Linguistics Commons^™

The Use Of Gesture In Self-Initiated Self-Repair Sequences By Persons With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Eleanor M. Feltner

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study examines the relationship between types of gestures and instances of self-initiated self-repair (SISR) used by persons with non-fluent aphasia (NFA), which is a type of aphasia characterized by stilted speech or signing (Papathanasiou et al., 2013), in interactions with clinicians. Conversation repairs in this study are assessed using the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), which is an approach for describing, analyzing, and understanding social interaction (Sidnell, 2010). Previous linguistic studies have demonstrated a distinct preference for the use of gesture during a repair by persons with aphasia (Goodwin, 1995; Klippi, 2015; Wilkinson, 2013). This study draws more conclusive …

Healing Through Language: Positive Physical Health Effects Of Indigenous Language Use, D. H. Whalen, Margaret Moss, Daryl Baldwin

Publications and Research

This article summarizes existing work that indicates language maintenance and revitalization efforts result in health-related benefits for Native Americans and other indigenous populations. Although forced loss of ancestral language has been a feature of life in most indigenous communities since the first contact with Europeans, the pace of loss has accelerated in the past 50 years. Among the many hardships such communities face, an especially troubling one is lowered health status. There are indications, however, that language maintenance and revitalization efforts have positive effects on physical and communal health among indigenous populations. The types of language programs currently in place …

Esperanto: A Diachronic Study Of Language Word Order, Daniel Seth Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Motivation And Technology Use During Second-Language Study Abroad In The Digital Age, Aroline Seibert Hanson, Melisa Dracos

Modern Languages and Cultures Faculty Work

Study abroad culture is constantly changing (Kinginger, 2013), involving new challenges such as easier access to the first language culture via technology. There has been little research done on technology use abroad and its relationship with both linguistic gains (Coleman & Chafer, 2010; Kelly, 2010) and motivation (Allen, 2013; Irie & Ryan, 2015). To explore the role of motivation in developing a successful study abroad culture in the digital age, we documented technology use in the first language and second language of 15 college students during their summer sojourn in Argentina. We quantitatively evaluated participants’ motivation (Gardner, 1985; Ushida, 2003) …

A Cross-Linguistic Preference For Torso Stability In The Lexicon: Evidence From 24 Sign Languages, N. Sanders, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

When the arms move in certain ways, they can cause the torso to twist or rock. Such extraneous torso movement is undesirable, especially during sign language communication, when torso position may carry linguistic significance, so we expend effort to resist it when it is not intended. This so-called “reactive effort” has only recently been identified by Sanders and Napoli (2016), but their preliminary work on three genetically unrelated languages suggests that the effects of reactive effort can be observed cross-linguistically by examination of sign language lexicons. In particular, the frequency of different kinds of manual movements in the lexicon correlates …

In God We Trust. All Others Must Bring Data. - W. Edwards Deming Using Word Embeddings To Recognize Idioms, 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 violate cohesive ties in local contexts, while literal expressions do not. 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) …

The Relationship Between Artificial And Second Language Learning, Marc Ettlinger, Kara Morgan-Short, Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg, Patrick C.M. Wong

CISLL Publications

Artificial language learning (ALL) experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we considered these questions by examining the relationship between performance in an ALL task and second language learning ability. Participants enrolled in a Spanish language class were evaluated using a number of different measures of Spanish ability and classroom performance, which was compared to IQ and a number of different …

Passive Unaccusatives In L2 English, Chad Tyler Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Passive unaccusativity refers to a phenomenon whereby L2 English speakers produce unaccusative verbs in passive constructions. Since unaccusative verbs are a subset of intransitive verbs and thus generally do not passivize, the question of how learners recognize unaccusatives without any overt input distinguishing subsets of intransitives has piqued the interest of many researchers since the late 1970's. Oshita's (2000) claim that passive unaccusatives are NP-movement markers is now a widely accepted claim; however, studies of more general characteristics of intransitivity have revealed close parallels between passive unaccusatives and other well-documented phenomena. The aim of this paper is to show that …

Language Modularity, Lindsay N. Harris, Iwona B. Lech

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Linguistic Variations Between Cajun French, Pedagogical French, And Mississippi Gulf Coast French, Virginia Jane Geddie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates lexical variation between three dialects of French in various stages of language death. Those dialects are Pedagogical French, an international language, Cajun French, an obsolescing language, and Mississippi Gulf Coast French, an extinct language. In order to determine the degree of variation, thirty-two lexical items or phrases that display variance with Pedagogical French are selected from Mississippi Gulf Coast French. They are then compared with counterparts in Pedagogical French and Cajun French to determine the amount of variance between dialects. I hypothesized that there is a larger degree of variation between the Gulf Coast dialects and Pedagogical …

