Browsing by Author "Gasser, Emily"

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    Classifications of Mundari Expressives and Other Reduplicated Structures Based on Phonological Patterns, Transitivity, and the Effects of Valency-Reducing Affixes
    (2017) Gray, Sam; Gasser, Emily
    Despite academic interest in the Munda languages of South Asia (Anderson 1999, Mohan 2008, Osada 1991, 2008) and their propensity for reduplication, previous work in this area does not address the resulting reduplicated structures' interactions with verbal morphology. I examine the valency of expressives, a class of ideophones in Mundari, comparing their behaviors as predicates to those of reduplicated verb forms. I further describe several valency-altering affixes indicating passive voice, reflexivity, and reciprocality, in conjunction with these reduplicated forms. I then propose a set of groupings for Mundari expressives based on valency and interaction with these affixes, complementing an existing classification by Toshiki Osada based on phonological patterns which I also expand upon.
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    Comparative Reconstruction of Proto-Biakic Phonology
    (2020) Rich, Ellora; Gasser, Emily
    Biakic is a small subgroup of New Guinea’s Austronesian (AN) languages belonging to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea (SHWNG) family. The Biakic group contains four languages: Biak, Roon, Roswar, and Dusner. Following the comparative method and utilizing six wordlists gathered from field research ‒ along with prior historical work on Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP), Proto- Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (PCEMP), and SHWNG ‒ this thesis reconstructs the consonant inventory of Proto-Biakic, provides a list of 133 proto-forms, and explores theories for subgrouping the Biakic languages. Though the observations presented are preliminary and more research is needed to verify the claims in this paper, this study begins to shed some light on the historical situation of an under-researched linguistic region.
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    Growing a (Family) Tree: Evaluating the Na Dene-Yeniseian Language Family Hypothesis through Phylogeny
    (2017) Murray, Bridget; Gasser, Emily
    In historical linguistics, deep genealogies postulating far-flung"macro-families11 have been at once fascinating, thought-provoking, and highly controversial because they reach beyond the limits of standard reconstruction methods (Campbell 2004). Recent research on one such family, the Dene-Yeniseian family, gives a new take by weaving linguistic and anthropological arguments to envision the history of a language whose speakers moved between late-Pleistocene North America and Eurasia (Kari & Potter 2010, Sicoli & Holton 2014). In this thesis, I add to this small body of literature by modeling the phylogeny of this family, taking into account both the relationships between these families) modern languages and the evolutionary history behind them. I use the Bayesian modeling software BEAST to infer the relationships within a set of 199 cross-linguistic characters and produce a series of phylogenetic trees. I focus on maximizing interdisciplinary approaches by factoring divergence dates for subgroups within each family drawn from linguistic and anthropological research in order to, one, capture the set of calibrations and rate of change that represents the data most effectively; and, two, see more generally if and to what degree linguistic modeling is effective in capturing and reproducing known calibrations. My results show that the findings of archaeological research may be relatively effectively replicated through linguistic methods, indicating the potential cooperation of these two disciplines when they intersect-at those moments in prehistory when we can connect the migrations of language speakers and the divergence of languages.
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    Iago Parla Unamunda: Understanding a nonsense language
    (2007) Gasser, Emily; Napoli, Donna Jo, 1948-
    If you walked into a room and were greeted by an exclamation of “Velcro! Police, comintern. Harvardyu?”, how would you respond? Probably with a puzzled look, possibly followed by, “Fine thanks, and you?” Much research has been done in how the human mind understands a known language. But though nonsense languages have a rich literary history, there is much less written on how we understand and process nonsense languages, those for which there is little or no existing mental framework. This thesis explores how this sort of linguistic input might be processed and understood, focusing in particular the case of Unamunda, the nonsense language created by David Ives in his short play “The Universal Language” (1994). Unamunda consists of a combination of English words assigned new meanings, proper nouns (also assigned new meanings), plays on foreign words and phrases, and nonsense words. Its syntax is very nearly that of English, with occasional variations on word order. Though no one listening to Unamunda being spoken onstage has any prior familiarity with its lexicon or grammar, it is still possible to understand the utterances with little extra effort. After an overview of some theories and models of some various aspects of word recognition, including the effects of context on lexical decision-making, the clues to meaning supplied by syntactic structures, and phonotactic neighborhood activation, I move on to a discussion of my own experiment, in which subjects were asked to translate written, spoken, and video segments of Unamunda into English.
