This study examined comprehension of verb particle constructions in persons with aphasia (PWA) and young and older typical adults according to the semantic classes by Jackendoff (2002). The experimental task focused on the following three classes of verb particle constructions: idiomatic, directional, and aspectual verb particles. Movement of the object NP also was examined. The study involved a picture-matching task counterbalanced for each participant. The results revealed that PWAs showed slower than normal overall processing, slower processing of aspectual verb forms, and slower processing of syntactic form regardless of movement. Error analysis revealed a bias toward the meaning of the verb, particularly on aspectual verb constructions for all three groups. Accuracy data revealed no significant differences between groups although the aphasic group was less accurate in idiomatic verb forms. The results support current literature on the processing of syntactic structures in PWA.

The current study examined a method of language sampling (the Dixit Method- Science, Math, Engineering, Arts, and Math) in early adolescents with typically developing language. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the DM-STEAM in eliciting lexically sophisticated spoken language samples in the early adolescent population. To examine lexical sophistication, traditional measures of analysis such as mean length of utterance (MLU) and average type token ratio (AVG TTR) were applied along with a measure of low frequency vocabulary. To compare performance on the DM-STEAM, school standardized assessments were obtained to measure student skill in academic content areas. Twenty-two student participants in the sixth grade (11 years to 12 years 11 months) were recruited from a local elementary school. The data was evaluated using a paired tailed t test and a path analysis test. Although the sample size is small, results from the study indicate the DM-STEAM elicits low frequency academic vocabulary in early adolescent populations.

The purpose of this project is to understand how humor works in expert-novice identity construction in podcasts. I employ a Community of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1989) framework to examine the social hierarchy among the participants of a regular podcast. I am particularly concerned with uncovering how novice members construct themselves and are constructed by expert members through humor, as well as how expert members socialize novice members to participate in the kinds of humor practices that index membership in the Community of Practice (CoP). Rooster Teeth is an internet-based entertainment production company. They produce a weekly podcast which they make available for free on the internet. The podcast participants represent a small CoP with expert/novice differentiation. Combining a corpus linguistic approach with an ethnographic approach, I collected, transcribed, and studied several podcasts that were recorded over a two-year period, beginning with the first few podcasts where founding members established the practices and their roles as experts. Then, I examine the performances of three novices over time. Two of them follow a periphery to core trajectory and become regular members of the podcast while one remained on the periphery. I discovered that teasing and modeling are the primary tools that the experts use to socialize novices and that within Rooster Teeth, novices have the power to negotiate practice from the periphery of the community. This study demonstrates the power that novices may wield within CoPs, and reveals how powerful a socializing tool humor can be.

To lure potential customers to buy a holiday away from home, most marketers incorporate certain semantic and pragmatic features into their promotional material: words and images are chosen with utmost care. The present study is conducted in order to reveal these semantic and pragmatic features and equally, to show how they highlight the concept of “magic”.This research is based on responses from six different interviews in which the interviewees had to describe twelve key words and key phrases taken from twelve tourism advertisements, in and out of context. Secondary material further consists of publications dealing with the areas of linguistics, advertising and tourism.The conclusion of this research will reveal that the impact of tourism advertisements depends on agreement between various semantic and pragmatic elements rather than implementation of individual semantic and pragmatic features per se. In other words, all the semantic and pragmatic elements (linguistic and non-linguistic content) have to reinforce one another, acknowledging common ground and meeting the reader's pre-existing assumptions. Hence, for an advertisement to avoid ambiguity it has to be relevance-governed, delivering just what is necessary to ensure that the reader is able to decode the message: that one should leave the ordinary and travel to a temporary, yet seemingly magical holiday destination.

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The purposes of this investigation were to identify, via the Pragmatic Protocol, the incidence of pragmatic disorders within public school articulation and language caseloads and a control group of normal students and to specify the pragmatic areas, i.e., utterance propositional, and/or illocutionary/perlocutionary act categories in which deficits occur.

This corpus-based study examined English and Spanish learner language for ‘heart’ metaphors. Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) compared ‘heart’ metaphors across five languages and that study served as a reference framework for the work presented here. This work intended to find evidence of metaphor transfer and/or new metaphor learning in second language writing. Conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and linguistic or lexical metaphors (Falck, 2012) from both languages were considered in the analysis. This work analyzed ‘heart’ metaphors taken from two learner corpora, the Cambridge Learner Corpus and the Corpus de Aprendices de Español. Results were compared to the findings of Gutiérrez Pérez (2008) to see whether these metaphors typically occur only in English, only in Spanish, or are found in both languages. The results showed evidence of language learners using several kinds of metaphors that do not typically occur in their first language. The aim of this study was to add a new facet to this body of research by examining these phenomena in learner corpora rather than monolingual corpora. Furthermore, this study also examined both second language English and second language Spanish corpora, addressing potential bi-directionality of transfer or conversely, the use of new linguistic forms.

This work presents an analysis of punctuation use in computer-mediated communication (CMC); in particular, the present study aims to describe the pragmatic functions of nonstandard punctuation on Twitter, providing a corpus-driven overview of the distribution and frequency of nonstandard punctuation use, and an analysis of sampled tweets at the individual tweet level to estimate noise levels in the overall corpus. A survey was also conducted which aimed to identify user understanding of the affective content of nonstandard punctuation strings and to identify any possible effects of character repetition. Survey results indicate that linguistic content was the strongest indicator of affective understanding, type of punctuation (i.e., ?, !, and combinations thereof) was a weaker indicator of some affective content, and repetition was not found to be significant. The study argues that certain string types, possibly defined by punctuation type and not count, have large indexical fields of pragmatic meaning available to them, which are bounded by context. In light of these observations, the study also proposes distinctions/categories of punctuation strings and their associated pragmatic meanings.

Communication refers to the conveyance of intended messages so that the listeners' attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors are changed. Communication through a language system may be thought of as the integration of the three components of content (semantics), form (syntax), and use (language in context or pragmatics). The corning together of content, form, and use in signs, words, phrases, and discourse is the essence of language development. The synergism of content/form/use makes up language competence, or knowledge. When children speak and understand a message, they have a plan that is knowledge of language and they use that plan for the behavior involved in speaking or understanding messages, (Bates, 1976; Bloom and Lahey, 1978).

The purpose of this investigation was to determine at which age levels, between four and eight years, children express Praise, Apology, Commiseration, Blame, Challenge, Endearment, and both a Positive and Negative State. Subjects were thirty children, six from each age level between four and eight years, selected from an elementary and preschool within the Portland area. Sixteen picture cards and stories were designed to elicit the eight different feelings. Each subject responded to questions at the end of the story and was given two chances to express the appropriate feeling. Each response was judged as appropriate or inappropriate and scored accordingly.