University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. Vol. 2 consists of appendices. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-207).

As increasing number of organizations are using virtual teams, communication scholars have started to pay more attention to these relatively new forms of work. Past studies explored interpersonal (i.e., trust, attraction) and group dynamics (i.e., conformity, subgrouping) in virtual teams. Despite the documented effects of interpersonal behaviors and social categories on virtual group dynamics, there is a substantial gap in how these two factors influence language use in virtual teams. To shed light on this neglected area of research, this dissertation examined how teammates’ interpersonal behaviors and social categories affected language use in virtual team collaborations. 164 participants interacted in four-person teams using a synchronous chat program. The age of participants ranged from 18 to 24. 58% of participants were female and 42% were male. Participants used Windows Live Messenger to complete Straus & McGrath’s (1994) decision making task. Upon completing the task, participants filled out social attraction and social identification scales to be used for manipulation checks. Decision making sessions for each group were saved and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Program (LIWC) was used to examine language use. Linguistic style accommodation was measured using language style matching (LSM) metric. LSM measured the degree to which group members used similar language patterns. It was calculated by averaging the absolute difference scores for nine function word categories generated by LIWC. Similarly, linguistic markers such as word counts, negations, assents, and pronouns were acquired through LIWC output. The results suggested that having a dissenting member in the group was associated with higher linguistic style accommodation compared to having an assenting member. This result contradicted with the assumptions of communication accommodation theory (Giles, Mulac, Bradac, & Johnson, 1987), yet provided evidence for the validity of minority influence theory (Moscovici, Lage, & Naffrechoux, 1969) in virtual teams. Unexpectedly, there was no significant effect of social categories on linguistic style accommodation. The results also showed that negative behaviors were strongly associated with increased word counts, negations and the second person singular pronouns, whereas positive behaviors were associated with increased use of assents, tentative language, first person plural and singular pronouns. / text

This dissertation presents studies of a socially highly relevant text category, local radio broadcasts. The language of news programmes in particular from three local radio stations - Radio Gotland, Radio Väs­terbotten and Radio Östergötland - has been studied in the light of the intentions behind the introduction of local radio, and the ambitions expressed by the radio people involved. Different factors for analysis and description of local radio language are presented and used in an empirical study of broadcasts from the three stations. Both regional and national variations and differences are taken into consideration. Language and context are analyzed on separate levels: complete news texts, sentences and clauses, words and phonemes. The methods vary from a pragmatic text-typology analysis to a syntactic study based on modern spoken language research. Particular consideration is given to the aspect of local radio language that establishes contact with listeners - greetings, forms of address, and studio talk between items. A receiver-oriented perspective is used to interpret the results - the concept communicative distance, that is to say the distance between the listener and the medium that she/he feels there is on the basis of the language used in the programmes. A demonstrable pattern has been found in the relations between extra- and intra-linguistic factors and what in this study is termed the communicative distance. Compared with that of national radio, the commuicative distance of local radio language tends to be somewhat less. Of the three local radio stations Radio Gotland tends to have the least and Radio Västerbotten the greatest. The book concludes with three perspectives on further research. / digitalisering@umu

This thesis has presented a comparative study of English and Spanish determiners. The comparison has been made at a surface level of the determiner systems of the two languages and also at a deep structure level. The reason of this comparison has been to find out how the two languages differ or have points of similarities. The points of difference have been taken into consideration to see how these differences between the two languages affect errors in writing compositions by Spanish-speaking students learning English.Some ideas have been drawn up of how constrastive analysis could help in teaching or learning a language.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2002. / Also available online. Online version lacks appendices B-H.

Research. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineering, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-170).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. Vol. 2 consists of appendices. Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-207). Also issued in print.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:30:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2013-05-24Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T21:01:10Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 fortilli_sc_dr_sjrp.pdf: 545611 bytes, checksum: 1a74cca30fd2179453ed97dccddb5dad (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Neste trabalho, analisam-se orações subjetivas encaixadas em matriz adjetival no português brasileiro. Por meio da observação de que a cópula que costuma anteceder alguns encaixadores pode não estar expressa, chegamos à ideia de que tais construções vêm passando por mudanças linguísticas tanto na fala como na escrita. À ausência de cópula na oração matriz soma-se, em alguns casos, um novo comportamento do adjetivo, que passa a ter a função de modificador, estágio alcançado quando há a perda do complementizador que une a oração principal à subjetiva. Partimos da hipótese de que, quando todas essas transformações ocorrem, o complexo oracional já se tornou uma sentença simples modificada por um parentético epistêmico, o que nos parece indicativo de dois processos específicos de mudança linguística: a Gramaticalização do adjetivo encaixador e a Dessentencialização da oração matriz. Ainda sobre o adjetivo, interessa-nos investigar seu papel semântico, partindo da observação de que aqueles que se sujeitam às transformações estão ligados a formas específicas de avaliação por parte do falante. A fim de contemplar as modalidades falada e escrita do português brasileiro, analisamos entrevistas do banco de dados Iboruna, de responsabilidade do Projeto ALIP (Amostra Linguística do Interior Paulista), e textos da versão on line do caderno Ilustrada do jornal Folha de São Paulo. Atentos ao fato de que nosso trabalho envolve um possível processo de mudança em curso, também observamos o comportamento dessas construções em outras fases da língua portuguesa, tarefa que se cumpriu pela análise de dados provenientes de textos escritos dos séculos XVIII, XIX e XX. Os resultados mostram que os processos de mudança ocorrem principalmente com construções que envolvem adjetivos epistêmicos, que sempre... / In this paper, we analyze constructions with subjective clauses in Brazilian Portuguese. Through observation that copulation which usually precedes some matrix adjectives predicates can not be expressed, we come to the idea that such constructions have undergone changes language both in speech and in writing. Besides the absence of copula verb, in some cases, there is a new behavior of the adjective, which is replaced by the modifier role, stage reached when there is loss of the complementizer that unites subjective clause to the main clause. Our hypothesis is that when all these changes occur, the complex clausal already become a simple sentence modified by a parenthetical epistemic, which seems indicative of two specific processes of linguistic change: the Grammaticalization of the adjective and the matrix predicate Dessentencialization. On the adjective, we are interested in investigating their semantic role, based on the observation that those who are subjected to transformations are linked to specific forms of evaluation by the speaker. In order to address the modalities of spoken and written Portuguese Brazilian, analyzed interviews database Iboruna, the responsibility of the Project ALIP (Sample Language of Interior Paulista), and texts of the online version of newspaper Folha de São Paulo. Our work involves a possible process of change, we also observed the behavior of these constructions in other phases of the Portuguese language, a task that is accomplished by analyzing data from written texts from XVIII, XIX and XX centuries. The results show that the processes of change occur mainly with constructions involving epistemic adjectives that always bind the embedded clauses with verb in finite form, more likely to become absolute sentences. When already grammaticalized, the modifier can occur at any... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)