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    An Interface and Case Studies for Automatic Cognate Detection Methods
    (2018) Collins, Kathryn J.; Gasser, Emily
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    "The Language of College": A Case Study of Code-switching and Identity Performance in Northern Appalachian University Communities of Practice
    (2017) Reutter, Mindy; Gasser, Emily
    This paper investigates the distribution of Appalachian and Southern speech markers in an Eastern Ohio College Community and the sociolinguistic implications of the distribution. I combine a qualitative approach that uses the content of participants' speech to understand the sociolinguistic pressures and expectations within four different Communities of Practice (CofPs) with a quantitative approach to measuring variable feature frequency across the CofPs. Frequencies of lajl monophthongization, lej/ shifting, and 101 fronting are contrasted across CofPs. Occurrences of the two stages of the Southern Vowel shift (SVS) are also contrasted. The findings here suggest that the distribution of these three feature types is controlled by the linguistic capital values associated with them in each CofP. Participants demonstrated acute awareness of social bias from non-members of the community against features that the participants themselves thought of as rural. CofPs that give high linguistic capital to 'mainstream' English, such as a traditional writing class, create low-capital situations for Appalachian and Southern speech markers. I found that frequencies of Appalachian and Southern features distributed separately, but that both increased in contexts which were contextually linked to ruralness, or whose social structure was relaxed.
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    The Language of Wellness: Perceived 'Quasi-Health' in Cereal Advertising Language
    (2020) Lampard, Alexandria; Gasser, Emily
    This thesis explores interactions between food, language, culture, and marketing in order to recognize their convergence in food product advertising. Marketing, a field that blends the studies of psychology, sociology, economics, and business, is not normally associated with linguistics. However, by examining the link between them in isolation, and again through the lens of diet culture, both semantics and pragmatics emerge as essential to the efficacy of the advertising language that signals ‘health’ in a product. To understand how these linguistic advertising tactics affect consumers’ perceptions of a food, I conducted survey research to gather perceived ‘health’ ratings of various cereals solely based on their linguistic ‘health’ cues. The results of this study suggest that there is a relationship between the language used to market cereal and the consumer’s perception. Furthermore, these results implicate the influence of diet culture as an authority in the field of food product marketing.
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    Learning ill-formed loanwords in Optimality Theory
    (2020) Paul, Benjamin; Gasser, Emily
    An under-studied phenomenon of lexical borrowing is the ill-formed, or partially assimilated loanword. Loans of this kind invite otherwise prohibited structures into the borrowing language, and in doing so contradict the native grammar. Because of this contradiction, ill-formed loans offer researchers a unique perspective on the nature of phonological generalizations that extend over only a subset of the lexicon. This study argues that ill-formed loans are not derivable in classical OT, and proposes a perception-learning model of loanword adaptation in which loans are adapted during perception, but adaptation can be blocked by factors of intense language contact and bilingualism. This proposal is claimed to account for (a) the full range of observed loanword adaptations, (b) the observed potential for difference between loan and native phonologies, (c) lexically partial phonological generalizations within the native vocabulary, and (d) the historical conditions of language contact that allow for ill-formed loans to appear.¹
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    Life-form Overlap in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec Plant Taxonomy
    (2020) Kelso, Neal; Gasser, Emily
    This paper provides preliminary evidence that in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (SLQZ), an Otomanguean language of Oaxaca, Mexico, plant taxonomy exhibits a unique system wherein life-form classes overlap significantly. Though similar findings have been recorded in other varieties of Zapotec, no comparable ethnobiological investigation in any Tlacolula Valley languages has yet been carried out. In this taxonomic system, plant life-form classes are defined by appearance and utility. When a single variety of plant exhibits more than one of these traits, it is often classified as a part of each of these groupings, breaking the foundational rules of Linnaean and non-Linnaean taxonomy. The data used in this analysis was collected from corpora created with the aim of language revitalization as well as from talks with Dr. Felipe H. Lopez, an L1 speaker of SLQZ. As the scope of these corpora is presently rather limited, the latter section of the thesis proposes several field work methods which can be used to more accurately record taxonomic information in SLQZ in the future.
