This dissertation explores the way Kotiria/Wanano (E. Tukanoan, Kotiria hereafter) women of the Brazilian Alto Rio Negro (ARN) contrive (McDowell 1990) kaya basa ‘sad songs’ using linguistic and musical resources to construct songs that express loneliness and other private emotions, while also creating alliances and separations from other women in their lives. A central concept is the practice of linguistic exogamy, in which Kotiria marry speakers of other languages, creating a multilingual and multivocal, cacophonic sound during po’oa exchange ceremonies. I compare these songs to mythological narratives depicting the beginnings of Kotiria society and the roles of men and women within it, as well as men’s ceremonial forms of speech and unmarried women’s joking songs as a way to think about the resonances of sound and meaning married women create in their songs. Drawing on resources from linguistic anthropology, ethnomusicology, semiotics, and intersectional feminism, I demonstrate that the singing of – and listening to – kaya basa is a fundamental social structuring event. Despite previous works (e.g., Brüzzi 1962) that saw men’s expressive practices like shamanic chanting or ritual instrument playing as those upholding the social order, I argue that the social order owes its stability equally to women’s public participation in musical practice. Following Hill’s formulation of musicalizing the other (1993, 2009, 2011, 2013), I demonstrate that kaya basa reflect on inter- and intra-community relations on the macro level, while also giving women the chance to comment on important life transitions on the micro level. Moreover, my combined linguistic and spectrographic analyses of the sounds of these songs illustrate the intricate relations between the sounds of language and the sounds of music, the methods by which one understands something is true or false, and how individual singers can contrive differently within the same genre to create a well-formed song. I propose further work on this genre, and on genres that seem to be related which are produced by other groups in the area. I extend Beier, Michael, and Sherzer’s (2002) conception of the greater Amazonian discourse area to one of a greater Amazonian soundscape in which sonic ways of producing and gathering meaning (acoustemologies, Feld 1996) have been and are a major driving force in the arraying of social life across language families in the ARN.

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This investigation was concerned with whether linguistic competence with printed material is related to the retention of information contained in prose passages of high readability. The specific purpose of the study was to investigate relationships between linguistic competence and free recall, immediate, delayed, and practiced, after the reading of a passage of high readability. In a review of related literature, indications were found that linguistic competence could be expressed by test scores of reading achievement. Therefore, in this study linguistic competence was operationally defined by scores of literal and inferential reading comprehension.

This study investigated the relationship between visual cues in art reproductions, simple linguistic time vocabulary and children's temporal understandings. During interview sessions, 33 third-grade students attending two suburban schools were asked to place three art postcard reproductions sets in chronological order. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded for analysis. Linguistic references used to represent historical time and visual cues within the art postcards which caused students to place art works in a particular time sequence were documented.

Study abroad (SA) is typically thought to provide an excellent opportunity for second language acquisition, particularly through exposure to and application of the target language within the target culture. However, actual language gains vary greatly among SA participants and some may gain very little (Freed, 1995a). The purpose of the current study is to determine some specific linguistic gains made by 28 second language learners of Japanese studying for two semesters in Japan, and to determine possible correlates with these gains. Specifically, it addresses whether or not these SA students improve their grammatical proficiency, lexical proficiency, narrative ability, fluency, and pragmatics proficiency. It then explores how language learning aptitude, personality, language use, social networking, and initial ability correlate with those gains. To measure these gains and their correlates it uses the following instruments: the Elicited Imitation task, a picture story, the Pragmatics Self-Assessment, the Non-Word Repetition test, the NEO-Five Factor Inventory, the Language Contact Profile, and the Study Abroad Social Interaction Questionnaire. The results indicated that these SA students improved significantly in at least on measure of grammatical proficiency, lexical proficiency, narrative ability, fluency, and pragmatics proficiency. Initial ability and language use proved to correlate best with each area of linguistic gain; however, the other correlates were also related in certain areas. SA students should prepare to use their language and participate in social networks to best improve their linguistic abilities.

