Linguistics Commons^™

Pragmatic Impairments, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

This review essay addresses the question, "What, properly speaking, is a pragmatic impairment?" Drawing on work from two recent books, it presents three possible answers, and evaluates them.

Phonological Awareness And Its Affect On Second Language Acquisition, Mallory Ann Ruiz

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the role phonological awareness plays in the second language (L2) classroom among English as Second Language (ESL) learners. In order to better understand the reasons behind second language (L2) student's phonological improvements, phonological awareness was tested to see what affect, if any, it had on student's intelligible speech. Six English as Second Language (ESL) college students participated in the study in which they provided three audio recordings of their English speech over the course of ten weeks.

Bridging The Gap: Composition Studies And Applied Linguistics/Teaching English As A Second Language In The Writing Center, Chloe Anne De Los Reyes

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis offers a critical comparison of how the fields of Composition Studies and Applied Linguistics and Teaching English as a Second Language inform the tutoring of second language writers in writing centers. It examines where the two fields diverge and intersect in order to identify what knowledge can be useful from each working with the other. The thesis discusses implications of the findings as well as offers reccommendations for a richer tutoring of second language writers (L2 writers) in the writing centers.

Identity Through Change And Substitutivity Salva Veritate, Ray Elugardo, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

This paper has three modest aims: to present a puzzle, to show why some obvious solutions aren’t really “easy outs”, and to introduce our own solution. The puzzle is this. When it was small and had waterlogged streets, Toronto carried the moniker ‘Muddy York’. Later, the streets were drained, it grew, and Muddy York officially changed its name to ‘Toronto’. Given this, each premise in the following argument seems true. Yet the conclusion is a contraction. P1: Muddy York = Toronto P2: Muddy York evolved into Toronto P3: The context “__ evolved into Toronto” is transparent, i.e., it allows substitution …

Philosophy Of Language, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Specification And Inversion: Evidence From Malagasy, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper analyzes specificational sentences in Malagasy and shows that such sentences involve obligatory inversion, marked by the topic particle dia. I argue that the topicalized element is a small clause predicate that inverts with its subject. Two competing analyses of this inversion are compared and contrasted. I conclude with a brief comparison of Malagasy and Tagalog.

The Contribution Of Domain Specificity In The Highly Modular Mind, Axel Barcelo Aspeitia, Angeles Erana, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

Is there a notion of domain specificity which affords genuine insight in the context of the highly modular mind, i.e. a mind which has not only input modules, but also central ‘conceptual’ modules? Our answer to this question is no. The main argument is simple enough: we lay out some constraints that a theoretically useful notion of domain specificity, in the context of the highly modular mind, would need to meet. We then survey a host of accounts of what domain specificity is, based on the intuitive idea that a domain specific mechanism is restricted in the kind of information …

Differential Pragmatic Abilities And Autism Spectrum Disorders: The Case Of Pragmatic Determinants Of Literal Content, Jessica De Villiers, Brooke Myers, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Contextualism In Epistemology And The Context Sensitivity Of 'Knows', Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

The central issue of this paper is whether contextualism in epistemology is genuinely in conflict with recent claims that ‘know’ is not in fact a context sensitive word. To address this question, I’ll first rehearse three key aims of contextualists and the broad strategy they adopt for achieving them. I then introduce two linguistic arguments to the effect that the lexical item ‘know’ is not context sensitive: one from Herman Cappelen & Ernie Lepore, one from Jason Stanley. I find these and related arguments quite compelling. In particular, I think Cappelen & Lepore (2003, 2005a) show pretty definitively that ‘know’ …

Clinical Pragmatics, By Louise Cummings, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Language Matters: A Guide To Everyday Questions About Language, Donna Jo Napoli, V. Lee-Schoenfeld

Linguistics Faculty Works

Is Ebonics really a dialect or simply bad English? Do women and men speak differently? Will computers ever really learn human language? Does offensive language harm children? These are only a few of the issues surrounding language that crop up every day. Most of us have very definite opinions on these questions one way or another. Yet as linguists Donna Jo Napoli and Vera Lee-Schoenfeld point out in this short and thoroughly readable volume, many of our most deeply held ideas about the nature of language and its role in our lives are either misconceived or influenced by myths and …

Cover Puzzle, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Crossword Puzzle featured on the cover of "The Playful Brian: The Surprising Science of How Puzzles Improve your Mind".

