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211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Many people find it hard to decide on their linguistics research topics because of the assumed complexities involved. They struggle to choose easy research paper topics for English language too because they think it could be too simple for a university or college level certificate.

All that you need to learn about Linguistics and English is sprawled across syntax, phonetics, morphology, phonology, semantics, grammar, vocabulary, and a few others. To easily create a top-notch essay or conduct a research study, you can consider this list of research topics in English language below for your university or college use. Note that you can fine-tune these to suit your interests.

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

If you want to study how language is applied and its importance in the world, you can consider these Linguistics topics for your research paper. They are:

• An analysis of romantic ideas and their expression amongst French people
• An overview of the hate language in the course against religion
• Identify the determinants of hate language and the means of propagation
• Evaluate a literature and examine how Linguistics is applied to the understanding of minor languages
• Consider the impact of social media in the development of slangs
• An overview of political slang and its use amongst New York teenagers
• Examine the relevance of Linguistics in a digitalized world
• Analyze foul language and how it’s used to oppress minors
• Identify the role of language in the national identity of a socially dynamic society
• Attempt an explanation to how the language barrier could affect the social life of an individual in a new society
• Discuss the means through which language can enrich cultural identities
• Examine the concept of bilingualism and how it applies in the real world
• Analyze the possible strategies for teaching a foreign language
• Discuss the priority of teachers in the teaching of grammar to non-native speakers
• Choose a school of your choice and observe the slang used by its students: analyze how it affects their social lives
• Attempt a critical overview of racist languages
• What does endangered language means and how does it apply in the real world?
• A critical overview of your second language and why it is a second language
• What are the motivators of speech and why are they relevant?
• Analyze the difference between the different types of communications and their significance to specially-abled persons
• Give a critical overview of five literature on sign language
• Evaluate the distinction between the means of language comprehension between an adult and a teenager
• Consider a native American group and evaluate how cultural diversity has influenced their language
• Analyze the complexities involved in code-switching and code-mixing
• Give a critical overview of the importance of language to a teenager
• Attempt a forensic overview of language accessibility and what it means
• What do you believe are the means of communications and what are their uniqueness?
• Attempt a study of Islamic poetry and its role in language development
• Attempt a study on the role of Literature in language development
• Evaluate the Influence of metaphors and other literary devices in the depth of each sentence
• Identify the role of literary devices in the development of proverbs in any African country
• Cognitive Linguistics: analyze two pieces of Literature that offers a critical view of perception
• Identify and analyze the complexities in unspoken words
• Expression is another kind of language: discuss
• Identify the significance of symbols in the evolution of language
• Discuss how learning more than a single language promote cross-cultural developments
• Analyze how the loss of a mother tongue affect the language Efficiency of a community
• Critically examine how sign language works
• Using literature from the medieval era, attempt a study of the evolution of language
• Identify how wars have led to the reduction in the popularity of a language of your choice across any country of the world
• Critically examine five Literature on why accent changes based on environment
• What are the forces that compel the comprehension of language in a child
• Identify and explain the difference between the listening and speaking skills and their significance in the understanding of language
• Give a critical overview of how natural language is processed
• Examine the influence of language on culture and vice versa
• It is possible to understand a language even without living in that society: discuss
• Identify the arguments regarding speech defects
• Discuss how the familiarity of language informs the creation of slangs
• Explain the significance of religious phrases and sacred languages
• Explore the roots and evolution of incantations in Africa

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

You may as well need interesting Linguistics topics based on sociolinguistic purposes for your research. Sociolinguistics is the study and recording of natural speech. It’s primarily the casual status of most informal conversations. You can consider the following Sociolinguistic research topics for your research:

• What makes language exceptional to a particular person?
• How does language form a unique means of expression to writers?
• Examine the kind of speech used in health and emergencies
• Analyze the language theory explored by family members during dinner
• Evaluate the possible variation of language based on class
• Evaluate the language of racism, social tension, and sexism
• Discuss how Language promotes social and cultural familiarities
• Give an overview of identity and language
• Examine why some language speakers enjoy listening to foreigners who speak their native language
• Give a forensic analysis of his the language of entertainment is different to the language in professional settings
• Give an understanding of how Language changes
• Examine the Sociolinguistics of the Caribbeans
• Consider an overview of metaphor in France
• Explain why the direct translation of written words is incomprehensible in Linguistics
• Discuss the use of language in marginalizing a community
• Analyze the history of Arabic and the culture that enhanced it
• Discuss the growth of French and the influences of other languages
• Examine how the English language developed and its interdependence on other languages
• Give an overview of cultural diversity and Linguistics in teaching
• Challenge the attachment of speech defect with disability of language listening and speaking abilities
• Explore the uniqueness of language between siblings
• Explore the means of making requests between a teenager and his parents
• Observe and comment on how students relate with their teachers through language
• Observe and comment on the communication of strategy of parents and teachers
• Examine the connection of understanding first language with academic excellence

Language Research Topics

Numerous languages exist in different societies. This is why you may seek to understand the motivations behind language through these Linguistics project ideas. You can consider the following interesting Linguistics topics and their application to language:

• What does language shift mean?
• Discuss the stages of English language development?
• Examine the position of ambiguity in a romantic Language of your choice
• Why are some languages called romantic languages?
• Observe the strategies of persuasion through Language
• Discuss the connection between symbols and words
• Identify the language of political speeches
• Discuss the effectiveness of language in an indigenous cultural revolution
• Trace the motivators for spoken language
• What does language acquisition mean to you?
• Examine three pieces of literature on language translation and its role in multilingual accessibility
• Identify the science involved in language reception
• Interrogate with the context of language disorders
• Examine how psychotherapy applies to victims of language disorders
• Study the growth of Hindi despite colonialism
• Critically appraise the term, language erasure
• Examine how colonialism and war is responsible for the loss of language
• Give an overview of the difference between sounds and letters and how they apply to the German language
• Explain why the placement of verb and preposition is different in German and English languages
• Choose two languages of your choice and examine their historical relationship
• Discuss the strategies employed by people while learning new languages
• Discuss the role of all the figures of speech in the advancement of language
• Analyze the complexities of autism and its victims
• Offer a linguist approach to language uniqueness between a Down Syndrome child and an autist
• Express dance as a language
• Express music as a language
• Express language as a form of language
• Evaluate the role of cultural diversity in the decline of languages in South Africa
• Discuss the development of the Greek language
• Critically review two literary texts, one from the medieval era and another published a decade ago, and examine the language shifts

Linguistics Essay Topics

You may also need Linguistics research topics for your Linguistics essays. As a linguist in the making, these can help you consider controversies in Linguistics as a discipline and address them through your study. You can consider:

• The connection of sociolinguistics in comprehending interests in multilingualism
• Write on your belief of how language encourages sexism
• What do you understand about the differences between British and American English?
• Discuss how slangs grew and how they started
• Consider how age leads to loss of language
• Review how language is used in formal and informal conversation
• Discuss what you understand by polite language
• Discuss what you know by hate language
• Evaluate how language has remained flexible throughout history
• Mimicking a teacher is a form of exercising hate Language: discuss
• Body Language and verbal speech are different things: discuss
• Language can be exploitative: discuss
• Do you think language is responsible for inciting aggression against the state?
• Can you justify the structural representation of any symbol of your choice?
• Religious symbols are not ordinary Language: what are your perspective on day-to-day languages and sacred ones?
• Consider the usage of language by an English man and someone of another culture
• Discuss the essence of code-mixing and code-switching
• Attempt a psychological assessment on the role of language in academic development
• How does language pose a challenge to studying?
• Choose a multicultural society of your choice and explain the problem they face
• What forms does Language use in expression?
• Identify the reasons behind unspoken words and actions
• Why do universal languages exist as a means of easy communication?
• Examine the role of the English language in the world
• Examine the role of Arabic in the world
• Examine the role of romantic languages in the world
• Evaluate the significance of each teaching Resources in a language classroom
• Consider an assessment of language analysis
• Why do people comprehend beyond what is written or expressed?
• What is the impact of hate speech on a woman?
• Do you believe that grammatical errors are how everyone’s comprehension of language is determined?
• Observe the Influence of technology in language learning and development
• Which parts of the body are responsible for understanding new languages
• How has language informed development?
• Would you say language has improved human relations or worsened it considering it as a tool for violence?
• Would you say language in a black populous state is different from its social culture in white populous states?
• Give an overview of the English language in Nigeria
• Give an overview of the English language in Uganda
• Give an overview of the English language in India
• Give an overview of Russian in Europe
• Give a conceptual analysis on stress and how it works
• Consider the means of vocabulary development and its role in cultural relationships
• Examine the effects of Linguistics in language
• Present your understanding of sign language
• What do you understand about descriptive language and prescriptive Language?

List of Research Topics in English Language

You may need English research topics for your next research. These are topics that are socially crafted for you as a student of language in any institution. You can consider the following for in-depth analysis:

• Examine the travail of women in any feminist text of your choice
• Examine the movement of feminist literature in the Industrial period
• Give an overview of five Gothic literature and what you understand from them
• Examine rock music and how it emerged as a genre
• Evaluate the cultural association with Nina Simone’s music
• What is the relevance of Shakespeare in English literature?
• How has literature promoted the English language?
• Identify the effect of spelling errors in the academic performance of students in an institution of your choice
• Critically survey a university and give rationalize the literary texts offered as Significant
• Examine the use of feminist literature in advancing the course against patriarchy
• Give an overview of the themes in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
• Express the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s diction in contemporary literature
• Examine the predominant devices in the works of William Shakespeare
• Explain the predominant devices in the works of Christopher Marlowe
• Charles Dickens and his works: express the dominating themes in his Literature
• Why is Literature described as the mirror of society?
• Examine the issues of feminism in Sefi Atta’s “Everything Good Will Come” and Bernadine Evaristos’s “Girl, Woman, Other”
• Give an overview of the stylistics employed in the writing of “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo
• Describe the language of advertisement in social media and newspapers
• Describe what poetic Language means
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing on Mexican Americans
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing in Indian Americans
• Discuss the influence of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” on satirical literature
• Examine the Linguistics features of “Native Son” by Richard Wright
• What is the role of indigenous literature in promoting cultural identities
• How has literature informed cultural consciousness?
• Analyze five literature on semantics and their Influence on the study
• Assess the role of grammar in day to day communications
• Observe the role of multidisciplinary approaches in understanding the English language
• What does stylistics mean while analyzing medieval literary texts?
• Analyze the views of philosophers on language, society, and culture

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

For your college work, you may need to undergo a study of any phenomenon in the world. Note that they could be Linguistics essay topics or mainly a research study of an idea of your choice. Thus, you can choose your research ideas from any of the following:

• The concept of fairness in a democratic Government
• The capacity of a leader isn’t in his or her academic degrees
• The concept of discrimination in education
• The theory of discrimination in Islamic states
• The idea of school policing
• A study on grade inflation and its consequences
• A study of taxation and Its importance to the economy from a citizen’s perspectives
• A study on how eloquence lead to discrimination amongst high school students
• A study of the influence of the music industry in teens
• An Evaluation of pornography and its impacts on College students
• A descriptive study of how the FBI works according to Hollywood
• A critical consideration of the cons and pros of vaccination
• The health effect of sleep disorders
• An overview of three literary texts across three genres of Literature and how they connect to you
• A critical overview of “King Oedipus”: the role of the supernatural in day to day life
• Examine the novel “12 Years a Slave” as a reflection of servitude and brutality exerted by white slave owners
• Rationalize the emergence of racist Literature with concrete examples
• A study of the limits of literature in accessing rural readers
• Analyze the perspectives of modern authors on the Influence of medieval Literature on their craft
• What do you understand by the mortality of a literary text?
• A study of controversial Literature and its role in shaping the discussion
• A critical overview of three literary texts that dealt with domestic abuse and their role in changing the narratives about domestic violence
• Choose three contemporary poets and analyze the themes of their works
• Do you believe that contemporary American literature is the repetition of unnecessary themes already treated in the past?
• A study of the evolution of Literature and its styles
• The use of sexual innuendos in literature
• The use of sexist languages in literature and its effect on the public
• The disaster associated with media reports of fake news
• Conduct a study on how language is used as a tool for manipulation
• Attempt a criticism of a controversial Literary text and why it shouldn’t be studied or sold in the first place

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

With these topics, you can commence your research with ease. However, if you need professional writing help for any part of the research, you can scout here online for the best research paper writing service.

There are several expert writers on ENL hosted on our website that you can consider for a fast response on your research study at a cheap price.

As students, you may be unable to cover every part of your research on your own. This inability is the reason you should consider expert writers for custom research topics in Linguistics approved by your professor for high grades.

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Home > School, College, or Department > CLAS > Applied Linguistics > Dissertations and Theses

Applied Linguistics Dissertations and Theses

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

Prosodic Analysis of Wh -indeterminate Questions in L2 Korean , Jung In Lee

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Critical Analysis of Anti-Asian Hate in the News , Benardo Douglas Relampagos

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of NASA's Instagram Account , Danica Lynn Tomber

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

A Computer Science Academic Vocabulary List , David Roesler

Variation in Female and Male Dialogue in Buffy the Vampire Slayer : A Multi-dimensional Analysis , Amber Morgan Sanchez

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Differences in Syntactic Complexity in the Writing of EL1 and ELL Civil Engineering Students , Santiago Gustin

A Mixed Methods Analysis of Corpus Data from Reddit Discussions of "Gay Voice" , Sara Elizabeth Mulliner

Relationship Between Empathy and Language Proficiency in Adult Language Learners , Mika Sakai

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

College Student Rankings of Multiple Speakers in a Public Speaking Context: a Language Attitudes Study on Japanese-accented English with a World Englishes Perspective , John James Ahlbrecht

Grammatical Errors by Arabic ESL Students: an Investigation of L1 Transfer through Error Analysis , Aisha Saud Alasfour

Foreign Language Anxiety, Sexuality, and Gender: Lived Experiences of Four LGBTQ+ Students , James Donald Mitchell

Verb Stem Alternation in Vaiphei , Jesse Prichard

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Teacher and Student Perceptions of World Englishes (WE) Pronunciations in two US Settings , Marie Arrieta

Escalating Language at Traffic Stops: Two Case Studies , Jamalieh Haley

Lexical Bundles in Applied Linguistics and Literature Writing: a Comparison of Intermediate English Learners and Professionals , Kathryn Marie Johnston

Multilingualism and Multiculturalism: Opinions from Spanish-Speaking English Learners from Mexico, Central America, and South America , Cailey Catherine Moe

An Analytical System for Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary for Data-Driven Learning: an Example from Civil Engineering , Philippa Jean Otto

Loanwords in Context: Lexical Borrowing from English to Japanese and its Effects on Second-Language Vocabulary Acquisition , Andrew Michael Sowers

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

The Effect of Extended Instruction on Passive Voice, Reduced Relative Clauses, and Modal Would in the Academic Writing of Advanced English Language Learners , Audrey Bailey

Identity Construction and Language Use by Immigrant Women in a Microenterprise Development Program , Linda Eve Bonder

"That's the test?" Washback Effects of an Alternative Assessment in a Culturally Heterogeneous EAP University Class , Abigail Bennett Carrigan

Wiki-based Collaborative Creative Writing in the ESL Classroom , Rima Elabdali

A Study of the Intelligibility, Comprehensibility and Interpretability of Standard Marine Communication Phrases as Perceived by Chinese Mariners , Lillian Christine Holland

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Empowering All Who Teach: A Portrait of Two Non-Native English Speaking Teachers in a Globalized 21st Century , Rosa Dene David

A Corpus Based Analysis of Noun Modification in Empirical Research Articles in Applied Linguistics , Jo-Anne Hutter

Sound Effects: Age, Gender, and Sound Symbolism in American English , Timothy Allen Krause

Perspectives on the College Readiness and Outcome Achievement of Former Intensive English Language Program (IELP) Students , Meghan Oswalt

The Cognitive Development of Expertise in an ESL Teacher: A Case Study , Lyndsey Roos

Identity and Investment in the Community ESL Classroom , Jennifer Marie Sacklin

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Code Switching Between Tamazight and Arabic in the First Libyan Berber News Broadcast: An Application of Myers-Scotton's MLF and 4M Models , Ashour S. Abdulaziz

Self-Efficacy in Low-Level English Language Learners , Laura F. Blumenthal

The Impact of Wiki-based Collaborative Writing on English L2 Learners' Individual Writing Development , Gina Christina Caruso

Latino Men Managing HIV: An Appraisal Analysis of Intersubjective Relations in the Discourse of Five Research Interviews , Will Caston

Opportunities for Incidental Acquisition of Academic Vocabulary from Teacher Speech in an English for Academic Purposes Classroom , Eric Dean Dodson

Emerging Lexical Organization from Intentional Vocabulary Learning , Adam Jones

Effects of the First Language on Japanese ESL Learners' Answers to Negative Questions , Kosuke Kanda

"Had sh'er haute gamme, high technology": An Application of the MLF and 4-M Models to French-Arabic Codeswitching in Algerian Hip Hop , Samuel Nickilaus McLain-Jespersen

Is Self-Sufficiency Really Sufficient? A Critical Analysis of Federal Refugee Resettlement Policy and Local Attendant English Language Training in Portland, Oregon , Domminick McParland

Explorations into the Psycholinguistic Validity of Extended Collocations , J. Arianna Morgan

A Comparison of Linguistic Features in the Academic Writing of Advanced English Language Learner and English First Language University Students , Margo K. Russell

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

The First Year: Development of Preservice Teacher Beliefs About Teaching and Learning During Year One of an MA TESOL Program , Emily Spady Addiego

L1 Influence on L2 Intonation in Russian Speakers of English , Christiane Fleur Crosby

English Loan Words in Japanese: Exploring Comprehension and Register , Naoko Horikawa

The Role of Expectations on Nonnative English Speaking Students' Wrtiting , Sara Marie Van Dan Acker

Hypothetical Would-Clauses in Korean EFL Textbooks: An Analysis Based on a Corpus Study and Focus on Form Approach , Soyung Yoo

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

Negative Transfer in the Writing of Proficient Students of Russian: A Comparison of Heritage Language Learners and Second Language Learners , Daria Aleeva

Informal Learning Choices of Japanese ESL Students in the United States , Brent Harrison Amburgey

Iktomi: A Character Traits Analysis of a Dakota Culture Myth , Marianne Sue Kastner

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Motivation in Late Learners of Japanese: Self-Determination Theory, Attitudes and Pronunciation , Shannon Guinn-Collins

Foreign Language Students' Beliefs about Homestays , Sara Racheal Juveland

Teaching Intonation Patterns through Reading Aloud , Micah William Park

Disordered Thought, Disordered Language: A corpus-based description of the speech of individuals undergoing treatment for schizophrenia , Lucas Carl Steuber

Emotion Language and Emotion Narratives of Turkish-English Late Bilinguals , Melike Yücel Koç

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

A Library and its Community: Exploring Perceptions of Collaboration , Phoebe Vincenza Daurio

A Structural and Functional Analysis of Codeswitching in Mi Vida Gitana 'My Gypsy Life,' a Bilingual Play , Gustavo Javier Fernandez

Writing Chinuk Wawa: A Materials Development Case Study , Sarah A. Braun Hamilton

Teacher Evaluation of Item Formats for an English Language Proficiency Assessment , Jose Luis Perea-Hernandez

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

Building Community and Bridging Cultures: the Role of Volunteer Tutors in Oregon’s Latino Serving Community-Based Organizations , Troy Vaughn Hickman

Theses/Dissertations from 2007 2007

Beyond the Classroom Walls: a Study of Out-Of-Class English Use by Adult Community College ESL Students , Tracey Louise Knight

