Linguistics Commons^™

Trademark Fame And Corpus Linguistics, Jake Linford, Kyra Nelson

Scholarly Publications

Trademark law recognizes that the same word can mean different things in different commercial contexts. Legal protection might extend to two or more owners who use the same symbol (like Delta) to indicate different sources of disparate goods or services, such as airlines and faucets. Generally, only those uses that threaten to confuse consumers-the use of similar symbols on identical or related goods-are subject to legal sanction.

But the law extends special protection to famous trademarks, not only against confusing use, but also against dilution: non-confusing use that blurs or tarnishes the distinctiveness of the famous mark. The result of …

A Micro-Typology Of Contact Effects In Four Tibeto-Burman Languages, Kristine Hildebrandt, Oliver Bond, Dubi Nanda Dhakal

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

When minority languages with similar typological profiles are in long-term contact with a genealogically unrelated socioeconomically dominant language, the perfect context is provided for investigating which observed contact effects are demonstrably allied to sociolinguistic dynamics rather than purely structural ones. This paper investigates the factors determining the different extent of contact effects in four Tibeto-Burman languages (Gurung, Gyalsumdo, Nar-Phu, and Manange) spoken in a geo-politically defined and multilingual region of Nepal. Using corpus data and sociolinguistic interviews collected in the field, we demonstrate that a range of social, economic and geo-spatial factors contribute to asymmetries where contact effects are observed …

Limitations Of Our Working Learner Persona: Insights From Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Learning And Advancement: 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 of 12 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.

Participants in the …

Synthesizing And Disseminating Research Findings Digitally, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Reading Comprehension Constrains Word Reading: A Tongue Twister Study By Moderating Attentional Control, Xueying Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Numerous research studies show word reading performance influences reading comprehension. Few studies investigate how reading comprehension influences word reading. The current study explores whether alleviating the attention required for reading comprehension correlates with a better word reading performance. Three types of tongue twister reading tasks that involve recall (RR), semantic priming (PP), and instructional focus on the phonological information (PF) all have a high demand for attention on word reading. Differently, the attention demanded by PP tasks on reading comprehension is smaller than RR and RF tasks. Numbers of speech errors are used to manifest the variability of these three …

A Corpus Study Of The Development Of The Adjective Phrase In French Children, Avery Elizabeth Baggett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis I attempt to answer three questions:

H1) Do children use proportionally more prenominal or post-nominal placement of adjectives than adults?

H2) Are children more conservative or more creative in their behavior in alternating prenominal and post-nominal placement of adjectives?

H3) If colored terms are more frequent in child speech will they pattern more like prenominal adjectives or more like post nominal adjectives, as in adult speech?

To do this, I examine two general semantic viewpoints, opting to use Scontras & Goodman (2017) subjectivity hypothesis. Next, I provide a general overview of First Language Acquisition research and then …

Fighting 'Stance': The Role Of Conversational Positioning In League Of Legends (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) Discourse, William Breslove

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

For researchers, the study of video game players - how they behave, interact, and cooperate in a virtual world – presents a challenge: what methodologies are best suited to approaching these interactions? From a sociolinguistic approach, how do gamers converse, and what do these conversations reveal about epistemic, affective, and political relationships? This study uses John DuBois’ Stance Theory (2007) and recent modifications of it (Kiesling 2022), to analyze data gathered from the popular multiplayer online battle-arena (MOBA) game League of Legends. It focuses on in-game interlocutors’ conversation samples to show their positioning, intersubjective alignment, and evaluation of a …

Microvariation In Verbal Rather, Jim Wood

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper uses survey results and interactive mapping tools to analyze correlations across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather, in particular with participial morphology, as in rathered. Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb HAVE. The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but …

The Axis Of Access: A Quantitative Ethnography Of Presidential Discourse On The Construct Of College Access In The United States, Pamela M. Donnelly

Theses and Dissertations

Federal discourse pertaining to college access requires clarified definition. Use of the college access construct has become commonplace, yet no unified refinement of meaning exists. This study, which covered U.S. presidential communications from January 2009 to October 2021, addressed the abstraction of language as leaders presented ideas, policies, and opinions. Observable trends impacting social mobility for students from underserved populations were of central interest. The research methodology, Quantitative Ethnography (QE), used the tool of Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). Eight codes were identified through grounded analysis: Affordability, Pathway Program, Underserved Populations, Class Systems, Upward Mobility, Career Readiness, Trajectory, and Career Technical …

The Role Of Word Knowledge In Error Detection: A Challenge To The Broken-Error-Monitor Account Of Dyslexia, Lindsay N. Harris, Benjamin Creed, Charles A. Perfetti, Benjamin Rickles

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

Dyslexic children often fail to correct errors while reading aloud, and dyslexic adolescents and adults exhibit lower amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN)—the neural response to errors—than typical readers during silent reading. Past researchers therefore suggested that dyslexia may arise from a faulty error-detection mechanism that interferes with orthographic learning and text comprehension. An alternative possibility is that comprehension difficulty in dyslexics is primarily a downstream effect of low-quality lexical representations—that is, poor word knowledge. On this view the attenuated ERN in dyslexics is a byproduct, rather than a source, of underdeveloped orthographic knowledge. Because the second view implies a …

A Critical Biography Of John Algeo: From Historical Linguist To Dialectologist, Lindy Sipes

