Linguistics Commons^™

Automatic Transcription Of Northern Prinmi Oral Art: Approaches And Challenges To Automatic Speech Recognition For Language Documentation, Connor Bechler

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

One significant issue facing language documentation efforts is the transcription bottleneck: each documented recording must be transcribed and annotated, and these tasks are extremely labor intensive (Ćavar et al., 2016). Researchers have sought to accelerate these tasks with partial automation via forced alignment, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) (Neubig et al., 2020). Neural network—especially transformer-based—approaches have enabled large advances in ASR over the last decade. Models like XLSR-53 promise improved performance on under-resourced languages by leveraging massive data sets from many different languages (Conneau et al., 2020). This project extends these efforts to a novel context, applying …

Generic Interpretations Of Possessive Recursion In English-Speaking Children, Tyler Poisson, Jill De Villiers, Hirsto Kyuchukov, Bea Weinand, Lilly Young, Sofia Morales, Laisha Aniceto

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Two-part s-possessives such as the dad’s kid’s bike admit at least two distinct interpretations: the dad has a kid who has a bike, or the dad has a bike that is made for kids. We propose that the former interpretation derives from recursively embedding DP-possessives, whereas the latter derives from representing kid’s bike asa generic NP-possessive. Accordingly, in the right context, two-part s-possessives are fully ambiguous for adults between ‘recursive’ and ‘generic’ readings. These readings can be disambiguated syntactically. Consider the difference in meaning when we insert a relative clause and extract the constituent kid’s bike—the kid’s bike that is …

Teaching Culture In The Argentinian Efl Classroom: Beliefs, Practice And Challenges, María Mercedes Sempé

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The need to address culture in EFL/ESL classrooms has been stressed by scholars in the SLA field for decades (see Kramsch, 1993, 2009, 2011; Byram, 1988; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). The original intention of working with culture in the English classes as a means to develop language proficiency –sociocultural competence– was expanded, and nowadays, the focus is on the role culture instruction has in developing empathy and respect for other ways of living and in promoting reflection about learners’ own lifestyle –intercultural competence (Byram, 1988, 2008; Deardoff, 2006). This new focus on cultural instruction is reflected in national curriculums around …

Rechazos Del Español: Una Comparación De Mexicanos Monolingües, Hablantes De Herencia Y Aprendices De Español, Maribel Fernández Moctezuma

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Learners of Spanish as a second language can use advanced grammatical structures, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions and have good pronunciation and communication skills. However, the speech act of refusal is not a natural act for them. The aim of this study is to analyze the structure and function of the refusal speech act by comparing three populations: 1) monolingual Mexicans, 2) Spanish heritage speakers and 3) second-language learners of Spanish (3 groups). This research will serve and help heritage speakers and Spanish learners improve their communicative competence to express themselves more clearly and concisely, as well as learn to communicate more …

Corpus Of Founding Era American English: Designing A Corpus For Interpreting The United States Constitution, Brett James Hashimoto

Faculty Publications

The original meaning of words or phrases is often in dispute in Founding Era legislation, especially the US Constitution. The Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) accurately provides evidence for the meaning of contested terms during the Founding Era. COFEA consists of 126,394 texts and over 136 million words. This corpus has been and is being used by legal researchers and interpreters in scholarly research as well as various courts, including the Supreme Court. This paper describes the motivation for the creation of COFEA and describes the process of designing and collecting the corpus.

The Missionary Voice: Perceptions Of An Emerging Register, Josh Stevenson, Joseph A. Stanley, Wendy Baker-Smemoe

Faculty Publications

Today’s presentation is on a particular way of speaking among certain members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Specifically, today I’ll be telling you about Latter-day Saint missionaries, who you may encountered before. Let’s set aside any preconceived notions you may have about missionaries or their faith and explore what appears to be an emerging missionary-based register.

