Language socialization in a Northern Thai bilingual community

Howard, Kathryn Marie University of California, Los Angeles 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation investigates the language socialization of children in a Northern Thai bilingual community into the use of two codes—Kam Muang, the community vernacular, and Standard Thai, the official national language of Thailand. Both language varieties have complex systems of honorifics and social registers that children must learn to use appropriately in a variety of settings. This dissertation investigates how kindergarten children are socialized into social and culturally appropriate uses of speech styles in these two languages in the educational settings of the family household, children's play groups, and the public school. Through an ethnographic, discourse-analytic study of four 5-year-old Muang children and their 7- to 9-year-old siblings, the dissertation examines how children are socialized through language into the social organization of hierarchy in their community, including the practices of respect in two languages, how they are socialized into the genres and linguistic practices of intimacy, and the impact of this process on a process of language shift in their community. The widespread use of new language mixing practices, lamented by Muang adults, is considered to be characteristic of younger Muang speakers, especially those in the city. This dissertation shows that children's socialization into the social and linguistic practices of their community is organized by community ideologies of respect, accommodation, and intimacy. This process of socialization, in turn, socializes children into multiple practices of language hybridity that represent a shift in the way that language is being used by community members. In a variety of settings with a wide range of community members, children are active participants in the social world around them, engaging in practices that both reflect and transform the values, expectations, and orientations of their community. We found that children's socialization is accomplished through their exposure to language-mixed genres and varieties, through competing modes of caregiving and teaching that highlight certain aspects of language behavior over others, and through participation in the routine and everyday language practices of their community.

Educated Japanese young women's diverse linguistic and social behaviors during the Meiji and Taisho periods (1868--1926) with implications for Japanese language pedagogy

Bohn, Mariko Tajima Stanford University 2008 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation takes an historical perspective on so-called "Japanese women's language" (joseigo/onna kotoba) which has been widely categorized as the stereotypical female speech style in Japanese language, as antipodal to "men's language" (danseigo/otoko kotoba). In addition to this historical work, I consider current perspectives of gendered speech styles including "Japanese women's language," investigating how Japanese language learners and instructors perceive these styles and how their perceptions impact upon language pedagogy. Recent micro-sociolinguistic studies, in contrast to the categorization of gendered speech styles, highlight the within-gender diversity in Japanese women's use of language, focusing particularly on the linguistic innovation associated with non-normative femininity. Moreover, recent studies with macrosociological analysis have focused on power and dominant ideology, identifying a "Japanese women's language" as a media product informed by the creation of a modern women's image during the Meiji government's modernization and language standardization in the early 20th century. During the Meiji and Taisho period (1868-1926), however, what is today considered normative "Japanese women's language" was regarded as unconventional or innovative and was criticized as being coarse and unladylike by educators and linguistic norm-holders. Taking micro-and macro-social analyses into consideration, this dissertation reveals a discord between the Meiji educators' perceptions of young women's use of innovative language and the media representations of this language. This dissertation focuses on educated young women's real linguistic practices, and therefore takes a different approach from recent studies that have used macrosociological analysis. Specifically, this dissertation investigates educated young women's linguistic innovation and performance of non-normative femininity during the Meiji and Taisho periods (1868-1926), by analyzing their letter-writing in readers' correspondence columns of three women's magazines: Jogaku sekai 'The World of Women's Learning,' Fujin sekai 'The Women's World,' and Reijokai 'Ladies' World.' Through a linkage between micro- and macro-social analyses, this dissertation reveals that innovative language plays a significant role in educated young women's self-expressions and their construction of a subculture through friendship practices, and identifies the similarities in linguistic innovation and performance of non-normative femininity between contemporary young women and educated young women of the Meiji and Taisho periods. In addition, by comparing how innovative language is presented in novels and fiction, I propose dual functions of innovative language; as an expression of a writer's identity as a young and modern female writer, and as a yakuwari-go 'language that fits to a particular character' (Kinsui 2003), including the use of the sentence-final expressions, da wa and no yo, which have been categorized as stereotypical feminine forms in current literature. Furthermore, I present a possible process of the spread, maintenance, and transformation of the sentence-final expressions, da wa and no yo from being viewed as coarse to become the stereotypical women's language, by proposing four social factors: young women's school and dormitory life, mimicry performance, the influence of female students and their culture, and the popularity of female students' use of these forms in public. This dissertation consists of five chapters. The first chapter provides an outline and introduction of the dissertation. The second chapter looks at previous studies of Japanese language and gender, focusing on how women's use of language has been viewed in both Japanese and Western society. The third chapter is divided into two sections. The first section investigates the historical process of the formation and maintenance of linguistic and social norms by analyzing conduct books, textbooks used in co-educational elementary schools, and readers used in girls' high schools from the late eighteenth to the early part of the twentieth century. The second section examines educated young women's diverse use of language in letter-writing and social behaviors presented in three women's magazines. The fourth chapter investigates, through the use of a questionnaire, how gendered speech patterns, including stereotypical women's language, are perceived by current Japanese language learners and instructors. Based on the analysis of the findings of the questionnaire, this chapter has implications for Japanese language pedagogy. The final chapter presents a summary of this dissertation.