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    Life-form Overlap in San Lucas Quiavini Zapotec Plant Taxonomy
    (2020) Kelso, Neal; Gasser, Emily
    This paper provides preliminary evidence that in San Lucas Quiavini Zapotec (SLQZ), an Otomanguean language of Oaxaca, Mexico, plant taxonomy exhibits a unique system wherein life-form classes overlap significantly. Though similar findings have been recorded in other varieties of Zapotec, no comparable ethnobiological investigation in any Tlacolula Valley languages has yet been carried out. In this taxonomic system, plant life-form classes are defined by appearance and utility. When a single variety of plant exhibits more than one of these traits, it is often classified as a part of each of these groupings, breaking the foundational rules of Linnaean and non- Linnaean taxonomy. The data used in this analysis was collected from corpora created with the aim of language revitalization as well as from talks with Dr. Felipe H. Lopez, an Ll speaker of SLQZ. As the scope of these corpora is presently rather limited, the latter section of the thesis proposes several field work methods which can be used to more accurately record taxonomic information in SLQZ in the future.
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    Linguistic Persecution in South Asia: Historical and Modern Implications for Post-Article 370 Kashmir
    (2020) Jinsi, Gaia; Gasser, Emily
    Koshur, also known as Kashmiri, is a Dardic language spoken primarily in the Kashmir Valley of South Asia, the center of the international Kashmir conflict, in India-administered Kashmir. It has about 7 million speakers globally, and at least 14 dialects (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig, 2019) though sociolinguistic research into the dialect distinctions is nearly nonexistent. This is due to a variety of reasons, many of them politically charged and fraught with diplomatic faux-pas. In this thesis, I will explore Kashmir’s and Koshur’s linguistic history and examples of linguistic persecution and conflict in modern South Asia to compare them to Koshur’s current standing. I will also discuss the lack of dialect-sensitive, objective research in Koshur’s documentation and stress the urgency with which this research is needed. Additionally, I will explore the treatment of the largest and starkest dialect split, which is between the co-dialects of Koshur spoken by the Kashmiri Hindu and Kashmiri Muslim communities. While this split encompasses many smaller sub-dialects and varieties, this split is the most obvious and simultaneously least acknowledged.
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    Morphosyntax of the Bangla Affix -ta
    (2017) Benham, Claire; Gasser, Emily
    In this thesis, I provide a mid-level descriptive analysis of the Bangla suffix / -(aI. I provide a discussion of the distribution of the affix in regards to other nominal markers of the language, the different meanings which it marks and how those manifest, and provide some basic analyses of its functions in the language. -ta is used as a semantically bleached component of numeral phrases, as in tEk-ta mach 'one fish'. It marks definiteness as well as singularity on nouns, demonstrated with contrastive examples such as boi 'a book, books' versus bOi-ta 'the book'. There is a brief discussion of -{i, the marginal, honorific variant of -tao I discuss how -ta interacts with other systems of the language, such as the demonstratives ei and oi, which carry no innate denotation of number and must be assigned number by the presence of either -ta 'sG' or -gulo 'PL'. -ta also participates in the nominative-accusative, partially animacy-based case marking system of Bangia, co-occuring with the accusative clitic ~ke to mark less animate patients such as mach 'fish'. I also discuss information structure in Bangia, and demonstrate that, while -ta shows a correlation with topic in Bangia, it does not do so in a consistent, obViously principled way. I then outline future lines of research which will provide a greater understanding of -ta and its history. Fail
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    The Reduplication of the Agentive -er Morpheme in Phrasal Verbs
    (2019) Shapiro, Caleb C.; Gasser, Emily
    For many English speakers, the agentive form of the phrasal verb pick up is picker-upper. The unusual reduplication of the -er has been subject to much debate on how it should be analyzed. I combined McIntyre's existing proposal of viewing this as inflectional with my own proposal of a derivational relationship between -er and -ee, in order to account for data that was unexplained by his original proposal. To find more evidence to inform my combinative theory, I conducted two surveys gathering grammaticality judgements on a variety of forms from each. The results from Survey A, which attempted to test if there was a derivational relationship between -er and -ee, did not indicate such a relationship, but the distribution of the survey and the results are problematic and should be discounted. The results from Survey B, which asked about wider ranges of are open-ended, but indicate more variation in which morphemes double than previously thought, and also call into question some previously assumed properties of phrasal verbs.
