UNT Libraries - 33 Matching Results

Search Results

Results: 1 - 24 next
open access

The Shape of Zauzou Noun Phrases: Predicting Reference Type, Classifiers, Demonstratives, Modifiers and Case Marking Using Syntax, Semantics, and Accessibility

Description: What explains the shape of Zauzou noun phrases? Zauzou (Trans-Himalayan, China) noun phrases exhibit considerable diversity in both the choice of the phrase's primary reference type, and the presence of classifiers, demonstratives, modifiers, and case marking. This investigation uses a large, previously existing Zauzou textual corpus. The corpus was annotated for variables hypothesized to predict the variation in noun phrase form. Syntactic variables investigated include word order, subordinati… more
Date: May 2023
Creator: Hull, Benjamin
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Taking the Irish Pulse: A Revitalization Study of the Irish Language

Description: This thesis argues that Irish can and should be revitalized. Conducted as an observational study, this thesis focuses on interviews with 72 participants during the summer of 2013. All participants live in the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland. This thesis investigates what has caused the Irish language to lose power and prestige over the centuries, and which Irish language revitalization efforts have been successful. Findings show that although, all-Irish schools have had a substantia… more
Date: December 2015
Creator: Roloff, Donna Cheryl
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Reading Beyond the Words: How Implementing Esl Strategies During Modified Guided Reading Affects a Deaf Student’s Language Acquisition Process

Description: While Deaf students are not typically classified as English as a second language (ESL) students, the majority of deaf students first become fluent in a signed language, making them ideal candidates for ESL research. This case study has been designed to explore the ways in which one method of ESL reading instruction, known as modified guided reading (MGR), affects the language acquisition process, and resulting reading comprehension level, of a deaf student over eleven weeks. The study documen… more
Date: August 2013
Creator: Christian, Laura
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Zero Anaphora and Meithei

Description: The focus of this thesis is to determine what factors predict zero anaphora in Meithei. The data for this thesis is derived from pear stories. Arguments were tabulated in spreadsheets counting nouns, pronouns, and zero anaphors; they were also examined for their semantic role and information status. The findings showed the agent role was typically represented by reduced forms of reference, the majority of the time by zero anaphora. Other semantic roles were typically represented by lexical f… more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Cockerham, Terence
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

"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.)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Semantic Shift and the Link between Words and Culture.

Description: This thesis is concerned with the correlation between cultural values and the semantic content of words over time; toward this purpose, the research focuses on Judeo-Christian religious terminology in the English language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is of central interest to this study, and the implications of the hypothesis, including a bidirectional interpretation allowing for both the influence of language on worldview and culture on language, is of great relevance to the research findings … more
Date: December 2008
Creator: Dunai, Amber
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Back to Top of Screen