Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Linguistics ; Sociolinguistics'

Despite the vast research on the relationship between bilingualism and cognition, no consensus has been reached about the positive impact of bilingualism and how various bilingual parameters may be effective to varying degrees. Thus, the purpose of this research is to examine the effects of bilingualism on inhibitory control and divergent thinking by assigning language learners to groups reflecting different bilingual background experience. To address this issue, 114 second language learners, assigned to three groups based on L2 frequency of use and L2 proficiency, were compared to 38 monolinguals in their performance at the Simon task (inhibitory control test) and the Alternate Uses Test (divergent thinking test). Inhibitory control results demonstrated that the positive effect of bilingualism was only found among the L2 group exhibiting the most frequent and regular use of L2. Findings of the divergent thinking task indicated similar performance across different L2 groups compared to the monolingual group. Results are discussed in light of how frequency of L2 use may improve inhibitory control by engaging similar mechanisms recruited for language control. Light is also shed on how different bilingual variables, such as the age of acquisition, may obscure the advantage of bilingualism on divergent thinking. Implications for this study are its relevance to the larger population of language learners and its contribution to the advancement of our understanding of the research gap surrounding how different linguistic parameters may influence the bilingual advantage.

The aim of this study is to reveal and analyze language ideologies and stereotypes associated with the three main regional dialects of Saudi Arabia: Najdi, Hijazi, and Janoubi. The research questions were “How do Saudi speakers with different educational levels perceive other regional dialects?” and “Does experience and exposure to other dialects play a role in terms of their perception?” Since college students typically have more opportunities to interact with speakers of different dialects, I hypothesized that their evaluations of other dialects would be different from high school students’ perspectives. The study participants consisted of 66 college subjects and 69 high school subjects; they came from different regional backgrounds. Lambert's Matched-Guise Test (1960) was implemented in order to examine the language attitudes toward these dialects. Interviews were also conducted to probe participants’ reasons and justifications for their judgments and opinions and also to support statistical findings. I found significant difference between college and high school subjects in the measures of five items. High school subjects tended to have a hard time guessing the speaker’s background, which indicates they lack awareness of other dialects. College participants also applied more positive adjectives to Hijazi and Najdi speakers. On the other hand, high school subjects tended to judge the Hijazi speaker as a very slow speaker. In the interviews, I found that college interviewees tended to provide more details than high school interviewees, which showed college participants are more aware of other dialects. This study tried to determine whether or not discriminatory attitudes existed among the participants. The results indicate that certain dialect speakers could be judged negatively based on which dialect they speak, and that there are implications for their social and work lives. This study may help scholars better understand some of the language ideologies held by high school and college students in Saudi Arabia.

This study examines lexical borrowing, code switching, and polylanguaging in Valencian Spanish to better understand how each is used differently in oral conversation in comparison with online communication on Twitter. This study compares data collected from three published corpora of oral interviews of speakers of Valencian Spanish with data collected from Twitter profiles of individuals residing in Valencia. In each of the sources Spanish is the preferred code into which Valencian material is inserted. A unique feature of data from the published corpora is the high frequency of code switching (CS) into Valencian in instances of reported speech. With regard to frequency, Twitter users switch from Spanish into Valencian, followed by from Valencian into Spanish and then from Spanish into English. On Twitter, the most frequent type of switch found is the tag switch, which includes exhortatives, greetings and farewells, happy birthday wishes, and a variety of other types of tags and other idiomatic expressions used in a highly emblematic fashion as a way of preforming identity. Both intrasentential and intersentential switches also appear online and reflect how discourse might be organized differently online than offline. In looking at lone vs. multiword insertions, the importance of turn taking is noted and instances where speakers are not in a naturalistic conversation evidence traits which influence patterns of CS and polylanguaguing. Additionally, lexical economy is suggested as a motivating factor for CS on Twitter given the platform’s technological limitation of 140 characters per tweet.

This thesis empirically asks whether Cajun English, a variety of American English spoken in South Louisiana, is an accent or a dialect. Because dialects are phonologically and syntactically and/or semantically different from a language’s standard form, this thesis examines one feature within each of those domains: the realization of interdental fricatives as stops, the use of perfective aspect on past tense verb phrases, and manner salience in descriptions of motion. In each domain, I ask if Cajun English is different from Standard English and, if it is, if that difference could be attributable to influences of Cajun French.

