Linguistics Commons^™

Lessons Learned: The Process Of Creating And Evaluating An Adult Literacy Curriculum For College Transition, Meredith Leigh Packard Gravett

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis documents the process of developing and evaluating a curriculum written for adult literacy students transitioning from their current literacy goals to academic and occupational pursuits. The curriculum, titled the Basic College Skills Transition Curriculum (BCS Transition Curriculum), was written for students at Project Read, a non-profit adult literacy program located at the Provo Library in Provo, Utah. The model used to design this curriculum is a variation on the ADDIE model (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation), including the reiterative steps of research and evaluation. The lesson plans and materials in the BCS Transition Curriculum include the topics …

June 5, 2014: Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series, 2014-2015, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Toward A Biocommunicable Cartography Of Health Decision-Making In The Amazon Basin Of Ecuador, James Cartwright

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper comprises a critical, ethnographic study of health communication in a rural community of Amazonian Ecuador. By synthesizing approaches from anthropology, discourse studies, and public health, the study explores how conversations influence health decisions, how communities understand health systems, and how macrostructural discourse changes the political economy of healthcare in Ecuador. My work draws on the recent theoretical development of ‘biocommunicability’ in anthropology as well as earlier sociological research on knowledge construction. Most importantly, this paper offers a critique of current interventions by NGOs in the region.

Automated Classification Of Argument Stance In Student Essays: A Linguistically Motivated Approach With An Application For Supporting Argument Summarization, Adam Robert Faulkner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study describes a set of document- and sentence-level classification models designed to automate the task of determining the argument stance (for or against) of a student argumentative essay and the task of identifying any arguments in the essay that provide reasons in support of that stance. A suggested application utilizing these models is presented which involves the automated extraction of a single-sentence summary of an argumentative essay. This summary sentence indicates the overall argument stance of the essay from which the sentence was extracted and provides a representative argument in support of that stance.

A novel set …

Speech Act Theoretic Semantics, Daniel W. Harris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics-pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and dynamic semantics.

The Influence Of Pseudo-Relatives On Attachment Preferences In Spanish, David Branco-Moreno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper presents the results from an off-line experiment on the extent to which the availability of pseudo-relatives modulates attachment preferences in Spanish. Participants were presented with sentences in which different syntactic and semantic factors had been manipulated to allow for either both a pseudo-relative (PR) and a relative-clause (RC) reading or a RC reading only. All the experimental items included two potential antecedents with which the constituents of interest could be associated. The experimental items can be divided into four groups: group 1 consists of stimuli allowing for a double reading in direct object position, and groups 2, 3 …

Temporal Information Extraction And Knowledge Base Population, Taylor Cassidy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Temporal Information Extraction (TIE) from text plays an important role in many Natural Language Processing and Database applications. Many features of the world are time-dependent, and rich temporal knowledge is required for a more complete and precise understanding of the world. In this thesis we address aspects of two core tasks in TIE. First, we provide a new corpus of labeled temporal relations between events and temporal expressions, dense enough to facilitate a change in research directions from relation classification to identification, and present a system designed to address corresponding new challenges. Second, we implement a novel approach for the …

The Sound Patterns Of Camuno: Description And Explanation In Evolutionary Phonology, Michela Cresci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a linguistic study of the sound patterns of Camuno framed within Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2004, 2006, to appear). Camuno is a variety of Eastern Lombard, a Romance language of northern Italy, spoken in Valcamonica. Camuno is not a local variety of Italian, but a sister of Italian, a local divergent development of the Latin originally spoken in Italy (Maiden & Perry, 1997, p. 2). It is an oral language with no writing system, and it is endangered. The language is understudied (Bonfadini, 1995, p. 26), and this thesis appears to be the first detailed study of Camuno …

Huu-Fa Thesis Dat?: A Syntactic Analysis Of Possessive Jamaican Creole Possessive Wh-Elements, Toni Ashlie Foster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis discusses the differences between the Jamaican Creole expressions huu-fa and fi-huu. Jamaican Creole is a language that was born from a combination of the lexifier language English and the substrate language Twi, therefore it is reasonable to check whether the features of JC were derived from these languages. The distribution of huu-fa and fi-huu resembles the distribution of English whose. Fi-huu and huu-fa are WH-elements that show possession, similar to the English word whose. They are made of a WH-pronoun and a form of the preposition fi "for". Both terms differ in internal structure, and distribution. The difference …

Guatemalan Spanish As Act Of Identity: An Analysis Of Language And Minor Literature Within Modern Maya Literary Production, Kenneth Yanes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My study approaches the use of Guatemalan Spanish in modern Maya literary works through a theoretical framework drawn on theories of "purity" and mestizaje, the concept of minor literature, and "image" and ideology of language. I problematize the "major"/"minor" dichotomy of language based on a Eurocentric view of the dominance of national languages as the extremely diverse linguistic ecology of Latin American lends itself to the deterritorialization of hegemonic discourse, but without sustaining a neat categorization of language. Guatemalan Spanish is a heavily Maya-inflected interlanguage share by all Guatemalans. Mayan writers chose purposefully to counter the ladino ethnocentrism of the …

Ethnic Language Maintenance: A Case Study Of Second-Generation Iranian Americans In The Northeastern States, Maryam Moeini Meybodi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a relatively new, highly educated and professional group, Iranian Americans show distinctive language usage patterns. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and 48 interviews with East Coast Iranian Americans, this thesis explores the attitudes and behavior of children of Iranian immigrants and their parents toward learning and preserving their native language: Persian. Although the literature points to the erosion of parental language among the second generation and its extinction by the third generation, the results of this study suggest otherwise, at least for young children. Findings show that parents and children had positive attitude and behavior toward …

