Taking into consideration some gaps observed in SLA research noticing, recasts, input enhancement (IE), and in CALL/CMC research, a study was conducted among 12 advanced FL Spanish learners to assess whether and how, by communicating with a Spanish native speaker in 5 chat-room sessions, their language competence would develop in the following areas: 1) communication strategies; 2) communicative acts; and 3) grammatical knowledge of verb tense-aspect-mood (TAM) assignation. Subjects were assigned to a specific feedback condition/group (A: +recast, -enhancement; B: +recast, +enhancement; and C: no feedback) under which their TAM errors were treated in the sessions. Few research studies have concentrated on the effectiveness of recasts for grammatical acquisition; rather, they tend to focus on conversational aspects (e.g. Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Ohta, 2000) while the scarce grammar-based recast research has yielded positive results (e.g. Doughty & Varela, 1998; Ishida, 2004; Mackey & Philp, 1998). On the other hand, IE, typically an enhancement of the perceptual salience of input in applying the input flooding technique (Francis, 2003), has yielded mixed results, but some studies have found a facilitative effect for IE (Doughty, 1991; Francis, 2003; Jourdenais et al., 1995; Shook, 1994). Because of their relatively ineffective, rather implicit nature when used in isolation, in this study recasts were combined with IE assuming that IE a tool not traditionally used in SLA as an additional measure of feedback might strengthen the recast and render it more effective for uptake of the linguistic forms. Based on the properties of the resulting combined feedback (group B: enhanced recast), it was anticipated that enhanced recasts would be a more powerful tool, and, as a result, the following sequence of gain in grammatical knowledge would be found: group B (enhanced) > group A (non-enhanced) > group C (no feedback). The findings reveal that groups B and C had the highest overall gains in verb TMA assignation, and group B was superior in most grammatical contexts. As for communication strategy and communicative act use, the sequence of gain was: A > B > group C.

Linguistic classification is a scientific methodology for categorizing the languages of the world. However, the tools and methods of linguistic classification have been used to various degrees by political entities to further nationalistic agendas. This thesis assesses the role of linguistic classification in nationality and politics, and addresses the disjunct between true linguistic classification, based on genealogical, areal, and typological features, and language designation, based on political and nationalistic motives. This thesis uses the Romanian language as a vehicle for illustrating both linguistic classification methods as well as how these methods have been manipulated for non-linguistic reasons both internally by Romanian nationalists and externally by the Soviet Union in Moldova. The Romanian language is analyzed in terms of three major classification methods: genealogical, areal, and typological. The thesis supports the idea that linguistic classification, a scientific practice, cannot be fully reconciled with language designation, a practice which essentially serves non-scientific purposes, namely to confirm or deny political and cultural relationships between different demographic groups. While some of the methods of linguistic classification are used in language designation, it must remain independent of real-world affairs in order to maintain its own principles.

Presented within this thesis, I have analyzed a particular TV broadcast news discourse called Korean Hurricane Media Discourse (KHMD), which was presented online from YTN, a Korean cable TV news station. The data presents the topic of the Korean refugees who were forced to evacuate to Baton Rouge from New Orleans, after facing the destructions of Hurricane Katrina on August 2005. The methods are Ron Scollons TV news frames (1998), van Dijks superstructure (1988a and 1988b) and macrostructure (1980), Allan Bells news structure (1991), Dell Hymess SPEAKING model (1974), and Erving Goffmans frameworks (1986). Since KHMD is a spoken, plannable TV news discourse along with written text presented on the Internet, chapter two discusses the relationships between spoken and written discourse, and between planned and unplanned discourse. In addition, the relationship between discourse and culture is manifested because of Korean cultural concepts in the data. Chapter three discusses media culture in Korea and the relationship between media and discourse. KHMD is analyzed by Scollons three frames. Chapter four shows a comparison of Bells with van Dijks news schema and macro-analysis in translation. KHMD is contextualized in terms of Dell Hymess SPEAKING model in chapter five. Finally, chapter six demonstrates that Goffmans frame analysis helps to understand particular events. As a result, he provides two frameworks. Hurricane Katrina can be interpreted as a natural framework; and can also be represented as a social (cultural) framework, otherwise know as Dong-po-ae (Brotherhood), a topic presented by KHMD.

