Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

An Eye-Tracking Study Examining The Role Of Question-Answer Congruency In Children’S Comprehension Of Only: A Preliminary Report, Lauren Covey, Caitlin E. Coughlin, Utako Minai

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

‘Crain’s puzzle’ is a term that has been used to describe children’s difficulty comprehending the focus operator only when it is in subject position (subject-only), showing a tendency to interpret only as if it preceded the verb phrase instead. While some researchers attribute children’s difficulty to impoverished pragmatics in the discourse (Hackl et al., 2015), others argue that children’s grammar fundamentally differs from adults’ Notley et al. (2009), yielding a debate regarding whether children’s misinterpretation reflects a non-adult-like linguistic representation of only or some computational burden on their processing of meaning. This study addresses this debate by using eye-tracking to …

Sign Modulation By Chimpanzees To Produce Interrogatives, Kailie Dombrausky

All Master's Theses

Native signers of American Sign Language produce interrogatives by holding signs for an extended duration while employing the questioning look. The questioning look is defined as raised eyebrows, a tilted head, and direct eye contact maintained for the duration of the utterance. Chimpanzees who communicate using signs have demonstrated modulation of signs including held sign, raised brow, and eye gaze. The present study used archived video data to compare the duration of signs when the chimpanzees did or did not employ the questioning look. In both single and multi-sign utterances, the chimpanzees held their signs for a mean of 0.6 …

Interactional Competence In Japanese As An Additional Language: An Overview, Tim Greer, Midori Ishida, Yumiko Tateyama

Faculty Publications

Speaking a language involves more than just knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation: It also requires the abilities to interpret what your interlocutor is saying, to formulate a relevant response, and to deliver it in a timely manner. In addition, it entails skills such as dealing with trouble in talk when it arises and being able to identify an appropriate moment to start speaking. In short, it requires interactional competence (IC). As this applies to speaking a language other than one's first, this volume of Pragmatics & Interaction examines specific interactional competences {ICs) that speakers of Japanese as an additional …

Developing Recipient Competence During Study Abroad, Midori Ishida

Faculty Publications

Partly as a response to Kinginger's (2009) call for studies that examine the interaction in which L2 speakers participate during study abroad and its relationship with long-term development, this chapter explores what features of social interaction might afford L2 speakers opportunities to "form new practices" (Pallotti & Wagner, 2011, p. 1), especially when using receipts.

A Discussion Of Delimitative In Mandarin Chinese, Qi Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates how delimitative marking in Mandarin Chinese is better considered as an instance of verb-phrase modification instead of aspect marking. The study investigates data with verb reduplication cases caused by delimitative marking from both syntactic and semantic points of view. Through observations and analyses, it is found that delimitative marking does not have the same distribution as other aspect markers, but rather shows resemblance to temporal modifiers syntactically. Semantically, instead of providing a viewpoint as other aspect markers do, delimitative indicates the temporal length (shortness) of the event. In addition, it is found that delimitative marking has strict …

Logical Form And The Vernacular Revisited, Andrew Botterell, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

We revisit a debate initiated some fifteen years ago by Ray Elugardo and Robert Stainton about the domain of arguments. Our main result is that arguments are not exclusively sets of linguistic expressions. Instead, as we put it, some non-linguistic items have ‘logical form’. The crucial examples are arguments, both deductive and inductive, made with unembedded words and phrases.

Tracing Trajectories In A Community Of Practice Through Podcasts, Richard W. Mansikka

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to understand how humor works in expert-novice identity construction in podcasts. I employ a Community of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1989) framework to examine the social hierarchy among the participants of a regular podcast. I am particularly concerned with uncovering how novice members construct themselves and are constructed by expert members through humor, as well as how expert members socialize novice members to participate in the kinds of humor practices that index membership in the Community of Practice (CoP).

Rooster Teeth is an internet-based entertainment production company. They produce a weekly podcast which they …

Pragmatic Comprehension Of English Refusals By Spanish-English Bilinguals, Clevia Josefina Perez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigated the pragmatic comprehension and production of the speech act of refusals in English by a group of Spanish-English bilinguals (SEB) in comparison with native English speakers (NES), taking into account variables such as length of residency in the L2 environment, type of refusals and level of politeness. Other variables explored included speed of lexical access and working memory. SEB who learned English as adults were divided into two groups (short, long) according to their length of residency in an English language environment. All participants performed a Pragmatic Listening Task (PLT) and an oral production task both involving …

Aspects Of Quantifier Float In Thai, Khanin Chaiphet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research on Thai Q(uantifier)-float attempts to manifest the problems for each of its analysis. For the adverbial analysis, the Japanese data show that the floating quantifiers can be associated with both distributive and plurality-of-events readings while Thai does not distinguish between these two readings. For the stranding analysis, the differences from English-Thai comparative data show that Thai floating quantifiers often occur in positions where their associated NPs could not have previously occupied or have been moved from, and thus cannot be analyzed as resulting from stranding. As a solution, Thai Q-float is postulated as an instance of rightward movement (extraposition) …

Comparing The Effects Of Phonomotor Treatment And Semantic Feature Analysis On Discourse Production For Individuals With Aphasia, Kasey Graue