This study contextualizes the explosive valorization and commodification of dialect in Japan since the 1980s, known as the “dialect boom”, in terms of Japanese social and economic issues and the growing public interest in diversity within Japan. While the dialect boom has been widely studied in sociolinguistics, little work has related it to the growing valorization of diversity, and most recent work has focused primarily on the Kansai dialect. To these ends, I analyze the enregisterment of six Japanese dialects, those of Osaka, Hakata, Nagoya, Aomori, Okinawa, and K?sh?. I analyze a corpus of YouTube comments responding to videos of dialect usage, using stance (DuBois 2007) to break down the social acts that produce enregisterment (Agha 2003). I draw on the theories of indexicality (Johnstone and Kiesling 2008, Eckert 2008) and the discourse analytic concept of dialect performance (Schilling-Estes 1998, Coupland 2007) as guides to interpreting the micro-social interactions I observe, connecting them to a macro-social context through the theories of Standard Language Ideology (Lippi-Green 1997), identity construction (Bucholtz & Hall 2005), and folklorization (Fishman 1987).

I examine evaluations of dialect based on attractiveness, humorousness, intelligibility, folklorization, and country-ness, evaluate their relative prestige by investigating the willingness of speakers to debate dialect performances’ fidelity, and finally examine the political conflicts dialects are implicated in by looking at how they are related to questions of diversity and nationalism. The similarities between evaluations of the dialects of Okinawa and Aomori, particularly in the category of folklorization, suggest that the dialects of Aomori have accrued affective traits of an Indigenous language (such as nostalgia or sentimentality) despite being spoken by members of the ethnic majority. However, the conflicts that arise over the cases of Okinawa and Osaka suggest that the use of dialect as a marker of regional identity is now being integrated into a nationalist Japanese self-image as a country with rich internal diversity. This provides a means by which Japan can engage with the discourses of liberal multiculturalism and diversity without seriously threatening the hegemony of Japanese ethno-nationalism, suggesting a need to reevaluate the past focus on nihonjinron in building critiques of Japanese nationalist ideology.

This study investigates why and how bilinguals speakers tend to code switch on social media such as; Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Bilingual speakers who were born in the US, who adapted English as their second language or who have learned Spanish as their second language in school, usually tend to combine the two languages, English and Spanish, in order to get across their point of view to others. For this reason, this investigation was created to analyze how code- switching can influence people when it's exposed on media. There were three social medias with the total of 37 participants who had posted comments, status, pictures, videos in English, Spanish or mixing both where a good amount of people got influenced by. Therefore, the leading results were the following: (1) at every code switching done on any social media, users code switch or use the same style as a way to expand and influence others. (2) Users code switch as a way to expand a new culture and identity as being one big group.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the syntactic structure of Guerrero Nahuatl using Baker’s proposed Polysynthesis Parameter (1996). Baker (1996) claims that polysynthetic languages must have common features that aggregate to the concept of the Polysynthesis Parameter, which suggests that polysynthetic languages employ morphology for syntactic functions. Baker (1996) suggests that in polysynthetic languages, &thetas;-roles are assigned through either an agreement relationship (agreement morphemes) or a movement relation (Noun Incorporation). As a result, Baker (1996) claims that polysynthetic languages must be non-configurational due to the flexibility of the word order and the absence of true quantifiers which indicates that all overt NPs are adjuncts. Prior researchers have made competing claims regarding the structure of the Nahuatl languages and Baker (1996) Polysynthesis Parameter. In this thesis, I show that Guerrero Nahuatl is a non-configurational polysynthetic language. I provide data showing that &thetas;-roles are assigned through either an agreement relationship or through a movement relation (NI) as Baker (1996) predicated for polysynthetic languages. I also argue that Guerrero Nahuatl has free word order and no occurring true quantifiers. I provide evidence that all overt NPs are in adjunct positions rather than in actual A-positions. In addition, I show that there is an extensive use of null anaphora, and an absence of reflexive overt NPs.

This thesis investigates word order change in infinitival clauses from Object-Verb (OV) to Verb-Object (VO) in the history of Latin and Old French. By applying a variationist approach, I examine a synchronic word order variation in each stage of language change, from which I infer the character, periodization and constraints of diachronic variation. I also show that in discourse-configurational languages, such as Latin and Early Old French, it is possible to identify pragmatically neutral contexts by using information structure annotation. I further argue that by mapping pragmatic categories into a syntactic structure, we can detect how word order change unfolds. For this investigation, the data are extracted from annotated corpora spanning several centuries of Latin and Old French and from additional resources created by using computational linguistic methods. The data are then further codified for various pragmatic, semantic, syntactic and sociolinguistic factors. This study also evaluates previous factors proposed to account for word order alternation and change. I show how information structure and syntactic constraints change over time and propose a method that allows researchers to differentiate a stable word order alternation from alternation indicating a change. Finally, I present a three-stage probabilistic model of word order change, which also conforms to traditional language change patterns.