Theses/Dissertations from 2004 2004

A Dialect Study of Oregon NORMs , Lisa Wittenberg Hillyard

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

The Acquisition of a Stage Dialect , Nathaniel George Halloran

Self-perceptions of non-native English speaking teachers of English as a second language , Kathryn Ann Long

The Development of Language Choice in a German Immersion School , Miranda Kussmaul Novash

Theses/Dissertations from 2002 2002

Writing in the Contact Zone: Three Portraits of Reflexivity and Transformation , Laurene L. Christensen

A Linguistic Evaluation of the Somali Women's Self Sufficiency Project , Ann Marie Kasper

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

Attitudes at the Bank : A Survey of Reactions to Different Varieties of English , Sean Wilcox

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

A Comparison of the Child Directed Speech of Traditional Dads With That of Stay-At-Home Dads , Judith Nancarrow Barr

Error Correction Preferences of Latino ESL Students , John Burrell

The Relationship Between Chinese Character Recognition Strategies and the Success of Character Memorization for Students of Mandarin Chinese , Hui-yen Emmy Chen

Portland dialect study: the story of /æ/ in Portland , Jeffrey C. Conn

On Communicative Competence : Its Nature and Origin , Mary Lou Emerson

The Influence of Cultural Backgrounds on the Interpretations of Literature Texts Used in the ESL Classroom , Barbara Jostrom Gates

Chinese Numeratives and the Mass/Count Distinction , David Goodman

Learning, Motivation, and Self : A Diary Study of an ESL Teacher’s Year in a Japanese Language Classroom , Laura Ruth Hawks

Portland Dialect Study - High Rising Terminal Contours (HRTs) in Portland Speech , Rebecca A. Wolff

Theses/Dissertations from 1998 1998

The Bolinger Principle and Teaching the Gerunds and Infinitives , Anna Maria Baratta-Zborowski

Training for Volunteer Teachers in Church-Affiliated English Language Mission Programs , Janet Noreen Blackwood

Šawaš ılıˀ--šawaš wawa: A Participant Observation Case Study of Language Planning by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon , Gregry Michael Davis

Phonological Processing of Japanese Kanji Characters , Randy L. Evans

Academic ESL Reading : Semantic Mapping and Lexical Acquisition , Jeffrey Darin Maggard

The Representation of Gender in Current ESL Reading Materials , Kyunghee Ma

Perception of English Passives by Japanese ESL Learners : Do Adversity Passives in L1 Transfer? , Koichi Sawasaki

Theses/Dissertations from 1997 1997

Non-Literate Students in Adult Beginning English as a Second Language Classrooms - A Case Study , Sandra Lynn Banke

A Case Study of Twelve Japanese ESL Students' Use of Interaction Modifications , Darin Dooley

The Home-School Connection: Parental Influences on a Child's ESL Acquisition , Catharine Jauhiainen

A Comparison of Two Second Language Acquisition Models for Culturally and Linguistically Different Students , Karen Dorothy Kuhn

ESL CD-ROM Principles and their Application: A Software Evaluation , Stephanie Burgi LaMonica

Developing a Language in Education Policy for Post-apartheid South Africa: A Case Study , Nancy Murray

Video Self-Monitoring as an Alternative to Traditional Methods of Pronunciation Instruction , P. C. Noble

Analysis of Rhetorical Organization and Style Patterns in Korean and American Business Fax Letters of Complaint in English , Mi Young Park

Ethnic and Language Identity Among a Select Group of Vietnamese-Americans in Portland Oregon , Jay Owen Peterson

The Importance of Time for Processing in Second Language Comprehension and Acquisition , Jennifer Lee Watson

Theses/Dissertations from 1996 1996

The Constraints of a Typological Implicational Universal for Interrogatives on Second Language Acquisition , Dee Anne Bess

An Assessment of the Needs of International Students for Student Services at Southern Oregon State College , Molly K. Emmons

The relationship between a pre-departure training program and its participants' intercultural communication competence , Daniel Timothy Ferguson

An Exploratory Evaluation of Language and Culture Contact by Japanese Sojourners in a Short-term US Academic Program , Elizabeth Anna Hartley

Correction of Classroom Oral Errors: Preferences among University Students of English in Japan , Akemi Katayama

An Analysis of Japanese Learners' Comprehension of Intonation in English , Misako Okubo

An Evaluation of English Spoken Fluency of Thai Graduate Students in the United States , Sugunya Ruangjaroon

A Cross-cultural Study of the Speech Act of Refusing in English and German , Charla Margaret Teufel

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A Student's Guide to the MA TESOL Writing an Applied Linguistics Thesis or Dissertation: A Guide to Presenting Empirical Research

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Marilyn Lewis, A Student's Guide to the MA TESOL Writing an Applied Linguistics Thesis or Dissertation: A Guide to Presenting Empirical Research, ELT Journal , Volume 64, Issue 4, October 2010, Pages 494–495, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccq052

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Two titles from the same publisher in two successive years on closely related topics seem to provide proof that publications in our field are becoming increasingly specific. Written in different parts of the world (Washington State University for Bell and Auckland University of Technology for Bitchener), both draw on current research and are strengthened by the authors' personal experience. Another common feature is that each could be of interest to a wider readership than the suggested MA TESOL/Applied Linguistics students of the titles, as this review intends to show.

In A Student's Guide , Bell models the academic style students will need to use themselves by including internal referencing to support the theory. Of her six chapters, the first three (with one slight exception) are an introduction to the TESOL discipline, with only the last three addressing the topic of studying for the MA of the book's title. This is not a criticism since students will never reach the point of putting together their dissertation or thesis if they have not first thought more widely about the field.

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BYU ScholarsArchive

Home > Humanities > Linguistics > Theses and Dissertations

Linguistics Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2022 2022.

Temporal Fluency in L2 Self-Assessments: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Spanish, Portuguese, and French , Mandy Case

Biblical Hebrew as a Negative Concord Language , J. Bradley Dukes

Revitalizing the Russian of a Heritage Speaker , Aaron Jordan

Analyzing Patterns of Complexity in Pre-University L2 English Writing , Zachary M. Lambert

Prosodic Modeling for Hymn Translation , Michael Abraham Peck

Interpretive Language and Museum Artwork: How Patrons Respond to Depictions of Native American and White Settler Encounters--A Thematic Analysis , Holli D. Rogerson

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Trademarks and Genericide: A Corpus and Experimental Approach to Understanding the Semantic Status of Trademarks , Richard B. Bevan

First and Second Language Use of Case, Aspect, and Tense in Finnish and English , Torin Kelley

Lexical Aspect in-sha Verb Chains in Pastaza Kichwa , Azya Dawn Ladd

Text-to-Speech Systems: Learner Perceptions of its Use as a Tool in the Language Classroom , Joseph Chi Man Mak

The Effects of Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback on the Accuracy and Complexity of Writing Produced by L2 Graduate Students , Lisa Rohm

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions as Applied to Motivation in L2 Vocabulary Acquisition , Lindsay Michelle Stephenson

Linguistics of Russian Media During the 2016 US Election: A Corpus-Based Study , Devon K. Terry

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Portuguese and Chinese ESL Reading Behaviors Compared: An Eye-Tracking Study , Logan Kyle Blackwell

Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions to Lower Test Anxiety , Asena Cakmakci

The Categorization of Ideophone-Gesture Composites in Quichua Narratives , Maria Graciela Cano

Ranking Aspect-Based Features in Restaurant Reviews , Jacob Ling Hang Chan

Praise in Written Feedback: How L2 Writers Perceive and Value Praise , Karla Coca

Evidence for a Typology of Christ in the Book of Esther , L. Clayton Fausett

Gender Vs. Sex: Defining Meaning in a Modern World through use of Corpora and Semantic Surveys , Mary Elizabeth Garceau

The attributive suffix in Pastaza Kichwa , Barrett Wilson Hamp

An Examination of Motivation Types and Their Influence on English Proficiency for Current High School Students in South Korean , Euiyong Jung

Experienced ESL Teachers' Attitudes Towards Using Phonetic Symbols in Teaching English Pronunciation to Adult ESL Students , Oxana Kodirova

Evidentiality, Epistemic Modality and Mirativity: The Case of Cantonese Utterance Particles Ge3, Laak3, and Lo1 , Ka Fai Law

Application of a Self-Regulation Framework in an ESL Classroom: Effects on IEP International Students , Claudia Mencarelli

Parsing an American Sign Language Corpus with Combinatory Categorial Grammar , Michael Albert Nix

An Exploration of Mental Contrasting and Social Networks of English Language Learners , Adam T. Pinkston

A Corpus-Based Study of the Gender Assignment of Nominal Anglicisms in Brazilian Portuguese , Taryn Marie Skahill

Developing Listening Comprehension in ESL Students at the Intermediate Level by Reading Transcripts While Listening: A Cognitive Load Perspective , Sydney Sohler

The Effect of Language Learning Experience on Motivation and Anxiety of Foreign Language Learning Students , Josie Eileen Thacker

Identifying Language Needs in Community-Based Adult ELLs: Findings from an Ethnography of Four Salvadoran Immigrants in the Western United States , Kathryn Anne Watkins

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Using Eye Tracking to Examine Working Memory and Verbal Feature Processing in Spanish , Erik William Arnold

Self-Regulation in Transition: A Case Study of Three English Language Learners at an IEP , Allison Wallace Baker

"General Conference talk": Style Variation and the Styling of Identity in Latter-day Saint General Conference Oratory , Stephen Thomas Betts

Implementing Mental Contrasting to Improve English Language Learner Social Networks , Hannah Trimble Brown

Comparing Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) Frequency Bands to Leveled Biology and History Texts , Lynne Crandall

A Comparison of Mobile and Computer Receptive Language ESL Tests , Aislin Pickett Davis

Yea, Yea, Nay, Nay: Uses of the Archaic, Biblical Yea in the Book of Mormon , Michael Edward De Martini

L1 and L2 Reading Behaviors by Proficiency Level: An English-Portuguese Eye-Tracking Study , Larissa Grahl

Immediate Repeated Reading has Positive Effects on Reading Fluency for English Language Learners: An Eye-tracking Study , Jennifer Hemmert Hansen

Perceptions of Malaysian English Teachers Regarding the Importation of Expatriate Native and Nonnative English-speaking Teachers , Syringa Joanah Judd

Sociocultural Identification with the United States and English Pronunciation Comprehensibility and Accent Among International ESL Students , Christinah Paige Mulder

The Effects of Repeated Reading on the Fluency of Intermediate-Level English-as-a-Second-Language Learners: An Eye-Tracking Study , Krista Carlene Rich

Verb Usage in Egyptian Movies, Serials, and Blogs: A Case for Register Variation , Michael G. White

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Factors Influencing ESL Students' Selection of Intensive English Programs in the Western United States , Katie Briana Blanco

Pun Strategies Across Joke Schemata: A Corpus-Based Study , Robert Nishan Crapo

ESL Students' Reading Behaviors on Multiple-Choice Items at Differing Proficiency Levels: An Eye-Tracking Study , Juan M. Escalante Talavera

Backward Transfer of Apology Strategies from Japanese to English: Do English L1 Speakers Use Japanese-Style Apologies When Speaking English? , Candice April Flowers

Cultural Differences in Russian and English Magazine Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach , Emily Kay Furner

An Analysis of Rehearsed Speech Characteristics on the Oral Proficiency Interview—Computer (OPIc) , Gwyneth Elaine Gates

Predicting Speaking, Listening, and Reading Proficiency Gains During Study Abroad Using Social Network Metrics , Timothy James Hall

Navigating a New Culture: Analyzing Variables that Influence Intensive English Program Students' Cultural Adjustment Process , Sherie Lyn Kwok

Second Language Semantic Retrieval in the Bilingual Mind: The Case of Korean-English Expert Bilinguals , Janice Si-Man Lam

Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Korean Heritage-Speaking Interpreter , Yoonjoo Lee

Reading Idioms: A Comparative Eye-Tracking Study of Native English Speakers and Native Korean Speakers , Sarah Lynne Miner

Applying the Developmental Path of English Negation to the Automated Scoring of Learner Essays , Allen Travis Moore

Performance Self-Appraisal Calibration of ESL Students on a Proficiency Reading Test , Jodi Mikolajcik Petersen

Switch-Reference in Pastaza Kichwa , Alexander Harrison Rice

The Effects of Metacognitive Listening Strategy Instruction on ESL Learners' Listening Motivation , Corbin Kalanikiakahi Rivera

The Effects of Teacher Background on How Teachers Assess Native-Like and Nonnative-Like Grammar Errors: An Eye-Tracking Study , Wesley Makoto Schramm

Rubric Rating with MFRM vs. Randomly Distributed Comparative Judgment: A Comparison of Two Approaches to Second-Language Writing Assessment , Maureen Estelle Sims

Investigating the Perception of Identity Shift in Trilingual Speakers: A Case Study , Elena Vasilachi

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Preparing Non-Native English Speakers for the Mathematical Vocabulary in the GRE and GMAT , Irina Mikhailovna Baskova

Eye Behavior While Reading Words of Sanskrit and Urdu Origin in Hindi , Tahira Carroll

An Acoustical Analysis of the American English /l, r/ Contrast as Produced by Adult Japanese Learners of English Incorporating Word Position and Task Type , Braden Paul Chase

The Rhetoric Revision Log: A Second Study on a Feedback Tool for ESL Student Writing , Natalie Marie Cole

Quizlet Flashcards for the First 500 Words of the Academic Vocabulary List , Emily R. Crandell

The Impact of Changing TOEFL Cut-Scores on University Admissions , Laura Michelle Decker

A Latent Class Analysis of American English Dialects , Stephanie Nicole Hedges

Comparing the AWL and AVL in Textbooks from an Intensive English Program , Michelle Morgan Hernandez

Faculty and EAL Student Perceptions of Writing Purposes and Challenges in the Business Major , Amy Mae Johnson

Multilingual Trends in Five London Boroughs: A Linguistic Landscape Approach , Shayla Ann Johnson

Nature or Nurture in English Academic Writing: Korean and American Rhetorical Patterns , Sunok Kim

Differences in the Motivations of Chinese Learners of English in Different (Foreign or Second Language) Contexts , Rui Li

Managing Dynamic Written Corrective Feedback: Perceptions of Experienced Teachers , Rachel A. Messenger

Spanish Heritage Bilingual Perception of English-Specific Vowel Contrasts , John B. Nielsen

Taking the "Foreign" Out of the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale , Jared Benjamin Sell

Creole Genesis and Universality: Case, Word Order, and Agreement , Gerald Taylor Snow

Idioms or Open Choice? A Corpus Based Analysis , Kaitlyn Alayne VanWagoner

Applying Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis to an Unrestricted Corpus: A Case Study in Indonesian and Malay Newspapers , Sara LuAnne White

Investigating the effects of Rater's Second Language Learning Background and Familiarity with Test-Taker's First Language on Speaking Test Scores , Ksenia Zhao

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

The Influence of Online English Language Instruction on ESL Learners' Fluency Development , Rebecca Aaron

The Effect of Prompt Accent on Elicited Imitation Assessments in English as a Second Language , Jacob Garlin Barrows

A Framework for Evaluating Recommender Systems , Michael Gabriel Bean

Program and Classroom Factors Affecting Attendance Patterns For Hispanic Participants In Adult ESL Education , Steven J. Carter

A Longitudinal Analysis of Adult ESL Speakers' Oral Fluency Gains , Kostiantyn Fesenko

Rethinking Vocabulary Size Tests: Frequency Versus Item Difficulty , Brett James Hashimoto

The Onomatopoeic Ideophone-Gesture Relationship in Pastaza Quichua , Sarah Ann Hatton

A Hybrid Approach to Cross-Linguistic Tokenization: Morphology with Statistics , Logan R. Kearsley

Getting All the Ducks in a Row: Towards a Method for the Consolidation of English Idioms , Ethan Michael Lynn

Expecting Excellence: Student and Teacher Attitudes Towards Choosing to Speak English in an IEP , Alhyaba Encinas Moore

Lexical Trends in Young Adult Literature: A Corpus-Based Approach , Kyra McKinzie Nelson

A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Academic Word List and the Academic Vocabulary List , Jacob Andrew Newman

A Self-Regulated Learning Inventory Based on a Six-Dimensional Model of SRL , Christopher Nuttall

The Effectiveness of Using Written Feedback to Improve Adult ESL Learners' Spontaneous Pronunciation of English Suprasegmentals , Chirstin Stephens

Pragmatic Quotation Use in Online Yelp Reviews and its Connection to Author Sentiment , Mary Elisabeth Wright

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Conditional Sentences in Egyptian Colloquial and Modern Standard Arabic: A Corpus Study , Randell S. Bentley

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Russian Word Order Patterns , Stephanie Kay Billings

English to ASL Gloss Machine Translation , Mary Elizabeth Bonham

The Development of an ESP Vocabulary Study Guidefor the Utah State Driver Handbook , Kirsten M. Brown

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MA Linguistics

The MA in Linguistics program is interdisciplinary, combining research methods from the humanities and the social, natural, and mathematical sciences.

Program Overview

Our department covers a broad range of research topics, with substantial coverage of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. We approach these topics from several different research traditions and backgrounds, with particular strengths in formal-theoretical linguistics, experimental and field linguistics, acquisition, and computational approaches to the study of communicative behaviour.

The Department is strongly committed to the study of Languages of the Americas, with particular focus on First Nations Languages of Canada, in the areas of documentation and theoretical research. Additionally, we have a long history of work on African languages as well as ongoing research on languages within the Indo-European, Japonic, Sino-Tibetan, Korean, and Uralic families.

Program Requirements

The MA in Linguistics can be earned in two ways: a thesis option and a non-thesis option. Each path has a specific set of course requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to complete the program. If you are unsure about which option is right for you, you will have until April 30 before making a final decision. If you wish to select the non-thesis option, you must send a written request to the Graduate Advisor.

Thesis Option Requirements

Students interested in linguistic research are strongly encouraged to enroll in the program for an MA with thesis. You must complete coursework under the following requirements:

• Breadth requirement (9 credits): A minimum of nine credits from the following courses or equivalents:
• LING 508: Phonetic Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• LING 510: Phonological Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• LING 520: Syntactic Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• LING 525: Semantic Theory and Analysis (3 credits)
• Methods requirement (6 credits): A minimum of six credits from the following courses: 
• LING 531: Field Methods in LInguistics I (3 credits)
• Either LING 532, LING 518, or an appropriate methods-related course within in Linguistics or in a different department
• Thesis Requirement  (6 credits) : LING 549C: Master’s Thesis
• Remaining 9 credits: The remaining nine credits must be chosen with approval from the supervisory committee; courses may be from Linguistics or another appropriate department.

First-year graduate students who do not have sufficient background for the first-year graduate courses are expected to take the appropriate undergraduate courses prior to registration in the graduate course.

Until their MA thesis prospectus has been approved, all MA students are expected to maintain a regular, active, physical presence in the Department. This can include participation in lab/project/reading groups, attending colloquia, research seminars or other ad hoc departmental events, meetings with their supervisor, committee members or other researchers in relevant areas. Certain circumstances may necessitate a student’s absence during some of this period (e.g. for field work); such absences should be discussed with the supervisory committee. At all stages of the program, a student and their supervisor should be in regular contact and communication. At the thesis/dissertation stage, such contact should happen at least once a month (again, barring extenuating circumstances), either through in-person meetings, videoconferencing, or communication/reporting over email.

In order to graduate, students must have a sound knowledge of one language other than English. They must fulfill this language requirement by the time of their thesis prospectus submission.

