The object of study of this thesis is the linguistic input in textbooks of Italian as a foreign language (FL). The intent is to study whether the linguistic changes, observed in contemporary Italian, have become part of the Italian offered as input to the learners. To identify the variety of language presented in the textbooks, some features of contemporary linguistic changes were chosen as verifiable indicators. These features, listed by Sabatini (1985: 155) as a basic part of "italiano dell’uso medio", and by Berruto (1987: 62) as part of "neostandard", are not occasional changes but are features that are gradually expanding and stabilizing into Italian standard (Sobrero 2005). A corpus consisting of 38 Italian textbooks published in Sweden and 8 in Italy in the years 2000-2012 were used to verify the manifestation of these features. The results show that the presence of neostandard features in the textbooks of Italian FL is conditioned, at first, by the rate of acceptance of those features by the linguistic norm. Thus, features that are nowadays commonly considered as normative have a high number of occurrences in the corpus. This is the case concerning lui, lei, loro as subject pronouns, the use of gli instead of loro, the use of the present tense for the future and the use of temporal che. On the other hand, features that are not considered as normative have no or very few occurrences. This is the case with gli instead of le and the use of imperfetto ipotetico. Secondly, the presence of the neostandard features in textbooks is conditioned by the instructive function of the textbooks, which shapes the typology of input introduced. Thus, occurrences of features such as cleft clauses and dislocations are mainly presented in authentic texts, oral texts, or introduced explicitly, but are rare or absent in textbooks characterized by simplified language.

<p> Researchers have explored immigrant identity in various contexts, but few studies have examined identity in low-income immigrant women entrepreneurs. To address this research gap, I conducted in-depth interviews with eight low-income Latino immigrants who were starting their own businesses and receiving support through a local microenterprise development program (MDP). The study explored how participants&rsquo; microenterprise efforts affected their identities and their investments in learning English. </p><p> The research found that entrepreneurship promoted positive identity construction by providing opportunities for participants to develop personal and cultural pride, strengthened parental roles, and interdependence with the community. These benefits helped participants decrease family stress and increase optimism for the future, regardless of the microenterprises&rsquo; financial success. Participants reported that their families were healthier and their children were doing better in school, suggesting a broad impact beyond the business owner. This finding indicates that MDPs and other social service programs should have explicit goals related to increasing participants&rsquo; symbolic resources. In the language-learning realm, this study introduced the construct <i> "relationship with English,"</i> extending Norton&rsquo;s (2000) notion of investment in language learning. The <i>relationship</i> construct encompasses the situated nature of immigrants&rsquo; English use, investment in learning, and feelings about using English. The businesses helped most participants improve their relationship with English by providing motivation and informal learning opportunities. The non-English speaking participants improved their relationship with English by finding ways to <i>use</i> English even without working on their ability to speak. This finding suggests that social service agencies, ESL programs, and employers should broaden their view of immigrants&rsquo; capabilities to use English and to invest creatively in their own learning. Another significant finding was that participants demonstrated signs of internalized racism, which can make it hard for immigrants to see their own strengths. New research could help MDPs and other social service providers address internalized racism and decrease its negative impact on identity construction. Looking ahead, long-term studies of MDP participants could help optimize program design, extend learnings to other types of programs, and help providers, policymakers, and funders allocate resources for maximum effect.</p>

<p> This qualitative phenomenological study explored the research question: What is the lived experience of hearing adults of Deaf parents who acted as language and cultural conduits for their parents during their formative years? Interviews captured recollections of 12 hearing adults, of culturally Deaf parents, where American Sign Language was the primary language in their home of origin, and who experienced interpreting for their parent(s). Recollections of lived experiences and perceptions of influence on personal development served as the research data. Open-ended questions stimulated self-directed responses of interviewee perceptions of desirable and challenging experiences. Interview data examined through Moustakas&rsquo; phenomenological analysis schema, provided a sense of the whole, ascertained meaningful units for psychological concept application, captured distinct descriptions, and composite essence of findings. Giorgi&rsquo;s three-stage analysis via bracketing, description, and essence articulation through the use of intentional journaling, secondary researcher scrutiny/agreement, along with manual and electronic analysis, supported objectivity. Nuance appreciation emerged using Bronfenbrenner&rsquo;s bio-ecological Process-Person-Context-Time model. Composite themes included: being a Child of Deaf Adults (Coda) is a privilege; parental interpreting expectations/preferences were influenced by era, sibling chronology, gender, personality, fluency, and technology; language brokering dynamics beyond the child&rsquo;s level of comfort or understanding; transient resistance to signing during one&rsquo;s tween/teen years; influence on one&rsquo;s own parenting style; personal identity development within the Deaf and Hearing cultural milieu; pride and appreciation for their parents&rsquo; achievements; and overt certainty that personal career choices directly stemmed from being a Coda.</p>

