Browsing by Author "Fernald, Theodore B."

Now showing 1 - 20 of 122
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    Adverbs of Quantitication in Public Health Surveys
    (2019) Guadalupe, Jason; Fernald, Theodore B.; Huang, Shizhe
    This thesis examines the function of adverbs of quantification through a comparison of questions found in two public health surveys, the data collected from each survey, and the subsequent allocations of healthcare resources and focus on specific areas in the medical field. After examining the types of questions present in the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) survey and the US Household Food Security Scale Module (HFSSM), I conclude that each of the surveys utilizes adverbs of quantification differently in their questions. The ACE survey's main objective is to establish the psychological impacts of childhood trauma, so while the possible answers may be linguistically vague, the survey collects important data to inform mental health professionals about how to treat patients. The HFSSM establishes more specific possible answers to create a scale of food security that can be nationally applied and assist the US government in allocating resources to fight food insecurity. I argue that survey authors would benefit from focused, basic linguistics training or a linguistic advisor to help write questions that avoid presuppositions and implicit restrictions, and help researchers collect the most helpful data possible.
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    Aglab Khazad: The Secret Language of Tolkien's Dwarves
    (2015) Amram, Tess; Fernald, Theodore B.
    J. R. R. Tolkien, best known for his epic works of high fantasy fiction, is also famous for his experimentation in constructed languages. By far his most complex and best-represented languages are those he assigned to his Elves. However, there are snippets from many other constructed languages in his works, all with varying levels of detail and analysis. One such language is Khuzdul, the language of Tolkien's Dwarves. It is poorly represented in Tolkien's works and writings, as the Dwarves kept it secret, barely using it around non-Dwarvish characters and even less frequently providing translations. What data exists, however, provides the basis for a larger language, known as Neo-Khuzdul, used in Peter Jackson's Middle-Earth film trilogies. This paper will provide a linguistic analysis of Neo-Khuzdul and, by extension, Khuzdul itself. I will first provide an overview of what data exists in both sources, text and film, with a brief analysis of each. Then I will provide more in-depth analysis of Neo-Khuzdul in several linguistic areas: I will start with a morphological analysis, looking at both NONCONCATENATIVE MORPHOLOGY, or the way words are formed and given meaning through internal structure, and CONCATENATIVE MORPHOLOGY, or prefixes and suffixes; next, I will look at the syntactic structure of the language; and finally, I will analyze the phonological system of the language and propose several phonetic changes drawn from the data. I will end with a sociolinguistic discussion of what we can glean of Dwarvish culture from its use of language. Overall, I hope this paper will be of interest to linguists, those interested in constructed languages, and those interested in learning more about Tolkien's literary world.
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    American Sign Language and the Universal Model of the Syllable
    (1997) Hussein, Hanan; Fernald, Theodore B.
    In spoken language, speech is divided into syllables. There are certain segments which are believed to be part of the universal syllable, and traits which go along with each of these segments. Is it possible that these universals hold for signed language as well? 2 In this paper, I will propose a model of the ASL syllable which follows this universal requirement of the syllable. There are existing models of the ASL syllable which either do not strictly follow the universal model of the syllable, or they ignore some of the distinguishing features of signing. For example, a model will be discussed later in which the behavior of the nondominant hand is not included in the syllable model. Is the nondominant hand not considered to be part of the ASL syllable even though it sometimes licenses distinguishing information of the sign? I will show not only how the nondominant hand's behavior is part of the syllable, but also, how the nondominant hand's behavior can be considered to be the coda of the signed syllable.
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    Analysis of the Standard French ne-drop Phenomenon
    (2003) Christensen, Susan; Fernald, Theodore B.
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    An Analytical Dissection of 'le'
    (2000) Leung, Cheryl; Fernald, Theodore B.
    In order to see whether the Ie's in Cantonese behave according to the one-Ie theory or the two- Ie theory, it is necessary to explore each theory in detail first. Since both theories have been constructed upon Mandarin data, sections I and II will be devoted to introducing the two main analyses of the Ie argument, Chao (1968), Li and Thompson's (1981) two-Ie theory and Shi Ziqiang's (1990) one-Ie theory respectively. Section III then explores the Cantonese usage ofthe lexical item Ie. Due to the fact that the Cantonese data seems to further support the two-Ie theory, section IV is dedicated to exploring the suggested flaws and ambiguities that Shi (1990) has suggested for the two-Ie theory, while attempting to fix the problems and strengthen the theory by the use of extra Mandarin and Cantonese data. Section V summarizes all the newly dissected Cantonese factors that might be useful for determining whether Mandarin contains one Ie or two.
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    Applying Moral Politics Theory to the 2018 Midterms
    (2019) Gutierrez-Prado, Erick; Fernald, Theodore B.