Miami language reclamation in the home: A case study

Leonard, Wesley Y University of California, Berkeley 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

We are in the midst of a worldwide movement of language revitalization in which indigenous peoples are reclaiming their histories, cultures, and identities. This dissertation reports on a successful example of reclamation. Deemed "extinct" in the 1960s when the only speaker of the language passed away, the Miami language underwent a 30-year period of silence. However, working with 300 years of documentation, the Miami community has begun the long process of bringing the language back. Tribal member Daryl Baldwin is a leader in this process; he began learning the language in the early 1990s and using it with his family. Daryl, his wife, and their first two children have since become conversationally proficient. Two more children were born in the late 1990s and are being raised with Miami as a native language. The family members also play an instrumental role in a community-wide process of language and cultural revitalization. This study explores the Baldwin family's language reclamation process. Its special focus is on the two younger children's language development -- that is, how they are acquiring the language and being socialized to speak it in this unique social situation. I adopt an ecological model of studying language development by considering all factors that play into this issue. These include the history of the language itself, the family's actual patterns of use, their language ideologies, and general cognitive principles of language acquisition. Part I of this dissertation presents the context in which the younger children's language development is taking place. I describe the history and structure of the language, how this family initially went about reclaiming it, and the design of this project as a participant-observation study in which my presence became a factor. Part II then examines the younger children's actual language development through a series of case studies. I show that they are successfully acquiring the grammar of the language and are also developing a positive orientation toward the language that bodes well for its continued use. In Part III, I conclude that the reclamation of a sleeping language as a language of daily communication is clearly possible.

Heritage Welsh: a study of heritage language as the outcome of minority language acquisition and bilingualism

Boon, Erin Diane Harvard University 2014 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation analyzes the language used by 20 adult heritage Welsh speakers now living in London, i.e., bilinguals who shifted to English dominance in childhood, and whose Welsh proficiencies now show divergences from baseline norms as a result of incomplete acquisition and attrition. The grammars of these heavily imbalanced bilinguals are compared with baseline informants (20 Welsh-dominant controls) on a narrative elicitation task, in which the informants tell the story of a children's wordless picture book ( Frog, Where Are You? by Mercer Mayer). The samples collected for this project (Appendix II.1) constitute the first corpus of heritage Welsh. Particular attention is paid to indicators of fluency (mean length of utterance, frequency of embedded clauses, speech rate, vocabulary recall delay, retraces, and retraces with correction), simplification in the system of initial consonant mutation, reanalysis of tense and aspect in verb construction, any non-native agreement morphology, and the availability of a null subject in the heritage Welsh samples. The heritage Welsh samples are examined for evidence that divergence in the heritage grammar results more from a trend toward simplification and access to Universal Grammar than influence from the speaker's dominant language, English. Part I investigates topics which are pertinent to the study of heritage language---its definition and connection to the Critical Period Hypothesis, the distinction between incomplete language acquisition and attrition, and theories of bilingual language systems. Part II details the analysis of the heritage Welsh samples in particular. The concluding remarks broaden the focus to the minority status of the baseline language in Wales, presenting the inevitability of heritage speakers there as well if childhood exposure to Welsh does not reach the critical level necessary for full native proficiency and if the language is not maintained in adulthood. This project introduces the terms "heritage Welsh" and "heritage speaker" into Welsh linguistics, and presents a framework with which to discuss this previously neglected category of bilinguals.

