This dissertation aims to analyze the Western Armenian (WA) verbal morphology from a diachronic perspective and perform an internal reconstruction to trace the modern Western dialects back to Classical Armenian (CA) or an older, unattested variant of Armenian. The dissertation's methodology (Chapter 1) is based on comparative dialectology (Chapter…

Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, which can affect listeners' phonological and lexical representations. I explore how different exposure to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two vowels in American English, /ae ai/, affects listeners' lexical processing behaviors across three perception tasks: perceptual similarity, priming, and…

This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai…

This dissertation provides a comparative analysis of Complementizer Agreement (C-agr) in modern dialects of West Germanic from a diachronic perspective, attributing the rise and development of C-agr to the initiation and progression of a Linguistic Cycle specific to C-agr. Approached as a historical process of reanalysis and compensatory renewal…

African-American students continue to lag behind White peers in nationwide test scores, in part due to deficits in literacy skills which may be connected to use of African American English (AAE) in the school setting. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between exposure to varying levels of mainstream American English (MAE)…

Our understanding of the history and development of Arabic is greatly challenged by the dearth of sources. Most scholars who have undertaken this task in the past have relied almost exclusively on data from the Arabic grammatical tradition. These sources claimed that Arabic originated as the language of the Bedouin of the central and southern…

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a description of some aspects of the syntax of Indonesian Teochew, a Southern Min Chinese language spoken in Indonesian. This dissertation examines two dialects of Indonesian Teochew: Jambi Teochew, which is spoken in Jambi City, Sumatra, and Pontianak Teochew, which is spoken in Pontianak, West…

The lexical dialect usage of Oklahoma has been well-studied in the past by the Survey of Oklahoma Dialects, but the acoustic speech production of the state has received little attention. Apart from two people from Tulsa and two people from Oklahoma City that were interviewed for the Atlas of North American English, no other acoustic work has been…

This dissertation establishes the utility and reliability of a statistical distance measure for syntactic dialectometry, expanding dialectometry's methods to include syntax as well as phonology and the lexicon. It establishes the measure's reliability by comparing its results to those of dialectology and phonological dialectometry on Swedish…

This dissertation evaluates the relationship between African American English and White Vernacular English as spoken in a small rural town in western North Carolina for consistencies in vowel production by group membership and for participation in the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), a vowel rotation currently occurring in the Southern United States. A…

From 1890-1914, Argentina received a large influx of Italian immigrants who wanted to "hacer la América," or live the American dream of economic prosperity. With Italian immigrants representing nearly half of all immigrants entering Argentina, the government strived to create a new sense of Argentine pride and nationalism. The objective…

How bilinguals' two languages interact with each other has stimulated considerable research. However, little of this research has focused on objective measures of speech production. This study aims to investigate bilinguals' production of Guoyu and Taiwanese voiceless sibilant fricatives to see how language contact and language dominance influence…

This dissertation is a sociophonetic analysis of the English spoken by Hmong Americans living in the "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The Twin Cities has the largest urban population of Hmong Americans in the United States. Through studies of production and perception of vowels involved in sound changes, I…

In Spanish, each uttered phrase, depending on its use, has one of a variety of intonation patterns. For example, a phrase such as "Maria viene manana" "Mary is coming tomorrow" can be used as a declarative or as an absolute interrogative (a yes/no question) depending on the intonation pattern that a speaker produces. …

Linguists have long accepted the inevitability of linguistic variation as scientific fact. However, the general public continues to associate regional variation with low intelligence and to promote a non-regional, "accentless" English as the ideal. The result of this ideology, which ignores the natural diversity of all languages, is that…