Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University / It 1a the purpose of this study (1) to analyze the pronunciation errors of Italian speaking people learning English and ( 2) to determine whether or not a native dialectical language has any effect on the individual's learning situation. Using the case study method the writer has selected twenty persona of Italian extraction-- ten native of northern Italy and ten native of southern Italy-- each speaking a native dialect as a primary language and exposed to the English language and pronunciation only through the regional dialect or western Connecticut.

The chief objective of this dissertation is the description of tone realization differences in Hanoian and Saigonese dialects based on a representative sample of recorded material, with special focus on read monologue and semi-spontaneous conversational speech. The research discusses mainly issues of tone production but it is complemented by a section on tone perception in form of a perception test. The theoretical background in Section 2.1. describes the topic of tonality and tonal languages in general. Section 2.2. is devoted to the description of the Vietnamese language and attention is specifically paid to tonal inventories of both researched dialects. Tonogenesis is mentioned on a general level as well as in the Vietnamese language in particular. Chapter 3 introduces the research methodology, namely the speaker selection, speech material preparation and recording, data extraction and preparation for the analyses and the perception test. Chapter 4 is divided into three sections. Section 4.1. speaks about tone realizations in isolation and carefully preselected context. Its goal is to investigate the behaviour of tonal contours influenced by as few variables as possible. The results should be comparable to the findings of previously conducted studies. Section 4.2. strives to assess data from a...

This paper offers a short report on an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the syllabification of single intervocalic consonants in the Arabic dialect of Sakaka city. This study aimed at investigating how intervocalic consonants of different sonority profiles are treated in the dialect of Sakaka City. Thirty monolingual male participants were recruited voluntarily in this study. Participants’ judgments were elicited using a metalinguistic word blending task with pairs of disyllabic nonwords of the structure ꞌCVCVC + ꞌCVCVC, where stress was on the first syllable only throughout the data. All phonemes involved in this structure are in conformity with Arabic phonotactics. In addition, the intervocalic consonants under examination belonged to four sonority levels; glides ([j] and [w]), liquids ([r] and [l]), nasals ([m] and [n]) and obstruents ([s] and [b]). The low vowel [a] was the only vowel used in this structure. Unlike many works of this nature, ambisyllabicity and word minimality effects were blocked in this complete word task. Although the investigation shed light on several important universal rules of syllabification, sonority profile of intervocalic consonants was the overriding preference in this blending task. That is, glides, liquids and nasals were parsed in coda position by the majority of participants whereas obstruents were parsed in onset position. However, the effects of other universal principles of syllabification such as Maximal Onset Principle and stress placement were minimized. The study concluded that the Split Margin Hierarchy adopted showed a strong preference for coda parse with high sonority consonants and onset parse with low sonority ones, thus adding further support to the abstractness of the syllable as a higher prosodic constituent and the discreteness of phonemes in the human speech stream. Keywords: Arabic dialect, Sakaka city, Optimality Theory, intervocalic consonants, nonwords, ambisyllabicity, minimality effects, Split Margin Hierarchy, sonority, Maximal Onset Principle, stress, syllable, speech stream.

abstract: This dissertation investigates vocal performance of art songs requiring authentic and appropriate regional dialects of the American South. Through close analysis of performance practice in American opera, musical theatre, and art song, this document follows the existence of regional southern dialects on the stage from the early 1800s to today’s practice. Evidence of specified regional southern accents is discussed regarding literary depictions in librettos, lyrics, and dialogue. Other topics include the ways regional nuances and colloquialisms differentiate southern regional accents, the existence of a generic “southern” accent to stand for any representation of rural whites, and, briefly, the nonspecific ways African American southern dialects are usually rendered. Art song selections from Kenneth Frazelle’s Appalachian Songbooks (1989) and Doug Borwick’s Southern Comfort (1989), which I studied, recorded, and transcribed into singer’s IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), are the central texts of this discussion. The recording can be accessed online at https://soundcloud.com/nina-c-garguilo/sets/southern-study-through-song. This research will benefit the performers of American art song that specifically requires “white” dialects, the native and non-native speakers of some Southern-American dialects, and scholars who seek to promote authentic performance practice of southern oral tradition in concert music. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music 2017