    This paper will begin with an abbreviated overview of the history of political polarization in the 1900s. First, it will suggest that polarization is in fact a real phenomenon by citing the D-NOMINATE method of measuring polarization among political elites. It will then go forward and suggest that the American public are living in a time of increased partisanship, that more or less corresponds with an ongoing "culture war" in some segments of American society, and an ongoing depopulation and political deemphasizing of the importance of the political center. The paper then suggests Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory, and more particularly Lakoff's extension Moral Politics Theory as a way to look at modern political polarization. Lakoff's "strict father" and "nurturant parent" moralities arise, and both moralities construct a model citizen and different demons to represent the ideal and nonideal type of people. This paper then uses the campaign speeches of Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee to exemplify how these politicians' used morality and identity-building to create ingroups and outgroups consistent with Moral Politics Theory. Next, the paper than focuses in on discourse regarding immigration, and notes how the "commonsensical" arguments of partisans on both the right and the left are moral, and that those morals are also consistent with Lakoff's "nurturant parent" and "strict father" models. Lastly, the paper suggests further research to compensate based on some anomalous findings that Lakoff's theory does not account for.
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    Authorship Attribution of Song Lyrics
    (2017) Tarlin, Lee; Fernald, Theodore B.
    Authorship attribution is a common application offorensic linguistics that can be performed on a variety of data types. The goal of authorship attribution is to predict the creator of a piece of linguistic data by analyzing the quirks and patterns of a text or audio sample and comparing them to a set of potential authors to determine the best match. In this paper, I apply this technique to a large database of song lyrics scraped from the Internet as I attempt to train a computational model to predict the performing artist of a given song. A key element of this project is to find a list of relevant features, or calculable information, that best distinguishes the songs of a certain artist from the songs of all other artists. For example, the most obvious difference between the line "In chilly sub-depth railways, the weathered concrete stairways provide me with a means of getting home" (from Owl City's "Early Birdie") and the line "So get out, get out, get out of my head / And fall into my arms instead" (from One Direction's "One Thing") is the presence of more unusual words in the former example than in the latter. Therefore, my model uses the inverse document frequency to determine the rareness of each word in the song and uses it to help find a matching artist. The entire feature set I discuss in this paper contains various types of linguistic information, although syntax is the most difficult to manage because the syntax of lyrics is strongly constrained by the meter of the song. Tarlin 2 This topic is inherently susceptible to a data sparsity problem-the number of words in a single song may not be enough to effectively perform the statistical component of the model. In fact, the reason that I choose to define the author as the performing artist rather than the lyricist is that there is not enough lyricist information available. In many cases, the song's metadata lists zero or multiple composers, both of which are incompatible with the machine learning algorithms I use from Python's scikitlearn package. However, I claim that predicting the performing artist is still a worthwhile task because bands will choose to record songs that have similar styles-both in terms of the music and the lyrics. Though my model does not correctly predict the majority of the artists, it does perform significantly better than chance, meaning that the selected features do give some indication of the performing artist. Although the success of the classifier is more visible with a smaller number of possible authors, the ratio between its accuracy and chance is maintained even when applied to a larger data set.
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    The Autoethnographic (De)Construction: How German writers of Turkish heritage manipulate the German language to reexamine ideas of national identity and -lingualism
    (2013) Starace, Emily; Fernald, Theodore B.
    This paper examines how the innovative, non-standard German language and usage presented by minority German authors with Turkish heritage stand as reactions to constructed ideals and myths that pervade modem Germany society. Using the medium of 'autoethnographic texts,' these authors work to dissolve the myths of nationhood, monolingualism and a 'mother tongue' in order to surmount the limitations they impose. Examining Feridun Zaimoglu's novel Kanak Sprak: 24 Misst6ne Vom Rande Der Gesellschaft (1995) and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's work Mutterzunge: Erzahlungen (1990), this thesis challenges the precondition of a solely monolingual identity and analyzes these works and the unique languages they employ as commentaries on both the heritage Turkish and the host German culture.
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    An Autosegmental Approach to Problems in Reconstructing Old Chinese
    (2004) Anderson, Joshua; Fernald, Theodore B.
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    A Comparative Analysis of Noun Incorporation Productivity in English and German
    (2017) Westley, Ian; Fernald, Theodore B.
