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- All Subjects: Language
- All Subjects: Syntax
- Creators: Pruitt, Kathryn
Description
ABSTRACT
The absence of the consonant sound /p/ in Libyan Arabic leads Libyan speakers of English to pronounce /p/ as /b/. This study examines how Libyan Arabic speakers distinguish the English /p/ and /b/ in their production of L2 English. The study also examines the effect of the production contexts and the learning environment on two groups of Libyan Arabic speakers' attainment of the English /p/ in the USA and Libya. The study collected voice recordings of word-initial /p/ and /b/ in isolated-words, minimal pairs, and sentences in English from both Libyan Arabic speakers and American English speakers. The study also collected Libyan Arabic stop consonants /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/ from the Libyan participants. The voice recording data were collected using the WhatsApp mobile application from all participants and the Libyan Arabic participants were also asked to fill an online survey. Using voice onset time (VOT) as a measurement tool, this study measured the English and Libyan Arabic data through Praat software. The findings show that most Libyan Arabic participants distinguish between /p/ and /b/, but they did not have as high VOT averages as the American participants' /p/. It also reveals that the production context, especially in minimal pairs and sentence contexts, has an effect on their participants' production. However, the learning environment does not have an effect on the Libyan participants' pronunciation of /p/ in this study.
The absence of the consonant sound /p/ in Libyan Arabic leads Libyan speakers of English to pronounce /p/ as /b/. This study examines how Libyan Arabic speakers distinguish the English /p/ and /b/ in their production of L2 English. The study also examines the effect of the production contexts and the learning environment on two groups of Libyan Arabic speakers' attainment of the English /p/ in the USA and Libya. The study collected voice recordings of word-initial /p/ and /b/ in isolated-words, minimal pairs, and sentences in English from both Libyan Arabic speakers and American English speakers. The study also collected Libyan Arabic stop consonants /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/ from the Libyan participants. The voice recording data were collected using the WhatsApp mobile application from all participants and the Libyan Arabic participants were also asked to fill an online survey. Using voice onset time (VOT) as a measurement tool, this study measured the English and Libyan Arabic data through Praat software. The findings show that most Libyan Arabic participants distinguish between /p/ and /b/, but they did not have as high VOT averages as the American participants' /p/. It also reveals that the production context, especially in minimal pairs and sentence contexts, has an effect on their participants' production. However, the learning environment does not have an effect on the Libyan participants' pronunciation of /p/ in this study.
ContributorsGarib, Ali A. A (Author) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Thesis advisor) / Renaud, Claire (Committee member) / González López, Verónica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This dissertation investigates the precise degree to which prosody and syntax are related. One possibility is that the syntax-prosody mapping is one-to-one (“isomorphic”) at an underlying level (Chomsky & Halle 1968, Selkirk 1996, 2011, Ito & Mester 2009). This predicts that prosodic units should preferably match up with syntactic units. It is also possible that the mapping between these systems is entirely non-isomorphic, with prosody being influenced by factors from language perception and production (Wheeldon & Lahiri 1997, Lahiri & Plank 2010). In this work, I argue that both perspectives are needed in order to address the full range of phonological phenomena that have been identified in English and related languages, including word-initial lenition/flapping, word-initial segment-deletion, and vowel reduction in function words, as well as patterns of pitch accent assignment, final-pronoun constructions, and the distribution of null complementizer allomorphs. In the process, I develop models for both isomorphic and non-isomorphic phrasing. The former is cast within a Minimalist syntactic framework of Merge/Label and Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 2013, 2015), while the latter is characterized by a stress-based algorithm for the formation of phonological domains, following Lahiri & Plank (2010).
ContributorsKruger, William Wriley (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Carnie, Andrew (Committee member) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This thesis covers second language acquisition in regards to age, examining the difference between elementary and high school students. The primary language of all the students tested was English. The second language being tested in this study is German. The general age range in the elementary students observed was 7-12 years old. The high school students' ages were between 14-18 years old. The environment consisted of a physical education atmosphere, which includes: gyms, outside recreational areas, fitness equipment, fields, etc. Methods used to conduct this study were visual and auditory/verbal approaches. No direct instruction was provided to the students, they were assessed based on their ability to absorb the information when provided to them indirectly in a traditional classroom atmosphere. In addition, direct instruction is also not conducive to a physical education setting as it has the potential to detract from the necessary lesson content.
ContributorsMarch, Ashley Taylor (Author) / Pangrazi, Connie (Thesis director) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
This thesis offers a contrastive analysis of the causative alternation phenomenon in English and Standard Arabic variety. This phenomenon has received a lot of attention in the literature on argument structure. It has traditionally been presented in terms of the causativization of inchoative verbs/unaccusatives. It is argued here that this analysis conflicts with the way the causative alternation is molded in Arabic. Causative alternation in Arabic is not only limited to inchoative verbs, but it incorporates unergative verbs as well, which play a vital role in this alternation. The implication of this observation is that the different syntactic behaviors between English and Arabic may reflect people’s different perception of events and lead to different syntactic computation. Therefore, this thesis highlights the role of this subset of intransitives/anti-causatives in the Arabic causative alternation and answers one of the highly considered questions on the causative alternation; that is, which version of the alternation is the lexical base, and which one is derived? This thesis also reveals that there is some significant difference between English and Arabic in terms of the alternatability of unaccusative verbs. Therefore, this study shows that most of the Arabic unaccusative verbs, except denominal verbs, have a causative alternant. This thesis also addresses the vital role of the Arabic verbal template in clarifying this phenomenon. In sum, this thesis provides an overview of the semantic, syntactic, and morphological properties of Arabic verbs undergoing the causative alternation. Besides employing the researcher’s native-speaker intuition, the English/Arabic Lexicon Dictionary and Arabicorpora are consulted to support the validity of the argument.
