Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

Exploring The Efficacy Of Transcutaneous Auricular Vagal Nerve Stimulation On Post-Stroke Aphasia: A Single-Subject Design Study, Aswathy Anakkathil Pradeep

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Background: Anomia or word-retrieval difficulty is a common long-term language impairment for individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Several behavioral interventions like semantic feature analysis (SFA) have shown positive results in naming outcomes, but continue to face difficulty in generalizing the treatment effects to untreated items. With recent advancements in technology, researchers are developing newer neuromodulation devices that aim at promoting neuroplasticity and neural reorganization in post-stroke individuals. Transcutaneous auricular vagal nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a relatively new technology that aims at stimulating the auricular branch of the vagal nerve to promote neuroplasticity. Studies have shown taVNS to potentially facilitate positive improvements …

A Global Comparison Of Communication Intervention Strategies For Justice-Involved Youth, Sophia Janeiro Martinez

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

Purpose: This paper explores the intricate relationship between communication disorders and delinquent youth behavior. It will explore the detrimental impact of zero-tolerance policies and their contribution to the school-to-prison pipeline. It will introduce issues, such as complex Miranda warning diction, and the benefits of including speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to aid in youth comprehension. Additionally, it will propose the integration of SLPs within the juvenile justice system to assist in communication between justice-involved youth (JIY) and justice professionals during conversations, questioning, and trials or hearings. Furthermore, this paper examines the roles of SLPs within juvenile justice systems abroad, including Canada, …

Getting To The Point: Contrasting Directness And Warmth In Motivational Embodied Conversational Agents, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Enhancing long-term engagement with conversational agents remains a significant challenge. Controlling the perceived warmth or directness of an agent’s personality through the style of its generated text could be used to increase user likeability. This paper reports an investigation of a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) mediated study of two variants of a motivational embodied conversational agent to measure user perception of and attitudes towards warmth in interaction style. Results show a significant effect of users preferring an agent with a "more direct" personality for this scenario, though this effect is in many ways nuanced.

Preschoolers’ Generation Of Quantity Implicatures, André Eliatamby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses the developing child as a window into the mechanisms and representations that allow us to understand the meaning of utterances in their contexts. I present three studies investigating 4- and 5-year-olds’ ability to generate two types of “quantity implicatures,” classic scalar implicatures with some that imply not all, and free choice inferences that arise with sentences like “Larry is allowed to have cake or ice-cream.” Together, the studies suggest a close relationship between pragmatic development and word learning, something not appreciated in existing literature. In the first study investigating some, I show that preschoolers interpret …

Liberal Attitude Reports, Tomasz Zyglewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Attitude reports are sentences such as “Tomasz thinks the Earth is flat” or “Susan wantsvice cream.” It is commonly assumed that the main reason people use them is to make sense of the reportee’s behavior: to explain their past actions, or predict future ones. To play this role effectively, attitude reports have to accurately describe what is going on in the reportee’s head. Let’s call attitue reports that do not meet this condition “Liberal attitude reports.” For example: Alice is a vegan doctor who thinks that every vegan should take a B12 supplements. It is felicitous to say to your …

Industrial Tenderness, Elbert Girón

Masters Theses

Industrial Tenderness surveys the relationship between visual language, cultural expression, and diasporic practices through the design of functional sculptures. These designed objects seek to communicate cultural legibility, or intuitive cultural belonging, to Mexican-American peoples by challenging legacy notions of design language. Through a proposed design language framework and designed objects, Industrial Tenderness seeks to affirm a pluriversal practice of industrial design.

Legacy industrial design confines design language to a heavily prescriptive canon, resulting in a stark monocultural language that is unrepresentative of perspectives outside of a legacy dominant white eurocentricity founded in thinking from the Bauhaus and Ulm schools. Through …

The Elusive Endonym, Thomas Eccardt

Publications and Research

The term ‘exonym’ was coined in 1957 by Marcel Aurousseau, an Australian geographer, to denote a place name used in a non-native language. ‘Endonym’ was later coined analogously as its counterpart, meaning the native name for a place. An example exonym would be the English word Germany, referring to the country whose inhabitants know it as its endonym Deutschland. These terms are useful to cartographers and also the United Nations, since it publishes documents in its six official languages, referring to places all over the world.

