Womens roles in the work force have increased, however, womens positions in the household have not changed greatly (Lennon & Rosenfield, 1994). While paid work research has focused significantly on the qualities of roles, household work research has not (Janzen & Hellsten, 2007). As the few existing instruments that do measure the quality of household work roles lack psychometric evidence (Janzen & Hellsten, 2007), a new instrument assessing all aspects of the quality of household work roles and possessing evidence of validity and reliability is required. The first step in the instrument development process is the identification and definition of relevant constructs. Thus, the main purpose of the study was to identify household work themes. Four focus groups of triple role women were performed with a total of 20 participants. A snowball sampling technique was used to recruit participants. Thematic analysis of the transcripts identified eight themes: No End Result, Scheduling, Time Constraints, Psychological Strain, Equality in Work, Value, Money, and Reward. The results found women to enjoy certain aspects of household work, but that they lead busy and hectic lifestyles. The themes created in the study were placed into a table of specifications this is to guide future instrument development research in which items can be included for each of these eight themes.

A causal theory of spiritual leadership taps into the fundamental needs of both leader (vision, hope/ faith, altruistic love) and follower for spiritual survival (calling/meaning, membership). The definition of spiritual leadership is to comprise the values, attitudes, and behaviors that are necessary to intrinsically motivate one¡¦s self and others so that they have a sense of spiritual survival through calling and membership, and to improve employees¡¦ organization commitment and productivity. In addition, change commitment which is one of the positive attitudes toward organizational change, could promote the success of organizational change. The relationship between spiritual leadership and change commitment will be discussed. Furthermore, employees¡¦ emotional experiences might influence the work attitudes and behaviors. Regulatory focus theory which includes promotion focus and prevention focus, will focus on the one¡¦ emotional content, magnitude and the further effect. It¡¦s helpful to describe the relationship between emotional experiences and work attitudes and behaviors. As a result, the mediating mechanism of regulatory focus between spiritual leadership and commitment will be discussed. Use LISREL to analyze the survey data from 369 employees. Following are the results: 1. There is a positive relationship among spiritual leadership, calling/ meaning and membership, and change commitment. And calling/ meaning and membership are the mediators in the relationship between spiritual leadership and change commitment. 2. There is a positive relationship among spiritual leadership, promotion focus and change commitment. And promotion focus is the mediator in the relationship between spiritual leadership and change commitment. Although spiritual leadership positively affects prevention focus, however, prevention focus will not influence change commitment. 3. The differences of respondents¡¦ profiles will make effects on spiritual leadership, calling/meaning, membership, regulatory focus and change commitment.

none

This Master’s report describes the Agent Focus construction in Ixil Mayan discourse and proposes a bi-clausal analysis that is discussed within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan, 2001; Dalrymple, 2001). Many previous analyses of the Agent focus construction have proposed a monoclausal analysis of this construction in other Mayan languages (Aissen, 1992 [Mayan languages in general], 1999 [Tzotzil]; Broadwell, 2000 [Kaqchikel]; Duncan, 2003 [Tzutujil]; Norman & Campbell, 1978 [Proto-Maya]). This analysis differs from these in that I assume the Agent focus construction is a complex, that is, bi-clausal cleft construction. Evidence for this analysis comes from a discussion of the Agent Focus construction in other Mayan languages, and facts about Ixil syntax, and the usage of the Agent Focus in Ixil discourse. I use Lambrecht’s (2001) framework of a cross linguistic typology of cleft construction to establish the function of the Agent Focus in Ixil. / text