Being a competent writer is an important skill in academic education. However, second language (L2) writers often struggle to be linguistically and lexically competent. This project explored the most frequent linguistic writing errors made by 343 English as a second language (ESL) students when Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) was applied as an instructional methodology. These errors were also classified by language groups based on the students' first language (L1). These students were enrolled in an intensive English program at the English Language Center (ELC), Brigham Young University. The first languages of these students were Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. The students' writing samples were collected to compile the most frequent linguistic error types. The results of this project show that the most frequent linguistic errors for ESL students are spelling, word choice, determiner, preposition, singular/plural, and word form. Among these errors, spelling and word choice were the most common errors for all ESL students no matter their L1. The principal aim of this project was to take the data collected in the error analysis and create a booklet to be used as a reference guide to frequent ESL linguistic writing errors. With this booklet, teachers should be more aware of frequent errors to better assist their students since this could help them anticipate some of the linguistic difficulties that L2 learners may encounter. This booklet could also help L2 learners attain writing linguistic competence.

This study examines how and if threshold concepts enable expansive learning and generalization. Expansive learning and generalization are part of the highly contested conceptions of transfer, and these specific conceptions offer a more complex conception of transfer that deals with knowledge transformation (Tuomi-Gr?hn and Engestr?m, Beach). One way that we can see expansive learning and generalization transform knowledge is through the teaching of threshold concepts. In the last decade, there has been a movement toward using threshold concepts in FYC*s that take up writing studies as their curricula (Wardle and Downs, Dew). Even though using threshold concepts seems to be one interesting way of specifically studying expansive learning and generalization, we have no studies examining whether or not teaching threshold concepts encourages expansive learning. The studies we do have do not seem to offer any methodologies that would enable us to study threshold concepts and generalization. Past methods, such as case studies, interviews, and surveys have included small sample sizes to collect their data from (Wardle, Dively and Nelms, Nowacek). A lot of the transfer data does not actually focus on the writing or the texts themselves or the reoccurring moves that students use in those texts. Linguistic discourse analysis offers a promising avenue for examining the generalization of threshold concepts. Using research methods like linguistic discourse analysis in marriage with the best qualitative methods of transfer, like case studies or interviews, could allow for a larger sample size of data collection and allows for us to see how students use these threshold concepts in their writing. Through linguistic discourse analysis and interviews, this study suggests that students* perceptions of writing change after being introduced to some threshold concepts from the Writing About Writing curriculum. The threshold concepts that students are presented to in the Writing About Writing curriculum at UCF tackles misconceptions and helps students change how they view writing. Once they can change this view, they are able to generalize the knowledge they have into their own writing. If students do not use the exact terminology from the curriculum, they are able to generalize those threshold concepts through using their own language or even through analogies.

