Linguistics Commons^™

Tempo Perception Across Cultures: The Beat Is All It Takes, Kendall L. Lyons, Jessica E. Nave-Blodgett, Erin E. Hannon

AANAPISI Poster Presentations

• Dancing to music is a human universal that relies on beat perception.
• Listeners may infer the “tempo” or speed of music from:
• the time interval between beats;
• the density of events;
• higher-level features of musical temporal organization (the meter).
• The “Gabbling Foreigner Illusion” is the observation that listeners perceive unfamiliar languages as being faster than familiar ones.
• Even when music is the same speed, listeners tap faster to unfamiliar music.
• Does culture background impact how we perceive musical tempo?

The Systematic Stretching And Contracting Of Ideophonic Phonology In Pastaza Quichua, Joseph A. Stanley, Janis B. Nuckolls, Elizabeth Nielsen, Roseanna Hopper

Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes systematic differences between sounds used in ideophones and sounds used in the non-ideophonic or “prosaic” lexicon of the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonian Ecuador. We compare a digitized corpus of vocabulary items with a list of ideophones identified from field observations. We find that if a sound, syllable structure, or stress pattern is distributionally restricted in Pastaza Quichua, it is likely to be normalized and expanded within ideophones. The overall system is also stretched among ideophones by the addition of new sounds to the obstruents. These expansions are complemented by an overall contraction among sonorant sounds within …

Humor, Discurso Y Argumentación: Cuando El Comediante Es El Filósofo, Yanira B. Paz

Hispanic Studies Faculty Publications

Este estudio nace de la pregunta sobre si los textos humorísticos pueden servir como construcciones histórico-sociales de la verdad. Tradicionalmente, la comedia y sus derivados han sido confinados a la categoría de géneros menores. No obstante, aparte de su función catártica, los textos humorísticos pueden tener una función cognitiva y pragmática de primer orden. Este trabajo hace uso de valiosos marcos teóricos tales como la teoría sobre la narrativa oral (Labov y Waletzky, 1966; Labov 1979), el análisis crítico del discurso (Fairclough, 1995, 2001; van Dijk, 2000, 2011, Charaudeau, 2015), el valor discursivo de la argumentación (Alcaide Lara, 2000; Kreichman, …

El Tarot Como Discurso De Contestación En La Caricaturista Venezolana Rayma, Yanira B. Paz

Hispanic Studies Faculty Publications

El hecho ocurrido el 7 de enero de 2015, cuando dos fanáticos religiosos armados entraron a las oficinas de Charlie Hebdo en París, asesinando a once personas e hiriendo a otras tantas (en su mayoría caricaturistas y periodistas), nos vuelve a poner en evidencia que no hay “nada más demoledor” que el humor. Me propongo un estudio que combina el análisis crítico del discurso (Fairclough 1995, 2001, van Dijk 2000, 2011), la teoría sobre los discursos multimodales (Kress y van Leeuwen 2001, 2006) y los aportes de la teoría general del humor verbal (Attardo 1994, Ruiz Gurillo 2012) a una …

Austerity And Its Effects On Neoliberal Industrial Policy: The Case Of Enterprise Policy In Ireland, Ewan Macdonald, John Hogan, Brendan O'Rourke

Conference papers

This paper seeks to explore the logic of actually existing austerity and its effects on the development of enterprise policy in the Republic of Ireland. It asks the following question: in what manner has enterprise policy been affected by the Irish experience of austerity? Neoliberal austerity is not merely state parsimony; after all the austerity of post-WWII United Kingdom, with its frugal construction of national health and welfare systems, is far from the austerity advocated by Merkel and Cameron today. In light of this, there are a large number of factors which have led to the unique development of actually …

The Pragmatics Of Economics Experts’ Engagement With Non-Specialists, Brendan O'Rourke, Jens Maesse

Other

A Call for Papers for Panel on Economics and Language Use: The pragmatics of economics experts’ engagement with non-specialists, 15th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA2017) to be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 16-21 July 2017.