This dissertation proposes an experimental study of focus in Spanish, investigating, in particular, if two types of focus – Contrastive focus and Non-contrastive focus – are syntactically and prosodically distinguished. The evidence that the conceptual distinction between the focus subtypes can be represented linguistically has been found in languages (Drubig 2003, É. Kiss 1998, Gundel & Fretheim 2001, Zubizarreta 1998 to name a few). As for Spanish, Zubizarreta (1998) argued that the two types of focus most noticeably differ syntactically. While Non-contrastive Focus should appear at utterance-final position, Contrastive Focus may appear in-situ. Nevertheless, not all the studies seem to accept Zubizarreta’s (1998) syntax-oriented distinction between the two focus types. A few studies suggest that not only Contrastive Focus but also Non-Contrastive Focus can indeed occur sentence-internally (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Kim & Avelino 2003, Toledo 1989). Inspired by a handful of studies and motivated by empirical data gathered for the pilot study, the current study sets out to investigate Zubizarreta’s (1998) syntax-oriented claim on the distinction between the focus subtypes. Focus in Spanish is known to be prosodically marked by its particular intonational contour- higher pitch and the early peak, and secondarily longer duration and/or higher intensity, compared to unfocused elements in a given utterance (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Domínguez 2004a & b, Face 2000, 2001, 2002b, Hualde 2003, 2005, Kim & Avelino 2003, de la Mota 1995, 1997, Navarro Tomás 1918, Nibert 2000, Quilis 1971, Sosa 1998, Toledo 1989, Zubizarreta 1998). We assume that the distinction between the two types of focus would also be made using the existing cues, as suggested by a handful of studies on focus types (Cabrera Abreu & García Lecumberri 2003, Kim & Avelino 2003, Zubizarreta, 1998). The findings of our experiments clearly indicate that Spanish speakers consistently use different phonetic and phonological cues such as duration and pitch in order to make a distinction between the two types of focus. These findings give clear evidence that the pragmatically defined notion of focus (Lambrecht 1994) is indeed further divided into two types in Castilian Spanish, somewhat similar to the distinction made in English (Selkirk 1984, 1995). / text

The Lovstrom site (DjLx-1) is a Late Precontact multicomponent site located in the Tiger Hills of southwestern Manitoba. Two occupation levels identified in Block E are separated by an approximate 400 year time span, the oldest identified as Blackduck at 800 BP and a later Vickers Focus group occupying the site around 400 BP. Excavations took place between 1986 and 1991 as part of the Brandon University archaeological field school. In addition to the information gained from the recovery of amounts of cultural material, later excavations were also opened in an effort to gain knowledge about the amount of site disturbance. The amount of material artifacts uncovered during test pitting necessitated a number of excavation blocks be opened. This thesis focuses on the faunal material recovered from Block E. Although a number of species were identified, bison represents the vast majority of faunal material. The faunal analysis was undertaken to determine the composition of the bison herd and seasonality. Due to the nature of the site and the fragmented faunal assemblage an in-depth analysis took place to identify any taphonomic forces that may have disturbed the archaeological record. This includes both cultural and natural forces that acted on the Block E assemblage. The occupant’s butchering practices are compared and contrasted with additional comparisons made to similar nearby archaeological sites, including the Blackduck Stott site and the Vickers Focus Jackson site.

The goal of this dissertation is to argue on the basis of the minimalist framework that the topichood of sentence topics and contrastive focus result from derivational and structural differences in the left periphery and to provide acquisition data from child language to support this claim, showing data from Korean, a free word-order and pro-drop language in which topics and contrastive foci are realized morphologically. In Korean, topic phrases merge in the left periphery and contrastive focus phrases undergo scrambling, one of the shared properties of free word-order languages. It is consistent in fixed word-order languages such as Italian and Hungarian and a free word-order language like Korean that topics merge and contrastive foci move to the left. Topics precede contrastive foci: topics merge in TopP, a higher functional projection than FocP, to which focus phrases move. In the process of language acquisition, the derivational and structural differences between topic phrases and contrastive focus phrases may have influences on the developmental order of grammar acquisition. In acquisition data from two-year-old Korean children, topics emerge earlier than contrastive foci, indicating that topic and contrastive focus are also acquisitionally different. This study is the first attempt to examine the structural differences and the influence on language acquisition of morphologically derived topic phrases and contrastive focus phrases in acquisition data from a free word-order and pro-drop language. This study shows the structural consistency of topic and contrastive focus between a free word-order language and fixed word-order languages. The syntactic and acquisitional distinction of topic merge and contrastive focus movement is compatible with the semantic and pragmatic approaches to topic and focus. This study provides evidence of the syntactic differences between topic and contrastive focus without dependence on phonetic features; therefore, this study is a base for drawing a map of the left periphery of human languages. / text

