Browsing Linguistics by Title
Now showing items 80-99 of 143
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Markers of contrast in Russian: A corpus-based study
(2013-07-25)Markers of contrast in Russian: A corpus-based study -
A minimalist account of optional wh-movement
(1997)Wh-movement has been assumed to be a parametrized fact about language, and, thus, whether a language has overt wh-movement or not has been assumed to be invariant within a language. Also, Chomsky's recent Minimalist Program ... -
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 ... -
Modals in Natural Language Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade-Off
The meanings expressed by the world’s languages have been argued to support efficient communication. Evidence for this hypothesis has drawn on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of both content ... -
Modeling Adnominal Possession in the LinGO Grammar Matrix
This thesis describes the expansion of the LinGO Grammar Matrix customization system with a library handling adnominal possession. This library extends the Grammar Matrix's ability to aid in the rapid prototyping of precision ... -
Modeling the Perceptual Learning of Novel Dialect Features
All language use reflects the user's social identity in systematic ways. While humans can easily adapt to this sociolinguistic variation, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems continue to struggle with it. This ... -
Multi-predicate Constructions in Nuuchahnulth
This dissertation documents and models two types of multi-predicate constructions in Nuuchahnulth: serial verb constructions, and a construction involving the suffix -(q)ḥ, which is called the predicate linker. I define a ... -
Named Entity Resolution for Historical Texts
The field of digital humanities has spurred an increase in applications of computational lin- guistics to historical documents, but the field remains underdeveloped. Standard natural language processing (NLP) techniques ... -
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 ... -
Non-Nominative Subjects in Russian and Lithuanian: Case, Argument Structure, and Anaphor Binding
In this dissertation, I aim to provide a comprehensive view of subjects in Russian and Lithuanian that have a morphological case other than nominative. Non-nominative subjects (NNSs) provide a window into the notion of ... -
"Obama never said that": Evaluating fact-checks for topical consistency and quality
This thesis examines topical consistency between claims and fact-checks in the Birdwatch dataset published by Twitter. The dataset has tweets (the claims), notes (context-adding annotations written by Birdwatch users), and ... -
Old Stereotypes "Live Free or Die": Addressing the Evaluation Problem of non-rhoticity in New Hampshire
Recent research examining New Hampshire English has demonstrated that the traditional Eastern New England features are dissipating among New Hampshirites (Nagy, 2001; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2005; Nagy & Irwin, 2010; Stanford, ... -
On the diverse language experiences of humans and machines
Human experience is characterized by remarkable linguistic and sociocultural diversity. At the same time, much of this diversity is neglected in the language-related fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and natural ... -
On the Statistical Significance Testing for Natural Language Processing
This thesis explores and compares statistical significance tests frequently used in comparing Natural Language Processing (NLP) system performance in several aspects. We begin by establishing the fundamentals of the NLP ... -
An optimality theoretic analysis of Nicaraguan Spanish diminutivization: results of a field survey
(1999)The goals of the present investigation of diminutive formation in Nicaraguan Spanish were twofold: to collect a solid corpus of data defining a clear pattern of diminutive formation in terms of preference and variability, ... -
Parallel Sentence Detection in Comparable Corpora with Bilingual Word Embeddings for Low-resource Languages
In an emergency, machine translation systems can be useful in facilitating international cooperation during rescue efforts. Unfortunately, training resources (bitexts) for many language pairs are scarce and tend to comprise ... -
Phonetics and phonology of Unangan (Eastern Aleut) intonation
(1999)This dissertation gives the first detailed description of the phonetics and phonology of the intonation system of Unangan (Eastern Aleut), an indigenous Alaskan language. Twelve fluent speakers were recorded giving ... -
Phonetics Information Base and Lexicon
(2013-04-17)In this dissertation, I investigate the linguistic and technological challenges involved in creating a cross-linguistic data set to undertake phonological typology. I then address the question of whether more sophisticated, ... -
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 ... -
The Phonetics of Tone in Two Dialects of Dane-zaa (Athabaskan)
(2013-07-25)This dissertation is an investigation of acoustic properties of lexical tone in two dialects of Dane-zaa (Athabaskan). The noteworthy mirror-image tone systems of the H-marked Doig and L-marked Halfway dialects provide a ...