The basis of this investigation is the concept that identity is an emergent, or performative (Butler, 1990), process rather than a stable set of characteristics. Rituals such as weddings are moments when many, as individuals and as couples, socially construct identities through their interactions with others, and reflecting on one's wedding is also an event of intense identity construction.

This dissertation examines how language is used in the social construction of identity through the analysis of couples' wedding narratives. It is situated within the research domains of language and identity (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004) as well as language and ideologies (Fairclough, 1992; Gee, 2014). Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, or bilingually with 12 mixed-sex couples and 3 same-sex couples (a total of 30 participants) about their weddings in order to identify how couples performed identity and how such performances are connected to beliefs and attitudes.

Understanding that processes of identity construction are at times deliberate and planned, such as when one plans a wedding, and at others spontaneous and unconscious, such as when one reflects on her wedding, the analysis focuses both on the wedding event as reported by couples as well as on the interview as an event. This event is one in which couples and the interviewer interact to produce identity dialogically (Bakhtin, 1981) through relative position and stance (Wortham, 2004) via indexical labeling, presupposition, orientation to stereotypes, conversation structure, narrative structure, and evaluation during social interaction.

This study demonstrates how, in interviews about weddings, individual semiotic acts that contribute to the construction of identity may reproduce prior acts, giving a sense of cohesion, belonging, legitimacy, and authenticity to our identities, or may add another layer to a partial picture of who we are. These acts might even contradict the identities that we have constructed in the past, showing that identity is always complex and incomplete in a given moment. The analysis concludes that social change, especially regarding gender roles and attitudes toward same-sex relationships, occurs through performativity at macro- and micro-levels as participants both aligned with and pushed the boundaries of social expectations about how weddings should be and who should be in them in order to locate themselves and others within the social order.

The effects of time and occupational prestige measured in this study had more of an impact than gender on how often witnesses hedged on the stand. A corpus of transcripts from 1893 to 2013 was assembled to test the variables of time, gender and occupational prestige on witnesses’ production of hedge constructions (e.g., I think, sort of). Results showed no significant differences between female and male hedge production over this 120-year period, yet significant differences were found in the production of phrases between earlier and later testimonies. Furthermore, a significant correlation was found between hedge production and occupational prestige. The more prestigious a witness’s occupation, the fewer hedges s/he used. These findings support previous research that suggests a similarity between female and male speech in other genres of discourse and emphasizes social and environmental factors as areas worthy of deeper investigation for the contextual assessment of function in language.

This thesis focuses on the infinitive among Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban speakers, in contrast with Mexicans. Most grammars describe as ungrammatical some types of optative clauses in Caribbean Spanish (Bosque & Gutiérrez-Rexach, 2009): (4) a. *Nosotros estamos buscando otras alternativas, pero el director dice él tener ya todo seteao. We are looking for other alternatives, but the director says he to-have [inf] already everything checked. We are looking for other alternatives, but the director says he has already checked everything. (5) a. *Eso te pasa por tú ir demasiado rápido. That you [acus] happens because [-Q] you [nom] to-go [inf] too fast. That happens to you because of your going too fast.

Therefore, a variation phenomenon is produced (Silva-Corvalán, 2001): (4) b. Nosotros estamos buscando otras alternativas, pero el director dice que tiene ya todo seteao. We are looking for other alternatives, but the director says he has already everything checked.

We are looking for other alternatives, but the director says he has already checked everything (5) b. Eso te pasa porque vas demasiado rápido. That you [acus] happens because you [nom] go [ind] too fast That happens to you because you go too fast This project sharpens a specific look to clauses such as (4) and (5) on the basis of mood microvariation concerning the infinitive/indicative optionality, related to linguistic variables: subject type, person features, prepositions, subject specificity, subject co-references, topic-actor subject, and declaration features; and sociolinguistic variables: Caribbean sub-variety, age, and education level. Debates have arisen when studying subjunctive/infinitive optionality (Aponte, 2008; Kempchinsky, 2007; Morales, 1986, 1999). Less attention has been given to indicative/infinitive variation. This work proposes the application of procedural meaning hypothesis (Terkourafi, 2011) to explain that Caribbean speakers choose infinitive clauses because their grammar has a syntax-pragmatics micro-parameter. Using GoldVarb2001, phenomena such as (4) and (5) are analyzed from a query answered by 72 Carribeans, and 24 Mexicans; and 125 interviews. Caribbeans prefer the infinitive with first person singular, non-specific, and topic-actor subjects. This hierarchy demonstrates that Caribbean Spanish has its own structural configurations which privilege the syntactic-pragmatic interface.

