Linguistics Commons^™

A Systematic Literature Review On Spam Content Detection And Classification, Sanaa Kaddoura, Ganesh Chandrasekaran, Daniela Elena Popescu, Jude Hemanth Duraisamy

All Works

The presence of spam content in social media is tremendously increasing, and therefore the detection of spam has become vital. The spam contents increase as people extensively use social media, i.e ., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and E-mail. The time spent by people using social media is overgrowing, especially in the time of the pandemic. Users get a lot of text messages through social media, and they cannot recognize the spam content in these messages. Spam messages contain malicious links, apps, fake accounts, fake news, reviews, rumors, etc. To improve social media security, the detection and control of spam text are …

Ethnic Differences In Lbms Structure, Lisa M. Johnson

Faculty Publications

This poster reports on structural correlations between low back vowel merger/position and front lax vowel lowering/retraction (Low-Back-Merger Shift or LBMS). Based on analyses of word list recordings from two groups of Utah teens (Pacific Islanders and Euro Americans), I argue that the position of BOT affects the front vowels in the two ethnic groups differently: while the F1 of EA front vowels is inversely correlated with BOT F1, PI front vowels appear to be more sensitive to BOT F2. These results highlight the structural complexity of LBMS and the importance of recruiting ethnically diverse groups of participants for such studies.

Language Interfaces In Adult Heritage Language Acquisition: A Study On Encoding Of Nominal Reference In Mandarin Chinese As A Heritage Language, Jing Jin, Sihui Echo Ke, John Chi-Kin Lee

Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Publications

According to the Interface Hypothesis in the field of bilingualism, the interface connecting a linguistic module with a language-external domain (e.g., syntax-discourse) will present prolonged difficulties for adult bilingual learners, as compared with the interface connecting language-internal modules (e.g., syntax-semantics). This study tested whether the Interface Hypothesis is applicable to the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language. An internet-based acceptability judgment task (AJT) was administered to 58 advanced and intermediate adult Chinese heritage speakers to collect data in accuracy and reaction time to investigate the adult heritage speakers’ mastery of referential nominal expressions regulated at the syntax-semantics and …

Voice Training Through "The Mirror And The Lamp", Rockford Sansom

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“You Keep Using That Word”: Why Privacy Doesn’T Mean What Lawyers Think, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

This article explores how the need to define privacy has impeded our ability to protect it in law.

The meaning of “privacy” is notoriously hard to pin down. This article contends that the problem is not with the word “privacy,” but with the act of trying to pin it down. The problem lies with the act of definition itself and is particularly acute when the words in question have deep-seated and longstanding common-language meanings, such as liberty, freedom, dignity, and certainly privacy. If one wishes to determine what words like these actually mean to people, definition is the wrong tool …

Morphosyntactic Variation In Bantu: Focus On East Africa, Peter Edelsten, Hannah Gibson, Rozenn Guérois, Gastor Mapunda, Lutz Marten, Julius Taji

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

Recent studies have developed a systematic approach to morphosyntactic variation among Bantu languages, taking well-known and widely attested construction types as a starting point and sketching their distribution across the family. One such approach, Guérois et al. (2017), utilises 142 morphosyntactic parameters or features, across a sample of some 50 Bantu languages (Marten et al. 2018). The present paper builds on this work and focusses on 10 parameters of variation where there is a significant difference between the values for East African Bantu languages and non-East African Bantu languages of the sample. The parameters relate to areas such as noun …

A Linguistic Analysis Of Rukiga Personal Names, Allen Asiimwe

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

The goal of the paper is to provide a linguistic description of the structure of personal names in a lesser studied Bantu language of Uganda, Rukiga (JE14). Data show that Rukiga personal names are presented as lexical entities but with underlying elaborate grammatical structures derived from the syntax, morphology, phonology and the lexicon of the language. Personal names in Rukiga form a special category of nouns derived from nouns, adjectives, verbs, phrases, clauses and full sentences. This study establishes that truncation, affixal derivation, lexicalization of phrases, clauses and sentences are employed in name-formation. The study further reveals that the socio-cultural …

The Structure Of The Iraqw Noun Phrase, Chrispina Alphonce

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

The structure of the noun phrase (NP) is demonstrated to differ among languages. Albeit studies that paid attention on Southern Cushitic languages in general and Iraqw in particular, their contribution is selective to the general grammar of the language while the structure of the NP is scarcely described. This study contributes to the description of the language through an empirical explanation of the elements and the morphosyntactic properties of the NP in the language. It describes the orders of the elements, their co-occurrence, and constraints to illuminate the structure of the NP of the language. It draws on the data …

