Search Results

open access

Alternative Complementation in Partially Schematic Constructions: a Quantitative Corpus-based Examination of COME to V2 and GET to V2

Description: This paper examines two English polyverbal constructions, COME to V2 and GET to V2, as exemplified in Examples 1 and 2, respectively. (1) the senator came to know thousands of his constituents (2) Little Johnny got to eat ice cream after every little league game. Previous studies considered these types of constructions (though come and get as used here have not been sufficiently studied) as belonging to a special class of complement constructions, in which the infinitive is regarded as instanti… more
Date: May 2012
Creator: Lester, Nicholas A.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An analysis of the syntactic and lexical features of an Indian English oral narrative: A Pear Story study.

Description: This pilot study addresses the distribution of nonstandard syntactic and lexical features in Indian English (IE) across a homogeneous group of highly educated IE speakers. It is found that nonstandard syntactic features of article use, number agreement and assignment of verb argument structure do not display uniform intragroup distribution. Instead, a relationship is found between nonstandard syntactic features and the sociolinguistic variables of lower levels of exposure to and use of English … more
Date: December 2007
Creator: Seale, Jennifer Marie
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Awakening a World With Words: How J.R.R. Tolkien Uses Linguistic Narrative Techniques to Take His Readers to Faery in His Short Story Smith of Wootton Major.

Description: J.R.R. Tolkien uses specific linguistic narrative techniques in Smith of Wootton Major to make the world of Wootton Major and the nearby land of Faery come to life for his readers. In this thesis, I examine how Tolkien accomplishes this feat by presenting a linguistic analysis of some parts of the story. My analysis is also informed by Tolkien's own ideas of fairy-stories, and as such, it uniquely shows the symbiotic relationship between Tolkien's theories and his narrative art.
Date: August 2007
Creator: Pueppke, Michael
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Bei Construction: A Focus Device in Chinese

Description: The bei construction has often been identified as a passive construction. This thesis uses Davis's (1983) semantic framework and Hsueh's (1989) descriptive corollaries to account for the various characteristics of the bei construction and proposes that the bei construction is not a passive construction but a more general Focus device.
Date: August 1992
Creator: Fu, Minyue
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Burushaski Case Marking, Agreement and Implications: an Analysis of the Hunza Dialect

Description: This thesis was written to explore the structural case patterns of the Burushaski sentence and to examine the different participant coding systems which appear between noun marking and verb agreement. Verb suffixes follow nominative alignment patterns of agreement, while the verb prefix agrees with the affected argument as determined by semantic relations, as opposed to syntactic ones. The agent noun phrase is directly marked when highly active or volitional, suggesting a system of agent markin… more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Smith, Alexander
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Corpus-Based Approach to Gerundial and Infinitival Complementation in Spanish ESL Writing

Description: This paper examines the use of infinitival and gerundial constructions by intermediate Spanish learners. The use of those two patterns creates problems for second language learners at intermediate and advanced levels. However, there are only few studies on their second language acquisition, and fewer focus on Spanish learners. This study tries to resolve this and to this end, I retrieved all hits of the two constructions from the Spanish component of the International Learner Corpus of English … more
Date: May 2011
Creator: Martinez-Garcia, Maria Teresa
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Directions Toward a “Happy Place”: Metaphor in Conversational Discourse

Description: This paper aims to show how people use and understand metaphorical language in conversational discourse. Specifically, I examine how metaphorical language has the potential to be either effective or ineffective in its usage, and how they are bound to the contextual environment of the conversation. This particular setting is a conversation between a researcher and a participant involved in a therapeutic program. Metaphorical language is shown to be helpful for understanding difficult subjects; h… more
Date: December 2011
Creator: Edwards, Jonathan Ryan
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Do College Students with ADHD have Expressive Writing Difficulties as Do Children with ADHD?

