Program Graduates and Their Theses

Sean Foley

Graduation Year: 2022
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Control and Biomechanics in Coarticulation: Insights from an Ultrasound Study of Standard Mandarin Apical Vowels
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton, Jeff Mielke, Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This study investigated the extent to which speaker-induced control and biomechanics play a role in determining the outcome of spatial coarticulation. Employing ultrasound tongue imaging, coarticulatory effects from and induced on adjacent consonants were quantified as measures of coarticulatory resistance and aggressiveness for the two apical vowels of Standard Mandarin in comparison to the three corner vowels. The results show that the two apical vowels are much less resistant to coarticulatory effects than the vowels [i a u], and they often do not induce larger effects on adjacent consonants than these vowels, due to speaker-targeted effects. It was also found that the retroflex apical vowel was consistently more resistant and aggressive than the dental apical vowel, due to biomechanical differences. Together, both of these findings implicate the roles of speaker control and biomechanics in coarticulation and highlight the need for a model of coarticulation to include both of these factors.

Martha Thomas

Graduation Year: 2022
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   A Quantitative Analysis of the Language Used By Violent and Non-Violent Incels
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marin, Mohamed Mwamzandi, Mike Terry
Abstract:

Language is used as a tool by online extremist groups to recruit members and create and maintain in-group identity. The choice to use specific terms indicates an ideological stance; the choice to refer to certain people groups by negative and derogatory terms serves to dehumanize and "other" the outgroup, while also reinforcing the group identity of the writer(s) is made through the employment of certain terms as opposed to others. In order to better understand the way that these groups draw in and keep members, it is necessary to understand the rhetorical tactics used in the creation of online content. This study aims to analyze the discourse patterns of both violent and non-violent incels in order to determine if there are observable differences in the discourse patterns of the two, and whether or not users of "incel language" are more likely to commit violent crimes or harm themselves than those who do not.

Jolie Hiers

Graduation Year: 2022
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Spanish Teacher Attitudes Toward Gender-Neutral Spanish Forms
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker, David Mora-Marin, Jim Michnowicz
Abstract:

This thesis examined sociolinguistic attitudes of Spanish teachers in the US regarding inclusive gender-neutral language forms, -x, -@ and -e and the novel third person singular pronoun elle. This is a relatively understudied area, especially within the classroom setting. However, nonbinary visibility and acceptance has been on the rise in the US in recent years. It follows that many members of the nonbinary student population in the US will enroll in Spanish courses during their education, and teachers of Spanish will need to be prepared to recognize nonbinary identities in the Spanish language. However, the attitudes held by Spanish teachers regarding nonbinary or gender-neutral language remain largely unexamined. Results of the study indicate that participant attitudes are, on the whole, quite positive and that –e is the preferred form among teachers. However, the demographic variables of age, gender, and LGBTQ+ identity have noticeable effects on teacher attitudes regarding these forms.

Yuanchen Bao

Graduation Year: 2022
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese by American Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners of Chinese
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith, Misha Becker
Abstract:

Heritage language acquisition has always been controversial and has been widely discussed by scholars in recent years. Some people think that heritage language acquisition is the same as L2 language acquisition, while other people think that heritage language acquisition is different from either L1 or L2 language acquisition. The current study aims to investigate the phonological acquisition of Mandarin Chinese by American heritage speakers and intermediate L2 learners. 5 heritage speakers, 8 intermediate adult L2 Chinese learners (including 5 lower intermediate and 3 upper intermediate learners), and 5 native speakers participated in the perception and production experiment. The logistic regression model on the results of error rates in the perception of half-T3 sandhi proves that both heritage listeners and intermediate L2 listeners are more sensitive to high tones or the tone starting with a high pitch point compared to low tones. Both groups rely on the starting point of the tonal pitch to perceive Mandarin tones rather than tonal contours. The results of the production experimentreveal that heritage speakers produce different Mandarin aspirated voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate [tɕʰ] from either native speakers or intermediate L2 speakers. The finding implies that heritage speakers may establish a new L2 sound category for L1 sounds and differ from low intermediate L2 speakers who assimilate the target phoneme to English voiceless post-aveloar affricate [tʃ]. The current study offers an aspect of heritage phonological acquisition in terms of the learning of Mandarin segmental and suprasegmental features by learners who acquire Chinese as an additional language.

Yiwen Peng

Graduation Year: 2021
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The selectional relations and constituency of classifiers in Mandarin Chinese
Thesis Advisor/s:  Brian Hsu, Misha Becker, Mike Terry
Abstract:

This thesis delves into classifiers (shortened as CL in the following discussion) in Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on proposing a single constituent structure to account for the syntactic positions of different categories of classifiers. I examine Zhang’s (2013) split analysis, according to which the scope of delimitive adjectives indicates that different types of classifiers have distinct constituent structures and thus left- and right-branching structures are both required. In the split accounts, Mandarin classifiers that form a constituent with head nouns are represented with the right-branching structure, while those that form a constituent with numerals are represented with the left-branching structure. In this paper, I offer an account of feature checking among s-selectional features to explain the distinct scope relations between delimitive adjectives and different types of classifiers, and I argue for a consistent right-branching structure for the representation of all types of classifiers. Finally, the structure of Noun-Classifier compounds in Mandarin are discussed to argue that classifiers occur in two distinct projections, UnitP and ClP: they are initially base-generated in CL, and then move to Unit to license numerals, and this supports the unified right-branching analysis in which classifiers form a constituent with nouns first rather than with numerals.

Jiefang Li

Graduation Year: 2021
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Contribution of Morphological Awareness to Word Segmentation Among Adult L2 Chinese Speakers
Thesis Advisor/s:  Katya Pertsova, Misha Becker, Jia Lin
Abstract:

The current study aims to investigate the causal correlation between Chinese morphological awareness and word segmentation among intermediate adult speakers who learn Chinese as their second language (L2). In particular, we intend to determine the role of a potential mediator, vocabulary knowledge in this relationship. A total of 45 intermediate adult L2 Chinese speakers participated in the experiment and finished three separate tasks on Chinese morphological awareness, Chinese word segmentation, and vocabulary size. The logistic regression on the results of Chinese morphological awareness task fails to prove that the L2 Chinese speakers are sensitive to the degree of compositionally of Chinese compounds. Multi-linear regressions were conducted to test the mediation effects, and the results demonstrate that: (1) Chinese morphological awareness didn’t directly predict participants performance in word segmentation; (2) Chinese morphological awareness didn’t indirectly exert a strong effect on word segmentation via vocabulary knowledge. Although the current study didn’t find evidence to verify the relationship between morphological awareness and word segmentation nor the mediation effects of vocabulary knowledge, it establishes a foundation for future research design and implementation.

Yu Cai

Graduation Year: 2021
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Lexical and Sandhi Tones in Nanchang Gan: A Phonetic Description
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith, Elliott Moreton, David Mora-Marin
Abstract:

This study is a descriptive and quantitative analysis of tones in Nanchang Gan (NCG). The broader goal of this project is to contribute to the preservation of NCG, and tones in this language serve as a starting point. Specifically, this study looks at tones on monosyllabic words and tones on the first word of disyllabic compounds in NCG, as well as tone sandhi patterns in this language. Quantitative analyses were conducted, and the results show that there are five monosyllabic tones and eight disyllabic-compound-initial tones in NCG. Moreover, by comparing the tones of morphemes when produced in the monosyllabic and disyllabic contexts, nine tone sandhi patterns were found, some of which appear to parallel Mandarin tone sandhi patterns.

Tristan Bavol

Graduation Year: 2020
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Preferred Argument Structure in Azajo Dialect P’urhepecha
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marin, Paul Roberge, Mike Terry
Abstract:

This thesis tests the Azajo dialect of P’urhepecha for evidence of Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) as outlined by Du Bois (1987; 2003). This thesis examines three formulations of the proposal, namely the Strong PAS theory, which includes the proposed PAS constraints (ibid.) as well as a proposed universal ergative-patterning of discourse as seen in Du Bois (1987), the Weak PAS theory, which includes the PAS constraints but not the universal ergative-patterning of discourse, and a counter-proposal made by Everett (2009), in which an alternative explanation of humanness is advanced to explain the PAS phenomena. This thesis does not find evidence supporting the Strong PAS proposal, in that there is no evidence found supporting an ergative-patterning of discourse in Azajo P’urhepecha, but does find evidence supporting the Weak PAS proposal, in that each of the constraints posited by Du Bois is replicated in the Azajo P’urhepecha data. In comparing the accounts by Du Bois and Everett it was found that both grammatical role and humanness affect the PAS distribution, echoing results found in Huang (2012). Moreover, the results suggest that humanness in particular affects the role S, causing it to either pattern with A if S is human, or O if S is nonhuman, which appears to mirror the clustering of these roles in languages with split-ergativity. These findings suggest that careful analysis of the interaction of humanness and grammatical role may advance the field’s understanding of cross-linguistic typology of morphosyntactic alignment.

Michael Bruxvoort

Graduation Year: 2020
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Enumerators in S’gaw Karen; A Compilation and Analysis
Thesis Advisor/s:  Brian Hsu, Katya Pertsova, David Mora-Marin
Abstract:

This thesis presents a compilation of numeral classifiers (which I will call enumerators) in S’gaw Karen, a Tibeto-Burman language in Southeast Asia, and provides a descriptive analysis of some of their syntactic distributions. Cross-linguistic accounts of enumerators often sub-categorize them by semantic function (Greenberg 1972; Aikhenvald 2000; Sneft 2000). This thesis argues that the common sub-categories of measure terms, mensural classifiers, and sortal classifiers also differ in their syntactic distributions in S’gaw Karen. In brief, only measure terms occur without a head noun and only sortal classifiers occur next to the head noun by means of a linker. This latter pattern is unattested in the literature, and the analysis of the morpheme Ɂa1 as linker is novel. Previous accounts present a similar morpheme under varied nomenclature (Jones 1961; Cervo 2011; Olson 2014). Analyzing Ɂa1 as a linker unifies these accounts and provides an explanation for this newly described distribution.

Brian Ladd

Graduation Year: 2020
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   More than Words: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Islamic State Language
Thesis Advisor/s:  Mike Terry, David Mora-Marin, Cori Dauber
Abstract:

In this thesis I will provide an exploratory study applying Multi-Dimensional analysis to the realm of Islamic State language. Systematic, observable variables that constitute IS communications can be identified through a built model. The idea is to make more of the type of information that a human analyst relies on available in the automated pre-processing and parsing phases, the types of information that they are looking for is something that a system like Bag-of-Words is missing. The corpus studied was drawn from the Islamic State newsletter al-naba’. I collected five issues from January 2020 – February 2020. From those issues the editorial sections were focused on specifically. Two paragraphs were chosen from each editorial at random. Each paragraph was translated and coded for sixteen linguistic features, including the presence or absence of religious or political nouns and verbs. I ran a correlation matrix as well as a Factor Analysis and qualitatively analyzed each for the communicative functions. The statistical analysis revealed that overall, the Islamic State uses significantly more political speech than religious. However, in longer sentences, political and religious speech is more likely to occur. The qualitative analysis found that in longer sentences, religious and political speech are in service to each other. There is a political aim to the sentence punctuated with a religious admonition statement to reinforce the political goal. I hypothesize that MDA can determine, via a seeded exploration method, a distinct IS register among the newsletters. This thesis does not fully realize this goal; however, it does provide support for the concept by identifying patterns that may very well help to determine an IS register.