Student Research Symposium

Phonomotor treatment is a program designed to address anomic deficits in people with aphasia (PWA) by training speech sounds in isolation before progressing to sound combinations and single words (Kendall et al., 2013). Kendall et al. (2015) investigated phonomotor treatment in a sample of 26 PWA, reporting improved naming of untrained nouns and ultimate generalization of phonologic processing abilities. Despite emerging literature on the effects of the phonomotor treatment on single word production, research is limited at the discourse level. This study’s objective is to examine the extent that phonomotor treatment used for PWA increases the amount of correct information …

Hebrew Typography: A Modern Progression Of Language Forms, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Influenced by studies in traditional Ashkenazi and Sephardi scripts. The typeface had been designed for the printing of the Koren Tanakh, a first edition printed Jewish Bible processed through an all-Jewish collaboration for the first time in centuries. Koren’s project was inspired by the revival of Hebrew initiated by Haskalah writers in the 18th century. Haskalah writers utilized the language and scripts of written and printed literary texts. Influenced by philosophical and political ideologies of the European Enlightenment, the Haskalah explored Jewish identity through language by defining the secular context through traditional Jewish symbolism and narratives. The Zionist movement of …

El Significado De La Construcción Con Ser Focalizador En El Español De Colombia, Ana I. González Támara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the syntactic features of Colombian Spanish is the usage of focalizing SER (“TO BE”) reported by Cuervo (1885); Curnow & Travis (2003); Mendez (2009), among others authors, in constructions such as pago es el arriendo (I pay is the rent), or vino fue hoy (he/she came was right now) in alternation with simple forms (pago el arriendo- I pay the rent, or vino ahora- he/she came right now) and pseudo-clefts (Lo que yo pago es el arriendo- What I pay is the rent, or when he/she came was right now) …

Making Sense Of Making Meaning, The Semiotic Way: Emotional Journey Of A Novice Learner, Papia Bawa

The Qualitative Report

I write this auto-ethnography as homage to my teachers and peers, both in the classroom and in scholarly realms, who inspired me to soar beyond the horizons of self and find meaning within the cosmic consciousness that surrounds us. As a novice learner in an introductory semiotics course, I learned about the process of meaning making. This paper is a product of my learning and understanding of a semiotic worldview. Encouraged by my professor, I delved deeply into the “thinkings” of two semiotic masterminds: Charles Sanders Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll, whose philosophies, ideologies and beliefs helped make sense of …

Indexing 'Entrustment': An Analysis Of The Japanese Formulaic Construction [N Da Yo N], Michiko Kaneyasu, Shoichi Iwasaki

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

Japanese conversations are known to contain a large amount of unexpressed information. When a speaker speaks with elliptical information, he or she assumes that the addressee will understand what is not overtly expressed based on the knowledge that is supposed to be shared textually, personally or culturally. The addressee, on the other hand, must determine what is not being expressed overtly using such shared knowledge. At the heart of this kind of communication is the existence of trust assumed among the interlocutors. Using the term 'entrustment', we will examine how one particular Japanese formulaic construction, [Noun (da) yo Noun ], …

Culminating And Non-Culminating Accomplishments In Malagasy, Ileana Paul, Baholisoa Simone Ralalaoherivony, Henriëtte De Swart

French Studies Publications

Malagasy is a language with non-culminating accomplishments. There is, however, a specific prefix (maha-), which appears to entail culmination. Moreover, verbs prefixed with maha- display a range of interpretations: causative, abilitive, ‘manage to’, and unintentionality. This paper accounts for these two aspects of this prefix with a unified semantic analysis. In particular, maha- encodes double prevention, as proposed by Wolff (2007, 2014) for English predicates like enable. The double prevention configuration is associated with a circumstantial modal base, which leads to culminating readings in the past and future. As such, this paper supports a more fine-grained theory …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

Linguistic And Conceptual Metaphors Of ‘Heart’ In Learner Corpora, Aurora Mathews Adams

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This corpus-based study examined English and Spanish learner language for ‘heart’ metaphors. Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) compared ‘heart’ metaphors across five languages and that study served as a reference framework for the work presented here. This work intended to find evidence of metaphor transfer and/or new metaphor learning in second language writing. Conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and linguistic or lexical metaphors (Falck, 2012) from both languages were considered in the analysis. This work analyzed ‘heart’ metaphors taken from two learner corpora, the Cambridge Learner Corpus and the Corpus de Aprendices de Español. Results were compared to the findings of …

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., the comparative) is sensitive to the location of prosodic prominence. Machine learning algorithms (support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis) and human perception experiments are used to cross-validate the web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. Results con rm the theoretical predictions for location of prominence in comparative clauses and the advantages using both web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. The most robust …

Secular But Not Superficial : An Overlooked Nonreligious/Nonspiritual Identity., Daniel G. Delaney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since Durkheim’s characterization of the sacred and profane as “antagonistic rivals,” the strict dichotomy has been framed in such a way that “being religious” evokes images of a life filled with profound meaning and value, while “being secular” evokes images of a meaningless, self-centered, superficial life, often characterized by materialistic consumerism and the cold, heartless environment of corporate greed. Consequently, to identify as “neither religious nor spiritual” runs the risk of being stigmatized as superficial, untrustworthy, and immoral. Conflicts and confusions encountered in the process of negotiating a nonreligious/nonspiritual identity, caused by the ambiguous nature of religious language, were explored …

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.