Linguistics Commons^™

Spanish In Contact With Islander Creole, Falcon Restrepo-Ramos

World Languages & Cultures Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Perspectives On Language From Street Produce Vendors In Cape Town: An Examination Of Education, Trading, And Development In The Informal Sector, Hannah Oldham

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Language is vital for the functioning of societies, from education to economic interactions. Language of education presents challenges in Africa due to colonial linguistic legacies and the diversity of indigenous African languages. While education trains learners for work in the formal economy, the South African formal cannot absorb all the available labor. The informal economy therefore provides vital work and income to millions of South Africans and immigrants. Language use in the informal sector was studied, including the education and work traders had before working as street produce vendors.

Six interviews were conducted: two near the Cape Town taxi rank, …

Structure Of Wamesa (Ling 067) Syllabus, Emily Gasser

Digital Humanities Curricular Development

Wamesa is a member of the under-studied South Halmahera-West New Guinea subgroup of the Austronesian language family, with roughly 5000 speakers in West Papua, Indonesia. This course will rely on both primary data, including my fieldnotes and recordings, and published work to look at the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language. We’ll also look at Wamesa as it compares to its sister languages within SHWNG, and see what it can tell us about linguistic theory. Finally, we’ll take a look at the cultural and political context in which Wamesa is spoken. This course will utilize theoretical tools of linguistic …

Homeworks 1, 2, 5, And 10, Emily Gasser

Digital Humanities Curricular Development

In these assignments, students use the Wamesa Talking Dictionary and other related dictionaries in the Cenderawasih Bay corpus to discover the phonetics, phonology, and morphology of the Wamesa language, and to learn about digital lexicography as part of a language documentation project.

It​ ​Is​ ​Time​ ​To​ ​Tackle​ ​Aspect!​ ​Some​ ​Insights​ ​To​ ​Help​ ​Clear​ ​Up The​ ​Tense/Aspect​ ​Mystery, Andreas Schramm

School of Education and Leadership<br>Faculty Publications

In this article, Dr. Andreas Schramm draws on the research of his graduate students, colleagues, and from his own recent sabbatical to describe what makes the tense-aspect system in English notoriously challenging to teach and learn, and to show that it can nonetheless be explicitly taught. Drawing from his experience as an English learner and one-time English teacher in training, he shares anecdotes and practical tips to help English as a Second and Foreign Language teachers unpack the meaning of tense and aspect for their learners.

A Correlational Study: Personality Types And Foreign Language Acquisition In Undergraduate Students, Frank Capellan

Doctor of Education (Ed.D)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between personality types and second language acquisition. The study addressed a problem that is inadequately investigated in foreign language acquisition research; specifically, personality traits as predictors of language learning in college students studying Spanish as a foreign language. The researcher conducted one sample t-tests to assess statistically significant differences between mean personality type score and the test value, as well as, a multiple linear regression analysis. A convenient sample of college students (n=52) completed the Neris Personality Type Indicator at the beginning of the course, and took several examinations throughout …

Language Attitudes [Linguistics], Leigh Garrison-Fletcher, Bede Mccormack, Walter Sistrunk

Open Educational Resources

This scaffolded assignment in two parts aims to engage students with the topic of how language and society are related. Framed by the global learning core competency and written ability in its entirety, Part I asks students to focus on their own language/dialect or variety and consider the kinds of attitudes that exist towards students’ language/dialect. Part II asks students to choose a language /dialect they are not familiar with and research the attitudes that exist about that language/dialect.

LaGuardia’s Core Competencies and Communication Abilities

Main Course Learning Objectives:

Explain ways in which language and society are related

Learning To Read English, Charles A. Perfetti, Lindsay N. Harris

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The Killing Of Death: Denying The Genocide Against The Tutsis, Kee En Chong

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Motivating Morphological Constituents: A Learning-Based Analysis Of Hebrew, Navajo, And Spanish, Ignacio Lorenzo Montoya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In both description and theory, a variety of linguistic structures have been posited to account for a multitude of linguistic patterns. In the sub-field of morphology, such units include roots, stems, and morphemes. Previous research that has explored the motivation for linguistic structures and constructs in phonology and syntax has raised questions about the nature of these linguistic structures and constructs. Such work, however, has not focused on morphological constituent structure, a gap which the present dissertation addresses through a focused examination of the evidence motivating morphological constituents in Hebrew, Navajo, and Spanish.

