Linguistics Commons^™

Pragmatic Quotation Use In Online Yelp Reviews And Its Connection To Author Sentiment, Mary Elisabeth Wright

Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has established that punctuation can be used to communicate nuances of meaning in online writing (McAndrew & De Jonge, 2011). Punctuation, considered a computer mediated communication (CMC) cue, expresses tone and emotion and disambiguates an author's intention (Vandergriff, 2013). Quotation marks as CMC cues can serve pragmatic functions and have been understudied. Some of these functions have been generally described (Predelli, 2003). However, no corpus study has specifically focused on the pragmatic uses of quotations in online text. Consumer reviews, a genre of online text, can directly impact business profits and influence customers' purchasing decisions (Floyd, Freling, Alhoqail, …

Lexical Trends In Young Adult Literature: A Corpus-Based Approach, Kyra Mckinzie Nelson

Theses and Dissertations

Young Adult (YA) literature is widely read and published, yet few linguistic studies have researched it. With an increasing push to include YA texts in the classroom, it becomes necessary to thoroughly research the linguistic nature of the register. A 1-million-word corpus of YA fiction and non-fiction texts was created. Children's and adult fiction corpora were taken from a subset of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) database. The study noted differences in use of modals and pronouns among children's, YA, and adult registers. Previous research has suggested that children's literature focus more on spatial relations, while adult literature …

The People Of Poquoson, Prue Salasky

Presentations and Projects

Documentation of language variation through ethnographic research.

Satuan Lingual Pengungkap Kearifan Lokal Dalam Pelestarian Lingkungan, Hari Bakti Mardikantoro

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This study aims to reveal the type and the function of linguistic units as the proof of the local wisdom in preserving environment towards society of Javanese Talk. The data on the study are gathered and analyzed based on two procedures; they are the analysis on the process of collecting data and the analysis after the data are collected. The result of the study shows that the type of linguistic units consist of word, phrase, sentence, and expression. Meanwhile, those linguistic units function in expressing local wisdom such as in giving name, commanding/advising, praying, and teaching sesorah values.

Ketepatan Penggunaan Preposisi Dalam Karangan Siswa Kelas Iii, Iv, V, Dan Vi, Sumadi Sumadi, Novi Eka Susilowati

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This study aims at describing the appropriate and correct use of prepositions in elementary school students’ composition. The design of this study is qualitative research combined with formal approaches for students in grade 3, 4, 5 and 6. The results of the study indicate that (1) there is a preposition used in all grades; (2) there are some prepositions used in certain grade; (3) some preposition functions are found in all grades; and (4) some preposition functions are found in certain grades.

The Effects Of Processing Instruction On Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of Spanish Copulae, Wesley Curtis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Processing instruction (PI) is a language teaching technique based upon the model of input processing developed by VanPatten (1993, 1996, 2002, 2004). The present study investigated the effects of PI as well as two other experimental conditions (traditional instruction and control) on the acquisition of the Spanish copulae ser and estar by 66 Chinese university students enrolled in a blended (partially presential and partially online) fourth-semester language course. The PI treatment condition included non-paradigmatic grammar explanations, processing strategies designed to help learners avoid commiting errors they may be predisposed to make, and structured input activities which eliminate redundant features of …

The Impact Of Length Of Stay On Adjudicated Male Youths;' Language Use: Focusing On Linguistic Analysis Of Verbal Samples, Yousun Shin Ph.D., Terry P. Overton Ph.D., Ed.D., Zelica Espinoza M.Ed.

Journal of Human Services: Training, Research, and Practice

The primary purpose of the study was to examine the impact of the length of juvenile offenders’ stay in a residential facility on attitudinal changes, measured by language use of 22 participants’ interviews analyzed by using a computerized text tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to obtain a measure of language use. A series of one-way ANOVA (SPSS 18.0 version) were used to examine the differences between the groups identified by the length of stay and interview interval. The results indicate that the length of stay significantly impacts language use regarding the language categories of affective process words …

My Father’S Name: A Study Of Patronymic Naming In Mozambique, Preston Christensen, Cynthia Hallen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Patronymic naming is very common in parts of Mozambique but there has possibly been no formal documentation of this practice prior to this study. Patronymic naming involves the passing of the father’s name to the children and is not to be confused with patronymic surnames. The research was conducted in the City of Quelimane, Mozambique and consisted of two parts, quantitative and qualitative.

Word Borrowing In Riograndenser Hunsrückisch, Trenton Hyer, Dirk Elzinga

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The objective of this project is to document word borrowing in Riograndenser Hunsrückisch, an understudied variety of German spoken in southern Brazil. UNESCO’s The Red Book of Endangered Languages listed Riograndenser Hunsrückisch as an endangered language in 1992, but linguists have written very little about it since.

Mormon Insights, Shane Peterson, Marvin Gardner

Journal of Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

A Quichua Video Dictionary: The Sight And Sound Of Ideophones, Diana Shelton (Née Sun), Janis Nuckolls

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Quichua is a branch of Quechua, a group of indigenous South American languages, which is found in Amazonian Ecuador. This language utilizes a type of adverb, called ideophones, which symbolizes sound, motion, and other sensations. Ideophones are often foregrounded with speaker movements and intonation and are therefore difficult to represent in written documentation. Our project aimed to create a video dictionary of Quichua ideophones as a valuable resource for language learners as well as future researchers of ideophones by using various media to demonstrate ideophones’ uses and contexts in reality.

