The Synchronic and Diachronic Phonology of Nauruan: Towards a Definitive Classification of an Understudied Micronesian Language

Nauruan is a Micronesian language spoken in the Republic of Nauru, a small island nation in the central Pacific. Lack of data and difficulty in analysis has hindered progress in better understanding Nauruan for decades, particularly regarding its phonology and its classification within the Micronesian family. Because of these challenges, earlier researchers have presented their work on Nauruan as highly tentative. This dissertation establishes more confident analyses of Nauruan phonology, sound change and classification, which have been made possible through original fieldwork. Approximately one hundred hours of digital recordings have been collected as part of this research, including wordlists, phrases, narratives, and spontaneous speech and conversation. Seventeen individual Nauruan speakers contributed to this work. This diverse body of data has allowed for much needed insight into the Nauruan language and its relation to the other Micronesian languages. A revised Nauruan phoneme inventory is proposed and a range of associated phonological processes are identified and discussed. Particular attention is paid to the phonetics of Nauruan speech sounds, including articulatory and acoustic properties of consonants and vowels. Also included is an analysis of Nauruan stress and prosody. Nauruan is shown to have a weight-sensitive stress system, as is typical of Micronesian languages. The prevailing view on Nauruan classification has been that it is a Micronesian language that should be classified apart from all other members of the family. This classification is based on little Nauruan data and should be reevaluated. To this end, this dissertation compiles nearly 300 lexical comparisons and shows regular sound correspondences between Nauruan, Proto‑Micronesian and individual Micronesian languages. Additionally, a range of Nauruan morphological paradigms are shown to have parallels across the Micronesian family. The analysis supports classifying Nauruan as a Micronesian language but has produced no compelling evidence for classifying Nauruan apart from the nuclear Micronesian group. As such, the nuclear/non-nuclear distinction within the family appears to be unnecessary. The evidence suggests that all Micronesian languages, including Nauruan, have descended from Proto-Micronesian. Possible classifications for Nauruan within the Micronesian family are discussed and evaluated. Several stages of pre‑Nauruan are also reconstructed, which suggests that Nauruan has undergone a significant degree of internal sound change. This may have contributed to earlier perceptions of Nauruan as a non-nuclear Micronesian language

Intermediate reading exercises for use with the Durrell Analysis of Reading Difficulty.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Language and the social: investigations towards a new sociology of language

This thesis investigates sociological understandings of language in texts deeply resonant for sociology today. It offers a comparative and analytical investigation of social-language projects written before the discipline was established. Sociologists have struggled to establish a field investigating arguably the most social arena of social life, namely, language as witnessed by insubstantial attempts to sociologically study language and unfulfilled promises in social theories of language or sociologies of communication, culture, media, etc. Chapter 1 critically reviews social scientific research approaches to language. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 examine carefully selected sites in European thought where language and social life interpenetrate too much to be disentangled, wherein there are ‘folk sociologies of language’. Chapter 2 looks at attempts to rectify a deep confusion pulling society apart and corroding language. Three social-language projects compose language: a gesture language (Bulwer), a philosophical language (Wilkins) and combination of both (Dalgarno). Chapter 3 looks at two critical dictionaries intended to fix language to help the realisation of the ideal society (Johnson’s Dictionary and Diderot’s Encyclopedié). Chapter 4 explores projects that capture historically changing nationhood: the OED and the work of the Grimm Brothers. These social-language projects are attempts to change something in the social, on a continuum of less to more radical interventions. These social-language projects are significant, but have been ignored by sociologists. As ‘language’ projects, they are assumed irrelevant in relation to power, knowledge, or nascent nationalism. As ‘social’ projects, they have been considered tangential to an increasingly narrow and technical linguistics. By mining this rich seam of sources, this work draws attention to elements central to sociology (about the nature and roles of collectives and individuals, about agency, structure, the subject, institutions) in light of key questions about language (its aspects, form, roles in relation to knowledge, law, politics). This is a first step towards analysing language events from a sociological perspective. The intended contribution of this research to current sociology is three-fold. Firstly, it outlines a distinctive approach by using sources from outside the discipline in order to get at problems at its core. Secondly, it shows how language is empirically current in ways that are central to the discipline (e.g. the ‘endangered languages movement’). Finally, it shows that without the distance gained by stepping outside we cannot see that the way we think about language and the social are mutually constitutive, indeed each shapes and conditions the other. In sum, language is much too sociologically important to be left to linguists

Double Dutch: Approximate Identities in Early Modern English Culture.

