Browsing by Subject "Linguistics"
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Item A Linguistic Analysis Of Rhetorical Strategies In Selected Narratives Of Alice Walker(2009) Matunda, Robert Stephen Mokaya; Jackson, Wendell P.; English and Languages; Doctor of PhilosophyThe objective of this investigation was to analyze rhetorical strategies of Alice Walker in four narratives, namely, The Color Purple, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart. As such, this study helps to expand the body of investigation relating linguistics to literature and medium to message. To address the problem, the writer relied upon the method of discourse analysis, specifically employing the linguistic tools of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, as well as a combination of theoretical frameworks, including Paul H. Grice's conversational implicature, Gill Seidel's discourse analysis, Edward Finegan's concepts of language use, George Yule's theoretical writings, Edward Said's colonial discourse theory, and certain feminist reductionist concepts. Even more specifically, the writer examined Walker's phonological processes; the patterns of word formation; the syntactic features that Walker employed to negotiate with her readers, including negation, verb deletion, tense variation, subordination, voice variation, and co-ordination; her rhetorical use of ambivalence as a semantic device; and her manipulation of fronting, code switching, and negation as pragmatic strategies. The study demonstrated that Alice Walker's rhetorical practices contributed to realistic presentation of her characters; underscored power differentials among these characters, and between the characters and her targeted audience, and even asserted a unity between these characters and Walker herself; highlighted moments of intensity; uncovered many of her ambivalent expressions as part of a deliberate artistic plan; and allowed Walker to advocate for change on various issues like religion, race, and gender bias. All in all, though we do not frequently imagine that writers purposefully manipulate the linguistic features of their creative work, it is clear that Walker is very much concerned with managing many linguistic elements to achieve her artistic effects, and this fact only reinforces the impression that Walker is an artist of complexity and depth.Item An Exploratory Study On The Influence Of Song Lyrics Referencing Marijuana, Heroin, And/Or Ecstasy: Perceptions Of Maryland College Students(2015) Sterrett, Zakia S.; Hargett, Stella; Sociology and Anthropology; Master of ArtsThe primary focus of this study was to gauge the attitudes of college students about the impact of marijuana, heroin, and/or ecstasy song lyrics on use of one or more of these drugs. The author created an online survey for Maryland college and university students 18 years of age and older; there were 125 participants. Most respondents perceived that song lyrics with references to marijuana, heroin, and/or ecstasy have no influence on their use of one or more of these drugs. Most students agreed that teenagers are more likely to be influenced to use marijuana, heroin, and/or ecstasy after listening to one or more of these references in song lyrics, but disagreed on this influence for young adults. The research concluded that adolescents are perceived to be more likely to use marijuana, heroin, and/or ecstasy because of the influence of song lyrics referencing one or more of these drugs. The perceptions of Maryland college students are important in establishing a link between direct exposure to illicit drug song lyrics and actual illicit drug usage among these demographic groups.Item English-Based Creoles: The History, Formation, And Usage Of Miskito Coast Creole And Gullah(2016) Bryant, Laquetta; Jeremiah, Milford A.; English and Languages; Master of ArtsThe History, Formation, and Usage of Miskito Coast Creole and Gullah identify similarities, differences, usage, and history among two English-based Creoles in North and Central America. During an excursion to Nicaragua in April of 2014, the writer experienced many cultural and linguistic differences. Eager to learn about the language and culture of Nicaragua, the writer attended many events to familiarize herself with life in Central America. J.L. Dillard, Lorenzo D. Turner, and Derek Bickerton are American linguist that have studied languages ranging from Black English to Creole. Throughout their studies, they often found characteristics that represent what some call “Broken English”. While identifying that both languages have influences from other authentic languages such as Spanish and West African Pidgin English, the researcher determined that while each of these languages are English-based, that does not mean they both have the same characteristics in Syntax and Phonology.Item Gendered Discourse In The Confessionalists And The New Journalists(2010) Butler, Brett Howard; White, Judy A.; English and Languages; Doctor of PhilosophyThis study compares the discourse of male female American authors who produced works between 1960 to 1975 in order to challenge existing theories of gender and discourse. It focuses on identifying the similarities and differences in the way male and female authors describe male and female characters and in the way they narrate selective events in their works. This study also identifies how the male and female authors from this time period assign or remove power to or from the characters about whom they write. The primary writers evaluated in this study are Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Joan Didion.Item The new 'Baltimorese'.(2004-09-23) Matunda, Robert Mokaya; Jeremiah, Milford A.; Master of ArtsItem Transferring Semantic Knowledge Into Language Encoders(2021-01-01) UMAIR, MOHAMMAD; Ferraro, Francis; Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; Computer ScienceWe introduce semantic form mid-tuning, an approach for transferring semantic knowledge from semantic meaning representations into transformer-based language encoders. In mid-tuning, we learn to align the text of general sentences---not tied to any particular inference task---and semantic representations of those sentences that were automatically generated by FrameNet and PropBank Semantic Role parsers. We show that this alignment can be learned implicitly via classification or directly via triplet loss. Our method yields language encoders that demonstrate improved predictive performance across inference, reading comprehension, textual similarity, and other semantic tasks drawn from the GLUE, SuperGLUE, and SentEval benchmarks. We evaluate our approach on three popular baseline models, where our experimental results and analysis concludes that current pre-trained language models can further benefit from structured semantic frames with the proposed mid-tuning method, as they inject additional task-agnostic knowledge to the encoder, improving the generated embeddings as well as the linguistic properties of the given model, as evident from improvements on a popular sentence embedding toolkit and a variety of probing tasks.