Iis It Really “Fine”?: An Analysis Of The Paralinguistic Function Of Punctuation In Text Messages, Meridean Shim

Scripps Senior Theses

This study has two major purposes: (1) to investigate if and how punctuation conventions have been rewritten in text messages to compensate for lack of paralinguistic cues and (2) the sociolinguistic implications of these findings. Data for this study was collected through an online, anonymous questionnaire in which participants gave their judgments about the meanings and function of punctuation used in sample text messages. The results show that punctuation is used to convey differences in meaning in direct and indirect ways and most are dependent on the context. Furthermore, age showed to be a factor in punctuation style and interpretation. …

Jargons And Pidgins And Creoles, Oh My!, Emily Gray

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Nowadays, creoles are often employed when a group wants to reach the minority audience with its message. Thanks to the presence of creoles on every continent, this strategy has the potential to be highly successful. Creole writings can be divided into two main subcategories: ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical. Writings related to Christianity can be found wherever English-based creoles are widely used and accepted. Creolized translations of missionary prayers have been dated back to the eighteenth century (Todd 71). Negerhollands, a Dutch-based creole of the Virgin Islands, even boasts a translation of the Bible. Translations of creoles have also been used in …

The Perception Of Creaky Voice: Does Speaker Gender Affect Our Judgments?, Kaitlyn E. Lee

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study focuses on the phonetics of creaky voice saliency and the perceptual sociolinguistic indexes that are evoked during creaky voice use. This study consists of two experiments: the first a listener judgment based Likert scale, the second an AXB study. The first experiment used modal and creaky voice statement-of-fact tokens to determine whether the speaker is or isn’t x characteristic (intelligent, feminine, educated, masculine, hesitant, and confident). This study found that both male and female speakers were found to be less intelligent, less educated, less feminine, more masculine, less confident, and more hesitant when using creaky voice phonation as …

Hebrew And Computer-Mediated Communication: The Effects Of A Language Manipulation On Perception, Identity, And Preservation, Tamar Nir

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study aimed to explore the ways in which Hebrew is currently being manipulated online through a linguistic deviation called Fakatsa. In this study, participants were asked to rate random statements of frivolous or serious topics in either standard grammatical Hebrew or Fakatsa Hebrew conditions on specific judgment values. It was hypothesized that participants would rate the Fakatsa writer negatively on certain characteristics, such as intelligence, education, religiosity, and nationalism and positively on other characteristics, such as femininity and creativity. Twenty-four participants completed this experiment. Results showed that participants responded as expected for certain negative attributes typical of Fakatsa and …

Marginal Models: An Alternative To Mixed-Effects Models In Sociolinguistic Research, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Sociolinguistic studies generally gather multiple instances from a single speaker. This introduces repeated measures that need to be taken into account when carrying out statistical analysis in order for the outcome to be statistically valid. One way of doing this is to apply a mixed-effects model. In the workshop, I present a lesser-known, but equally valid method for dealing with repeated measures—marginal models.

How Inflection Class Systems Work: On The Informativity Of Implicative Structure, Jeffery R. Parker, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

The complexity of an inflection system can be defined as the average extent to which elements in the system inhibit motivated inferences about the realization of lexemes’ paradigm cells. Research shows that systems tend to exhibit relatively low complexity in this sense. However, relatively little work has explored how structural and distributional aspects of the inflectional system produce this outcome. In this paper we use the tools of information theory to do so. We explore a set of nine languages that have robust inflection class systems: Palantla Chinantec, French, Modern Greek, Icelandic, Kadiwéu, Nuer, Russian, Seri, and Võro. The data …