In essence, missionaries are Latter-day Saint volunteers who dedicate 18 months to two years to tell others about their faith. They’re assigned around the world and often have to learn a new language, are typically college-aged, and adhere to strict …

Enriching Our Understanding Of Language Change With Vowel Formant Trajectories, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

American English vowels are variable in pronunciation

• ban vs. bat, too vs. boo
• feel vs. fill, [bæt] vs. [bæ̞̙ t]

We can categorize these differences:

Shifts:

• I pronounce /u/ fronter than my grandparents do.
• My students pronounce /æ/ as lower and more centralized than I do.

Mergers:

• For me, cot and caught are distinct; for 95% of my students, they’re homophones
• In Utah, feel and fill are often pronounced the same

Language change happens as some variants spread to more and more people.

"Does This Make Sense?": The Effect Of Congruent Guise In Regional Accent On Grammatical Acceptability Judgments, Nour Kayali

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with congruent or incongruent social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgement task. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a congruent place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgement of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

Language Values Guide, Bank Street College Of Education. School For Children

All Faculty and Staff Papers and Presentations

Designed to be used as a tool and to provide useful information on our daily interactions with both adults and children. The purpose of this guide is to continue educating our community toward maintaining a safe and inclusive community by recognizing what we say does matter. This guide will be used as a support document throughout the College, including with our partners, so we share a common language that respects both individuals and groups.

Impact Of Accent On Receptive Language Assessments For Bilingual Children, Katherine Stariknok

Honors Theses and Capstones

Language assessments are used to screen and diagnose children with language disorders. Many speech-language pathologists (SLP) practicing in Spanish in the United States do not speak Spanish as their first language, so they are administering these assessments in accented speech. This study aims to find what effect an SLP’s accent will have on a bilingual child’s language assessment. Initial findings show that participants were largely able to understand words in the L2 accent, with most of the errors due to several repeating consonantal features (i.e., voicing alone; place and manner of articulation). The broader impact of this work is to …

N-Gram Text Classification On Standard Croatian, Bosnian And Serbian, Kegan Messmer

Honors Theses and Capstones

This study attempts to use three different kinds of n-gram text classification models to differentiate the standard forms of Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian. These three languages, along with Montenegrin, were once considered one language, collectively termed “Serbo-Croatian”. These languages share a common South Slavic ancestry, and there is an argument to be made that their novel status as distinct languages is due to non-linguistic factors, such as culture and politics. This study uses 300,000 sentences from each language, sourced from Wikipedia pages written in the standard forms of each language. Three different classifiers were used: one unigram, one bigram, and …

In Search Of Founding Era Registers: Automatic Modeling Of Registers From The Corpus Of Founding Era American English, Liina Repo, Brett James Hashimoto, Veronika Laippala

Faculty Publications

Registers are situationally defined text varieties, such as letters, essays, or news articles, that are considered to be one of the most important predictors of linguistic variation. Often historical databases of language lack register information, which could greatly enhance their usability (e.g. Early English Books Online). This article examines register variation in Late Modern English and automatic register identification in historical corpora. We model register variation in the corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA) and develop machine-learning methods for automatic register identification in COFEA. We also extract and analyze the most significant grammatical characteristics estimated by the classifier for …

“A Change Of Name During Sickness”: Surveying The Widespread Practice Of Renaming In Response To Physical Illness, Russell Fielding

Honors College Faculty Publications

This paper synthesizes and summarizes a selection of literature—largely anthropological and ethnographic, published between the early 18^th and early21^st centuries—that describes the practice of renaming gapers onwho is physically ill in order to affect their recovery. In none of these publications is this particular practice central; rather, it is often mentioned alongside myriad other cultural and naming practices. While no claim is made as to the exhaustive nature of the literature review, this analysis reveals patterns and similarities related to the reasoning behind such a practice and the special relationship between personal names and physical health in a …

Removing The Masc: Dismantling Gendered Occupations Through Social Work Education, Austin M. Raines

DSW Capstone Projects

The “Masculine mystique” refers to a psychological mask that men wear, enabling them to maintain power and distance themselves from traits associated with femininity” (Kahn, 2009, p. 283). This capstone project seeks to solve the Social Work Grand Challenge of improving the lives that hegemonic masculinity harms and limits. It emphasizes the relationship between the two areas of life (work-home), once thought to exist in different realms but are today more interwoven than ever (Lin & Burgard, 2018; Sok et al., 2014). Men have higher rates of traumatic injuries and exposure to significant physical risks, violence hazards, and stricter normative …