Similarity in L2 phonology

Barrios, Shannon L University of Maryland, College Park 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty with which L2 learners perceive and acquire non-native contrasts, theories of (L2) speech perception often appeal to notions of similarity. But how is similarity best determined?. In this dissertation I explored the predictions of two theoretical approaches to similarity comparison in the second language, and asked: [1] How should L2 sound similarity be measured? [2] What is the nature of the representations that guide sound similarity? [3] To what extent can the influence of the native language be overcome?. In Chapter 2, I tested a `legos' (featural) approach to sound similarity. Given a distinctive feature analysis of Spanish and English vowels, I investigated the hypothesis that feature availability in the L1 grammar constrains which target language segments will be accurately perceived and acquired by L2 learners (Brown [1998], Brown [2000]). Our results suggest that second language acquisition of phonology is not limited by the phonological features used by the native language grammar, nor is the presence/use of a particular phonological feature in the native language grammar sufficient to trigger redeployment. I take these findings to imply that feature availability is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition to predict learning outcomes. In Chapter 3, I extended a computational model proposed by Feldman et al. [2009] to nonnative speech perception, in order to investigate whether a sophisticated `rulers' (spatial) approach to sound similarity can better explain existing interlingual identification and discrimination data from Spanish monolinguals and advanced L1 Spanish late-learners of English, respectively. The model assumes that acoustic distributions of sounds control listeners' ability to discriminate a given contrast. I found that, while the model succeeded in emulating certain aspects of human behavior, the model at present is incomplete and would have to be extended in various ways to capture several aspects of nonnative and L2 speech perception. In Chapter 4 I explored whether the phonological relatedness among sounds in the listeners native language impacts the perceived similarity of those sounds in the target language. Listeners were expected to be more sensitive to the contrast between sound pairs which are allophones of different phonemes than to sound pairs which are allophones of the same phoneme in their native language. Moreover, I hypothesized that L2 learners would experience difficulty perceiving and acquiring target language contrasts between sound pairs which are allophones of the same phoneme in their native language. Our results suggest that phonological relatedness may influence perceived similarity on some tasks, but does not seem to cause long-lasting perceptual difficulty in advanced L2 learners. On the basis of those findings, I argue that existing models have not been adequately explicit about the nature of the representations and processes involved in similarity-based comparisons of L1 and L2 sounds. More generally, I describe what I see as a desirable target for an explanatorily adequate theory of cross-language influence in L2 phonology.

Language in the Mirror: Language Ideologies, Schooling and Islam in Qatar

Asmi, Rehenuma Columbia University 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

My study explores language ideologies in the capital city of Doha, Qatar, where school reform movements are placing greater emphasis on English language acquisition. Through ethnography and a revised theory of language ideologies, I argue that as languages come in greater contact in multi-lingual spaces, mediation must occur between the new and old relationships that are emerging as a result of population growth, policy changes and cross-cultural interactions. I interrogate the development concept of the "knowledge economy" as it is used to justify old and new language ideologies regarding Arabic and English. As Qataris change their education systems in response to the economic development framework of the "knowledge economy," they are promoting language ideologies that designate English as useful for the economy and "global" citizenship and Qatari Arabic and Standard Arabic as useful for religious and cultural reasons. I argue that Standard English, through its association with the "knowledge economy," becomes "de-localized" and branded an "international" language. This ideology presents English as a modern language free of the society in which it is embedded, to circulate around the globe. In contrast, Standard Arabic is represented as stiff, archaic language of religious traditions and Qatari Arabic is presented as the language of oral culture and ethnonationalism. These findings counter the arguments of scholars who have viewed Arabic's linguistic diversity as a binary of written religious tradition and spoken dialects. I argue that scholars have ignored the metapragmatic analysis of Arabic speakers, who view both Standard Arabic and their regional dialects as one language that needs to be defended against the encroachment of foreign languages. In chapter one, I explore the history of Qatar through narrative accounts of western historians and Qatari oral and written accounts. I reflect upon the efforts of the current Qatari leaderships to connect with narratives of globalization through the framework of the "knowledge economy." In chapter two, I outline the actor-networks of the "knowledge economy" that create a development hierarchy between English, the language of the de-localized "international" citizen, and Arabic, the language of the "local" Qatari. In chapter three, I trace how privatization of schooling affects Arabic teachers and their defense of the value of Arabic through an ideology of "Arabic is the language of the Quran." In the following chapter, I move to sites of higher education, where orality and literacy of Arabic are disputed by Arabic teachers, Qatari students and non-Qatari students of Arabic. I contend that studying language through the speech community reduces the tendency to see language variability as problematic or a sign of language death. In chapter five, I explore the role of Islam in Arabic language ideologies by juxtaposing discourses of the secular and of religious tradition. While some scholars have argued that Arabic speakers do not fully understand the implications of Arabic's connection to Islam, my work indicates that speakers are fully aware of this relationship and when necessary, utilize it discursively to promote various political, social and cultural agendas. In conclusion, I argue that a methodology of actor-network theory has allowed me to write a situated ethnography of globalizing processes. The tracing of actor-networks is ideal for studying the rapid changes in Qatar and the ways in which immense wealth has brought many different types of individuals into the country to create new models of schooling and education. Rather than placing the focus on "international" discourses, knowledge economies and globalization, my ethnography emphasizes the need for situated accounting that combines the metalanguage of academics, policy makers and leaders with those of the individuals affected by reforms and projects of globalization.

