Rovotlif is a constructed language (conlang) made as a creative demonstration of linguistic concepts. The language's grammatical characteristics are influenced by Russian, German, English, and Mandarin. This document contains a description of the grammatical structure of the language, short translations of texts from English into Rovotlif, and a small lexicon of words and definitions for the language.

<p>Conversational code-switching is common among bilingual speakers, in fact, we consider this routine; however, the reasons for switching and the location of this mechanism in the brain remain largely unknown. There is much to be discovered about bilingual code-switching especially in relation to autobiographical memories shared between immigrants. This study investigates the two phenomena: code-switching and autobiographical memories. The research is based on the following major theories: 1) Schrauf (2009) who said that one’s “…particular personal memories are associated with one or the other of the bilingual’s languages” (p. 26), which he called the language-specificity effect; 2) Marian & Neisser (2000) who proposed that “…memories become more accessible when language at retrieval matches language at encoding…any increase in the similarity between the linguistic environments at encoding and at retrieval should facilitate recall” (p. 361); 3) Marian & Kaushanskaya (2005), who found that “…bilinguals are more likely to code-switch to the other language when the language of encoding does not match the language of retrieval” (p. 1483). The results of this study both supported and disproved the above mentioned research, which indicate that language alone may not be the only influence on autobiographical memory recall or code-switching in elderly bilinguals. It is my belief that both phenomena stem from a higher process that is involved with cognitive control and located in the cingulate gyrus, one part of the limbic system.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

It is difficult to understand why genocide continues to occur, even when the international community pledges never to let it happen in the future. Techniques such as moral disengagement and dehumanization have consistently resulted in genocide. These techniques can be greatly amplified through the careful use of language and labeling. The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles that language and labeling play in genocide. Social and psychological influences that use language will be investigated through the examination of the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide and the Rwandan genocide. These influences are many times unintentionally or unknowingly exercised and can have negative results for everyone involved. The use of language in the media is also examined, along with ways in which ordinary people can avoid susceptibility to language that could influence them to commit evil acts such as genocide.

This study investigates the creation of humor in the dialog of the television sit-com Seinfeld to gain a deeper understanding of humor techniques in a long format. By analyzing six episodes of the series, it is seen that the Incongruity Theory of Humor, violations of Grice’s maxims of the Cooperative Principle, and perspective clashes (such as miscommunications) are essential to the humor throughout each episode.

This mixed-method study investigated the correlation of sound symbolic associations with age and gender by analyzing data from a national survey of 292 American English speakers. Subjects used 10 semantic differential scales to rate six artificial brand names that targeted five phonemes. Subjects also described the potential products they imagined these artificial brand names to represent. Quantitative analysis alone provided insufficient evidence to conclude that age or gender affect sound symbolism in American English. While 26 out of 60 scales showed a monotonic shift among the means of the three age groups, only three were statistically significant. The evidence of differences between genders was similarly weak; only five scales out of 60 showed a statistically significant difference when comparing genders. Analysis of the qualitative data, however, suggested both monotonic generational shifts as well as generational blips in sound-symbolic associations. Of particular interest is the possible influence of pop culture, fashions, and fads, and society's shifting focus from broadcast to narrowcast media. The implications of this research are relevant for both theory (empirical evidence for iconicity in language) and application (e.g., devising brand names that communicate particular attributes to specific demographics).

These stories are markers of temporal planes, the physical and the emotional, the swift and the fell. They operate at two ends; they are written and so are finitely formed and they are read indefinitely and yet only exist when they are read again. As a writer, this is my means of extension, waiving at the future with my ghost in the voices of my characters. They are also my archive, preserving instances of personal observation in the description of the body, still and living, moving in scene. For accuracy, I've done my best to emulate their movement. The analogy might be of a puppeteer pretending she has strings or better, the sand castles she's made are first only etchings at the shore; their formations quickly washed away and begun again then built better inland. To push metaphor: the description of body and movement within these stories are one kind of mirror and the author is another. The simultaneity of the reader lies between both. Perhaps this is paradoxical: these stories are archival and yet emulate timeless human occasion. I've desired to push metaphor and yet keep clear. My place between clarity and complexity is yet to melt-down from its oasis and gather into something drinkable.

