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…

The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The…

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…

THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO ANALYZE THE SOCIAL CAUSES FOR THE DIFFERENTIAL RATE OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR BETWEEN BRAHMINS AND NON-BRAHMINS. INDICATIONS ARE THAT (1) INDIAN SPEECH COMMUNITIES ARE CONSCIOUS OF CASTE DIALECTS, (2) LINGUISTIC FORMS DIFFUSE MORE RAPIDLY AMONG LOWER-STATUS GROUPS, (3) THE SPEECH OF LOWER-STATUS GROUPS DISPLAYS FORMS…

Examines how successfully changes in the high- and mid-front and -back vowels in the South are being disseminated throughout a local urban community, and how these changes fit in with changes occurring in other American dialects. Weighs the attraction to local or national norms in determining success and diffusion of shifts relative to the social…

This study identifies the phonological system in the idiolects of three native speakers of the Acadian dialect in southwest Nova Scotia, on the coast of Baie Sainte-Marie. The study also highlights the specificity of the phonological system by comparing it with the speech of Acadians in Moncton, New Brunswick and with standard French. The…

In a comparative study of American English speakers and British English speakers, it was examined whether segmental effects can be used in speech production as cues to syntactic structure. American speakers could use the segmental cues in syntax perception, while British speakers could not. Speakers of British English who were long-term residents…

Paper presented at the Seventh International Conference on Salish Languages, Bellingham, Washington, August 1972; research supported by the National Science Foundation. (DD)

The vowel system of the educated rural sedentary dialect of the West Bank (Palestine) is analyzed from a generative phonological point of view and in relation to three phonological processes: monophthongization, centralization, and pharyngealization. The results of the analysis are compared with Mark Cowell's broader 1964 analysis of Syrian…

Among the Mexican American Dialects activity's concerns is the linguistic phenomena characterizing what has been termed Local Hispanicized English (LHE) and whether or not LHE has become an institutionalized dialect of American English. In order to answer whether LHE has characteristics distinguishing it from other Hispanicized forms of English…

Comparison of the moribund dialects of Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, and Smith Island, Maryland, demonstrates that valuable insight into the patterning of variation and change in language death can be obtained by investigating moribund varieties of healthy languages. Discusses comparative investigation of two kinds of linguistic decay:…

This paper discusses the relationship between linguistic reconstructions and their historical validity using the case of Old Japanese (8th century A.D.) vowels as an example. Reconstructions throughout the paper include only those cases in which the modern reflexes and phonological correspondences between two or more genetically related languages…

A representative group of black American novels was examined to discover the extent to which black dialect has been employed by black novelists, to determine the validity of the dialect used, to show a relationship between their representation of dialect and the era in which they lived, and to compare linguistic studies of black dialect with their…