Megan Fletcher

Graduation Year: 2020
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Bias in the Classroom: How that Southern Twang Could Influence Instructor Evaluations
Thesis Advisor/s:  Katya Pertsova, Becky Butler, David Mora-Marin
Abstract:

In the U.S. as in other countries, there exists the idea that one variety of a language is better, or more prestigious than others. This dialect is referred to as the “standard” or standardized dialect. It is not an actual dialect anyone speaks but rather a “hypothetical construct (Lippi-Green, 2012:55)” based off of prescriptivists ideas of what English “should” look and sound like. Many dialects that do not meet this idealized “standard” face language biases, whether related to ethnicity, as in African American English, or the geographic region, as in Southern American English. These biases either come from the incorrect notion that there is only one “correct” form of English, or they are implicit biases toward a group of people which results in biases towards their dialects. Some people view Southern dialects of English as less intelligent or less “correct” than the standardized form of English. This idea of standardized English and its “correctness” is perpetuated by schools and the media (Lippi-Green, 2012: 62). In the university setting, a speaker of a different dialect, whether regional or otherwise, faces possible repercussions in terms of grades or sense of belonging (Dunstan, 2013). Since the use of standardized English is viewed as the norm, the use of any other dialect brings along biases associated with this dialect and could harm the student’s success in the world of academia. This project aimed to determine if university instructors are biased against students who speak a Southern American English dialect. Specifically, will instructors rate answers to questions lower if the answer is spoken in a southern dialect? For the study, instructors at UNC were asked to take a survey rating Southern and standard speakers. These speakers were orally answering academic questions. The instructors’ responses were analyzed in order to determine if the Southern speakers were rated lower. The findings showed that the instructors rated everyone very highly and thus a statistically significant difference could not be determined between the speakers. These high ratings could have been due to the survey design, the instructors’ low years of experience, or the university setting and subsequent diversity training. Despite the lack of statistical significance, this study could act as a pilot study for quantitative studies of language bias. If the survey is corrected, further research could be conducted to obtain quantitative data about bias against Southern speakers.

Erin Chesson

Graduation Year: 2020
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Heritage speaker use of pro-drop and verbal agreement morphology in Tigrinya
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker, Abbas Benmamoun, Brian Hsu
Abstract:

This thesis analyzes the production of overt and null pronouns and verbal agreement morphology in heritage speakers of Tigrinya. I demonstrate that in spontaneous speech heritage speakers produce more overt pronouns where not pragmatically required than a native speaker, which aligns with the existing literature. I argue from the elicited data that heritage speakers use more unexpected subject and object agreement morphology than a native speaker, which also aligns with the existing literature. The spontaneous speech data does not support a strong conclusion about heritage agreement morphology due to the freedom in agreement for nouns with unstable gender in Tigrinya. In addition, based on this freedom of agreement and resulting mismatch in phi-features by object agreement markers and their referents, I argue that these morphemes in Tigrinya are agreement markers and not doubled clitics.

Minlu Zhang

Graduation Year: 2020
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Lexical Structure and Semantic Changes of the Nomenclature of Body Terms in Xainju Wu
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marin, Uffe Bergeton, Mike Terry
Abstract:

This study aims to document the body part vocabulary of Xianju Wu with contributions to the preservation of the language. It serves as a starting point for this documentation work by analyzing the nomenclature of body terms within the language. This consists of two discussions, namely those concerning the lexical structure and semantic changes. With regard to lexical structure, the present study aims to test Cecil H. Brown’s 7 rules of partonomy, finds out the hierarchical ranks and lexical structure of Xianju Wu body lexemes. As a result, the study comes out with five hierarchical ranks, which support the partonomy principles. Besides, three lexical categories are determined. Among which, the secondary lexemes usually consist of two bound lexemes as the head, followed by another constituent indicating the superordinate or subordinate relations. Through this, I establish that disyllabic bound structure is the basic form of nomenclature of primary lexical structure concerning Xianju Wu body lexemes. This lexical structure that distinguished from Mandarin may not have been influenced by Mandarin yet. With regard to semantic changes, the study aims to evaluate the occurring semantic changes and shift of Xianju Wu. Through the apparent-time method, the comparative study shows that Xianju Wu body terms are undergoing semantic changes and shift through analogy and deletion. The analysis of metaphors and metonymies discloses that most polysemies in Xianju Wu are extended through interfield metaphors. This evidence does not support David Wilkins’ (1996) model for tendencies of change in the domain of parts of the body. The data analyzed in the study was collected during Summer 2019 with 5 speakers from 5 age groups completing surveys and providing the body terms studied in this research.

William Carter

Graduation Year: 2019
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Explicit and Implicit Acquisition of Opacity: Initial Evaluations of A Dual-System Model of Grammar
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton, Katya Pertsova, Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

Despite OT’s success, opaque alternations prove difficult to capture with constraints, and some violate the theory’s formal restrictions. Here, I propose a novel account of opacity drawing upon developments in psychology. Rather than one grammar, I propose a dual-system model with implicit and explicit mechanisms, a domain-specific OT-like system and a domain-general rule-based system respectively. While the implicit system can handle most linguistic patterns, special cases like opacity require explicit acquisition. This predicts an advantage for explicit over implicit learning of opacity, and that elusive substantive bias may manifest by isolating implicit learners. In an artificial language experiment, participants learned opaque and transparent metathesis patterns. Despite participants’ difficulty acquiring the patterns, analysis shows a positive effect of explicit learning for opaque patterns. Additionally, implicit learners, but not explicit learners, show higher performance for substantively motivated vs. non-motivated patterns. These results tentatively support the dual-system account, and further exploration is warranted.

Simon Wolf

Graduation Year: 2019
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   OMG break a leggg lol: Digital discourse-pragmatic variation in a theater-based community of practice
Thesis Advisor/s:  Paul Roberge, Katya Pertsova, David Mora-Marin
Abstract:

This thesis investigates the structure and use of language in the digital correspondences of a university community centered around the practice of making theater. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach combining variationist and interactional sociolinguistic techniques, this study analyzes the function of three digital language phenomena (LOL, OMG, and typographic lengthening). All three variables are shown to position discourse participants in relation to the broader community audience while contributing their particular pragmatic meanings to an interaction. Both LOL and OMG are also shown to be sensitive to syntactic structure and at times to serve as discourse markers. In addition, use of “digital language features” is shown to be significantly impacted by relative chronology, discourse structure, and (to a limited extent) community role. These results provide support for ongoing processes of grammaticalization in digital discourse and demonstrate the importance of digital language and discourse for building ties in this community of student artists.

Melissa Klein

Graduation Year: 2019
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Cherokee Writing Reexamined: A Linguistic Analysis of the Cherokee Syllabary
Thesis Advisor/s:  Benjamin Frey, Misha Becker, David Mora-Marin
Abstract:

This thesis applies a novel methodology to analyze the graphic forms of the Cherokee Syllabary to address the questions: Is the Cherokee Syllabary a pure syllabic writing system, and if so, did it start out that way? Calligraphic terminology was borrowed to identify and analyze the anatomical pieces of Cherokee graphemes. Previous scholars have explored the Cherokee Syllabary in-depth, but did not apply a systematic formal and structural analysis to the sign inventory. Through my analysis, I observe that 1) MCS (Modern Cherokee Syllabary) is a syllabic system, 2) OCS (Original Cherokee Syllabary) may have features of a mixed system with abugida-like diacritics, 3) OCS and MCS graphemes are formally related, 4) approximately 50% of the possible diacritics in OCS were maintained into MCS graphemes, and 5) many CS graphemes were borrowed and repurposed from the Roman alphabet, resulting in graphemic divergence through the alterations of rotation, deletion, and substitution.

Mykel Brinkerhoff

Graduation Year: 2019
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   On Subcategorization and PRIORITY: Evidence from Welsh Allomorphy
Thesis Advisor/s:  Brian Hsu, Katya Pertsova, Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This thesis examines the phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy (PCSA) of the definite article in Welsh and initial consonant mutations. The analysis of these patterns shows that Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993]), with the addition of Lexical Selection’s use of priority relationship and lexical subcategorization (Mascaró 2007; Bonet et al. 2007) and Prosodic Subcategorization (Inkelas 1990, 1993; Zec 2005; Bye 2007; Bennett et al. 2018; Tyler 2019), can account for the distribution of the definite article allomorphs and their interaction with the rest of the grammar as well as the behavior of Welsh initial consonant mutations contrary to Hannahs & Tallerman (2006). The analysis further argues for an expansion of prosodic subcategorization to include allomorph-specific subcategorization frames in light of the Welsh definite article. Additionally, this thesis makes the argument against a purely morphological subcategorization approach to phonologically conditioned allomorphy, contrary to the claims of Paster (2009, 2015).

Kate Rustad

Graduation Year: 2018
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Taking Linguistics: Does an Introductory Linguistics Class Result in Increased Social Emotional Competency?
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín, Jules Terry, Glynis Cowell
Abstract:

The present study was conducted to investigate changes in dialectal tolerance and/or social emotional competencies of Linguistics 101 students through the duration of a semester. Students from Linguistics 101 were surveyed twice during Spring 2018, along with students from a control class outside of Linguistics. A third class based in variationist theory was also surveyed.

Six speaker clips of various dialects, Valley Girl, AAE, NNS, and SAE, were played for participants in a verbal-guise task, to be rated on politeness, level of education, sociability, kindness, and professionalism. Participants were asked to rate themselves according to the five core competencies of social emotional learning: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision Making. Minor differences appeared in relation to social emotional competencies when comparing linguistics students to a control group. Dialect tolerance ratings showed minor differences, but not enough to suggest that an introductory linguistics course can change inherent biases.

Raua-Banu Kadirova

Graduation Year: 2018
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Sociolinguistic Attitudes of Kazakhs Towards the Latin Alphabet and Orthography Reform in Kazakh
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín, Paul Roberge, Michael Terry
Abstract:

This research study examines the sociolinguistic attitudes of Kazakhs towards the Latin alphabet and orthography reform by means of the sociolinguistic attitude survey. The recent announcement of Nursultan Nazarbaev, the Kazakh president of the Republic of Kazakhstan, about an intention of the Kazakh government to have shifted the current Cyrillic-based Kazakh alphabet to the Latin seemed to lead to the division of the Kazakh society into two opposite groups.

The president announced a full support of the Latin alphabet adoption by various sections of the population of Kazakhstan, although there is not or no publicly available a research study or official consensus regarding the reform in Kazakh. Therefore, this research study is directly motivated by this linguistic situation in Kazakhstan.

To find out whether such an alphabet and orthography reform is triggered by a linguistic need of Kazakh, an interview with some Kazakh language experts was also conducted in addition to the sociolinguistic survey. As a result, both the Kazakh language users and experts unanimously support the current reform and associate it with a language need and globalization.

Mika Wang

Graduation Year: 2018
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Anaphora Resolution Based on Semantic Relatedness in the Biomedical Domain
Thesis Advisor/s:  Katya Pertsova, Jules Terry, Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

In Linguistics, an anaphor is an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context, namely an antecedent expression. Anaphora resolution is a task of identifying the anaphorical relation between the anaphor and its antecedent. Anaphora resolution is used in many high-level tasks of Natural Language Processing. Traditionally, the rule-based approaches to anaphora resolution rely on the syntactic structures and discourse features.

In my study, I implement two semantic approaches on biomedical texts, ontology-dependent method and ontology-independent vector semantic method. The ontology-dependent method will be used to locate the antecedent for noun phrases with determiners while the ontology-independent method will be implemented on pronouns. The results show that the semantic approaches are promising directions in investigating resolutions for anaphora problems in the future.

Haley Boone

Graduation Year: 2018
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Phonetic Motivation for Diachronic Sound Change in Bantu Languages as Evidenced by Voiceless Prenasalized Stop Perception by Native Somali Chizigula Speakers
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Two hypotheses were tested as triggering nasal effacement, leaving an aspiration contrast, in voiceless prenasalized stops in Bantu languages: Aspiration is more reliably produced than voiceless nasalization. Voiceless nasalization is harder to hear than aspiration.

Productions from two Somali Chizigula speakers were measured to test the cue reliability of nasalization amplitude versus aspiration duration. Aspiration is a more reliably produced cue, providing better distinction between voiceless stops.

The perception of voiceless nasalization and aspiration by 10 Somali Chizigula participants was tested. Native productions of voiceless prenasalized and plain stops were cross-spliced to contain pre-burst information from one stop type and post-burst from the other. Participants then identified each stimulus as prenasalized or plain.

Nasalized-only stimuli were identified as "prenasalized" significantly less than control prenasalized stimuli, but aspirated-only stimuli did not receive significantly less "prenasalized" responses than prenasalized controls. Aspiration appears easier to hear, but not more heavily weighted than nasalization.