The goal of this dissertation is to address the question of the Verb Second status of Old French as well as its decline by examining the interaction of syntax and Information Structure (IS) in the Left Periphery from the 13th century through the 16th century. Old French (OFr) has long been considered to be a Verb Second (V2) language, due to the overwhelming tendency for the finite verb to occur as the second constituent in matrix clauses, the hallmark of V2. Recently, the V2 analysis OFr has been called into question, due to the relatively high rate of clauses with more than one preverbal constituent (V>2). During this same period, our understanding of what V2 is has evolved in such a way as to place less emphasis on the number of preverbal constituents, and more on the theoretical underpinnings of the clause structure.

The results, obtained using a methodology for the annotation of IS in a corpus created for this project, support the V2 analysis of 13th century French, both in terms of its syntax and its IS. From a descriptively syntactic stance much of decline of V2 occurs between the 13th and 14th centuries (e.g. the rise in V>2 clauses, the decline in postverbal subjects). However, in examining the IS changes, we find that key aspects of the V2 grammar (e.g. V to C movement, EPP) are robust into the 15th century.

Ultimately, we find that examining Old French syntax through the lens of IS provides new insight into the interaction between IS and syntax in language change, especially with respect to both the manner and the timeline of the decline of V2 in the history of French.

This dissertation investigates the semiotic resources that Singaporeans combine, balance, and negotiate in order to enact a “proper” Singaporean identity. The analysis considers a variety of semiotic resources, ranging from fine-grained phonetic variables to language varieties to education or career paths. The meaningful organization and use of these semiotic resources are situated within Singapore’s broader sociopolitical discourses of nationhood, that is, how Singaporeans perceive themselves as a nation and citizens of that nation according to participation—or non-participation—in institutional discourses. I show how the notion of being “proper” as well as evaluations of “properness” are associated with social and linguistic practices that index (Silverstein 2003) meanings of being global and local, often simultaneously or in balance. Furthermore, this work extends Eckert’s (2008) concept of indexical fields , acknowledging that variables index multiple social meanings, any one of which have the potential to be activated in use. In the enactment of a “proper” identity, I investigate how these meanings are continuously co-constructed in interaction (Bucholtz and Hall 2005).

The (re-)production of “proper” ways of speaking and being are part of the processes of enregisterment (Agha 2007), via a semiotic repertoire, which is then available for public circulation and performable cultural models of behavior. This work examines the range and flexibility of resources that constitute a semiotic repertoire through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses—connecting macro-level discourses, such as the circulation of sociocultural stereotypes, to variation in speakers’ day to day language use, including micro-level investigations, such as the perception of voice onset time in Singapore English. This work highlights the many ways in which social identities and meanings are contextualized in and emerge out of interactions that regiment and discipline the behaviors of the self and others.

This dissertation explores language as a resource for the formation and expression of ethnic identity among the members of an Asian American college sorority. As a community of practice organized around ethnicity, the sorority provides an excellent site to examine the mutually constitutive relationship of language and ethnic identity. Two features of the sorority members' speech are analyzed in detail: their pronunciation of the mid-back rounded GOAT vowel, and their prosodic rhythm. For both variables, the behavior of the sorority members is compared with that of college peers of both Asian and non-Asian descent. The results indicate that both segmental and suprasegmental features are available as markers of Asian American ethnicity, and that the association of linguistic features with ethnicity is mediated by group membership and region, among other factors.

The community of study is an Asian-interest sorority at a large public university in New Jersey. The data are drawn from two main sources: participant observation of sorority activities and one-on-one sociolinguistic interviews. The ethnographic observations allow the behaviors and beliefs of the sorority members to be situated in the local context of the school, the state, and the region. The interview data, meanwhile, provide high-quality spontaneous speech data for phonetic analysis. It is argued that it is only through an understanding of the particular social context in which speakers exist that their linguistic behavior can be understood; conversely, examining linguistic behavior can illuminate how identity categories such as "Asian American" are construed and enacted within a given social setting.

