Browsing by Subject "Linguistics"
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Item Open Access 51 properties of 125 words: A unit analysis of verbal behavior(Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1980-01-01) Rubin, DCValues for 125 words were obtained for 51 scales including measures of orthography, pronunciation, imagery, categorizability, association, number of attributes, age-of-acquisition, word frequency, goodness, emotionality, autobiographical memory, tachistoscopic recognition, reading latency, lexical decision, incidental and intentional recall, recall using a mnemonic pathway, paired-associate learning, and recognition. Six factors emerged: Spelling and Sound, Imagery and Meaning, Word Frequency, Recall, Emotionality, and Goodness. Implications for current methodology and theory are discussed, including the claims: that multivariate research is a necessary addition to the study of verbal behavior; that a unidimensional concept such as depth does not do justice to the complexity of recall; and that associative frequency, emotionality, and pronunciability are among the best predictors of our commonly used tasks. © 1980 Academic Press, Inc.Item Open Access Cajun, Créole, et CODOFIL : La politique et la planification linguistique en Louisiane(2023-04-08) Costley, AudreyToday, linguists consider there to be two varieties of French in Louisiana: Louisiana French (Cajun) and Louisiana Creole. Both of these languages are classified as endangered, with a continually declining population of speakers. Language change occurs naturally, however, there are policies that impact the nature and rate of change. Through the lens of Critical Language Policy (CLP), the research examines how the decline of the French language in Louisiana has been impacted by policy decisions, while considering the structural and ideological factors that influenced these policies. Further, the project examines more recent policies, institutions, and grassroots movements aimed at revitalizing and maintaining the role of French in Louisiana. The project takes a critical lens in analyzing the successes and shortcomings of current language policy in Louisiana with a focus on education.Item Open Access Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables(2016) Patterson, Reginald DewightIn my thesis, “Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables,” I ask and answer the ‘Who? What? Where? When? Why?” of Creole Literature using the 19th century production of Aesopian fables as clues to resolve a set of linguistic, historical, literary, and geographical enigmas pertaining the ‘birth-place(s)’ of Creolophone Literatures in the Caribbean Sea, North and South America, as well as the Indian Ocean. Focusing on the fables in Martinique (1846), Reunion Island (1826), and Mauritius (1822), my thesis should read be as an attempt capture the links between these islands through the creation of a particular archive defined as a cartulary-chronicle, a diplomatic codex, or simply a map in which I chart and trace the flight of the founding documents relating to the lives of the individual authors, editors, and printers in order to illustrate the articulation of a formal and informal confederation that enabled the global and local institutional promotion of Creole Literature. While I integrate various genres and multi-polar networks between the authors of this 19th century canon comprised of sacred and secular texts such as proclamations, catechisms, and proverbs, the principle literary genre charted in my thesis are collections of fables inspired by French 17th century French Classical fabulist, Jean de la Fontaine. Often described as the ‘matrix’ of Creolophone Literature, these blues and fables constitute the base of the canon, and are usually described as either ‘translated,’ ‘adapted,’ and even ‘cross-dressed’ into Creole in all of the French Creolophone spaces. My documentation of their transnational sprouting offers proof of an opaque canonical formation of Creole popular literature. By constituting this archive, I emphasize the fact that despite 200 years of critical reception and major developments and discoveries on behalf of Creole language pedagogues, literary scholars, linguists, historians, librarians, archivist, and museum curators, up until now not only have none have curated this literature as a formal canon. I also offer new empirical evidence in order to try and solve the enigma of “How?” the fables materially circulated between the islands, and seek to come to terms with the anonymous nature of the texts, some of which were published under pseudonyms. I argue that part of the confusion on the part of scholars has been the result of being willfully taken by surprise or defrauded by the authors, or ‘bamboozled’ as I put it. The major paradigmatic shift in my thesis is that while I acknowledge La Fontaine as the base of this literary canon, I ultimately bypass him to trace the ancient literary genealogy of fables to the infamous Aesop the Phrygian, whose biography – the first of a slave in the history of the world – and subsequent use of fables reflects a ‘hidden transcript’ of ‘masked political critique’ between ‘master and slave classes’ in the 4th Century B.C.E. Greece.
This archive draws on, connects and critiques the methodologies of several disciplinary fields. I use post-colonial literary studies to map the literary genealogies Aesop; use a comparative historical approach to the abolitions of slavery in both the 19th century Caribbean and the Indian Ocean; and chart the early appearance of folk music in early colonial societies through Musicology and Performance Studies. Through the use of Sociolinguistics and theories of language revival, ecology, and change, I develop an approach of ‘reflexive Creolistics’ that I ultimately hope will offer new educational opportunities to Creole speakers. While it is my desire that this archive serves linguists, book collectors, and historians for further scientific inquiry into the innate international nature of Creole language, I also hope that this innovative material defense and illustration of Creole Literature will transform the consciousness of Creolophones (native and non-native) who too remain ‘bamboozled’ by the archive. My goal is to erase the ‘unthinkability’ of the existence of this ancient maritime creole literary canon from the collective cultural imaginary of readers around the globe.