    Noun incorporation (e.g. crab-walk or hand-hold) is defined by Feist (2013) as a word or expression that includes a noun in the verbal constituent of an utterance. In this paper, I compare the productivity of noun incorporation in English and German. My goal is to determine whether the relationship between noun incorporation in English and German is similar to that of nominal compounding. Berg et al. (2012) posit that German assigns a more important role to compounding than English does, resulting in a higher occurrence of nominal compounds in German. Specifically, their study finds that nominal compounds composed of two constituents are more prominent and productive in German. Meyer (1993) notes that nominal compound productivity in German has very few restrictions and argues that picking up a German newspaper or magazine will expose the reader to a wide range of novel noun-noun compounds. Since the expanding productivity of nominal compounds in German is higher than in English, one might expect the same finding to be reflected in noun incorporation. In this paper, I argue that such is not the case, and that English makes more productive use of noun incorporation than German. I additionally argue, along with Baker (2009) and Barrie & Mathieu (2016) that one shouldn't expect the productivity of English and German noun incorporation to perfectly mirror Berg et al.'s findings, since noun incorporation is a syntactic process whereas compounding is a morphological process. In order to facilitate this study, I adopt Mithun's (1984) classification of noun incorporation, in which she breaks the process of noun incorporation down into four categories. Based on the existence (or lack thereof) of these four types of noun incorporation in German and English, I conclude that English noun incorporation displays comparatively superior productivity. To carry out this comparison, I cite examples from a variety of studies (see Feist 2013; Barrie 2011; Barrie & Spreng 2009; Barrie & Mathieu 2016) and additionally interview two native German speakers.
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    A Comparison of French and German Auxiliary Verb Selection: The HAVE/BE Alternation
    (1999) Johnson, Ellen S.; Fernald, Theodore B.
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    Compound Naming in Aphasic Speakers: The effect of activation parameters on decomposition and phonetic errors
    (2000) Ayala, Jennifer; Fernald, Theodore B.
    A long-standing question in lexical processing is whether compounds decompose into separate morphemes. Seven aphasic patients were tested with a picture naming test to see if compounds decompose into morphemes in the lexicon. Certain patients were found to produce more decomposition errors as well as more phonetic errors then is found in the error pattern of normal speakers. These data are accounted for within a new version of an interactive activation (IA) model (Dell, 1986) that incorporates decomposition of compound morphemes. This model accounts for both normal and aphasic type errors. In this model, decomposition and phonetic errors occur more often when lexical activation parameters (connection strength and decay rate) are altered.
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    Compounding in Aphasia: A Cross-Linguistic Review
    (2007) Goldman, Rebecca; Fernald, Theodore B.
    Psycholinguistic data from patients with aphasia, a family of language disorders caused by brain damage, may help determine how compound words are represented in the lexicon. The errors produced by such patients may reflect whole-word storage or rule-based composition of compounds. Experimental investigations of compounding may also shed light on the deficits caused by aphasia. The noun-verb double dissociation observed in certain subtypes of aphasia may apply to the noun and verb components of compound words at the sublexical level as well. Studies of aphasic speakers of English, German, Italian, Finnish, Japanese, and Chinese are reviewed to assess whether processing of compound words differs among speakers of languages that differ in terms of morphological structure and orthography. There is evidence from all six languages for both componential and whole-word storage of compounds, suggesting dual representation of such words in the lexicon. While the possibility of a sublexical double dissociation in aphasia is supported, data from more languages is needed to confirm that the phenomenon is present in languages with different types of compounds. A critique of the experimental methods currently used to study compounding in aphasia is provided, and directions for further research are discussed.
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    Conjunction in Colonial Valley Zapotec
    (2016) Plumb, May Helena; Fernald, Theodore B.
    Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ) was spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, during the colonial period; the language is attested a set of printed texts and handwritten documents. In this paper I discuss the four primary conjunctions strategies in CVZ: chela, huanee, =la, and asyndetic conjunction. These conjunction strategies are used interchangeably in CVZ (ยง2) and throughout a wide time frame and geographic area (ยง3). In some passages, a scribe alternates between different conjunction strategies to emphasize semantic and syntactic groupings within the construction. To explain these constructions I introduce a theory of localized semantic/ syntactic sensitivity, an expansion of the current typology of conjunction (ยง4).
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    Conjunction in Colonial Valley Zapotec
    (2016) Plumb, May Helena; Fernald, Theodore B.
    Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ) was spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, dur- ing the colonial period; the language is attested a set of printed texts and handwritten documents. In this paper I discuss the four primary conjunctions strategies in CVZ: chela, huanee, =la, and asyndetic con- junction. These conjunction strategies are used interchangeably in CVZ (x2) and throughout a wide time frame and geographic area (x3). In some passages, a scribe alternates between di erent conjunction strategies to emphasize semantic and syntactic groupings within the construction. To explain these constructions I introduce a theory of localized seman- tic/syntactic sensitivity, an expansion of the current typology of conjunc- tion (x4).
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    Consonant Clusters and Syllabification in Passamaquoddy-Maliseet
    (1996) Maule, Catherine; Fernald, Theodore B.
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    A Contrastive Analysis of French and American English
    (1999) Markey, Amy; Fernald, Theodore B.