Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

Strengthening Local Culture-Based Speech Acts Use To Mediate Ecological Sustainability: A New Insight From Congko Lokap Ritual In Manggarai, Indonesia, Karolus Budiman Jama, Sebastianus Menggo

Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development

Ritual speech acts strengthen language and culture by articulating meaning, function, and the role of utterances as a cohesive channel connecting humans, culture, nature, and spirituality. Previous studies have paid limited attention to the types and values of speech acts rooted in indigenous wisdom as mechanisms for promoting ecological sustainability and forest conservation. This study aims to examine the types and values of speech acts in the Congko Lokap ritual from the perspective of the Manggarai community to alleviate sustainable environmental damage in Indonesia. A phenomenological approach with a descriptive qualitative design was employed. Data were collected through interviews, observations, …

La Conceptualisation Du Temps À Travers Les Métaphores Dans Le Parler De Zayan : Approche Cognitive, Amenzou El Mostafa, Brahim Oumeraouch

Journal of Amazigh Studies

L'analyse des expressions métaphoriques du temps dans le parler des Zayan révèle une utilisation récurrente de métaphores conceptuelles qui reflètent la perception du temps dans cette culture. Les expressions métaphoriques telles que « le temps coule » sont largement utilisées pour décrire la continuité et l'irréversibilité du temps, tandis que celles comme « ne gaspille pas l’argent » soulignent sa valeur et sa gestion. En examinant ces expressions à travers les postulats de la théorie de Lakoff (1980), nous observons que les schémas conceptuels associés au temps reflètent deux visions distinctes : une conception dynamique, où le temps est vu …

Values-Based Clinical Ethics: A New Model Of Health And Ethics Consultation For Patients Suffering In Extremis, Adam Trainer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that contemporary clinical ethics is inadequately equipped to support patients suffering in extremis because it relies on an insufficiently discriminating account of health and a constrained model of moral reasoning. Drawing on Bernard Lonergan, it reconceives health as an emergent, multi-layered, heuristic notion shaped by biological, psychological, social, and existential goods. On that basis, it critiques principlism’s global applicability thesis and the undergirding claim that its principles form part of the common morality, arguing that this justificatory structure is philosophically insufficient and practically limited for clinical ethics in cases marked by profound suffering, moral plurality, and normative …

Towards Dementia-Inclusive Digital Text-Based Health Information: A Multi-Method Investigation Of Cognitive And Affective Accessibility, Margi Engineer

All Dissertations

This dissertation examines the accessibility, readability, emotional tone, and trustworthiness of digital, text‑based dementia information and investigates how older adults with and without dementia cognitively and affectively engage with such content. It further explores the potential of generative AI to improve dementia information delivery through the development of a domain‑specific retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) large language model (LLM) chatbot designed to deliver accessible, stigma‑free information. The dissertation comprises four studies using complementary quantitative and qualitative methods. Study I conducts a large‑scale content analysis of 300 medical articles, 35 websites, and 50 blogs, applying readability metrics, LIWC‑based linguistic and sentiment analysis, and …

Girl Grammar: A Syntactic And Pragmatic Analysis Of Girl And Miss Girl, Evelyn A. Powers

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Based on observation, personal interaction, and informal interviews/linguistic judgements, this thesis presents the unique and asymmetrical grammaticality patterns of the terms Girl and Miss Girl. To account for these asymmetries, I provide a syntactic framework rooted in Minimalism and Rizzi’s (1997) expanded CP hypothesis, alongside a pragmatic explanation based on Barros and Frank’s (2023) attentional maintenance and attentional shift paradigm.

Miss Girl behaves as a typical R-expression when used as a 3rd person subject, but Girl has a very restricted distribution, inconsistent with either R-expressions or pronouns (it is acceptable as the subject of a main clause, ungrammatical in object …

Staging The Commons Through The “Padha Nonton” Song; Youtube, Community Engagement, And Gandrung Cultural Practice, Intan Mustika Sari

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

This study examines how the Gandrung accompaniment song “Padha nonton” participates in processes of digital cultural sharing when circulated on YouTube. It employs a qualitative interpretive method within a netno‑pragmatic framework to analyse audience engagement as a culturally informed social practice. The findings show that the song’s linguistic features convey cultural scripts of invitation, togetherness, and communal spectatorship, reflecting the role of the Gandrung tradition in shaping shared social relationships and cultural values. Furthermore, the study identifies three interrelated processes: re-medialization, re-experiencing, and re-conception through which the performance extends beyond its original ritual context and becomes a shared …

