Dissertations & Theses: Recent submissions
Now showing items 41-60 of 112
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NON-NATIVE SPEAKER COLLOCATIONS: A CORPUS-DRIVEN CHARACTERIZATION FROM THE WRITING OF NATIVE SPEAKERS OF MANDARIN
(University of Texas Arlington, 1997-12)Non-native speaker difficulty in producing collocations (i.e., domain-specific recurrent word combinations) is widely acknowledged (see, e.g., Bahns 19 9, Channel 1981, Farghal and Obiedat 1995, Gitsaki 1996, and Zughoul ... -
LISTENING COMPREHENSION: ADULT SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1987-12)The goal of this work is to discover information that will improve the selection and design of listening comprehension materials for adult second language learners. Chapter 1 treats adult versus child language learning and ... -
LINGUISTIC VARIATION WITHIN GUMUZ: A STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HISTORICAL CHANGE AND INTELLIGIBILITY
(University of Texas at Arlington, 2004-05)The Gumuz language is spoken by roughly 160,000 people across the Blue Nile region of Ethiopia and Sudan (Grimes 2004). Gumuz is the sole member of the Gumuz family which is part of the larger Nilo-Saharan super-family ... -
LANGUAGE DEATH IN MESMES: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND HISTORICAL-COMPARATIVE EXAMINIATION OF A DISAPPEARING LANGUAGE
(University of Texas at Arlington, 2004-05)Mesmes is a recently extinct language within the Peripheral West Gurage subgroup of the Ethio-Semitic Gurage cluster in southwestern Ethiopia. While Leslau (1979) and Hetzron (1972 and 1977), among many others, have examined ... -
INTERRELATIONS OF PROSODY, CLAUSE STRUCTURE AND DISCOURSE PRAGMATICS IN TARIFIT BERBER
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1996-08)The interconnections that exist among prosody, clause structure, and discourse pragmatics have been noted by many linguists (e.g., Halliday 1967; Givon 1983; Longacre 1983). These interconnections have included such phenomena ... -
FACILITATIVE OR FAVORABLE CONDITIONS FOR ADULT LEARNERS TO ACQUIRE ORAL PROFICIENCY IN ENGLISH
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1999-12)Social interaction in the language classroom has been said to contribute to the acquisition of oral proficiency in a target language by presumably facilitating comprehension and learner production through negotiation of ... -
CONTINUITY AND GIVEN-NEW STATUS OF DISCOURSE REFERENTS IN ADZERA ORAL NARRATIVE
(University of Texas at Arlington, 2002-12)This thesis analyzes the encoding of discourse referents in oral narratives in Adzera, an SVO Austronesian language of Papua New Guinea. First, it classifies overt referents on a given-new continuum according to Prince's ... -
COMPUTER ASSISTED DIALECT ADAPTATION: THE TUCANOAN EXPERIMENT
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1986-05)This dissertation provides the theoretical basis for a computer program that adapts textual material from one language of the Tucanoan family to another. Tucanoan languages are spoken by small groups living in southeastern ... -
CODE-SWITCHING IN THE SPEECH OF SPANISH-ENGLISH BILINGUALS
(University of Texas at Arlington, 2004-05)The purpose of this study is the investigation of (a) the motivations for code-switching; and (b) the process by which bilinguals perceive code-switching as meaningful. The empirical basis for the study is data gathered ... -
AN ARGUMENT FOR THE LUKAN AUTHORSHIP OF HEBREWS
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1987-12)The question of the authorship of the New Testament epistle to the Hebrews has provided scholars with fertile ground for speculation from the earliest days of Church history until the present time. The purpose of this ... -
A STUDY OF ICONICITY IN KOREAN: WITH SPECIAL ATTENTION TO LONG AND SHORT FORMS
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1989-12)This study of iconicity if Korean has examined the iconic relationship (non-arbitrariness) between form and meaning in phonology, morphology, and syntax. There are many pairs of linguistic expressions that carry roughly ... -
A SOCIOLINGUISTIC SURVEY OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AMONG THE SHIPIBO OF AMAZONIAN PERU
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1998-05)In the 1950s, the trend worldwide in public education was for classes to be conducted in the national (prestige) language. In Amazonian Peru however, an alternative was being considered: Bilingual Education (BE). Since ... -
A SOCIOLINGUISTIC COMPARISON OF THE SYNTAX OF MODERN STANDARD ARABIC AND JORDANIAN ARABIC
(University of Texas at Arlington, 2003-08)This thesis investigates some of the syntactic differences between two forms of Arabic, the standard and the local vernacular of Petra. This vernacular has not been looked at from a syntactic perspective. The attempt here ... -
A GRAMMAR OF TWO PACOH TEXTS
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1980-12)The goals of this grammar are threefold: first to learn more about the Pacoh language of Viet Nam and leave a record of the results for future students of Pacoh; second, to learn more about discourse structure, and third, ... -
A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE EMPLOYED IN ENGLISH TEXTS BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AND NATIVE SPEAKERS OF SPANISH
(University of Texas at Arlington, 1996-08)It has often been observed that students of English as a second language not only speak with a foreign accent but write with a distinctively foreign accent as well. Two apparently conflicting theories have been proposed ... -
Automatic processing of tonal information during visual word recognition in L2 Chinese learners
(2020-08-10)This dissertation investigates the automatic tonal processing in a second language (L2) and a first language (L1) during visual word recognition. Four experiments were conducted to examine -- (i) whether tonal information ... -
On the syntax of West Kalimantan: Asymmetries and A'-movement in Malayic and Land Dayak languages
(2020-09-01)This dissertation focuses on five Malayic and five Land Dayak languages of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, exploring voice, A’-movement, and extraction asymmetries through a Minimalist framework. The main goal of this dissertation ... -
Reconstraining massive pied-piping in English: A non-interrogative CP analysis
(2020-09-04)This dissertation focuses on the distribution of "massive pied-piping" (Heck 2008) constructions in English. Compared to other forms of wh-movement and pied-piping, broadly speaking, massive pied-piping is limited in the ... -
THE PLACE DEIXIS OF MODERN STANDARD ARABIC: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE DIMENSIONAL SYSTEM AND THE FACTORS THAT CONTROL THE CHOICE OF PLACE DEICTIC EXPRESSIONS
(2020-08-10)This dissertation investigates place deixis in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) focusing primarily on two issues, 1) examining the dimensional system of place deixis in MSA as opposed to Classical Arabic, and 2) exploring the ... -
Morphological decomposition in heritage language speakers
(2019-07-24)This dissertation investigates the grammatical processing in a heritage language (HL), or the first language (L1) in a home or minority setting that has become a non-dominant language, and a more dominant second language ...