This dissertation explores the workings of resemblance, similitude, approximation, and interchangeability between the English and the Dutch in early modern English cultural performances. It argues that an analytical double vision was engendered by both real (geographic, religious, commercial, and cultural) and imagined proximities between the English and the Dutch, and traces how notions of English and Dutch ethnic and national identity were shaped by this double vision: one that held cultural similitude and difference together within its scope. Chapter one traces how English and Dutch identities were “jumbled” in London city comedies by means of puns and wordplay that emphasize the fluidity of signifiers of ethnic difference: including language, diet, clothing, and religious belief. Anglo-Dutch ethnic approximation is thematized in plays such as, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, Thomas Middleton’s The Family of Love and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s. Chapter two argues that early-seventeenth-century histories of the English language emphasized the relatedness of English and Netherlandish linguistic and racial history, while representations of English and Dutch speech on stage revealed the phonetic resemblances between English and Dutch. Exploring the period’s drama, historiography, printed playbooks, Anglo-Dutch dictionaries, and humanist tracts on the worth of Europe’s vernacular languages, this chapter demonstrates the various modes of cultural production involved in rendering the English and the Dutch close kin. Chapter three considers how, in civic pageantry, London’s Dutch community mobilized the site of The Royal Exchange (London’s commercial center and an architectural copy of Antwerp’s Burse), to position themselves as enfranchised members of the London community. Chapter four uncovers Dutch and English epistolary correspondence and English-authored travel accounts to reveal that, in the early years of Anglo-Dutch colonial endeavors, a crisis of ethnic and national identity erupted. In ceremonies of distinction performed on the East Indies’ Spice Islands and in theaters after the Restoration, English attempts to make clear their ethnic, national, and colonial difference from the Dutch resulted in exposing instead the proximity of Anglo-Dutch identity.Ph.D.English Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57639/2/mrubrigh_1.pd

Феномен синкретизма в украинской лингвистике

У сучасній лінгвістиці вивчення складних системних зв’язків та динамізму мови навряд чи буде завершеним без урахування синкретизму. Традиційно явища транзитивності трактуються як поєднання різних типів утворень як результат процесів трансформації або відображення проміжних, синкретичних фактів, що характеризують мовну систему в синхронному аспекті.In modern linguistics, the study of complex systemic relations and language dynamism is unlikely to be complete without considering the transitivity. Traditionally, transitivity phenomena are treated as a combination of different types of entities, formed as a result of the transformation processes or the reflection of the intermediate, syncretic facts that characterize the language system in the synchronous aspect.В современной лингвистике изучение сложных системных отношений и языкового динамизма вряд ли будет полным без учета синкретизма. Традиционно явления транзитивности трактуются как совокупность различных типов сущностей, сформированных в результате процессов преобразования или отражения промежуточных синкретических фактов, которые характеризуют языковую систему в синхронном аспекте

A comparative study of the phenomenon of false friends in SMG and CSG

The present dissertation examines the phenomenon of false friends presenting the evolution of research regarding the same, the theoretical background (definition, linguistic levels involved, total vs. partial, reasons of emergence, the mechanism of borrowing and its importance, etc.) and the practical side of problems caused in communication due to their existence. The aim of the dissertation is not only to present false friends as a linguistic occurrence between languages (interlinguistic false friends) and its many facets, but mainly in delimitating the existence of false friends at the intralinguistic level, namely between varieties of the same language. The thesis presents the specialized case of false friends between two varieties of Modern Greek, i.e. Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot (Standard) Greek. The first variety is used in Greece whereas the second in Cyprus and the sociolinguistic situation that characterizes the two varieties is described, in order to clarify the lack of awareness as regards the existence of the phenomenon. Apart from the theoretical background for the phenomenon and the specifics of the specific intralinguistic faux amis, hte thesis boasts the presentation and analysis of 194 false friends between the two varieties of Mordern Greek. The 194 pairs appear as lemmas in Greek accompanied by phonetic transcription, exclusive SMG or C(S)G meanings, as well as common meanings (where there are), real examples of usage in the Cypriot context and an analysis that attempts to explain their provenance and relation

