Linguistics Commons^™

Passive Voice Constructions In Modern Irish, Brian Nolan

The ITB Journal

This paper is about the passive construction, of which modern Irish (a VSO language) has two primary forms, the personal passive and its variants, and the impersonal. An empirical question is posed as to whether a third passive form exists within the language, that of a functionally defined GET-passive. To deliver a unified analysis of the various passive constructions, a perspective that takes account of the complete event is necessary.

Increasing Language Awareness And Self-Efficacy Of Fl Students Using Self-Assessment And The Actfl Proficiency Guidelines, Elizabeth M. Kissling, M. E. O'Donnell

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

This study describes how oral language was assessed in an advanced-level college foreign language (FL) conversation course. Learners used the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines to guide self-analyses of their oral production at intervals throughout the course. The intent was to provide opportunities for learners to develop an understanding of what constitutes oral proficiency, gauge their own progress, and set personal goals. Learners’ self-analysis narratives suggested they began to notice different aspects of their speech and to better articulate their abilities and limitations. Broadly speaking, the results suggest that self-assessment of oral performance guided by the Proficiency Guidelines is an effective way …

November 6, 2015: Carol Symes Lecture, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Carol Symes

Progressive Place Assimilation In Optimality Theory, Andrew Lamont

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis presents an investigation into progressive place agreement in clusters through the lens of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; McCarthy & Prince, 1995, 1999). A large typology of such languages is presented and examined to detail a broad swath of phenomena. The main line of inquiry over this typology is how direction of assimilation is formally represented. This work argues that simple phonological mechanisms explain the cross-linguistic effects including an agreement constraint and conflicting faithfulness constraints.

The Vocabulary Research Database: A Compilation Of State-Of-The-Art Academic Vocabulary Research, Melissa Ann Young

Theses and Dissertations

The Vocabulary Research Database (VRD) is a research tool comprised of a compilation of state-of-the art academic research in the field of vocabulary acquisition and pedagogy. The VRD has flexible search features that allow users to obtain higher granularity than is possible with other free databases and online search options currently available, making the results more relevant and manageable. These features include the ability to constrain results by date, author, publication, sub-topics, keywords, citation numbers, journal impact factors, and participant ages. It is anticipated that the ability to manipulate results, combined with relevant and current content, will provide language professionals …

Idioms As A Measure Of Proficiency, Kyle Hugh Vanderniet

Theses and Dissertations

This purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationship between idiomatic knowledge and second language proficiency. As the amount of research directly related to this topic is sparse, an in-depth discussion of relevant research and definitions comprises the first part of this paper. Two studies are then presented here that test the relationship between idiomatic knowledge and second language proficiency. A new definition for idioms proposes that all non-compositional phrases, popularized by usage, that is stored, retrieved, and employed as a single lexical unit. The results from more than 400 participants across two studies indicate that the two constructs …

The Effect Of The Spanish Diminutive In Gender Processing Of Opaque Nouns, Falcon Restrepo-Ramos, Jorge Valdés-Kroff

World Languages & Cultures Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploración De Las Narrativas BilingüEs Orales Y Escritas En Español E Inglés, Maria Luisa Spicer-Ecalante

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Este estudio investiga las diferencias y/o similitudes en las narrativas personales bilingües, español e inglés, de un grupo de estudiantes de escuela secundaria, cuando cuentan una historia de manera oral o escrita. Previos estudios sugieren que los estudiantes bilingües nativo-hablantes del español tienden a producir narrativas diferentes dependiendo de la lengua en que relatan las historias. Los participantes del estudio escribieron una narración en español y unos días después escribieron la misma narración en inglés. Posteriormente, durante una entrevista personal, se les pidió que contaran la narración que habían escrito, tanto en español como en inglés. Las muestras se analizaron …

Ideographs And American Mass Media: Understanding The Narrative On The Israel-Palestine Conflict And Its Influence On Publics, Savanna Lynn Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the American mass media's narrative on the Israel-Palestine conflict to understand the power of ideographs and their influence on specific publics. I focus on two popular ideographs in mass media reporting,and, in order to examine how these ideographs are utilized to construct a narrative for the media's publics, the political ideologies they represent, the agendas they further, and the consequences their narrow use has on developing counterpublics and emerging alternative narratives around the conflict. I focus my attention on the mass media's coverage of a sixteen day Israeli shelling in Gaza and how public consent is acquired …

October 5, 2015: David Bleich Lecture, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring David Bleich

Emotional Facial Expressions In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars: A Manual Evaluation., Robert G Smith, Brian Nolan

Other Resources

This research explores and evaluates the contribution that facial expressions might have regarding improved comprehension and acceptability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish sign language (ISL), the Deaf (the uppercase ‘‘D’’ in the word ‘‘Deaf’’ indicates Deaf as a culture as opposed to ‘‘deaf’’ as a medical condition) community’s responsiveness to sign language avatars is examined. The hypothesis of this is as follows: augmenting an existing avatar with the seven widely accepted universal emotions identified by Ekman (Basic emotions: handbook of cognition and emotion. Wiley, London, 2005) to achieve underlying facial expressions will make that avatar more human-like …

October 1, 2015: Safe On Campus Training, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Learn to be a better advocate and ally to lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender people. Participants receive information on practical strategies for addressing homophobia, learn ways to support students who are coming out, and gain an understanding of respectful language use.

