Linguistics
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From Aari to Zulu: Massively Multilingual Creation of Language Tools using Interlinear Glossed Text
This dissertation examines the suitability of Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) as a computational, semi-structured resource for creating NLP tools for resource-poor languages, with a focus on the tasks of word alignment, ... -
East Uvean A condensed grammar
East Uvean (EUV), also called Faka’Uvea or le wallisien, is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, spoken on Wallis Island (‘Uvea) in the French collectivity of Wallis and Futuna, as well as by populations in ... -
How peripheral a phenomenon is it?: On the interaction of DP-internal ellipsis, degree inversion, and islands
In this dissertation I set out to solve a series of puzzles related to the notion of a DP periphery, defined as an area around the edge of a given domain targeted by operations such as movement and agreement. In solving ... -
Automated Gloss Mapping for Inferring Grammatical Properties
This thesis describes a software system that maps glosses from interlinear glossed text (IGT) to an internally consistent set. This study hypothesizes that mapping glosses supports better inference of grammatical properties. ... -
Endangered languages, technology and learning: A Yakama/Yakima Sahaptin case study
Efforts to support Indigenous and endangered language education continue to utilize technology in a variety of ways. As the vitality of many languages around the world continues to be threatened, it is important to reassess ... -
The diachronic development of passive constructions from Archaic Chinese to Modern Mandarin
In this dissertation, I study the diachronic development of passive construction from Archaic Chinese to Modern Mandarin. I classify the passive forms into two major groups: 1) the monoclausal passive. 2) the biclausal ... -
Southern, Texan, or Both?: Southernness and Identity in Deer Park, Texas
Perceptual dialectology researchers have reported that in “draw-a-map” tasks focused on non-linguists’ perceptions of dialect regions, the South is one of the most commonly identified regions in the United States, and that ... -
Mixed Gender Agreement in Russian DPs
This thesis provides a new account of mixed gender agreement in Russian, incorporating the joint strengths of several previous accounts. Mixed agreement results when some elements in a sentence agree with the grammatical ... -
The Phonetics of Stance-taking
Stance -- attitudes and opinions about the topic of discussion -- has been investigated textually in conversation- and discourse analysis and in computational models, but little work has focused on its acoustic-phonetic ... -
Second Language Acquisition of Korean Case by Learners with Different First Languages
This dissertation examines the role of L2 learners’ first language (L1) in acquiring a target morpho-syntactic feature (case) and learner perceptions of the L2 grammar, specifically, Korean case and case particles. In ... -
Faculty Attitudes Towards Heritage Language and Heritage Language Teaching Policy in Washington State Community College Spanish Departments
Felix (2009) and Potowski (2002) have shown that negative attitudes about Heritage language can impact Heritage speakers in the classroom. This paper describes research carried out to assess the attitudes toward Heritage ... -
A Linguist-Friendly Machine Translation System for Low-Resource Languages
Low-resource languages have largely been left out of the machine translation revolution. Speakers would benefit from machine translation for many different tasks if it were available. Because of insufficient text data, the ... -
New Methods for Detecting Deceptive Product Reviews
With the explosion of online shopping sites, there has been a proliferation of businesses offering to post positive product reviews in exchange for payment. The presence of these deceptive reviews transforms a product's ... -
The Social Distribution of a Regional Change: /æg, ɛg, eg/ in Washington State
Recent studies at the University of Washington as part of the Pacific Northwest English (PNWE) Study have found that Washingtonians are raising /æ, ɛ/ before /g/ (e.g. "bag", "beg"), known as 'pre-velar raising' (Wassink, ... -
Language attitudes and bilingualism in Turkish-German popular film
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine attitudes towards Turkish-German language mixing. Lambert (1967), Lippi-Green (1997) and Preston (2010) have shown that stereotypes about groups of people can be expressed ... -
Full Forest Treebanking
In this thesis, I present a new method of producing treebanks using constraint-based grammars. Rather than requiring an explicitly enumerated set of candidate analyses per utterance, my method works from an implicit ... -
Generativism and Emergentism: Evidence From Second Language Acquisition Studies of Poverty of the Stimulus Phenomena
This work applies evidence from second language acquisition studies to the question of the existence of an inborn, language-specific system that constrains the set of possible human grammars. Three sets of studies are ... -
Leveraging Training Data from High-Resource Languages to Improve Dependency Parsing for Low-Resource Languages
Dependency parsing is an important natural language processing (NLP) task with many downstream applications, and as is common in the field, high accuracy results can be obtained when using statistical methods and training ... -
Extracting Topically Related Synonyms from Twitter using Syntactic and Paraphrase Data
The goal of synonym extraction is to automatically gather synsets (groups of synonyms) from a corpus. This task is related to the tasks of normalization and paraphrase detection. We present a series of approaches for synonym ... -
Adjectives in the LinGO Grammar Matrix
The LinGO Grammar Matrix (Bender et al. 2002, 2010) provides a system for user-linguists to jump start the creation of starter Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar precision grammars (Pollard and Sag 1994), with semantic ...
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