Browsing by Subject "linguistics"
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Item It's a Big World After All ...the pitfalls of digitizing and describing a linguistics project by non-linguists(2013-06-28) Holmes, Ramona; Schenk, Krystal; University of Texas at ArlingtonA digitized collection of linguistics recordings made by Jimmy G. Harris, a former employee of the United Nations who worked for several decades in many far-flung parts of the world. The recordings are unique, capturing languages and dialects from speakers in currently politically unstable countries where field work is difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, since the recordings were made from the 1960s to the 1980s, they also represent a unique capture of these speakers during a specific time. Adding this digital collection to our institutional repository posed some unique challenges, including reel to reel capture of sound from materials that were decades old and metadata creation without a certain type of specialization.Item Language and power in Roman comedy(2009-05) Rich, Laura Brooke; Moore, Timothy J., 1959-; Riggsby, Andrew M.The theory of powerless speech suggests that speakers in powerless social positions use more “powerless” speech acts than their social superiors. This report will use two such powerless speech acts, hedges and tag questions, to examine the interplay between the power relationships of Roman comedy and the language of its characters. The results of this study show that Republican Latin does not always follow the theory’s predictions, suggesting that hedges and tag questions may not be powerless speech acts in Latin; that the theory may need to be modified in order to accommodate Latin; or that the Saturnalian nature of Roman comedy prevents the expected outcome of powerless language.Item Status & solidarity through codeswitching: three plays by Dolores Prida(Texas A&M University, 2004-09-30) Anderson, Sheri L.This analysis employs the sociolinguistic framework of status and solidarity (Holmes, 2001) to examine the use of codeswitching on the relational development between the characters in three plays by Cuban-American playwright Dolores Prida. The three plays discussed are Beautiful Se?oritas (1978), Coser y cantar (1981) and Bot?nica (1991). Linguistic scholars recognize the lack of linguistic analysis of literary texts; specifically, codeswitching at present is not fully explored as a linguistic phenomenon in written contexts. Furthermore, Prida's works have never before been appraised using linguistic methodology. Hence, this work aims to add to scholarly research in the fields of codeswitching, discourse analysis, and literary linguistics, using the status and solidarity framework to examine the codeswitching in Dolores Prida's plays. Dolores Prida is a feminist and Hispanic dramatist whose central theme is the search for identity of Hispanic immigrants, specifically women, in the United States today. Due to her ideological stance, it is expected that a strong emphasis on solidarity rather than status and the use of affective rather than referential speech functions are present in the relationships in her plays. Accordingly, the analysis of Bot?nica reveals that indeed codeswitching between the characters does affect their relational development in maintaining solidarity and intimacy. However, the relationships found in Beautiful Se?oritas and Coser y cantar do not offer such conclusions, due to the variable nature of the relationships identified. Further analysis of these and other literary works will more accurately determine benefits of the status and solidarity framework as applied to the codeswitching research.Item Tož, tak to bylo, anyway : the borrowing and adaptation of the discourse marker 'anyway' in Texas Czech(2011-05) Tomeček, John Michael; Rappaport, Gilbert C.; Boas, Hans C.This thesis addresses the borrowing and adaptation of the English discourse marker (DM) anyway into the speech of the Czech-speaking diaspora in Texas, known widely as Texas Czechs (TC). The primary goal of the thesis is to assess which subtypes of 'anyway', according to the schema of Ferrara (1997), are borrowed into TC, and to what extent. Chapter one addresses the sociolinguistic history of the TC community. The historical origins of the people and cultural background are provided. Late in the chapter, I provide a discussion of previous scholarship in the field of TC linguistics over the last half-century. Chapter two addresses the theories of borrowing and code-switching in language. The two are disambiguated, and a basic set of conditions which define the two are proposed. From this, I address Serra's (1998) theory of a mixed-code system, which relies on the knowledge of two separate codes for understanding, but also utilizes borrowings. The works of Fuller (2001) and Weilbacher (2007) in Pennsylvania and Texas German communities are addressed, as is Johnson's (1995) work on Tejano. The chapter concludes with a brief description of DMs. Chapter three describes the subtypes and features of 'anyway' in English according to Ferrara's (1997) schema, as well as surveys a number of possible counterparts for 'anyway' in standard European Czech. Chapter four analyzes borrowed 'anyway' in TC speech as a Ferraran subtype. I disambiguate the uses of various types of anyway, proposing that only anyway, Ferrara's only true DM, is borrowed in TC. I demonstrate that possible functions of native TC DMs similar to 'anyway' function inherently differently than those of Ferrara. I show that 'anyway' is borrowed into TC to fulfill a pragmatic gap in the form of 'anyway', whereas the two adverbial subtypes are not borrowed. In older data, these two were borrowed, but no examples exist in modern speech. I propose that this is indicative of the TC's existence as a mixed-code system, in that knowledge of both English and TC are required to properly choose the appropriate DM and to understand borrowed DMs from the other code.