Description: This study analyzed the expressive writing of college students. Twenty-two ADHD students and 22 controls were asked to write a story based on a picture story and a personal challenge. The texts were compared based on several qualitative and quantitative parameters. The results show that students in both groups presented similar text quality. Out of six qualitative parameters only one was statistically different between the two groups: ADHD students performed worse in adequacy, but only in t… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Mantecon, Hripsime Der-Galustian
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Drawing Boundaries and Revealing Language Attitudes: Mapping Perceptions of Dialects in Korea

Description: Perceptual dialectology studies have shown that people have strong opinions about the number and placement of dialect regions. There has been relatively little research conducted in this area on Korean, however, with early studies using only short language attitude surveys. To address this gap in research, in the present study, I use the 'draw-­?a-­?map' task to examine perceptions of language variation in Korea. I ask respondents to draw a line around places in Korea where people speak differe… more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Jeon, Lisa
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Exposing Deep-rooted Anger: A Metaphor Pattern Analysis of Mixed Anger Metaphors

Description: This project seeks to serve two purposes: first, to investigate various semantic and grammatical aspects of mixed conceptual metaphors in reference to anger; and secondly, to explore the potential of a corpus-based, TARGET DOMAIN-oriented method termed metaphor pattern analysis to the study of mixed metaphor. This research shows that mixed metaphors do not pattern in a manner consistent with statements made within conceptual metaphor theory. These metaphors prove highly dynamic in their combin… more
Date: August 2011
Creator: Barron, Andrew T.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A First Look at Mankiyali Morphology

Description: This thesis is the first comprehensive description and analysis of the inflectional morphology of Mankiyali — an endangered Indo-Aryan language spoken by under 500 people in rural Mansehra District, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan. The study primarily focuses on the morphological patterns involved in inflecting nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs, and discusses the inflectional requirements in forming postpositional and adverbial phrases. With documentary efforts still in early stag… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Englert, Eric G
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

How Drawing Becomes Writing: Proto-orthography in the Codex Borbonicus

Description: The scholarship on the extent of the Nahuatl writing system makes something of a sense-reference error. There are a number of occurrences in which the symbols encode a verb, three in the present tense and one in the past tense. The context of the use of calendar systems and written language in the Aztec empire is roughly described. I suggest that a new typology for is needed in order to fully account for Mesoamerican writing systems and to put to rest the idea that alphabetic orthographies are … more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Bolinger, Taylor
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Improving Topic Tracking with Domain Chaining

Description: Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) research has produced some successful statistical tracking systems. While lexical chaining, a non-statistical approach, has also been applied to the task of tracking by Carthy and Stokes for the 2001 TDT evaluation, an efficient tracking system based on this technology has yet to be developed. In thesis we investigate two new techniques which can improve Carthy's original design. First, at the core of our system is a semantic domain chainer. This chainer relie… more
Date: August 2003
Creator: Yang, Li
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Lack of Evaluation as Evaluation: Analysis of an African American Woman’s Narrative

Description: This thesis examines an African American woman’s narrative about the day that her daughter was shot. Like many personal narratives of “frightening experiences,” the speaker in this narrative highlights the peak of her story, making sure her point is salient. In earlier analyses, it has been shown that evaluation tends to cluster around the peak of the narrative. In “The day my daughter got shot” we see that this event-filled narrative is not evaluated as predicted as there is no increased usage… more
Date: August 2011
Creator: van Drunen, Vanessa
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Language Choice in the ESL and FL Classrooms: Teachers and Students Speak Out

Description: This paper compares English as a second language (ESL) and foreign language (FL) teachers' and students' perspectives regarding target language (TL) and first language (L1) use in the respective classrooms. Teachers and students were given questionnaires asking their opinions of a rule that restricts students' L1 use. Questionnaires were administered to 46 ESL students, 43 FL students, 14 ESL teachers, and 15 FL teachers in Texas secondary public schools. Results were analyzed using SPSS and R.… more
Date: August 2006
Creator: Fernandez, Cody
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Language Contact in the Inner City: the Acquisition of AAVE Features by Bilingual Hispanic Adolescents

Description: Sociolinguists working in Northern urban areas have shown that Hispanics who come in contact with African Americans sometimes acquire features of African American vernacular English (AAVE). However, the acquisition of AAVE features by Hispanics in the South has yet to be documented. Specifically, no one has studied the kind of English that Hispanics in Texas are acquiring. The present study investigates this issue through research in an inner-city area of Dallas: Oak Cliff. During the past twen… more
Date: August 1998
Creator: Coleman, Jeffrey Alan
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Lines by Someone Else: the Pragmatics of Apprompted Poems