The language to fulfill this requirement is expected to be chosen on the basis of its relevance for the student’s research program, in consultation and by approval of the student’s supervisory committee. Relevance can be determined by a variety of factors such as the following:

• The language is the object of the student’s research, or is closely related to the language of research; for example, where a student’s research focuses on Yoruba, knowledge of Yoruba could fulfill the requirement, or where the student’s research is on one Salish language, knowledge of another could fulfill the requirement.
• There is a significant and relevant linguistic literature in the language; for example, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Russian could fulfill the requirement.
• The language serves as a medium for conducting linguistic research relevant to the student’s program of research; for example, Hausa could fulfill the language requirement for a student conducting research on a language of northern Nigeria.

Students may fulfill the language requirements in various ways:

• Certain departments at UBC periodically schedule reading knowledge examinations. This exam evaluates a student’s language competence based on the translation of a text (approximately 1000 words) relating to the student’s field of study. A minimum second class standing (B- or better) must be obtained on this exam in order to satisfy the Foreign Language Requirement. For further information on such examinations, contact the appropriate departments.
• If you speak a language natively, your native proficiency can be accepted by the supervisory committee.
• If you have completed a program of post-secondary language study (a minimum of 12 credits or equivalent). A minimum second class standing (B- or better) must be obtained for these credits in order to satisfy the Foreign Language Requirement.
• For other languages, it may be necessary to establish an ad hoc mechanism for conducting an evaluation of the student’s knowledge. In such cases, the student should make a written request to their supervisory committee, including a proposal for how such an examination can take place, and including a proposal for a qualified examiner. Students considering this option should be aware that the requirements (including the required level of competence in the language and how to demonstrate it) may vary extensively from case to case, depending on the norms of the language community involved.

A Research Supervisor is appointed for a student before the beginning of their first year in the program. The Graduate Advisor and the Research Supervisor, in consultation with the incoming student, will establish a three-member Temporary Supervisory Committee no later than the end of the first week of the first term. Prior to registration for the second year, the Temporary Supervisory Committee shall be dissolved and a new Supervisory Committee shall be established. A MA Supervisory Committee consists minimally of the Research Supervisor and two additional members. Normally the members of the supervisory committee are from the Department of Linguistics; if the students committee includes members from outside the Department of Linguistics, a majority must be departmental members.

Establishing a Research Supervisor is the joint responsibility of the student and the Graduate Advisor. Both new and continuing MA students will have a meeting with their Supervisory Committee during the last week of August or in early September. At this meeting students can discuss their course work and other aspects of their program. Incoming students are requested to bring with them copies of the calendars of course offerings from the institutions they previously attended (other than UBC). At the end of April or the beginning of May, all students will meet with their Supervisory Committee to discuss the year’s progress and to plan further work. Any changes in a graduate student’s program must be approved by the Supervisory Committee. The Graduate Advisor, in advising students, makes every effort to ensure that they have satisfied all the requirements for the degree — language requirements, course work, etc. However, it is ultimately every student’s responsibility to ensure that at the time he/she applies for the degree he/she has met all the requirements. Separate records of a student’s program and progress are kept by the Faculty of Graduate Studies; these records are obtained from information provided by the Graduate Advisor and are used to determine a student’s ultimate eligibility for graduation.

• Summary page (Max: ½ page)
• Detailed description (Max: 3 pages)
• Bibliography
• Budget (if there will be costs associated with completing the thesis research
• Budget justification

The prospectus is approved by the supervisory committee. Once approved, the prospectus is filed in the Department Reading Room and circulated electronically to the Department. The completed thesis must be read and approved by the supervisory committee, which will conduct an oral examination on the completed thesis. Students will be encouraged to present a version of their paper at a departmental colloquium or at a regional, national, or international meeting.

• Supervision: As soon as the student’s supervisory committee is formed, the student and his/her committee will meet to arrange procedures for organizing the thesis and to establish procedures the committee will follow in reading and approving the thesis. Preliminary drafts, either of individual chapters or of the whole thesis, should be submitted as the student proceeds. The thesis committee should assess the thesis at two stages — when the topic is proposed, and before the thesis reaches final typing. With respect to criticism and subsequent revisions, it is up to the student and the supervisor to check the procedures and deadlines of both the department and the university.
• Thesis preparation : Theses should be prepared in accordance with the thesis formatting regulations available on the Faculty of Graduate Studies website. Typescripts which do not meet the standards specified may be rejected. Documentation should follow the style guide of The Canadian Journal of Linguistics, Language or the American Psychological Association.
• Number of copies: The candidate should prepare a minimum of five copies of the thesis: one for himself/herself, one for the supervisor, one for delivery to the Faculty of Graduate Studies, and two to be retained by the Linguistics Department (one for filing and one for the Reading Room). Normally a student will also provide a copy to each member of his/her supervisory committee.
• Oral examination: A final oral on the thesis may be held at any time of the year, provided the supervisory committee can be assembled. The final oral examination will not be held until the student has fulfilled all the other requirements for the degree.
• Distance exemption: A student residing more than 500 miles from the university when he/she submits his/her thesis may request exemption from the oral. Where substantial revisions to the thesis are not required, such a request may be granted at the discretion of both the examining committee and the Graduate Advisor.

Non-Thesis Option Requirements

Students interested in linguistic research are strongly encouraged to enroll in the program for an MA with thesis. You must complete a minimum of 30 credits of coursework under the following requirements:

• 24 credits must be at the 500 level or above.
• The other 6 credits must be at the 300 level or above.
• Complete a graduating essay.

For specific course requirements, please contact the Graduate Advisor.

A Graduating Essay differs from a thesis both in the scope and in the degree of originality expected. A typical Graduating Essay is a minimum of 15 pages in length. The Essay should go beyond the formal course work of the program but, where appropriate, may originate in formal courses. The Essay is not required to contain original results, but should be a finished product demonstrating reasonable mastery and sophistication in its area.

The completed and approved Essay should be deposited in the Departmental office, and the Faculty of Graduate Studies will be so advised.

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Recent projects, theses, and dissertations

The following are recently completed PhD dissertations and MA Linguistics/MA Applied Linguistics theses, as well as MILR projects and theses. You can access any of these  UVic's Research and Learning repository (UVicSpace) .

PhD Dissertations

Yu, Chen. 2023.  The perception and production of Mandarin citation tones by prelingually deaf adults.

Khatri, Raj. 2022.  Supporting B.C.’s expanding international education: The efficacy of academic reading strategy instruction among adult English-as-an-additional-language students.

Deng, Jie. 2022.  L2, L3 and Heritage Acquisition of Chinese T3 Sandhi: Comprehensibility and Accentedness

Friesen, Dianne. 2022.  A Grammar of Relationship: How Mi’kmaw verbs indicate the relationship between participants in a sentence.

Yousefi, Marziyeh. 2020.  Investigating the Effect of Corrective Feedback on Second Language Pragmatics: Face-to Face vs. Technology-Mediated Communication.

Anisman, Adar. 2019.  When 'if' is 'when' and 'when' is 'then': The particle nı̨dè in Tłı̨chǫ.

Hart-Blundon, Patricia. 2019.   Learning Standard English in addition to a Local English Variety.

Ceong, Hailey Hyekyeong. 2019.   The morphosyntax of clause typing: single, double periphrastic, and multifunctional complementizers in Korean.

Liu, Jianxun. 2019.  The syntax of V-V resultatives in Mandarin Chinese .

Leonard, Janet. 2019.  The Phonological Representation and Distribution of Vowels in SENĆOŦEN (Saanich).

Alkutbi, Douaa. 2018.  Bridging the Gap: A Study of Academic Language-Learning Needs of Saudi International Students.

Onosson, D. Sky. 2018.  An Acoustic Study of Canadian Raising in Three Dialects of North American English.

Lucarevschi, Claudio Rezende. 2018.  The Role of Storytelling in the Development of Pronunciation of Brazilian Learners of English as a Foreign Language.

Qian, Xiaojuan. 2017. Novice, Paraprofessional, and Professional Translators' Strategy Use in Chinese-English Translation Processes: Retrospective Reflections, Concurrent Screen-capturing, and Key-stroke Logging.

Travers, Nicholas. 2017. English-as-an-Additional-Language Job Interviews: Pragmatics Training for Candidates and Analyzing Performance on Both Sides of the Table.

Nogita, Akitsugu. 2016. L2 Letter-Sound Correspondence: Mapping Between English Vowel Graphemes and Phonomes by Japanese EAL Learners.

Luo, Shan. 2015. Gestural overlap across word boundaries: Evidence from English and Mandarin speakers.

Li, Ya. 2015. Timing and Melody: An Acoustic Study of Rhythmic Patterns of Chinese Dialects .

Karim, Khaled. 2013. The Effects of Direct and Indirect Corrective Feedback (CF) on English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) Students' Revision Accuracy and Writing Skills.

Nicolson, Marianne. 2013. Yexa Uḱwine’, yexa Gukw, dłuwida Awinagwis” The Body, the House, and the Land: The Conceptualization of Space in Kwakwaka’wakw Language and Culture   [INTD: Linguistics and Anthropology]

Moisik, Scott. 2013. The Epilarynx in Speech .

Lee, Sunghwa. 2013. Multiple Exponence in Non-inflectional Morphology.

Robertson, David Douglas. 2012. Kamloops Chinuk Wawa, Chinuk pipa, and the vitality of pidgins .

Tian, Jun. 2012. The Effects of peer editing versus co-writing on writing in Chinese-as-a-foreign language .

Pytlyk, Carolyn. 2012. Expanding the scope of orthographic effects: evidence from phoneme counting in first, second, and unfamiliar languages .

MA Linguistics Theses

Farr, Chloë. 2024.  Unmasking ChatGPT: The Challenges of Using Artificial Intelligence for Learning Vocabulary in English as an Additional Language.

Li, Mitchell, 2024.  Statistical Power for Small Effect Sizes: An investigation of backward priming in Mandarin-English bilinguals.

Campbell, Jessalyn. 2023.  Serial Verb Constructions in SENĆOŦEN.

Loughlin, Aiden. 2022.  Who is they? Pronoun use across time and social structure.

Allen, Caroline. 2022.  GET over time: a longitudinal variationist analysis of passive voice in contemporary English.

Moser, Christiana. 2021.  Heterogeneity in the structure of Icelandic -st figure reflexives.

Buaillon, Emmanuelle. 2021.  À Paris/sur Paris: A Variationist Account of Prepositional Alternation Before City Names in Hexagonal French.

Fortier, Kyra. 2019.  An Acoustic Investigation of Vowel Variation in Gitksan .

Comeau, Emily. 2018.  Literacy and Language Revitalization: Leaving a Visible Trace.

Dworak, Catherine. 2018.  Limxhl Hlgu Wo'omhlxw Song of the Newborn: Knowledge and Stories Surrounding Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn. A Collaborative Language Project.

Richards, Matthew. 2018.  Prosodic Structure of the Foxtrot.

Hilderman, Dustin. 2018.  Codeswitching in the Multilingual Mind.

Nolan, Tess. 2017. A Phonetic Investigation of Vowel Variation in Lekwungen.

Enriquez Garcia, Ildara. 2017.  Variation and Clitic Placement among Galician Neofalantes.

Jenni, Barbara. 2017. Self-Narrative Following Acquired Brain Injury: An Exploration of Linguistic, Subjective, and Other Associated Factors.

Hildebrand-Edgar, Nicole. 2016. Creaky Voice: An Interactional Resource for Indexing Authority.

Huijsmans, Marianne. 2015. Linearization and Prosodic Phrasing: The Case of SENĆOŦEN Second-Position Clitics.

Saunders, Susan Jane. 2015. A Language Survey of Northern Metis Languages: A Community-Based Language Revitalization Project.

Litvin, Natalia. 2014.  An Ultrasound Investigation of Secondary Velarization in Russian.

Xing, Nan. 2014. English /l/s as Produced by Native English and Mandarin Chinese Speakers.

McKishnie, Andrew. 2013.  Depictives and Wh-Movement of Depictives in East Slavic.

McCreery, Dale. 2013. Challenges and Solutions in Adult Acquisition of Cree as a Second Language .

Liu, Jianxun. 2012. An applicative approach to “oblique object” constructions and DOCs in Chinese.

Ceong, Hailey Hyekyeong. 2012. The Syntax of Korean polar alternative questions: A-not-A.

MA Applied Linguistics Theses

Mao, Siyu (Rain). 2024.  Chinese-as-a-First-Language (CL1) and English-as-a-First-Language (EL1)Undergraduate Students' Business Writing in Canadian Universities:A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study of Linguistic Features.

Somerville, Matthew. 2023.  Nihonjin Kyoushi Dake?: The Perceptions and Beliefs of a Non-Native Speaking Teacher in a High-intermediate Japanese Language Class.

O'Toole, Erin. 2023.  A critical examination of Core French curriculum, teaching methods, and learning motivational factors in British Columbia.

Aleassa, Lana. 2023.  Apology Strategies in High vs. Low Context Cultures.

Cervantes, Eloisa. 2023.  Heritage Language Anxiety in Canadian Post-Secondary Learners of Spanish.

Serpas, Gill. 2023.  Mainly English, Some Japanese: Exploring the Opinions of EFL Students and EFL Teachers on Using Translanguaging in EFL Classrooms in Japan.

Shirani, Reza. 2020.  Explicit versus Implicit Corrective Feedback During Videoconferencing: Effects on the Accuracy and Fluency of L2 Speech.

Blackstone, Pam. 2019.   An investigation of pedagogical approaches and methods used in a French university French-as-a-foreign-language program: teacher and student perspectives.

Bagherbeigi, Vahid. 2019.  The Impact of Computer-mediated Communication on EFL Learners' Oral Performance.

Kim, Keun. 2019. The efficacy of lexical stress diacritics in the English comprehensibility and accentedness of Korean speakers.

Zhang, Yiran. 2018.  A Comparative Study of the Language Content of Employment-Related Units in Government-Funded Language Programs for Newcomers in Canada and Australia.

Suessenbach, Lisa. 2018.  A Phonetic and Phonological Investigation of North American English (NAE) Segments in the Interlanguage Grammar of a Native Speaker of German (SHG).

Romig, Silas. 2017. The Production and Perception of English Vowels by Native Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese Living in Victoria, Canada.

Thompson Wagner, Christiani Pinheiro. Preliminary Study of the Role of Eye Contact, Gestures, and Smiles Produced by Chinese-as-a-First-Language Test-Takers on Ratings Assigned by English-as-a-First-Language Examiners During IELTS Speaking Tests.

Hill, Carrie. 2015. Exploring Mandarin-speaking English-as-an-Additional-Language graduate students' academic reading strategies in three reading modes: paper, e-reading without hypertext, and e-reading with embedded hypertext.

Zariski, Ross. 2014. World of Warcraft as a medium for Intermediate-Level English Language Acquisition: Leveling up Accuracy, Fluency, and Lexical Complexity.

Cai, Mengyue. 2014. Undergraduate EAL (English-as-an-Additional-Language) Students' Reported Use of Vocabulary Learning Strategies and its Relationship vis-a-vis Language Proficency, Vocabulary Size, and Gender.

Kim, Jongmin. 2014. Incidental Focus-on-Form and Learner Extraversion.

Parker, Aliana Violet. 2013. Learning the language of the land .

Malec, Alesia. 2013. Examining emotional responses to written feedback and the role emotions play on second language writing performance .

Chen, Sibo. 2013. Genre Features of Personal Statements by Chinese English-as-an-Additional-Language Writers: A Corpus-Driven Study .

Hannigan, Patricia. 2013. Promoting awareness and regulation of social and affective behaviours during L2 speaking tasks through written reflection .

Park, Seon-Young. 2012 . Korean parents', kindergarten teachers', and kindergarten students' perceptions of early English-language education .

Yu, Zhaoru. 2012. The production and the perception of English vowels by Mandarin speakers .

Fu, Tingfen. 2012. Corrective feedback and learner uptake in a Chinese as a foreign language class: do perceptions and the reality match?

Guo, Xiaoqian. 2012. L1 and L2 writing strategies: a study of Chinese graduate writers using concurrent think-aloud.

Kaneko, Kyoko. 2012. A comparative study of the use of request strategies by learners and native speakers of Japanese.

Fan, Yanan. 2012. Articulatory timing of English consonant clusters in the coda positions: a study of Chinese-English interlanguage.

MA Applied Linguistics Non-Thesis

Aalam, Niloofar. 2019. The role of playing collabortive online games in mediating vocabulary learning.

Cathers, Bryan. 2019.  A Survey of Michif Language Use and Attitudes of Métis in Victoria .

Sinha, Tara-Shankar. 2017. ESL Learners' Perception and the Efficacy of Written Corrective Feedback.

MILR Projects and Theses

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Recent Masters Theses

Since 2009, most theses submitted by M.A. and M.S. recipients at the university are published online at the OhioLINK Electronic Theses & Dissertations Center (EDT). This page lists theses submitted by recipients of the M.A. in Linguistics, beginning with the more recent theses which are avalable through EDT. We are currently in the process of extending the list back to the first OSU M.A. in Linguistics (Thomas Scovel's thesis on A distinctive feature analysis of the phonemic segments of Mandarin in 1964), and intend to provide a link to a pdf file or other publication information where available and otherwise a link to the OSU Library Catalog listing.

Riley Wagner

The Perception of Loan Verb Integration Strategies in Romanian Committee:  Brian Joseph (advisor) and Andrea Sims

Giorgio Sbardolini

Conventions and Change in Semantics Committee:  Craige Roberts (advisor)

Race, Gender, and /u/: Social Perceptions of a Non-Stereotype Feature Committee: Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (advisor) and Donald Winford

Ajda Zeynep Gokcen

A Matter of Debate: Using Dialogue Relation Labels to Augment (Dis)agreement Analysis of Debate Data Committee:  Marie-Catherine de Marneffe (advisor) and Brian Joseph

Eric Snyder

Generalizing Individuating/Measure-Ambiguities Committee:  Craige Roberts and Shapiro Stewart (co-advisors)

Jennifer Qian Zhang

Nonsibilant Fricative Acquisition by Bilingual Guoyu-Taiwanese Southern Min Children Committee:  Mary Beckman (advisor) and Micha Elsner

Yourdanis Sedarous

Studies in Nominal Modification in Bohairic Coptic Committee:  Peter Culicover and Brian Joseph (co-advisors)

Lara Downing

Dutchified English in an Ohio Mennonite Community Committee: Brian Joseph and Donald Winford

Gregory Kierstead

Projectivity and the Tagalog Reportative Evidential Committee: Craige Roberts and Judith Tonhauser (co-advisors)

Robert Brice Russ

Examining Regional Variation Through Online Geotagged Corpora Committee: Kathryn Campbell-Kibler and Brian Joseph Since receiving his MA in Linguistics, Brice Russ has worked as a social media / policy consultant, including serving a three-year term as the first Director of Communications for the LSA.

Jeffrey Parker

Palatalization and Utilization of Contrast: An Information-theoretic Investigation of Palatalization in Russian Committee: Brian Joseph and Andrea Sims After receiving his MA in Linguistics, Jeffrey Parker transferred back to the Slavic Linguistics program , where he is currently finishing his dissertation before taking up a faculty position in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Brigham Young University.

"Y'all Done Up and Done It": The Semantics of a Perfect Construction in an Upstate South Carolina Dialect Committee: Donald Winford and Judith Tonhauser After receiving his MA, Eric Ruppe accepted the position of French immersion teacher at Meadow Glen Middle School in Lexington, SC .