A primary goal of foreign language instruction today is to increase opportunities for authentic communication among students. One way to accomplish this is through synchronous computer-mediated classroom discussion (CMCD). While this electronic medium is highly interactive and beneficial for second language acquisition (SLA) on many levels, studies have noted that learner output in CMCD is often inaccurate. In order to heighten students' attention to features of the target language (TL), SLA research suggests integrating a focus on form (FonF) within meaning-based activities. In the CMCD literature, however, FonF has not been widely treated. The current study addresses this gap by documenting the linguistic and interactional features present in intermediate, university-level French students' synchronous discussions. Furthermore, students' perceptions of their general experience with CMCD are qualitatively examined.In this study, students participated in CMCD once a week, for 16 weeks. Discussion prompts encouraged them to use their French meaningfully to communicate with each other while paying attention to accuracy. To make form salient, students set pre-chat language goals; their transcripts were graded on both content and accuracy; they received whole-class and personalized feedback on their transcripts; and they corrected a percentage of their errors. Results show that balancing the concurrent pressures of form and content was challenging for the students. Likely determined by their proficiency level as well as the medium of CMCD itself, students produced mainly short and simple messages in the present tense; used an average range of vocabulary; and wrote with variable grammatical accuracy. As for being accountable for their language usage, students responded very well. Most importantly, focusing on form was not found to be incompatible with students' ability to engage in rich, meaningful, and enjoyable communication. While focusing on accuracy, students shared their opinions and aspects of their personal lives while remaining in the TL. Moreover, they used French for a range of social, strategic and interactional functions. Students also reported the overall experience as highly motivating and rewarding. These findings point to CMCD as a valuable means of increasing authentic classroom communication and indicate that attention to form need not be sacrificed in the process.

In this dissertation, I examine the marking of focus and givenness in Nte?kepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). The focus is, roughly, the answer to a wh-question, and is highlighted by the primary sentential accent in stress languages like English. This has been formalized as the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle. Given material is old information, and is de-accented in languages like English. Nte?kepmxcin is a stress language, but marks focus structurally. However, I argue that the structure has a prosodie motivation: the clause is restructured such that the focus is leftmost in the intonational phrase. It follows that Salish focus structures lack the special semantics that motivates the use of English structural focus (clefts). As a theoretical contribution, I show that the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle does not account for focus marking in all stress languages, nor does the "distress-given" generalization account for the marking of given information. This is because focus surfaces leftmost, while the nuclear stress position is rightmost. Instead of "stress-focus", I propose that alignment with prosodie phrase edges is the universally common thread in focus marking. This mechanism enables listeners to rapidly recover the location of the focus, by identifying coarse-grained phonological categories (p-phrases and i-phrases). In Thompson River Salish, the focus is associated with the leftmost p-phrase in the matrix intonational phrase. The analysis unifies the marking of focus across languages by claiming that focus is always marked prosodically, by alignment to a prosodie category. The study combines syntactic analysis of focus utterances with their phonetic realization and semantic characteristics. As such, this dissertation is a story about the interfaces. This research is based on a corpus of conversational data as well as single sentence elicitations, all of which are original data collected during fieldwork. The second contribution of this dissertation is thus methodological: I have developed various fieldwork techniques for collecting both spontaneous and scripted conversational discourses. The empirical contribution that results is a collection of conversational discourses, to add to the single speaker traditional texts already recorded for Nte?kepmxcin.

The MJCCA Weinstein Center for Adult Days Services provides social activities and medical services to older adults, including individuals with memory loss. Center administrators requested a program evaluation to explore attraction and retention of clients, beneficial effects of Center activities, and the current case management program. Regular members of the Center’s Traditional Group (n=14) and family caregivers of Memory Loss program attendees (n=10) participated in open-ended interviews in focus groups. Content analysis revealed that clients consider Center activities, staff, and social environment superior to the few other day care alternatives. The activities benefit clients primarily physically and emotionally. Potential areas of improvement include enhanced communication with caregivers and more engaging, mentally-stimulating activities personally significant to participants. Findings reveal that person-centered care is appropriate in the adult day service setting and may guide the Center in program modifications. The evaluation partially satisfies new rules in Georgia for licensure and quality assurance.