Brent Eisenbarth

Graduation Year: 2018
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Reading Lips and Learning Sounds: The Effect of Visual Cue Saliency on Phonological Production in a Second Language
Thesis Advisor/s:  Lucia Binotti, Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

Visual cues in speech perception are often studied in the context of the McGurk effect, that is to say, they are researched insofar as their role in interrupting or supporting audio cues during instanteous speech processing. What is unknown, however, is the extent to which visual cues may influence second language acquisition. L2 production reflects biases in language processing and learning from first language interference and cue availablity, such as markedness, and distinctiveness from other tokens.

Data from Menke and Face, 2009, shows a curious pattern in which advanced Spanish L2 learners produce labial spirantization more accurately than velar spirantization. The difference is most pronounced in advanced speakers. This thesis seeks to reproduce this pattern by testing the distinctiveness of labial and velar singleton- geminate contrasts produced by Italian L2 speakers of differing proficiencies. Participants distinguish labial geminate-singleton pairs more reliably than their velar counterparts, when controlled for the following vowel context.

Will Carter

Graduation Year: 2018
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Explicit and Implicit Acquisition of Opacity
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton, Katya Pertsova, Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

In an artificial language experiment, participants learned opaque and transparent metathesis patterns. Despite participants’ difficulty acquiring the patterns, analysis shows a positive effect of explicit learning for opaque patterns. Additionally, implicit learners, but not explicit learners, show higher performance for substantively motivated vs. non-motivated patterns. These results tentatively support the dual-system account, and further exploration is warranted.

Brent Eisenbarth

Graduation Year: 2018
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Reading Lips and Learning Sounds: The Effect of Visual Cue Saliency on Phonological Production in a Second-Language
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith, Lucia Binotti, Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

While L2 production is widely understood to show traces of L1 interference and general cue availability, the role of visual cue strength on L2 production is previously unstudied. As such, this experiment compares the production of 10 L2 Italian speakers’ intervocalic /p/ - /pp/ and /k/ - /kk/ contrasts, to see if the more visible labial pair is produced more distinctly than its less visible velar counterpart. Participants read an adapted excerpt of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and a subsequent word list. After compensating for following vowel effects within a subset, intermediate and advanced participants were found to produce more distinct labial than velar pairs; an effect most evident in advanced participants. Furthermore, this thesis discusses a potential asymmetry between the behavior of visible and non-visible gestures produced across different places of articulation, suggesting further research into the potential influence of varying visual cue strengths in L2 production.

Hui, 'Eric' An

Graduation Year: 2017
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Classification of Mandarin Idiomatic VPs
Thesis Advisor/s:  J. Michael Terry
Abstract:

Due to their uncommon meaning-form pairing, idioms have always been a center piece in discussions about how human mind stores and computes meaning. Based on the composition of their aspectual properties, this thesis classifies Mandarin idiomatic VPs into five different categories to show that certain idioms can be argued to have aspect put together in the syntax while others are best described to have their aspectual properties stored as a whole in the lexicon. This complex result adds partial support to both Representational Modularity and Distributed Morphology, meanwhile providing more cross-linguistic evidence to the discussion on idiomatic meaning-form pairing.

Yuka Muratani

Graduation Year: 2017
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Influence of Poor Fit Vowels on Perception of Consonants
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith, Katya Pertsova
Abstract:

The present study investigated native English listeners' perception of an ambiguous fricative noise from a [s]-[ʃ] continuum followed/preceded by a poor fit vowel—either one of the [i]s that have higher/lower formant frequencies than a good exemplar of English [i], or [u]s that have higher/lower formant frequencies than a good exemplar of English [u].

The main questions that the present study intended to address were, i) whether listeners would show perceptual contextual dissimilation, a.k.a. compensation for coarticulation, Mann & Repp, 1980, 1981, or listeners would show perceptual contextual assimilation, a.k.a. parsing, Fowler, 1984,; and ii) whether listeners would respond to the stimuli according to their phonological analysis of the segments, Kingston et al., 2011, or according to the actual phonetic details of the segments, Whalen, 1989.

The results were that the listeners showed perceptual contextual dissimilation for their broad,more abstract, phonological categorization of [i] and [u]. However, when the listeners were sensitive to the phonetic details of the segments, the listeners showed perceptual contextual assimilation. The listeners somehow, however, were not sensitive to the phonetic details of poor fit vowels when the stimuli were identified as [si] and [ʃi].

Although it is hard to come to a solid conclusion from these response patterns, the results at least indicate that listeners may be able to parse vowels using their native language knowledge, and dynamically adjust the acoustic discrepancy by showing perceptual contextual assimilation.

Daniel Seabrooks

Graduation Year: 2017
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Child Acquisition of Spanish Clitic Impersonal Constructions: An Empirical Study on the CHILDES Corpora
Thesis Advisor/s:  Randall Hendrick, Bruno Estagarribia, Misha Becker
Abstract:

The passive and impersonal uses of the Spanish clitic se have been the focus of an important linguistic debate; they are often considered to be similar because they both de-emphasize the logical subject of the verb, but they differ in the way they affect the verb’s transitivity. Many theories have suggested that the clitic se raises to subject position and that these two forms are syntactically identical with a difference in the application of subject-verb agreement, for example Cinque 1988, Oesterreicher 1992, and Rivero 2002.

Amaya Mendikoetxea’s 2008 analysis of Romance clitic impersonal constructions se/si offers a novel understanding, not only of the relationship between these two Spanish clitic constructions, but also of how the impersonal se construction differs from simple transitive sentences. Specifically, she theorizes that both impersonal and passive constructions containing se contain a generic null pronoun, which she calls G-pro, as Spec of vP and that they differ in whether or not v assigns accusative case to the verb’s complement.

This difference in case marking determines whether the verb’s complement raises to subject, to yield the passive se construction, or whether the verb’s complement remains in place and a phonologically null expletive fills the subject position. With this analysis in mind, a CHILDES longitudinal study is conducted to assess children’s acquisition of Mendikoetxea’s proposed structures. The results confirm Mendikoetxea’s basic claim that there is a distinction among simple transitive sentences, impersonals with se and passives with se.

Anissa Neal

Graduation Year: 2017
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Trip the Freaking Light Fantastic: Syntactic Structure in English Verbal Idioms
Thesis Advisor/s:  J. Michael Terry, Randall Hendrick, Katya Pertsova
Abstract:

In past scholarship, idioms have been discussed from a mostly semantic perspective; authors have been primarily concerned with how idiomatic meaning is composed and stored, Swinney and Cutler 1979; Gibbs 1980; 1986. This thesis investigates idioms' syntactic behavior and concludes that all verbal idioms of English have stored, internal syntactic structure.

Vacuous modification, such as modification that does not contribute to the semantics of the phrase, metalinguistic modification, such as modification that indicates non-literal readings, aspect, and subject-oriented adverbs, SOAs, are used to test a variety of idioms for evidence of syntactic structure. There are restrictions on the syntactic processes some idioms can undergo, such as, passivization and raising constructions. However, this is not due to their lack of internal syntax, but how their meaning is mapped onto the internal syntax.

Xue He

Graduation Year: 2017
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Second Language Acquisition of Particle-Verb Constructions in English by Adult Mandarin Speakers
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker, Randall Hendrick, Michael Terry
Abstract:

There have been few research studies on the acquisition of particle-verb constructions, PVCs, in English by Mandarin speakers. The present study investigates the grammaticality judgments of PVCs in English made by Mandarin speakers who have been learning English as a second language, L2.

The result of the present study shows that Mandarin speakers have different grammaticality judgments from native English speakers, which could be the reason for the avoidance of PVCs in English by Mandarin speakers shown by Liao and Fukuya (2004). The result also shows that Mandarin speakers are confident in their grammaticality judgments, so being unsure about the grammaticality of PVCs in English is not the cause for Mandarin speakers’ avoidance of PVCs. Furthermore, the present study finds that the grammaticality judgments on PVCs by Mandarin speakers show evidence of transfer of the grammaticality of PVCs in Mandarin and evidence of the interlanguage grammar shifting away from the L1 grammar, supporting the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis.

Metta Crouse

Graduation Year: 2016
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Gender and Headedness in Spanish Blends
Thesis Advisor/s:  Katya Pertsova, Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This thesis builds on previous experiments on English lexical blends, Shaw 2013, Moreton et al. forthcoming, that argued that semantic heads, nouns, and proper nouns are positions privileged by universal phonological constraints. Using novel Spanish blends as stimuli, I conduct three experiments with native Spanish speakers.

The first, a survey, revealed significant predictors of blend gender, including the inflection, gender, and headedness of the source words. These results contribute to the study of blend formation as a morphological process by providing valuable information to compare with the formation of Spanish compounds.

Additionally, I strengthen arguments for the existence of a constraint privileging semantic heads by showing a stronger effect of head faithfulness in Spanish than was found in similar English experiments. I discuss what it means for a position to be privileged within positional faithfulness, Beckman 1997, and test whether masculine gender is one of these privileged positions.

Iyad Ghanim

Graduation Year: 2016
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Effect of Age of Acquisition on Concept Mediation in Heritage Bilinguals
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker, Katya Pertsova, Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Current models of bilingual lexical systems represent a shared conceptual domain and separate, language-dependent domains. Regarding the second language domain, researchers propose L2 words share a direct connection to the conceptual domain only for fluent bilinguals. Conversely, for non-fluent bilinguals, L2 words lack a direct conceptual connection and instead are connected via L1 translation equivalents. However, previous studies confounded age of acquisition with proficiency as variables that contribute to concept mediation.

The present thesis disentangles these variables' respective effects on developing concept mediation. Thirteen heritage Arabic-English bilinguals are subject to a picture-naming task and a translation task. Heritage speakers’ response times match the concept mediation model irrespective of proficiency, with the exception of low proficiency speakers. These results indicate that for individuals who acquired a language at an early age, moderate loss of language proficiency may not remove lexico-conceptual links.

Emily Andino

Graduation Year: 2016
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Grapheme-to-Phoneme Mapping in L2 and L3: Developing a Model of Reading Aloud in Non-Native Languages
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith, Misha Becker, Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

In this study of non-native reading aloud, subjects with L1 English, L2 Spanish, and L3 Brazilian Portuguese were asked to read words that are spelled identically in their L2 and L3 but are pronounced differently. Each of these "homographic heterophones" was primed in either the L2 or the L3, and its subsequent pronunciation was assessed for context appropriateness.

Participants were found to produce many more context-inappropriate pronunciations in L3 context than in L2 context, supporting the Foreign- Language Effect hypothesis, Meisel, 1983; Hammarberg, 2001; priming was not found to have a significant effect on pronunciation. The observation of mixed pronunciations, or single words produced partially with L2 and partially with L3 phonology, is incorporated into the development of a model of reading in non-native languages that allows for whole lexical representations to be broken into sublexical units when reading aloud, contrary to Coltheart, 1993.