Item Open Access Deconstructing Essentialist Identities: Reimagining the Russian Disapora of the Third Wave(2013) Kim, Eunice YoungeunThe identity of the Third Wave Russian Diaspora has been misunderstood through the oversimplification of their ethnic and language identity. In addition, the methodologies of sociolinguistic fieldwork, including bilingual studies in the Russian Diaspora, contain essentialism at their core. The paper explores the problem of the essentialist identity in the study of the Third Wave Diaspora and how it is created and maintained. In the first part of the thesis, I unpack the history of the Third Wave Soviet émigrés to understand why they were essentialized as Soviet or Russian Jews before becoming immigrants and then the Russian Diaspora. As a way to open up the discussion of the problem of studying Russian diaspora as one group, I discuss the methodologies of several key scholars in this field. Then, I specifically look at lexical data that have been studied by scholars on the Russian Diaspora. I use lexical terms I gathered from Soviet dictionaries to analyze and deconstruct the interpretations by the previous scholars. My conclusion is that because of this oversimplification of the Third Wave Russian Diaspora and methodological tendency to essentialize identities in studies, the Russian Diaspora and the language as a result have also been essentialized.
Item Open Access Development and Assessment of the Effectiveness of an Undergraduate General Education Foreign Language Requirement(Foreign Language Annals, 2014-01-01) Thompson, RJ; Walther, I; Tufts, C; Lee, KC; Paredes, L; Fellin, L; Andrews, E; Serra, M; Hill, JL; Tate, EB; Schlosberg, L© 2014 by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. This article describes a faculty-led, multiyear process of formulating learning objectives and assessing the effectiveness of a foreign language requirement for all College of Arts and Sciences undergraduates at a research university. Three interrelated research questions were addressed: (1) What were the levels and patterns of language courses completed under the language requirement compared to those under the previous curriculum? (2) To what extent was the oral proficiency learning objective being attained? and (3) How did oral proficiency vary by course level and the patterns of courses completed to satisfy the language requirement? The oral proficiency of 614 students was assessed with the Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview and categorized in terms of ACTFL ratings. Study findings indicated that 76% of students met or exceeded the objective of the Intermediate Mid level of oral proficiency and that oral proficiency differed by course level and the pattern of courses completed to satisfy the language requirement. In particular, the impact of completing an advanced-level course was clear, which in turn had implications for curricular policies and academic advising. It is argued that faculty-led evaluation of program effectiveness, in which assessment approaches are both summative and formative and findings are routinely used to improve educational practices as well as document student learning, is the necessary context for developing an evidence-based approach to undergraduate language education.Item Open Access Emerging Hispanic English in the Southeast U.S.: Grammatical Variation in a Triethnic Community(2013) Callahan-Price, Erin ElizabethAbstract
This study investigates variable past tense marking patterns in an emerging variety of N.C. Hispanic English (n=44) spoken by language learners at three Length of Residency (LOR) groups in three schools in Durham, NC in terms of 1. lexical semantics (Andersen & Shirai 1996, Bayley 1999), 2. frequency (Guy & Erker 2012) 3. discourse structure (Bardovi-Harlig 1998) and 4. verb class and phonological environment (Wolfram 1985, Bayley 1994). Statistical results show significant effects of verb class, lexical aspect, and frequency and interacting effects of verb class and frequency (specifically, suppletives like copula are simultaneously highly frequent and highly phonetically salient). A subsample coded for the discourse factor shows some evidence for the correlation of copula and backgrounding function. A separate analysis of consonant cluster reduction patterns (CCR) demonstrates dialect acquisition of variable constraints (e.g. in terms of N.C. AAVE), namely phonological environment (_C > _V) and morphemic status (monomorpheme > bimorpheme). Pedagogical applications are discussed, including accurately identifying English Language Learners (ELLs) in the context of local/regional accommodation.
Item Open Access Lucian and the Atticists: A Barbarian at the Gates(2019) Stifler, David William FriersonThis dissertation investigates ancient language ideologies constructed by Greek and Latin writers of the second and third centuries CE, a loosely-connected movement now generally referred to the Second Sophistic. It focuses on Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian “barbarian” writer of satire and parody in Greek, and especially on his works that engage with language-oriented topics of contemporary relevance to his era. The term “language ideologies”, as it is used in studies of sociolinguistics, refers to beliefs and practices about language as they function within the social context of a particular culture or set of cultures; prescriptive grammar, for example, is a broad and rather common example. The surge in Greek (and some Latin) literary output in the Second Sophistic led many writers, with Lucian an especially noteworthy example, to express a variety of ideologies regarding the form and use of language. A number of authors, including Lucian, practiced Atticism, the belief that the best literature wouldn be made possible by reviving the Attic dialect of Classical Athens, language of Plato and Aristophanes. Others, however, disagree with the narrow and perhaps pretentious version of Greek this ideology produced; intriguingly Lucian was a member of this group as well. This study examines Lucian’s complex and contradictory attitudes towards linguistic practices, focusing the works of his that address Atticism and other linguistic topics—such as the degree to which mastery of a language and its culture will allow one to identify with that culture. Here, too, Lucian portrays the relationship between linguistic practice and cultural identity in several different ways. Investigations into the linguistic views of other authors of the period help answer the question of which contemporary ideologies Lucian may be drawing on for his satire. The dissertation concludes that the detailed, specific humor of Lucian’s linguistic satire is tied into his overall project of creating a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and linguistic position for the self-representation of his disparate personae.