Description: Over the last sixty years, overtly intertextual poems with titles such as “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery” and “Poem Ending with a Line by George W. Bush” have been appearing at an increasing rate in magazines and collections. These poems wed themselves to other texts and authors in distinct ways, inviting readers to engage with poems which are, themselves, in conversation with lines from elsewhere. These poems, which I refer to as “apprompted” poems, explicitly challenge readers to… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Gibson, Kimberly Dawn
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Man Needs a Female like a Fish Needs a Lobotomy: The Role of Adjectival Nominalization in Pejorative Meaning

Description: This thesis documents the grammatical processes and semantic impact of innovative ways to pejoratively reference individuals through adjectival nominalization. Research on nominalized adjectives suggests that when meanings shift from having one property (1) to becoming a kind with associated properties (2), the noun form often encodes stereotypical attributes: [1] "Her hair is blonde." (hair color); [2] "He married a blonde." (female, sexy, dumb). Likewise, the linguistic phenomenon of generic… more
Date: May 2018
Creator: Robinson, Melissa Aubrey
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Mankiyali Phonology: Description and Analysis

Description: This thesis provides a detailed description and analysis of the Mankiyali phonology, a hitherto undocumented and endangered language of northern Pakistan. The language is spoken by about 500 people in a remote mountainous area in the Mansehra district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan. The data contained herein is a result of first-hand fieldwork with native Mankiyali speakers between 2019 and 2021. Data collection methods include recordings of naturally occurring discourse (e.g., storie… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Paramore, Jonathan Charles
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Mary/merry and horse/hoarse: Mergers in Southern American English

Description: Phonetic mergers in American English have been studied throughout the last half century. Previous research has contributed social and phonetic explanations to the understanding of front and back vowel mergers before /l/, front vowel mergers before nasals and phonetically unconditioned back vowel mergers. Using data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), this thesis examines the spread of the front vowel merg… more
Date: May 2004
Creator: Ehrhardt, Brooke
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Middle Voice Construction in Burushaski: From the Perspective of a Native Speaker of the Hunza Dialect

Description: This study is about voice system in Burushaski, focusing especially on the middle voice (MV) construction. It claims that the [dd-] verbal prefix is an overt morphological middle marker for MV constructions, while the [n-] verbal prefix is a morphological marker for passive voice. The data primarily come from the Hunza dialect of Burushaski, but analogous phenomena can be observed in other dialects. This research is based on a corpus of 120 dd-prefix verbs. This research has showed that positio… more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Karim, Piar
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Perception of Foreign Accented Speech: the Roles of Familiarity and Linguistic Training

Description: This paper seeks to address the issue by examining two factors that potentially affect a listener’s perception of foreign accented speech: degree of familiarity (as acquired through a work or personal environment) and amount of ESL or linguistic training. Speech samples were recorded from 18 international students from Hispanic, Asian, and Middle-eastern backgrounds and across all proficiency levels as designated by their academic English program. Six native English speakers were also recorded … more
Date: May 2012
Creator: Sales, Rachel
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Present tense marking as a synopsis of Southern American English: Plural verbal -s and zero 3rd singular.

Description: This thesis explores the evolution plural verbal -s ("People thinks he is guilty") and zero 3rd singular ("He think he is guilty") in data from two sources on Southern English: The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). The research questions that underlie this study consider (1) the demographic association of plural verbal -s and zero 3rd singular, (2) the maintenance of each form, (3) the constraints on their use,… more
Date: May 2005
Creator: Aguilar, Amanda G.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Processing Instruction and Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling: A Study of Input in the Second Language Classroom

Description: This paper reports a study of VanPatten's processing instruction (PI) and Ray's TPRS. High school students in a beginning Spanish course were divided into three groups (PI, TPRS, and control) and instructed in forms using the Spanish verb gustar. Treatment included sentence-level and discourse-level input, and tests included interpretation and production measures in a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest given two and a half months following treatment. The PI group made the gr… more
Date: May 2011
Creator: Foster, Sarah Jenne
Partner: UNT Libraries
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