A Computational Translation Of The Phaistos Disk, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

For over a century the text of the Phaistos Disk remained an enigma without a convincing translation. This paper presents a novel semi-automatic translation method that uses for the first time a recently discovered connection between the Phaistos Disk symbols and other ancient scripts, including the Old Hungarian alphabet. The connection between the Phaistos Disk script and the Old Hungarian alphabet suggested the possibility that the Phaistos Disk language may be related to Proto-Finno-Ugric, Proto-Ugric, or Proto-Hungarian. Using words and suffixes from those languages, it is possible to translate the Phaistos Disk text as an ancient sun hymn, possibly connected …

A Computational Study Of The Evolution Of Cretan And Related Scripts, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Crete was the birthplace of several ancient writings, including the Cretan Hieroglyphs, the Linear A and the Linear B scripts. Out of these three only Linear B is deciphered. The sound values of the Cretan Hieroglyph and the Linear A symbols are unknown and attempts to reconstruct them based on Linear B have not been fruitful. In this paper, we compare the ancient Cretan scripts with four other Mediterranean and Black Sea scripts, namely Phoenician, South Arabic, Greek and Old Hungarian. We provide a computational study of the evolution of the three Cretan and four other scripts. This study encompasses …

The Language Ecology Of Sierra Leone, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Many of Sierra Leone’s indigenous languages are robust and enjoy some support on the national level. Mende and Temne, for example, receive government support in terms of materials having been created for developing literacy in those languages. Other Sierra Leone languages receive support in nearby countries, e.g., Mandingo (Malinké) and Kisi in Guinea. Three languages in Sierra Leone, however, receive no such support and will likely disappear in a generation, namely, the three South Atlantic languages Mani (Bullom So), Kim (Krim) and Bom (Bum). A fourth language belonging to the same group, Sherbro, the subject of an upcoming investigation, has …

50 Años De Evolución En Los Estudios Lingüísticos Transculturales: De La Retórica Contrastiva A La Retórica Intercultural, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Why Digital Problem Solving Matters: A Closer Look At How Education And Skills Online Can Be Used To Inform Educational Outreach Efforts, Jill Castek, Cindy Gibbon

Presentations and Publications

This presentation focuses digital problem solving and the approaches and strategies digital problem solvers use.

Interpretation Of Overt Pronouns In L1 And L2 Japanese: The Role Of Context, Marisa A. Nagano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the interpretation of Japanese overt 3rd person pronouns by native (N=21) and advanced L1-English/L2-Japanese (N=20) speakers, using interpretation, reaction-time, and eye-tracking data. Previous studies have investigated L1 and L2 pronoun interpretation in null-subject languages like Spanish, Italian, and Greek, finding that L1 speakers tend to show a topic-shift effect for overt pronouns more often than L2ers (Sorace, 2011). Similar studies on Japanese, which allows null subjects but also differs greatly from these languages, have been mixed; crucially, several studies found no antecedent bias for overt pronouns by L1 speakers to begin with (Okuma, 2012; Ueno & Kehler, …

Roles Of Shifting Attention, Alternating Attention And Inhibition On Temporary Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution And Use Of Context In Younger And Older Adults, Youngmi Park

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Twenty-four younger adults (20-35 years, mean: 25.88) and thirty-four older adults (65-79 years, mean: 71.82) read sentences via a word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm. Study 1 examined how older and young adults resolve sentences containing Noun Phrase (NP) and Verb Phrase (VP)-attached Prepositional Phrases (PPs) yielding temporary syntactic ambiguity, and which cognitive factors (working memory capacity, inhibition, shifting attention, alternating attention, and cognitive processing speed) contribute to temporary syntactic ambiguity resolution.

Study 2 was designed to investigate how both age groups utilize contextual information while resolving PP-attachment, and which cognitive functions play a role in the use of referential context during …

/N/:/R/ Correspondences In Albanian Dialects: Understanding The N>R Sound Change, Katie Albany

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Albanian language is an Indo-European language that constitutes a separate branch in the Indo-European language family. There are two major dialects, Geg and Tosk, spoken in present day Albania that are mutually intelligible. There are morpho-syntactic differences between the two dialects and shared words provide evidence for a number of sound changes applying in certain contexts in Tosk. The focus of this paper is n > r sound change in Tosk applying to the nasal /n/ in an intervocalic position followed by an unstressed vowel. The lenition rule has been prolific diachronically, but stopped applying some time between the 13 …