Internet Linguistics Final Project

The final project was the opportunity for students to explore some question in Internet Linguistics that interested them. They were asked to produce two final products: one academic paper, and one public-facing product. The paper followed the norms of a standard academic paper. The audience for this was the instructor, fellow student, and (potentially) a wider academic community. The public-facing product was an opportunity to be more creative with form. Students were asked to decide: What audience do you want to share this with, and how would that best be achieved? Students might record a video for YouTube; edit/create Wikipedia pages; create a webcomic; write a blog post with links to relevant information; create a Buzzfeed-style quiz; write a listicle (#7 will shock you!); make a game, or other ideas

Internet Linguistics (Ling 004B) Syllabus

Despite predictions to the contrary, it seems that the internet has not destroyed English. But how has the internet changed language use, and the study of linguistics? This course will be an exploration of the various forms that language takes online and in other digital formats, such as texting. We will explore questions such as: Why do my parents insist on texting in full paragraphs?; Is the internet good or bad for the future of indigenous and minority languages?; Is there a difference in meaning between :), :-), ^_^,?; What are the differences and similarities between face-to-face and online communication? We will look at a range of sources and methods for investigating language use online, and use some of these methods in our own investigations of internet language

Revisiting History in Language Policy: The Case of Medium of Instruction in Nepal

This paper examines the history of language-in-education policy in Nepal. I begin with a brief overview of a standard history of Nepali language planning and policy. This version of history describes an early period with almost no schools, followed by the Nepali-only Panchayat period, and, after the 1990 restoration of democracy, an openness toward multilingual schooling in policy. I augment this history to point toward a view of history that is not split into static periods, does not impose current categories of ethnicity and language on a past when such categories functioned differently, and that recognizes the importance of influences from outside of Nepal’s national borders. Finally, I discuss the ways these differences inform an understanding of the past and opportunities for considering the future of language policy

Schooling Languages: Indigeneity, Language Policy And Language Shift In Nepal

What happens when a language is allowed into school for the first time? How do policies and characterizations of languages travel through time and space? How do official metasemiotic regimes relate to linguistic behaviors and their interpretation, and what do we learn from this about phenomena such as indigeneity and states? In this dissertation, I examine these questions through the case of Dhimal, an indigenous Tibeto-Burman language spoken by around 20,000 people in the eastern plains of Nepal. Recent political changes in Nepal, a country with substantial cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity but longstanding one-nation one-language policies, guaranteed all communities the right to education in their mother tongues. Implementation of this bold provision has been a site of political struggle, shaped by relations of power and inequality between languages and their speakers. At the same time, speakers of minoritized languages increasingly demand schooling in English, and many have shifted to using Nepali in daily life. Working in the traditions of ethnography of language policy and semiotic anthropology, I investigate citizenship, indigeneity and language policy at multiple scales of time and space. Following a brief history of language in education policy in Nepal, I discuss three government schools that have or have not introduced a Dhimal language subject, demonstrating how agents and their affiliations to political parties, not just linguistic or ethnic groups, determined school-level language policy. Through analysis of a textbook lesson as it was written and revised, I show how the voicing structure of a single text illustrated conflicting goals among the participants in a single language revitalization project. At the classroom level, teaching methods influenced by the metasemiotic projects described in the prior chapters shaped teaching methods that focused on demonstrating equivalence and separation between named languages. Outside of school, language shift was taking place due to discourse patterns in which young people were never expected to produce Dhimal language, while close examination of these and other interactions demonstrated that no matter what speech forms children produced, they were never heard by adults as speaking Dhimal

Ways of Talking (and Acting) About Language Reclamation: An Ethnographic Perspective on Learning Lenape in Pennsylvania

The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity, and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources

Right-handed Neutrinos in Low-Energy Neutrino-Electron Scattering

In this paper a scenario admitting the participation of the exotic scalar coupling of the right-handed neutrinos in addition to the standard vector and axial couplings of the left-handed neutrinos in the weak interactions is considered. The research is based on the low-energy $(\nu_{\mu} e^{-})$ and $(\nu_{e} e^{-})$ scattering processes. The main goal is to show how the presence of the right-handed neutrinos in the above processes changes the laboratory differential cross section in relation to the Standard Model prediction. Both processes are studied at the level of the four-fermion point interaction. Neutrinos are assumed to be polarized Dirac fermions and to be massive. In the laboratory differential cross section, the new interference term between the standard vector coupling of the left-handed neutrinos and exotic scalar coupling of the right-handed neutrinos appears which does not vanish in the limit of massless neutrino. This additional contribution, including information about the transverse components of neutrino polarization, generates the azimuthal asymmetry in the angular distribution of the recoil electrons. This regularity would be a signature of the participation of the right-handed neutrinos in the neutrino-electron scattering. The future low-energy high-precision neutrino-electron scattering experiments using the strong and polarized artificial neutrino source would allow to search for the exotic effects coming from the R-handed neutrinos.Comment: REVTeX, 9 pages, 5 eps figures; published in Phys. Lett. B 555, 215-226 (2003

Concluding talk at NOW 2006

This writeup summarizes the status of neutrino oscillations, including recent fluxes and experimental data, as of summer 2006. A discussion is given on the current status of absolute scale of neutrino mass from tritium, neutrinoless double beta decay and cosmological observations, as well as the prospects for the next generation of experiments, including lepton flavor violation searches, and their theoretical significance.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, Concluding talk at Neutrino Oscillation Workshop, Conca Specchiulla (Otranto, Lecce, Italy) September 9-16, 2006. To appear in proceeding

Extra polarization states of cosmological gravitational waves in alternative theories of gravity

Cosmological Gravitational Waves (GWs) are usually associated with the transverse-traceless part of the metric perturbations in the context of the theory of cosmological perturbations. These modes are just the usual polarizations `+' and `x' which appear in the general relativity theory. However, in the majority of the alternative theories of gravity, GWs can present more than these two polarization states. In this context, the Newman-Penrose formalism is particularly suitable for evaluating the number of non-null GW modes. In the present work we intend to take into account these extra polarization states for cosmological GWs in alternative theories of gravity. As an application, we derive the dynamical equations for cosmological GWs for two specific theories, namely, a general scalar-tensor theory which presents four polarization states and a massive bimetric theory which is in the most general case with six polarization states for GWs. The mathematical tool presented here is quite general, so it can be used to study cosmological perturbations in all metric theories of gravity.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Classical and Quantum Gravity

Nuclear and Particle Physics applications of the Bohm Picture of Quantum Mechanics

Approximation methods for calculating individual particle/ field motions in spacetime at the quantum level of accuracy (a key feature of the Bohm Picture of Quantum Mechanics (BP)), are studied. Modern textbook presentations of Quantum Theory are used throughout, but only to provide the necessary, already existing, tested formalisms and calculational techniques. New coherent insights, reinterpretations of old solutions and results, and new (in principle testable) quantitative and qualitative predictions, can be obtained on the basis of the BP that complete the standard type of postdictions and predictions.Comment: 41 page

Solar neutrino oscillations and bounds on neutrino magnetic moment and solar magnetic field

If the observed deficit of solar neutrinos is due to neutrino oscillations, neutrino conversions caused by the interaction of their transition magnetic moments with the solar magnetic field (spin-flavour precession) can still be present at a subdominant level. In that case, the combined action of neutrino oscillations and spin-flavour precession can lead to a small but observable flux of electron antineutrinos coming from the sun. Non-observation of these nuebar's could set limits on neutrino transition moment \mu and the strength and coordinate dependence of the solar magnetic field B_\perp. The sensitivity of the nuebar flux to the product \mu B_\perp is strongest in the case of the vacuum oscillation (VO) solution of the solar neutrino problem; in the case of the LOW solution, it is weaker, and it is the weakest for the LMA solution. For different solutions, different characteristics of the solar magnetic field B_\perp(r) are probed: for the VO solution, the nuebar flux is determined by the integral of B_\perp(r) over the solar convective zone, for LMA it is determined by the magnitude of B_\perp in the neutrino production region, and for LOW it depends on the competition between this magnitude and the derivative of B_\perp(r) at the surface of the sun.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, 2 eps figures. References added; discussion of the LOW case modifie