<p> Connectionist models of language acquisition typically have difficulty with systematicity, or the ability for the network to generalize its limited experience with language to novel utterances. In this way, connectionist systems learning grammar from a set of example sentences tend to store a set of specific instances, rather than a generalized abstract knowledge of the process of grammatical combination. Further, recent models that do show limited systematicity do so at the expense of simultaneously storing explicit lexical knowledge, and also make use of both developmentally-implausible training data and biologically-implausible learning rules. Consequently, this research program develops a novel unsupervised neural network architecture, and applies this architecture to the problem of systematicity in language models.</p> <p> In the first of several studies, a connectionist architecture capable of simultaneously storing explicit and separate representations of both conceptual and grammatical information is developed, where this architecture is a hybrid of both a self-organizing map and an intra-layer Hebbian associative network. Over the course of several studies, this architecture's capacity to acquire linguistic grammar is evaluated, where the architecture is progressively refined until it is capable of acquiring a benchmark grammar consisting of several difficult clausal sentence structures - though it must acquire this grammar at the level of grammatical category, rather than the lexical level.</p> <p> The final study bridges the gap between the lexical and grammatical category levels, and develops an activation function based on a semantic feature co-occurrence metric. In concert with developmentally-plausible sensorimotor grounded conceptual representations, it is shown that a network using this metric is able to undertake a process of semantic bootstrapping, and successfully acquire separate explicit representations at the level of the concept, part-of-speech category, and grammatical sequence. This network demonstrates broadly systematic behaviour on a difficult test of systematicity, and extends its knowledge of grammar to novel sensorimotor-grounded words.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p> This dissertation brings the insights of linguistic discourse analysis, and particularly of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), to bear on the prophetic book of Joel in order to clarify the nature and function of the Day of YHWH in the book. The concepts of register and genre as defined by SFL, along with the related concepts of context of situation, context of culture, and context of text (or co-text), provide helpful tools that both dovetail with the problems and goals of other kinds of synchronic analysis and give new and valuable insights. By applying register analysis to the various passages that deal with the Day of YHWH in the book of Joel, the dissertation identifies the registers of the four sections of the book and compares and contrasts the various registers of each of these sections, making use of this analysis to shed light on the nature and function of the Day of YHWH in each section. Following this is a description of the linguistic register, the context of situation, and the nature and function of the Day of YHWH in the book of Joel as an entire text.</p> <p> The Day of YHWH in the book of Joel is a future moment of theophanic intervention, an inevitable day of destruction and salvation. Key to the theology of the Day of YHWH in Joel is the relational orientation of the readers/hearers of the book to YHWH. The book of Joel is thus a communicative act that calls for repentance grounded in worship of YHWH and that promises deliverance from the Day and a glorious eschatological future for those who heed the book's call to proper orientation toward YHWH.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Vad räknas som språk? Det var den fundering som först uppkom då beslutet att utföra en studie i ämnet språkliga landskap var fattat. När vi satte oss in i forskningen på området insåg vi att det språkliga landskapet kan utgöras av mer än exempelvis skriftspråk eller verbalt språk, såsom exempelvis svenska, engelska eller arabiska.  Vi antog därför ett dynamiskt perspektiv på flerspråkighet och valde att, utöver skriftspråk, inkludera sådant som teckenspråk, bildstöd, normer, symboler, stödstrukturer och identitet- och nationalitetssymboler i vår definition av språk, och därmed även i insamlingen av data.  Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur det språkliga landskapet ser ut i en svensk grundskola, samt att få lärares-, fritidspersonals- och skollednings perspektiv på, och tankar kring, skolans språkliga landskap. De forskningsfrågor som besvaras är 1. Hur ser det språkliga landskapet i den undersökta skolan ut? och 2. Vilka uppfattningar och föreställningar påverkar utformningen av skolans språkliga landskap?  Studien genomfördes i två steg, dels genom observation och fotografering av skolans fysiska utrymmen, dels genom kvalitativa intervjuer med två lärare, biträdande rektor samt en fritidspersonal.  I studien framkom ett språkligt landskap där svenskt skriftspråk dominerade. Vidare användes bildstöd i kombination med svenska frekvent i samtliga observerade utrymmen. Engelska förekom i ett antal stödstrukturer och på affischer. TAKK (tecken som alternativt och kompletterande kommunikationssätt) förekom i ett klassrum. I det språkliga landskapet uttrycktes även normer och värderingar riktade till elever, från lärare, skrivna uteslutande på svenska. Övergripande framkom att det inte fanns någon allomfattande policy för utformningen av skolans språkliga landskap, utan att de val som gjordes oftast baserades på lärares egna uppfattningar och åsikter. Däremot uttryckte samtliga intervjuade personliga åsikter och medvetna förhållningssätt dels till utformningen av skolans språkliga landskap, dels till flerspråkighet i allmänhet. Sammantaget visade undersökningen ett språkligt landskap som varierade från rum till rum, och där flerspråkighet främst gavs utrymme baserat på enskilda peroners val, uppfattningar och åsikter.