The use of Iscamtho by children in white city-Jabavu, Soweto: slang and language contact in an African urban context

Includes bibliographical references.The work presented in this thesis relies on language recordings gathered during thirty months of fieldwork in White City-Jabavu, Soweto. The data was collected from children between the ages of two and nine, following anthropological participant observation, and through the use of an audio recorder. Strong attention was given to the sociolinguistics and structure of the language collected. This thesis is interested in issues of slang use among children and language contact, as part of the larger field of tsotsitaal studies. It is interested in: sociolinguistic issues of registers, slang, and style; and linguistic issues regarding the structural output of language contact. The main questions answered in the thesis concern whether children in White City use the local tsotsitaal, known as Iscamtho; and what particular kind of mixed variety supports their use of Iscamtho. Particularly, I focus on the prediction of the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 2002) regarding universal constraints on the output of language contact. This model was used previously to analyse Iscamtho use in Soweto. Using methodologies from three different disciplinary fields (anthropology, sociolinguistics, and linguistics) as well as four different analytic perspectives (participatory, statistical, conversational, and structural), I offer a thorough sociolinguistic and linguistic description of the children's language. I demonstrate that the universal constraints previously identified do not apply to a significant part of the children's speech, due to stylistic and multilingual practices in the local linguistic community. I further demonstrate that style, slang, and deliberate variations in language, can produce some unpredictable and yet stable structural output of language contact, which contradicts the main hypotheses of universal natural constraints over this output formulated by the Matrix Language Frame model

Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History

This volume of original essays explores the power of network thinking and analysis for humanities research. Contributing authors are all scholars whose research focuses on a medical history topic—from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Provence to psychiatric hospitals in twentieth-century Alabama. The chapters take readers through a variety of situations in which scholars must determine if network analysis is right for their research; and, if the answer is yes, what the possibilities are for implementation. Along the way, readers will find practical tips on identifying an appropriate network to analyze, finding the best way to apply network analysis, and choosing the right tools for data visualization. All the chapters in this volume grew out of the 2018 Viral Networks workshop, hosted by the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NIH), funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and organized by Virginia Tech

'She Chose to Get Rid of Him by Murder, Not by Leaving Him': Discursive Constructions of a Battered Woman Who Killed in R v Craig

This dissertation uses linguistic/discourse analysis to critically examine a Canadian murder trial in which a battered woman who killed her husband was unsuccessful in securing a self-defence findingR v Teresa Craig, (2011 ONCA 142). The defendants self-defence plea relied upon testimony on Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) and theory of coercive control in order to highlight the ways in which her actions (in killing her husband) were reasonable reactions to the abuse she and her son experienced. Feminist legal scholars argue that securing self-defence findings for battered women who kill is made difficult by the androcentric nature of the legal system, including the standards by which courts determine the legitimacy of self-defence claims, and the general lack of knowledge about intimate partner violence exhibited by many legal actors. This project attempts to locate these barriers to self-defence for these women in the language/discourse of R v Craig. Because the defendant was unsuccessful in securing an acquittal or a conditional sentence, particular attention is devoted to the various ways participants within the case (and the news media) used discursive means to construct the defendants identity as a woman undeserving of either a self-defence plea or leniency in sentencing. The data for this study comes from two separate sourcesinstitutionally produced transcripts from the case file and a corpus of newspaper reports of the trial. The study utilizes feminist critical discourse analysis, incorporating tools from discourse, conversation, and intertextual analysis. The findings indicate that discriminatory ideologies about battered women informed the way in which the defendant was represented in both the legal system and the media. The study considers the consequences of such representations for not only this trial, but also for how society comes to define battered women and those who kill. Although studies of battered women who kill occupy a significant position within feminist jurisprudence, analysis of these kinds of cases has as of yet been unexplored in linguistic scholarship. Through critical examination of the linguistic details of this case, my work provides empirical support for claims that battered women who kill may be unduly disadvantaged in the legal system

Chatbots for Modelling, Modelling of Chatbots

Tesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de Lectura: 28-03-202

State of Refactoring Adoption: Towards Better Understanding Developer Perception of Refactoring

Context: Refactoring is the art of improving the structural design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Today, refactoring has become a well-established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research presuming that refactoring is primarily motivated by the need to improve system structures. However, recent studies have shown that developers may incorporate refactoring strategies in other development-related activities that go beyond improving the design especially with the emerging challenges in contemporary software engineering. Unfortunately, these studies are limited to developer interviews and a reduced set of projects. Objective: We aim at exploring how developers document their refactoring activities during the software life cycle. We call such activity Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR), which is an indication of the developer-related refactoring events in the commit messages. After that, we propose an approach to identify whether a commit describes developer-related refactoring events, to classify them according to the refactoring common quality improvement categories. To complement this goal, we aim to reveal insights into how reviewers develop a decision about accepting or rejecting a submitted refactoring request, what makes such review challenging, and how to the efficiency of refactoring code review. Method: Our empirically driven study follows a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. We text mine refactoring-related documentation, then we develop a refactoring taxonomy, and automatically classify a large set of commits containing refactoring activities, and identify, among the various quality models presented in the literature, the ones that are more in-line with the developer\u27s vision of quality optimization, when they explicitly mention that they are refactoring to improve them to obtain an enhanced understanding of the motivation behind refactoring. After that, we performed an industrial case study with professional developers at Xerox to study the motivations, documentation practices, challenges, verification, and implications of refactoring activities during code review. Result: We introduced SAR taxonomy on how developers document their refactoring strategies in commit messages and proposed a SAR model to automate the detection of refactoring. Our survey with code reviewers has revealed several difficulties related to understanding the refactoring intent and implications on the functional and non-functional aspects of the software. Conclusion: Our SAR taxonomy and model, can work in conjunction with refactoring detectors, to report any early inconsistency between refactoring types and their documentation and can serve as a solid background for various empirical investigations. In light of our findings of the industrial case study, we recommended a procedure to properly document refactoring activities, as part of our survey feedback