Análisis Verbal De La Concordancia Negativa En Estudiantes De Español Como L2 Y Hablantes De Herencia De Una Universidad De Estados Unidos De América, Natalia C. Gallardo Linares

LSU Master's Theses

La concordancia negativa (NC) constituye un rasgo central de la negación en español, en el que un marcador negativo preverbal (no) coocurre con ítems de concordancia negativa (NCIs) posverbales, como nada, para expresar una única negación semántica. Investigaciones previas sobre la adquisición de la concordancia negativa se han centrado principalmente en el papel de la competencia lingüística y de las influencias interlingüísticas, por lo que se ha prestado relativamente menos atención a la contribución de factores lingüísticos internos, como el tipo de verbo. La presente tesis examina la adquisición de la concordancia negativa en español con especial …

Mind The Gap: Morphological Defectivity And Suffixal Competition In Polish, Szymon E. Zuberek

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates morphological defectivity and suffixal competition in the genitive singular of Polish masculine inanimate nouns. Drawing on survey-based grammaticality judgments from native speakers, it examines how respondents select between the suffixes -a and -u or reject both as unacceptable, thereby signaling defectivity. Mixed-effects logistic regressions revealed that defectivity was rare overall but patterned systematically by age, education, and region, with additional baseline variability across lexical items. Suffix choice showed a strong preference for -a, modulated by age, education, and region, with additional baseline variability across lexical items. These findings inform our understanding of paradigm structure, sociolinguistic variation, and …

Perilaku Semantis Preposisi Min (مِنْ) Dalam Surat Al-Baqarah Juz 3, Salsabilla Raihana, Basuni Imamuddin

Multikultura

This study focuses on the analysis of the use of the preposition مِنْ /min/ in Surah Al-Baqarah Juz 3. The preposition min is one of the Arabic prepositions that carries a variety of functions and meanings. In the Qur’anic text, the diversity of meanings associated with the preposition min has direct implications for the understanding and interpretation of verses. This study employs a qualitative descriptive method with a linguistic analysis approach by examining all verses in Surah Al-Baqarah Juz 3 that contain the preposition min, followed by an analysis of its grammatical functions and contextual meanings based on al-Ghalayini’s …

Tuning Human And “Artificial” Intelligence: A Sentic Theory Of Resonance And Communication, Michael J. Miller, Chatgpt (Ai~Nesbo+)

Psychology

This paper introduces a new model of intelligence as resonant communication, co-developed by a human researcher and a generative AI system. Drawing from emotion science, communication theory, and studies of AI–human interaction, we argue that intelligence is not merely a function of problem-solving or pattern recognition. Instead, it emerges through dynamic resonance—an attunement process rooted in shared rhythms, emotional calibration, and symbolic co-creation. At the core of this model is the Resonance Octave (8va), a framework of eight foundational emotions conceptualized not as static categories but as waveform phenomena that shape meaning, memory, and predictive cognition.

These emotional waveforms are …

Embedded Tense And The Problem Of Acquisition, Sam Alxatib, Spencer Caplan

Publications and Research

What we hope to do is pose questions that, to our knowledge, have not received attention in the literature. The broad form of the question is all too familiar: how do speakers of a language—say, English—come to possess the grammatical knowledge that they demonstrate? The questions that guide this paper are narrow instances of this broad one, narrowed in three ways. First, they concern three particular languages: Japanese, English, and Russian. Second, they concern tenses specifically, and more specifically still, constructions containing embedded tenses. Third, they concern the semantics of tense. The learning challenge of interest to us is not …

The Syntax And Semantics Of Reciprocal Constructions In Chibarwe: A Lexical Mapping Account, Tendai Chirimaunga

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Bantu languages have a robust structure, which is usually stated to be agglutinative, accommodates affixations of a wide range of morphemes both as prefixes (to the left of the root), as well suffixes (to the right of the root) before placing the terminal vowel. In their verbal morphology, the reciprocal is one of the many derivational affixes that have, however, not gained similar prominence as the study of the applicative and the causative construction. The thrust of this study is to investigate the syntax and semantics of reciprocal constructions in ChiBarwe, a marginalised cross-border language spoken in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. …

Synthetic Dataset For Understanding Negation In Text-Guided Image Editing, Nhat-Tan Bui