The segmental variable analyzed in this study is the realization of the mid-back rounded vowel in the GOAT class of words. A quantitative analysis shows that the sorority members produce a more backed and monophthongal GOAT vowel than their non-Asian peers. In previous work, the fronting of GOAT has been noted as an ongoing change in certain regional dialects in the United States; however, the present analysis shows that sorority members tend to produce backer GOAT vowels than non-Asian speakers regardless of region.

The suprasegmental variable analyzed is prosodic rhythm, which refers to the relative length of adjacent syllables in speech. English is typically described as a stress-timed language, with stressed syllables being much longer than unstressed syllables. However, the sorority members' speech shows characteristics of syllable timing, with stressed and unstressed syllables being of roughly equal length. This finding coincides with those for other varieties of English, including Hispanic English and Singapore English. It is argued that syllable timing in English is likely a substrate effect from syllable-timed heritage languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Individual differences in prosodic rhythm are also examined with respect to age of acquisition and other inter- and intraspeaker factors.

This dissertation draws on multiple research traditions in the study of language and identity: it is an ethnographic description of a community of practice as well as a sociophonetic study of regionally and ethnically linked variables. It is also a study of young women's language at a critical stage of identity formation—the college years. Additionally, this dissertation is part of a growing body of sociolinguistic research on Asian Americans, a group that until recently has been drastically understudied. As a group with tremendous internal diversity, Asian Americans present both challenges and opportunities for the study of language and ethnicity. This dissertation thus advances sociolinguistic research in two ways: one, by shedding light on the language practices of this rapidly growing population, and two, by contributing to our overall understanding of how language interacts with various facets of identity, including ethnic identity.

Since the majority of Arabic language institutes teach Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), studies of the speech act performance of learners of Arabic as a second/foreign language compare learners’ productions made in MSA with the productions of native Arabic speakers. However, MSA is not spoken natively, and Arabic speech acts are performed orally. Therefore, individuals in the sample group either use their own dialect or they consciously code-switch to MSA, which leads to artificial production, especially when those productions are elicited via a written DCT. The present study, however, used the closed role-play data collection method so as to investigate the development of refusals to invitations made by L2 learners of Emirati Arabic at two levels of ability, low-intermediate and advanced, and to compare their production with the production of native Emirati Arabic speakers. The goal here is to determine whether there is a positive correlation between the learners’ language proficiency and their pragmatic development. Further, the study seeks to determine whether length of residence in the target community plays a significant role in acquiring Emirati Arabic refusals to invitations. The goal of the study’s second objective is to determine whether there is a positive correlation between length of residence in the target community and pragmatic development. Regarding both objectives, the current study is interested in revealing whether or not the status of interlocutors (higher, equal, or lower) modifies the degree of directness, semantic formulas, and content of NSs and NNS’s refusals to invitations in the same way. The study used the same classification scheme of refusal strategies that was proposed by Beebe et al. (1990) but with different situations and scenarios. Findings showed differences between the NS and NNSs of Emirati Arabic in the frequency, content, and order of the semantic formulas used as well as the effect of interlocutors’ social statuses on these variables. Further, findings revealed that learners of Emirati Arabic were remarkably more direct than the Emirati Arabic NSs, while the former learners who remained longer in the target community produced refusal patterns similar to those the Emirati Arabic NSs produced.

This study seeks to examine and compare motivational orientations of French learners across different dimensions: cultural background (USA vs. Russia), educational modality and age (college students vs. private courses learners), gender, and time of studying foreign language. 613 American and Russian learners of French completed the questionnaire addressing 10 motivational factors to study French language. Despite differences in nationality, age, educational background and learning experience, all groups of participants produced nearly identical motivational rankings. The rankings are topped by the Travelling orientation, which seems to be universally appealing, followed by the orientations within the Idealistic motivational cluster (Aesthetic Factors, Culture, Knowledge, and Ideal Self). The Pragmatic motivational cluster (Instrumental orientation, which is sometimes coupled to Emigration and Friendship dimensions) is by far less important. This disposition is also confirmed by the qualitative data. With regard to specific orientations it has been found that US learners score consistently higher in Sociability motivation, whereas Russians score higher in the Peers’ Encouragement and Aesthetic categories. In regard to gender differences, this study shows that male students appear to be more personable, e.g. among American learners males consistently outscore females in the Friendship category. Referring to age differences, it was found that the overall level of motivation tends to decline with age.