This thesis focuses on the role of the Basque language (Euskera or Euskara) in the national identity of the Basque people. I looked at the history of Basque education, from the beginnings of the ikastola movement of the early 20th century to the current bilingual education system. I examined the use of Euskara in education from the primary school level to the university level in the Basque Autonomous Community. This research involved looking at the BAC governments detailed studies on students in the various linguistic models of education in the BAC. Other areas I discuss in this paper are the use of Euskera in media, government, commerce, and social settings. The majority of my research focused on the role of language in the attitudes of Basque musicians; I conducted this research via the social networking site MySpace.com. I collected data from Basque rock bands MySpace profiles and asked members of those bands to respond to questionnaires concerning their language and education. Based on the research done by the BAC government regarding Basque education and my own research on Basque musicians, I concluded that for Basque nationalism to continue, Basque-language education must continue.

Through a research approach of emergence applied to a corpus of academic letures, I developed a theory to explicate the referents of a class of frequently used pronouns (I, you, and we), which I term the Participatory Pronouns. My theory of the Positioning of Participatory Pronouns resolves the main practical concern of the research participants, which is to place their utterances in contexts for authoritative, intellectually sound, and socially relevant interpretation. At the theoretical level, my theory is a specification of Relevance Theory and resolves disparate previous analyses of pronouns. Overall, my work provides a new paradigm for how referents are retrieved, the language function of these referents, the discourse strategies of the speakers, and what these reveal about academic lectures. Through analysis of seven thousand pronouns from twenty-three university-level, introductory science lectures, my findings emerged from the data as the best explanation for the usage of the participatory pronouns I, we, and you. These pronouns occur frequently in the academic lecture and help to create social and spatial contexts for interpretation. Member-checking interviews and additional tests of validity and reliability verified the limits and generalizability of my findings. The academic lecture is a principal locus of engagement between students and professors. The main concern of the professors in their lecture is how to position their speech in contexts for interpretation so that their message is intellectually sound, socially relevant, and authoritative. My concept of participant positioning analyzes the way speakers and listeners place speech in a social and physical context for interpretation. The Positioning of Participatory Pronouns theory explains the associated language functions of juggling, categorical referents, economy, and interchangeability while also accounting for the discourse strategies of extending, exampling, and staturing. Here I explicate the conditions for the occurrence of economy, categorical referents, and interchangeability, which have been noted but not resolved in previous research. My research goes beyond all extant explanations of pronominal reference offering the concept of referent juggling, accounting for switching between several referents designated by the same pronominal form, as well as discourse strategies that are essential to academia.

This study seeks to uncover the characteristics of foreign language instructors discourse styles implemented in the classroom when teaching students the target language. Foreign language classrooms are unique to academia because the teachers of the language, depending on whether they are native or non-native speakers of the target language, learned it in different environments and for distinct purposes. Many of the previous studies examining the effect a teachers ability in the target language will have on his/her instruction have focused on native and non-native speakers teaching styles and/or methodologies. Rather than the effect on the teachers style, the central question in this dissertation is how an instructors native or non-native ability will affect his/her pedagogical discourse when presenting the target language to students. Through the analysis of data collected from university classrooms with native and non-native instructors, three salient variances in the instructors teaching discourse are revealed: the effect the L1 of the students has in presenting the L2, the pronouns used to address students and refer to speakers of the target language and the students native language, and the positioning and quantity of code-switching implemented in the classes. Due to the non-native instructors sharing the same L1 as their students, they have an advantage of identifying the learning process of their students. Furthermore, non-native instructors build solidarity with their students by consistently using the first person plural pronoun when comparing the forms and cultures of their and the students L1 to the forms and cultures of the target language. Code-switching in the classroom room is unique and different from that which is heard in speech communities. Contributing to previous literature on classroom code-switching, the present study reveals two significant motivations behind the instructors code-switching: a pedagogical tool and topic expansion. From the results revealed in this study, the non-native speakers are more pedagogically prepared to recognize their students progress in the acquisition of the target language and to answer questions their students have about the target language. These results further aid in the preparation of language teachers in order to improve the overall outcome of future language students.

This study is an examination of a corpus of computer mediated Korean discourse (i.e., e-mail), based on a folk-cultural category, nunchi. Nunchi is actively involved in linguistic feature use in terms of [+age] and [+distance] of human relationships. Many Koreans think that the world has an inherent hierarchy according to age. This idea has been reflected through nunchi, a culture-specific system for maintaining harmonious social relationships especially between [+age] and [age] people. Nunchi has a function of foresight, in that it is part of the way that people read the situations and the faces of addressers and addressees. Like oral and written language, Korean e-mail discourse shows that when a younger writer communicates with an older recipient, s/he perceives nunchi and then uses grammatical and lexical forms to communicate deference. The experiment was based on one occasion and three different social relationships, and between one sender and three different receivers. Fifteen Korean participants were asked to send three e-mails: to a senior professor, an equal aged close friend, and a younger aged close friend. Results of the experiment in e-mail language use show that there is a normative honorific system between [+age] and [age]. However, the results of the experiment did not completely overlap with the findings in the application, which involved real-life e-mail data. The application shows that the normative honorific system can be modified by the level of [+distance] relationship between the addresser and the addressee. Thus, if a younger addresser does not perceive the pressure of nunchi in a close relationship with an older recipient, the younger addresser does not change his or her language forms honorifically. Therefore, the results of this study argue that Koreans vary their Korean language use in systematic but not always traditional ways.