The theoretical framework of this dissertation follows …

A Discussion Of Delimitative In Mandarin Chinese, Qi Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates how delimitative marking in Mandarin Chinese is better considered as an instance of verb-phrase modification instead of aspect marking. The study investigates data with verb reduplication cases caused by delimitative marking from both syntactic and semantic points of view. Through observations and analyses, it is found that delimitative marking does not have the same distribution as other aspect markers, but rather shows resemblance to temporal modifiers syntactically. Semantically, instead of providing a viewpoint as other aspect markers do, delimitative indicates the temporal length (shortness) of the event. In addition, it is found that delimitative marking has strict …

Measuring Social Interaction During Study Abroad: Quantitative Methods And Challenges, Dan Dewey, Dan Dewey

Faculty Publications

This paper examines ways of measuring (assigning numbers to) social interaction and language use during study abroad. It reviews the development of instruments for such measurement and describes some of the connections that have been made between quantitative measures of social second language use and language development while abroad. Measures addressed include the Language Contact Profile, language logs, the Social Network Questionnaire, the Study Abroad Social Interaction Questionnaire, online social media, photo elicitation, mobile phone surveys, and other computational methodologies. The paper encourages mixed methods for clearer and more elaborate understanding and more detailed documentation of tools and procedures for …

Escalating Language At Traffic Stops: Two Case Studies, Jamalieh Haley

Dissertations and Theses

In recent years, the public has seen a rise in recorded footage of violent encounters between police and Black American citizens, partially due to technology such as cell phones, dash-cameras, and body-cameras. This linguistic study examines how these encounters get escalated to the point of violence by asking 1) what kind of directives were used, 2) how were they responded to, 3) how the directives contributed to escalation, and 4) how might power and authority have played a role. I use two case studies to analyze directives and their responses. Findings reveal that repetition of directives on the part of …

Loanwords In Context: Lexical Borrowing From English To Japanese And Its Effects On Second-Language Vocabulary Acquisition, Andrew Michael Sowers

Dissertations and Theses

Research has shown that cognates between Japanese and English have the potential to be a valuable learning tool (Daulton, 2008). Yet little is known on how Japanese learners of English produce cognates in context. Recently, studies have argued that cognates can cause a surprisingly high number of syntactic errors in sentence writing activities with Japanese learners (Rogers, Webb, & Nakata, 2014; Masson, 2013). In the present study, I investigated how Japanese learners of English understood and used true cognates (words that have equivalent meanings in both languages) and non-true cognates (words where the Japanese meaning differs in various ways from …

Comparison Between Mexican And American Parentese: A Qualitative Case Study, Elayna S. Dyke

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

This single case study examines possible cultural implications of the current definition of Parentese, also called caretaker speech, based on the personal accounts of a person who is bilingual in both English and Spanish. This case study was conducted in one interview in order to find possible differences in Parentese with the Spanish language in Mexican culture in contrast to Parentese in the English Language in American culture. The purpose of this study was to find if there were differences between parentese between these cultures, and in which ways they were different. According to the subject’s personal experiences within her …

Examining Adult Learners’ Digital Problem Solving In Libraries Using A Learning Typology, Jill Castek, Amy Honisett

Presentations and Publications

In this presentation, we shared our emerging findings around what constitutes digital problem solving and the approaches and strategies digital problem solvers use.

Logical Form And The Vernacular Revisited, Andrew Botterell, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

We revisit a debate initiated some fifteen years ago by Ray Elugardo and Robert Stainton about the domain of arguments. Our main result is that arguments are not exclusively sets of linguistic expressions. Instead, as we put it, some non-linguistic items have ‘logical form’. The crucial examples are arguments, both deductive and inductive, made with unembedded words and phrases.

Influence Of Predicate Sense On Word Order In Sign Languages: Intensional And Extensional Verbs, Donna Jo Napoli, R. Sutton Spence, R. Müller De Quadros

Linguistics Faculty Works

We present evidence for the influence of semantics on the order of subject, object, and verb in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) sentences. While some have argued for a prevailing pattern of SVO in Libras, we find a strong tendency for this order in sentences that do not presuppose the existence of the verb’s object, but not in sentences that do, which instead favor SOV. These findings are coherent with those of a recent study on gesture. We argue that the variable influence of the relevant predicates is particularly salient in sign languages, due to the iconic nature of the visual …

A Sentiment Analysis Of Language & Gender Using Word Embedding Models, Ellyn Rolleston Keith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Robin Lakoff started the conversation around language and gender with her 1975 essay “Language and Woman’s Place,” extensive work has been done on analyzing sociolinguistics associated with gender. While much work has been done on the differences between how men and women use language, there is less research to be found on language about women as opposed to language about men. In this work, I build a word embedding model from a corpus of Wikipedia film summaries and use this model to create lists of words associated with men and words associated with women. I then use sentiment analysis …

Discourses Of Prejudice In The Professions: The Case Of Sign Languages, T. Humphries, P. Kushalnagar, G. Mathur, Donna Jo Napoli, C. Padden, C. Rathmann, S. Smith

Linguistics Faculty Works

There is no evidence that learning a natural human language is cognitively harmful to children. To the contrary, multilingualism has been argued to be beneficial to all. Nevertheless, many professionals advise the parents of deaf children that their children should not learn a sign language during their early years, despite strong evidence across many research disciplines that sign languages are natural human languages. Their recommendations are based on a combination of misperceptions about (1) the difficulty of learning a sign language, (2) the effects of bilingualism, and particularly bimodalism, (3) the bona fide status of languages that lack a written …