Do adult L2 English bilingual speakers have difficulty with cognate words whose meanings are distinct across their two languages? This study explored the extent to which variations in meaning in cross-language cognates affect translation performance in a translation task by L2 English (L1 Spanish) speakers who learned English as adults. A prep-phase experiment was conducted to test native English-speakers’ predicted completions of the study’s stimuli sentences, in order to choose the optimal stimuli for the primary experiment. The method for the primary experiment of this study consisted of a web-based translation task of 120 sentences from Spanish to English, while controlling for polysemy and frequency. The results showed that adult L2 learners of English did experience difficulty when translating cognates in sentences from their L1 to their L2. The interaction of the Spanish word’s polysemous nature, Spanish word frequency, English target frequency and English cognate frequency played a role in the participants’ performance.

The study of kana 仮名 development has only begun in the last fifteen years, with much scholarship focused upon discerning either the Heian origins of kana or such later developments as furigana 振り仮名 (phonetic guides) and spelling rules. However, these perspectives have largely overlooked a key moment in Japanese writing history: in 1900, the Meiji government standardized the kana, from hundreds of possible variant graphemes to the forty-six used today, one symbol per sound. From then on, what had commonly been known only as kana were divided into two groups: hiragana 平仮名, the standard set, and hentaigana 変体仮名, the set of all non-standard graphemes. This standardization represented a seismic shift in Japanese writing culture, affecting everything from education to aesthetics, and yet it occurred without any bureaucratic debate—or, it seems, any post-legislation public outcry. This study addresses the apparent incongruity by examining a variety of primary sources for evidence of a pre-Meiji acceptance of a standardized set of graphemes, before the official standardization in 1900. Arguing from this evidence, a convincing case is made that the kana made standard in 1900 had been historically recognized as distinct from all other variants, despite there being no demonstrable difference in their use in context. This project, by closely examining long-neglected sources, sheds new light on the issue of pre-modern Japanese script usage.

This thesis describes analysis of user web query behavior associated with Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Enterprise Search System (Hereafter, ORNL Intranet). The ORNL Intranet provides users a means to search all kinds of data stores for relevant business and research information using a single query. The Global Intranet Trends for 2010 Report suggests the biggest current obstacle for corporate intranets is “findability and Siloed content”. Intranets differ from internets in the way they create, control, and share content which can make it often difficult and sometimes impossible for users to find information. Stenmark (2006) first noted studies of corporate internal search behavior is lacking and so appealed for more published research on the subject. This study employs mature scientific internet web query transaction log analysis (TLA) to examine how corporate intranet users at ORNL search for information. The focus of the study is to better understand general search behaviors and to identify unique trends associated with query composition and vocabulary. The results are compared to published Intranet studies. A literature review suggests only a handful of intranet based web search studies exist and each focus largely on a single aspect of intranet search. This implies that the ORNL study is the first to comprehensively analyze a corporate intranet user web query corpus, providing results to the public. This study analyzes 65,000 user queries submitted to the ORNL intranet from September 17, 2007 through December 31, 2007. A granular relational data model first introduced by Wang, Berry, and Yang (2003) for Web query analysis was adopted and modified for data mining and analysis of the ORNL query corpus. The ORNL query corpus is characterized using Zipf Distributions, descriptive word statistics, and Mutual Information. User search vocabulary is analyzed using frequency distribution and probability statistics. The results showed that ORNL users searched for unique types of information. ORNL users are uncertain of how to best formulate queries and don’t use search interface tools to narrow search scope. Special domain language comprised 38% of the queries. The average results returned per query for ORNL were too high and no hits occurred 16.34%.

One of most prevalent issues surrounding English education internationally is the differentiation between Native English-Speaking Teachers (NESTs) and Non-native English-Speaking Teachers (NNESTs). What is sometimes termed the "Native speaker fallacy" is the notion that in order to be a proficient teacher of the English language one must either be a native speaker or possess native like fluency (Phillipson, 1992). This position is furthered by Hollidays Native Speakerism (Holliday, 2006) which suggests that within the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) there is an assumption that NESTs are better equipped to teach English language learners due to language proficiency and Western teaching methodology. Today, instructors who are native speakers of English are more sought after on the international market than their non-native English-speaking counterparts. NNESTs have less access to employment, fair wages and job security due to the perceived differences in language ability (Barry, 2011). The distinction between the two classes of teachers underscores the belief that NNESTs are often treated as second-class citizens (Braine, 1999). Subsequently, when employers and colleagues note the differences between English variety and dialect NNESTs' social and teacher identity in the classroom may be jeopardized (Varghese et al., 2005). The purpose of this qualitative, ethnographic case study is to explore the socio-historical lives of two NNESTs living in the Pacific Northwest. Specifically, this study is concerned with the way in which two NNESTs perceive their social and teacher identity in relation to being bilingual speakers teaching English. This study attempts to explore in a non-dichotomous fashion the manner in which these two actors describe and interpret their roles and positions as NNESTs.