Re-Analyzing The Function Of Demonstrative Reference In Tajik, Kelly E. Bowman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a re-analysis of Tajik demonstratives based on an alternative to the widely accepted framework for understanding demonstrative reference. In this framework, demonstrative reference is categorized according to two criteria: the anchor relative to which reference is made, and the number of spatial distinctions the system has for encoding distance from the anchor (Levinson 2004, O’Grady 2010). According to previous literature (Rastorgueva 1963, Perry 2005, Windfuhr & Perry 2009), Tajik has a speaker-anchored, two-way reference system. However, these criteria alone do not account for the data presented in this thesis. I therefore propose the following change to this …

Stress Variation As Unifying Features Of Upstate New York, Tracey Vail

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study investigates sociophonetic stress variation in the Onondaga County area of Upstate New York. I argue that five variations of stress correlate to factors of age, education level, place of residence, frequency, and analogical change. Dinkin and Evanini (2010) have examined and discovered similar outcomes of stress variation in his work with dialectal features across the state of New York. Rather than analyze the state and its borders in their entirety, I focus on morpheme-specific analogical change of stress in specific social categories within the Syracuse, New York region. In terms of lexical items, I analyze stress placement within …

Encyclopedia Of Hispanic Linguistics, Eva Núñez-Méndez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Literary Dialect In Flannery O'Connor's "The Lame Shall Enter First" And "Good Country People", Katherine Ireland Kuiper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Flannery O’Connor is known for her widely read and loved short stories. By employing sociolinguistic, quantitative, qualitative, and corpus linguistic methods along with R Studio to gather data about literary dialect utilized in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories “Good Country People” and “The Lame Shall Enter First”, I argue that not only was O’Connor a gifted author in her portrayal of African American English and Southern English, but that her writing was also accurate in comparison to language use in the South. The findings suggest that O’Connor’s characters were true to life in the Southern US at the time of her …

Academic And Language Socialization Of Russian Ma Tesl Students At Us Universities: Struggles, Triumphs, And New Identities, Marina Lepekhova

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Each year a great number of students leaves their home countries to study abroad. As a result, international students constitute a considerable portion of student body in us universities and around the world. For many students, study abroad is a holistic and a life-changing experience. Life in a foreign country and everyday exposure to new social and academic cultures make international students undergo an uneasy academic socialization process and re-imagine themselves through the use of second language (l2). This process is simultaneously coupled with academic and language socialization practices that construct novices as certain kinds of situationally organized persons, with …

Experiments In Idiom Recognition, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Some expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretations depending on the context they occur in, e.g., sales hit the roof vs. hit the roof of the car. We present a novel method of classifying whether a given instance is literal or idiomatic, focusing on verb-noun constructions. We report state-of-the-art results on this task using an approach based on the hypothesis that the distributions of the contexts of the idiomatic phrases will be different from the contexts of the literal usages. We measure contexts by using projections of the words into vector space. For comparison, we implement Fazly et …

The Push And Pull Of Language Ideologies : Multilingual Communicative Practices Among Youths In An Indonesian City, Kristian Tamtomo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis deals with the use of Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia and English in the spoken and written communication of high school youths in the city of Semarang, Central Java. The thesis aims to understand the patterns in which youths make use of these languages in various communicative contexts and the way youths use languages to either enact or negotiate the polycentric "push and pull" of the various language ideologies associated with local, national, and global language. Data collection was conducted using ethnographic methods, which involved participant observation, recordings of conversations, collection of texts, as well as interviews with youth groups …

The Teachability Of Situation-Bound Utterances In Modern Chinese As A Foreign Language Context, Shu-Han Yeh

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the teachability of Situation-Bound Utterances (SBUs hence) in a Modern Chinese foreign language classroom. Specifically, the basic question to be examined is this: to what extent two instructional paradigms--explicit versus implicit instruction--affect learners’ knowledge and ability to use SBUs. For this study, SBUs were defined by Kecskés (2000) as “highly conventionalized, prefabricated pragmatic units whose occurrences are tied to standardized communicative situations” (p. 606). SBUs consist of strings such as “I’ll see you later,” and “You can say that again,” which are used predictably by native speakers in certain contexts.