem solving. These tasks, and the metacognitive scaffolding prompts and protocol associate dwith them, were developed and refined with the Multnomah County Library’s website resources in mind. Other libraries can adapt these tasks and protocol or develop a related observational protocol inspired by the design principles offered. This document suggest what libraries can do to support digital problem solving development.

The Origin Of The Gilaki Causative Suffix -Be(ː)-, Zia Khoshsirat

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The Proto-Indo-European causative/iterative suffix *-ei̯e- was inherited by Old Iranian and persists in almost all Middle and Modern Iranian languages as -aya- and -ēn- (-Vn-) respectively. Comparably, in the Indic branch -aya- functions as a causative suffix in Sanskrit beside another suffix -āpaya which became the productive causative suffix -āvē- in Middle Indic and still used in Modern Indic today. Evidence shows eight Eastern Iranian languages- †Khotanese, †Khwarazmian, Parachi, Wakhi, Munji, Pashto, Ormuri, and Yidgha- using the morphological causative suffix in addition to the expected Iranian one -aya- or -Vn-. This alternative causative suffix is …

#Hashtags: A Look At The Evaluative Roles Of Hashtags On Twitter, Leah Rose Schaede

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Social media has become a large part of today’s pop culture and keeping up with what is going on not only in our social circles, but around the world. It has given many a platform to unite their causes, build fandoms, and share their commentary with the world. A tool in helping group posts together or give commentary on a thought is the hashtag. In this paper I explore the evaluative roles of hashtags in social media discourse, specifically on Twitter. I use a sample of randomly selected tweets from the Twitter API stream I collected and compiled myself. I …

Pragmatic Functionality Of Punctuation On Twitter, Elizabeth M. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work presents an analysis of punctuation use in computer-mediated communication (CMC); in particular, the present study aims to describe the pragmatic functions of nonstandard punctuation on Twitter, providing a corpus-driven overview of the distribution and frequency of nonstandard punctuation use, and an analysis of sampled tweets at the individual tweet level to estimate noise levels in the overall corpus. A survey was also conducted which aimed to identify user understanding of the affective content of nonstandard punctuation strings and to identify any possible effects of character repetition. Survey results indicate that linguistic content was the strongest indicator of affective …

“Listening With An Attitude”: The Role Of Attitude On Native And Non-Native Intergroup Communication, Aidah N. Aljuran

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

People tend to draw their own conclusions about similarities and differences between who they are and the “other.” Having perceptions of being similar to the in-group and being different from the out-group “satisfies psychological needs” (Robbins & Krueger, 2005). Based on this social perception, individuals show communication variations as a way of expressing their identities (Giles 1973). This study implements quantitative and qualitative methods in order to examine the attitude of native speakers (NSs), as well as the potential impact of these attitudes on their communication with non-native speakers (NNSs). The potential impact of NSs’ interactions on NNSs’ interactions was …