Xuewei Li

Graduation Year: 2015
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Learning of Noun Classes Based on Semantic and Phonological Information in an Artificial Grammar
Thesis Advisor/s:  Katya Pertsova
Abstract:

Rachel Broad

Graduation Year: 2015
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Accent placement in Japanese blends
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

Brandon Prickett

Graduation Year: 2015
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Complexity and Naturalness in First Language and Second Language Phonotactic Learning
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Laura Barnes

Graduation Year: 2015
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Vowel Accommodation Strategies Used by ESL Teachers in Foreigner-Directed Speech
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker
Abstract:

Melinda Johnson

Graduation Year: 2015
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Korean Stop VOT Production by Heritage Speakers in the Language Classroom
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Yina Ma

Graduation Year: 2015
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Negative Raising in Mandarin
Thesis Advisor/s:  Randall Hendrick
Abstract:

Caleb Hicks

Graduation Year: 2015
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Condition bias in split-Alignment Systems: A Typological Study of North American Languages
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín
Abstract:

Kayleigh Reyes

Graduation Year: 2015
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Lexical Shifts in the English of Southeastern North Carolina
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín
Abstract:

Jessica Slavic

Graduation Year: 2014
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   On Impersonal Constructions: Implications of Celtic Verbal Inflections
Thesis Advisor/s:  Randall Hendrick
Abstract:

Hugo Salgado

Graduation Year: 2014
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Topological Spatial Relations and Frames of Reference in Santo Domingo de Guzmán Pipil: Typological and Historical Implications
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín
Abstract:

Kayla Vix

Graduation Year: 2014
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Verticalization, Wartime Americanization Efforts, and the German-to-English Shift Among the Mennonite Brethren of Hillsboro, Kansas
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín
Abstract:

Megan Gotowski

Graduation Year: 2014
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Subject Clitics in Child French
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker
Abstract:

Chunmeng, "Bonnie" Wang

Graduation Year: 2014
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Prosody-Syntax Interaction in the “YI-BU-QI-BA” Rule: A Morphologically Conditioned Tone Change in Mandarin Chinese
Thesis Advisor/s:  Katya Pertsova
Abstract:

Siyun Zhu

Graduation Year: 2014
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   A Study on Mandarin Focus Produced by English L2 Speakers
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Zachary Wilkins

Graduation Year: 2014
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   A Study of the Comprehension of Equative Tautologies in Adults and Children
Thesis Advisor/s:  Bruno Estigarribia
Abstract:

Aziz Jaber

Graduation Year: 2014
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   On Genericity in Modern Standard Arabic
Thesis Advisor/s:  J. Michael Terry
Abstract:

Lúcia Lopes Fischer

Graduation Year: 2013
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Sgaw Karen as Spoken by a Member of the Local North Carolina Community: A Phonetic Analysis and Phonemic Description
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Justin Pinta

Graduation Year: 2013
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Lexical Strata in Loanword Phonology: Spanish Loans in Guaraní
Thesis Advisor/s:
Abstract:

An analysis of a corpus of Spanish loanwords in Paraguayan Guaraní shows the stratified structure of the Guaraní lexicon evidenced by varying phonological repair strategies in the loans. Ito and Mester, 1999 and earlier work, show that a language with a synchronically relevant stratified lexicon displays impossible nativization effects. The phonology and morphology of Guaraní provide evidence for the synchronic relevance of the stratification, and as expected the corpus shows specific nativization strategies which are unattested.

A nonce-word experiment with native Guaraní speakers shows that in some cases, but not all, impossible nativizations are strongly avoided by native speakers. The Ito and Mester (1999) model handles the impossible nativizations within Optimality Theory through their proposed ranking consistency of faithfulness constraints across strata. Variable repair strategies of certain Spanish phonological structures in Guaraní in addition to the results of the experiment present a theoretical problem for ranking consistency.

Katherine Shaw

Graduation Year: 2013
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Head Faithfulness in Lexical Blends: A Positional Approach to Blend Formation
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Mary Kohn

Graduation Year: 2013
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Adolescent Ethnolinguistic Stability and Change: A Longitudinal Study
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton, Erik Thomas
Abstract:

Most sociolinguistic studies rely on apparent time, cross-sectional methods to analyze language change. On the basis of apparent time data, sociolinguists have hypothesized that cultural processes of lifespan change create predictable cycles of linguistic behavior in which adolescents lead in the use of vernacular variants and advance sound change, Eckert 1997. While adolescence is hypothesized to be central to vernacular optimization and language change processes, only longitudinal studies reveal whether individuals change their linguistic behavior in predictable ways across adolescence. Furthermore, longitudinal data about individual trajectories of change allow linguists to confirm or disconfirm apparent time data.

As a longitudinal study of over 67 African Americans from infancy to post-high school, the Frank Porter Graham, FPG, study presents a unique opportunity to document language variation across the lifespan. This analysis is the first longitudinal acoustic analysis of vocalic variation from childhood to early adulthood. Because African American English, AAE, vowels in the Piedmont region of NC are stable, this study can explore the extent to which life-stage variation influences participation in ethnolinguistic vowel systems without the confound of a change in progress. Additionally, because longitudinal trajectories of AAE morphosyntactic/consonantal variables are documented, comparisons across linguistic subsystems reveal the extents and limits to which life-stage patterns predict linguistic cycles of behavior.

This study focuses on a subset of 20 individuals at approximately ages 9, 12, 15, and 20. Although all participants are from the Piedmont region of NC, individuals come from two communities with different demographics. Hierarchical regressions show that, while participation in AAE vowels strongly correlate with community and school demographics, stable vocalic variables do not undergo aggregate-level peaking patterns consistent with age-grading. Instead, stable aggregate patterns camouflage idiosyncratic individual trajectories. A lack of group patterns for vowel variation across adolescence suggests that life-stage variation does not affect all linguistic systems equally; age- grading is a minority pattern perhaps associated with stereotyped features and/or morphosyntactic/consonantal variables. Because age-grading is not a predominant pattern for non-stereotyped vocalic variation, apparent time peaks in adolescent vowel data should not be taken for granted as a default product of age-grading.

Hang Zhang

Graduation Year: 2013
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent language. The study tests for three possible sources of L2 tonal errors; namely, 1) universal phonological constraints, i.e. the Tonal Markedness Scale, TMS, the Obligatory Contour Principle, OCP, and Tone-Position Constraints, TPC; 2) the transfer of L1 pitch patterns; and 3) a pedagogical problem of Tone 3. The data shows that these three factors jointly shape the properties of interlanguage grammars.

This study finds that the TMS, the OCP, and TPC constrain L2 tone acquisition, but do so to varying degrees. Evidence is found that the TMS applies to both word- and sentence-level L2 productions. Some effects of the OCP are found to interact with the TMS and with L1 transfer effects. For example, patterns regarding tone pairs, more T1-T1 productions than T4-T4, and in turn more than T2-T2, can be attributed to either a case of the "emergence of the unmarked" interacting effects of the TMS and the OCP, or to local conjunction of the TMS. Learners are better at maintaining Rising, T2, at word-initial positions, but Falling, T4, at word-final positions. L2 learners often substitute other tones for target tones and the substitution patterns provide evidence for L1 transfer. For example, English speakers often use high falling tone while Japanese speakers tend to lengthen low tones to express monosyllabic narrow focus in sentences. This study found conflicting error and substitution patterns pertaining to Tone 3, as well as greater accuracy in processing Pre-T3 sandhi than the sandhi occurring elsewhere. This effect is argued to be attributed to the “T3 [214]-First” teaching method.

In light of the three factors affecting L2 tone acquisition, this study proposes a constraint re-ranking model to provide a new way of viewing positive and negative transfer. It is demonstrated that some markedness constraints are promoted while some are demoted in the acquisition of tones.

Emily Moeng

Graduation Year: 2012
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Do Phonologically Active Classes Cause Warping of the Perceptual Space?
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Perceptual warping has been observed in various domains, both linguistic and non linguistic. The perceptual space is warped so that stimuli which belong to the same category are perceived as more similar to one another, while stimuli which belong to different categories are perceived as less similar to one another. Observations of perceptual warping in the linguistic domain have been confined to those of individual phonemes, for example, categorical perception of consonants, and the Perceptual Magnet Effect for vowels.

This thesis attempts to replicate a study done by Dale Terbeek, 1977, which may hint at perceptual warping caused by phonological classes of sounds. More specifically, this study trains English speakers on an artificial language with front/back vowel harmony. Similarity judgments of vowels are obtained before and after training to determine whether language training has warped the perceptual space. Results do not reach statistical significance, and recommendations for further study are made.

Gilbert Kline

Graduation Year: 2012
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Linking Element and Swedish Complex Nominal Compounds
Thesis Advisor/s:  Randall Hendrick, Katya Pertsova
Abstract:

This thesis investigates the linking element that sometimes appears in Swedish compounds made up of three noun stems, also called complex nominal compounds. I present a comprehensive analysis of Swedish compounding and the nature of the linking element, and then argue that the appearance of the linking element, typically -s-, in complex nominal compounds is predictable.

This thesis proposes that the linking element is a marker of a particular syntactic structure, and thereby a particular linear ordering of the nouns inside a complex compound. Two previous syntactic proposals, Josefsson, 1998; Mukai, 2008, for the linking element and Swedish complex compounds are discussed, and I argue that these proposals are partly problematic due to their application of Kayne's, 1994, antisymmetry theory of syntax.

I discuss Kayne's antisymmetry theory, with its restrictions to asymmetric c-command, and offer a solution to the problem found in the previous proposals. I contend that antisymmetry theory can account for both the subword structure and linearization of Swedish complex nominal compounds with and without the linking element.

Inmaculada Gómez Soler

Graduation Year: 2012
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Acquiring Spanish at the Interfaces: An Integrative Approach to the L2 Acquisition of Psych-Verbs
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker
Abstract:

This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych-verbs, for example, gustar 'to like,' across four different proficiency levels. In particular, psych-verbs constitute a testing ground for the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis, Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycok &qmp; Filiaci, 2004; Sorace, Serratrice, Filiaci & Baldo, 2009; inter alia, one of the most influential theories in current generative second language acquisition. Its main claim is that properties that hinge on external interfaces, such as those that require the interaction between a linguistic module and a cognitive module, are more problematic for learners than those that do not hinge on that interface, such as internal interfaces/narrow syntax.

In order to assess the empirical adequacy of the IH, this project encompasses five experiments that test different syntactic properties of psych predicates as well as phenomena that belong to both internal and external interfaces. The results of this study indicate that clitic and verb agreement is the most problematic aspect of psych-verb acquisition in accordance with the previous literarture in the field, for example Montrul, 1998, 2001. As for the issue of interfaces, this project is only partially consistent with the proposals of the IH. Whereas external interfaces present a certain level of difficulty for some groups of L2 learners, the low-proficiency participants are sensitive to pragmatic factors in spite of their lack of mastery of the morphosyntax of these constructions. Thus, external interfaces are problematic for L2ers but not more so than internal interfaces.

Additionally it is not a necessary condition that syntax will precede the understanding of pragmatic phenomena. Instead, pragmatics can come for free in L2 acquisition while the learner still struggles with the target syntactic templates. Because of these inconsistencies with the IH, I turned to a more articulated model, the Integrative Model of Bilingual Acquisition, Pires & Rothman, 2011, that accounts for the differences between native and non-native speakers by resorting to the interplay of a series of factors, such as formal complexity, L1-L2 parameter mapping, processing resources and primary linguistic data.

I argue that this more sophisticated model not only is able to more successfully account for the patterns found in this dissertation but it is also a more integrated explanation for the intricacies of the acquisition process.

Anne Bakken

Graduation Year: 2011
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Scandinavian Interference on the /s ~ z/ Voicing Contrast in American English
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This thesis examines phonological substrate interference as a result of language shift. It has been observed that Scandinavian-American communities in the Upper Midwest, where Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish speakers shifted to English in the 19th and 20th centuries, devoice /z/. This phenomenon is thought to be due to the lack of a voicing contrast in sibilants in Scandinavian languages.

Acoustic analysis was performed comparing the production of /s/ and /z/ in a highly Scandinavian region, the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota, and a region with very little Scandinavian presence, the Piedmont of North Carolina. Red River Valley residents with and without Scandinavian background were likewise compared.

It was found in this study that the speakers with a greater degree of Scandinavian background produced less glottal pulsing in /z/ and more in /s/ than other speakers. The latter result had not been previously recorded. I therefore propose that the substrate effect is not devoicing of /z/, but greater neutralization of the voicing contrast.

Halley Wilson

Graduation Year: 2011
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Child Acquisition of Passive Sentences: Building upon Animacy Assumptions from UG
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker
Abstract:

Children's acquisition of passive sentences has been widely studied in an attempt to understand why children acquiring languages such as English appear to exhibit a delay in the acquisition of this structure. The present study examined semantic factors in English acquiring children's comprehension of passive sentences as a means of accounting for this delay.

The results of the study indicated that animacy in the by-phrase may be the crucial factor required for passive comprehension. The process by which passive sentence structure is acquired is argued to be linked to inherent assumptions about animacy from UG which children may utilize to build the syntactic structures required to comprehend passives.

