<p> Nativist language, expressed as opposition to foreigners, has been a part of American history since the country's founding. At various times, often during periods of recession and economic pressure, nativist movements have arisen with remarkable fervor, at times affecting the course of the nation's history. Most recently, the twenty years from 1990-2010 saw a significant increase both in the number and power of anti-immigration organizations. During this period, the contemporary minutemen, organizations of nativists focused on border security, came to prominence. Anti-immigrant pressure groups, whose purpose was to focus on specific aspects of immigration, became powerful. Nativist politicians found that rhetoric could successfully elevated their cause to prominence on the national stage. </p><p> This study uses principles of generic criticism to analyze the rhetoric of two contemporary Minutemen organizations and their founders, as well as three prominent nativist leaders. It seeks to determine whether there are common characteristics in the chosen examples of nativist rhetoric. Under such circumstances, the rhetoric would be classified as belonging to a particular genre, or type. The analysis reports that there are five common characteristics shared by the five rhetors: Appeals to rationality and positioning within the mainstream; predictions of threats to economic security and political stability; paranoid language; patriotic and constitutional imagery and alignment with law enforcement; and appeals for sympathy for victims. It continues by comparing the five commonalities with common rhetorical forms and concludes that all five align with the rhetorical type known as the jeremiad. Named for the biblical prophet Jeremiah, this type of rhetoric is marked by a call for a return to traditional values, predictions of disasters to come if the audience does not heed the warnings, and reassurance that the audience and the nation will be rewarded for their righteous behavior. The study also finds that contemporary nativist rhetoric can be classified as exhibiting the paranoid style of rhetoric. The study concludes with an enumeration of issues relating to rhetorical studies of nativism that arose during the research. These issues would be useful avenues of inquiry for other researchers intrigued by the subject.</p>

Thesis (M.S.) PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Recovery from aphasia, loss of language following a cerebrovascular incident (stroke), is a complex process involving both left and right hemispheric regions. In our study, we analyzed the relationships between semantic processing behavioral data, lesion size and location, and functional signal change from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Our study included 14 persons with aphasia in the chronic stage of recovery (six or more months post stroke) who performed semantic processing tasks of determining whether a written semantic feature matched a picture or whether two written words were related. Region of interest (ROI) analysis revealed that left inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis and pars triangularis, despite significant damage, were the only regions to correlate with behavioral accuracy. Additionally, bilateral frontal regions including superior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, and anterior cingulate appear to serve as an assistive network in the case of damage to traditional language regions including inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and angular gyrus. Contralesional posterior regions including right middle temporal gyrus, right supramarginal gyrus, and right angular gyrus are engaged in the case of complete damage to left hemisphere language regions. Additionally, right inferior frontal gyrus pars orbitalis is noted to be possibly serving a monitoring function. These results reinforce the importance of the left hemisphere in language processing in aphasia, as well as the nuanced relationships between lesion size, lesion location, and bilateral signal change in aphasia. / 2031-01-01

Dialogue promises a natural and effective method for users to interact with and obtain information from computer systems. Statistical spoken dialogue systems are able to disambiguate in the presence of errors by maintaining probability distributions over what they believe to be the state of a dialogue. However, traditionally these distributions have been derived using generative models, which do not directly optimise for the criterion of interest and cannot easily exploit arbitrary information that may potentially be useful. This thesis presents how discriminative methods can overcome these problems in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Dialogue State Tracking (DST). A robust method for SLU is proposed, based on features extracted from the full posterior distribution of recognition hypotheses encoded in the form of word confusion networks. This method uses discriminative classifiers, trained on unaligned input/output pairs. Performance is evaluated on both an off-line corpus, and on-line in a live user trial. It is shown that a statistical discriminative approach to SLU operating on the full posterior ASR output distribution can substantially improve performance in terms of both accuracy and overall dialogue reward. Furthermore, additional gains can be obtained by incorporating features from the system's output. For DST, a new word-based tracking method is presented that maps directly from the speech recognition results to the dialogue state without using an explicit semantic decoder. The method is based on a recurrent neural network structure that is capable of generalising to unseen dialogue state hypotheses, and requires very little feature engineering. The method is evaluated in the second and third Dialog State Tracking Challenges, as well as in a live user trial. The results demonstrate consistently high performance across all of the off-line metrics and a substantial increase in the quality of the dialogues in the live trial. The proposed method is shown to be readily applied to expanding dialogue domains, by exploiting robust features and a new method for online unsupervised adaptation. It is shown how the neural network structure can be adapted to output structured joint distributions, giving an improvement over estimating the dialogue state as a product of marginal distributions.

