Browsing by Department "Linguistics"

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    Filling the Emptiness of a Stunned Inner Silence: Survivors' Memoirs of Japanese Internment Camps in Indonesia during World War II
    (2010-05-21T20:17:52Z) Emery, Lindsay
    War stories are so often reported with the number of victims. Statistics break down the logistics into birthplace, military versus nonmilitary, or even men versus women. With constant exposure, readers are numb to the significance of these numbers; one cannot fully grasp the fear, pain, suffering, or sadness that accompanied the over 15,000 Allied prisoners of war that died building the Burma Railroad or the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. This desensitization results in indifference or ignorance. Perhaps what may be more impactful and memorable is to read war stories from the view and experience of the survivors. The surviving prisoners of war have memories and stories that provide insight and force the reader to feel and experience the memory; an understanding that is impossible to gain from war victim statistics. This thesis analyzes written narratives of Dutch women and children survivors of the Japanese internment camps in Indonesia during World War II in an attempt to give coherence and presence to the fragmentary existence of their experience. The fragments of these individuals exemplify the tragedy, disappointment, emotional anxiety, difficulty in articulating their story and isolation from the outside world felt by each survivor in their distinct experiences. These stories reevaluate how this experience has shaped the survivors as individuals despite the unaware, unwelcoming, and unperturbed observers of the outside world. By assembling these various memoirs we can construct an image of the larger, collective experience of the internees and fill the void that each story individually cannot fill.
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    The Dynamics of Linguistic Humor Comprehension
    (2017-05-30) Dudley, Taela
    As a performance whose functioning relies heavily on sociocultural rules, humor does not easily transcend cultural and language lines. In most cases, humor comprehension requires more than fluency in a language. Linguistic humor in particular can create challenges for second language (L2) speakers because it demands fluency, as well as a higher competence of linguistic rules governing how the language is applied. This study aimed to examine the role that such competence may play in humor comprehension by determining if fluent L2 English speakers from first language (L1) Mandarin and French speech communities could understand Standard American English (SAE) linguistic humor. The findings suggest that comprehension of linguistic humor may be dependent on sufficient exposure to a speech community, but further research with larger population sizes is necessary.