Talking To Strangers--A Sociolinguistic Experiment: Variation In Initial Dyadic Interactions Between Spanish-Speakers In Early 21st Century Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mary Ann Dziugis

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

What are the chances of a dyad of Spanish-speaking strangers using informal address in casual, initial interactions in Buenos Aires, Argentina, today? To discover the pattern(s) of contemporary address, the Principal Investigator (PI) conducted a sociolinguistic experiment focusing on strangers' initial interactions to minimize the influence of Brown and Gilman's (1960) dimensions of power and solidarity on address variation. To gather natural and reported speech, the PI used mixed methodologies: participant observation, TV news, survey questionnaires, and interviews. She enhanced the authenticity of reported speech via the use of her new tool--a photo interlocutor prompter sheet. The research consisted of …

Articulations Of Identity Within High School Cliques: Language Choices In Boyat And Emo Filipino Youth Groups, Dalal Saleh Almubayei

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation adds to work exploring where language stands in the shaping of adolescent speakers' social identities, since identities emerge through discursive and social practices, and social selves are produced through interaction (Bucholtz 1999), but much of the literature studying the role of language in defining the adolescent's identity is insufficient (Fortman 2003). This study is based on data from five months of fieldwork in 2008-2009 with two distinct and stigmatized high school cliques in Kuwait. The first clique is well known for its Arabish name boyat 'lesbian tomboys'. The second clique is a combination of Emo subculture and Filipino …

Like Finding A Needle In A Haystack: Annotating The American National Corpus For Idiomatic Expressions, Laura Street, Nathan Michalov, Rachel Silverstein, Michael Reynolds, Lurdes Ruela, Felicia Flowers, Angela Talucci, Priscilla Pereira, Gabriella Morgon, Samantha Siegel, Marci Barousse, Antequa Anderson, Tashom Carroll, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper presents the details of a pilot study in which we tagged portions of the American National Corpus (ANC) for idioms composed of verb-noun constructions, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. The three data sets we analyzed included 1, 500-sentence samples from the spoken, the non-fiction, and the fiction portions of the ANC. This paper provides the details of the tagset we developed, the motivation behind our choices, and the inter-annotator agreement measures we deemed appropriate for this task. In tagging the ANC for idiomatic expressions, our annotators achieved a high level of agreement (< .80) on the tags but a low level of agreement (>.00) on what constituted an …

Planteamientos Colaborativos En La Didáctica De La Composición Desde Modelos Procesuales, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

El presente artículo parte de una revisión del modelo tradicional de la enseñanza de la escritura en la clase de LE entendida como producto. Desde este punto de partida, se evidencian las ventajas de adoptar una escritura colaborativa basada en la consideración del texto como un proceso en construcción que pasa por diferentes fases creativas y en un modelo pedagógico que centra su atención en el alumno dentro de la práctica escrita.

SUMMARY: In the initial part of this article, we begin with a review of the traditional model of teaching composition in a foreign language class in which writing …

Realkeepen: Anglicisms In The German Hip-Hop Community, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Round Vowel And Dorsal Consonant Epenthesis In Seri, Stephen A. Marlett

Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session

Recent work on markedness has claimed that round vowels and dorsal consonants are never epenthesized. However, Seri seems to present exactly these types of epenthesis. Relevant data are presented and discussed, and it is claimed that these rules are valid counterexamples that need to be taken into consideration more seriously.

A Declarative Approach To Language Change: Regularization As Realignment, Andrew R. Hippisley

Linguistics Faculty Publications

In this paper I consider how best to model lexical regularization as a type of language change, and more specifically how to capture regularization when it is a question of realigning the syntactic function with the expected morphological expression. While it seems natural to approach language change in procedural terms, I will argue that a declarative/static approach is more natural for at least certain types of lexical change, specifically change that involves a reorganization of the paradigm. This account is modeled in the defaults-based framework of Network Morphology (Corbett & Fraser 1993; Brown & Hippisley forthcoming).

Voice And Valence-Altering Operations In Falam Chin: A Role And Reference Grammar Approach, Deborah King

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation describes and analyzes voice and valence-altering operations in Falam Chin, a Tibeto-Burman language of Burma. The data is explained within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), which supplies several key concepts particularly useful for generalizing the behavior of the Falam Chin operations. The first is RRG's system of semantic decomposition, based on Dowty (1979), which is used to formulate each predicate's underlying logical structure (LS). Second is the concept of macroroles, generalized semantic roles actor and undergoer, which are assigned to the arguments of a predicate according to a hierarchy of LS positions. M-transitivity refers to …