Item Open Access The Dynamics of Linguistic Humor Comprehension(2017-05-30) Dudley, TaelaAs 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.Item Open Access The Influence of Structural Information on Natural Language Processing(2020) Zhang, XinyuanLearning effective and efficient vectoral representations for text has been a core problem for many downstream tasks in natural language processing (NLP).
Most traditional NLP approaches learn a text representation by only modeling the text itself.
Recently, researchers have discovered that some structural information associated with the texts can also be used to learn richer text representations.
In this dissertation, I will present my recent contributions on how to utilize various structural information including graphical networks, syntactic trees, knowledge graphs and implicit label dependencies to improve the model performances for different NLP tasks.
This dissertation consists of three main parts.
In the first part, I show that the semantic relatedness between different texts, represented by textual networks adding edges between correlated text vertices, can help with text embedding.
The proposed DMTE model embeds each vertex with a diffusion convolution operation applied on text inputs such that the complete level of connectivity between any two texts in the graph can be measured.
In the second part, I introduce the syntax-infused variational autoencoders (SIVAE) which jointly encode a sentence and its syntactic tree into two latent spaces and decode them simultaneously.
Sentences generated by this VAE-based framework are more grammatical and fluent, demonstrating the effectiveness of incorporating syntactic trees on language modeling.
In the third part, I focus on modeling the implicit structures of label dependencies for a multi-label medical text classification problem.
The proposed convolutional residual model successfully discovers label correlation structures and hence improves the multi-label classification results.
From the experimental results of proposed models, we can conclude that leveraging some structural information can contribute to better model performances.
It is essential to build a connection between the chosen structure and a specific NLP task.
Item Open Access Variable wordforms, adaptable learners: evidence from real-time word comprehension and naturalistic corpora(2021) Moore, CharlotteWhen learning a language, typically-developing infants face the daunting task of learning both the sounds and the meanings of words. In this dissertation, we focus on a source of variability that complicates the one-to-one relationship between words and their meanings: wordform variability. In Chapter 1 we make a distinction between the micro timescale, where learning and acquisition can be observed during the comprehension of individual utterances, and the macro timescale, where a longitudinal lens can reveal intuitions about the speech that infants and toddlers can learn from. In Chapter 2, a corpus analysis confirms that infants hear more irregular verbs than irregular nouns. We then compare toddlers' phonological representations of irregular nouns and verbs to their regular counterparts in an eyetracking study. Toddlers demonstrate well-specified representations for verbs 8 months later than they do for nouns, but the sounds in irregular words are represented with high fidelity at the same time as regular words in both syntactic categories. In Chapter 3, an eyetracking study with adults explores word comprehension when coarticulation cues have been manipulated. Adults take available referents into account when they hear a word whose coarticulation cues match an unfamiliar word. We also find that participants vary in whether they map an unfamiliar word to an available unfamiliar object if the unfamiliar word is sufficiently similar to a relevant known word. In Chapter 4, we return to early childhood, using annotated data from a longitudinal corpus of naturalistic recordings from the lives of 6-17-month-old infants. In this corpus, we characterize and quantify wordform variability, and find that for high-frequency words, wordform variability may aid in word learning. Theoretical implications and next steps are discussed in Chapter 5. Taken together, this work suggests that throughout the lifespan, wordform variability is no problem for learners and can in some cases facilitate learning and comprehension.
Item Open Access Vulnerabilidad de lenguas en Durham, NC: un análisis geolingüístico y socioeconómico(2022-06-12) Kelly, AlexanderIn the context of linguistic rights, I present a series of cartographic observations about the growing diversity of languages in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. This work’s purposes are to identify vulnerable populations through language and related socioeconomic trends, share information in an accessible manner to community members, and discuss methods to promote linguistic equity. I explore the right to speak one’s own language, linguistic rights in the Americas, and their importance in Raleigh-Durham-Cary, a multilingual area. I share the information about local linguistic diversity gathered from interviews with community advocates. The methodology of creating the maps and conducting statistical analyses is then explained. I present the maps and make observations about diverse language groups’ characteristics. Finally, I observe which language communities are the most vulnerable.