ContributorsAl-qadi, Mona (Author) / Gelderen, Elly v. (Thesis advisor) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Gibberish seems to have a universal comedic appeal that transcends language barriers – Youtube sensation Crazy Frog goes “bing-ding,” stop-motion penguin Pingu goes “noot-noot,” and Chilean street clown Karcocha speaks in whistle. Clowns don’t need language to make people laugh – Charlie Chaplin did it silently – but what if their gibberish meant something? Intrigued, I sought to explore a species of clowns and how their naturalistic language could evolve the hoots and honks of clown gibberish through naturalistic processes of grammaticalization. First, I evolved a base language (which is not “clown-ish” in itself). Then, I modified the whistled register used by shepherds (not unlike Hmong and Silbo Gomero) into a clown register, which hides the true meaning of jokes in a series of whistles (to encode tone) and other sound effects (to encode consonants). Combined with a clownish subspecies of sapiens and a culture built around “facepaint as self” and humor as a leveling mechanism, this constructed language is vividly clownish. My ultimate intent is to demonstrate the limitless possibility of language change through a detailed, yet silly lens.
ContributorsSteiner, Reed (Author) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Thesis director) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / The Design School (Contributor) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Sch (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
The purpose of this thesis is to provide an in-depth examination of the syntactic rules and pragmatic structures that govern the construction of Thai nominal phrases. There is a current debate among linguistic researchers of the Thai language (and others within the Tai-Kadai family) contemplating whether the inherent syntactic structure of nominal phrases projects a Determiner Phrase [DP] or a Noun Phrase [NP] (Birmingham, 2020; Jenks, 2011; Piriyawiboon, 2010; and Singhapreecha, 2001). An examination of the grammatical and pragmatic features that dictate the formation of Thai nominals, as well as an investigation of the prevailing linguistic theories focused on nominal phrase construction supporting each structure, has been conducted and is presented within this thesis. This extensive research, performed to address the dilemma “Does the Thai language project a DP or an NP?”, has resulted in the conclusion that the Thai language, with its free word-order and its fascinating pragmatic structures, projects an underlying NP phrase structure that allows for an optional determiner, used to indicate specificity.
ContributorsBirmingham, Sabrina A (Author) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Thesis advisor) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / Peterson, Tyler (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Temporal adverbial clauses are present in many forms of writing. These clauses can impact the complexity of a sentence. Sentence complexity can have some effect on how readers with a diagnosed reading disability, such as dyslexia, process language. This study incorporated Hawkins’ (1994) theories about Early Immediate Constituency into a self-paced reading task designed to evaluate whether or not temporal adverbial clause positioning caused the main clause of the sentence to become more difficult to understand. Hawkins theorized that main clauses appearing at the beginning of a sentence would create an environment where a reader could reach sentence comprehension faster (CITE). The experiment used software called Linger to present the self-paced reading task. Eight participants – four with dyslexia and four without – volunteered to read sentence items from a college level textbook that had temporal adverbial clauses appearing before and after the main clause of sentences. Statistical significance in the findings show that participants read sentences more quickly when the temporal adverbial clause appeared before the main clause; however, more research is required to determine the difference between sentences fronted by adverbial clauses and sentences fronted by main clauses.
ContributorsClaire, Jordan (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / James, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Temporal features and frequency of pauses have been studied extensively in the literature, but the interest in the syntactic location of pauses is a more recent development. While previous research has studied the pause patterns of L1 and L2 speakers as well as the effects of pause location on perceptions of fluency, these studies have all utilized a binary approach the categorization of pauses as occurring either between or within clauses or major constituent boundaries. This research attempts to take a look at pause placement with a finer distinction of pause location, including junctures that occur between and within phrases. To accomplish this, two experiments were conducted. The first experiment gathered read-aloud speech samples from native, non-native, and heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese, which were then manipulated in Praat to contain only a single pause that occurred either between or within phrases. The samples were presented to native Chinese speakers to assess for perceptions of fluency as affected by the pause location condition. Findings of this preliminary pilot study did not find a significant correlation between pause location and perceptions of fluency at the phrasal level. The second experiment gathered spontaneous speech samples from the same speaker population as Experiment 1. The pauses that occurred in the samples were coded according to a system developed by the author to account for eight different syntactic junctions, and the percentage of pause at each location was calculated. Analysis showed a significant correlation with pause location and percentage of pauses (p < 0.01), as well as a statistically significant interaction between the effects of speaker status and pause location on percentage of pause (p = 0.011). The findings of this study are limited due to the small population size, but research in this fine-grained analysis of pause location within a clause has implications in the fields of L2 acquisition, psycholinguistics, and natural language processing.
ContributorsKennedy, Mary Kathryn (Author) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Thesis advisor) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / Prior, Matthew T (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This is a constructed language that is primarily based on getting rid of Morphological and Syntactical ambiguity. Much of the inspiration I took when making this language came from Latin and Ancient Greek, adopting the things that make those languages beautiful, and changing the things that make them difficult. The main thing I wanted this language to accomplish was to achieve maximum specificity, clarity, and complexity of thought, and therefore I focused heavily on clause formation and making this a highly synthetic language.
ContributorsJennings, Elisa Tamara (Author) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Thesis director) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12