Using data from Arizona, United States, the present study seeks to further our understanding of lone other language items (LOLIs) in bilingual discourse and their status as either borrowings or codeswitches by measuring the degree of incorporation that can indicate a LOLI's status as a borrowing or codeswitching. To accomplish this aim, nouns from 40 sociolinguistic interviews from 8 Spanish monolingual speakers from Sonora, Mexico, 8 English monolingual speakers from Arizona, and 24 Spanish-English bilinguals from Arizona (from Sonoran families) are compared. Codeswitching can be defined as the "juxtaposition of sentences or sentence fragments, each of which is internally consistent with the morphological and syntactic (and optionally, phonological) rules of the language of its provenance" (Poplack, 1993, p. 255). Borrowing involves the incorporation of LOLIs from a donor language incorporated into a recipient language and need to be morphologically and syntactically adapted into the recipient language (Poplack, Sankoff, and Miller, 1988; Sankoff, Poplack, and Vanniarajan, 1990). Accordingly, the key difference between codeswitching and borrowing is that borrowings are morphosyntactically incorporated into the recipient language while codeswitches are not incorporated. It is important to note that in terms of LOLIs' status, phonological integration has been discarded for being too variable and therefore not a reliable factor in discerning one-item codeswitches from borrowings (Poplack and Sankoff, 1984; Poplack, Sankoff, and Miller, 1988). In order to measure the degree of incorporation that can in turn indicate the LOLI's status as a borrowing or a codeswitch, the present study applies a sociolinguistic comparative method to loanwords, following Poplack and Meechan (1995, 1998) by comparing nouns from Spanish (recipient language), nouns from English (donor language), and LOLIs from English in Spanish discourse. Since phonology has not been applied to the method of analysis, this study also seeks to explore if phonological integration is correlated to morphosyntactic integration of determiner realization of LOLIs. The results show, in accordance to previous studies, that the LOLIs overall act morphosyntactically like patrimonial Spanish words in terms of the variables that condition determiner usage. In terms of how phonological integration interacts with morphosyntactic integration, it does seem that the two correlate. LOLIs with Spanish morphology are more morphosyntactically similar to Spanish patrimonial nouns and LOLIs with English phonology are more morphosyntactically similar to English patrimonial nouns in both overall frequencies and the factors that condition determiner usage, leading to the hypothesis that LOLIs that are integrated phonologically are established borrowings and LOLIs that are not integrated phonologically are either codeswitches or nonce borrowings. We provide further evidence for this hypothesis by examining the pauses and false starts that are present before LOLIs with Spanish versus English phonology. The results indicate that LOLIs with English phonology are more often preceded with pauses and false starts than LOLIs with Spanish phonology. The findings of this study suggest that phonological integration is a factor that should be brought back to the discussion on discerning LOLIs' status as a borrowing or a codeswitch.

L'invasion et la colonisation de la Normandie par les vikings scandinaves introduisirent en frangais plusieurs mots d'origine noroise. Cette étude examine l'étymologie de certains mots réputés d'être de cette origine. II y a particulièrement deux catégories de mots qui ont été considerees. Premièrement il s'agit de termes qui ont un rapport, quelconque à la mer, c'est-à-dire la mer elle-même, certains types d'embarcation, certaines parties du gréage, la navigation, des poissons et la pêche. Chapître II traite de ces mots. Deuxièmement il est question de noms de lieux en Normandie. Le troisième chapître considère ces noms de lieux. II y en a deux groupes, d'abord des noms comportant un nom topographique, et puis des noms composés d'un nom d'homme avec la terminaison -ville. La méthode employée est celle d'examiner les œuvres des experts sur le sujet, et de comparer leurs opinions et leurs conslusions à l'égard des étymologies et des origines; et deuxièmement d'établir le rapport, s'il y a lieu, entre le terme en discussion et le scandinave moderne, surtout le norvégien actuel. Deux résultats de cette examination sont à noter. D'abord on est frappé par le rapport étroit et la similarité remarquable entre le franqais (le normand) et le norvégien moderne. II semble qu'il y ait là un champ de recherche peu explorè. Deuxièmement on trouve souvent un assez grand désaccord parmi les experts. Ce désaccord fait ressortir le besoin de plus amples études. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

Eighteen two-year-olds and twenty four-year-olds were studied as to their knowledge and use of eleven colour terms: BLUE,GREEN,RED,YELLOW,BLACK,WHITE,GREY,BROWN,PURPLE, ORANGE, and PINK. Level of acquisition was determined by a production (naming) task, a comprehension (selection) task, and a discrimination (matching) task. The objectives were to examine various performance differences in light of possible evolutionary, perceptual and environmental factors and aspects of general lexical development. Performance accuracy was found to have no correlations with the evolutionary order proposed by Berlin & Kay, nor did it reveal the strong conceptual groups of primary, non-primary and achromatic colours which have been proposed by other studies. In particular, the non-primary colours did not behave as a group in any of the analyses. Measures of input and practice obtained from parental questionnaires also showed few correlations of environment with task performance. For various reasons, this information was considered unreliable and no claims about environment as a determinant in naming behavior could be made. Performance was notably more accurate in four-year-olds than in the two-year-olds. More terms had been acquired by the older group than by the younger, the average being eight terms and two terms respectively, and six of the older group had acquired all eleven colour terms. Comprehension was more advanced for both ages than, production, although more terms were produced than were comprehended. No sex differences were found at all. Further analyses concentrated on production performance. As expected, the number of colour terms used increased with age and their use became more stable with age. There was no one colour term that appeared in all of the subjects' lexicons, but the colour terms most likely to appear were the primaries and the non-primary ORANGE. BLUE showed a marked, though not significant, preference at both ages and several possible reasons are suggested for this. GREY, as expected, appeared least frequently, followed by the achromatics. Colour terms used most accurately were ORANGE and PINK. These appear to be the first colour categories to emerge with separate labels, followed by the primary colours and GREY again ranking lowest. There were no terms which had been acquired by a significantly large number of two-year-olds and none by a significantly small number of four-year-olds. Primary terms as a group were also those most likely to be used incorrectly. Those terms most likely to be overextended by the younger subjects were also those without a stable referent, while for the older ones it was those terms which the subject already knew the correct use of. The actual errors did not seem to be based on any of the proposed perceptual properties of colour. It is suggested that the child at these stages does not organize his lexical or conceptual colour categories in terms of the adult distinctions of primary/non-primary/achromatic or of hue/saturation/brightness. Further in-depth examination might reveal a base of associative or contextual criteria instead of the random, ad-hoc guesses they appear to be in this study. It is further suggested that such organizational criteria are very individualistic and therefore will not fit the generalizations made by previous studies about colour-term acquisition. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