Echolocation: Using Word-Burst Analysis To Rescore Keyword Search Candidates In Low-Resource Languages, Justin Richards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

State of the art technologies for speech recognition are very accurate for heavily studied languages like English. They perform poorly, though, for languages wherein the recorded archives of speech data available to researchers are relatively scant. In the context of these low-resource languages, the task of keyword search within recorded speech is formidable. We demonstrate a method that generates more accurate keyword search results on low-resource languages by studying a pattern not exploited by the speech recognizer. The word-burst, or burstiness, pattern is the tendency for word utterances to appear together in bursts as conversational topics fluctuate. We give evidence …

Some Complexities In English Article Use And Acquisition, Victoria Somogyi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Along with preposition use, native-like article use is one of the greatest difficulties for learners of English, particularly for those learners whose first languages do not have articles. And unlike many other areas involved in the mastery of the language, articles continue to present a challenge for advanced learners. A significant number of article usages are complex in that they are neither simple to explain (in that the does not encode definiteness or contextual uniqueness) nor strictly idiomatic. This paper a) provides an overview and critique of the scholarship on articles and their acquisition, b) takes a detailed look at …

The Degree Of Certainty System In Written Spanish In Mexico, Jaseleen Ruggles

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Practitioners in threat assessment have considered direct threats as being high-level threats of future violence (O'Toole 2000: 9), but empirical studies testing the predictive validity of direct threats have contradicted this intuition (Dietz, Matthews, Martell et al. 1991; Smith 2006). Studies that include analyses of the deployment of English verbal roots (such as kill, hurt, etc.) have failed to show significant correlations between lexical choices and the occurrence of realized outcomes (Dietz, Matthews, Martell et al. 1991; Scalora, Baumgartner, Zimmerman et al. 2002a: 1360; Scalora, Baumgartner, Zimmerman 2002b: 46, Smith 2006). This analysis focused on inflectional affixes, rather …

Effects Of Phonological Neighborhood Density On Lexical Access In Adults And Children With And Without Specific Language Impairment, Diana Almodovar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study was designed to examine how adults, children with typical language development (TLD), and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) process words from sparse and dense phonological neighborhoods, using the Cross Modal Picture-Word Interference Paradigm. The participants were asked to label a picture presented on a computer screen, while ignoring auditory distractors (interfering words or IWs) presented over headphones. The target items were manipulated according to neighborhood density (high and low density words), and the auditory distractors were either identical to the target, a neutral distractor (good), phonologically related (by rhyme), or unrelated to the target item. The …

Windesi Wamesa Morphophonology, Emily A. Gasser

Linguistics Graduate Dissertations

Wamesa [wam] is an endangered Austronesian language spoken in the south-eastern Bird’s Head of New Guinea, in the Indonesian province of West Papua. is dissertation provides a description and formal analysis of the phonology and morphology of the Windesi dialect based on the author’s fieldwork with speakers of the language. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the language, its speakers, and the cultural, geographic, and linguistic context in which Wamesa is spoken. It also provides background on the fieldwork which forms the basis of this dissertation and the resulting corpus. Chapter 2 describes the phonology of Wamesa, including its phoneme …

Statistical Literacy Among Applied Linguists And Second Language Acquisition Researchers, Shawn Loewen, Elizabeth Lavolette, Le Anne Spino, Mostafa Papi, Jens Schmidtke, Scott Sterling, Dominik Wolff

Language Resource Center

The importance of statistical knowledge in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research has been emphasized in recent publications. However, the last investigation of the statistical literacy of applied linguists occurred more than 25 years ago (Lazaraton, Riggenbach, & Ediger, 1987). The current study undertook a partial replication of this older work by investigating (a) applied linguists’ general experiences with statistics, (b) underlying factors that constitute applied linguists’ knowledge about and attitudes toward statistics, and (c) variables that predict attitudes toward statistics and statistical self-efficacy. Three hundred thirty-one scholars of applied linguistics and SLA completed a questionnaire. Eighty percent …

Pourquoi J’Écris En Français, Julien Kilanga Musinde

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Why have I chosen to write in French? My personal engagement in front of French language, my profession of teacher and researcher in French linguistics, my quality as a writer and the years I worked as director of French at the International Organization of Francophonie have largely contributed to increase my link with this tongue. We say, the language belongs to his speakers and particularly to the people who use it as the place of expression of art and original thought.

Créativité Et Lecture En Langue Seconde : Propositions Pour La Lecture Des Textes Des Journaux Francophones Du Cameroun, Louis Martin Onguéné Essono

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Nowadays, it is common to say that the French press in Africa greatly contributes to the lower level of French. If true, this assertion hides a much deeper problem that concerns the act of writing and the act of reading in a non-native language. The performance of newspaper, radio or television journalists show that these writers share the same competence and face the same difficulties as the entire French-speaking population who is compelled to transmit ideas and information in a second language they do not master, or just a bit. This paper aims at understanding the reasons why non-African readers …

Nous Habitons Les Langues Et Les Langues Nous Habitent, Cheikh Tidiane Sow

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Who has not his mother, suckles his grandmother. This wolof of Senegal adage tells us that the absence of the native language and the adoption of another language, far from being a handicap, would open more “naturally” to the universal. The author, whose parents are Fulani speaking Pulaar, delivers his experience and his relationship to his two family “second languages”, Wolof and French.