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This critical biography of lexicographer, linguist, and dialectologist Dr. John Algeo delves into his corpus of research data and notes and seeks to analyze his methods and the resulting wealth of publications derived from their compilation. It also aims provide a succinct overview of his life and career. Algeo experienced many changes within these fields; perhaps most notably, the advent of technological advances that made data collection and storage easier, such as the Internet and computer processes. As a result, his work lends itself as an incredible historic model and, as such, will be compared to current techniques of dictionary-making. …

Maya-Kwobabiny: Re-Embedding Language At Kepa Kurl, Western Australia, Clint Bracknell, Amy Budrikis, Roma Yibiyung Winmar

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This paper describes a Nyungar language revitalisation project in the southern region of Western Australia conducted in partnership between a university research team and the Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation. It discusses how linguistic analysis of historical Nyungar documentation was essential to addressing community aims of re-embedding the language into the community, developing and using pedagogical resources, and exploring new domains for language use. In particular, this paper focuses on the community’s desire for the reclamation of a dialectal flavour of Nyungar that is distinctive to the Esperance region, and the factors contributing to a successful partnership between the …

Factors That Affect Native English Speakers’ Comfort Levels When Communicating With Non-Native English Speakers, Kayla Nymeyer, Dan Dewey, William Eggington, Wendy Baker-Smemoe

Faculty Publications

This study explores native English speakers’ (NESs) self reported comfort levels when speaking with non-native English speakers (NNESs) from different first language (L1) backgrounds and in six different communication situations. NESs (n=122) listened to Spanish L1 and Chinese L1 NNESs with low, mid or high levels of English proficiency and rated their comfort level interacting with them. Results indicated that higher proficiency speakers were rated significantly higher (more comfortable as interlocutors) than Mid which were in turn rated higher than Low proficiency speakers. Spanish L1 speakers were rated higher than Chinese L1 speakers except at low proficiency levels. Ratings for …

Multidimensional Signals And Analytic Flexibility: Estimating Degrees Of Freedom In Human-Speech Analyses, Stefano Coretta, Joseph V. Casillas, Joseph A. Stanley, Timo B. Roettger

Faculty Publications

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis that can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time. Even greater flexibility is to be expected in fields in which the primary data lend themselves to a variety of possible operationalizations. The multidimensional, temporally extended nature of speech constitutes an ideal testing ground for assessing the variability in analytic approaches, which derives not only …

Order Of Operations In Sociophonetic Analysis, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

In modern sociophonetic data analysis, a researcher makes numerous decisions when processing their data. Many of the “big” decisions include how data is collected, how audio is transcribed, how these transcriptions are aligned to the audio, and how acoustic measurements are extracted. Once a spreadsheet of numbers has been generated, further decisions must be made regarding normalization, detecting and handling outliers, and excluding tokens irrelevant to the research question. This paper takes a closer look at this second group of decisions—those made after acoustic measurements have been extracted—and shows that the order in which they are applied can have significant …

How Sample Size Impacts Pillai Scores: And What Sociophoneticians Should Do About It, Joseph A. Stanley, Betsy Sneller

Faculty Publications

Pillai scores in Sociolinguistics

• A way to quantify overlap in multiple dimensions (e.g., F1, F2, duration) (Hay et al., 2006; Nycz & Hall-Lew 2013)
• Some concern about unequal vowel categories sizes (Johnson 2015; convo on Twitter June 2, 2021)
• Our solution: a big simulation to show exactly what impact sample size has on Pillai scores

The Simulation

1. Start with a single bivariate normal distribution.

2. Sample two “vowel classes” from this distribution. – Ground Truth is they’re merged.

3. Calculate the Pillai score – Should be close to 0 because they’re merged!

4. Repeat many, many times.

Clitic Doubling: The Case Of Nariño Andean Spanish, Jessica Paola Jurado Eraso

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis examines the behavior of clitic doubling in Nariñense, a little-studied Andean Spanish variety spoken in the southwest of Colombia, and compares it to well-studied varieties such as standard Peninsular, Rioplatense, and other Andean Spanish varieties. Its aim is to present novel data about clitic doubling in order to shed more light into the extensive literature about this phenomenon in Spanish. Through spontaneous speech recordings obtained from thirty native speakers of Nariñense, 133 sentences involving clitic doubling were analyzed. Features such as agreement matching between the clitic and the doubled NP, use of the preposition a to introduce the …

Microcore: Using Online Playable Cases To Increase Student Engagement In Online Writing Environments, Jon Balzotti, Kevin Haws, Amy A. Rogers, Jason K. Mcdonald, Matt Baker

Faculty Publications

This case study explores a type of educational simulation, an alternative reality game we call a playable case study (PCS), and how its use influenced student engagement in an online writing classroom. The goal of the simulation was to help students create professional communication artifacts and experience real-world professional communication situations. This article reports the effectiveness of the playable case study as a tool specifically for online writing instruction (OWI). The context of our research was a PCS called Microcore. Acting as interns for a company, students are asked to investigate a serious problem that occurs and present a solution …

Linguistic Awareness And Dyslexia Beliefs Among Teachers Of Students Who Are Blind Or Visually Impaired., Nosheen Gul, Lindsay N. Harris, Alicia Larouech, Gracie Strohm

CISLL Publications

US students who are blind or have visual impairments do not read at the level of a third-grader with typical sight until, on average, halfway through the seventh grade. As a first step toward narrowing that gap, we investigated levels of linguistic awareness among teachers of students who are blind or visually impaired (TSBVIs) because research with general education teachers has demonstrated a link between teacher linguistic awareness and student literacy outcomes. We also examined the accuracy of dyslexia beliefs among TSBVIs and whether TSBVI linguistic aware- ness and dyslexia beliefs are associated with training and experience variables. A survey …