Diglossic code-switching in Kuwaiti newspapers

Phd ThesisThe present study investigates the phenomenon of diglossic code-switching between Standard Arabic, as a High variety, and Kuwaiti Arabic, as a Low variety, in Kuwaiti newspaper articles. The study was precipitated by the paucity of research on the linguistic characteristics of newspaper discourse generated within this region as well as Kuwaiti perceptions towards this medium of communication. The frameworks adopted in this research were extended to novel contexts and were also utilised to gain new insights into several dimensions of diglossia, most of which have never been explored before. The findings of this study indeed revealed important insights into how diglosia is changing and how participants both use and perceive diglossic code-switching. The investigation was carried out to explore three main dimensions of code-switching in newspaper articles in Kuwait: changes in attitudes and frequency of code-switching use, the social motivations for it and the morphosyntactic constraints associated with it in this context. The first involves the study of changes in both language attitudes and in the frequency of code-switching in newspaper articles over the last 29-30 years. The second part of the study offers a social motivations’ analysis of code-switching in newspaper articles by appealing to the ideas captured in the Markedness Model (MM), proposed by Myers-Scotton 1993a. The primary goal of this element of the research was to seek explanations for the diglossic code-switching strategies identified in a sample of twelve newspaper articles. The third aspect explored in the research relates to the testing of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model which applies specifically to the morphosyntactic constraints thought to operate in spoken code-switching contexts (Myers-Scotton 1993b, 2002). A key objective of the research overall was to evaluate the models themselves which have not, to my knowledge, been appraised heretofore using written data of this kind. In general terms, my findings regarding attitudinal change and code-switching frequency suggest that, despite the differences exhibited by a range of social variables, the nature of the attitudes expressed by the readers and columnists alike still reflect the traditional diglossic situation in Kuwait. Moreover, an analysis of language attitudes, ix employing the ‘apparent time’ hypothesis, shows that there is indeed a change in language attitudes in Kuwait between one generation and the next. This change, however, is contrary to predictions as it actually shows a favouring effect within the community at large for the H variety, i.e. SA. Non-parametric statistical analyses (specifically the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests) were selected as most appropriate for discriminating quantitative distinctions in the analysis of attitudes. Furthermore, an investigation of how common code-switching has become over the last three decades reveals that there is, in fact, static code-switching frequency, indicating that the practice of code-switching has remained relatively stable between 1985 and 2014-15. As for the second and third dimensions of the research, it was shown that the MM offers a very useful explanation of the linguistic behaviour of columnists and reveals the intricacies of their code-switching strategies which can be related to their understanding of community perceptions towards diglossic codeswitching in Kuwait as captured in other aspects of the research. A key finding with respect to the testing of the MLF model itself was how difficult it actually was to diglossic code-switching in a written context. My research clearly shows that the MLF approach does not, in fact, provide as much insight into the dynamics of the phenomenon as it clearly does when applied to conversational exchanges and this is partially due to the problems identified in my thesis regarding the analysis of Arabic code-switching in writing

Prosody and speech perception

The major concern of this thesis is with models of speech perception. Following Gibson's (1966) work on visual perception, it seeks to establish whether there are sources of information in the speech signal which can be responded to directly and which specify the units of information of speech. The treatment of intonation follows that of Halliday (1967) and rhythm that of Abercrombie (1967) . By "prosody" is taken to mean both the intonational and the rhythmic aspects of speech.Experiments one to four show the interdependence of prosody and grammar in the perception of speech, although they leave open the question of which sort of information is responded to first. Experiments five and six, employing a short-term memory paradigm and Morton's (1970) "suffix effect" explanation, demonstrate that prosody could well be responded to before grammar. Since the previous experiments suggested a close connection between the two, these results suggest that information about grammatical structures may well be given directly by prosody. In qthe final two experiments the amount of prosodic information in fluent speech that can be perceived independently of grammar and meaning is investigated. Although tone -group division seems to be given clearly enough by acoustic cues, there are problems of interpretation with the data on syllable stress assignments.In the concluding chapter, a three-stage model of speech perception is proposed, following never (1970), but incorporating prosodic analysis as an integral part of the processing. The obtained experimental results are integrated within this model