The topic of endonyms and exonyms would seem to fall into the …

The Relationship Between Autistic Traits, Autistic Camouflaging, And Adults’ Representations Of Abstract And Social Concepts, Henry Tomiser, Katja Wiemer Dr.

Honors Capstones

Concrete concepts (e.g., BUTTON) can be experienced directly by the senses, whereas abstract concepts (e.g., FRIENDSHIP) cannot. Additionally, the mind may represent abstract concepts using more introspective, social, and emotional information than concrete concepts. Social difficulties are one defining feature of autism, and autistic individuals may use social camouflaging to hide these difficulties, but the precise nature of social processing in autism is not known. This study aims to explore possible links between autistic traits, autistic camouflaging, and mental representations of concepts. Participants gave open-ended definitions for concepts varying in concreteness and social content via an online survey. Responses were …

Vulnerability Of Semantic Networks In Multiple Sclerosis: An Analysis Of Verbal Fluency Data, Sophia Lall

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Word finding difficulty is a frequently reported subjective cognitive concern among persons with Multiple Sclerosis (pwMS). Word-finding relies on several information retrieval processes, including search and retrieval from the conceptual store, the phonological store, the syllabary, as well as other stores of information. Neuropsychological assessments, including the semantic verbal fluency measure, can be used to measure word retrieval abilities. Despite this, the MS research literature shows that neuropsychological assessment of semantic verbal fluency yields mixed results in detecting word-finding difficulties. While some studies report finding statistically lower semantic fluency scores in pwMS relative to healthy controls (HC), others found no …

Retórica Intercultural En El Discurso Académico Universitario: Las Funciones Retóricas De La Citación En Los Trabajos De Fin De Máster Escritos En Español Y En Inglés Por Hablantes Nativos Y No Nativos, David Sanchez-Jimenez

Publications and Research

This research derives from the interest in learning the cultural differences in citation practices in the academic genre of Master's thesis of native Spanish (Ee), non-native Filipino writers of Spanish (Fe), native Filipino writers of English (Fi), and American writers of English. A total of thirty-two (32) master´s theses – eight (8) for each group – were analyzed. A quantitative and qualitative methodology was used to study this phenomenon based on the computerized textual analysis of the rhetorical function of citations arranged in typological classification that modified the outline proposed by Petrić in his 2007 article. The results obtained from …

Using Ai For Qualitative Labeling: Consistency And Comparisons, James Mcintyre

Honors Program Theses

This paper details a research study evaluating AI's ability to perform qualitative deductive coding. Multiple AI models were utilized and compared against three human coders and one expert coder. A series of 107 statements were sourced from a group discussion for a qualitative impact assessment of an organization. The AI models were provided these statements and directed to code them using the Community Capitals Framework. Two generations of AI models were evaluated. Overall, the AI achieved a fair level of agreement with the human annotators, but the alignment was far from perfect. Newer AI models did not increase agreement with …

What’S In A Threat: A Corpus-Based, Speech Act And Lexicogrammatical Approach To Threats In English, Natalie Raun Carter

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Threats can be made without using language at all, but previous research on the language of threats is limited and primarily examines threats with a small amount of constructed data. Building on Austin (1962) and Searle (1965; 1969)’s speech act theory and using a corpus of naturally occurring data consisting of 827 threatening texts from publicly available websites and law enforcement, this dissertation determines what constitutes a threat, as well as the interdependence between words and grammar.

Pragmatically, this dissertation identifies four required felicity conditions that must be met to constitute a threat—building on those set by John Searle, Bruce …

“Your Legs Don’T Look All That Good” An Analysis Of Impoliteness And Politeness In Individuals With Traumatic Brain Injuries In The Workplace, Grace Kozal

Theses and Dissertations--Communication Sciences and Disorders

Background: Social communication disorders are a common outcome from traumatic brain injury (TBI). This social communication disorder can be seen through impolite speech acts during conversation. While politeness is a social norm for workplace discourse, instances of impoliteness may have poor consequences. This research explores the use of impoliteness in persons with TBI within computer generated work-based conditions.

