Linguistics Commons^™

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.

Why Control Of Pro In Rationale Clauses Is Not A Relation Between Arguments, Alexander Williams, Jeffrey Jack Green

Faculty Publications

After (1) or (2) we can use (3), a rationale clause, to mean (4). We then mean that those who acquire a pitcher are the traders of the outfielders.

(1) The team traded away two outfielders

(2) Two outfielders were traded away

(3) PRO to acquire a pitcher.

(4) because then the trader might acquire a pitcher.

On grammatical accounts, this indicates a relation between two arguments that ensures their coreference, for any assignment of values to variables. PRO in (3), for example, would be related in this way to an argument that is linked to the role of …

Transcribing The Digital Archive Of Southern Speech: Methods And Preliminary Analysis, Rachel Miller Olsen, Michael L. Olsen, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

Large-scale transcribed audio corpora are available on Buckeye Corpus, Santa Barbara Corpus, etc.

How do these come to be? What’s the on-the-ground process of building such a corpus?

Here we discuss:

• Methods for large-scale transcription
• Early data & analysis resulting from transcription

Large-scale transcription:

• Time to transcribe. Estimated: 10:1; Reality:13:1

Phonetic Analysis:

• Comparison of formant measurements
• In-house Praat script no good
• DARLA filtered out 53%
• Too early to tell if FAVE modifications were better

Changes In The Timber Industry As A Catalyst For Linguistic Change, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Researchers have noticed the linguistic consequences of major social events in a community. Events that cause dramatic changes in demographics or sudden exposure to a new varieties such as World War II (Bailey et al. 1996), the rapid increase of island tourism (Wolfram, Hazen & Schilling-Estes 1999), or the start of daily trips to the mainland (Schilling 2017) often lead to the rapid spread of innovative linguistic variables and the recession of traditional features (cf. Herold 1990; Johnson 2010). The effects of these “catastrophic events” are typical of external factors in language change (Labov 2001). In this paper, I show …

Joselito And Calentito: Diminutive Enigmas, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Two exceptional diminutives exist that have received little attention in the relevant literature. Joselito is unusual because it takes the suffix -lito, which may come from the /l/ in José Luís since the two are the most frequent collocates. The early appearance of Joselito, along with the fact that most of the other words that take -lito were later borrowings into Spanish, suggests that Joselito was the first diminutive of its kind. It then served as an analog for the diminutives of subsequent borrowings that ended in stressed vowels (e.g. cafelito, bebelito). The diminutive variant -tito (e.g. cafetito, sofatito) is …

Nominalized Adverbs In Spanish: The Intriguing Case Of Detrás Mío And Its Cohorts, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Instances of adverbs modified by adjectives (e.g. detrás mío, delante tuyo) were extracted from the Corpus del Español. The corpus analysis reveals that these constructions are attested in all 21 Spanish-speaking countries to varying degrees, but are most frequent in Argentina and Uruguay. Adjectives following the adverbs in questions are predominantly masculine; however, in Peninsular varieties feminine forms are quite common. Although alrededor and lado are both adverbs as well as masculine nouns, they are occasionally followed by feminine adjectives (e.g. al lado suya), which is arguably due to the use of the feminine in other constructions such as encima …

Sicilians In Detroit: How Do They Speak?, Giovanna Brunetti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study focuses on the linguistic analysis of the varieties of the Sicilian dialect spoken in the city of Detroit, Michigan. The city has witnessed, starting from the early 19th century, a steady process of immigration and settlement involving speakers mainly arriving from the two Sicilian coastal towns of Terrasini and Cinisi. The varieties they speak appear to have never been the subject of systematic observation. The present study, thus, focuses on the preservation, attrition and/or loss of the phonological features of the Sicilian dialect spoken by a community of Sicilian immigrants of different generations living in Detroit. Native …

Adult L2 Processing And Acquisition Of The English Present Perfect, Christopher J. Farina

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the second language (L2) processing and acquisition of the English present perfect via two features: boundedness and current relevance. Boundedness indicates whether an action reaches an endpoint (Smith 1997; Verkuyl 1972); it divides the functions of the present perfect into sets that denote completed situations or ongoing/iterative ones (Bybee et al. 1994; Housen 2002). Current relevance indicates the present importance of a past situation (Siemund 2004); it differentiates the present perfect from the simple past (Bardovi-Harlig 2002). Previous research has relied on offline methods (that evaluate metalinguistic knowledge); no research in SLA has investigated the acquisition of …

Attune With Baby: An Innovative Attunement Program For Parents And Families With Integrated Evaluation, Sara Beth Lohre

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Infants speak in their own language; sounds, screeches, cries, and howls that help them to communicate their caregiving needs. Unaware, parents may develop a checklist of caregiving approaches to the baby. The infant tells the adult directly what they need, and waits for the parent to respond. Infant talk may change from soft and quiet to loud and aggressive; coos and cries become crying and screams as the infant’s caregiver—communicating the intensity of emotion, urgency of their request, or their frustration with varied and sometimes inadequate, failed, or missing caregiving patterns the infant has no choice but to accept. When …