Michelle Dionisio

The Syntax and Semantics of the Tagalog Plural Marker Mga Committee: Judith Tonhauser and Craige Roberts

Sara Phillips-Bourass

Implicit Imitation of Regional Dialects in Typically Developing Adults and Adults with High-Functioning Autism Committee: Cynthia Clopper and Shari Speer

Michael Collins

Cognitive Perspectives On English Word Order Committee: William Schuler and Peter Culicover

Hartman Brawley

What Informs Event Descriptions: Language, Salience, and Discourse in English and Japanese Committee: Laura Wagner, Shari Speer, and Kiwako Ito

Lia Mansfield

A CVG Approach to Verp-Particle Constructions in English Committee: Carl Pollard and Robert Levine

Youn Kyung Shin

Variability in the Use of Infinitival to in Present Day American English Committee: Brian Joseph, Robert Levine, and Donald Winford

Oxana Skorniakova

Sensitivity to Sub-Phonemic Variation: Evidence from a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) Goodness-Rating Task Committee: Mary Beckman and Shari Speer

Sarah Bibyk

The Development of Children’s Processing of English Pitch Accents in a Visual Search Task Committee: Shari Speer, Laura Wagner, Cynthia Clopper, and Kiwako Ito After receiving her MA, Sarah Bibyk was accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Rochester .

Parsing with Local Content Committee: Chris Brew, Laura Wagner, and Shari Speer After receiving his MA, John Pate went on to earn a PhD at the University of Edinburgh and was a post-doctoral research fellow in Machine Learning and Computational Linguistics at Macquarie University before taking up his current position on the faculty in Linguistics at the University of Buffalo .

Differential Object Marking in Paraguayan Guaraní Committee: Judith Tonhauser and Peter Culicover After receiving his MA, Cory Shain worked for several years as a linguist at SIL International before returning to Ohio State University and entering the doctoral program in Linguistics.

Rachel Shain

The Preverb Eis - and Koine Greek Aktionsart Committee: Judith Tonhauser, Brian Joseph, and Craige Roberts

Ross Metusalem

Evoking Upcoming Contrast through Accentual Prominence: The Effect of Producing L+H* on Discourse Entities and Discourse Markers Committee: Kiwako Ito and Shari Speer After receiving his MA, Ross Metusalem went on to earn a PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego , where he is now teaching in the Department of Psychology.

Jon Stevens

The Old English Demonstrative: A Synchronic and Diachronic Investigation Committee: Brian Joseph and Judith Tonhauser After receiving his MA, Jon Stevens went on to earn a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania before taking up his current position on a postdoctoral researcher on the PRAGSales project in computational pragmatics at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin.

Sharon Ross

Interpretation by Adults and Children of Implicatures Generated through Contrastive Stress: Evidence that Prosodic Contrastive Stress has a Predominantly Presuppositional Character Committee: Peter Culicover and Laura Wagner After receiving her MA, Sharon Ross become a Fulbright Scholar doing research on The Semantics of Focus Marking and Contrastive Stress in Israeli Sign Language at the University of Haifa.

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List of Top Linguistics Dissertation Topics and Ideas in 2023

Are you experiencing difficulty picking a linguistics dissertation title ? Linguistics dissertation topics are frequently considered as a different and complex subject that includes a sharp investigation of linguistics, structure, semantics, and history of different dialects.

Also, check related posts for French dissertation topics and English dissertation topics.

Language may appear as a single word, but it is a complete discipline having its own diverse areas and domains. Linguistics dissertation topics cover all these areas such as phonology, structure, semantics, applications, and many others as well.

Different languages are spoken throughout the world, and each has its own specific areas. Linguistics thesis topics also cover the differences between different global languages and their structures as well as functions.

Applied linguistics and socio-linguistics are the two most widely researched areas of investigation in the field of linguistics on a global level.

List of Top Linguistics Dissertation Topics and Ideas for college students

Given below is an interesting list of research topics in linguistics:

• Historical analysis of systematic functional linguistics: connecting past with the present and the future.
• Undergoing critical discourse analysis using corpus linguistics methods: a review of the literature.
• An integration between corpus linguistics and audiovisual translation.
• Understanding the link between resilience linguistics and orthography: a descriptive study.
• Speakers of endangered languages: how linguistic training can help?
• Structural linguistics and Saussurean linguistic thought: focus on emergence and development.
• Using computational corpus linguistics methods to analyze continuous neuronal activity in natural speech.
• Systemic functional linguistics and culturally sustaining pedagogies: understanding the relationships.
• Low-level English language users in an education program: benefits of teaching linguistics.
• The role played by linguistics in the domain of feminism: a systematic analysis.
• Language teaching education and folk linguistics: a descriptive study.
• Second language learners and cognitive linguistics challenges: a review of the literature.
• Uncovering the Unknown Chomsky in linguistics: a qualitative approach.
• Linking linguistics, ethnography, and evangelism: a descriptive approach.
• Cognitive linguistics and fictive motion: understanding the relationship.
• Place of ELT in the field of applied linguistics in X country.
• How romantic mythopoeia has affected Khoesan linguistics? A descriptive study.
• Historical analysis of clinical linguistics: connecting past with present and future.
• Studying the relationship between structural linguistics and linguistics of universals.
• Understanding language, linguistics, and literature in modern foreign languages: a descriptive approach.
• Correlational analysis of cognitive neuropsychology, aphasia therapy, and clinical linguistics.
• Research in applied linguistics: potential challenges and interventions.
• Using systemic functional linguistics as a culturally sustainable approach towards academic language education.
• Cognitive linguistics: conceptual complexity versus semantic complexity.
• Problem-solving inference as a high-order cognitive skill in linguistics: a descriptive study.
• The role played by language vitality and linguistics delivery in development of linguistics: a systematic analysis.
• Descriptive analysis of structure and substance in linguistics.
• Understanding the ethical practices in clinical linguistics: a review of the literature.
• Descriptive linguistics in UK versus USA: a comparative analysis.
• Language endangerment in 21 st century: the role played by linguistics.
• The role played by ethnology and linguistics in translation problems: a quantitative study.
• Corpus linguistics: past, present, and future.
• Educational linguistics in developed versus developing countries of the world: a comparative analysis.
• Language learning and experimental linguistics: a grounded theory approach.
• Effects of accountability and transparency in applied linguistics: a descriptive study.
• The sensitivity of the distinction between English-restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses for Chinese L2-learners
• The effects of literature circles on Chinese foreign language immersion students’ literacy-skills
• Future directions for ‘role and reference grammar’: Distinctions to be drawn between Russian and English
• An assessment of standardized and spontaneous language measures in late talkers
• The interrelation between Cornish identity and Cornish dialect: A case study of two Cornish octogenarians and two Cornish twenty year old.
• Gender in the community of practice ‘University Caving Club’: Phonological variation
• The use of metaphor as a motivator for change: Differences in Obama’s rhetoric between the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.
• How Another Set of Linguistics Become the Norm: The Way Technology Changes Communication
• How Neuro-Linguistic  Programming (NLP) Can Reduce Negative Power of Words for Trauma-Victims
• The Rapid Development of Language: How Childhood Can Make or Break-Speech

To compose an excellent paper, it would help if you had the option to break down and reach robust inferences on a few zones of linguistics to demonstrate your insight and competency in control. Above is the list of linguistics dissertation topics, and you can choose one to make your dissertation exceptional.

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Home > CLA > APPLIED_LINGUISTICS > APPLIED_LINGUISTICS_THESES

Applied Linguistics Masters Theses Collection

This collection contains open access and campus access Masters theses, made possible through Graduate Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The full content of open access theses is available to all, although some files may have embargoes placed on them and will be made available as soon as possible. The full content of campus access theses is only available to those either on the UMass Boston campus or with a UMass Boston campus username and password. Click on the "Off-Campus UMass Boston Users" link on the record page to download Campus Access publications. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this thesis through resources like Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global or through Interlibrary Loan.

Theses from 2024 2024

Writing For Your Profession: L2 English Students' Acquisition of Academic English , Sonja Haakonsen

Theses from 2023 2023

The "Messy Middle": A Framework for Analyzing Raciolinguistic Inequity , Casey Erin Anthony

Japanese Reading Japlish: High School Students Study Their Own Fashion Linguistic Landscape , Gabriel Frost Johnson

Theses from 2021 2021

Meaning-Making Dynamics of Job Interview Performances , Jacquelyn K. Bertman

Theses from 2020 2020

Computerized Dynamic Assessment of Grammar in Second Language Development , Tina S. Randall

Limited Viewpoints: The Implementation of Multimodal Constructs in an ELL Model Curriculum Unit , Deborah A. Smith

Theses from 2019 2019

Adult Educators at the Crossroads of Language Learning and Workforce Development: A Qualitative Study of Teacher Agency , Liz Ging

Language Learning and ADA: An Observation of d/Deaf Adults and Their Interpreters in ESL Classrooms , Katharine M. Ward

Theses from 2017 2017

Languaging at Work: The Language Socialization of Support Staff in the Healthcare Workforce , Kristen E. Schlapp

Theses from 2016 2016

Performing Language and Identities: Adult Immigrant Students and the Creation of a Play , Kathleen R. McGovern

Theses from 2015 2015

Discourses and Capital in Court Trials: Representation of Witness Accounts and Identity , Misty Crooks

Theses from 2014 2014

What's in a Game? Identity Negotiations and Pedagogical Implications of Gameplay Discourse , Caleb Reed

Their Decision to Wear Al Hijab: The Stories of U.S. Northeastern Muslim Women , Hadeel Salman

Theses from 2012 2012

Meanings and Typologies of Duboisian Double Consciousness within 20th Century United States Racial Dynamics , Marc E. Black

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Master Program Linguistics

Quicklinks und sprachwechsel, main navigation, master thesis, table of contents, the master thesis, preparation, formal requirements, booking and deadlines, recommended reading.

Semester Awards

Archive of previous MA theses

The Master Thesis is a written piece of work written independently by the student and is supervised by a Professor or another member of staff holding at least a PhD degree. As a rule, the Master's thesis comprises 50 - 90 pages (approx. 29,000 - 52,000 words) and is graded.

The Master Thesis is usually supervised by a professor. Members of staff holding a doctoral degree are also allowed to supervise MA theses. Note, however, that they are not obliged to do so. 

Make sure to contact a potential supervisor prior to booking the MA thesis module online – ideally at the end of the preceding semester, but no later than: 

             August 5 for the fall semester      

             January 5 for the spring semester

Students are to agree on their topic with their supervisor in a timely manner. Further details pertaining to requirements specific to the respective field in which the student has chosen to write the thesis should be discussed with them. 

We strongly recommend that you write your MA thesis in the last semester and that you have successfully completed at least one seminar paper before starting your MA thesis.

The topic of the MA thesis can either be chosen freely or come from topics suggested by lecturers. The language in which the thesis is written is determined according to the agreement with the supervisor. It should be noted, however, that if a teaching diploma is being pursued, it is advisable to choose the topic for the MA thesis in a way that it will also be recognized for the teaching diploma (for details, see section Lehrdiplom für Maturitätsschulen ). 

The topic of the MA thesis can either be chosen freely or come from topics suggested by lecturers. The language in which the thesis is written is determined according to the agreement with the supervisor. It should be noted, however, that if a teaching diploma is being pursued, it is advisable to choose the topic for the MA thesis in a way that it will also be recognized for the teaching diploma (for details, see section Lehrdiplom an Maturitätsschulen . 

The recommendation for the formatting of your MA thesis is as follows:

• Font: Times New Roman
• Font size: 12pt
• Line spacing: 1.5
• Margin: left/right 2.5cm, top/bottom 2cm
• Justification: justified with automatic hyphenation

Please discuss specifics with your supervisor.

Visit the download area for template covers and the Selbständigkeitserklärung  under General Guidelines and Templates .

The MA thesis must be booked online during the  module booking period . Click on “Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences” to see the current deadlines as well as the cancellation deadlines. 

The  latest possible submission dates  for the MA thesis are:

           December 1 for the fall semester

          June 1 for the spring semester

General information from the Faculty of Arts can be found here . 

We strongly recommend that you write your MA thesis in the last semesters and that you have successfully completed at least one seminar paper before starting your MA thesis.

Supervision Agreement

Once you have booked the MA thesis module, please download this Supervision Agreement (PDF, 78 KB) and have it signed by your supervisor and you. Send it back to [email protected]

Alison Wray, &  Aileen Bloomer. 2012. Projects in Linguistics and Language Studies: A Practical Guide to Researching Language. New York/London: Routledge.

Sunderland, Jane. 2010. Research questions in linguistics. In Lisa Litosseliti, ed. Research Methods in Linguistics. London: Continuum.

The semester awards, with a value of CHF 600.–, are granted by the faculties for outstanding scholarly work. A total of 30 awards are distributed according to the size of the student body at the individual faculties. The awards are presented by the President of UZH.

Two of our students have won a semester award, congratulations! 

• "Shifting Pronouns and Disruptive Technology: Studying Singular ‚They‘ with GPT- 3" by Carlos Hartmann in HS22 (Digital Linguistics)
• "Mouse Tracking for Reading (MoTR): A New Incremental Processing Paradigm" by Cui Ding in HS23 (Digital Linguistics)

You will fine a list of MA thesis titles written by our students. This is not an exhaustive list; we only publish with permission of the author. This list is meant to give you an idea of what other students have written their MA thesis on. Some of the theses are published on ZORA.

If you wish to make your own MA thesis available on ZORA please contact our study advisor .

Weiterführende Informationen

«my thesis in 5 minutes».

«My Thesis in 5 Minutes» is an informal  event where we talk and answer your questions about writing a Master's Thesis in the Linguistics program. Some students will briefly talk about their MA thesis writing process.

Who : Students from the Linguistics program who either like to share where they are in their thesis writing process or those that are seeking more information.  When : Friday, 19th of April, 2024 from 10:30-12:00 Where : Cafeteria, Room AND 2.51 in Oerlikon. Andreasstrasse 15, 8050 Oerlikon

For registration or if you have questions, please contact Lorena Schneider,  [email protected]

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Postgraduate taught

MA Linguistics

Gain a thorough foundation and background in modern linguistics

Year of entry: 2024 (September)

1 year full-time, 2 years part-time

Department of Language and Linguistic Science

September 2024 ( semester dates )

Apply for this course

Join us online or in person to find out more about postgraduate study at York.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language.

The MA in Linguistics at York offers a route into linguistic study for those who want to apply and develop their critical analysis and learning skills from other subjects to questions that are central to the study of language. You will engage with both theoretical and empirical approaches, and develop the tools to investigate linguistic questions as a researcher in your own right. Such questions include:

• What are the properties of the sound systems of language?
• What is grammatical structure, and what is the extent of cross-linguistic structural variation?
• How is language used to convey meaning?
• How do social structures affect language?

World-leading research

Ranked 1st in the UK for the quality of our research - according to the Times Higher Education’s ranking of the latest REF results (2021).

Innovative department

We're joint third in the UK for linguistics, according to the Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024.

Studying phonetics allows me to appreciate the fine details of human speech: the rhythms, intonations, sudden stops and breathy starts. It trains your ear to identify sounds you’ve always heard, yet never really heard before. It equips you with the skills to transcribe these sounds and share them with others. Believe me: after taking phonetics, you'll never view conversation in the same way again. Daniel, MA Linguistics Read more on what our students say about us.

Course content

Our programme takes you on an exciting journey of discovery that begins with intensive training in both the core theoretical issues and the practical data analysis techniques of phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics.

You then choose specialist modules within up to two of these areas, through which you deepen your subject knowledge while also developing your abilities in analysing data, evaluating evidence and the quality of arguments, and articulating your own conclusions. Finally, you design and conduct your own independent linguistic research project for your dissertation.

A research training seminar supports you on your path towards the dissertation, during which you advance your transferable skills in critical reading, research question formulation, research ethics, and presentation to an audience, as well as developing specialist skills in writing in linguistics and the use of digital tools for linguistic research.

• Dissertation

Core modules

Semester one.

• Phonetics and Phonology

Semester Two

• Research Training

Option modules

You will choose one option module in Semester 1, from:

• Language Variation and Change

You will choose two option modules in Semester 2, from:

• Phonological Development
• Neurolinguistics: Language and the Brain
• Sociophonetics
• Syntactic Theory
• Semantic Theory
• Advanced Topics in Language Variation and Change
• A Usage-based View of Language

The full list of options available to you will be confirmed after you begin your course. For further information please get in touch .

If you have covered substantial parts of the taught MA programme in your undergraduate degree, please talk to us about whether  our MSc Linguistics programme would be more suitable for you.

Our modules may change to reflect the latest academic thinking and expertise of our staff, and in line with Department/School academic planning.

You'll prepare and write a research dissertation over Semester 2 and the vacation. This will be supervised by a member of staff. You'll submit your dissertation in September.

Topics have ranged from:

• A phonetic and acoustic analysis of English vowel realisations by a group of adult Hausa immigrants living in Britain
• Deaccenting in L2
• An investigation into Long Distance Scrambling: Minimalism, Case and Labelling
• Argument/adjunct asymmetries in wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese
• A Probabilistic Semantics for Causality in Counterfactuals
• Comparative study of written and spoken code-switches in Malaysia
• Claiming identity in interaction: A discursive analysis

Recent MA dissertation topics

The York approach

Every course at York is built on a distinctive set of learning outcomes. These will give you a clear understanding of what you will be able to accomplish at the end of the course and help you explain what you can offer employers. Our academics identify the knowledge, skills, and experiences you'll need upon graduation and then design the course to get you there.

Students who complete this course will be able to:

• Approach with confidence intricate, complex and unfamiliar linguistic phenomena, discern and analyse relevant patterns in linguistic data, and convey their significance effectively and with appropriate technical conventions.
• Select and deploy appropriate qualitative and quantitative research methods acquired through the study of the nature and use of language to gain a holistic and multifaceted understanding of linguistic phenomena.
• Propose creative and principled solutions to linguistic problems, appealing to linguistic theory where appropriate, and contribute them effectively to written reports and presentations.
• Communicate clearly and effectively at an appropriate level for different audiences the nature and relevance of linguistic questions and controversies, the pivotal significance of language for human cognition, and the ways in which knowledge of language influences behaviour.
• Apply advanced reasoning and critical perspectives on linguistic and cultural diversity by synthesising and critically engaging with arguments from a variety of standpoints.
• Create detailed and persuasive, academically and ethically informed, project proposals at a professional level, and initiate, develop and complete a substantial independent research project.
• Manage their own development as researchers and professionals, demonstrating the ability to reflect on their own practice and on feedback received, and seeking assistance where appropriate.

Fees and funding

Annual tuition fees for 2024/25.

Students on a Student Visa are not currently permitted to study part-time at York.

For courses which are longer than one year , the tuition fees quoted are for the first year of study.

• UK (home) fees may increase in subsequent years (up to a maximum of 2%).
• International fees may increase in subsequent years in line with the prevailing Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rate (up to a maximum of 10%).

Fees information

UK (home) or international fees?  The level of fee that you will be asked to pay depends on whether you're classed as a UK (home) or international student.  Check your fee status .

Find out more information about tuition fees and how to pay them.

• Postgraduate taught fees and expenses

Funding information

Discover your funding options to help with tuition fees and living costs.

We'll confirm more funding opportunities for students joining us in 2024/25 throughout the year.

If you've successfully completed an undergraduate degree at York you could be eligible for a  10% Masters fee discount .

Funding opportunities

• UK government Masters loans
• Funding for UK students
• Funding for international students

Find out more about funding specific to  Language and Linguistic Science .

Living costs

You can use our  living costs guide  to help plan your budget. It covers additional costs that are not included in your tuition fee such as expenses for accommodation and study materials.

Teaching and assessment

You’ll work with world‐leading academics who’ll challenge you to think independently and excel in all that you do. Our approach to teaching will provide you with the knowledge, opportunities, and support you need to grow and succeed in a global workplace.

Teaching format

You'll be taught with a mixture of lectures, seminars, workshops and practical training. You'll have approximately three contact hours a week for each module. For some modules you’ll complete collaborative group work outside your classes. You’ll be set essential reading, and will complete weekly assigned exercises.

A Research Training module runs in Semester 2, to support your development in academic skills as a linguist in preparation for the dissertation.