This thesis focuses on the historical development of dialectal variation in the Gaelic languages with special reference to Irish. As a point of departure, competing scholarly theories concerning the historical relationships between Goidelic dialects are laid out. Next, these theories are tested using dialectometric methods of linguistic analysis. Dialectometry clearly suggests the Irish of Ulster is the most linguistically distinctive of Irish dialects. This perspective on the modern dialects is utilised in subsequent chapters to clarify our understanding of the history of Gaelic dialectal variation, especially during the Old Irish period (AD 600–900). Theoretical and methodological frameworks that have been used in the study of the historical dialectology of Gaelic are next outlined. It is argued that these frameworks may not be the most appropriate for investigating dialectal variation during the Old Irish period. For the first time, principles from historical sociolinguistics are here applied in investigating the language of the Old Irish period. In particular, the social and institutional structures which supported the stability of Old Irish as a text language during the 8th and 9th centuries are scrutinised from this perspective. The role of the ecclesiastical and political centre of Armagh as the principal and central actor in the relevant network structures is highlighted. Focus then shifts to the processes through which ‘standard’ languages emerge, with special reference to Old Irish. The evidence of a small number of texts upon which modern understandings of Old Irish was based is assessed; it is argued that these texts most likely emerged from monasteries in the northeast of Ireland and the southwest of Scotland. Secondly, the processes through which the standard of the Old Irish period is likely to have come about are investigated. It is concluded that the standard language of the period arose primarily through the agency of monastic schools in the northeast of Ireland, particularly Armagh and Bangor. It is argued that this fact, and the subsequent prominence of Armagh as a stable and supremely prestigious centre of learning throughout the period, offers a sociolinguistically robust explanation for the apparent lack of dialectal variation in the language. Finally, the socio-political situation of the Old Irish period is discussed. Models of new-dialect formation are applied to historical evidence, and combined with later linguistic evidence, in an attempt to enunciate dialectal divisions which may have existed during the period.

As variantes dialetais de cada idioma possuem características geográficas, sociais, situacionais e culturais muito próprias e que podem vir a ser diferentes das encontradas em qualquer outra língua. Portanto, a tradução dessas variantes estaria diante de problemas para os quais seria necessário empregar uma variedade de técnicas tradutórias que, a nosso ver, merecem uma investigação mais detalhada. Assim, esta pesquisa tem como tema o estudo da tradução da representação literária do dialeto rural no romance Don Segundo Sombra (1926) do escritor argentino Ricardo Güiraldes para o português. A necessidade de um trabalho que vise analisar a tradução da representação literária do dialeto deve-se à falta de pesquisas sobre traduções de variantes dialetais que tenham como corpus original uma obra literária de língua espanhola e se baseie numa metodologia que exponha os dados de maneira qualitativa. A pesquisa fornece respostas às problemáticas que envolvem a tradução de dialeto e se beneficiarão dela todos os interessados nos aspectos da tradução de romances regionalistas, tal como aqueles que buscam amostras para os estudos dialetológicos na área de tradução. Analisamos a tradução com o auxílio do modelo de avaliação de qualidade de tradução de Juliane House (1997), baseado em quatro níveis de análise: função do texto individual, gênero, registro e linguagem/texto. Concluímos que o tradutor realiza um trabalho bastante satisfatório ao se aproveitar do contínuo dialetal existente entre o português brasileiro e espanhol, mais especificamente o português do Rio Grande do Sul e o espanhol do Rio da Prata, para marcar a linguagem da tradução como regional e estrangeirizadora. Por meio disso, ele consegue transmitir ao leitor a noção de que as personagens produzem uma variante marcada dialetalmente como não padrão/neutra, sem descaracterizá-las. / The dialect variants of each language have geographical, social, cultural and situational features very unique and that may be different from those found in any other language. Therefore, the translation of these variants would face problems for which it would be necessary to employ a variety of translation techniques that, in our view, deserve a more detailed investigation. Thus, this research theme is the study of translation of literary representation of rural dialect in the novel Don Segundo Sombra (1926) by Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes into Portuguese. The need for a work aimed to analyze the translation of literary representation of dialect is due to the lack of research on translations of dialect variants that have as source corpus a literary piece written in Spanish language and based on a methodology that expose data in a qualitative way. The research provides answers to problems involving the translation of dialect and it will benefit all interested in aspects of translation of regionalist novels, as well as those seeking dialect samples for studies in the field of translation. We analyzed the translation with the help of Juliane Houses model of translation quality assessment (1997), based on four levels of analysis: individual textual function, genre, register and language / text. We conclude that the translator performs a quite satisfying work as he takes advantage of the dialect continuum between Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish, more specifically the Portuguese from Rio Grande do Sul and Spanish from Rio de la Plata, to mark the language of translation as regional and foreignizing. By this, he manages to convey to the reader the notion that the characters produce a variant marked as dialectally nonstandard / neutral without uncharacterize them.