Binding interpretations in adult bilingualism: A study of language transfer in L2 learners and heritage speakers of Korean

Kim, Ji-Hye University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation investigates the acquisition and maintenance of the binding properties of Korean anaphors in two groups of adult bilinguals: post-puberty L2 learners and adult simultaneous bilinguals who speak Korean as a minority (heritage) language. The aim is to tease apart UG-hased and language-specific properties in L2 acquisition and bilingualism, in examining understanding of core/grammatical vs. exempt/logophoric binding (Pollard and Sag 1994) that is increasingly gaining prominence in theoretical studies of binding. Specifically, I investigate the role of language transfer by examining Korean grammar in bilingual speakers of different contact languages (i.e. English and Chinese). In this study, I hypothesized the following: (i) UG-based binding properties are acquired easier than language-specific binding properties in L2/bilingual acquisition, (ii) knowledge of the stronger/contact language in bilinguals will affect the binding interpretations of Korean as a weaker language, (iii) the effect of transfer will be stronger in post-puberty L2 learners than in simultaneous bilinguals. Two anaphors (caki and caki-casin) were investigated to test core vs. exempt binding of Korean. Two experiments were conducted --- one with Truth Value Judgment with stories, which tests core binding properties such as size of Governing Category (Manzini and Wexler 1987) and Sub-command (Tang 1989), and the other with Grammaticality Judgment Task coupled with Preferential Sentence Interpretation, which tests exempt binding properties such as logophoricity conditions (Sells 1987) and strict vs. sloppy reading in VP ellipsis (Huang and Liu 2001). Overall results show that the subjects performed better with UG-based properties than language-specific properties. The results also reveal the effects of transfer from different languages in interpretations of Korean core binding by bilingual groups; however, bilinguals did not show expected transfer with language-specific interface properties in Korean exempt binding. Overall responses show that the early bilinguals are more similar to Korean monolinguals compared to the late bilinguals.

The second language acquisition of Spanish stress: Derivational, analogical or lexical?

Lord, Gillian E The Pennsylvania State University 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This research investigates English speakers' acquisition of stress placement in Spanish. There has been a lack of research into the acquisition of suprasegmental features of language, although Spanish teachers will be aware of the fact that beginning students do make a number of errors in stress assignment. This is thus is an area of Spanish acquisition that merits further research. This acquisition process is investigated by analyzing the data of 56 learners of Spanish, at three proficiency levels, as well as those of a native control group (14 Spanish speakers). Participants took part in two experiments: a production experiment and a perception experiment. The production study incorporated both real and invented words to examine what learners do with words that are not familiar to them, and included a variety of syllable structures in testing. The perception study investigated learners' ability to perceive stress location on different syllables, as there is debate as to whether perception precedes production, or vice versa. Results show that stress is largely lexical, contrary to much of the recent literature in the area, which claims that rules are employed by learners to compute the stress placement. Under the present analysis, the learner's familiarity with a word allows for correct stress placement through memorization and lexical recall In the absence of lexical knowledge, however, learners recur to an internal system of stress output checking. In initial stages of language learning this system is influenced by a variety of factors, including overgeneralizations generated about the target language based on limited data as well as interference from the first language. With increased proficiency the learner system comes to resemble that of the native language, thanks to greater lexical knowledge and greater experience with patterns encountered in the language. The most advanced learners' performance is indistinguishable from that of native speakers. These results bring to light interesting insights into the process of learning this under-investigated aspect of foreign language, and provide novel information regarding the processes at work in second language phonological learning.