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    The Role of aŋ in Ilonggo Information Structure
    (2016) Monari, Richard; Gasser, Emily
    In Ilonggo (an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines), the article aŋ is known to mark constituents with "emphasis". To accommodate this quality of "emphasis)), the literature on Ilonggo morphosyntax has classically labeled aŋ as either a topic marker (Wolfenden 1975) or a focus marker (Wolfenden 1971, Spitz 2001). I demonstrate that aŋ does not fit exclusively into either of these functions, but that it plays a role in the articulation of both topics expressions and focus marking. To evaluate the claims that aŋ is a topic marker or a focus marker, I apply Lambrechtls (1994) theory of information structure. This theory asserts that topical denotata (entities) are coded through topic expressions, which include lexical NPs and unaccented pronouns which establish a topic relation between the denotatum and the proposition of the sentence. Focus denotata are coded through focus marking, which are prosodic and morphosyntactic markers that establish a focus relation between the denotatum and the proposition. Aŋ is capable of expressing three types of topic expressions: lexical NPs with a reference-oriented function (aŋ sapat, 'the animar), role-oriented "optional)) lexical NPs (which can be dropped if assumed in context), and role-oriented specified pronouns (aŋ duwa sila, 'the two of them} This functional capacity is partially attributed to mls inherently non-implicit nature; aŋ can only appear before explicitly stated lexical NPs and pronouns that have been preceded by specifiers. Aŋ's role in focus marking is ultimately unclear. Aŋ does appear within constituents that refer to focus elements, as shown in (Cb): However, it is presently impossible to determine if V itself is marking constituents with focus, or if phrases preceded by aŋ are simply viable targets for some presently invisible focus marking (i.e. prosodic accents). Despite these unknown variables, it is established that aŋ can certainly appear in constituents that express focus elements. Through this analysis, I ultimately prove that the titles "topic marker)) and "focus marker)) are inherently inaccurate in describing how aŋ contributes to the articulation of information structure in Ilonggo. The mechanisms for expressing topic and focus appear to be more nuanced and complex than the use of a single grammatical marker.
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    Rules Versus Objectives: What is Most Salient in Toddlers' Language Acquisition?
    (2017) Sciascia, Jordan; Gasser, Emily; Christie, Stella
    How do young children learn the complex rules of language? Prior research has shown that infants as young as 7 months of age can learn simple rules, such as abstracting an ABB pattern after hearing strings of sounds "ga-ti-ti; gi-la-la, ta-ni-ni" (Marcus et aI., 1999). But later in development, research on visual (non-language) rules showed that 3-year-olds ignored rules in favor of matching objects. For example, given [00] and a choice between [xx] and [ox], children matched the look-alike [ox] more frequently than the same-rule [xx] (Christie and Gentner, 2007). Here I asked how this attention to object matches affects rule abstraction ability in language acquisition. In Experiment 1, I asked whether 3- and 6-year-olds are able to abstract simple patterns, just as 7-month-olds had in Marcus et aI., (1999). Children were familiarized with a string of syllables such as "li-ti-ti" and tested with novel syllables of the familiar pattern (wo-fe-fe) or of a new pattern (wo-fe-wo). Surprisingly, unlike infants, young children did not learn the rule easily, choosing randomly between the familiar and unfamiliar patterns. In Experiment 2, I asked how 3- and 6-year-olds learned a rule when it was pitted against object matches. 3- and 6-year-olds heard the same familiarization as in Experiment l(li ti ti ), but now were tested with a familiar rule (wo-fe-fe) versus a new rule with object matches (li-wo-li). Contrary to predictions, children, even adults, did not strongly prefer either object or rule matches. I discussed the implication of these results for language acquisition.
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    Syllable Structure in Umatilla Sahaptin
    (2019) Chzanowski, Tymoteusz Alan; Gasser, Emily
    Umatilla Sahaptin is a Shaptian language spoken in North-Eastern Oregon by the Umatilla tribe. While it has some documentation, such as a dictionary and sketch grammar, there are still acknowledged gaps in the literature. The purpose of this thesis is to fill one of those gaps with a description of syllable structure. To do this I compare data gathered from speakers of Umatilla with published accounts of syllable structure in the mutually intelligible sister language Yakima. After establishing what is meant by syllable structure and what is known about Yakima, I discuss the data I gathered. Using word list and sentence elicitations, stories, poems, and songs I conclude that Umatilla syllable structure is very similar to Yakima's, with some differences, namely in maximal margins, minimal words, and licensing of sonority sequence defying clusters.