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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

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

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
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

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
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

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

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

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

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
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

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

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.
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

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

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
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

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

Teaching linguistic mimicry to improve second language pronunciation.

Description: This thesis tests the hypothesis that a whole language approach to ESL (English As A Second Language) pronunciation with emphasis on suprasegementals through the use of linguistic mimicry is more effective than a focus on segmentals in improving native speakers perceptions of accent and comprehensibility of ESL students' pronunciation of English. The thesis is organized into seven chapters. Chapter 2 is a discussion of the factors that affect the degree of foreign accent in second language acqu… more
Date: May 2003
Creator: Yates, Karen
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

A test of the effects of linguistic stereotypes in children's animated film: A language attitude study.

Description: This study examined the claim that animated films influence childrens' opinions of accented-English. Two hundred and eighteen 3rd through 5th graders participated in a web-based survey. They listened to speakers with various accents: Mainstream US English (MUSE), African American Vernacular English (AAVE), French, British, and Arabic. Respondents judged speakers' personality traits (Work Ethic, Wealth, Attitude, Intelligence), assigned jobs/life positions, and provided personal information, mov… more
Date: May 2007
Creator: Trowell, Melody
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Why the Japanese double-ga construction cannot be scrambled.

Description: This thesis presents a comprehensive study of the Japanese double-ga construction and offers an explanation as to why the Japanese double-ga construction does not allow scrambling. In chapter 2, the particle-ga and the particle-wa are defined as the focus marker and the topic marker respectively. The different shades of meaning that both particles have are also explained. Chapter 3 illustrates the Japanese double -ga construction. Chapter 4 deals with the impossibility of scrambling in the doub… more
Date: August 2003
Creator: Hoye, Masako Oku
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
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