All About Dat Bass Or Linguistic Blackface: White Pop Artists And African American English, Sovoya Davis

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

This work explores America's love-hate relationship with African American English (AAE). As Linguist Geneva Smitherman points out, AAE is both stigmatized and superficially celebrated in the U.S. Focusing on White pop artist Meghan Trainor, I examine the role of AAE in her music and interviews and how her use of AAE relates to her image, the content of her songs, and how she is viewed. Even though some people benefit from its commodification, AAE and its native speakers continue to be discriminated against in most contexts. This work explores AAE's status in American society through Trainor's commodification of the language …

Developing Sustainable Partnerships To Advance Digital Equity, Jill Castek, Cindy Gibbon, Gloria Jacobs

Presentations and Publications

In the early 2000s, inequities surrounding affordable Internet access brought the digital divide into public consciousness. Over time, practitioners and researchers working to address this divide have revealed a persistent, wider gap that includes inequities in social support networks (DiMaggio & Hargittai, 2001). Jenkins et al. (2006) identified a participation gap in using and interacting with digital tools. Evolving conversations have produced a broader conceptualization of the issues through the lens of digital inclusion and digital equity (Siefer, 2016). Those on the wrong side of the digital divide need digital literacy training, access to technical support, and the applications and …

Gendered And Racialized Language Ideologies At Sdsu, Brooke N. Leetham

The Journal of Undergraduate Research

This research project explores the ways in which South Dakota State University students perceive speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in comparison to how they perceive speakers of Standard American English (SAE). Language ideologies affect these perceptions, and they largely exist on a subconscious level—therefore, I uncover them in order to discover how language ideologies affect SDSU. I conducted a matched-guise test with recordings by four speakers (two African American males, one African American female, and one mixed African American/White female). These speakers each made the first of two recordings in SAE and the second in AAVE. Out of …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

Generating Amharic Present Tense Verbs: A Network Morphology & Datr Account, T. Michael W. Halcomb

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis I attempt to model, that is, computationally reproduce, the natural transmission (i.e. inflectional regularities) of twenty present tense Amharic verbs (i.e. triradicals beginning with consonants) as used by the language’s speakers. I root my approach in the linguistic theory of network morphology (NM) and model it using the DATR evaluator. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of Amharic and discuss the fidel as an abugida, the verb system’s root-and-pattern morphology, and how radicals of each lexeme interacts with prefixes and suffixes. I offer an overview of NM in Chapter 2 and DATR in Chapter 3. In …

Linguistic And Conceptual Metaphors Of ‘Heart’ In Learner Corpora, Aurora Mathews Adams

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This corpus-based study examined English and Spanish learner language for ‘heart’ metaphors. Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) compared ‘heart’ metaphors across five languages and that study served as a reference framework for the work presented here. This work intended to find evidence of metaphor transfer and/or new metaphor learning in second language writing. Conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and linguistic or lexical metaphors (Falck, 2012) from both languages were considered in the analysis. This work analyzed ‘heart’ metaphors taken from two learner corpora, the Cambridge Learner Corpus and the Corpus de Aprendices de Español. Results were compared to the findings of …

The Declensions Of Modern Eastern Armenian: A Paradigm Function Morphology Approach, Malachi W. Oyer

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In traditional grammar, the inflection of a word’s different forms based on the possible morphosyntactic property combinations of the language can be ordered into a tables. Words of the same part of speech often can be grouped together when they inflect in similar fashions. These similar groups are represented by a single word that expresses the morphosyntactic property set possible for that part of speech. These groups are called declensions. These declensions are not always complete sometimes there is a particular morphosyntactic property set that does not have a corresponding form (word). This is known as defectiveness. One approach that …

Laki Verbal Inflection, Sahar Taghipour

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis mainly examines inflectional morphology of verbal paradigms in Laki, which is considered as one of the Southern varieties of Kurdish language. The association of form and content of morphological markings are viewed from a realizational angle, in which exponents (morphological forms) are associated with the morphosyntactic properties via the application of rules of exponence, appealed by paradigm functions (Stump 2001) and ordered into rule blocks (Anderson 1992). In particular, I applied the paradigm linkage theory proposed and fully developed by Stump (2002 and 2016) to account for Laki verbal paradigms. In this study, it is claimed that alignment …

Phonetic Complexity Affects Children’S Mandarin Tone Production Accuracy In Disyllabic Words: A Perceptual Study, Puisan Wong, Winifred Strange

Publications and Research

This is the first study to examine the effect of phonetic contexts on children’s lexical tone production. Mandarin tones in disyllabic words produced by forty-four 2- to 6-year-old children and twelve mothers were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Native Mandarin speaking adults categorized the tones based on the pitch information in the filtered stimuli. All mothers’ tones were categorized with ceiling accuracy. Counter to the findings in most previous studies on children’s tone acquisition and the prevailing assumption in models of speech development that children acquire suprasegmental features much earlier than segmental features, this study found that children as …