The Google Books corpus contains millions of books in a variety of languages. Due to this incredible volume and its free availability, it is a treasure trove that has inspired a plethora of linguistic research. It is tempting to treat frequency trends from Google Books data sets as indicators for the true popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw novel conclusions about the evolution of public perception of a given topic. However, sampling published works by availability and ease of digitization leads to several important effects, which have typically been overlooked in previous studies. One of these is the ability of a single prolific author to noticeably insert new phrases into a language. A greater effect arises from scientific texts, which have become increasingly prolific in the last several decades and are heavily sampled in the corpus. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations. We highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions to the statistical divergence of English data sets between decades in the period 1800--2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts, in clear contrast to the first version of the fiction data set and both unfiltered English data sets. We critique a method used by authors of an earlier work to determine the birth and death rates of words in a given linguistic data set. While intriguing, the method in question appears to produce an artificial surge in the death rate at the end of the observed period of time. In order to avoid boundary effects in our own analysis of asymmetries in language dynamics, we observe the volume of word flux across various relative frequency thresholds (in both directions) for the second English Fiction data set. We then use the contributions of the words crossing these thresholds to the Jensen-Shannon divergence between consecutive decades to resolve major factors driving the flux. Having established careful information-theoretic techniques to resolve important features in the evolution of the data set, we validate and refine our methods by analyzing the effects of major exogenous factors, specifically wars. This approach leads to a uniquely comprehensive set of methods for harnessing the Google Books corpus and exploring socio-cultural and linguistic evolution.

This thesis is concerned with the relation between the notion of national language and identity, in particular the manner in which a shared sense of national belonging is expressed and reproduced through the display of public attitudes towards foreign loanwords in society. Employing the case study of contemporary Japan, this research seeks to uncover the process by which a national language is conceived of as a symbol of national identity that requires the exclusion of certain loanwords from the perceptual framework of this national language. To this end, contemporary Japanese discourse on language has been scrutinised, drawing on nationwide newspaper entries published between 1991 and 2010 on the subject of foreign loanwords known as 'gairaigo' in Japanese. Through this analysis, the thesis argues that the fierce debate on the use of loanwords can be understood as a particular manifestation of the ongoing (re-)negotiation of Japanese national identity. On the whole, criticism and praise of the use of loanwords are found to be grounded upon a desire to establish specific understandings of Japaneseness in reference to the otherness symbolised by loanwords. Both parties in the debate are, therefore, highly reliant upon notions of national consciousness, challenging the common view that debates over the use of foreignisms are merely that of an opposition between nationalists who argue for the purity of language and internationalists who argue against such normative boundaries in language. In this context, it is argued that loanwords represent a foreignness, or otherness, felt within a society that constructs an 'internal other', or 'outside within', to a Japanese 'self', the identity of which is neither autonomous nor clearly delineated.

No description available.

<p> Although Kreyol is the language spoken and understood by the majority of Haitians, French is the language used as the medium for instruction. The use of a foreign language as a means for students to acquire literacy is a practice that has led to an ineffective educational system in Haiti. The aim of the quasi-experimental research study is to study the effects of using Kreyol versus French as the instructional method in math and science classes. Participants were selected from a target population of 246 girls enrolled at Institution X, a private school in the Ouest Department. Students from this institution are part of the 29% of people who attend secondary schools in Haiti. The 139 students that were part of the sample were randomly divided into two groups per class (standard and Kreyol condition) and were given a pre-test followed by a lesson then a post-test. Students in the standard group were taught in French and those in experimental group in Kreyol. Data gathered from the intervention were analyzed and results indicated that pre-test scores of French condition and Kreyol condition groups were normally distributed. When ANCOVA was used as one of the data analysis tools, because it French conditions for pre-test values and allows for observation of post-test scores, results yielded confirmed a significant difference between the French condition and Kreyol condition groups. The results from this quasi-experimental study provided data that aligned with the literature review and demonstrated that there was in fact a significant difference in performance when Kreyol was used as a medium for instruction instead of French. The results further provide statistical data confirming the important role that Kreyol should play in the improvement of the Haitian education system.</p><p>