This dissertation studies the prosodic structure of the variety of Jordanian Arabic that is spoken in the rural areas of the Governorate of Irbid (IA) by investigating the role of syntactic structure in the formation of prosodic domains. It empirically explores the word-level, phrase-level and clause-level prosody of IA and attempts to account for these empirical results in a framework based on the standard syntactic-prosodic interface principles developed in Match Theory (Selkirk 2011) and formulated as OT constraints (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The basic hypotheses in this dissertation are that the prosodic word (ω), phonological phrase (Φ) and intonational phrase (ι) are present in IA, and that they are anchored in syntactic constituents. Relying on hypotheses derived from the MATCH constraints (Selkirk 2011) that ensure the syntactic-prosodic correspondence, ω, Φ and ι should respectively match the grammatical word, syntactic phrase and clause and should recursively match embedded syntactic constituents. A series of experiments was designed to test the hypotheses. Twenty native speakers (ten males and ten females) of Jordanian Arabic living in Irbid participated in the tasks. Each pair of participants performed several tasks in one session. Two game-based tasks were designed to explore intonational and temporal cues to Φ and ι boundaries and examine their relation to XPs and clauses, respectively. Two additional reading tasks were designed to determine the application domain of post-lexical segmental processes in IA (the coarticulation of pharyngealization and vowel hiatus resolution). The collected tokens were submitted to acoustic and statistical analyses. Based on the results of these experiments, the existence of the ω, Φ and ι is confirmed and our understanding of their segmental and suprasegmental cues is refined. ω’s match grammatical words and are the domain of stress, realization of the feminine -t suffix and coarticulation of pharyngealization. Φ`s match syntactic phrases and are cued suprasegmentally: their right boundaries are marked by low phrase accents (L-) and pre-boundary syllable lengthening. As for ι`s, they match clauses and are cued by additional final lengthening, boundary tones (H% or L%) and resistance to vowel reduction. There is also ample evidence that syntactic nesting motivates prosodic recursion. At the ω level, the primary/secondary status of genitive constructs of stress mirrors syntactic nesting. At the Φ level, recursion is evidenced by gradient pre-boundary syllable lengthening, which is greater at the right boundaries of higher prosodic subcategories that match larger syntactic domains. As for recursion at the ι level, it is not only cued by gradient pre-boundary syllable lengthening, but also by boundary tones: continuative H% are used at sentence-internal ι boundaries, but L% tones are cues to boundaries of larger ι’s. However, prosodic recursion is not unconstrained in IA: prosodic domains can only consist of two subcategories, i.e. a minimal and maximal layers. In this way, prosodic recursion is neither prohibited as proposed in the early version of Strict Layer Hypothesis (Nespor &Vogel 1986, Selkirk 1986), nor free to perfectly mirror syntactic nesting. As in most previous case studies, it is proposed that the one-to-one correspondence constraints of Match Theory (Selkirk 2011) account for the prosodic patterns in IA, but have to be complemented with language-specific markedness constraints on phonological weight, exhaustivity and recursion. It is also shown that these explanatory principles can, with minor reorganization, account for the prosodic patterns described in other Arabic dialects.

Phonological and morphological awareness are shown to be predictors of hearing and deaf children's literacy achievements in various languages, and Arabic is assumed to be no different. However, this might not be the case for two reasons. Firstly, the linguistic context of the Arab world is characterised by diglossia, i.e. the use of two different varieties of the same language in different settings. Hearing and orally educated deaf children will therefore encounter the vernacular variety of Arabic outside school, but are introduced to literacy in the more prestigious variety of Standard Arabic during instruction in school. Secondly, Arabic orthography has two forms: a fully vowelised script, which is typically taught in the first two years of school, and a non-vowelised script, which is the form of the written language widely used in society. This study specifically aims to investigate whether phonological and morphological awareness are independent predictors of the emergent literacy achievement of hearing and orally educated deaf Kuwaiti children. This is in addition to the question of whether children's awareness of the two language forms, i.e. their dialect awareness, contributes to their literacy achievement and to their levels of phonological and morphological awareness. This investigation was carried out longitudinally through a number of phonological, morphological and dialect awareness measures utilised as predictors of literacy outcome skills of word reading, word spelling, pseudo-word decoding and reading comprehension. Variances of age and general cognitive ability were controlled for throughout all the analyses undertaken. The results for the first target group of hearing children (N = 78, aged 6; 2 years) indicated a significant superiority of phonological awareness as the predominant predictor of all literacy skills across grade levels one and two. Morphological awareness was a predictor of first- graders' spelling ability, and was subsequently implemented to predict all the literacy skills of second-graders. Dialect awareness was a predictor of the word reading and reading comprehension ability only for second-graders, and its mediational effect was revealed when it was seen to significantly reduce the effect of phonological and morphological awareness on second-graders' reading skills after being examined as a control measure. The results for the second target group of orally educated deaf children (N = 34, aged 7; 6 years) indicated that phonological, morphological and dialect awareness were varyingly significant independent predictors of the subjects' literacy skills. A mediational effect of dialect awareness on the predictive link between morphological awareness and word spelling outcome was also evident. Although the prediction association between literacy predictor and outcome measures was mostly consistent and similar across both groups, exceptions in the predictive pattern revealed that the deaf children were at a disadvantage in developing language awareness skills that facilitate efficient mapping of speech into the written form. These findings are discussed in terms of language-general and language-specific properties. The outcomes offered by the current study cannot imply a cause-and-effect association, but allow for constructive identification of literacy predictors and assist in clarifying possible implications for children's literacy capabilities. As the strengths and needs of the examined groups have been clearly recognised, future investigations of causal and mediational analyses will validate the current findings about the Arabic diglossic phenomenon, and additionally specify an appropriate response in terms of practical educational plans.

