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- All Subjects: durational metrics
Description
The following is a brief grammatical sketch of the Chechen language whose analysis largely follows that of the existing Ingush grammar by Johanna Nichols. All data was elicited virtually from native speakers via translation exercises. It presents the current orthography of the language as well as the transcription system used in Nichols and Vagapov's Chechen dictionary, and further discusses the morphology of the major parts of speech as well as a few syntactic characteristics of the language such as agreement, coordination, and subordination.
ContributorsSchrooten, Eric (Author) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Thesis director) / Peterson, Tyler (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2023-12
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
Languages have long been studied through the rhythm class framework, which discriminates them into separate classes on the basis of shared rhythmic properties. Originally these differences were attributed to the isochronous timing of different prosodic units, such as stress intervals in “stress-timed” languages and syllables in “syllable-timed” languages. More recent work has turned to durational metrics as a means of evaluating rhythm class, by measuring the variability and proportion of segmental intervals in the speech stream. Both isochrony and durational metrics are no longer viewed as correlative with natural language rhythm, but durational metrics in particular have remained prevalent in the literature. So long as the conclusions of durational metrics are not overextended, their analysis can provide a useful mechanism for assessing the compatibility of a language with a given rhythm class by way of comparative analysis. This study therefore presents a durational-metric comparison of Scottish Gaelic, a language which has frequently been described as stress-timed but has never been empirically tested for rhythm class, with English, a prototypical and well-studied example of a stress-timed language. The Gaelic metric scores for %V (percentage of vocalic content), ΔV (standard deviation in vocalic interval length), and ΔC (standard deviation in consonantal interval length) (Ramus et al. 1999) are shown to be very similar to those measured for English, indicating that the language displays similar patterns of durational variability and segmental proportion typically ascribed to a rhythmically stress-timed language. This provides clear support for the classification of Scottish Gaelic as stress-timed.
ContributorsKellogg, Jackson (Author) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Thesis advisor) / Gelderen, Elly van (Committee member) / Peterson, Tyler (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020