Literatures of Language: A Literary History of Linguistics in Nineteenth-Century America

Jackson, Korey B University of Michigan 2010 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation traces the intertwined history of linguistics and imaginative literature in the nineteenth-century United States. Fiction and travel literature throughout the century gave rise to changing modes of thinking about and documenting language difference. At the same time, new discourses of language study transformed how literary authors represented and reflected on speech in writing. The history of this cross-disciplinary, mutually constitutive relationship has been an understudied topic in both historical linguistics and literary criticism. By reading major works from each field in context with one another---by performing, in other words, a literary history of language study---I seek to understand the profusion of multilingual and dialect literatures and to create a more complete historiography of the discipline of linguistics. My first chapter examines the work of early US language scholars Peter Duponceau and John Pickering. Alongside their research into various Amerindian languages, I discuss the fiction and travel writing of James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Margaret Fuller. Historicizing literary vernacular as part of an emerging, multidisciplinary interest in phonetic transcription, I turn in the second chapter to a number of authors of the Southwestern comic genre: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, William Gilmore Simms, David Crockett, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris. The third chapter focuses on the ethnolinguistic literature of James Russell Lowell and Mark Twain. Alongside their work I examine postbellum linguists William Dwight Whitney and Max Muller, who were beginning to make the case for applying a strict scientific method to the study of language variation. The final chapter follows Lafcadio Hearn, an enigmatic, international travel writer who was responsible for some of the first ethnographic sketches of French and Spanish Creole quarters of New Orleans. These documents reveal a novel retheorization of contact languages and creoles in fin-de-siecle American literature and language study. Throughout this dissertation, it is my goal both to resurface further cross-disciplinary documents, and to reveal their shared methodological and conceptual approaches to language---approaches that were not simply echoes across a divide, but a collective practice that was part of the nascent disciplinary landscape of language study.

A comparison of Spanish produced by Chinese L2 learners and native speakers---an acoustic phonetics approach

Chen, Yudong University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Foreign accent receives constant attention among both language teaching practitioners and researchers. From the practical perspective, foreign accent is one of the more important indices to measure the success of a language program. Many language programs make serious efforts to reduce the amount of foreign accent carried by the participating L2 learners. Also, communicative approaches in second language teaching are receiving more and more criticism due to the lack of performance of students. Many argue that more emphasis should be put on language accuracy. With the regained interest on form in the field of second language acquisition, studies on foreign accent are also receiving more and more attention. Under this general picture, one blank space in the understanding of foreign accent remains to be filled: the acquisition of Spanish phonology by learners who speak Standard Mandarin as first language. Comparing to studies on the acquisition of English phonology by Chinese learners, which include a wide range of studies on perception, articulation and the acoustic phonetics, studies on the acquisition of Spanish phonology by Chinese learners is still largely based on the impressionistic decision rather than research methodologies that have been established and widely accepted in the field of phonetics and phonology. With the growth of popularity of Spanish among the Chinese speaking world, the lack of understanding of Spanish L2 phonology by Chinese learners has drawn more and more attention among language teachers and researchers. This study intends to fill this gap by exploring some of the most important aspects of the phonological system of the interlanguage of Chinese L2 learners of Spanish. First, a general comparison of the phonological system of Standard Mandarin and Spanish is conducted to explore the structural difference between these two languages. Then the interlanguage of Standard Mandarin speakers is analyzed to identify structural differences between the interlanguage and the target language that may cause the perception of foreign accent. Since a complete description and analysis is beyond the scope of a single dissertation, only a few important phonological structures are examined, including plosives, vowels and stress. The choice of the three phonological structures is based both on experience and theoretical considerations. First, they cover both segmental and suprasegmental features and are very representative linguistic structures of the target language. Second, these linguistic structures cause most confusion in language teaching and acquisition and are very robust in the sense that learners generally do not improve significantly their performance on these structures during the acquisition. This study tries to answer several important questions, such as what are the sources of foreign accent with regard to each one of the three linguistic structures and whether the foreign accent caused by these structures improves during the process of acquisition. In Chapter 1, I offered a general review of the phonological systems of Spanish and Standard Mandarin. The review of the Spanish phonological system is conducted with more details since it is the target language under discussion. Then, the two phonological systems are compared. Both segmental and suprasegmental features are examined. Finally, I give a review of the general theories about the acquisition of L2 phonology. In Chapter 2, the design of the three experiments is presented and the hypotheses are proposed. Chapter 3, 4 and 5 cover in detail the experiments for three important aspect of the acquisition of Spanish by Chinese learners, including stress, plosives and vowels. Chapter 3 focuses on tire acquisition of Spanish stress by Chinese learners. Chapter 4 focuses on the acquisition of Spanish plosives by Chinese learners and Chapter 5 focuses on the acquisition of Spanish vowels by Chinese learners. In each chapter, a detailed review of the current theories about the phonological structure under discussion is given. The experiment design is also discussed in detail; results of the experiments presented and hypotheses examined. Several significant conclusions are drawn based on the experiment data of the current study. Chapter 6 summarizes the conclusions of the current study and points to some possible future studies.