Current methods for assessing African American English (AAE) speaking children's semantic knowledge are seriously flawed. Many AAE-speaking children who do not have language disorders perform poorly on standardized vocabulary tests. However, there is no reason to believe that all of these AAE-speaking children are deficient in their ability to learn a rich and functional vocabulary. Existing vocabulary tests often are culturally biased because lexical items are selected and normed on middle-class Euro-American children. This results in an inherent bias against linguistically and culturally diverse populations. Some African American children have less exposure to the lexical items selected for use on standardized tests than Euro-American middle-class children. These cultural and language differences become exacerbated when these children enter school. Frequently, AAE-speaking children are referred to the school speech-language pathologist (SLP) for language testing. However, the SLP is often ill-equipped to provide an unbiased evaluation due to reasons previously mentioned. The problem for the SLP is to determine what areas of semantics to test and what methods should be utilized in this assessment. This study investigated the processing-dependent measure of fast mapping as an alternative method of assessing semantic knowledge in children. AAE and Standard American English (SAE) speaking children between the ages of four and six were presented with two comprehension tasks involving real verbs and the fast mapping of novel verbs in four different argument structures (intransitive, transitive, transfer, and complement). These tasks were developed to evaluate how children use syntactic bootstrapping to help fix the meaning of new verbs. The participants' performance on the alternative assessment measure was compared to their performance on a commonly used psychometric vocabulary test. Although significant differences were found between AAE- and SAE-speakers in the transitive argument structure for real verbs and transfer argument structure for both real and novel verbs, overall results indicated that both groups were able to fast map novel verbs. A performance gap between AAE and SAE participants on the psychometric vocabulary test was noted in this study. These results suggest the feasibility of fast mapping as a method to reduce test bias in semantic assessment.

The purpose of this investigation was to compare conversational repair strategies of hearing and deaf/hearing-impaired children in response to a partner's indication of communication breakdown. Experimental subjects were eight profoundly deaf children, ages 4 years to 7 years, 6 months, who used total communication. Control subjects were eight hearing children, matched by age and sex to experimental subjects. Each subject was videotaped while individually engaged in two language sample elicitation activities, a structured and an informal communication situation. During the conversation in each experimental condition, the investigator initiated ten stacked clarification request sequences consisting of three neutral queries ("Huh?," "What?," and "I don't understand.") per sequence. The sequences were inserted on alternating items about which the subject spoke, and/or when the subject produced an intelligible utterance of sufficient complexity that a clarification request had validity. The videotaped language samples of the clarification request/repair response sequences were transcribed verbatim. Clarification repairs were coded as repetition, revision, addition, cue, discussion, and inappropriate responses. Variations in the use of total communication by the experimental subjects, and the use of pointing, or other mode variations, by the control subjects were also coded. Frequencies and percentages of occurrence were derived for each request type in each repair category and for each language condition. Chi-square analyses were used to determine the relationships between the variables. Results indicated that while all subjects were aware of the obligatory nature of the clarification requests, experimental and control subjects employed different types of repair strategies. Revision repairs were the most common type of responses, however, deaf/hearing-impaired subjects were twice as likely to revise their utterances while hearing subjects were as likely to repeat as they were to revise their utterances. In addition, hearing subjects were three times more likely to provide cue repair responses as their experimental counterparts. Differences in conversational repair strategies were also evident as the queries in the clarification request sequences progressed. No significant differences were noted within groups when communication conditions were compared. Communication mode variations appeared to have little influence on the coding of repair strategies.

<p> This dissertation describes an investigation of the practice of teaching argumentation in the undergraduate composition classroom in large part by examining a corpus consisting of 16 commonly used argumentation textbooks with publication dates from 2010 to 2014. The purpose of this project is to help advance the teaching of written argumentation by examining how it is defined, justified, and taught via textbooks, by ranking the textbooks on a 1-3 sliding scale according to how well the lesson plans within them are equipped to teach students how to write arguments according to what the authors and publishers describe as the ideal argument.</p><p> This study is conducted in two phases: The first is a process in which the textbooks are categorized into one of three types, or uses, of argumentation (academic/professional, advocacy, or exploration). The second phase is the evaluation of two chapters in each book to see how well the activities in them are developed as to help student learn to write the classified argument. The final chapter of this dissertation contains recommendations that can be adapted by future textbooks authors, editors, and publishers, recommendations that involve developing books that more clearly identify with one or more of the three categories making up this taxonomy, as well as adding sections that teach students to use a stasis-mapping formula to evaluate existing, as well as to create new, arguments.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study is to explore the rhetorical functions of references to God and the Bible in the first presidential inaugural addresses from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama. The Inaugural Address serves to reunite the nation after the division of an election. The language used in this address reflects the culture and identity of the nation it speaks to. Through a modern rhetorical analysis of the inaugural addresses from 1933-2009, this thesis aims to identify the trends in American religiosity, as can be seen through particular use of references to God and uses of biblical metaphor as a rhetorical and persuasive tool in the inaugural address.</p>