Chinese Slang, Robert L. Moore

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Meaning Hypothesis To Explain Speaker's Choice Of The Sign Look, Nadav Ayal Sabar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A meaning hypothesis to explain speakers' choice of the sign look

by

Nadav Sabar

Adviser: Professor Ricardo Otheguy

The purpose of the meaning hypotheses advanced in this dissertation is to explain why speakers and writers choose the forms that they do in the course of documented acts of speaking or writing. The choice of interest is the decision to use look (or /lÊ?k/), particularly in situations where see, seem, and appear would at first glance seem to be just as appropriate. The answer to the question of why language users make the choices they do is cast in theoretical terms …

Neurophysiological Correlates Of English Vowels /I/ And /E/ In Monolingual And Bilingual 4 And 5-Year-Old Children, Nancy Vidal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Second language (L2) input in the infant and toddler years clearly affects speech processing, particularly for L2 vowels (Cheour, Shestakovab, Ceponieneb, Näätänen 2002), Moreno, Rodriguez-Fornells, Matti, 2008); Rinker, Paavo, Brosch, Kiefer 2010). However, few studies have closely examined how amount of L1 versus L2 input impacts automaticity of speech processing in young children. Greater language use of one than the other language promotes improved speech perception and production in the language of greater use (Flege & Munro 1994; Flege & MacKay 2004). Investigations have used a variety of custom-designed questionnaires to quantify amount of language use, but most have not …

Hpcnmf: A High-Performance Toolbox For Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Karthik Devarajan, Guoli Wang

COBRA Preprint Series

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a widely used machine learning algorithm for dimension reduction of large-scale data. It has found successful applications in a variety of fields such as computational biology, neuroscience, natural language processing, information retrieval, image processing and speech recognition. In bioinformatics, for example, it has been used to extract patterns and profiles from genomic and text-mining data as well as in protein sequence and structure analysis. While the scientific performance of NMF is very promising in dealing with high dimensional data sets and complex data structures, its computational cost is high and sometimes could be critical for …

The Role Of The Press In Framing The Bilingual Education Debate: Ten Years After Sheltered Immersion In Massachusetts, Fern L. Johnson, Marlene G. Fine

New England Journal of Public Policy

In 2002 Massachusetts voters passed a voter initiative that changed the way children who are not fluent in English are taught. The initiative overturned the state’s requirement for “transitional bilingual education,” through which children are gradually transitioned, usually over a three-year period, from instruction in their native language to instruction entirely in English. Transitional bilingual education was replaced with “sheltered English immersion,” which places children with little or no English-language fluency in classes where almost all instruction is in English, with the expectation that they will move to regular English-only classrooms after one year.

We used frame analysis to examine …

Voicing The Other: Mock Aave On Social Media, Hanna L. Smokoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the use on social media sites of features of African American Vernacular English by nonspeakers of it. This outgroup use of AAVE does not require nor reflect any true proficiency with the variety, but instead is often used to exaggerate the social distance between the stylizers using it on social media and the marginalized people for whom AAVE is a genuine mode of communication. Through double indexicality, nonspeakers of AAVE use features of it to annex certain positive qualities associated with Black or hip hop culture—toughness, coolness, an anti-establishment stance—for themselves, while reproducing negative stereotypes of …

Re-Examining The Bilingual Advantage On Interference-Control And Task-Switching Tasks: A Meta-Analysis, Seamus Donnelly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A much-debated topic in psycholinguistics is whether lifelong bilingualism enhances executive functions (EF), the set of higher-order cognitive processes involved in the control of thought and action. Several researchers have predicted bilingual advantages on various EF tasks, especially interference-control and task-switching tasks. Many studies have tested these predictions, but results have proven unreliable. As a complementary approach to recent quantitative syntheses on this topic, the present dissertation tests whether the bilingual advantage is moderated by a number of theoretically significant variables: dependent variable (DV), task, age, age of L2 acquisition and lab.

Two meta-analyses were conducted. Study 1 considered interference-control …

Defining The Obvious, Or Not, Emily Furner, William Eggington

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When a new word premieres in a publication in the English language, the word is normally followed with a definition (hereafter gloss) that defines or restates its meaning¹. But generally, words will eventually stop being defined as readers come to understand the meaning of the word. In other words, when readers “accept” a word into their vocabulary, the practice of including definitions with newer words becomes unnecessary. In this study, I explored the possibility of using corpora to determine when words stop appearing with definitions, thus signaling when these new words became “accepted” into American English.

Access In The Accent: Career Opportunity Based On Differences In Regional Accents, Stephanie Hedges, David Eddington

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Accents affect employment ratings more when the accent is perceived to be stronger (Carlson & McHenry, 2006). When the accent is strongly perceived by the employer, employment ratings drastically dropped for those speaking Spanish-influenced, Asian-influenced and African American English dialects (Carlson & McHenry, 2006). However, when the accent was only minimally perceived, employment ratings remained high (Carlson & McHenry, 2006). This proposes that accents only negatively impact employment when maximally perceived by the employer (Carlson & McHenry, 2006).