All modules, including the Research Training module, offer developmental assessments that do not contribute to your final mark. These provide a chance to practice your skills and gain useful feedback on your progress and understanding, before you take the final assessments. A member of the teaching staff will act as your supervisor throughout the degree, to help guide your studies and monitor progress.

All of our modules have Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) websites where all crucial materials—reading lists, handouts, discussion boards—are accessible.

We have our own departmental e-Lab for the teaching and study time of our students. Here you will have access to a variety of resources, including specialist linguistics software, corpora of different varieties, and online language-learning materials. 

Teaching location

You will be based in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science on Campus West. Some of your contact hours will be in or close to Vanbrugh College, and all of your teaching will be on Campus West.

About our campus

Our beautiful green campus offers a student-friendly setting in which to live and study, within easy reach of the action in the city centre. It's  easy to get around campus  - everything is within walking or pedalling distance, or you can always use the fast and frequent bus service.

Assessment and feedback

A range of assessments formats are used, including exercises, essays, and exams. You'll produce 5,000-word essays for your option modules. 

For the Research Training module you'll take one examination, and write a methodological critique of a linguistics research paper.  Finally, you will also complete a research dissertation of up to 12,000 words. You'll also complete exercises and assignments which do not contribute to your final grade that will give you useful feedback on your progression.

Typical offer Undergraduate degree 2:1 or equivalent Other international qualifications

English language

If English isn't your first language you may need to provide evidence of your English language ability. We accept the following qualifications:

	Minimum requirement
IELTS (Academic and Indicator)	7.0, minimum 6.5 in each component
Cambridge CEFR	C1 Advanced: 185, with 176 in each component
Oxford ELLT	8, minimum 7 in each component
Duolingo	130, minimum 120 in all other components
LanguageCert SELT	C1 with 33/50 in each component
LanguageCert Academic	75 with a minimum of 70 in each component
KITE	495-526, with 459-494 in all other components
Skills for English	C1: Pass overall, with Pass in each component
PTE Academic	67, minimum 61 in each component
TOEFL	96, minimum 23 in each component
Trinity ISE III	Distinction in all component

For more information see our postgraduate English language requirements .

If you haven't met our English language requirements

You may be eligible for one of our pre-sessional English language courses . These courses will provide you with the level of English needed to meet the conditions of your offer.

The length of course you need to take depends on your current English language test scores and how much you need to improve to reach our English language requirements.

After you've accepted your offer to study at York, we'll confirm which pre-sessional course you should apply to via You@York .

You can apply and send all your documentation online. You don’t need to complete your application all at once: you can start it, save it and finish it later.

• How to apply

Get in touch if you have any questions

• Postgraduate Administrator
• [email protected]
• +44 (0) 1904 322652

Related courses

If you are new to the field or have only minimal prior background:

• MA in Applied Linguistics

If you have considerable prior background:

• MSc in Forensic Speech Science
• MSc in Linguistics
• MA in Psycholinguistics

Discover York

Accommodation

We offer a range of campus accommodation to suit you and your budget, from economy to premium.

Student life

Explore campus and city life and hear what our current students have to say about living here.

Lively, full of culture and beautiful, York is regularly voted one of the best places to live and visit in the UK.

Find out more about York. Chat to staff and students and take the tour, on campus or online.

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Graduates & Theses

Program graduates and their theses, select by graduation year, cassidy amundsen.

Graduation Year: 2024 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Unveiling Linguistic Authenticity: Analysis of AAE in Performative Poetry Thesis Advisor/s:   Jamilläh Rodriguez, David Mora-Marin, Michael Terry Abstract:  

Lucas Adelino

Graduation Year: 2024 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Paraop: A Novel Framework for the Automatic Annotation of Paraphrase Operations Thesis Advisor/s:   Caitlin Smith, Michael Terry, Katya Pertsova Abstract:  

Ashton Rooney

Graduation Year: 2024 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   THE PROSODIC RHYTHM OF YUCATEC MAYA AND YUCATECAN SPANISH Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith, David Mora-Marin, Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Heejeong Wee

Graduation Year: 2024 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Distinguishing “made of/from/with” based on the semantic relations of the arguments Thesis Advisor/s:   Katya Pertsova, Jamilläh Rodriguez, Michael Terry Abstract:  

Erin Humphreys

Graduation Year: 2024 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Rethinking mental verb acquisition: Animate objects as a potential cue to verb meaning Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker, Brian Hsu, Laura Demsey Abstract:  

Colin Nixon

Graduation Year: 2024 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Second Language Acquisition of Phonotactics: Learning Through Positive and Negative Evidence Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith, Katya Pertsova Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2023 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Perceptions and Attitudes toward L1 Singapore English Speakers: A Critique of the "Native Speaker" Notion Thesis Advisor/s:   Paul Roberge, Michael Terry, Becky Butler Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2023 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Impact of Attitudes and Use on First Language Attrition and Backward Transfer for Mandarin-English Bilinguals Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker, Brian Hsu, Michael Terry Abstract:  

Benjamin Coleman

Graduation Year: 2023 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   CONSONANT WEIGHT AND DURATION: NO PHONETIC EVIDENCE OF PHONOLOGICAL STRUCTURE Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith, Moreton Elliott, David Mora-Marin Abstract:  

Andrew Knudsen

Graduation Year: 2023 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Role of Glyph Blocks in Punctuating Mayan Texts Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marin, Joseph Lam, Matthew Looper, Katya Pertsova Abstract:  

Jarem Saunders

Graduation Year: 2023 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   OBSERVABLEND: Application of Observable Linguistic Features to Improve Machine Learning Predictions of English Lexical Blends Thesis Advisor/s:   Katya Pertsova, Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Rebecca Winters

Graduation Year: 2023 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   COMPARING THREE THEORIES OF ORIGIN OF THE ELDER FUTHARK: A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH TO THE QUESTION Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marin, Janet Downie, Paul Roberge Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2022 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Control and Biomechanics in Coarticulation: Insights from an Ultrasound Study of Standard Mandarin Apical Vowels Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton, Jeff Mielke, Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Martha Thomas

Graduation Year: 2022 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   A Quantitative Analysis of the Language Used By Violent and Non-Violent Incels Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marin, Mohamed Mwamzandi, Mike Terry Abstract:  

Jolie Hiers

Graduation Year: 2022 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Spanish Teacher Attitudes Toward Gender-Neutral Spanish Forms Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker, David Mora-Marin, Jim Michnowicz Abstract:  

Yuanchen Bao

Graduation Year: 2022 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese by American Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners of Chinese Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith, Misha Becker Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2021 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The selectional relations and constituency of classifiers in Mandarin Chinese Thesis Advisor/s:   Brian Hsu, Misha Becker, Mike Terry Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2021 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Contribution of Morphological Awareness to Word Segmentation Among Adult L2 Chinese Speakers Thesis Advisor/s:   Katya Pertsova, Misha Becker, Jia Lin Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2021 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Lexical and Sandhi Tones in Nanchang Gan: A Phonetic Description Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith, Elliott Moreton, David Mora-Marin Abstract:  

Tristan Bavol

Graduation Year: 2020 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Preferred Argument Structure in Azajo Dialect P’urhepecha Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marin, Paul Roberge, Mike Terry Abstract:  

Michael Bruxvoort

Graduation Year: 2020 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Enumerators in S’gaw Karen; A Compilation and Analysis Thesis Advisor/s:   Brian Hsu, Katya Pertsova, David Mora-Marin Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2020 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   More than Words: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Islamic State Language Thesis Advisor/s:   Mike Terry, David Mora-Marin, Cori Dauber Abstract:  

Megan Fletcher

Graduation Year: 2020 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Bias in the Classroom: How that Southern Twang Could Influence Instructor Evaluations Thesis Advisor/s:   Katya Pertsova, Becky Butler, David Mora-Marin Abstract:  

Erin Chesson

Graduation Year: 2020 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Heritage speaker use of pro-drop and verbal agreement morphology in Tigrinya Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker, Abbas Benmamoun, Brian Hsu Abstract:  

Minlu Zhang

Graduation Year: 2020 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Lexical Structure and Semantic Changes of the Nomenclature of Body Terms in Xainju Wu Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marin, Uffe Bergeton, Mike Terry Abstract:  

William Carter

Graduation Year: 2019 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Explicit and Implicit Acquisition of Opacity: Initial Evaluations of A Dual-System Model of Grammar Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton, Katya Pertsova, Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2019 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   OMG break a leggg lol: Digital discourse-pragmatic variation in a theater-based community of practice Thesis Advisor/s:   Paul Roberge, Katya Pertsova, David Mora-Marin Abstract:  

Melissa Klein

Graduation Year: 2019 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Cherokee Writing Reexamined: A Linguistic Analysis of the Cherokee Syllabary Thesis Advisor/s:   Benjamin Frey, Misha Becker, David Mora-Marin Abstract:  

Mykel Brinkerhoff

Graduation Year: 2019 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   On Subcategorization and PRIORITY: Evidence from Welsh Allomorphy Thesis Advisor/s:   Brian Hsu, Katya Pertsova, Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Kate Rustad

Graduation Year: 2018 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Taking Linguistics: Does an Introductory Linguistics Class Result in Increased Social Emotional Competency? Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín, Jules Terry, Glynis Cowell Abstract:  

The present study was conducted to investigate changes in dialectal tolerance and/or social emotional competencies of Linguistics 101 students through the duration of a semester. Students from Linguistics 101 were surveyed twice during Spring 2018, along with students from a control class outside of Linguistics. A third class based in variationist theory was also surveyed.

Six speaker clips of various dialects, Valley Girl, AAE, NNS, and SAE, were played for participants in a verbal-guise task, to be rated on politeness, level of education, sociability, kindness, and professionalism. Participants were asked to rate themselves according to the five core competencies of social emotional learning: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision Making. Minor differences appeared in relation to social emotional competencies when comparing linguistics students to a control group. Dialect tolerance ratings showed minor differences, but not enough to suggest that an introductory linguistics course can change inherent biases.

Raua-Banu Kadirova

Graduation Year: 2018 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Sociolinguistic Attitudes of Kazakhs Towards the Latin Alphabet and Orthography Reform in Kazakh Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín, Paul Roberge, Michael Terry Abstract:  

This research study examines the sociolinguistic attitudes of Kazakhs towards the Latin alphabet and orthography reform by means of the sociolinguistic attitude survey. The recent announcement of Nursultan Nazarbaev, the Kazakh president of the Republic of Kazakhstan, about an intention of the Kazakh government to have shifted the current Cyrillic-based Kazakh alphabet to the Latin seemed to lead to the division of the Kazakh society into two opposite groups.

The president announced a full support of the Latin alphabet adoption by various sections of the population of Kazakhstan, although there is not or no publicly available a research study or official consensus regarding the reform in Kazakh. Therefore, this research study is directly motivated by this linguistic situation in Kazakhstan.

To find out whether such an alphabet and orthography reform is triggered by a linguistic need of Kazakh, an interview with some Kazakh language experts was also conducted in addition to the sociolinguistic survey. As a result, both the Kazakh language users and experts unanimously support the current reform and associate it with a language need and globalization.

Graduation Year: 2018 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Anaphora Resolution Based on Semantic Relatedness in the Biomedical Domain Thesis Advisor/s:   Katya Pertsova, Jules Terry, Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

In Linguistics, an anaphor is an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context, namely an antecedent expression. Anaphora resolution is a task of identifying the anaphorical relation between the anaphor and its antecedent. Anaphora resolution is used in many high-level tasks of Natural Language Processing. Traditionally, the rule-based approaches to anaphora resolution rely on the syntactic structures and discourse features.

In my study, I implement two semantic approaches on biomedical texts, ontology-dependent method and ontology-independent vector semantic method. The ontology-dependent method will be used to locate the antecedent for noun phrases with determiners while the ontology-independent method will be implemented on pronouns. The results show that the semantic approaches are promising directions in investigating resolutions for anaphora problems in the future.

Haley Boone

Graduation Year: 2018 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Phonetic Motivation for Diachronic Sound Change in Bantu Languages as Evidenced by Voiceless Prenasalized Stop Perception by Native Somali Chizigula Speakers Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Two hypotheses were tested as triggering nasal effacement, leaving an aspiration contrast, in voiceless prenasalized stops in Bantu languages: Aspiration is more reliably produced than voiceless nasalization. Voiceless nasalization is harder to hear than aspiration.

Productions from two Somali Chizigula speakers were measured to test the cue reliability of nasalization amplitude versus aspiration duration. Aspiration is a more reliably produced cue, providing better distinction between voiceless stops.

The perception of voiceless nasalization and aspiration by 10 Somali Chizigula participants was tested. Native productions of voiceless prenasalized and plain stops were cross-spliced to contain pre-burst information from one stop type and post-burst from the other. Participants then identified each stimulus as prenasalized or plain.

Nasalized-only stimuli were identified as "prenasalized" significantly less than control prenasalized stimuli, but aspirated-only stimuli did not receive significantly less "prenasalized" responses than prenasalized controls. Aspiration appears easier to hear, but not more heavily weighted than nasalization.

Brent Eisenbarth

Graduation Year: 2018 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Reading Lips and Learning Sounds: The Effect of Visual Cue Saliency on Phonological Production in a Second Language Thesis Advisor/s:   Lucia Binotti, Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Visual cues in speech perception are often studied in the context of the McGurk effect, that is to say, they are researched insofar as their role in interrupting or supporting audio cues during instanteous speech processing. What is unknown, however, is the extent to which visual cues may influence second language acquisition. L2 production reflects biases in language processing and learning from first language interference and cue availablity, such as markedness, and distinctiveness from other tokens.

Data from Menke and Face, 2009, shows a curious pattern in which advanced Spanish L2 learners produce labial spirantization more accurately than velar spirantization. The difference is most pronounced in advanced speakers. This thesis seeks to reproduce this pattern by testing the distinctiveness of labial and velar singleton- geminate contrasts produced by Italian L2 speakers of differing proficiencies. Participants distinguish labial geminate-singleton pairs more reliably than their velar counterparts, when controlled for the following vowel context.

Will Carter

Graduation Year: 2018 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Explicit and Implicit Acquisition of Opacity Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton, Katya Pertsova, Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Despite OT’s success, opaque alternations prove difficult to capture with constraints, and some violate the theory’s formal restrictions. Here, I propose a novel account of opacity drawing upon developments in psychology. Rather than one grammar, I propose a dual-system model with implicit and explicit mechanisms, a domain-specific OT-like system and a domain-general rule-based system respectively. While the implicit system can handle most linguistic patterns, special cases like opacity require explicit acquisition. This predicts an advantage for explicit over implicit learning of opacity, and that elusive substantive bias may manifest by isolating implicit learners.

In an artificial language experiment, participants learned opaque and transparent metathesis patterns. Despite participants’ difficulty acquiring the patterns, analysis shows a positive effect of explicit learning for opaque patterns. Additionally, implicit learners, but not explicit learners, show higher performance for substantively motivated vs. non-motivated patterns. These results tentatively support the dual-system account, and further exploration is warranted.

Graduation Year: 2018 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Reading Lips and Learning Sounds: The Effect of Visual Cue Saliency on Phonological Production in a Second-Language Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith, Lucia Binotti, Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Hui, 'Eric' An

Graduation Year: 2017 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Classification of Mandarin Idiomatic VPs Thesis Advisor/s:   J. Michael Terry Abstract:  

Due to their uncommon meaning-form pairing, idioms have always been a center piece in discussions about how human mind stores and computes meaning. Based on the composition of their aspectual properties, this thesis classifies Mandarin idiomatic VPs into five different categories to show that certain idioms can be argued to have aspect put together in the syntax while others are best described to have their aspectual properties stored as a whole in the lexicon. This complex result adds partial support to both Representational Modularity and Distributed Morphology, meanwhile providing more cross-linguistic evidence to the discussion on idiomatic meaning-form pairing.

Yuka Muratani

Graduation Year: 2017 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Influence of Poor Fit Vowels on Perception of Consonants Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith, Katya Pertsova Abstract:  

The present study investigated native English listeners' perception of an ambiguous fricative noise from a [s]-[ʃ] continuum followed/preceded by a poor fit vowel—either one of the [i]s that have higher/lower formant frequencies than a good exemplar of English [i], or [u]s that have higher/lower formant frequencies than a good exemplar of English [u].

The main questions that the present study intended to address were, i) whether listeners would show perceptual contextual dissimilation, a.k.a. compensation for coarticulation, Mann & Repp, 1980, 1981, or listeners would show perceptual contextual assimilation, a.k.a. parsing, Fowler, 1984,; and ii) whether listeners would respond to the stimuli according to their phonological analysis of the segments, Kingston et al., 2011, or according to the actual phonetic details of the segments, Whalen, 1989.

The results were that the listeners showed perceptual contextual dissimilation for their broad,more abstract, phonological categorization of [i] and [u]. However, when the listeners were sensitive to the phonetic details of the segments, the listeners showed perceptual contextual assimilation. The listeners somehow, however, were not sensitive to the phonetic details of poor fit vowels when the stimuli were identified as [si] and [ʃi].

Although it is hard to come to a solid conclusion from these response patterns, the results at least indicate that listeners may be able to parse vowels using their native language knowledge, and dynamically adjust the acoustic discrepancy by showing perceptual contextual assimilation.

Daniel Seabrooks

Graduation Year: 2017 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Child Acquisition of Spanish Clitic Impersonal Constructions: An Empirical Study on the CHILDES Corpora Thesis Advisor/s:   Randall Hendrick, Bruno Estagarribia, Misha Becker Abstract:  

The passive and impersonal uses of the Spanish clitic se have been the focus of an important linguistic debate; they are often considered to be similar because they both de-emphasize the logical subject of the verb, but they differ in the way they affect the verb’s transitivity. Many theories have suggested that the clitic se raises to subject position and that these two forms are syntactically identical with a difference in the application of subject-verb agreement, for example Cinque 1988, Oesterreicher 1992, and Rivero 2002.

Amaya Mendikoetxea’s 2008 analysis of Romance clitic impersonal constructions se/si offers a novel understanding, not only of the relationship between these two Spanish clitic constructions, but also of how the impersonal se construction differs from simple transitive sentences. Specifically, she theorizes that both impersonal and passive constructions containing se contain a generic null pronoun, which she calls G-pro, as Spec of vP and that they differ in whether or not v assigns accusative case to the verb’s complement.

This difference in case marking determines whether the verb’s complement raises to subject, to yield the passive se construction, or whether the verb’s complement remains in place and a phonologically null expletive fills the subject position. With this analysis in mind, a CHILDES longitudinal study is conducted to assess children’s acquisition of Mendikoetxea’s proposed structures. The results confirm Mendikoetxea’s basic claim that there is a distinction among simple transitive sentences, impersonals with se and passives with se.

Anissa Neal

Graduation Year: 2017 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Trip the Freaking Light Fantastic: Syntactic Structure in English Verbal Idioms Thesis Advisor/s:   J. Michael Terry, Randall Hendrick, Katya Pertsova Abstract:  

In past scholarship, idioms have been discussed from a mostly semantic perspective; authors have been primarily concerned with how idiomatic meaning is composed and stored, Swinney and Cutler 1979; Gibbs 1980; 1986. This thesis investigates idioms' syntactic behavior and concludes that all verbal idioms of English have stored, internal syntactic structure.

Vacuous modification, such as modification that does not contribute to the semantics of the phrase, metalinguistic modification, such as modification that indicates non-literal readings, aspect, and subject-oriented adverbs, SOAs, are used to test a variety of idioms for evidence of syntactic structure. There are restrictions on the syntactic processes some idioms can undergo, such as, passivization and raising constructions. However, this is not due to their lack of internal syntax, but how their meaning is mapped onto the internal syntax.

