Linguistics Commons^™

Language In Human Life: A Ge Course Targeting English Language Learners, Gail Shuck

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

The presenter will describe a cross-cultural course, Language in Human Life, designed to meet several university needs: 1) To provide a course for non-majors that fulfills a long-standing gap in general education courses at the presenter’s institution that introduce students to linguistic thought, 2) to be a magnet course for speakers of English as an additional language in order to allow all students to learn about each others’ languages, and 3) to offer a linguistically accessible course for lower-proficiency users of English that is taught by an instructor with ESL expertise but that fulfills a university requirement for all students. …

Language And The Law, Tineke Scholten

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

This is an upper division course that has been certified as a General Education Course in the area of “Lifelong Learning”. The course also is part of a “Social Justice” GE Path, which encourages students to select their GE courses around a particular theme. The course draws students from a variety of undergraduate majors, including Psychology, Business Law, Political Science, History and Sociology.

The course investigates the role that language and linguistics play in the legal written and oral discourse. In doing so, it hopes to serve two purposes: (1) to illustrate and explicate essential qualities of natural languages and …

Old English And Old Norse: An Inquiry Into Intelligibility And Categorization Methodology, Eric Martin Gay

Theses and Dissertations

To say that the Old English and Old Norse languages have an interesting history with one another is a declaration of utter understatement. So intertwined were these languages and their people that we, some 1,000 years later, are still attempting to discern the extent of their relationship with one another. As new evidence and the reevaluation of old evidence emerges, research in the historical Germanic languages continues to paint a clearer picture. However, the study of possible Old English and Old Norse mutual intelligibility is a subject that is comparatively new within the field, and as such is still exploring …

Non-Native Speaker Attentional Capacity And The Processing Of English Phrasal Verb Constructions, Aubrey Dillard

Theses and Dissertations

The effect of syntactic and semantic complexity on attention and processing in second language acquisition (SLA) has long been of interest to both practitioners and researchers of SLA. Theoretical models of attention in SLA (Schmidt 1990, Tomlin and Villa 1994, Robinson 1995) have spurred a great deal of empirical research in the field, and VanPatten's (1994, 2004, 2007) work on the effect of attention to form and meaning on comprehension of input has been very influential in the field. From a language processing viewpoint, Clahsen and Felser (2006, 2009) have hypothesized that the different ways in which native and nonnative …

Wicked Intense: The Grammaticalization Of Wicked And Other Intensifiers In New Hampshire, Emma M. Brown

Honors Theses and Capstones

This article presents a synchronic study of wicked and other intensifiers in Southern New Hampshire. Two sets of data were collected: one from the social media website Twitter, and the other from spoken casual interviews conducted by students at the University of New Hampshire. In all, more than 9000 intensifiable adjectives and verbs were collected, with rates of 22 and 24 per cent intensification for the Twitter and spoken data, respectively. The first goal of this paper is to show that one intensifier in particular, wicked, is in the process of grammaticalizing through the mechanisms of desemanticization and extension …

Assessing The Validity Of Can‐Do Statements In Retrospective (Then‐Now) Self‐Assessment, N. Anthony Brown, Dan Dewey, Troy L. Cox

Faculty Publications

In this study, the authors evaluated the strengths and limitations of a self assessment based on ACTFL Can‐Do statements (ACTFL, 2013) as a tool for measuring linguistic gains over an internship abroad in Russia. They assessed its reliability, determined how its items mapped with the ACTFL scale, and measured the degree to which students’ self‐evaluations matched oral proficiency interview (OPI) test results (i.e., predictive validity). Data revealed a high level of reliability. Furthermore, self assessment items ascended in the order of difficulty expected (i.e., Superior items were the most difficult, followed by Advanced), but differences between the means for items …

Needed Research On The Englishes Of Appalachia, Bridget L. Anderson, Jennifer Cramer, Bethany K. Dumas, Beverly Olson Flanigan, Michael Montgomery

Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer

Faculty Articles

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …

Experiencias De Discriminación Lingüística En Contra De Inmigrantes De Primera Generación En El Paso, Tx, Maria Asuncion Gutierrez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

El poder simbólico del idioma, la racialización y la discriminación lingüística, no sólo afectan la forma en que las personas son tratadas dentro de una sociedad, también influencian la identidad de éstas y la manera en que son tratadas como parte de un determinado grupo. Este estudio revela las diferentes formas en que el idioma inglés es usado como poder simbólico en contra de la gente, racializándola y discriminándola porque no lo habla o lo habla con acento mexicano, ejerciendo de esta manera violencia simbólica. En este sentido, las/los inmigrantes de primera generación que no saben hablar inglés o lo …

Language Difference Between Peer And Professional Drug And Substance Abuse Counselors: What Can It Tell Us?, Lizzeth Celeste Jensen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Language studies that explore the human mind are not new. In recent years new techniques have opened new areas of investigation. One such is whether different professional groups do not merely use language in different ways, but a) "think" differently, or b) may be professionally more effective.