The overarching purpose of both dissertation studies is to contribute to the extant literature base on language assessment in the context of poverty and African American English (AAE) dialect. Language assessment with culturally and linguistically diverse populations, in particular children who speak AAE, has been a longstanding challenge for professionals in the field of speech-language pathology despite the preponderance of scholarly attention this topic has received. The purpose of the first study is to conduct a systematic review of the literature to synthesize the existing literature on AAE from the past approximately three and a half decades, to identify aspects of language and assessment approaches that have been most informative for identifying language impairment in this population. The purpose of the second study is to examine the grammaticality judgments of school-age, AAE-speaking children as a function of their nonmainstream dialect density and language ability. Data for this study came from 273 African American children from low-income backgrounds who were participants in a larger project focused on language and literacy outcomes for children reared in urban areas. the relationship between language ability and dialect density was explored using correlational analysis and the contribution of language ability and dialect density on grammaticality judgments was analyzed using multiple regression. Finally, a multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to investigate the impact of dialect density and language ability on various items that differed in grammatical constructions. Results from both studies are discussed relative to the existing oral language profiles of AAE speakers and the impact of linguistic variation on assessment. Together, these papers contribute to the extant literature by supporting the development of a more comprehensive profile of AAE and increasing the field's understanding of language assessment and language impairment in child AAE speakers.

Les dialectes, comme on a déjà vu, sont des entités destinées à évoluer sans cesse. Beaucoup plus que les langues traditionnelles, les plus diffusées. Faire des prévisions en linguistique est un exercice impossible, d'un côté et inutile de l'autre. Cela ne sert à rien en effet. Le phénomène néo-mélodique avec lequel, on l’a plusieurs fois déclaré dans cette recherche, le dialecte s'identifie complètement, est destiné à évoluer continuellement. On arrivera à un niveau de saturation auquel suivra un déclin inévitable. Est-ce que le dialecte napolitain suivra cette parabole ? Ou est-ce qu'il se distinguera, en récupérant une propre autonomie d'existence en re parcourant des dynamiques différentes ? Quel sera le destin du dialecte en général ? Si nous lisons les données de l’ISTAT de moins en moins de personnes seront intentionnées et motivées à s'exprimer en dialecte. Les média aujourd'hui ont une capacité de conditionnement impressionnante. Leurs services sont homologuants et à la longue ils finiront par délimiter toujours plus le domaine de l’utilisation du parler dialectal. C’est ce que nous pouvons prévoir en analysant la situation aujourd'hui. Est-ce que ce sera ainsi ? Est-ce que ce sera vrai ? Personne ne peut le dire. En linguistique les marges de l’impondérabilité et de l’imprévisibilité sont toujours plutôt consistantes. / This text is an analysis of the progessive disappear terms of French origin in Neapolitan dialect . It is a linguistic phenomenon that in recent times there has been more intensively. The research is divided into five chapters in which they are analyzed the texts of traditional and neomelodic Neapolitan music.The basic thesis is that the Neapolitan dialect, over time, has seen an increasing reduction of terms of French origin: the music of the neomelodic singers of latest generation has little in common with the nineteenth century Neapolitan dialect. It is characterized by an essential language, where the phonetic element prevails over the graphic form. The sound is more important than the written word. The Neapolitan dialect, used in music, has been increasingly influenced by the Anglo-Saxon spoken.