This dissertation proposes a general methodological framework for the application of computational text analysis to the study of long duration material processes of transformation, beyond their traditional application to the study of discourse and rhetorical action. Over a thin theory of the linguistic nature of social facts, the proposed methodology revolves around the compilation of term co-occurrence matrices and their projection into different representations of an hypothetical semantic space. These representations offer solutions to two problems inherent to social scientific research: that of "mapping" features in a given representation to theoretical entities and that of "alignment" of the features seen in models built from different sources in order to enable their comparison. The data requirements of the exercise are discussed through the introduction of the notion of a "narrative horizon", the extent to which a given source incorporates a narrative account in its rendering of the context that produces it. Useful primary data will consist of text with short narrative horizons, such that the ideal source will correspond to a continuous archive of institutional, ideally bureaucratic text produced as mere documentation of a definite population of more or less stable and comparable social facts across a couple of centuries. Such a primary source is available in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (POB), a collection of transcriptions of 197,752 criminal trials seen by the Old Bailey and the Central Criminal Court of London and Middlesex between 1674 and 1913 that includes verbatim transcriptions of witness testimony. The POB is used to demonstrate the proposed framework, starting with the analysis of the evolution of an historical corpus to illustrate the procedure by which provenance data is used to construct longitudinal and cross-sectional comparisons of different corpus segments. The co-occurrence matrices obtained from the POB corpus are used to demonstrate two different projections: semantic networks that model different notions of similarity between the terms in a corpus' lexicon as an adjacency matrix describing a graph and semantic vector spaces that approximate a lower-dimensional representation of an hypothetical semantic space from its empirical effects on the co-occurrence matrix. Semantic networks are presented as discrete mathematical objects that offer a solution to the mapping problem through operation that allow for the construction of sets of terms over which an order can be induced using any measure of significance of the strength of association between a term set and its elements. Alignment can then be solved through different similarity measures computed over the intersection and union of the sets under comparison. Semantic vector spaces are presented as continuous mathematical objects that offer a solution to the mapping problem in the linear structures contained in them. This include, in all cases, a meaningful metric that makes it possible to define neighbourhoods and regions in the semantic space and, in some cases, a meaningful orientation that makes it possible to trace dimensions across them. Alignment can then proceed endogenously in the case of oriented vector spaces for relative comparisons, or through the construction of common basis sets for non-oriented semantic spaces for absolute comparisons. The dissertation concludes with the proposition of a general research program for the systematic compilation of text distributional patterns in order to facilitate a much needed process of calibration required by the techniques discussed in the previous chapters. Two specific avenues for further research are identified. First, the development of incremental methods of projection that allow a semantic model to be updated as new observations come along, an area that has received considerable attention from the field of electronic finance and the pervasive use of Gentleman's algorithm for matrix factorisation. Second, the development of additively decomposable models that may be combined or disaggregated to obtain a similar result to the one that would have been obtained had the model being computed from the union or difference of their inputs. This is established to be dependent on whether the functions that actualise a given model are associative under addition or not.