Justin Rill

Graduation Year: 2011
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   A Unified Analysis of "Dative Shift" in English and the Applicative Construction in Chichewa
Thesis Advisor/s:  Randall Hendrick
Abstract:

Many languages exhibit alternate syntactic realizations of ditransitive verbal constructions. For example, English features both a prepositional construction, Mary gave candy to the children, and a Double Object construction, Mary gave the children candy, a phenomenon known as "Dative Shift," Larson 1988.

In Chichewa, the "applicative construction" is a similar syntactic alternation, Baker 1988, Marantz 1993. The primary aim of this thesis is to present a unified analysis of Dative Shift and the applicative construction for both of these typologically distinct languages.

The proposed unified analysis features an identical argument structure for both languages, as well as isomorphic morphosyntactic processes. It accounts for several asymmetries previously observed between benefactive and instrumental ditransitives in Chichewa. These asymmetries serve as the basis for a corollary hypothesis about natural sub-classes within the class of "oblique" arguments.

Alice Drozdiak

Graduation Year: 2011
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Identifying and Describing Prosodic Domain Interaction with Duration and Hyperarticulation
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

Motivated by the ambiguities of prosodic constituency and prosodic domain interaction, this study asks whether pitch accent acts upon non-segmental features, specifically right-edge word boundaries, as well as whether or not right-edge word boundaries induce hyperarticulation in the preceeding syllable.

By looking at the duration of diphthongs in both word-initial and word-final positions, my research shows that pitch accent does indeed appear to hyperarticulate word boundaries, giving evidence to prosodic interactions across different phonological domains.

Additionally, with few exceptions, the data collected in this study support the hypothesis that right-edge word boundaries do not hyperarticulate preceding diphthongs. These results contribute to current discourse regarding prosodic domain interactions.

Finally, this work proposes and employs a method of measuring hyperarticulation in diphthongs, a process yet unexplored, using first and second formant values.

Amy Reynolds

Graduation Year: 2011
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Competing Factors in Phonological Learning Models: The Acquisition of English Consonant Clusters
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This thesis tests the relative influence of a number of factors within phonological learning models that have been proposed to affect patterns of child language acquisition. In the Gradual Learning Algorithm literature, social factors such as variation in the adult grammar and frequencies of forms in child-directed speech, and mental grammar factors such as constraints and decision strategies make various predictions about the learning paths followed by children.

English-speaking children’s acquisition of consonant clusters is modeled to test the relative influence of learning model factors, since each social factor in the English adult language makes opposite predictions about what learning paths children should follow.

Adult grammar variation is shown to be the more influential social factor, and a comparison between the constraint sets and decision strategies used in Boersma and Levelt, 2000, and Jesney and Tessier, 2011, provides support for using Specific Faithfulness constraints to adequately model child language acquisition.

Jennifer Griffin

Graduation Year: 2011
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Variation and Gradience in a Noisy Harmonic Grammar with Lexically Indexed Constraints: The Case of Spanish -s Deletion and Aspiration
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

This thesis presents a new way of modeling variation in production and perception within and across lexical categories. By adding lexical indexes to both the input and relevant faithfulness constraints in a Noisy Harmonic Grammar model, I will show that production frequencies be used to predict well-formedness judgments of variable forms.

First I show that by using this model, an artificial learner in Praat, Version 5.1.43, can learn the appropriate production frequencies of variants showing -s deletion and aspiration in Spanish.

In Experiment 1 I show that Puerto Rican Spanish speakers choose sentences with aspirated adjectives as more well-formed than sentences with aspirated nouns. In Experiment 2, participants' perception of ambiguous phonemes along a continuum from [h] to [s] is significantly influenced by the lexical category of the root to which the ambiguous fricative is attached.

These results support the predictions made about perception judgments based on variable production frequencies.

Caleb Crandall Hicks

Graduation Year: 2010
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Morphosyntactic Doubling in Code Switching
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín, Paul Roberge
Abstract:

When code switching occurs between languages which are typologically opposed, the resulting utterance sometimes obeys the typological patterns dictated by both languages. If one contributor language has a basic word order of SVO, and the other has SOV, the code switched sentence may have the surface order SVOV; in effect, producing a doubled morphosyntactic element, where each “double” is realized in a different source language.

In this thesis, I examine code switches which furnish doubled verbs, auxiliaries, adpositions, coordinations, complementizers, and morphological affixes from a large variety of language pairs. I argue that previous accounts of such doubles are unsatisfactory, as is the application of syntactic approaches to monolingual doubling. I contend that a framework favoring simultaneous access of multiple languages gives a more promising account of code switched doubles.

Victoria McGee

Graduation Year: 2010
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Ethnic Identity, Language, and /o/ Fronting Among Latinos at UNC Chapel Hill
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín
Abstract:

This study focuses on the variety of English used by college students at UNC Chapel Hill who self-identify as Latino and the relationship between the social and linguistic categories governing the speech of this particular group.

The study will reveal, through conversations, interviews and questionnaires, certain details pertaining to the creation and expression of ethnic identity, which allows each speaker to orient themselves socially within the complex matrix of a college campus.

The linguistic analysis of the study involves obtaining measurements of the F2 values of /o/ of Latino English speaking university students at UNC Chapel Hill at various grade levels and analyzing these measurement statistically in order to determine patterns that explain the connection between /o/ fronting and ethnic identity.

Jennifer Renn

Graduation Year: 2010
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Acquiring Style: The Development of Dialect Shifting among African American Children
Thesis Advisor/s:  Michael Terry
Abstract:

The dearth of research on style shifting in African American English, AAE, during the early lifespan has left a number of unanswered questions related to the acquisition of and the ability to shift speech styles.

This presentation focuses on several of these questions, including when stylistic shifting is initiated, whether there are differential patterns of stylistic usage among children and adolescents, and how stylistic facility relates to school achievement and literacy. It further considers the influence of social, demographic, and self-regard factors to determine how they affect style over time. As a basis for addressing these issues, this research utilizes data from a unique, longitudinal study of AAE and literacy.

The analysis compares formal and informal language data from a sample of African American speakers collected at three temporal data points, Grade 1/2 - N=73; Grade 6 - N=125; and Grade 8 - N=164, to compare linguistic behavior throughout the elementary and middle school years. Language samples representing different situational contexts were analyzed in terms of 42 morphosyntactic and phonological AAE features to determine the overall difference in dialect use across time and situation.

Analyses suggest that while there is a range of individual variation in the early use of style shifting, speakers progressively engage in an overall expansion of style shifting over time. Further investigation of the influence of gender, mother's education, social contacts, school demographics, and the child's score on a racial centrality index identifies which factors have a greater impact and how the relative influence of these variables evolves during childhood and adolescence.

Tests of the interaction effects of these various social, personal, and demographic factors indicate that while certain factors are significantly related to style shifting, the influence of others is instead associated with speakers' overall dialect use.

Ian Clayton

Graduation Year: 2010
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   On the Natural History of Preaspirated Stops
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

his dissertation makes two contributions, one empirical, the other theoretical. Empirically, the dissertation deepens our understanding of the lifecycle and behavior of the preaspirated stop, an extremely rare phonological feature. I show that in most confirmed cases, preaspirated stops develop from earlier voiceless geminate stops, less commonly from nasal-voiceless stop clusters. When decaying, preaspirated stops typically develop into unaspirated voiceless stops, or undergo buccalization to become preaffricated. More rarely, decaying preaspirated stops may trigger tonogenesis, or undergo spirantization or nasalization. Phonologically, preaspirated stops usually function as positionally conditioned allophones of underlying aspirated voiceless stops contrasting with voiceless unaspirated stops.

The dissertation tests three theoretical frameworks. First, the State-Process model claims that the synchronic distribution of linguistic features offers insight into their rates of innovation and transmission. Conventionally, the rarity of preaspirated stops is attributed to a presumed low rate of transmission: they are rare because they are hard to hear. However, the geographic and genetic distribution of preaspirated stops fit the State-Process model's prototype of an infrequently innovated but robustly transmitted linguistic feature.

Further, I show experimentally that preaspirated stops are no more difficult to distinguish from unaspirated stops than are much more abundant postaspirated stops. Second, the dissertation tests the success of two models, one cognitive, the other phonetic/diachronic, at accounting for two place-based asymmetries in Scottish Gaelic preaspiration. Whereas a conventional Optimality-Theoretic analysis of these asymmetries overgenerates, an analysis modified via Steriade's P-map Hypothesis resolves this overgeneration. The P-map analysis depends on congruent perceptual scales, which the perception experiment, above, confirms: participants' confusion rates closely match the place-based asymmetries observed in Gaelic.

The competing innocent misperception model depends on the presence of phonetic precursors to produce an ambiguous phonological signal, which listeners may interpret differently than intended by the speaker, leading to an alteration in a segment's underlying form. A series of production experiments identifies potential precursors, but also reveals between-speaker variation more compatible with the P-map account than innocent misperception, again lending support to Steriade's hypothesis.

Melissa Frazier

Graduation Year: 2009
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   The Production and Perception of Pitch and Glottalization in Yucatec Maya
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This dissertation uses the Bidirectional Stochastic OT model of the phonetics- phonology interface, Boersma 2007a, to analyze the production and perception of pitch and glottalization in Yucatec Maya. The Gradual Learning Algorithm, GLA, Boersma and Hayes 2001, is used to develop mean ranking values of constraints.

I show that, when using this algorithm, a simulated learner must be trained on both production and perception tableaus in order to reach an accurate adult grammar, contra Boersma 2006, who proposes that perception learning alone is sufficient. This simulated learner is trained on phonetic data obtained from tokens of real speech, and these results show that bidirectional constraints can account for the symmetrical relationship between production and perception. However, because the symmetries are not exact, the production grammar does not simply fall out of perception learning.

Production and perception studies were conducted with native speakers of Yucatec Maya in Yucatan, Mexico. The results of these studies are analyzed with Bidirectional Stochastic OT, but they are also presented in detail in order to document the phonetics of pitch, length, and glottalization in Yucatec Maya. One important result of the production studies is that there is previously undocumented dialectal variation in the production of pitch and length such that tone may be a dialectal feature of Yucatec Maya.

Furthermore, there is variation in the perception of pitch that mirrors the variation in production; the cues that differentiate phonemic categories in production are the same cues that are attended to in perception. These results thus provide further support for the idea that production and perception grammars are defined by the same constraints.

This research fills in two gaps in the literature. First, despite the robust literature on its morphosyntax, there is little research on the sound system of Yucatec Maya, especially at the phonetic level. The production study thus provides the first thorough account of the suprasegmentals of the vowel system, and the perception study is one of the first conducted with this language. Second, this work is the first to test the Bidirectional Model with actual, and not simulated and idealized, language data.

Suzannah Kirby

Graduation Year: 2009
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Semantic Scaffolding in First Language Acquisition: The Acquisition of Raising-to-Object and Object Control
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker
Abstract:

This dissertation joins the debates on whether language is innate and/or modular, by examining English-speaking children's acquisition of raising-to-object (RO; (1)) and object control (OC; (2)) utterances. 1. RO: Suki wanted/needed Neili [ti to kiss Louise] 2. OC: Suki asked/told Neili [PROi to kiss Louise]. While these verbs may appear in the same surface string, they map onto two distinct underlying structures.

As a result, they differ in their syntactic and semantic behaviors, including the interpretation of embedded passives, and whether the subject of the embedded clause may be expletive or inanimate. Several truth-value and sentence judgment tasks yielded the following results: Children have adultlike comprehension of active RO/OC utterances by age 4. Children who fail on tests of matrix passives can interpret passives embedded under RO verbs, despite their greater length and syntactic complexity, but not under OC verbs, which have syntax more like matrix passives. In sentence judgment tasks, children preferentially parse the embedded clause alone.

To account for these patterns, I offder the semantic scaffolding hypothesis, which comprises two major proposals: (a) children assume a canonical alignment of thematic and grammatical roles, resulting in agent-subjects and patient-objects, and (b) children assume a default clausal shape of contiguous subject and predicate.