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This study aimed to examine how variable exposure to language statistical patterns affects reading behaviour, specifically, eye-movements during reading. The statistical patterns of language affect how individuals store, produce and comprehend language. When reading, individuals with greater linguistic proficiency typically have been shown to rely less on language statistical information compared to less proficient readers. Based on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, however, it was hypothesized that spelling bias, a print-specific probabilistic cue, may only be utilized for representations with sufficient strengths of representation - through increased exposure to print in individuals, or through higher frequency of occurrence for individual words, since these individuals, and these words, would be expected to have representations of high quality in the reader’s mental lexicon. Undergraduate students with varying amounts of reading experience were presented with sentences containing English noun-noun compound words that varied in spelling bias, i.e. the probability of occurring in text either as spaced (window sill) or concatenated (windowsill). Linear mixed effect multiple regression models were fitted to the eye-movement data and demonstrated that compound words presented in their more supported format - i.e. the format with the highest bias, were read faster, but that this effect was modulated by reading experience, as measured by a test of exposure to print, as well as by word frequency. Only individuals with the most reading experience, and words with the highest frequencies benefited from this facilitatory effect of bias. This distributional property can thus be used during reading, but only when individuals' lexical representations are of sufficiently high quality. The results of this study thus suggest that future research considering the relationship between linguistic properties and reading must consider individual differences in reading skill and exposure. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

No description available.

Despite increasing interest in the interface between emotion word processing and bilingualism, the representation of valence during emotion word processing in the bilingual brain remains unclear. In the present study, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the neural correlates of written emotion words in a first (L1) and a second (L2) language. Native English (16) and native Chinese (16) bilingual participants rated emotion words in their first and second language while we recorded their brain activity. Our results show distinct neural processing patterns between L1 and L2, with the former eliciting increased overall activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPF) during an emotional rating task. Our results suggest increased neural activity in the left hemisphere for positive words and the right hemisphere for negative words during L1 processing. Intriguingly, we observed the opposite pattern during L2 processing. Emotion condition elicited a statistically significant difference in ratings and response times across groups. Implications for research on bilingualism and emotion are discussed.

Combinatorics on words explore words – often called strings in the com- puter science community, or monoids in mathematics – and their structural properties. One of the most studied question deals with repetitions which are a form of redundancy. The thesis focuses on estimating the maximum number of distinct squares in a string of length n. Our approach is to study the combinatorial properties of these overlapping structures, nested systems, and obtain insights into the intricate patterns that squares create. Determin- ing the maximum number of repetitions in a string is of interest in different fields such as biology and computer science. For example, the question arrises when one tries to bound the number of repetitions in a gene or in a computer file to be data compressed. Specific strings containing many repetitions are often of interest for additional combinatorial properties. After a brief review of earlier results and an introduction to the question of bounding the maxi- mum number of distinct squares, we present the combinatorial insights and techniques used to obtain the main result of the thesis: a strengthening of the universal upper bound obtained by Fraenkel and Simpson in 1998. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis analyzes the offensiveness of Afrikaans taboo words gathered from an online survey and cross-compares it to grammatical constructions and functionality as displayed in an Afrikaans corpus. Culturally speaking, Afrikaans has a rich history of taboo terminology, especially in the racial category. The historical importance of taboo terms aids in understanding the evolution of the offensiveness of terms, especially as influenced by factors such as politics, attitude shifts, younger generations, etc. Results from the online survey focused primarily on the White Afrikaans-speaking population, as minimal responses were gathered from other ethnic groups. Additional findings from the survey indicated that various social factors (i.e., gender, Afrikaans, age, occupation, etc.) did not determine what was considered most offensive in both overall and categorical rankings. However, significant findings displayed that context (i.e., church, familiarity, school, university, and work) and where taboo terms were learned determined when taboo terms were most offensive. The level of offensiveness was affected by factors such as country, learning Afrikaans in school, and in the situation of 'offensiveness to you'. Results from the Afrikaans corpus indicated that the frequency of taboo terminology is affected by the terms' offensiveness, grammar constructions and functionality. This study also indicates that the genericness of taboo terms plays a role in determining the functionality and type of grammar constructions a term may have. Further research is needed to examine if genericness remains consistent within other languages and with other Afrikaans taboo terms not examined in this study.