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Psycholinguistic and Neurophysiological Aspects of Language Acquisition

Description: The purpose of this thesis is to propose a theory of language acquisition which could serve as a basis for further studies in this area. The thesis is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the psycholinguistic aspects of language and its acquisition, and the second dealing with the activities of the brain which relate to language ability, behavior, and acquisition.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Vincent, Nora B.
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Fielding's Creative Psychology: A Belief in the Good-Natured Man

Description: The philosophy of Henry Fielding turns more upon a study of human nature than upon any stated adherence to a system of beliefs. The thesis of this paper is that he was a moderate law-and-order Anglican of his time, but strongly influenced by the deist Shaftesbury's studies of the psychological characteristics of men. These inquiries into motivations and Shaftesbury's advocacy of the social virtue of desiring good for others seem to have helped determine Fielding's philosophy.
Date: December 1972
Creator: Dundas, Doris Hart
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Isolation and Caritas: Polar Themes in Melville's The Confidence-Man

Description: The thesis examines isolation and caritas, or charity, in The Confidence-Man as polar themes which express, respectively, withdrawal from and suspicion of the human community and integration within and appreciation for that community. Isolation is considered a negative theme; caritas, an affirmative theme.
Date: December 1971
Creator: Hollen, Norman V.
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The Treatment of the American Dream in Three Novels by Bernard Malamud

Description: The American Dream is an established theme in much American literature from the beginning to the present. In dealing with this major theme, three critics, Leo Marx, Henry Nash Smith, and R. W, B. Lewis have evolved a cohesive definition of this complex and ambiguous vision. Three major components define the Dream: a pastoral dream of a new, fertile Eden, a success dream of financial prosperity, and a dream of world brotherhood to be realized in the new continent. These three components are exam… more
Date: December 1971
Creator: McAndrew, Sara
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The Development of a Critical Standard for the Novel in Fraser's Magazine, 1830-1850

Description: This thesis is concerned with establishing the nature of the critical standard which Fraser's Magazine, a Victorian journal, used in evaluating the artistic merit of current English novels. Eminent critics such as William Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle, and William Maginn were associated with the magazine during its early years of publication: thus, the early numbers contain some of its most valuable criticism. Because the English novel was in a period of transition in the decade of the 1840's and t… more
Date: December 1972
Creator: Lively, Cheryl L.
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Mark Twain's Southern Trilogy: Reflections of the Ante-Bellum Southern Experience

Description: The purpose of this study is to explore Mark Twain's involvement with the southern ante-bellum experience as reflected in his Southern Trilogy, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade), and Pudd'nhead Wilson. He came to denounce the South more and more vehemently in these novels, and each occupies a critical position in his artistic and philosophical growth.
Date: August 1973
Creator: Robinson, Jimmy Hugh
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The Divine Pilgrimage of Conrad Aiken: A Study of his Poetic Quest for Personal Identity

Description: Because his search for self is such a dominant and important theme of his work and because it grows out of a rich tradition in western thought, it is the purpose of this thesis to examine this search and to clarify Aiken's ideas concerning the self and the methods and form he used to communicate these ideas.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Jauchen, Mary
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The Cherokee Language and Culture: Can Either Survive?

Description: One of the three-fold purposes of this study is to indicate the relationship between the cultural advancements of the Cherokees and the development and implementation of a written, printable language into their culture. In fulfilling a second purposes, the study emphasizes the influence of literacy on the social values of the Cherokees. The third purpose is to consider the idea of the Cherokees themselves that bi-lingual education, first in Cherokee, then in English, and a renewed national prid… more
Date: August 1972
Creator: Lyde, Judith Ann
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The Narrator of the Short Poetry of Thomas Hardy

Description: Throughout the poetry of Thomas Hardy, excluding The Dynasts, there reappears a characteristic and constant narrator device which Hardy employs to force the reader to maintain perspective and objectivity upon the action of the poems and to provide a framework of attitudes and conclusions by which the reader can judge the content of the poems.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Lyle, Mary Herring
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"Be" in Dallas Black English

Description: This dissertation purposes to answer the question of whether or not the verb system of Black English in Dallas has the same features as those that characterize Black English in other sections of the country. Specifically, it describes in detail the use of the verb "be" within the speech of blacks in the Dallas metropolitan area and accounts for these usages formally within the framework of a transformational-generative grammar of the type proposed by Noam Chomsky.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Jones, Nancy (Nancy N.)
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Some Linguistic Aspects of the Heroic Couplet in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley

Description: This dissertation is an examination of the characteristics of Phillis Wheatley's couplet poems in the areas of meter, rhyme, and syntax. The metrical analysis employs Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser's theory of iambic pentameter, the rhyme examination considers the various factors involved in rhyme selection and rhyme function, and the syntactic analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework of a generative grammar similar to that proposed in Noam Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of … more
Date: August 1973
Creator: Holder, Kenneth R.
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Samuel Johnson's Epistolary Essays: His Use of Personae in The Rambler, The Adventurer, and The Idler

Description: One goal of the present study is to emphasize Johnson's "talent for fiction, the range of his comic invention, and the subtlety of his tone." A substantial group of essays from all three serials, those written in the form of letters ostensibly submitted to the essayist by his readers, appears to offer many examples of the inventiveness of Johnson's mind, and it is to this group that the term epistolary essays refers. Johnson was following a well-established tradition in utilizing the device of … more
Date: August 1972
Creator: Vonler, Veva Donowho
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In Awesome Wonder

Description: The dissertation is a collection of eighteen short stories. These stories relate the life experiences of the first-person narrator and chronicle a period of twenty years. They are arranged in five thematic groups: Expectations, Questions, Lighter Moments, Answers, and Separation. The focus of each one represents the narrator's experiences with his father, as the narrator attempts to understand a man who exerts such control over his life. Expectations contains three stories, with the first depic… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: McMurtry, William Charlie
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Friendship, Politics, and the Literary Imagination: the Impact of Franklin Pierce on Hawthorne's Works

Description: This dissertation attempts to demonstrate how Nathaniel Hawthorne's lifelong friendship with Franklin Pierce influenced the author's literary imagination, often prompting him to transform Pierce from his historical personage into a romanticized figure of notably Jacksonian qualities. It is also an assessment of how Hawthorne's friendship with Pierce profoundly influenced a wide range of his work, from his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), to the Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) and such later works a… more
Date: August 1996
Creator: Williamson, Richard Joseph, 1962-
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