This is an exploratory study that uses secondary data analysis to see if difference in approach to providing help by Peer versus Professional substance use counselors, are reflected in differences of language use. For the purpose of this study Peer will stand for those counselors which, during the interview, stated they were ex-addicts …

Examining The Intersection Of The Cognitive Advantages And Disadvantages Of The Bilingual Brain, Irina Rabkina

Scripps Senior Theses

Two conflicting findings characterize cognitive processing accompanying bilingualism. The “bilingual advantage” refers to improved cognitive performance for bilingual compared to monolingual participants. Most bilingual advantages fall under the umbrella of cognitive control mechanisms, most frequently demonstrated using the Stroop task and the Simon task (e.g., Bialystok, 2008; Coderre, Van Heuven, & Conklin, 2013). The “bilingual disadvantage,” on the other hand, refers to bilinguals’ diminished performance on tasks that require word retrieval or switching between languages. This study examined the intersection of the bilingual advantage and the bilingual disadvantage to investigate whether they stem from a single cognitive control process. The …

Needed Research On The Englishes Of Appalachia, Bridget L. Anderson, Jennifer Cramer, Bethany K. Dumas, Beverly O. Flanigan, Michael Montgomery

English Faculty Publications

Information about the 79th annual meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) organized by Jennifer Cramer at the University of Kentucky on April 2012 in Lexington, Kentucky. Topics discussed at the meeting includes current state of research studies on linguistic processes in Appalachia, traditional dialectological and ethnographic. The meeting also featured panel experts including Bridget L. Anderson, Michael Montgomery and Walt Wolfram.

The (Statistical) Power Of Mechanical Turk, Amelia Kimball

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

In this paper, I argue for the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) in language research. AMT is an online marketplace of paid workers who may be used as subjects, which can greatly increase the statistical power of studies quickly and with minimal funding. I will show that—despite some obvious limitations of using distant subjects—properly designed experiments completed on AMT are trustworthy, cheap, and much faster than traditional face-to-face data collection. Not only this, but AMT workers may help with data analysis, which can greatly increase the scope of research that one researcher may carry out. This paper will first …

A Unified Analysis Of Classifiers And Reduplication Across Nominal And Verbal Domains, Charles Lam

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

This paper discusses the use of classifiers and reduplication in Cantonese. I propose a unified account for the syntax-semantics of both nouns and verbs, based on two functional layers: individuation and quantification. I demonstrate an abstract semantics that handles the interaction between classifiers and reduplication without reference to syntactic categories. Quantification (reduplication) and individuation (classifiers) can be treated as general semantic functions that subsume category-specific functions. The analysis also separates quantification from individuation to provide a natural explanation of durative readings of reduplicated unbounded events.

The Role Of The Input In Young Children’S Speech Production Is Modulated By Syllable Position, Yuanyuan Wang

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

The aim of the current study is to investigate the role of the input on an English-speaking child’s production of fricatives in onset and coda positions. Transcript data from a child-mother dyad from Providence Corpus (Demuth, Culbertson & Alter 2006) in CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000) was examined. The child and the adult production frequency of fricatives in both onset and coda positions were calculated. The results suggested the role of the input in child’s production was modulated by syllable position; more specifically, the child’s production of fricatives was predicted by the mother’s input frequency better in coda position than in …

Proceedings Of The 9th Pla Symposium, Charles Bradley, Charles Lam, Mengxi Lin

Purdue Linguistic Association Symposium

This is the combined conference proceedings of the 9th annual Purdue Linguistics Association (PLA) Symposium.

Engagement Differences For 2-Year-Olds Identified As Late Talker, Brianna E. Hendrickson, Shari L. Deveney

Special Education and Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

The investigators compared engagement in language-rich activities for 2-year-olds identified as late talkers and their typically developing peers. Participants included twelve 2-year-old children ranging in age from 24- to 33-months of age (M = 27 months; SD= 2.906), three were identified as being typically developing, five were identified as having expressive-only language delay, and four were identified as having expressive and receptive language delay. From videotaped interactions, child behaviors were coded as unengaged (e.g., uninvolved with any specific people, objects, or symbols), onlooking (e.g., watching researcher or parent activity, but not taking part), person engaged (e.g., involved solely …

Truth Is, Sentence-Initial Shell Nouns Are Showing Up Bare, Laurel Smith Stvan

Linguistics & TESOL Faculty Publications & Presentations - Archive

In one subtype of English shell noun construction, the noun serves as the subject in a pre-clausal unit, e.g., “The thing is.” Shell noun NPs have mainly been investigated synchronically, often as case studies of particular noun types, with the bare forms only ever briefly noted. Data from COCA and COHA was examined to collect the range of sentence-initial bare form shell nouns, to track any changes in their use occurring between 1810 and 2012. The findings suggest that, referentially, these abstract bare forms function differently than bare concrete count nouns, and distributionally, that bare shell forms are used increasingly …

Position Class Preclusion: A Computational Resolution Of Mutually Exclusive Affix Positions, Rebecca O. Hale

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In Paradigm Function Morphology, it is usual to model affix position classes with an ordered sequence of inflectional rule blocks. Each rule block determines how (or whether) a particular affix position is filled. In this model, competition among inflectional rules is assumed to be limited to members of the same rule block; thus, the appearance of an affix in one position cannot be precluded by the appearance of an affix in another position. I present evidence that apparently disconfirms this restriction and suggests that a more general conception of rule competition is necessary. The data appear to imply that an …

Pronominal Complex Predicates In Colloquial Persian, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Pronominal complex predicates in colloquial Persian are periphrastic constructions with an idiosyncratic syntactic pattern. They show a peculiar behavior compared to the regular agreement system in Persian, and they are the only construction in Persian which requires the obligatory presence of a pronominal enclitic. This work is an attempt to analyze this construction in order to find its function. For this purpose, a lexical semantic classification of them was proposed, which helped in presenting a new analysis. It was found out that this construction is used to express a particular diathesis in which the topic of the sentence (determined according …