‘A Category Of Their Own’: Quantitative Methods In The Use Of Pile-Sort Data In Perceptual Dialectology, Zachary Ty Gill

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The purpose of this study is to investigate how Mississippi Gulf Coast Creoles perceive language differences in their home area. A pile-sort task was carried out in which respondents were given stacks of cards with local communities written on them and instructed to stack together the regions where people “talk the same.” Once the piles were made, the fieldworker discussed their sortings with the respondents. The stacks were analyzed by means of a hierarchal agglomerative cluster analysis and non-parametric multidimensional scaling with k-means cluster analysis overlays to extract the perceived dialect areas. The groupings reveal that respondent strategies are based …

Language Ideologies In Deep South Korea: Voices Of Jeollanamdo English Teachers, Ian Schneider

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Language ideologies serve as shared beliefs and key frames that link language and society, mediating both macro-level social forces and micro-level interactions. Through this lens, this thesis compares the ideological perspectives and experiences of expatriate and local English teachers working in secondary-level schools in the rural province of Jeollanamdo, South Korea. Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, this study argues for complexity and nuance in how language teachers from distinct backgrounds perceive and negotiate dominant English language ideologies in Korean society. Moreover, these ideological perspectives differ between teachers of local and expatriate backgrounds, or teachers working in urban and rural …

Rhyming Tactics In Korean Hip-Hop With Two Approaches Of English And Korean Syllable Structures, Gihyun Gal

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Rhyming Tactics in Korean Hip-Hop with Two Approaches of English and Korean Syllable Structures

Today, Korean Hip-Hop (KHH) has been slowly moving beyond a localized pop culture through the internet and media. This study finds that rhyming patterns in KHH are much more complex than prior research suggests. Especially, this study focuses on an evolution of Korean Hip-Hop through the time such as since 1989 to 2015. Park (2016) discusses how Korean rappers think about using rhyming tactics as "[m]over, the concept of rhyming was not conceptualized as belonging to the Korean language by most of rappers. Even if rappers …

Perceptual Dialectology Of Tulsan Speakers Of English, Andrew Carter

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The present study analyzes new interviews from fifteen Tulsan speakers of English and maps produced by draw-a-map tasks. The interviews and subsequent map tasks were conducted over the course of the winter of 2021 for the purpose of this thesis and have been analyzed for folk linguistic information about the perceptions of Tulsa and the rest of the state. The study finds that Tulsan speakers hold similar dialectal perceptions about both their own city and other locations as their fellow Oklahomans, and also provides evidence of a deteriorating faith among Tulsans in the existence of the northern-southern dialectal divide compared …

It's Football Time In The Bluegrass!: The Community Of Uk Football Athletes & Fans And Their Shared Language & Religious Practices, Virginia Anderson

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis observes how University of Kentucky fans and athletes create both a community and a religious experience surrounding the sport of football through their use of language. Fans and athletes took part in interviews that implicitly asked about religious experiences and community. Once the interviews were completed, they were transcribed and underwent open thematic coding. Themes were gathered from the interviews and compared to determine if the fans and athletes were separate subcommunities or if they were simply part of the at-large University of Kentucky football program community. These themes also aided in determining if and how fans and …

“Local, But Intelligent”: Language Ideologies In The Informant Biographies Of The Linguistic Atlas Project, Nicholas A. Passarelli

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis argues for the relevance of the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) for studies of language ideologies, indexicality, and enregisterment. The LAP represents the largest dialect survey of North American English to date, offering an abundance of historical linguistic data for research in dialectology, linguistic geography, and variation over space and time. Additionally, the LAP also contains additional sources of sociolinguistic data, including informant biographies — documents written by fieldworkers at the conclusion of the LAP interview that summarize an informant’s demographic profile, as well as their personality, speech, and caliber as an interviewee. Rife with subjective judgments from the …