Graduation Year: 2017 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Second Language Acquisition of Particle-Verb Constructions in English by Adult Mandarin Speakers Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker, Randall Hendrick, Michael Terry Abstract:  

There have been few research studies on the acquisition of particle-verb constructions, PVCs, in English by Mandarin speakers. The present study investigates the grammaticality judgments of PVCs in English made by Mandarin speakers who have been learning English as a second language, L2.

The result of the present study shows that Mandarin speakers have different grammaticality judgments from native English speakers, which could be the reason for the avoidance of PVCs in English by Mandarin speakers shown by Liao and Fukuya (2004). The result also shows that Mandarin speakers are confident in their grammaticality judgments, so being unsure about the grammaticality of PVCs in English is not the cause for Mandarin speakers’ avoidance of PVCs. Furthermore, the present study finds that the grammaticality judgments on PVCs by Mandarin speakers show evidence of transfer of the grammaticality of PVCs in Mandarin and evidence of the interlanguage grammar shifting away from the L1 grammar, supporting the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis.

Metta Crouse

Graduation Year: 2016 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Gender and Headedness in Spanish Blends Thesis Advisor/s:   Katya Pertsova, Elliott Moreton, Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

This thesis builds on previous experiments on English lexical blends, Shaw 2013, Moreton et al. forthcoming, that argued that semantic heads, nouns, and proper nouns are positions privileged by universal phonological constraints. Using novel Spanish blends as stimuli, I conduct three experiments with native Spanish speakers.

The first, a survey, revealed significant predictors of blend gender, including the inflection, gender, and headedness of the source words. These results contribute to the study of blend formation as a morphological process by providing valuable information to compare with the formation of Spanish compounds.

Additionally, I strengthen arguments for the existence of a constraint privileging semantic heads by showing a stronger effect of head faithfulness in Spanish than was found in similar English experiments. I discuss what it means for a position to be privileged within positional faithfulness, Beckman 1997, and test whether masculine gender is one of these privileged positions.

Iyad Ghanim

Graduation Year: 2016 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Effect of Age of Acquisition on Concept Mediation in Heritage Bilinguals Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker, Katya Pertsova, Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Current models of bilingual lexical systems represent a shared conceptual domain and separate, language-dependent domains. Regarding the second language domain, researchers propose L2 words share a direct connection to the conceptual domain only for fluent bilinguals. Conversely, for non-fluent bilinguals, L2 words lack a direct conceptual connection and instead are connected via L1 translation equivalents. However, previous studies confounded age of acquisition with proficiency as variables that contribute to concept mediation.

The present thesis disentangles these variables' respective effects on developing concept mediation. Thirteen heritage Arabic-English bilinguals are subject to a picture-naming task and a translation task. Heritage speakers’ response times match the concept mediation model irrespective of proficiency, with the exception of low proficiency speakers. These results indicate that for individuals who acquired a language at an early age, moderate loss of language proficiency may not remove lexico-conceptual links.

Emily Andino

Graduation Year: 2016 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Grapheme-to-Phoneme Mapping in L2 and L3: Developing a Model of Reading Aloud in Non-Native Languages Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith, Misha Becker, Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

In this study of non-native reading aloud, subjects with L1 English, L2 Spanish, and L3 Brazilian Portuguese were asked to read words that are spelled identically in their L2 and L3 but are pronounced differently. Each of these "homographic heterophones" was primed in either the L2 or the L3, and its subsequent pronunciation was assessed for context appropriateness.

Participants were found to produce many more context-inappropriate pronunciations in L3 context than in L2 context, supporting the Foreign- Language Effect hypothesis, Meisel, 1983; Hammarberg, 2001; priming was not found to have a significant effect on pronunciation. The observation of mixed pronunciations, or single words produced partially with L2 and partially with L3 phonology, is incorporated into the development of a model of reading in non-native languages that allows for whole lexical representations to be broken into sublexical units when reading aloud, contrary to Coltheart, 1993.

Graduation Year: 2015 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Learning of Noun Classes Based on Semantic and Phonological Information in an Artificial Grammar Thesis Advisor/s:   Katya Pertsova Abstract:  

Rachel Broad

Graduation Year: 2015 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Accent placement in Japanese blends Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Brandon Prickett

Graduation Year: 2015 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Complexity and Naturalness in First Language and Second Language Phonotactic Learning Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Laura Barnes

Graduation Year: 2015 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Vowel Accommodation Strategies Used by ESL Teachers in Foreigner-Directed Speech Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker Abstract:  

Melinda Johnson

Graduation Year: 2015 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Korean Stop VOT Production by Heritage Speakers in the Language Classroom Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2015 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Negative Raising in Mandarin Thesis Advisor/s:   Randall Hendrick Abstract:  

Caleb Hicks

Graduation Year: 2015 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Condition bias in split-Alignment Systems: A Typological Study of North American Languages Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín Abstract:  

Kayleigh Reyes

Graduation Year: 2015 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Lexical Shifts in the English of Southeastern North Carolina Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín Abstract:  

Jessica Slavic

Graduation Year: 2014 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   On Impersonal Constructions: Implications of Celtic Verbal Inflections Thesis Advisor/s:   Randall Hendrick Abstract:  

Hugo Salgado

Graduation Year: 2014 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Topological Spatial Relations and Frames of Reference in Santo Domingo de Guzmán Pipil: Typological and Historical Implications Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2014 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Verticalization, Wartime Americanization Efforts, and the German-to-English Shift Among the Mennonite Brethren of Hillsboro, Kansas Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín Abstract:  

Megan Gotowski

Graduation Year: 2014 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Subject Clitics in Child French Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker Abstract:  

Chunmeng, "Bonnie" Wang

Graduation Year: 2014 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Prosody-Syntax Interaction in the “YI-BU-QI-BA” Rule: A Morphologically Conditioned Tone Change in Mandarin Chinese Thesis Advisor/s:   Katya Pertsova Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2014 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   A Study on Mandarin Focus Produced by English L2 Speakers Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Zachary Wilkins

Graduation Year: 2014 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   A Study of the Comprehension of Equative Tautologies in Adults and Children Thesis Advisor/s:   Bruno Estigarribia Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2014 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   On Genericity in Modern Standard Arabic Thesis Advisor/s:   J. Michael Terry Abstract:  

Lúcia Lopes Fischer

Graduation Year: 2013 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Sgaw Karen as Spoken by a Member of the Local North Carolina Community: A Phonetic Analysis and Phonemic Description Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Justin Pinta

Graduation Year: 2013 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Lexical Strata in Loanword Phonology: Spanish Loans in Guaraní Thesis Advisor/s:   Abstract:  

An analysis of a corpus of Spanish loanwords in Paraguayan Guaraní shows the stratified structure of the Guaraní lexicon evidenced by varying phonological repair strategies in the loans. Ito and Mester, 1999 and earlier work, show that a language with a synchronically relevant stratified lexicon displays impossible nativization effects. The phonology and morphology of Guaraní provide evidence for the synchronic relevance of the stratification, and as expected the corpus shows specific nativization strategies which are unattested.

A nonce-word experiment with native Guaraní speakers shows that in some cases, but not all, impossible nativizations are strongly avoided by native speakers. The Ito and Mester (1999) model handles the impossible nativizations within Optimality Theory through their proposed ranking consistency of faithfulness constraints across strata. Variable repair strategies of certain Spanish phonological structures in Guaraní in addition to the results of the experiment present a theoretical problem for ranking consistency.

Katherine Shaw

Graduation Year: 2013 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Head Faithfulness in Lexical Blends: A Positional Approach to Blend Formation Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Graduation Year: 2013 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Adolescent Ethnolinguistic Stability and Change: A Longitudinal Study Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton, Erik Thomas Abstract:  

Most sociolinguistic studies rely on apparent time, cross-sectional methods to analyze language change. On the basis of apparent time data, sociolinguists have hypothesized that cultural processes of lifespan change create predictable cycles of linguistic behavior in which adolescents lead in the use of vernacular variants and advance sound change, Eckert 1997. While adolescence is hypothesized to be central to vernacular optimization and language change processes, only longitudinal studies reveal whether individuals change their linguistic behavior in predictable ways across adolescence. Furthermore, longitudinal data about individual trajectories of change allow linguists to confirm or disconfirm apparent time data.

As a longitudinal study of over 67 African Americans from infancy to post-high school, the Frank Porter Graham, FPG, study presents a unique opportunity to document language variation across the lifespan. This analysis is the first longitudinal acoustic analysis of vocalic variation from childhood to early adulthood. Because African American English, AAE, vowels in the Piedmont region of NC are stable, this study can explore the extent to which life-stage variation influences participation in ethnolinguistic vowel systems without the confound of a change in progress. Additionally, because longitudinal trajectories of AAE morphosyntactic/consonantal variables are documented, comparisons across linguistic subsystems reveal the extents and limits to which life-stage patterns predict linguistic cycles of behavior.

This study focuses on a subset of 20 individuals at approximately ages 9, 12, 15, and 20. Although all participants are from the Piedmont region of NC, individuals come from two communities with different demographics. Hierarchical regressions show that, while participation in AAE vowels strongly correlate with community and school demographics, stable vocalic variables do not undergo aggregate-level peaking patterns consistent with age-grading. Instead, stable aggregate patterns camouflage idiosyncratic individual trajectories. A lack of group patterns for vowel variation across adolescence suggests that life-stage variation does not affect all linguistic systems equally; age- grading is a minority pattern perhaps associated with stereotyped features and/or morphosyntactic/consonantal variables. Because age-grading is not a predominant pattern for non-stereotyped vocalic variation, apparent time peaks in adolescent vowel data should not be taken for granted as a default product of age-grading.

Graduation Year: 2013 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent language. The study tests for three possible sources of L2 tonal errors; namely, 1) universal phonological constraints, i.e. the Tonal Markedness Scale, TMS, the Obligatory Contour Principle, OCP, and Tone-Position Constraints, TPC; 2) the transfer of L1 pitch patterns; and 3) a pedagogical problem of Tone 3. The data shows that these three factors jointly shape the properties of interlanguage grammars.

This study finds that the TMS, the OCP, and TPC constrain L2 tone acquisition, but do so to varying degrees. Evidence is found that the TMS applies to both word- and sentence-level L2 productions. Some effects of the OCP are found to interact with the TMS and with L1 transfer effects. For example, patterns regarding tone pairs, more T1-T1 productions than T4-T4, and in turn more than T2-T2, can be attributed to either a case of the "emergence of the unmarked" interacting effects of the TMS and the OCP, or to local conjunction of the TMS. Learners are better at maintaining Rising, T2, at word-initial positions, but Falling, T4, at word-final positions. L2 learners often substitute other tones for target tones and the substitution patterns provide evidence for L1 transfer. For example, English speakers often use high falling tone while Japanese speakers tend to lengthen low tones to express monosyllabic narrow focus in sentences. This study found conflicting error and substitution patterns pertaining to Tone 3, as well as greater accuracy in processing Pre-T3 sandhi than the sandhi occurring elsewhere. This effect is argued to be attributed to the “T3 [214]-First” teaching method.

In light of the three factors affecting L2 tone acquisition, this study proposes a constraint re-ranking model to provide a new way of viewing positive and negative transfer. It is demonstrated that some markedness constraints are promoted while some are demoted in the acquisition of tones.

Emily Moeng

Graduation Year: 2012 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Do Phonologically Active Classes Cause Warping of the Perceptual Space? Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Gilbert Kline

Graduation Year: 2012 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Linking Element and Swedish Complex Nominal Compounds Thesis Advisor/s:   Randall Hendrick, Katya Pertsova Abstract:  

This thesis investigates the linking element that sometimes appears in Swedish compounds made up of three noun stems, also called complex nominal compounds. I present a comprehensive analysis of Swedish compounding and the nature of the linking element, and then argue that the appearance of the linking element, typically -s-, in complex nominal compounds is predictable.

This thesis proposes that the linking element is a marker of a particular syntactic structure, and thereby a particular linear ordering of the nouns inside a complex compound. Two previous syntactic proposals, Josefsson, 1998; Mukai, 2008, for the linking element and Swedish complex compounds are discussed, and I argue that these proposals are partly problematic due to their application of Kayne's, 1994, antisymmetry theory of syntax.

I discuss Kayne's antisymmetry theory, with its restrictions to asymmetric c-command, and offer a solution to the problem found in the previous proposals. I contend that antisymmetry theory can account for both the subword structure and linearization of Swedish complex nominal compounds with and without the linking element.

Inmaculada Gómez Soler

Graduation Year: 2012 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Acquiring Spanish at the Interfaces: An Integrative Approach to the L2 Acquisition of Psych-Verbs Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker Abstract:  

This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych-verbs, for example, gustar 'to like,' across four different proficiency levels. In particular, psych-verbs constitute a testing ground for the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis, Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycok &qmp; Filiaci, 2004; Sorace, Serratrice, Filiaci & Baldo, 2009; inter alia, one of the most influential theories in current generative second language acquisition. Its main claim is that properties that hinge on external interfaces, such as those that require the interaction between a linguistic module and a cognitive module, are more problematic for learners than those that do not hinge on that interface, such as internal interfaces/narrow syntax.

In order to assess the empirical adequacy of the IH, this project encompasses five experiments that test different syntactic properties of psych predicates as well as phenomena that belong to both internal and external interfaces. The results of this study indicate that clitic and verb agreement is the most problematic aspect of psych-verb acquisition in accordance with the previous literarture in the field, for example Montrul, 1998, 2001. As for the issue of interfaces, this project is only partially consistent with the proposals of the IH. Whereas external interfaces present a certain level of difficulty for some groups of L2 learners, the low-proficiency participants are sensitive to pragmatic factors in spite of their lack of mastery of the morphosyntax of these constructions. Thus, external interfaces are problematic for L2ers but not more so than internal interfaces.

I argue that this more sophisticated model not only is able to more successfully account for the patterns found in this dissertation but it is also a more integrated explanation for the intricacies of the acquisition process.

Anne Bakken

Graduation Year: 2011 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Scandinavian Interference on the /s ~ z/ Voicing Contrast in American English Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

This thesis examines phonological substrate interference as a result of language shift. It has been observed that Scandinavian-American communities in the Upper Midwest, where Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish speakers shifted to English in the 19th and 20th centuries, devoice /z/. This phenomenon is thought to be due to the lack of a voicing contrast in sibilants in Scandinavian languages.

Acoustic analysis was performed comparing the production of /s/ and /z/ in a highly Scandinavian region, the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota, and a region with very little Scandinavian presence, the Piedmont of North Carolina. Red River Valley residents with and without Scandinavian background were likewise compared.

It was found in this study that the speakers with a greater degree of Scandinavian background produced less glottal pulsing in /z/ and more in /s/ than other speakers. The latter result had not been previously recorded. I therefore propose that the substrate effect is not devoicing of /z/, but greater neutralization of the voicing contrast.

Halley Wilson

Graduation Year: 2011 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Child Acquisition of Passive Sentences: Building upon Animacy Assumptions from UG Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker Abstract:  

Children's acquisition of passive sentences has been widely studied in an attempt to understand why children acquiring languages such as English appear to exhibit a delay in the acquisition of this structure. The present study examined semantic factors in English acquiring children's comprehension of passive sentences as a means of accounting for this delay.

The results of the study indicated that animacy in the by-phrase may be the crucial factor required for passive comprehension. The process by which passive sentence structure is acquired is argued to be linked to inherent assumptions about animacy from UG which children may utilize to build the syntactic structures required to comprehend passives.

Justin Rill

Graduation Year: 2011 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   A Unified Analysis of "Dative Shift" in English and the Applicative Construction in Chichewa Thesis Advisor/s:   Randall Hendrick Abstract:  

Many languages exhibit alternate syntactic realizations of ditransitive verbal constructions. For example, English features both a prepositional construction, Mary gave candy to the children, and a Double Object construction, Mary gave the children candy, a phenomenon known as "Dative Shift," Larson 1988.

In Chichewa, the "applicative construction" is a similar syntactic alternation, Baker 1988, Marantz 1993. The primary aim of this thesis is to present a unified analysis of Dative Shift and the applicative construction for both of these typologically distinct languages.

The proposed unified analysis features an identical argument structure for both languages, as well as isomorphic morphosyntactic processes. It accounts for several asymmetries previously observed between benefactive and instrumental ditransitives in Chichewa. These asymmetries serve as the basis for a corollary hypothesis about natural sub-classes within the class of "oblique" arguments.

Alice Drozdiak

Graduation Year: 2011 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Identifying and Describing Prosodic Domain Interaction with Duration and Hyperarticulation Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

Motivated by the ambiguities of prosodic constituency and prosodic domain interaction, this study asks whether pitch accent acts upon non-segmental features, specifically right-edge word boundaries, as well as whether or not right-edge word boundaries induce hyperarticulation in the preceeding syllable.

By looking at the duration of diphthongs in both word-initial and word-final positions, my research shows that pitch accent does indeed appear to hyperarticulate word boundaries, giving evidence to prosodic interactions across different phonological domains.

Additionally, with few exceptions, the data collected in this study support the hypothesis that right-edge word boundaries do not hyperarticulate preceding diphthongs. These results contribute to current discourse regarding prosodic domain interactions.

Finally, this work proposes and employs a method of measuring hyperarticulation in diphthongs, a process yet unexplored, using first and second formant values.

Amy Reynolds

Graduation Year: 2011 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Competing Factors in Phonological Learning Models: The Acquisition of English Consonant Clusters Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

This thesis tests the relative influence of a number of factors within phonological learning models that have been proposed to affect patterns of child language acquisition. In the Gradual Learning Algorithm literature, social factors such as variation in the adult grammar and frequencies of forms in child-directed speech, and mental grammar factors such as constraints and decision strategies make various predictions about the learning paths followed by children.

English-speaking children’s acquisition of consonant clusters is modeled to test the relative influence of learning model factors, since each social factor in the English adult language makes opposite predictions about what learning paths children should follow.

Adult grammar variation is shown to be the more influential social factor, and a comparison between the constraint sets and decision strategies used in Boersma and Levelt, 2000, and Jesney and Tessier, 2011, provides support for using Specific Faithfulness constraints to adequately model child language acquisition.

Jennifer Griffin

Graduation Year: 2011 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Variation and Gradience in a Noisy Harmonic Grammar with Lexically Indexed Constraints: The Case of Spanish -s Deletion and Aspiration Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

This thesis presents a new way of modeling variation in production and perception within and across lexical categories. By adding lexical indexes to both the input and relevant faithfulness constraints in a Noisy Harmonic Grammar model, I will show that production frequencies be used to predict well-formedness judgments of variable forms.

First I show that by using this model, an artificial learner in Praat, Version 5.1.43, can learn the appropriate production frequencies of variants showing -s deletion and aspiration in Spanish.

In Experiment 1 I show that Puerto Rican Spanish speakers choose sentences with aspirated adjectives as more well-formed than sentences with aspirated nouns. In Experiment 2, participants' perception of ambiguous phonemes along a continuum from [h] to [s] is significantly influenced by the lexical category of the root to which the ambiguous fricative is attached.

These results support the predictions made about perception judgments based on variable production frequencies.

Caleb Crandall Hicks

Graduation Year: 2010 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Morphosyntactic Doubling in Code Switching Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín, Paul Roberge Abstract:  

When code switching occurs between languages which are typologically opposed, the resulting utterance sometimes obeys the typological patterns dictated by both languages. If one contributor language has a basic word order of SVO, and the other has SOV, the code switched sentence may have the surface order SVOV; in effect, producing a doubled morphosyntactic element, where each “double” is realized in a different source language.

In this thesis, I examine code switches which furnish doubled verbs, auxiliaries, adpositions, coordinations, complementizers, and morphological affixes from a large variety of language pairs. I argue that previous accounts of such doubles are unsatisfactory, as is the application of syntactic approaches to monolingual doubling. I contend that a framework favoring simultaneous access of multiple languages gives a more promising account of code switched doubles.