<p> Assured by the City and County of Denver (CCD) to be a compassionate initiative, the Unauthorized Camping Ordinance (UCO) enacted in May 2012 has resulted in a form of social action that contradicts the notion of compassion. For example, in opposition to its presentation as an measure intended to benefit homeless persons, violation can result in citation, fines, arrest, and incarceration. Using critical discourse analysis, the rhetoric of place, legal and political history, communication studies, and stigma theory, my study examines aspects of the UCO's and CCD's contradictory disregard of Denver's unhoused residents, suggesting that the ordinance imposes disadvantages that exceed the advantages promised by the CCD. Taken at face value, the UCO stipulates that violators must be referred to services. In actuality, rather than connecting homeless people with these services, the outworking of the ordinance has resulted the routinized utterance of the phrase "move along" by Denver police officers. In stark contrast to compassion, "move along" signals to Denver's unhoused residents that they are unwelcome in Denver. Moreover, the ordinance and officials of the CCD incorrectly imply that there is sufficient and adequate shelter space for Denver's unhoused residents to inhabit. This conveys to the public that resolving the issue of homelessness in Denver rests upon whether homeless persons unquestioningly comply with the ordinance and inhabit shelters. On top of this, evidence suggests that some homeless persons reasonably decide against inhabiting such shelters. In spite of their decision, the CCD continues to enforce an ordinance that, by and large, excludes and obscures homeless persons from public view, all the while calling the measure an act of "compassion." The end result is the disaffiliation, displacement, and dehumanization of Denver's homeless persons, encouraging their social exclusion and potentially justifying hate crimes against them. The contradictory disregard of the UCO and the CCD alike significantly limits and deteriorates the political and physical places allotted to homeless people, diminishing connections to the social power and capital they need to cultivate and maintain stable living. </p>

<p>The media&rsquo;s ability to frame a news story, or to slant it in a particular direction and thereby shape public perceptions, is a powerful tool with implications for material effects in society. In this thesis, a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the words and photographic images used in the framing of <i>Life</i> magazine&rsquo;s September 14, 1953 article, &ldquo;The Lonely Men of Short Creek,&rdquo; is combined with contextualization of the story within the historical, sociological, and regional settings that may have affected its ideological content. This provides insights into <i> Life</i>&rsquo;s editorial perspectives and potential audience response. &ldquo;The Lonely Men of Short Creek&rdquo; is an account that some writers have suggested contributed to a laissez-faire attitude towards the polygamist community of Short Creek, Arizona, in which a failure to enforce state laws allowed child sexual abuse to continue unhindered there for the next half century. This analysis of <i>Life</i>&rsquo;s account demonstrates its overall sympathetic framing of Short Creek in 1953, particularly of male community members, and the construction of a narrative with significant absences and misrepresentations that obscured or concealed darker themes. <i> Life</i>&rsquo;s construct has in certain aspects been replicated today in what some consider to be the &ldquo;definitive&rdquo; account of the story, which repeats a persistent tale of religious persecution, compromised constitutional rights, and an overbearing state&rsquo;s &ldquo;kidnap&rdquo; of the children of an apparently innocent and harmless rural polygamist community. Such a narrative has deflected attention from an alternative frame&mdash;that of a community charged with multiple crimes, including the statutory rape of children manipulated by adults within a religious ideology that demanded plural &ldquo;wives.&rdquo; This thesis contends that in 1953, these children were overlooked, or ignored in a fog of often taken-for-granted US national ideologies and editorial perspectives relating to religious freedom and the &ldquo;sacred&rdquo; nature of the family in the post-Korean War and Cold War era. Such findings raise questions about the ethics of partisan framing of news stories in which alleged victims are implicated, acceptable limits of religious and family rights, and the often un-interrogated national ideologies sometimes used to justify harmful or criminal behaviors. </p>

<p> Martin Heidegger is a key philosophical thinker who has influenced contemporary scholarship in rhetorical theory. His concept of disclosure has become particularly significant because it is uniquely situated to explain the nuances of contemporary public political address. Yet the meaning and applicability of Heidegger's rhetoric of disclosure to explain new forms of political speech have been contested by two contemporary philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, who advance different interpretations of the nature of a rhetoric of disclosure--one highlighting rhetoric as immanence, the other transcendence. This thesis, then, examines the philosophical and rhetorical debate about the rhetoric of disclosure by focusing on Derrida's transcendent interpretation and Deleuze's immanent interpretation in an effort to clarify Heidegger's rhetoric of disclosure and its usefulness for rhetorical studies. These divergent perspectives will then be applied to the political case study of President Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech to assess how each contributes to our understanding of rhetorical theory and criticism.</p>