I Speak Better Arabic: Arabic Native Speakers’ Perception Of Arabic Dialects, Mahmoud Sayed Abdel-Fattah Abdel-Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A limited number of studies in the field of perceptual dialectology covered the Arab World. This is a perceptual dialectology study that aims at investigating Arabic native speakers’ perception of Arabic dialect areas. This study utilized a questionnaire that is based on Preston’s (1999) techniques for investigating perceptual dialectology. This questionnaire consisted of two parts. The first part includes a detailed map of the Arab world and participants are asked to identify as many dialect areas of Arabic as they could. The second part of the questionnaire investigates Arabic native speakers’ perception of different Arabic dialects in terms of where …

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 …

Investigating The Effects Of A Parent-Mediated Intervention On Latino Parent-Child Verbal Interaction And Children's Receptive Vocabulary, Patricia G. Onorato

Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to investigate parent-child verbal interactions in Spanish in a group of Latino preschoolers growing up in the United States through a parent-mediated program at home, and the effects of the program on their receptive vocabulary in Spanish. A single subject multiple baseline across participants design was used in the study. The participants were 3 Latino mothers and their sons, with low family income, living in the United States. The intervention taught the mothers strategies to enhance their children’s language through a sharing-book activity. The study lasted for 6 weeks during which baseline and intervention conditions data were …

Sounding Appalachian: /Ai/ Monophthongization, Rising Pitch Accents, And Rootedness, Paul E. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Appalachia, the mountainous region that stretches from northern Georgia to Pennsylvania (ARC, 2015), is a region that has been considered culturally and linguistically unique in the United States. There is a small but growing body of literature that has demonstrated that the language varieties of this region, collapsed under the broad heading of Appalachian English (AE), diverge from Mainstream American English and other Southern American English varieties (Wolfram & Christian, 1976, Montgomery & Hall, 2004, Labov et al., 2006, among others). Much of this literature has focused on vowels and morpho-syntax, but other linguistic aspects have not received much attention, …

Implicit Causality And Consequentiality In Native And Non-Native Coreference Processing, Wei Cheng

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of two studies that examined the role of implicit causality and consequentiality in coreference processing. Implicit causality (IC) refers to the phenomenon that certain interpersonal verbs bias the causation of the events described by the verbs towards either its subject (the first noun phrase NP1) or its object (the second noun phrase NP2). Implicit consequentiality (IR) refers to the phenomenon that certain verbs bias the consequence towards either NP1 or NP2. These IC and IR biases have been found to influence language comprehenders’ establishment of coreference.

The first study examined whether intentionality of an event affects …

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 …

Aging, Discourse, And Ideology, Julia Mckinney

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the language practices of members of the Andrus Center, a recreational senior center located in the southeastern United States. It specifically examines how “young-old” members, or those who had relatively recently made the transition to older identity, invoked and contested widely circulating ideologies of aging in the course of constructing their local age identities. Rather than treating age as an objective, individual characteristic, as commonly presumed in sociolinguistics, this study highlights the ways in which age identities were relationally and emergently coconstructed. Through analyses of interactional and ethnographic data collected over 18 months, I argue that mainstream …

The Theoretical Argument For Disproving Asymptotic Upper-Bounds On The Accuracy Of Part-Of-Speech Tagging Algorithms: Adopting A Linguistics, Rule-Based Approach, William Foley

Honors Theses

This paper takes a deep dive into a particular area of the interdisciplinary domain of Computational Linguistics, Part-of-Speech Tagging algorithms. The author relies primarily on scholarly Computer Science and Linguistics papers to describe previous approaches to this task and the often-hypothesized existence of the asymptotic accuracy rate of around 98%, by which this task is allegedly bound. However, after doing more research into why the accuracy of previous algorithms have behaved in this asymptotic manner, the author identifies valid and empirically-backed reasons why the accuracy of previous approaches do not necessarily reflect any sort of general asymptotic bound on the …

The Role Of Language Attitudes In Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo's Language Revitalization Efforts, Armida Hernandez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In the United States, language preservation and revitalization efforts have taken on greater urgency as tribes spanning all across Indian Country, from Alaska to Florida, are collaborating with linguists, Native and non-Native, in a pitched fight to save their languages from decline and/or extinction. With respect to the causes of indigenous language loss, it is important to recognize that blame cannot be assigned exclusively to external pressures. Recognizing the strong interplay between language attitudes and language maintenance or loss, this study focuses on the role of language attitude in one particular Native American tribeâ??s language revitalization efforts, that of Ysleta …

Weakening Of The Affricate /T[Voiceless Postalveolar Fricative]/ In The Spanish Of Ciudad Juárez, Luis Alberto Méndez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A characteristic feature of the Spanish spoken in the Mexican state of Chihuahua is the pronunciation of the standard phoneme [t∫] (ch) as a non-standard allophone /∫/ (sh). The present study analyzes the social and linguistic factors that influence variation in the Mexico-United States border community of Ciudad Juárez. Direct and indirect elicitations techniques were used to gather tokens of /t?/ from a sample of 40 speakers who varied in age, sex, socioeconomic status, education level, and degree of bilingualism. The data was perceptually and acoustically interpreted and then examined using variable rules analysis. On the linguistic side, the results …