Victoria McGee

Graduation Year: 2010 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Ethnic Identity, Language, and /o/ Fronting Among Latinos at UNC Chapel Hill Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín Abstract:  

This study focuses on the variety of English used by college students at UNC Chapel Hill who self-identify as Latino and the relationship between the social and linguistic categories governing the speech of this particular group.

The study will reveal, through conversations, interviews and questionnaires, certain details pertaining to the creation and expression of ethnic identity, which allows each speaker to orient themselves socially within the complex matrix of a college campus.

The linguistic analysis of the study involves obtaining measurements of the F2 values of /o/ of Latino English speaking university students at UNC Chapel Hill at various grade levels and analyzing these measurement statistically in order to determine patterns that explain the connection between /o/ fronting and ethnic identity.

Jennifer Renn

Graduation Year: 2010 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Acquiring Style: The Development of Dialect Shifting among African American Children Thesis Advisor/s:   Michael Terry Abstract:  

The dearth of research on style shifting in African American English, AAE, during the early lifespan has left a number of unanswered questions related to the acquisition of and the ability to shift speech styles.

This presentation focuses on several of these questions, including when stylistic shifting is initiated, whether there are differential patterns of stylistic usage among children and adolescents, and how stylistic facility relates to school achievement and literacy. It further considers the influence of social, demographic, and self-regard factors to determine how they affect style over time. As a basis for addressing these issues, this research utilizes data from a unique, longitudinal study of AAE and literacy.

The analysis compares formal and informal language data from a sample of African American speakers collected at three temporal data points, Grade 1/2 - N=73; Grade 6 - N=125; and Grade 8 - N=164, to compare linguistic behavior throughout the elementary and middle school years. Language samples representing different situational contexts were analyzed in terms of 42 morphosyntactic and phonological AAE features to determine the overall difference in dialect use across time and situation.

Analyses suggest that while there is a range of individual variation in the early use of style shifting, speakers progressively engage in an overall expansion of style shifting over time. Further investigation of the influence of gender, mother's education, social contacts, school demographics, and the child's score on a racial centrality index identifies which factors have a greater impact and how the relative influence of these variables evolves during childhood and adolescence.

Tests of the interaction effects of these various social, personal, and demographic factors indicate that while certain factors are significantly related to style shifting, the influence of others is instead associated with speakers' overall dialect use.

Ian Clayton

Graduation Year: 2010 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   On the Natural History of Preaspirated Stops Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

his dissertation makes two contributions, one empirical, the other theoretical. Empirically, the dissertation deepens our understanding of the lifecycle and behavior of the preaspirated stop, an extremely rare phonological feature. I show that in most confirmed cases, preaspirated stops develop from earlier voiceless geminate stops, less commonly from nasal-voiceless stop clusters. When decaying, preaspirated stops typically develop into unaspirated voiceless stops, or undergo buccalization to become preaffricated. More rarely, decaying preaspirated stops may trigger tonogenesis, or undergo spirantization or nasalization. Phonologically, preaspirated stops usually function as positionally conditioned allophones of underlying aspirated voiceless stops contrasting with voiceless unaspirated stops.

Further, I show experimentally that preaspirated stops are no more difficult to distinguish from unaspirated stops than are much more abundant postaspirated stops. Second, the dissertation tests the success of two models, one cognitive, the other phonetic/diachronic, at accounting for two place-based asymmetries in Scottish Gaelic preaspiration. Whereas a conventional Optimality-Theoretic analysis of these asymmetries overgenerates, an analysis modified via Steriade's P-map Hypothesis resolves this overgeneration. The P-map analysis depends on congruent perceptual scales, which the perception experiment, above, confirms: participants' confusion rates closely match the place-based asymmetries observed in Gaelic.

The competing innocent misperception model depends on the presence of phonetic precursors to produce an ambiguous phonological signal, which listeners may interpret differently than intended by the speaker, leading to an alteration in a segment's underlying form. A series of production experiments identifies potential precursors, but also reveals between-speaker variation more compatible with the P-map account than innocent misperception, again lending support to Steriade's hypothesis.

Melissa Frazier

Graduation Year: 2009 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   The Production and Perception of Pitch and Glottalization in Yucatec Maya Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

I show that, when using this algorithm, a simulated learner must be trained on both production and perception tableaus in order to reach an accurate adult grammar, contra Boersma 2006, who proposes that perception learning alone is sufficient. This simulated learner is trained on phonetic data obtained from tokens of real speech, and these results show that bidirectional constraints can account for the symmetrical relationship between production and perception. However, because the symmetries are not exact, the production grammar does not simply fall out of perception learning.

Production and perception studies were conducted with native speakers of Yucatec Maya in Yucatan, Mexico. The results of these studies are analyzed with Bidirectional Stochastic OT, but they are also presented in detail in order to document the phonetics of pitch, length, and glottalization in Yucatec Maya. One important result of the production studies is that there is previously undocumented dialectal variation in the production of pitch and length such that tone may be a dialectal feature of Yucatec Maya.

Furthermore, there is variation in the perception of pitch that mirrors the variation in production; the cues that differentiate phonemic categories in production are the same cues that are attended to in perception. These results thus provide further support for the idea that production and perception grammars are defined by the same constraints.

This research fills in two gaps in the literature. First, despite the robust literature on its morphosyntax, there is little research on the sound system of Yucatec Maya, especially at the phonetic level. The production study thus provides the first thorough account of the suprasegmentals of the vowel system, and the perception study is one of the first conducted with this language. Second, this work is the first to test the Bidirectional Model with actual, and not simulated and idealized, language data.

Suzannah Kirby

Graduation Year: 2009 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Semantic Scaffolding in First Language Acquisition: The Acquisition of Raising-to-Object and Object Control Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker Abstract:  

This dissertation joins the debates on whether language is innate and/or modular, by examining English-speaking children's acquisition of raising-to-object (RO; (1)) and object control (OC; (2)) utterances. 1. RO: Suki wanted/needed Neili [ti to kiss Louise] 2. OC: Suki asked/told Neili [PROi to kiss Louise]. While these verbs may appear in the same surface string, they map onto two distinct underlying structures.

As a result, they differ in their syntactic and semantic behaviors, including the interpretation of embedded passives, and whether the subject of the embedded clause may be expletive or inanimate. Several truth-value and sentence judgment tasks yielded the following results: Children have adultlike comprehension of active RO/OC utterances by age 4. Children who fail on tests of matrix passives can interpret passives embedded under RO verbs, despite their greater length and syntactic complexity, but not under OC verbs, which have syntax more like matrix passives. In sentence judgment tasks, children preferentially parse the embedded clause alone.

I argue that children use semantic scaffolding as a stepping stone on their way to adultlike syntactic and processing power. In short, movement may be easier than control structures, if these assumptions are not violated. Moreover, the fact that children do maintain a distinction between the verb classes is evidence for innateness and modularity in language. However, the language module interacts crucially with other cognitive modules, for example the conceptual-semantic system, and with domain-general faculties, for example attention, memory.

Finally, the results presented here also bear on the following issues: There is no evidence for maturation of A-chains and/or control, contra Wexler. Children's performance on active RO, passives, and embedded passives suggest that RO utterances should instead be analyzed as instances of exceptional case marking. The data can neither support nor refute Hornstein's proposal that RO and OC both be analyzed as instances of movement.

Graduation Year: 2008 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Verbal Acquisition in L2 Spanish Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker Abstract:  

This study was designed to evaluate verbal agreement in early and late L2 Spanish. The early L2 group included children from local immersion preschools who participated in an elicitation task and spontaneous speech recordings. The late L2 group, consisting of UNC-CH undergraduate students in beginning to intermediate Spanish, was asked to describe pictures in Spanish in a task similar to the child elicitation task.

All eligible subject/verb pairs produced were evaluated for accuracy and when not accurate were given a specific code for the error type. The results obtained for the early L2 group lend support to the Morphological Underspecification Hypothesis, proposed by McCarthy, 2007. However, contrary to McCarthy, 2007, the adult data support the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis, Prévost & White, 2000b, rather than the MUSH.

Additionally, the child group used significantly more 3rd person singular default forms, consistent with McCarthy, 2007, and L1 Spanish, than the adult group.

Jeffrey Conn

Graduation Year: 2007 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Greek Prothetic Vowel and the Sanskrit Long-Reduplicant Perfect: A Statistical Evaluation of the Indo-European Laryngeal Theory Thesis Advisor/s:   Craig Melchert Abstract:  

This study addresses a small subset of these concerns by statistically measuring the degree of correlation between two phenomena which the Laryngeal Theory implies should be correlated. These are the "prothetic vowel" of Greek, and the lengthened reduplication-syllable of certain Sanskrit perfects. Both of these are attributed by the Laryngeal Theory to the presence of a laryngeal segment at the beginning of the root in proto-Indo-European.

If the Laryngeal Theory is correct, there should be more roots whose reflexes show both of these developments than should occur by chance. The correlation is measured by the Fisher's Exact test. For the set of all roots as defined traditionally, the P value is 0.25349; for roots grouped together without distinguishing between root-extensions and similar alterations, the value is 0.26401; and for resonant-initial roots the value is 0.67371.

These figures are consistent with the predicitons of the Laryngeal Theory, but also with the hypothesis that both the Greek prothetic vowel and the Sanskrit long-reduplicant perfects are due to epenthesis before resonant-initial roots.

Graduation Year: 2007 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Differential Acquisition of Phonemic Contrasts by Infant Word-learners: Does Production Recapitulate Perception? Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliot Moreton Abstract:  

This dissertation investigates the relationship between the acquisition orders of phonological contrasts by children in perception and production and the phonological theories that account for this relationship. Three key words can be used to characterize this relationship: gap, parallel and mismatch.

Experiments done as part of this dissertation suggest that the parallel between perceptual and productive acquisition orders of phonemic contrasts does not always hold: 17-month-old American-English-acquiring children were able to distinguish [n] and [r] yet not [t] and [n] in a perceptual word-learning task; while productively, the [t]-[n] contrast has been found to be acquired earlier than the [n]-[r] contrast. In other words, the orders of acquisition of phonological contrasts in perception and production can mismatch each other.

Most phonological acquisition models, reviewed in this dissertation: Smith 1973, Braine 1976, Macken 1980, Boersma 1998, Smolensky 1996a, Lassettre and Donegan 1998, and Pater 2004, are able to account for the gap. The model proposed by Pater, 2004, is also able to explain the parallel. When more than one phonological contrasts are involved and the order of acquisition between them is at issue, its explanation for the developmental parallel would depend on two necessary assumptions that the model did not elaborate: One, the shared MARKEDNESS constraints must be fixed in ranking; and two, the FAITHFULNESS constraints must not only be fixed in ranking, but also be homogeneous in form and function. However, under these assumptions, the model will not be able to explain the attested mismatch.

This dissertation proposes to revise Pater's model by allowing non-homogeneous faithfulness constraints for perception and production. It demonstrates how the revised model is able to account for the mismatch, explain the gap, and at the same time allow for the parallel.

Kara VanDam

Graduation Year: 2007 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   A Study of Language Identity and Shift: The Calvinist Dutch of West Michigan Thesis Advisor/s:   Connie Eble Abstract:  

From the perspective of the sociology of language developed by Joshua Fishman, and working from letters, newspapers, secondary accounts, and grave inscriptions, this study describes and explains bilingualism and the loss of the Dutch language in two West Michigan Dutch immigrant communities from 1847-1930, the Reformed Church, RCA, Dutch and the Christian Reformed Church, CRC, Dutch.

The loss of Dutch in some ways parallels the contemporaneous language shift of Norwegian immigrants, Haugen, 1969, and Swedish immigrants, Karstadt, 2002. The two West Michigan Dutch Calvinist communities were unique in their language shift experiences.

The RCA Dutch experienced and promoted a rapid assimilation and shift to English. The CRC Dutch promoted a multi-generational maintenance of the Dutch language in a stable Dutch- English bilingual setting-the preservation of Dutch was not at the expense of the acquisition of English-and then consciously and abruptly abandoned the Dutch language in the years immediately after World War I.

The CRC Dutch maintained their language for so long precisely because it was the marker of identity for them and it was inextricably tied to their faith; the RCA Dutch were able to abandon the Dutch language early on because it was not the marker of religious identity for them.

Abby Spears

Graduation Year: 2006 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Nasal Coarticulation in the French Vowel /i/: A Phonetic and Phonological Study Thesis Advisor/s:   Elliott Moreton Abstract:  

In this thesis, I use acoustic phonetic data to examine the phenomenon of nasal coarticulation in French. Previous work describes French as a language with very little vowel-nasal, VN, coarticulation, presumably due to the oral/nasal contrast in vowels, Cohn 1990.

However, I found that the high vowel /i/, which has no nasal counterpart in French, exhibits a high degree of coarticulation. This finding supports the proposal that contrast and coarticulation are inversely correlated, Manuel 1990, adding the insight that this correlation is observable even within a language.

Based on this finding and a typological survey of VN coarticulation, I propose an underspecification account in an Optimality Theoretic framework to capture the patterns of VN coarticulation. In this OT account, the interaction of markedness constraints driving orality and minimizing effort and a faithfulness constraint protecting the feature [+ nasal] provides an explanation for the French data and produces the attested typology.

Claire Lampp

Graduation Year: 2006 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Negation in Modern Hindi-Urdu: the Development of NahII Thesis Advisor/s:   Craig Melchert Abstract:  

There are three negative particles used for sentential negation in Hindi-Urdu-mat, na, and nahII. The particles mat and na are generally of restricted distribution in the modern language, and their origins are relatively straightforward. The status of the modern general negative particle nahII is more problematic.

There are two common explanations for modern Hindi-UrdunahII: (1) nahII results from the Old Indo-Aryan, OIA, general negative particle na combining with a substantive/existential verb form; (2) nahII results from na combining with the OIA emphatic particle hi. In a recent account Elena Bashir offers support for both explanations.

Based on evidence from a modern Hindi corpus and a reexamination of Bashir's work, I conclude that modern Hindi-Urdu nahII likely has its origin only in the existential, thus providing another example in support of William Croft's negation cycle.

Graduation Year: 2006 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Language Attitudes of Québécois Students Towards le Français Québécois Standard and le Franco-Québécois Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín Abstract:  

The many language attitude studies which have been conducted in the province of Québec over the past fifty years have revealed that the linguistic attitudes and beliefs of the Québécois towards both English and specific varieties of French have changed considerably.

The purpose of the present study was to determine the current language attitudes of Québécois students towards standard Québec French and towards a colloquial variety of Québec French, le franco-québécois. In spite of the significant shift in language attitudes in Québec's recent history, the results of this study were comparable to those of a similar study conducted three decades ago by Méar-Crine and Leclerc. In both studies, the majority of Québécois participants indicated a preference for the standard variety of Québec French.

Graduation Year: 2006 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Accent in Proto-Indo-European Athematic Nouns: Antifaithfulness in Inflectional Paradigms Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

This thesis examines four accent patterns displayed by athematic nouns in Proto-Indo-European. Each accent pattern is distinguished by either alternating stress or vowel quality between 'weak' forms, nominative, accusative, vocative, and 'strong' forms.

I argue that surface stress is the result of the interplay of the lexical accent specifications of the morphemes that compose the stem. The strong endings are classified as dominant and are thus responsible for the accent/ablaut alternations.

Optimality Theory is used to provide a synchronic phonological analysis of athematic noun accent. The weak forms are accounted for with a ranking of faithfulness and alignment constraints, including a positional faithfulness ranking in which faithfulness to roots is preferred over faithfulness to derivational affixes.

The strong endings, which are dominant, trigger antifaithfulness constraints, Alderete 1999, and so a new type of antifaithfulness constraint is introduced that works within inflectional paradigms, based on the Optimal Paradigms model, McCarthy 2005.

Melissa Damann

Graduation Year: 2006 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   ESL Learners' Perceptions of American Dialects Thesis Advisor/s:   David Mora-Marín Abstract:  

This study was conducted to determine how ESL, English as a Second Language, learners' perception of American dialects differs from the perception of native American English speakers.

Thirtynine ESL students and 18 native speakers listened to and rated eight different speakers, representing four different dialects, such as Standard American English, Southern American English, African American English and Latino English. These speakers were rated on status, solidarity and language proficiency-related characteristics.

The ESL and native speaker groups ranked the dialect groups similarly on status-related features, such as successful, smart, confident. However, the test groups had markedly different rankings of the dialect groups for solidarity-related features, such as dependable, funny, friendly.

The ESL and native speaker groups had similar rankings concerning the speakers' language proficiency, that is, speaking English well. However, with the exception of the Standard dialect, the ESL group generally viewed each dialect's proficiency more positively than the native speaker group.

Donna Salisbury

Graduation Year: 2005 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Local Adverbs in Neo-Hittite Thesis Advisor/s:   Craig Melchert Abstract:  

This dissertation systematically and exhaustively evaluates the functions of the local adverbs in Neo-Hittite as determined by their use in assured Neo-Hittite compositions.

The primary finding is that the Old Hittite synchronic system of contrasting directional and locatival pairs as established by Starke, 1977, remains fundamentally intact in Neo-Hittite. There are a limited number of specific cases of overlap. The triple distinction in function of preverb, postposition, and freestanding adverb likewise continues throughout the history of the language.

This study accounts for each Neo-Hittite occurrence of a local adverb, assesses its functional role, and presents a justification for its inclusion in a given class. Where possible, it provides an explanation of the likely path by which evolved meanings of a preverb have arisen. An analysis of instances of consecutive adverbs evaluates whether the two coincidentally co-occur or have developed a specialized function as a combination. Those established as unitary combinations are categorized as preverb, postposition, or freestanding adverb compounds.

Susannah Kirby

Graduation Year: 2005 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Semantics or Sub-cases? The Acquisition of Referential vs. Expletive It Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker Abstract:  

This study was conducted to determine the natural order of acquisition among deictic pronoun it, anaphoric pronoun it, and expletive it. Files from four children, Adam, Eve, Nina, and Peter, ages 1;6 – 3;0 in the CHILDES database were coded for occurrences of NP it, here it is, and expletive it, it's raining. Occurrences of NP it were coded for whether they followed an overt discourse anaphor, anaphoric it, or not, deictic it.

All children examined produce deictic and anaphoric pronoun itfrom the very first files examined, but do not produce expletive it until 2-7 months later. Following Inoue's, 1991, lexical-semantic reanalysis account of the acquisition of expletive there after locative there, it is proposed that children acquire expletive it by reanalyzing referential pronoun it to include an expletive subtype. This reanalysis takes place when children realize that expletive it never co-occurs with a deictic or anaphoric referent.

Becky Butler Thompson

Graduation Year: 2005 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Cross-Dialectal Tendencies of Emphasis Spread in Arabic: An Optimality Theoretic Account Based in Experimental Phonetics Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Emphasis refers to a secondary pharyngeal constriction in the pharynx. In Arabic, this constriction affects, spreads to, neighboring sounds.

In this thesis, I consider two cross-dialectal tendencies of spread: i) directionality, which I show is a phonological parameter not grounded in universal phonetics, and ii) the identity of segments that block spread. I propose that all segments can be ranked hierarchically according to their incompatibility with emphasis, thereby explaining the tendency for certain segments to be blockers.

I explore these ideas in terms of Optimality Theory and use them as metrics to compare two OT theories: Traditional Approach and Span Theory, McCarthy 2004. I show that Span Theory accounts for the data presented equally as well as the Traditional Approach.

Heidi Angel

Graduation Year: 2005 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Classifier Predicate Acquisition by a Deaf Child with Delayed Linguistic Input Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker Abstract:  

This study focuses on the acquisition of American Sign Language, ASL, classifier predicate constructions, specifically observing the use of handshape by an eight-year-old deaf child with delayed linguistic input.