The areas of Pragmatics and Second Language Acquisition have existed separately in the field of Linguistics for some time. Their connection, however, has more recently seen a great deal of study by researchers like Scarcella and Brunak (1981), Rintell (1981), Brown and Levinson (1987), Koike (1992, 1996), Saito, Beecken (1997), Félix-Brasdefer (2003, 2006) and Huth (2006). A common thread in these studies is the effect of language transfer or cross-linguistic influence that the first language has while learners are attempting to acquire the pragmatic and politeness principles that are central to the target language and culture. One speech act that is particularly of interest to researchers is compliment responses because they require a great deal of pragmatic insight by the speaker and therefore are often rich with data. The present study attempts to bring together the research that has been done on this speech act and clarify it using data from American learners of Spanish in a foreign language classroom at the university level. Although collecting data from learners is not a new concept, this cross-sectional study of learners at three (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) stages of learning will help to fill a void in the research that exists on the role of language transfer in pragmatic acquisition, as well as the correlation between grammatical competence and pragmatic competence. Results from a compliment response survey administered to American native English-speaking learners of Spanish at a large American university from varying levels will be analyzed and compared to control data from native English and Spanish speakers. This research will illustrate that in the second language classroom, pragmatic accuracy in the second language often does not simply emerge with grammatical instruction. Instead, these data will show that explicit instruction might be a better tool for pragmatic accuracy in compliment responses. Results will indicate that with more Spanish instruction, students will be able to produce more grammatically correct compliment responses, but there will be little variation in their pragmatic content through the levels. These results have pedagogical implications since pragmatic competence largely remains an overlooked aspect of second language acquisition in the language classroom.

Modality is traditionally defined as the expression of possibility or necessity. In English, modality is expressed by the modal auxiliaries such as can, would, should, or might; adjectives and adverbs such as possible, necessary, maybe, and absolutely; or phrasal verbs such as going to or have to. Theory of Mind (ToM) is broadly defined as the ability to attribute thoughts and beliefs to other people. ToM is usually expressed using propositional attitude verbs such as think as in Mary thinks that it will rain. Hegarty (2006, 2010) proposes that propositional attitude verbs are covertly modalized and can be analyzed using the same apparatus as modals. If this theory is correct, then attitude ascriptions that are used to express ToM should be acquired by children after the child has a command of modality. Previous research shows that modality emerges in children as young as two years of age (Choi, 1999), but that children do not reach adult proficiency until around twelve years of age (Coates, 1987). Similarly, ToM begins to emerge when children can pass the standard false belief task near their fourth birthday (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985), but children lack the necessary interpretation of the thoughts and beliefs of other people until they are approximately twelve years old (Lalonde & Chandler, 2002). This study evaluates the acquisition of both modality and ToM in eighty-six first, third, and fifth graders, using elicitation tasks for modality and question-answer tasks to test for higher-order ToM. The data was then analyzed indicating the approximate age of the acquisition of different types of modality such as epistemic (both strong and weak), alethic, priority, and dynamic. These results were then compared to those of the ToM tasks which indicate the age at which first, second, third, and fourth order ToM are acquired. The data suggests that modality and ToM are interdependent. Based on the results, a strong sense of modality emerges before the appropriate use of expressions of the second-order ToM, and third and fourth order ToM are mastered before the more difficult expressions of modality.

Abstract The main purpose of this thesis is to study the aspectual complements of the aspectualizers begin and start. Aspectualizers are verbs that give aspectual readings to the sentence. I started with a summary of Freeds (1978) analysis. In this summary, semantic differences among seven aspectualizers that take to V and V-ing complements were explained. The semantic distinction between to V and V-ing was also discussed. Following the summary, a brief research on aspectual complements was conducted. Based on Freeds analysis, I first examined the difference in meaning and in frequency of occurrence between the to V and the V-ing complement of the two aspectualizers. My research revealed some interesting problems that Freed failed to address. These problems blur the difference between the to V and the V-ing complement of begin and start that Freed claims. Through the research, however, I failed to pinpoint the significant difference, too. More research on this issue should be done in the future.