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An Ewp Model Of Quechua Agreement: Further Evidence Against Dm, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

In this paper we first describe the Quechua verbal agreement paradigm using two generative morphological theories and then argue that Anderson’s EWP accounts for the data better than Distributed Morphology (DM). Kerke (1996) has already shown evidence against DM using this paradigm, and we provide additional support for this.

The Quechua verbs conjugate to agree with the subject and the object of the VP in one of three tenses (Table 1). Each cell contains up to five morphemes, from a selection of twelve, which appear consistently in the same order. Though there is some semblance of regularity in the paradigm, …

The Repeated Name Penalty And The Overt Pronoun Penalty In Japanese, Shinichi Shoji

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigated the Repeated Name Penalty (RNP) and the Overt Pronoun Penalty (OPP) in Japanese. The RNP was first reported by Gordon, Grosz and Gilliom (1993), who observed that English sentences with repeated-name subject anaphors were read slower than sentences with overt-pronoun subjects when the antecedents were either the grammatical subject or the first-mentioned surface-initial noun phrase of the previous sentence. The OPP has been reported in studies of Spanish (Gelormini-Lezama & Almor, 2011) in which sentences with overt-pronoun subject anaphors were read slower than sentences with null-pronoun subject anaphors for subject antecedents.

A concern with the RNP and …

Mormon Metaphors Of Restoration: Pathways To Identity And Understanding, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

The important role of metaphors in interfaith understanding has received significant attention. The pervasiveness of certain metaphors in the lives of members of a religious community is especially significant when they are incorporated into sacred texts. This would seem to be the case not only for Judaism, Islam, and mainline Christianity, but also for Mormonism, a distinctive branch of Christianity. Officially known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Mormonism shares some root metaphors with other Christians but differs in important ways in its development and use of these metaphors. In this paper we discuss the journey, …

Phonetic Shift /Ɔr/ Phonemic Change? American English Mergers Over 40 Years, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick

Faculty Publications

In this paper we analyze the vowel formants of a speaker over four decades to show phonemic change through time. Other real-time studies (Harrington, Palethorpe & Watson 2000; Harrington & Reubold 2015) have found that the vowel spaces of UK English speakers shift over the lifetime, likely as a consequence of interaction with speakers of other dialects or social classes. We focus on an understudied variety of English, spoken in the western United States, to investigate a pair of phonological mergers, the cord-card merger and the hoarse-horse merger.

The cord-card merger is a result of a historical three-way contrast of …

Constructing A Russian Elicited Imitation Exam, Troy L. Cox, Jennifer Brown, Jacob Burdis

Faculty Publications

A Russian student wants to know if it is worth the expense to pay for an official ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI). The director of a flagship program wants to measure the improvement of the oral proficiency of students returning from their in-country experience. A university department needs to provide evidence that their students are meeting learning objectives as part of accreditation. In each of these cases, a cost-effective, scalable solution to measuring oral proficiency would be helpful.

Assessing speaking ability in a foreign language has traditionally been a difficult and time-intensive task. A traditional method of measuring oral language …

The Deserving Patient: Blame, Dependency, And Impairment In Discourses Of Chronic Pain And Opioid Use, Maureen Nickerson

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Negative stereotypes about people with chronic pain pose a barrier in the delivery of care; contribute to worsening symptoms of physical and psychological distress; and play a role in policy decisions that adversely affect patients and providers. Pain-care seekers may be accused of malingering, laziness, mental aberration, attention seeking, and drug seeking. The propagation of stigmatizing attitudes was explored in this Critical Discourse Analysis of online-reader-comments responding to a series of pain-care policy articles published by a large metropolitan newspaper. Results suggest that framing pain patients as legitimate and deserving can inadvertently reproduce the inequities advocates seek to redress. Ascriptions …

On The Shithouse Wall: The Communicative Value Of Latrinalia, Thomas Lively

Online Theses and Dissertations

Graffiti has communicative value, and it is a medium through which individuals voice their innermost thoughts, concerns, and beliefs. Restroom graffiti or "latrinalia" offers a unique space for graffiti writers to deliver their messages. The sole focus of this paper is to examine the meaning and communicative value of latrinalia as found in the men's restrooms of a medium-sized university. For this study, restrooms in 17 buildings were visited and a total of 965 instances of graffiti were recorded and codified into 14 different categories. The four most common categories of latrinalia were signature, sexual, artistic, and discriminatory. Latrinalia was …

December 30, 2015: Mckittrick Keynote Opens Ellis Series Spring Season, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series WMU Faculty Keynote Lecture Casey McKittrick

December 17, 2015: 2016 Green Rose Prize From New Issues, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The 2016 Green Rose Prize Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum by Nadine Sabra Meyer

December 16, 2015: The Gwen Frostic Reading Series Spring 2016, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Gwen Frostic Reading Series Schedule for Spring 2016 Semester

December 12, 2015: Spring 2016 Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Events, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

The Minstrel Legacy: African American English And The Historical Construction Of "Black" Identities In Entertainment, Jennifer Bloomquist