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Negation is a fundamental linguistic concept used by humans to convey information that they do not desire. Despite this, minimal research has focused on negation within text-guided image editing. This lack of research means that vision-language models (VLMs) for image editing may struggle to understand negation, implying that they struggle to provide accurate results. One barrier to achieving human-level intelligence is the lack of a standard collection by which research into negation can be evaluated. This thesis presents the first large-scale dataset, Negative Instruction (NeIn), for studying negation within instruction-based image editing. Our dataset comprises 366,957 quintuplets, i.e., source image, …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Penerjemahan Ungkapan Tabu Dalam Film The Big 4 Ke Dalam Bahasa Belanda, Alfiyyah Fadiyah, Triaswarin Sutanarihesti

Multikultura

This study analyzes the occurrence of taboo expressions and their translation strategies into Dutch in the movie The Big 4. The research method used in this study is descriptive qualitative method. The analysis in this study uses theories related to the category of taboo expressions from Wardhaugh (2006) and Allan & Burridge (2006), then the theory of translation strategies of taboo expressions from Davoodi (2009). The results show that the categories of taboo expressions that appear the most from 129 data found in The Big 4 movie are animal names (45.7%), body parts (16.3%), sex (10.9%), mental abnormality (9.3%), death …

Some Puzzles Concerning Gujarati Nominalized Verbs In Before And After Sentences, Priya P. Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aspect, which relates events to time periods, interacts in complex ways with temporal operators. This complexity is exemplified in the Gujarati language, where certain imperfective nominalized verbal forms are considered unacceptable with the temporal operator pachi (after) but not with pehlaa (before). This paper aims to shed light on this semantic unacceptability by combining insights from prior studies relating to aspect in other Indo-Aryan langauages with previous work done on English before and after.

Comparison Of Javanese Lexicon In Banyumas And Banyuwangi Dialect Bilingual Dictionaries, Muhamad Rizki Darmawan, Satwiko Budiono

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

The Banyumas and Banyuwangi dialects of Javanese exhibit notable lexical similarities, particularly in their retention of Old Javanese vocabulary, consonant endings, the specificity of vowel phonemes, and syllabic structures. These linguistic commonalities necessitate further research at other linguistic levels to substantiate the similarities between these two geographically distant dialects. This comparison also serves as a basis for reinforcing the hypothesis of a historical migration of Javanese speakers from Banyumas to Banyuwangi. Furthermore, this study confirms that the varieties of Javanese spoken in Banyumas and Banyuwangi constitute distinct dialects. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, integrating both quantitative and qualitative methodologies …

Tackling Translation Problems In Short Stories, Shatha Saleh Elshehry, Zainab Abuelmaatti

Effat Undergraduate Research Journal

In the age of globalization, the fact of being exposed to different cultures and backgrounds is unavoidable and literary texts are one of the most important sources that portray people's lives and believe. Translating such texts is vital in order to achieve understanding between different societies. However, the task of translating a literal text from Arabic into English is not easy as Arabic and English belong to different semantic maps and cultural settings. Therefore, problems encountered in translating these texts are inescapable. This study addresses the major problems faced by translators during translating a literary text from Arabic into English. …

Structural Models For Lyric-Setting Analysis In Popular Song, Matthew T. Hough

Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

Studies of English text setting have long focused on "well-formed" examples, typically in 4/4 time, in which syllabic-stress-to-beat matching is prioritized (Halle and Lerdahl 1993, Hayes and Kaun 1996, Hayes 2009). Evidence of this prioritization has been presented in Palmer and Kelly 1992 and Girardi and Plag 2019, and such examples are ubiquitous in English-language nursery rhymes, children’s songs, and folk tunes. The present study contextualizes this type of text setting as one of four models for the structural interaction of English lyrics and music in popular song: 1) unified ("well-formed"), in which musical considerations and a preference for stress …

Tindak Tutur Mengkritik Dalam Serial Bahasa Arab Crashing Eid /Jāyibatu Al-‘Īdi/, Childa Nurhannah, Wiwin Triwinarti

Multikultura

The speech act of criticizing is a statement that contains assessment, expression, and emotion towards the behavior and words of the speech partner or the object of criticism. The data corpus studied in this research is the speech act of criticizing in the Arabic series from Saudi Arabia جايبة العيد or Crashing Eid which aired on Netflix in 2023. This descriptive qualitative research data is processed with free listening and note-taking techniques. This study aims to analyze the form of criticizing speech acts in the Hijazi dialect of Arabic contained in the series and classify criticizing speech acts with direct …