“They’Re Plotting Against Us”: Public Narratives Utilised By Kenyan Community-Based Organisations Advocating For Land Rights, Billian Khalayi Otundo, Anne Nangulu

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

The narratives of Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) are significant for linguistic analysis as they provide natural data in highly emotional public discourses. In Kenya, any topic or discourse on land injustice is a highly emotive venture. In the same vein, public narratives are relevant to provide evidence for evaluations of language choice, power, and authority, as well as the linguistic communication of emotion. In this respect, emotion-provoking narratives are highly important phenomena that are hardly ever absent in the public discourse of CBOs advocating for land rights. Within the framing rhetoric of social movements, we explore how these groups frame land …

Pragmatic Inferences Of Locative Enclitics In Luganda, Moureen Nanteza

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

This paper examines the non-locative functions of locative enclitics in Luganda (JE 15). Locative enclitics are words which cannot stand alone but attach on a verb to make meaning. Their status is ambiguous between free word and affix, hence motivating their analysis as enclitics. The enclitics are attached on the post final position of their hosts. Although the locative enclitics occur regularly in some Bantu languages (Luganda, Runyankore-Rukiga, Runyoro- Rutooro, Lunda, Ikizu, Fwe, Chichewa, Kinyarwanda among others), they have not been widely studied in the literature. The paper looks at verbal locative enclitics only but the locative enclitics also appear …

Many Voices: Participants As Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Working Learners In An Workplace Learning Ecosystem, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

“My Background Is A Little Bit More Than What I Am Now", 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Direct Supervisor: Insights From Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

Part of our research process has been to engage the voices of individuals involved in employer-supported education and training initiatives or otherwise impacted by the issues we have been investigating. To this end, we hosted a series of convenings to discuss our findings and invited a group of12 interested parties who represented a range of backgrounds and experience in the workforce development system to respond to our initial observations, to make sure that we are doing things that were relevant and useful, and to identify things that we had missed or that we didn't get right.

What Do We Mean By Learning?, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

There is no one way a working learner interacts in the workplace to learn. Nor is there just one set of initiatives in the field that promote learning. Learning is a set of interactions that depend on the context, the conditions, the learner, and the learner's goals.

Missing Persona: Insights From Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Code-Switching And Advising In Multilingual African Situations: An Analysis Of Radio Phone-In Programmes In Kenya And Cameroon, Billian Khalayi Otundo, Susanne Mühleisen

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

Radio phone-in programmes are relevant for linguistic analysis in multilingual contexts, like Kenya and Cameroon, because they provide relatively natural data in expert-user and user-user contexts in an often emotional interactive environment. Any topic on relationships is an emotive undertaking in any society given the varied cultural disparities. In radio phone-in programmes, speech activities such as advice-giving and advice-receiving are also performed symmetrically or asymmetrically. In this media format, code-switching is a highly important phenomenon that is an expected and unconscious part of the linguistic behaviour of multilingual speakers. Switches between languages are highly relevant since they provide evidence for …

Some Notes On The "Needs Washed" Construction, Jim Wood, Josephine Holubkov, Ian Neidel, Kaija Gahm

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper describes the geographic and social factors that correlate with the acceptability of the needs washed construction, based on the results of recent survey data. After briefly describing the survey methods, we discuss several ways to analyze the geographic distribution of the construction, focusing on the distribution of “hot” and “cold” spots across different versions of the construction. We find certain core areas where the construction is highly accepted, as well as core areas where the construction is highly rejected. Our survey looks at the effect of verb (need, want, like, and love), tense/modality …

Complexifying Paid Learning, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Endangered Languages: A Sketch Of The Sengwer Sound System, Jamas Nandako

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

Within the next century as many as half of the world’s seven thousand languages, are poised to become extinct at an alarmingly accelerated rate (Evans 2010). This correlates to a loss of knowledge, collective and individual identities, and social values. This loss is not only one of the most serious issues facing humanity today, but also it is representative of an unspeakable loss of information invaluable to humanity. This is so because these languages are among our few sources of evidence for understanding human history and each of these languages embodies unique local knowledge of the cultures and natural systems …