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

Linguists have long been aware that the language scripted for "ethnic" roles in the media has been manipulated for a variety of purposes ranging from the construction of character "authenticity" to flagrant ridicule. This paper provides a brief overview of the history of African American roles in the entertainment industry from minstrel shows to present-day films. I am particularly interested in looking at the practice of distorting African American English as an historical artifact which is commonplace in the entertainment industry today. Dialogue which is clearly meant as an imitation of African American English still results in the construction of …

A Qualitative Analysis Of The English Language Teaching Practices Of Latter-Day Saint Missionaries, Rachel Tui Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the teaching practices of recently returned Latter-day Saint (LDS) missionaries who voluntarily taught the English language on their full-time missions' serving for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout various parts of the world. The analyses performed in this research offer an insider's perspective by looking at a large selection of qualitative data gathered directly from these missionaries to provide evidential insight into what those practices are, including the most effective and the most ineffective teaching practices as principally perceived by the missionaries themselves. Thus far, there has been no research reported or data gathered …

The Development Of An Esp Vocabulary Study Guidefor The Utah State Driver Handbook, Kirsten M. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project details research conducted and the method employed to create a tool for acquiring the technical vocabulary from the Utah Driver Handbook. Technical terms were compiled into a vocabulary tool for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. ESL programs within the state have noted the need for materials to help learners acquire this vocabulary. The tool will assist ESL learners preparing for the written driving exam by reinforcing the vocabulary through various iterations, including flash cards, simplified definitions, and an L1 gloss. Learners preparing for the exam will be able to study difficult vocabulary terms using the …

Syriac Rhetorical Particles: Variable Second-Position Clitic Placement, Patrick Brendon Pearson

Theses and Dissertations

Investigation on second-position clitic phenomena has steadily increased since Wackernagel’s (1892) observations. Researchers have applied contemporary clitic typology to various Semitic languages though Syriac has received little attention. This thesis identifies a group of Syriac rhetorical particles and describes their categorization as clitics, versus words or affixes. It establishes each of the Syriac particles as second-position clitics and provides evidence of this conclusion from a state-of-the-art digitized corpus of Syriac literature. Extending previous Syriac analyses, this thesis describes the nature of attachment of these second-position clitics as enclisis to either the first word or the first constituent/phrase of their domain. …

A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Russian Word Order Patterns, Stephanie Kay Billings

Theses and Dissertations

Some scholars say that Russian syntax has free word order. However, other researchers claim that the basic word order of Russian is Subject, Verb, Object (SVO). Some researchers also assert that the use of different word orders may be influenced by various factors, including positions of discourse topic and focus, and register (spoken, fiction, academic, non-academic). In addition, corpora have been shown to be useful tools in gathering empirical linguistic data, and modern advances in computing have made corpora freely available and their use widespread. The Russian National Corpus is a large corpus of Russian that is widely used and …

Identity Phauxnetics, Nathan T. Jones

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the construction of identity and authenticity through sociophonetic variation, focusing on British Hip Hop artist Amy Winehouse. Prior work on British vocal artists’ phonetic variation has relied upon regional categorical frameworks (Trudgill, 1983; Carlsson, 2001) and found variation to be evidence of production errors and speakers’ misidentification of targeted speech patterns, resulting in summative interpretations of conflict between speakers’ discreet identities and speech pattern categories. More recent work has attended to linguistic processes within cultural movements influenced but not strictly delimited by sociolinguistics’ canonical categories of region, class, race, etc. Within the context of the Hip Hop …

Spectrums, Subgroups And School-Lunch: The Linguistic Capital Of Students With Autism, Scott Belden

Theses and Dissertations

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are known to have difficulties with pragmatic language. There is, however, a subpopulation of those with ASD that exhibits a high competency with pragmatic language. It can be difficult for researchers to find natural contexts to record these high-functioning individuals and examine their spontaneous use of pragmatic language. Additionally, there is a need to move beyond analyzing the cognitive abilities of these individuals to a sociolinguistic exploration of how they use pragmatic abilities to form and navigate social groups.

The research involved in this thesis included audio-visual recordings of 14 high school students with …

Nonstandard Languages: The Outcasts Of The Language Revitalization Movement, Whitney Snowden

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis compares the failures of the creolization movement with the success of the language revitalization movement and seeks to determine which elements are missing from the former to make it as successful as the latter. Education policy, identity, and language ideology are all examined as contributors to the future success of creole inclusivity in education and society, as well as the potential benefits such a movement would include. Specifically examined are Siegel’s research on creole education and Armstrong’s work on language ideology.

Reflexive And Reciprocal Constructions In Modern Irish, Brian Nolan

The ITB Journal

This paper examines reflexive (and reciprocal) constructions in modern Irish, a VSOX language for which the generative analysis using c-command is problematic. Reflexive and reciprocal constructions are best reflected in the inherent VSOX word order. The reflexive occurs in transitive constructions with the reflexive marker féin, which can also be used non-reflexively but emphatically. A continuum is observed with a human/animate participant as the subject argument at the reflexive pole and a nonhuman inanimate at the emphatic end. Motion is an ingredient in reflexivity. Fictive or nontranslational motion are both non-reflexive. Translational motion alone allows reflexivity. Reciprocals are complex in …