I argue that children use semantic scaffolding as a stepping stone on their way to adultlike syntactic and processing power. In short, movement may be easier than control structures, if these assumptions are not violated. Moreover, the fact that children do maintain a distinction between the verb classes is evidence for innateness and modularity in language. However, the language module interacts crucially with other cognitive modules, for example the conceptual-semantic system, and with domain-general faculties, for example attention, memory.

Finally, the results presented here also bear on the following issues: There is no evidence for maturation of A-chains and/or control, contra Wexler. Children's performance on active RO, passives, and embedded passives suggest that RO utterances should instead be analyzed as instances of exceptional case marking. The data can neither support nor refute Hornstein's proposal that RO and OC both be analyzed as instances of movement.

Jenna Mory

Graduation Year: 2008
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Verbal Acquisition in L2 Spanish
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker
Abstract:

This study was designed to evaluate verbal agreement in early and late L2 Spanish. The early L2 group included children from local immersion preschools who participated in an elicitation task and spontaneous speech recordings. The late L2 group, consisting of UNC-CH undergraduate students in beginning to intermediate Spanish, was asked to describe pictures in Spanish in a task similar to the child elicitation task.

All eligible subject/verb pairs produced were evaluated for accuracy and when not accurate were given a specific code for the error type. The results obtained for the early L2 group lend support to the Morphological Underspecification Hypothesis, proposed by McCarthy, 2007. However, contrary to McCarthy, 2007, the adult data support the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis, Prévost & White, 2000b, rather than the MUSH.

Additionally, the child group used significantly more 3rd person singular default forms, consistent with McCarthy, 2007, and L1 Spanish, than the adult group.

Jeffrey Conn

Graduation Year: 2007
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Greek Prothetic Vowel and the Sanskrit Long-Reduplicant Perfect: A Statistical Evaluation of the Indo-European Laryngeal Theory
Thesis Advisor/s:  Craig Melchert
Abstract:

Although now accepted almost universally, the "Laryngeal Theory" of Indo-European linguistics has been criticized in the past as being too abstract and formalistic; making excessive claims for the effects of the posited "laryngeal" segments; and implying typologically odd features of the proto-language.

This study addresses a small subset of these concerns by statistically measuring the degree of correlation between two phenomena which the Laryngeal Theory implies should be correlated. These are the "prothetic vowel" of Greek, and the lengthened reduplication-syllable of certain Sanskrit perfects. Both of these are attributed by the Laryngeal Theory to the presence of a laryngeal segment at the beginning of the root in proto-Indo-European.

If the Laryngeal Theory is correct, there should be more roots whose reflexes show both of these developments than should occur by chance. The correlation is measured by the Fisher's Exact test. For the set of all roots as defined traditionally, the P value is 0.25349; for roots grouped together without distinguishing between root-extensions and similar alterations, the value is 0.26401; and for resonant-initial roots the value is 0.67371.

These figures are consistent with the predicitons of the Laryngeal Theory, but also with the hypothesis that both the Greek prothetic vowel and the Sanskrit long-reduplicant perfects are due to epenthesis before resonant-initial roots.

Li Yu

Graduation Year: 2007
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Differential Acquisition of Phonemic Contrasts by Infant Word-learners: Does Production Recapitulate Perception?
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliot Moreton
Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the relationship between the acquisition orders of phonological contrasts by children in perception and production and the phonological theories that account for this relationship. Three key words can be used to characterize this relationship: gap, parallel and mismatch.

It is commonly observed that young children's ability to perceive phonological contrasts is more advanced than their ability to produce them, for example Smith 1973, Werker and Stager 2000. It has also been found that the order in which phonological contrasts are acquired in production recapitulates that in perception, Jusczyk et al. 1999, Pater 2004.

Experiments done as part of this dissertation suggest that the parallel between perceptual and productive acquisition orders of phonemic contrasts does not always hold: 17-month-old American-English-acquiring children were able to distinguish [n] and [r] yet not [t] and [n] in a perceptual word-learning task; while productively, the [t]-[n] contrast has been found to be acquired earlier than the [n]-[r] contrast. In other words, the orders of acquisition of phonological contrasts in perception and production can mismatch each other.

Most phonological acquisition models, reviewed in this dissertation: Smith 1973, Braine 1976, Macken 1980, Boersma 1998, Smolensky 1996a, Lassettre and Donegan 1998, and Pater 2004, are able to account for the gap. The model proposed by Pater, 2004, is also able to explain the parallel. When more than one phonological contrasts are involved and the order of acquisition between them is at issue, its explanation for the developmental parallel would depend on two necessary assumptions that the model did not elaborate: One, the shared MARKEDNESS constraints must be fixed in ranking; and two, the FAITHFULNESS constraints must not only be fixed in ranking, but also be homogeneous in form and function. However, under these assumptions, the model will not be able to explain the attested mismatch.

This dissertation proposes to revise Pater's model by allowing non-homogeneous faithfulness constraints for perception and production. It demonstrates how the revised model is able to account for the mismatch, explain the gap, and at the same time allow for the parallel.

Kara VanDam

Graduation Year: 2007
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   A Study of Language Identity and Shift: The Calvinist Dutch of West Michigan
Thesis Advisor/s:  Connie Eble
Abstract:

From the perspective of the sociology of language developed by Joshua Fishman, and working from letters, newspapers, secondary accounts, and grave inscriptions, this study describes and explains bilingualism and the loss of the Dutch language in two West Michigan Dutch immigrant communities from 1847-1930, the Reformed Church, RCA, Dutch and the Christian Reformed Church, CRC, Dutch.

The loss of Dutch in some ways parallels the contemporaneous language shift of Norwegian immigrants, Haugen, 1969, and Swedish immigrants, Karstadt, 2002. The two West Michigan Dutch Calvinist communities were unique in their language shift experiences.

The RCA Dutch experienced and promoted a rapid assimilation and shift to English. The CRC Dutch promoted a multi-generational maintenance of the Dutch language in a stable Dutch- English bilingual setting-the preservation of Dutch was not at the expense of the acquisition of English-and then consciously and abruptly abandoned the Dutch language in the years immediately after World War I.

The CRC Dutch maintained their language for so long precisely because it was the marker of identity for them and it was inextricably tied to their faith; the RCA Dutch were able to abandon the Dutch language early on because it was not the marker of religious identity for them.

Abby Spears

Graduation Year: 2006
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Nasal Coarticulation in the French Vowel /i/: A Phonetic and Phonological Study
Thesis Advisor/s:  Elliott Moreton
Abstract:

In this thesis, I use acoustic phonetic data to examine the phenomenon of nasal coarticulation in French. Previous work describes French as a language with very little vowel-nasal, VN, coarticulation, presumably due to the oral/nasal contrast in vowels, Cohn 1990.

However, I found that the high vowel /i/, which has no nasal counterpart in French, exhibits a high degree of coarticulation. This finding supports the proposal that contrast and coarticulation are inversely correlated, Manuel 1990, adding the insight that this correlation is observable even within a language.

Based on this finding and a typological survey of VN coarticulation, I propose an underspecification account in an Optimality Theoretic framework to capture the patterns of VN coarticulation. In this OT account, the interaction of markedness constraints driving orality and minimizing effort and a faithfulness constraint protecting the feature [+ nasal] provides an explanation for the French data and produces the attested typology.

Claire Lampp

Graduation Year: 2006
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Negation in Modern Hindi-Urdu: the Development of NahII
Thesis Advisor/s:  Craig Melchert
Abstract:

There are three negative particles used for sentential negation in Hindi-Urdu-mat, na, and nahII. The particles mat and na are generally of restricted distribution in the modern language, and their origins are relatively straightforward. The status of the modern general negative particle nahII is more problematic.

There are two common explanations for modern Hindi-UrdunahII: (1) nahII results from the Old Indo-Aryan, OIA, general negative particle na combining with a substantive/existential verb form; (2) nahII results from na combining with the OIA emphatic particle hi. In a recent account Elena Bashir offers support for both explanations.

Based on evidence from a modern Hindi corpus and a reexamination of Bashir's work, I conclude that modern Hindi-Urdu nahII likely has its origin only in the existential, thus providing another example in support of William Croft's negation cycle.

Amie Kraus

Graduation Year: 2006
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Language Attitudes of Québécois Students Towards le Français Québécois Standard and le Franco-Québécois
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín
Abstract:

The many language attitude studies which have been conducted in the province of Québec over the past fifty years have revealed that the linguistic attitudes and beliefs of the Québécois towards both English and specific varieties of French have changed considerably.

The purpose of the present study was to determine the current language attitudes of Québécois students towards standard Québec French and towards a colloquial variety of Québec French, le franco-québécois. In spite of the significant shift in language attitudes in Québec's recent history, the results of this study were comparable to those of a similar study conducted three decades ago by Méar-Crine and Leclerc. In both studies, the majority of Québécois participants indicated a preference for the standard variety of Québec French.

Melissa Frazier

Graduation Year: 2006
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Accent in Proto-Indo-European Athematic Nouns: Antifaithfulness in Inflectional Paradigms
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This thesis examines four accent patterns displayed by athematic nouns in Proto-Indo-European. Each accent pattern is distinguished by either alternating stress or vowel quality between 'weak' forms, nominative, accusative, vocative, and 'strong' forms.

I argue that surface stress is the result of the interplay of the lexical accent specifications of the morphemes that compose the stem. The strong endings are classified as dominant and are thus responsible for the accent/ablaut alternations.

Optimality Theory is used to provide a synchronic phonological analysis of athematic noun accent. The weak forms are accounted for with a ranking of faithfulness and alignment constraints, including a positional faithfulness ranking in which faithfulness to roots is preferred over faithfulness to derivational affixes.

The strong endings, which are dominant, trigger antifaithfulness constraints, Alderete 1999, and so a new type of antifaithfulness constraint is introduced that works within inflectional paradigms, based on the Optimal Paradigms model, McCarthy 2005.

Melissa Damann

Graduation Year: 2006
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   ESL Learners' Perceptions of American Dialects
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Mora-Marín
Abstract:

This study was conducted to determine how ESL, English as a Second Language, learners' perception of American dialects differs from the perception of native American English speakers.

Thirtynine ESL students and 18 native speakers listened to and rated eight different speakers, representing four different dialects, such as Standard American English, Southern American English, African American English and Latino English. These speakers were rated on status, solidarity and language proficiency-related characteristics.

The ESL and native speaker groups ranked the dialect groups similarly on status-related features, such as successful, smart, confident. However, the test groups had markedly different rankings of the dialect groups for solidarity-related features, such as dependable, funny, friendly.

The ESL and native speaker groups had similar rankings concerning the speakers' language proficiency, that is, speaking English well. However, with the exception of the Standard dialect, the ESL group generally viewed each dialect's proficiency more positively than the native speaker group.

Donna Salisbury

Graduation Year: 2005
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Local Adverbs in Neo-Hittite
Thesis Advisor/s:  Craig Melchert
Abstract:

This dissertation systematically and exhaustively evaluates the functions of the local adverbs in Neo-Hittite as determined by their use in assured Neo-Hittite compositions.

The primary finding is that the Old Hittite synchronic system of contrasting directional and locatival pairs as established by Starke, 1977, remains fundamentally intact in Neo-Hittite. There are a limited number of specific cases of overlap. The triple distinction in function of preverb, postposition, and freestanding adverb likewise continues throughout the history of the language.

This study accounts for each Neo-Hittite occurrence of a local adverb, assesses its functional role, and presents a justification for its inclusion in a given class. Where possible, it provides an explanation of the likely path by which evolved meanings of a preverb have arisen. An analysis of instances of consecutive adverbs evaluates whether the two coincidentally co-occur or have developed a specialized function as a combination. Those established as unitary combinations are categorized as preverb, postposition, or freestanding adverb compounds.

Lastly, a reconsideration of the relationship of local adverbs to Hittite word order takes into account the three functional roles. This preliminary analysis identified a basic word order with numerous possible deviations, certain of which may be considered preferred for each specific function. A process of fronting of the local adverbs to positions before the subject in a sentence accounts for some but certainly not all non-standard configurations.