The findings are compared with other cases of delayed or impoverished input and research into a critical period for language acquisition. While the subject shows delayed ASL acquisition, his innovations and possible 'home signs' demonstrate an innate bias to create productive and natural language features similar to ASL and other natural sign languages.

A distinction is made between natural sign languages and artificial sign languages, such as Manually Coded English, MCE, which makes up a significant portion of the child's language input but is not reflected in his output. This supports nativist claims of an innate language-learning mechanism. In particular, a focus on handshape configurations in classifier predicate constructions was chosen because the use of classifiers is acquired relatively late in children acquiring ASL natively and the handshape parameter is a particularly fragile component of signs in general, often found in ‘slips of the hand' even in adult native signers. Analysis of these complex constructions in a subject with delayed input may corroborate evidence for Universal Grammar, UG, which claims a language-specific domain for acquisition.

Hayden Stack

Graduation Year: 2004 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Analysis of Output Opportunities in a First-Grade Spanish-English Dual Language Program Thesis Advisor/s:   Larry King Abstract:  

Although students receive much comprehensible input in dual language programs, their opportunities to produce comprehensible output that allows for hypothesis testing, feedback, automaticity, and syntactic processing are severely restricted even at the first grade level, thus hindering improvement in oral proficiency. The current pilot study focused upon native English-speaking students in a first grade dual language class.

The main goals included collecting evidence concerning the role of output in second language acquisition in the dual language environment and characterizing the input that fostered this output. An analysis of the data revealed a predominance of one-word output on the part of students and reliance on close-ended questions on the part of teachers. It was found that complexity of output improves when more output hypotheses-whether correct or erroneous-are made and feedback applied to subsequent efforts. Dual language educators are thus encouraged to pro-vide students with more opportunities to interact conversationally in the tar-get language in order to foster second language development.

Julia St. john

Graduation Year: 2004 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   The Semantics of English Manner Adverbs Thesis Advisor/s:   Gert Webelhuth Abstract:  

This dissertation details an empirical study investigating the semantic properties of English manner adverbs and subject modifiers and the verbs they modify. The purpose of the study is to determine which of these semantic properties are relevant to manner adverb modification and to enable a comparison of those properties to the semantic properties relevant to the syntactic phenomenon of argument realization and to other semantic phenomena such as the temporal and aspectual properties of verbs.

In order to make this comparison, it was necessary to systematize the data to determine which adverb and verb combinations were acceptable and which were unacceptable. This sys-tematization of the data serves as the groundwork for a preliminary hierarchy of the types of semantic relations that play a role in adverbial modification. The hierarchy is expressed as a multiple inheritance hierarchy in which more specific types inherit information from more general supertypes.

The semantic properties elucidated in this study are expressed in the formalism developed in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, HPSG; Pollard and Sag: 1987, 1994. The comparison of this hierarchy to a hierarchy of semantic relations derived from semantic properties identified by Dowty, 1989; 1991, and Davis, 2001, as important to an adequate account of argument realization reveals a number of differences. Among those, two important distinctions are (1) the fact that, although some of the semantic properties relevant for argument realization also are identified as significant for describing the interactions of manner adverbs and verbs, the former are a small subset of the latter, and (2) the fact that semantic clashes between manner adverbs and verbs are much more easily overridden by contextual factors than is the linking of semantic role and argument.

Patrick Murphy

Graduation Year: 2004 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Passive Prototypes, Topicality, and Conceptual Space Thesis Advisor/s:   Laura Janda Abstract:  

Passive constructions are perhaps the most widely studied grammatical phenomenon within generative grammar. Typological studies describe the wide variety of features of passive constructions cross-linguistically, and both typolological and acquisition studies offer insight into the relative markedness of these constructions.

This dissertation has the goal of investigating the nature of membership within the category 'passive' and cross-linguistic comparison of constructions, 'passive' and otherwise. A model of universal passive types within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, HPSG, is presented. This is accomplished by proposing a set of type definitions, characterizing both the relatively unmarked and relatively marked features of passive constructions. This provides some granularity in the passive's characterization, but does not model the markedness of these features with respect to each other.

To that end, preference principles in the construction of passive type matrices in HPSG are introduced: a metagrammar provided by Universal Grammar describing the markedness of each type with respect to its supertype. The resulting system models a passive prototype within HPSG. Topicality measures were collected from the Uppsala Corpus of Russian for the Russian verbs pisat'/napisat' 'to write', davat'/ dat' 'to give', and zabyvat'/zabyt' 'to forget'.

Examining the conceptual space of various voice constructions with these Russian verbs, Croft's, 2001, notion of plotting constructions in 'conceptual space' is exploited as a means of cross-linguistic comparison using these topicality measures. Examining the conceptual space of various voice constructions with these Russian verbs, Croft's generalizations are upheld, their position being consistent whether Referential Distance or Topic Persistence is used as a measure.

Finally, data from other typological discourse studies is plotted, noting where various voice constructions pattern, and how this data fits into Croft's model.

Elaine Ferreira Abousalh

Graduation Year: 2004 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Phonetic Implementation of Tonal Downtrends in Coatzospan Mixtec Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

This thesis compares the phonetic implementation of downstepped high tones (!H) and low tones (L) in Coatzospan Mixtec, an Otomanguean language spoken in San Juan Coatzospan, Mexico.

Two-word phrases where the second element consists of a bimoraic monotonic word associated to a !H or L were examined. It is shown that F0 means for !H and L at the initial mora of target words are not different from each other, while F0 means for the two tones at the second mora of target words are always significantly different.

This is interpreted as resulting from the assignment of the same F0 target to !H and L. The difference between the tones would be caused by tone-specific declination, which makes the F0 of L decay more than the F0 of !H. If the TBU bearing !H or L is placed before a pause, the tones are further affected by final lowering.

Erin Eckhouse

Graduation Year: 2003 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Onset-Rime Awareness in Children's Reading Thesis Advisor/s:   Misha Becker, Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Neal Snider

Graduation Year: 2003 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Tongan Raising: A Minimalist Analysis Thesis Advisor/s:   Randall Hendrick Abstract:  

The Polynesian language Tongan has a set of raising predicates that take a complement clause and optionally allow either the ergative or absolutive argument of the complement predicate, but not both, to appear with the matrix raising predicate. This behavior appears to present a problem for the Minimalist syntactic theory of Chomsky, 1995, which holds that there are no optional movements.

This work argues that the raising is motivated by morphological requirements of the particle 'o that marks the complement clause. There are actually two dialects, the grammars of which are both consistent with Minimalist theory: One has a [+D] morphological feature on 'o and requires a DP to its left to check the feature. In this dialect, there is raising only of ergative-marked arguments in transitive clauses. The other dialect has a [+Focus] morphological feature, which allows for the raising of ergative- or absolutive-marked DPs in transitive clauses.

Kimberly Thomas

Graduation Year: 2003 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Issues Concerning Divergence/Convergence in the Southern Vernacular: Postvocalic /r/ and the Time-Depth Contingency Thesis Advisor/s:   Walt Wolfram Abstract:  

In this thesis, I examine the admissibility of the evidence regarding divergent and convergent linguistic change in white and black vernacular varieties, concluding that the changes in the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ (i.e., etymological /r/ before consonants or pause) are both divergent and convergent for black and white Southern speakers.

Maki Takahashi

Graduation Year: 2003 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Acquisition of Mora in Japanese Children: Do they Develop Vowel-Length Contrast Before Coda Segments? Thesis Advisor/s:   Jennifer Smith Abstract:  

Jenny Palmer

Graduation Year: 2002 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Role of /s/ Duration as a Perceptual Cue for Gay-Sounding Male Speech Thesis Advisor/s:   Chip Gerfen Abstract:  

This thesis is an experimental analysis of the role that /s/ duration plays in how listeners perceive male sexual orientation based on speech.

With listener responses measured as both a categorical, forced choice, response and a continual mean 'gayness' score, listeners' perception of a man as gay increased substantially with the longer /s/ durations in word-initial, stressed /skV/ and /spV/ environments. Listener participants heard one of 3 /s/ durations of a man whose sexual orientation had been perceived as neutral.

ANOVA analysis showed that listeners who heard the longer /s/ durations perceived the man as sounding 'gayer'. In addition, multiple regression analysis showed that listeners who heard the longer /s/ durations were significantly more likely to judge the speaker as sounding 'gay'.

Patrick Obregon

Graduation Year: 2001 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Thesis Advisor/s:   Chip Gerfen Abstract:  

In this thesis I propose an Optimality Theoretic analysis of the monophthong-diphthong alternations, primarily [o]~[wé] and [e] ~[jé], found in etymologically related forms in Spanish, and commonly referred to as diphthongization.

This work builds upon the notion of Harris, 1985, and Dunlap, 1991, that vowels subject to this alternation may be marked in the lexicon by their association with two positions on the melodic tier, which for the purposes of this analysis I am taking to be a segmental skeletal tier.

I posit a positional faithfulness constraint Max-Pos(Head), which holds that underlying segmental count must be pre-served in stressed syllables. The high ranking of No Long Vowels prevents diphthongizing vowels from surfacing with two associated skeletal slots, and hence moras, leaving epenthesis (of [e]) as the only means of satisfying Max-Pos (Head).

Sonority sequencing constraints preventing mid-mid diphthongs, along with the integrity constraint O-Anchor-Pos, which ensures the tautosyllabicity of the associated skeletal slots, works to produce the high onglide shape of the resulting diphthong.

Sarah Tully Marks

Graduation Year: 2001 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Gender and Computer-Mediated Communication: Why Women Need their Space Thesis Advisor/s:   David Herman, Rusty Barrett Abstract:  

The interaction of gender and computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become a subject of great research in the last few years. Many researchers have considered the differences between behavioral norms of genders when spoken and when typed as CMC.

This thesis considers these differences, taking special consideration of the notions of 'flaming' and 'thanking'. In addition to asserting that differences such as these necessitate separate spaces for women to participate in Internet Relay Chat, this thesis considers the possibility that it is not in fact the genders which assign people's behavioral norms online.

In reality, the norms of conversational style are determined by the chat systems themselves to be followed by the participant members of the community. Of most interest here is the notion that the effects of gender can be superceded when language is considered to be a function of a community at large and not an individual.

Scott Halbritter

Graduation Year: 2001 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Idioms, Metaphors, and Speech Acts: Accounting for and Predicting Idiomatic Flexibility Thesis Advisor/s:   Gert Webelhuth Abstract:  

In this study I will explore the work of Webelhuth and Ackerman, 1994, in order to provide a basis for furthering the HPSG approach of handling idioms by Riehemann, 1997. I will use the model of W. and A. to test my own corpus of 1000 English idioms to verify the English applicability of their "aboutness" findings.

I will show that metaphor is the critical aspect for defining and understanding idioms. I will suggest areas of inquiry that appear to be promising for predic-ting the flexibility and availability of idiomatic expressions. As Riehemann suggests, hierarchies of metaphorical mappings may indeed provide some of the keys to designing algorithms modeled after real +HUMAN speech acts–idioms, metaphors, and all. Regardless, it should be apparent that the traditional categories of context-free grammars hold little promise for being able to account for the intricacies of the key element of idioms: metaphor.

Rodney Edwards

Graduation Year: 2001 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Development of the Southern Double-Object Construction Thesis Advisor/s:   Gert Webelhuth Abstract:  

The Southern Double Object Construction poses a major syntactic problem. How can a sentence like 1 be grammatical alongside 2 and 3 ? 1 Maryi bought heri a book; 2 Maryi bought herj a book; 3 Maryi bought herselfi a book.

Sentence 1 shows that a bare pronoun may stand in place of a reflexive pronoun, although standard varieties of Modern English mandate that such a bare pronoun should not be co-referential with its subject as in 1 , but must always show disjoint reference as in 2 . This was not the case, however, in Old English.

Object pronouns in Southern English are specified as non-anaphoric by default, but the Southern Double Object Construction, preserving the situation that obtained in the ancestral form of English, may continue to license the overriding of this default similar to the way Old English construed its object pronouns. Thus any violations of the principles of Binding Theory are avoided.

Graduation Year: 2001 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Crosslinguistic Comparison of the Perception of Glottalization in English and Coatzospan Mixtec Thesis Advisor/s:   Chip Gerfen Abstract:  

This thesis takes a cross-linguistic look at the role that amplitude and fundamental frequency, f0, play in cueing the percept of glottalization in English and Coatzospan Mixtec, CM, an Otomanguean language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Although vowel glottalization is contrastive in CM but allophonic in English, two salient acoustic features of glottalization in both languages are concurrent amplitude and f0 declinations. A series of forced-choice perception experiments using synthetic speech stimuli in which amplitude and f0 had been manipulated were conducted with CM listeners.

The results of the experiments reported here indicate that, consistent with previous findings for English listeners, either an f0 or an amplitude drop alone can cue the percept of glottalization. However, CM listeners proved to be more highly attuned to slight change along both the f0 and amplitude dimensions than English listeners.

This finding is consistent with the fact that glottalized vowels are contrastive in CM, and the expectation that CM speakers are more sensitive than English speakers to the acoustic variables which cue the percept of glottalization. Additionally, this thesis con-tributes to the body of literature per-taining to language-particular effects on speech perception and adds to our knowledge of the phonetics of glottalization in general.

Benito Vilá

Graduation Year: 2000 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Vocabulary of Self and Other in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Chilean Documents Thesis Advisor/s:   Craig Melchert Abstract:  

Members of every linguistic community possess a set of internal cognitive referents with which they interpret sensory input. These referents are not necessarily uniform within every community, and tend to evolve over time, as a result of innovation, reinterpretations, and borrowings from neighboring communities. However, many elements seem to persist within individual communities over time, elements which often yield distinctive interpretations of the world relative to other communities.

There is much in the patterns of continuity and change that suggest we are dealing with a linguistic mechanism. Changes in interpretations of cause and effect, of social relations and of individual responsibility reflect many of the same characteristics as do phonological, syntactic and semantic changes, as studied in Historical Linguistics.

Representations of Self and Other are among the most fundamental internal referents in any grammar of the universe. A look at this specific element in 16th and 17th Century Chilean documents reveals, on the one hand, commonalities with the grammar of Latin Antiquity, and on the other, borrowings from a very different perception of Self and Other in other European communities. There are, moreover, differences between Chilean documents themselves which seem to trace to the specific location of various authors within their shared culture, and signs of change in representations, within an enduring distinctiveness, as the overall community absorbed outside influences.

Graduation Year: 2000 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   The Syntax of Albanian Subordination: The Interaction of Subjects and Complementizers Thesis Advisor/s:   Randall Hendrick Abstract:  

This thesis examines the Albanian complementizer system in the Principles and Parameters syntactic framework, which seeks to establish universal principles of syntactic organization, as well as to define parameters which restrict the variation between languages.

The Albanian complementizer system is of interest because it appears to be language-specific and idiosyncratic; further it appears to violate syntactic universals in two respects. First, complementizers precede Wh-phrases in subordinate clauses. Second, the complementizer system interacts with subject pronoun deletion. I argue that these two facets of variation follow from the parametric variation of complementizer systems in Universal Grammar.

I show that the idiosyncratic properties of Albanian with respect to Wh-Movement and subject pronoun deletion follow directly from the selection of the parametric value of multiple complementizers in Albanian. This conclusion is supported by detailed discussions of that-trace effects, restrictions on object movement and topicalization, as well as Verb Second effects.

Soo-Jung Kim

Graduation Year: 2000 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Accentual Effects on Segmental Phonological Rules in Korean Thesis Advisor/s:   Chip Gerfen, Megan Crowhurst Abstract:  

This dissertation provides empirical support for the intonation-based model, Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986; Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988; Jun 1993, 1998, of Korean prosodic structure by arguing that this model best characterizes the domains of Lateralization, Delateralization, and N-insertion in Korean.

Lateralization refers to the assimilation of a coronal nasal n to the adjacent lateral l. Delateralization is the segmental proscription against laterals in word-initial position. N-insertion is a phenomenon in which n appears stem-initially in stems beginning with i or y that are preceded by a stem or prefix ending in a consonant. Specifically, using nasal airflow data combined with pitch tracks, I show that the accentual phrase serves as a domain for these rules. I demonstrate that lateralization and n-insertion are not utterance-span rules, and that word-initial laterals in loanwords do not trigger lateralization of the preceding consonants.

Throughout, I compare predictions of syntax-based and intonation-based models by examining cases where the target sequences (l-n for lateralization, n-l for delateralization and n-i for n-insertion) are projected to be within the same phrase by different models, cases where different models split the sequences by phrase boundaries, and cases where different models disagree regarding the location of phrase boundaries. By doing this, I show that each of the rules is best characterized as an accentual phrase phenomenon.

Specifically, lateralization occurs within the accentual phrase and is blocked across the accentual phrase boundary. Regarding delateralization, word-initial /l/s are changed into either an [n] or a geminate [l] within the accentual phrase, or [ɾ] across the accentual phrase. And n-insertion applies across prosodic words within an accentual phrase. This work adds to a body of literature arguing that prosodic structure higher than the word in Korean is best modeled in terms of intonationally based approaches such as developed by Jun, 1993, 1998. It further leads us to ask whether this kind of phonetic work will lead to adoption of intonational phrasing approaches for languages in general, or whether some languages employ syntax-based prosodic models, while others are intonation-based.

Della Chambless

Graduation Year: 2000 Degree Sought:   MA Thesis Title:   Stress in Standard Italian: An Optimality Theoretic Account Thesis Advisor/s:   Chip Gerfen Abstract:  

This thesis provides a comprehensive account of stress in Italian, within the framework of Optimality Theory. It is shown that an extrametricality account of unpredictable primary stress is unnecessary if lexical accent is assumed. High rankings of input-to-output prosodic faithfulness constraints ensure that lexical accent is realized, while secondary stress is accounted for through interaction of these faithfulness constraints with lower-ranked markedness constraints.

After accounting for primary and secondary stress in monomorphemic words, I present an analysis of stress in suffixed words. Stress preservation effects (formalized as output-to-output faithfulness constraints) require that the syllable with primary stress in the base of the derived word surface with secondary stress in the suffixed word. Finally, variability is identified in secondary stress in suffixed words, and an attempt is made to capture this variability through constraint rankings.

Graduation Year: 2000 Degree Sought:   Ph.D. Thesis Title:   Resultative Constructions in English and German Thesis Advisor/s:   Gert Webelhuth Abstract:  

This dissertation captures the licensing factors that underlie the distribution of resultative constructions in English and German. The usage-based model put forward in this dissertation argues for a constructional approach towards resultatives that regards the multiple conventionalized senses associated with verbs as central to a framework that aims at capturing the full range of resultative constructions. Based on corpus data which show that particular senses of verbs subcategorize for distinct semantic and/or syntactic classes of resultative phrases and distinct semantic classes of postverbal NPs, I argue that resultatives should be grouped into two main classes, namely conventionalized resultative constructions and non-conventionalized resultative constructions. On this view, each particular sense of a verb constitutes a mini-construction represented by an event-frame that captures the semantic/pragmatic and syntactic specifications of the sense of the verb.

Adopting the main ideas of Frame Semantics, I propose that event-frames contain two types of interrelated information, namely linguistically immediately relevant on-stage information that needs to be overtly realized because it is conceptually the most salient type of information, and conceptual off-stage information that may be realized linguistically given the proper contextual conditions. Based on corpus data, I show that it is possible to account for the licensing of conventionalized resultative constructions in terms of the event-frames associated with verbs. Non-conventionalized resultative constructions are licensed by an analogical process by which a verb acquires a new syntactic frame. This associative process is triggered by a semantic overlap with a conventionalized resultative in combination with contextual background information.

The similarities and differences in distribution between resultatives in English and German are shown to be due to the distinct lexical polysemy networks of English and German verbs. I show that historically related verbs show different distributions of resultative because of the differences in conventionalized usage patterns.