Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1973. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-154). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, School of English and Linguisitics, 1984. / Bibliography: leaves 443-447.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

<p> Second language (L2) learners are usually given a limited amount of exposure to pragmatic instruction even though researchers have advocated the importance of teaching pragmatics in the classroom (Alc&oacute;n-Soler, 2008; Bardovi-Harlig, 1990; Cohen, 1996). One area that is discussed among researchers is learners&rsquo; proficiency and its effect on acquiring pragmatic competence. On one hand, researchers argue that learners need to have a high level of linguistic competence or proficiency in order to produce complex linguistic pragmatic functions. Researchers such as Codina-Espurz (2008) believe that there needs to be &ldquo;a certain degree of linguistic competence&rdquo; (p. 229) in order to gain pragmatic competence. In other words, lower L2 level learners may not find it beneficial to receive instruction since they lack the vocabulary to produce appropriate pragmatic responses. However, researchers have found that even having a high level of linguistic competence does not mean gaining complete native-like pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig &amp; Hartford, 1990; Hill, 1997). On the other hand, researchers suggest that pedagogical intervention even at the beginning level is beneficial (Tateyama et al., 1997; Wildner-Bassett, 1994). </p><p> This study involves teaching pragmatic requests to adult English second language (ESL) learners of beginner and advanced intact classes at a non-profit organization called Meet Each Need with Dignity (MEND) in Pacoima, California. The study was of mixed methods, and data were collected using pre and posttests that included a written and oral role-play portion called a Discourse Completion Test (DCT), a Multiple-Choice assessment (MC), and a Background Questionnaire (BQ). Additionally, an interview and a delayed posttest were given three months later to one learner from each level to study the effect instruction had on their request development. Furthermore, this study wanted to find if pragmatic instruction had an effect on acquiring and producing appropriate responses to different request situations. </p><p> The results showed that learners from both levels improved after explicit pragmatic instruction and developed different types of request expressions and modification items after intervention. Learners in both levels were able to move toward more native-like production by increasing the amount of conventional expressions used; however, the advanced learners were able to use a wider variety of expressions and modifiers. Overall, the results showed that instruction affected learners&rsquo; awareness and ability to produce pragmatically appropriate responses in different sociopragmatic situations beneficially.</p>

<p> English prosody works as a structural and semantic glue that establishes relationships among words and phrases within a sentence, and among sentences within a larger discourse. This dissertation hypothesizes and demonstrates an association between acoustic measurements of English prosody and holistic measures of English proficiency. To test this hypothesis, acoustic data was used from 10 examinees each of low, medium, and high oral English proficiency groups of L1 Chinese speakers who took Purdue&rsquo;s Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT). Prosodic measurements of duration, F0, and intensity were gathered from adjacent function and content words in the OEPT audio data and compared with holistic OEPT scores. An ordered logistic regression found a significant difference (p = 2.00^e-16) among the three groups for how groups used durational differences between adjacent function and content words. Parallels of mental mapping of information are proposed between acoustic treatment of function and content words and the suppression and enhancement mechanisms of Gernsbacher&rsquo;s (1997a) Structure Building Framework.</p><p>

<p> This thesis presents findings from a yearlong study of a classroom of adult immigrants studying English as a Second Language (ESL) in the U.S., who collaboratively created and performed plays based on their life experiences. This research is rooted in poststructuralist theories of identity in second language learning (e.g., Norton, 2000; 2013), a view of language pedagogy as a form of liberation (Freire, 1970), and the notion that theater can be used by non-actors to critically engage with issues of relevance to the community (Boal, 1979). The teacher-researcher of the class used ethnographic investigation informed by autoethnography and action research to examine: 1) how students perceived theater as affecting their language development, and 2) how individual students&rsquo; identity development was affected by participation in the class. Data included interviews, field notes, audiovisual recordings, artifacts, and journal entries. Relevant literature in the fields of immigration, second language acquisition, and drama in language teaching is reviewed and discussed. The process of engaging students in playwriting and performing is detailed in the findings section along with a discussion of the nature of theater in the second language classroom. The data analysis exhibits that creating a play had many positive effects on students&rsquo; affective dimensions, second language development, classroom dynamics, and investment in the course, as well as some negative effects including anxiety amongst students at the prospect of performing in English and instances of interpersonal tensions. Classroom implications of the study include the recommendation that teachers frame theater explicitly in a positive light and make expectations of students clear from the beginning of the course.</p>

Since Chomsky & Halle (1968), English stress preservation – oríginal -> orìginálity, óbvious -> óbviousness – has been important in generative discussions of morphophonological interaction. This thesis carries out empirical investigations into English stress preservation, and uses their results to argue for a particular version of Optimality Theory: Stratal Optimality Theory (‘Stratal OT’) (Kiparsky, 1998a, 2000, 2003a; Bermúdez-Otero, 1999, 2003, in preparation). In particular, the version of Stratal OT proposed in Bermúdez-Otero (in preparation) and Bermúdez-Otero and McMahon (2006) is supported. The empirical investigations focus upon the type of preservation where preserved stress is subordinated in the preserving word (‘weak preservation’): e.g. oríginal -> orìginálity; àntícipate -> antìcipátion. Evidence for the existence of weak preservation is presented. However, it is also shown that weak preservation is not consistently successful, but that it is, rather, probabilistically dependent upon word frequency. This result is expected in light of work like Hay (2003), where it is proposed that word frequency affects the strength of relationships between words: stress preservation is an indicator of such a relationship. Stratal OT can handle the existence of English stress preservation: by incorporating the cyclic interaction between morphological and phonological modules proposed in Lexical Phonology and Morphology (‘LPM’), Stratal OT has the intrinsic serialism which is necessary to predict a phenomenon like English stress preservation. It is shown that the same cannot be said for those of models of OT which attempt to handle preservation while avoiding such serialism, notably, Benua (1997). Bermúdez-Otero’s (in preparation) proposal of ‘fake cyclicity’ for the first stratum in Stratal OT can capture weak preservation’s probabilistic dependence upon word frequency. Fake cyclicity rejects the cycle which has previously been proposed to handle weak stress preservation, in LPM and elsewhere; instead, fake cyclicity proposes that weak preservation is a result of blocking among stored lexical entries. Blocking is independently established as a psycholinguistic phenomenon that is probabilistically dependent upon word frequency; in contrast, the cycle is not a probabilistic mechanism, and so can only handle instances of stress preservation failure by stipulation.