Darkness, Depression, and Descent in Anglo-Saxon England

This collection of essays examines the motifs of darkness, depression, and descent in both literal and figurative manifestations within a variety of Anglo-Saxon texts, including the Old English Consolation of Philosophy, Beowulf, Life of Saint Guthlac, the Junius manuscript, the Wonders of the East, and the Battle of Maldon. Essays deal with such topics as cosmic emptiness, descent into the grave, and recurrent grief. In their analyses, the essays reveal the breadth of this imagery in Anglo-Saxon literature as it is used to describe thought and emotion, as well as the limits to knowledge and perception. The volume investigates the intersection between notions of darkness and the burgeoning interest in representations of the mind and of emotion within Anglo-Saxon literature.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_rrc/1001/thumbnail.jp

Stranger Compass of the Stage: Difference and Desire in Early Modern City Comedy

In periods of social and political upheaval like ours, it is more important than ever to interrogate constructions of identity and difference and to understand the histories of alterity that separate us from one another. Stranger Compass of the Stage: Difference and Desire in Early Modern City Drama reimagines the cultural and social effect of alien, foreign, and stranger characters on the early modern stage and re-envisions how these characters contribute to, alter, and imaginatively build new epistemologies for understanding difference in early modern London. Resisting the field’s current critical inclination toward English identity formation, this project works intersectionally to exhume the delicate cultural and theatrical networks in which difference was negotiated. In doing so, it rescopes the limits of what counts as difference in the period. Stranger Compass addresses fundamental questions of how early modern theater navigated difference on the stage by looking to four areas of performed difference: geographic and social difference, sexual difference, physical difference/disability, and gender non-conformance. Each chapter focuses on one of these areas, and each chapter is treated with a similar analytical framework that draws on transformation and desire as socially constitutive forces. Rescoping the cultural and theatrical landscape of London allows this project to begin with geographic and social difference and to work ever closer to negotiations of individual difference in the theatrical space. Ultimately, Stranger Compass brings together methodologies that demonstrate how theatrical performance stimulated audience members to engage, participate, and revise their intimate attitudes toward difference. Looking to Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term (1604) and A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), the anonymously authored Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607), Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1607/10), and Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1616 folio), I highlight that figures of difference are also often figures of familiarity and locality, who were integral to London’s most basic social relationships as a growing city with a malleable culture. Vital in their difference and desirable in their tangible divergence, the characters in these works call on us to reconsider difference, identity, and desire

'Schizomorphic visions': visuality and dissenting subjectivities in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia

This dissertation examines the role of literary visuality in the construction of cultural categories of madness, delirium, schizophrenia, and trauma in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia. In addition to exploring configurations of madness and delirium in theoretical and critical writings produced by members of various interrelated literary movements in the 1960s, this dissertation centres on close readings of a selection of lesser known ekphrastic, visual, concrete, and collage poetic works, produced between 1961-1977, by Giulia Niccolai, Edoardo Sanguineti, Adriano Spatola, and Patrizia Vicinelli. I look also to more recent thought outside of the immediate historical Italian-language context in order to illuminate and inform my readings of the strategies of these literary figures. As part of my analysis of the renegotiation of these fraught themes in the experimental poetry of the neoavanguardia, I investigate how the theoretical category of schizomorfismo as described by Alfredo Giuliani, a key figure in the literary group known as the Novissimi, provides an illuminating paradigm for reading the discontinuous, discordant and febrile literary forms found within this poetry. I draw attention to the underexamined visual dynamics at play in both theoretical and poetic writings of this period, expanding on the fluid relations between visuality and madness, and their invocation as dissenting, countercultural literary entities. As examples of a scrittura altra, invocations of ‘other’ subjectivities are, I argue, embedded in these mostly non-representational texts, which draw on the rich capacities of visual, typographic and concrete experimental forms to raise questions of normativity, marginalisation, and subjugation, as well as interrogate epistemologies of logic and logocentrism. Accordingly, this dissertation interrogates what it means to invoke cultural-clinical categories in the context of poetic experimentation and as literary tools of social critique at a historical moment, in Italy and beyond, when the relationship between clinical and cultural understandings of non-normative mental states were being fundamentally renegotiated