Susannah Kirby

Graduation Year: 2005
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Semantics or Sub-cases? The Acquisition of Referential vs. Expletive It
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker
Abstract:

This study was conducted to determine the natural order of acquisition among deictic pronoun it, anaphoric pronoun it, and expletive it. Files from four children, Adam, Eve, Nina, and Peter, ages 1;6 – 3;0 in the CHILDES database were coded for occurrences of NP it, here it is, and expletive it, it's raining. Occurrences of NP it were coded for whether they followed an overt discourse anaphor, anaphoric it, or not, deictic it.

All children examined produce deictic and anaphoric pronoun itfrom the very first files examined, but do not produce expletive it until 2-7 months later. Following Inoue's, 1991, lexical-semantic reanalysis account of the acquisition of expletive there after locative there, it is proposed that children acquire expletive it by reanalyzing referential pronoun it to include an expletive subtype. This reanalysis takes place when children realize that expletive it never co-occurs with a deictic or anaphoric referent.

Becky Butler Thompson

Graduation Year: 2005
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Cross-Dialectal Tendencies of Emphasis Spread in Arabic: An Optimality Theoretic Account Based in Experimental Phonetics
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

Emphasis refers to a secondary pharyngeal constriction in the pharynx. In Arabic, this constriction affects, spreads to, neighboring sounds.

In this thesis, I consider two cross-dialectal tendencies of spread: i) directionality, which I show is a phonological parameter not grounded in universal phonetics, and ii) the identity of segments that block spread. I propose that all segments can be ranked hierarchically according to their incompatibility with emphasis, thereby explaining the tendency for certain segments to be blockers.

I explore these ideas in terms of Optimality Theory and use them as metrics to compare two OT theories: Traditional Approach and Span Theory, McCarthy 2004. I show that Span Theory accounts for the data presented equally as well as the Traditional Approach.

Heidi Angel

Graduation Year: 2005
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Classifier Predicate Acquisition by a Deaf Child with Delayed Linguistic Input
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker
Abstract:

This study focuses on the acquisition of American Sign Language, ASL, classifier predicate constructions, specifically observing the use of handshape by an eight-year-old deaf child with delayed linguistic input.

The findings are compared with other cases of delayed or impoverished input and research into a critical period for language acquisition. While the subject shows delayed ASL acquisition, his innovations and possible 'home signs' demonstrate an innate bias to create productive and natural language features similar to ASL and other natural sign languages.

A distinction is made between natural sign languages and artificial sign languages, such as Manually Coded English, MCE, which makes up a significant portion of the child's language input but is not reflected in his output. This supports nativist claims of an innate language-learning mechanism. In particular, a focus on handshape configurations in classifier predicate constructions was chosen because the use of classifiers is acquired relatively late in children acquiring ASL natively and the handshape parameter is a particularly fragile component of signs in general, often found in ‘slips of the hand' even in adult native signers. Analysis of these complex constructions in a subject with delayed input may corroborate evidence for Universal Grammar, UG, which claims a language-specific domain for acquisition.

In this thesis I will discuss the overall results of the classifier handshape analysis, the relationship to UG as well as specific results in which conceptual, physiological and perceptual complexity seem to contribute to the production of handshape errors in the acquisition of ASL classifier predicate constructions.

Hayden Stack

Graduation Year: 2004
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Analysis of Output Opportunities in a First-Grade Spanish-English Dual Language Program
Thesis Advisor/s:  Larry King
Abstract:

Although students receive much comprehensible input in dual language programs, their opportunities to produce comprehensible output that allows for hypothesis testing, feedback, automaticity, and syntactic processing are severely restricted even at the first grade level, thus hindering improvement in oral proficiency. The current pilot study focused upon native English-speaking students in a first grade dual language class.

The main goals included collecting evidence concerning the role of output in second language acquisition in the dual language environment and characterizing the input that fostered this output. An analysis of the data revealed a predominance of one-word output on the part of students and reliance on close-ended questions on the part of teachers. It was found that complexity of output improves when more output hypotheses-whether correct or erroneous-are made and feedback applied to subsequent efforts. Dual language educators are thus encouraged to pro-vide students with more opportunities to interact conversationally in the tar-get language in order to foster second language development.

Julia St. john

Graduation Year: 2004
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   The Semantics of English Manner Adverbs
Thesis Advisor/s:  Gert Webelhuth
Abstract:

This dissertation details an empirical study investigating the semantic properties of English manner adverbs and subject modifiers and the verbs they modify. The purpose of the study is to determine which of these semantic properties are relevant to manner adverb modification and to enable a comparison of those properties to the semantic properties relevant to the syntactic phenomenon of argument realization and to other semantic phenomena such as the temporal and aspectual properties of verbs.

In order to make this comparison, it was necessary to systematize the data to determine which adverb and verb combinations were acceptable and which were unacceptable. This sys-tematization of the data serves as the groundwork for a preliminary hierarchy of the types of semantic relations that play a role in adverbial modification. The hierarchy is expressed as a multiple inheritance hierarchy in which more specific types inherit information from more general supertypes.

The semantic properties elucidated in this study are expressed in the formalism developed in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, HPSG; Pollard and Sag: 1987, 1994. The comparison of this hierarchy to a hierarchy of semantic relations derived from semantic properties identified by Dowty, 1989; 1991, and Davis, 2001, as important to an adequate account of argument realization reveals a number of differences. Among those, two important distinctions are (1) the fact that, although some of the semantic properties relevant for argument realization also are identified as significant for describing the interactions of manner adverbs and verbs, the former are a small subset of the latter, and (2) the fact that semantic clashes between manner adverbs and verbs are much more easily overridden by contextual factors than is the linking of semantic role and argument.

Patrick Murphy

Graduation Year: 2004
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Passive Prototypes, Topicality, and Conceptual Space
Thesis Advisor/s:  Laura Janda
Abstract:

Passive constructions are perhaps the most widely studied grammatical phenomenon within generative grammar. Typological studies describe the wide variety of features of passive constructions cross-linguistically, and both typolological and acquisition studies offer insight into the relative markedness of these constructions.

This dissertation has the goal of investigating the nature of membership within the category 'passive' and cross-linguistic comparison of constructions, 'passive' and otherwise. A model of universal passive types within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, HPSG, is presented. This is accomplished by proposing a set of type definitions, characterizing both the relatively unmarked and relatively marked features of passive constructions. This provides some granularity in the passive's characterization, but does not model the markedness of these features with respect to each other.

To that end, preference principles in the construction of passive type matrices in HPSG are introduced: a metagrammar provided by Universal Grammar describing the markedness of each type with respect to its supertype. The resulting system models a passive prototype within HPSG. Topicality measures were collected from the Uppsala Corpus of Russian for the Russian verbs pisat'/napisat' 'to write', davat'/ dat' 'to give', and zabyvat'/zabyt' 'to forget'.

Examining the conceptual space of various voice constructions with these Russian verbs, Croft's, 2001, notion of plotting constructions in 'conceptual space' is exploited as a means of cross-linguistic comparison using these topicality measures. Examining the conceptual space of various voice constructions with these Russian verbs, Croft's generalizations are upheld, their position being consistent whether Referential Distance or Topic Persistence is used as a measure.

Finally, data from other typological discourse studies is plotted, noting where various voice constructions pattern, and how this data fits into Croft's model.

Elaine Ferreira Abousalh

Graduation Year: 2004
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Phonetic Implementation of Tonal Downtrends in Coatzospan Mixtec
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

This thesis compares the phonetic implementation of downstepped high tones (!H) and low tones (L) in Coatzospan Mixtec, an Otomanguean language spoken in San Juan Coatzospan, Mexico.

Two-word phrases where the second element consists of a bimoraic monotonic word associated to a !H or L were examined. It is shown that F0 means for !H and L at the initial mora of target words are not different from each other, while F0 means for the two tones at the second mora of target words are always significantly different.

This is interpreted as resulting from the assignment of the same F0 target to !H and L. The difference between the tones would be caused by tone-specific declination, which makes the F0 of L decay more than the F0 of !H. If the TBU bearing !H or L is placed before a pause, the tones are further affected by final lowering.

Erin Eckhouse

Graduation Year: 2003
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Onset-Rime Awareness in Children's Reading
Thesis Advisor/s:  Misha Becker, Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

Neal Snider

Graduation Year: 2003
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Tongan Raising: A Minimalist Analysis
Thesis Advisor/s:  Randall Hendrick
Abstract:

The Polynesian language Tongan has a set of raising predicates that take a complement clause and optionally allow either the ergative or absolutive argument of the complement predicate, but not both, to appear with the matrix raising predicate. This behavior appears to present a problem for the Minimalist syntactic theory of Chomsky, 1995, which holds that there are no optional movements.

This work argues that the raising is motivated by morphological requirements of the particle 'o that marks the complement clause. There are actually two dialects, the grammars of which are both consistent with Minimalist theory: One has a [+D] morphological feature on 'o and requires a DP to its left to check the feature. In this dialect, there is raising only of ergative-marked arguments in transitive clauses. The other dialect has a [+Focus] morphological feature, which allows for the raising of ergative- or absolutive-marked DPs in transitive clauses.

Kimberly Thomas

Graduation Year: 2003
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Issues Concerning Divergence/Convergence in the Southern Vernacular: Postvocalic /r/ and the Time-Depth Contingency
Thesis Advisor/s:  Walt Wolfram
Abstract:

In this thesis, I examine the admissibility of the evidence regarding divergent and convergent linguistic change in white and black vernacular varieties, concluding that the changes in the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ (i.e., etymological /r/ before consonants or pause) are both divergent and convergent for black and white Southern speakers.

Maki Takahashi

Graduation Year: 2003
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Acquisition of Mora in Japanese Children: Do they Develop Vowel-Length Contrast Before Coda Segments?
Thesis Advisor/s:  Jennifer Smith
Abstract:

Jenny Palmer

Graduation Year: 2002
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Role of /s/ Duration as a Perceptual Cue for Gay-Sounding Male Speech
Thesis Advisor/s:  Chip Gerfen
Abstract:

This thesis is an experimental analysis of the role that /s/ duration plays in how listeners perceive male sexual orientation based on speech.

With listener responses measured as both a categorical, forced choice, response and a continual mean 'gayness' score, listeners' perception of a man as gay increased substantially with the longer /s/ durations in word-initial, stressed /skV/ and /spV/ environments. Listener participants heard one of 3 /s/ durations of a man whose sexual orientation had been perceived as neutral.

ANOVA analysis showed that listeners who heard the longer /s/ durations perceived the man as sounding 'gayer'. In addition, multiple regression analysis showed that listeners who heard the longer /s/ durations were significantly more likely to judge the speaker as sounding 'gay'.

Patrick Obregon

Graduation Year: 2001
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:
Thesis Advisor/s:  Chip Gerfen
Abstract:

In this thesis I propose an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the monophthong-diphthong alternations, primarily [o]~[wé] and [e] ~[jé], found in etymologically related forms in Spanish, and commonly referred to as diphthongization.

This work builds upon the notion of Harris, 1985, and Dunlap, 1991, that vowels subject to this alternation may be marked in the lexicon by their association with two positions on the melodic tier, which for the purposes of this analysis I am taking to be a segmental skeletal tier.

I posit a positional faithfulness constraint Max-Pos(Head), which holds that underlying segmental count must be pre-served in stressed syllables. The high ranking of No Long Vowels prevents diphthongizing vowels from surfacing with two associated skeletal slots, and hence moras, leaving epenthesis (of [e]) as the only means of satisfying Max-Pos (Head).

Sonority sequencing constraints preventing mid-mid diphthongs, along with the integrity constraint O-Anchor-Pos, which ensures the tautosyllabicity of the associated skeletal slots, works to produce the high onglide shape of the resulting diphthong.

Sarah Tully Marks

Graduation Year: 2001
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Gender and Computer-Mediated Communication: Why Women Need their Space
Thesis Advisor/s:  David Herman, Rusty Barrett
Abstract:

The interaction of gender and computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become a subject of great research in the last few years. Many researchers have considered the differences between behavioral norms of genders when spoken and when typed as CMC.