Methods: Language samples from the Voicemail Elicitation Task (VET) and Feedback/Advice Spoken Task (FAST) were transcribed word-for-word. Transcripts from all 62 participants were coded for impoliteness using a developed Impoliteness Codebook and were analyzed to identify significant differences in the number of …

The Movie Is On!: Pragmatics Of The Video Joker In Who Killed Captain Alex?, Hunter Hulett

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The film Who Killed Captain Alex? (WKCA) is a Ugandan film that provides an opportunity to examine the use of pragmatic and specifically deictic features to study the manipulation of borders between the film and reality. A commentator called the Video Joker (VJ) is the film’s deictic center, constantly destabilizing deictic relations and orienting the internal and external pragmatics of the film around themself. As the film’s ultimate pragmatic force, they occupy a position blurring diegesis and non-diegesis due to originating as real-time film commentators before being edited into the text. In this unique position, they shift the deixis’s organization …

Exploring Etymology Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

The English language is a borrowed language, a blend of words from many languages from around the world. We see this in the various ways sounds are represented by letters and letter combinations. In transparent or shallow orthographies, there is high predictability and consistent letter-sound correspondence whereas in opaque or deep orthographies, there are many ways to spell the same sound as well as there are many sounds for the same spellings (Burkins & Yates, 2021; Moats, 2020). This assignment description is a guided inquiry for preservice teachers to explore the concept of etymology by watching and reflecting on six …

Beyond Words: An Exploration Of Research And Writing For Indigenous Land Acknowledgements, Oksana Flores

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone delves into the practical application and importance of land acknowledgments within the frameworks of Critical Indigenous Theory and Narrative Theory. Through the utilization of archival research methods, the project not only offers recommendations for crafting an effective land acknowledgment but also provides the necessary historical foundation for the implementation of such a statement at Kennesaw State University. This effort serves to strengthen the university's commitment to diversity and equity on campus.

Conceptual Meaning In Phonology: Multimodal Iconic Expressions In Discourse Focus, David Páez Acevedo

Linguistics ETDs

In everyday communication, speakers go beyond words to synchronize speech sounds and gestures, adding nuanced meanings. For instance, in Colombian Spanish, recounting the distant past involves elongating words, modulating pitch, and using expressive hand movements. This dissertation explores this phenomenon, termed Multimodal Iconic Expressions (MMIEs), using Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar. The quantitative study uncovers correlations between verb aspect, nominal quantification, and speech duration, revealing phono-iconic connections. The qualitative study examines construal operations giving rise to MMIEs across semantic domains. MMIEs predominantly appear in discourse Focus, with durative events and mass-like quantities exhibiting pronounced phono-iconic associations. Patterns include stress and …

Connecting With The Outside World: Psychosocially Supportive Aspects Of Operational Communication Between Isolated Crews In Space And Mission Control On The Ground, Dennis J. Frederiksen

Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments

Radio-based communication between crew members in space and mission control centers on the ground has the operational purpose of supporting the safe and effective execution of missions in space. Space-to-ground communication also, however, constitutes one of the relatively few interpersonal relationships astronauts have during missions and in addition to its operational purpose, this communication can support astronauts’ wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to identify psychosocially supportive aspects of operational space-to-ground communication between astronauts in space and spacecraft communicators on the ground. Through qualitative analysis of authentic mission communication, this paper identifies two supportive aspects and develops a terminology …

Translation Techniques Of Islamic Finance And Economic Terms In Arabic-English Dictionaries, Ali Al-Harazi Antar Fuad

Student Works (2020-2029)

The general aim of the current research is to study translation techniques employed in rendering Islamic financial and economic terms (IFETs) in bilingual Arabic-English dictionaries within the context of semantic fields. The three specific aims of the study are: (i) to investigate the semantic fields that may be utilized to classify IFETs (ii) to identify the translation techniques most frequently employed in each semantic field by the dictionary compilers of the five Arabic-English dictionaries selected for this study to provide English equivalents to the IFETs in Arabic, and (iii) to recommend translation techniques which could render adequate meanings for the …

The Language Of Mechanical Support In Children: Is It ‘Sticking’, ‘Hanging’, Or Simply ‘On’?, Julia Marie Hauss

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Research has found that children begin to differentiate in the terms they use to encode support. In English, BE on, the Basic Locative Construction (Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; “put on” in dynamic events) tends to encode support-from-below (e.g., cup on table), whereas lexical support verbs (e.g., hang, stick, tape, glue, etc.) tend to encode mechanical support. We see this differentiation in semantic space by six years of age (Johannes et al., 2016). Although this differentiation occurs, we can still use BE on to encode all types of support, just as we can use a variety of lexical verbs (e.g., the …