Linguistics Commons^™

Speech Equality: A Gendered Analysis Of Children’S Television Shows, Rikki N. Bergen

Anthropology Presentations

Childhood is an exciting time and kids are just learning who they are and who they are expected to be. The role television plays in their understanding of gender, racial, cultural, economic and social identity cannot be denied and it is therefore important for scholars to examine the types of ideas that are being presented. The gendered attitudes portrayed both explicitly and implicitly in children’s television shows can have a negative effect on childhood development and a child’s perceptions of self and the world around them.

Universal Design For Belonging: Living And Working With Diverse Personal Names, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

There is great diversity in the names and naming practices of Canada’s population due to the multiple languages and cultures from which names and name-givers originate. While this diversity means that everyone encounters unfamiliar names, institutional agents who work with the public are continually challenged when attempting to determine a name’s correct pronunciation, spelling, structure and gender. Drawing from over a hundred interviews in London (Ontario) and Montréal (Québec), as well as other published accounts, I outline strategies used by institutional agents to manage name diversity within the constraints of their work tasks. I explain how concern with saving face …

Reduced Structure In Malagasy Headlines, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper examines the register associated with headlines in Malagasy. While in many languages headlines appear to have reduced structure as evidenced by the absence of certain grammatical markers (determiners, copulas, tense), Malagasy headlines show a change in word order from VOS to SVO. It is argued that like English, Malagasy headlines involve a truncated syntactic structure and that the absence of certain functional projections accounts for the change in word order.

Culminating And Non-Culminating Accomplishments In Malagasy, Ileana Paul, Baholisoa Simone Ralalaoherivony, Henriëtte De Swart

French Studies Publications

Malagasy is a language with non-culminating accomplishments. There is, however, a specific prefix (maha-), which appears to entail culmination. Moreover, verbs prefixed with maha- display a range of interpretations: causative, abilitive, ‘manage to’, and unintentionality. This paper accounts for these two aspects of this prefix with a unified semantic analysis. In particular, maha- encodes double prevention, as proposed by Wolff (2007, 2014) for English predicates like enable. The double prevention configuration is associated with a circumstantial modal base, which leads to culminating readings in the past and future. As such, this paper supports a more fine-grained theory …

A Handbook And Materials For Ilead: An Intercultural Communication Program Between Intensive English Program And Teacher Education Students, Sharon Tjaden-Glass

Center for International Programs Publications and Presentations

iLEAD is an intercultural communication program for university students that focuses on developing intercultural competence through guided conversations and shared activities. iLEAD stands for “International Language Exchange and Dialogue.” It was developed through a partnership between the Intensive English Program and the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Dayton.

The educational context: There is a stark difference in how domestic and international students experience the university. The majority of university students fit into the description of traditional, residential students. However, many international students do not fit the traditional, residential student demographic. Many of our international students who come …

Rhetoric Of Typography: Cross-Cultural Perceptions Of Typefaces For Technical And Visual Communication, Michael Peterson

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Since the early 2000s, scholars have been conducting research to determine whether typefaces influence a reader's response to a document. Some areas of research have included the role of gender, age, or other demographics on typeface perception. However, the role of culture in academic discourse on the rhetoric of typography has been largely underexplored, and this is concerning given the ease with which technical documents can be delivered to cultures around the world with a couple of clicks on a computer.

I developed my research topic to explore whether Koreans perceive typefaces differently from non-Koreans and to discover what typefaces …

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 …

/S/ Aspiration In Ciudad Juárez And Speech Accommodation, Sandra Esparza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Phonological variation in Spanish mainly affects consonants rather than vowels. One of the consonants that is part of the variation is /s/ (Hualde, 2005). The phonological process that commonly affects /s/ is aspiration and is defined as the absence of the oral place features while a glottal friction is retained (Clements, 1985). Aspiration occurs in about half of the Spanish-speaking world (Terrell, 1981) and constitutes one of the most useful stylistic and sociolinguistic variables that characterizes Spanish social dialects and discourse models (Lipski, 1991). Aspiration is present in several Spanish dialects in Latin America (Resnick, 1975). In the specific case …

The Semantic Difference Between Italian Vi And Ci, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

The Italian adverbial clitics vi and ci, both routinely glossed ‘there,’ are not synonymous but instead are signals of opposing meanings in a grammatical system of Restrictedness of Space. Vi means more Restricted, and ci means less Restricted. Operating at the discourse level, the two meanings function to direct attention onto the relevant conceptual space for each event in a narrative. Conceptual space includes physical places, subject matter complements, and realms of existential constructions. The semantic hypothesis accounts both for quantitative patterns observed in stretches of discourse and for the respective interpretive effects of the two clitics and for …

Executive Control Mechanisms In Bilingualism: Beyond Speed Of Processing, Klara Marton, Mira Goral, Luca Campanelli, Jungmee Yoon, Loraine K. Obler

Publications and Research

The question of interest in this study was whether bilingual individuals show superior executive control compared to monolingual participants. Findings are mixed, with studies showing advantage, disadvantage, or no difference between bilingual and monolingual speakers. In this study, we used different experimental conditions to examine implicit learning, resistance to interference, monitoring, and switching, independently. In addition, we matched our monolingual and bilingual participants on baseline response time. Bilingual participants demonstrated faster implicit learning, greater resistance to interference, more efficient switching compared to monolingual participants. The groups did not differ in monitoring. In conclusion, depending on task complexity and on the …

Children’S Quantification With Every Over Time, Athulya Aravind, Jill De Villiers, Peter A. De Villiers, Christopher J. Lonigan, Beth M. Phillips, Jeanine Clancy, Susan H. Landry, Paul R. Swank, Michael Assel, Heather B. Taylor, Nancy Eisenberg, Tracy Spinrad, Carlos Valiente