This thesis considers these differences, taking special consideration of the notions of 'flaming' and 'thanking'. In addition to asserting that differences such as these necessitate separate spaces for women to participate in Internet Relay Chat, this thesis considers the possibility that it is not in fact the genders which assign people's behavioral norms online.

In reality, the norms of conversational style are determined by the chat systems themselves to be followed by the participant members of the community. Of most interest here is the notion that the effects of gender can be superceded when language is considered to be a function of a community at large and not an individual.

Scott Halbritter

Graduation Year: 2001
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Idioms, Metaphors, and Speech Acts: Accounting for and Predicting Idiomatic Flexibility
Thesis Advisor/s:  Gert Webelhuth
Abstract:

In this study I will explore the work of Webelhuth and Ackerman, 1994, in order to provide a basis for furthering the HPSG approach of handling idioms by Riehemann, 1997. I will use the model of W. and A. to test my own corpus of 1000 English idioms to verify the English applicability of their "aboutness" findings.

I will show that metaphor is the critical aspect for defining and understanding idioms. I will suggest areas of inquiry that appear to be promising for predic-ting the flexibility and availability of idiomatic expressions. As Riehemann suggests, hierarchies of metaphorical mappings may indeed provide some of the keys to designing algorithms modeled after real +HUMAN speech acts–idioms, metaphors, and all. Regardless, it should be apparent that the traditional categories of context-free grammars hold little promise for being able to account for the intricacies of the key element of idioms: metaphor.

Rodney Edwards

Graduation Year: 2001
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Development of the Southern Double-Object Construction
Thesis Advisor/s:  Gert Webelhuth
Abstract:

The Southern Double Object Construction poses a major syntactic problem. How can a sentence like 1 be grammatical alongside 2 and 3? 1 Maryi bought heri a book; 2 Maryi bought herj a book; 3 Maryi bought herselfi a book.

Sentence 1 shows that a bare pronoun may stand in place of a reflexive pronoun, although standard varieties of Modern English mandate that such a bare pronoun should not be co-referential with its subject as in 1, but must always show disjoint reference as in 2. This was not the case, however, in Old English.

Object pronouns in Southern English are specified as non-anaphoric by default, but the Southern Double Object Construction, preserving the situation that obtained in the ancestral form of English, may continue to license the overriding of this default similar to the way Old English construed its object pronouns. Thus any violations of the principles of Binding Theory are avoided.

Kirk Baker

Graduation Year: 2001
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Crosslinguistic Comparison of the Perception of Glottalization in English and Coatzospan Mixtec
Thesis Advisor/s:  Chip Gerfen
Abstract:

This thesis takes a cross-linguistic look at the role that amplitude and fundamental frequency, f0, play in cueing the percept of glottalization in English and Coatzospan Mixtec, CM, an Otomanguean language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Although vowel glottalization is contrastive in CM but allophonic in English, two salient acoustic features of glottalization in both languages are concurrent amplitude and f0 declinations. A series of forced-choice perception experiments using synthetic speech stimuli in which amplitude and f0 had been manipulated were conducted with CM listeners.

The results of the experiments reported here indicate that, consistent with previous findings for English listeners, either an f0 or an amplitude drop alone can cue the percept of glottalization. However, CM listeners proved to be more highly attuned to slight change along both the f0 and amplitude dimensions than English listeners.

This finding is consistent with the fact that glottalized vowels are contrastive in CM, and the expectation that CM speakers are more sensitive than English speakers to the acoustic variables which cue the percept of glottalization. Additionally, this thesis con-tributes to the body of literature per-taining to language-particular effects on speech perception and adds to our knowledge of the phonetics of glottalization in general.

Benito Vilá

Graduation Year: 2000
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Vocabulary of Self and Other in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Chilean Documents
Thesis Advisor/s:  Craig Melchert
Abstract:

Members of every linguistic community possess a set of internal cognitive referents with which they interpret sensory input. These referents are not necessarily uniform within every community, and tend to evolve over time, as a result of innovation, reinterpretations, and borrowings from neighboring communities. However, many elements seem to persist within individual communities over time, elements which often yield distinctive interpretations of the world relative to other communities.

There is much in the patterns of continuity and change that suggest we are dealing with a linguistic mechanism. Changes in interpretations of cause and effect, of social relations and of individual responsibility reflect many of the same characteristics as do phonological, syntactic and semantic changes, as studied in Historical Linguistics.

Representations of Self and Other are among the most fundamental internal referents in any grammar of the universe. A look at this specific element in 16th and 17th Century Chilean documents reveals, on the one hand, commonalities with the grammar of Latin Antiquity, and on the other, borrowings from a very different perception of Self and Other in other European communities. There are, moreover, differences between Chilean documents themselves which seem to trace to the specific location of various authors within their shared culture, and signs of change in representations, within an enduring distinctiveness, as the overall community absorbed outside influences.

Kara VanDam

Graduation Year: 2000
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   The Syntax of Albanian Subordination: The Interaction of Subjects and Complementizers
Thesis Advisor/s:  Randall Hendrick
Abstract:

This thesis examines the Albanian complementizer system in the Principles and Parameters syntactic framework, which seeks to establish universal principles of syntactic organization, as well as to define parameters which restrict the variation between languages.

The Albanian complementizer system is of interest because it appears to be language-specific and idiosyncratic; further it appears to violate syntactic universals in two respects. First, complementizers precede Wh-phrases in subordinate clauses. Second, the complementizer system interacts with subject pronoun deletion. I argue that these two facets of variation follow from the parametric variation of complementizer systems in Universal Grammar.

I show that the idiosyncratic properties of Albanian with respect to Wh-Movement and subject pronoun deletion follow directly from the selection of the parametric value of multiple complementizers in Albanian. This conclusion is supported by detailed discussions of that-trace effects, restrictions on object movement and topicalization, as well as Verb Second effects.

Soo-Jung Kim

Graduation Year: 2000
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Accentual Effects on Segmental Phonological Rules in Korean
Thesis Advisor/s:  Chip Gerfen, Megan Crowhurst
Abstract:

This dissertation provides empirical support for the intonation-based model, Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986; Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988; Jun 1993, 1998, of Korean prosodic structure by arguing that this model best characterizes the domains of Lateralization, Delateralization, and N-insertion in Korean.

Lateralization refers to the assimilation of a coronal nasal n to the adjacent lateral l. Delateralization is the segmental proscription against laterals in word-initial position. N-insertion is a phenomenon in which n appears stem-initially in stems beginning with i or y that are preceded by a stem or prefix ending in a consonant. Specifically, using nasal airflow data combined with pitch tracks, I show that the accentual phrase serves as a domain for these rules. I demonstrate that lateralization and n-insertion are not utterance-span rules, and that word-initial laterals in loanwords do not trigger lateralization of the preceding consonants.

Throughout, I compare predictions of syntax-based and intonation-based models by examining cases where the target sequences (l-n for lateralization, n-l for delateralization and n-i for n-insertion) are projected to be within the same phrase by different models, cases where different models split the sequences by phrase boundaries, and cases where different models disagree regarding the location of phrase boundaries. By doing this, I show that each of the rules is best characterized as an accentual phrase phenomenon.

Specifically, lateralization occurs within the accentual phrase and is blocked across the accentual phrase boundary. Regarding delateralization, word-initial /l/s are changed into either an [n] or a geminate [l] within the accentual phrase, or [ɾ] across the accentual phrase. And n-insertion applies across prosodic words within an accentual phrase. This work adds to a body of literature arguing that prosodic structure higher than the word in Korean is best modeled in terms of intonationally based approaches such as developed by Jun, 1993, 1998. It further leads us to ask whether this kind of phonetic work will lead to adoption of intonational phrasing approaches for languages in general, or whether some languages employ syntax-based prosodic models, while others are intonation-based.

Della Chambless

Graduation Year: 2000
Degree Sought:  MA
Thesis Title:   Stress in Standard Italian: An Optimality Theoretic Account
Thesis Advisor/s:  Chip Gerfen
Abstract:

This thesis provides a comprehensive account of stress in Italian, within the framework of Optimality Theory. It is shown that an extrametricality account of unpredictable primary stress is unnecessary if lexical accent is assumed. High rankings of input-to-output prosodic faithfulness constraints ensure that lexical accent is realized, while secondary stress is accounted for through interaction of these faithfulness constraints with lower-ranked markedness constraints.

After accounting for primary and secondary stress in monomorphemic words, I present an analysis of stress in suffixed words. Stress preservation effects (formalized as output-to-output faithfulness constraints) require that the syllable with primary stress in the base of the derived word surface with secondary stress in the suffixed word. Finally, variability is identified in secondary stress in suffixed words, and an attempt is made to capture this variability through constraint rankings.

Hans Boas

Graduation Year: 2000
Degree Sought:  Ph.D.
Thesis Title:   Resultative Constructions in English and German
Thesis Advisor/s:  Gert Webelhuth
Abstract:

This dissertation captures the licensing factors that underlie the distribution of resultative constructions in English and German. The usage-based model put forward in this dissertation argues for a constructional approach towards resultatives that regards the multiple conventionalized senses associated with verbs as central to a framework that aims at capturing the full range of resultative constructions. Based on corpus data which show that particular senses of verbs subcategorize for distinct semantic and/or syntactic classes of resultative phrases and distinct semantic classes of postverbal NPs, I argue that resultatives should be grouped into two main classes, namely conventionalized resultative constructions and non-conventionalized resultative constructions. On this view, each particular sense of a verb constitutes a mini-construction represented by an event-frame that captures the semantic/pragmatic and syntactic specifications of the sense of the verb.

Adopting the main ideas of Frame Semantics, I propose that event-frames contain two types of interrelated information, namely linguistically immediately relevant on-stage information that needs to be overtly realized because it is conceptually the most salient type of information, and conceptual off-stage information that may be realized linguistically given the proper contextual conditions. Based on corpus data, I show that it is possible to account for the licensing of conventionalized resultative constructions in terms of the event-frames associated with verbs. Non-conventionalized resultative constructions are licensed by an analogical process by which a verb acquires a new syntactic frame. This associative process is triggered by a semantic overlap with a conventionalized resultative in combination with contextual background information.

The similarities and differences in distribution between resultatives in English and German are shown to be due to the distinct lexical polysemy networks of English and German verbs. I show that historically related verbs show different distributions of resultative because of the differences in conventionalized usage patterns.

Graduates & Theses

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Sean Foley

Martha Thomas

Jolie Hiers

Yuanchen Bao

Yiwen Peng

Jiefang Li

Yu Cai

Tristan Bavol

Michael Bruxvoort

Brian Ladd

Megan Fletcher

Erin Chesson

Minlu Zhang

William Carter

Simon Wolf

Melissa Klein

Mykel Brinkerhoff

Kate Rustad

Raua-Banu Kadirova

Mika Wang

Haley Boone

Brent Eisenbarth

Will Carter

Brent Eisenbarth

Hui, 'Eric' An

Yuka Muratani

Daniel Seabrooks

Anissa Neal

Xue He

Metta Crouse

Iyad Ghanim

Emily Andino

Xuewei Li

Rachel Broad

Brandon Prickett

Laura Barnes

Melinda Johnson

Yina Ma

Caleb Hicks

Kayleigh Reyes

Jessica Slavic

Hugo Salgado

Kayla Vix

Megan Gotowski

Chunmeng, "Bonnie" Wang

Siyun Zhu

Zachary Wilkins

Aziz Jaber

Lúcia Lopes Fischer

Justin Pinta

Katherine Shaw

Mary Kohn

Hang Zhang

Emily Moeng

Gilbert Kline

Inmaculada Gómez Soler

Anne Bakken

Halley Wilson

Justin Rill

Alice Drozdiak

Amy Reynolds

Jennifer Griffin

Caleb Crandall Hicks

Victoria McGee

Jennifer Renn

Ian Clayton

Melissa Frazier

Suzannah Kirby

Jenna Mory

Jeffrey Conn

Li Yu

Kara VanDam

Abby Spears

Claire Lampp

Amie Kraus

Melissa Frazier

Melissa Damann