The present research attempts to develop a general model of the diffusion of Western loanwords in contemporary Japanese within the variationist framework. It describes and predicts, based on empirical evidence from apparent- and real-time data, the elaborate process of changes in favor of loanwords as opposed to their existing native equivalents. First, people's self-reporting shows a consistent tendency for a younger generation to show a stronger preference for loanwords than an elder one. This indicates changes in favor of loanwords are in progress in apparent time (Chapter 4). Second, the above-mentioned age gradient is attested to by corpus-based data. It also reveals that the occurrence of loanwords is accounted for multi-dimensionally by a wider range of language-external factors such as generation, education, register and style (Chapter 5). Third, an in-depth study of the individual loanword keesu (< case) reveals that not only external factors but also internal ones, e.g., usage and collocation of the word, have impacts on its occurrence (Chapter 6). Fourth, an investigation of the loanword sapooto (< support) shows that a stylistic variable comes into play in its diffusion in interaction with an educational variable. The loanword is disfavored when the speech setting shifts to formal in particular by the most educated speakers (Chapter 7). Fifth, a real-time approach to loanword adoption verified that individuals can change their language attitude or behavior throughout their lifetime. It highlights importance of longitudinal observation of the phenomenon in making a more accurate prediction of change (Chapter 8). The present research confirms that the occurrence of loan variants is bound by various social and linguistic contexts. The above empirical findings contribute to the field of variationist study by opening up the possibility of analyzing linguistic variation in Japanese at the lexical level.

Orientador: Marymarcia Guedes / Banca: Jarbas Vargas Nascimento / Banca: Alessandra Del Ré / Banca: Cristina Martins Targetti / Banca: Angel Humberto Corbera Mori / Resumo: Essa tese toma como tema a História da Língua Portuguesa escrita no contexto sócio-cultural do século XIX e constitui como corpus os anúncios publicados nos jornais desse período. Partimos da hipótese de rever o uso do futuro do presente uma vez que o mesmo pode ser substituído por outras formas de empregar esse tempo. Para consecução do objetivo proposto, buscamos fundamentar-nos nos postulados da Historiografia Lingüística e da Sociolingüística visando a entender o homem e as características peculiares existentes na expressão lingüística nacional daquele contexto histórico-ideológico. Detectamos que os primeiros anúncios brasileiros surgiram no início do século XIX, depois da vinda de D. João VI para o Brasil, tendo como objetivo reproduzir as condições da corte portuguesa no país, sendo responsável por inúmeros avanços no campo cultural, entre eles o advento da imprensa nacional. Esses anúncios eram conhecidos como classificados, cujo texto, puramente informativo, assemelhava-se a um aviso, quando não a uma notícia. Observamos, que na primeira metade do século XIX os anúncios apresentam-se bem variados, ora aparecem escritos políticos, editais, conteúdo opinativo,engajado, às vezes satíricos e corrosivos envolvendo questões ideológicas, políticas, morais e, com freqüência, pessoais. Nessa época, podemos ver que o futuro do presente do modo indicativo apresenta-se mais precisamente na terceira pessoa do singular e do plural. Já a partir da segunda metade do século a imprensa é influenciada pela literatura, podendo ser percebida pelo uso da mesóclise, uma linguagem mais elaborada, ou melhor, um recurso estilístico do autor. Época de grandes conflitos e discursos acalorados e impulsionadores de integridade nacional, como tentativa de emancipação do jugo histórico-cultural, imposto pelo povo português, levam... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This paper tells about the Portuguese Language History in the social - cultural context in the nineteenth century and has as the corpus the published ads in the newspapers of that period. We started with the hypothesis of reviewing the use of the "future of the present" because this one can be substituted by other forms of using this tense. For the consecution of the proposed aim, we tried to have fundamentals in the postulates of the Linguistic historiography and the sociolinguistics aiming to understand the men and the peculiar characteristics of the national linguistics expression of that historic - ideological context. We detect that the first Brazilian ads appeared in the beginning of the nineteenth century, after D. João VI came to Brazil, with the propose of reproducing the conditions of the Portuguese royalty in the country, being responsible for several advances in the cultural area, including the beginning of the national media. These ads were known as classifieds, in which the text, informative only, was similar to an advice or just news. We observed that in the first half of the nineteenth century the ads were varied,once politic writings appear, edicts, opinative subjects, engaged, sometimes satiric and corrosive writings involving ideological questions, politics, moral and, frequently personal subjects. In that period, we can see that the "future of the present" of the "indicative way" was presented in the third person singular and plural, but in the second half of the century the media was influenced by the literature, being noticed by the use of the "mesóclise", a more elaborated language, or in other words, a resource style of the author. Time of great conflicts and hot speeches besides being the impulse of national integrity , as an attempt of emancipation of the historic-cultural judgment, imposed by the Portuguese people, make the news writers... (Complete abstract, click electronic access below) / Doutor