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This article looks closely at two types of errors children have been shown to make with universal quantification—Exhaustive Pairing (EP) errors and Underexhaustive errors—and asks whether they reflect the same underlying phenomenon. In a large-scale, longitudinal study, 140 children were tested 4 times from ages 4 to 7 on sentences involving the universal quantifier every. We find an interesting inverse relationship between EP errors and Underexhaustive errors over development: the point at which children stop making Underexhaustive errors is also when they begin making EP errors. Underexhaustive errors, common at early stages in our study, may be indicative of a …

Automatic Idiom Recognition With Word Embeddings, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Expressions, such as add fuel to the fire, can be interpreted literally or idiomatically depending on the context they occur in. Many Natural Language Processing applications could improve their performance if idiom recognition were improved. Our approach is based on the idea that idioms and their literal counterparts do not appear in the same contexts. We propose two approaches: (1) Compute inner product of context word vectors with the vector representing a target expression. Since literal vectors predict well local contexts, their inner product with contexts should be larger than idiomatic ones, thereby telling apart literals from idioms; and (2) …

Code Switching, Lexical Borrowing, And Polylanguaging In Valencian Spanish : An Analysis Of Data From Conversational Corpora And Twitter, Andrew Jordan Lavender

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study examines lexical borrowing, code switching, and polylanguaging in Valencian Spanish to better understand how each is used differently in oral conversation in comparison with online communication on Twitter. This study compares data collected from three published corpora of oral interviews of speakers of Valencian Spanish with data collected from Twitter profiles of individuals residing in Valencia. In each of the sources Spanish is the preferred code into which Valencian material is inserted. A unique feature of data from the published corpora is the high frequency of code switching (CS) into Valencian in instances of reported speech. With regard …

Sociophonetic Accommodation As A Function Of Interlocutor Target Language Competence : The Case Of New York Dominican Spanish, Cecily Corbett

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation contributes to the variationist understanding of the process of phonetic accommodation through the analysis of syllable-final consonant weakening in the speech of native speakers of New York Dominican Spanish (NYDS) during their interactions with second language learners of Spanish. The principal objective is to examine the inner workings of the accommodation phenomenon by using Dominican Spanish as a medium. The data analyzed in this dissertation come from conversations between the informants—native speakers of NYDS—and four different interlocutors, one of whom is a fellow native speaker of NYDS and three who are second-language learners of Spanish with varying degrees …

VariacióN Y Cambio En El EspañOl De Bogotá : AnáLisis De Dos Variables SociofonéTicas, Leonardo Correa

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

RESUMEN

La ProbléMatique Du Dictionnaire ÉWé-Langue(S) Indo-EuropéEnne(S) : ÉTude MéTalexicographique Et ÉTat Des Lieux, Komla Amegashie

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The dictionary is the core reference object of a language. It is used to learn and understand the lexicon of languages. Speakers acquire and develop knowledge of the language through its lexicon. Ewe speakers are not an exception. Ewe dictionaries are their main reference works and it emerges from our research that more than a dozen dictionaries have been produced in Ewe. However, many of them have not survived and exist only in bibliographical references. Many others are quite rare. In general, Ewe dictionaries are difficult for the public to acquire or access.

The Effects Of Increasing Object Pronoun Input Frequency On The Aural Comprehension Of 3rd Person Object Pronouns Among Second Semester Classroom Learners Of French, Olivia Barone

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This semester-long study was designed to benefit developing Second Language Acquisition (SLA) instructional methods, specifically honing French language instruction, creating a foundation on which to explore the connection between input frequency during instruction and aural comprehension of difficultly acquired forms. Concurrently, five current French textbooks commonly used in universities across the United States are evaluated for object pronoun exposure. This evaluation uncovers a trend of avoidance of third person object pronoun forms prior to their being taught explicitly, and a general paucity of naturally occurring object pronouns in French language instruction textbooks. These instances of avoidance strategies lower the frequency …

A Study Of Sociolinguistic Variation In A Small Community : Puerto Rican Spanish In Amsterdam, New York, Zahir Mumin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New York based on the duration of time that they have lived on the Island of Puerto Rico. Previous research on Puerto Rican Spanish in the US has focused particularly on final /s/ deletion (Poplack, 1980b, 1980c), final liquid production of /l/ and /ɾ/ (Ramos-Pellicia, 2007), …

Participant Perspectives And Critical Reflections On Language Teacher Education By Distance, John S. Knox

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Language teaching is a profession which is international in character. Language teachers often work and study in foreign countries, and distance education has become very important in the education of language teachers. Drawing on two international surveys, this paper explores language teacher education by distance from the perspective of students (i.e. trainee or practicing language teachers) and teacher-educators in such distance programs. There are significant educational advantages for language teachers who choose to study by distance, and e-learning technologies have enhanced these benefits. This paper also includes an in-depth analysis of the qualitative survey responses from two individual students, highlighting …

The Role Of Contextual Frequency In The Articulation Of Initial /F/ In Modern Spanish: The Same Effect As In The Reduction Of Latin /F/?, Earl K. Brown, Matthew C. Alba

Faculty Publications

The acoustic energy of 996 tokens of word-initial /f/ in the speech of 38 speakers of Mexican Spanish was analyzed. The results suggest that the frequency with which words occur in phonological contexts favorable to reduction (Frequency in a Reducing Context or FRC) conditions the reduction of /f/, even after taking into account the immediate phonological context. Despite this, it is also found that the conditioning effect of FRC is less robust than the influence of the immediate phonological context, thus confirming the preeminence in these data of the online articulatory factors in comparison to the usage-based frequency factors.