Browsing by Author "Copeland, James E."
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Item A comparative phonology of the stressed vowel systems of Texas English and Modern High German(1975) Burger, Carl Raymond; Copeland, James E.This is a study of instances of negative transfer attributable to interference of Texas English with German. It is intended for use as a supplement to William G. Moulton's The Sounds of English and German in teaching German in Texas. The system of stressed vowels of Texas English is presented for comparison and contrast with the stressed vowel system of Modern High German. There follows a contrastive analysis section, which discusses difficulties the Texas student is likely to experience in pronouncing German, based upon conflict between the two systems of stressed vowels. Finally, a discussion is offered of how the instructor of German can best deal with those instances of negative transfer, and specific corrective drills are formulated.Item A semantic study of discourse connectivity in Korean(1993) Yang, Insun Kang; Copeland, James E.The focus of this paper is on coordinate conjunction markers in Korean. Most studies of clause conjunctions in Korean have been very formal syntactic studies. Formal syntactic approaches, however, fail to identify the subtle semantic qualities of conjunctions in discourse. This paper thus adopts a pragmatic/functional perspective, concluding that coordinating conjunctions carry not only grammatical information, but also necessarily semantic and pragmatic information. In other words, the present study discovers the underlying semantic differences among the coordinate conjunctions by examining their more overt syntactic behaviors based on insights from a functional approach. This study also investigates how spoken discourse is connected. A sentence outside of its context can be interpreted in a number of different ways depending on the inclination of the interpreter. Studies 'beyond the sentence' that is actual discourse, however, ultimately necessary for understanding language. In discourse, connectivity is one of the fundamental areas needing exploration, and my analysis of spoken Korean discourse is intended as a contribution to that study. The Korean discourse data itself is another contribution to the analysis of Korean discourse.Item Cyclical grammaticalization and the cognitive link between pronoun and copula(1996) Katz, Aya; Copeland, James E.The process of grammaticalization is the transition from a less "grammatical" state to one that is more so. But the results of the process, if we follow the history of any given linguistic unit as it undergoes grammaticalization over and over again, may involve achieving a state similar to one that was in effect at an earlier stage of its history. The phenomenon explored in this dissertation is the grammaticalization of pronouns into copulas and copulas into pronouns. A crosslinguistic examination of copulas in ten languages, Chinese, English, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese, reveals the following functional tendencies: (1) one morpheme is used for possession and existence, and (2) another is used for identity and class membership. It is from these equative copulas in (2) that third person pronouns are developed, and it is from third person subject pronouns that we get newly formed copulas. The following instances of grammaticalization of pronoun and copula are demonstrated here: (1) Chinese--pronoun to copula (2) Hebrew (Biblical to Modern)--pronoun to copula (3) Finnish--pronoun to copula (4) Turkish--copula to pronoun (5) Hebrew (pre-proto-Semitic to Biblical)--copula to pronoun The Hebrew example, combining (2) and (5) above, provides us with a full cycle, from copula to pronoun to copula. At each step, the unit becomes more bleached and conventionalized. Starting from a form of a stative verb with marking for conjugation, gender, number and person, it becomes a demonstrative pronoun, marked only for person, gender and number, and then is transformed once more to a copula, marked only for number and gender, but not person. Pronouns and copulas are equally abstract, but at each stage of the change from one to the other we have seen an example of generalization and conventionalization. While grammaticalization progresses along a unidirectional cline from concrete to abstract, the history of a particular linguistic unit may reveal that it has travelled the the same semantic path more than once.Item Discourse functions of negation in modern German(1985) Nilakanta, Rema; Copeland, James E.; Clark, Susan; Davis, Philip W.For a long time now, the study of negation has belonged to the discipline of logic. Linguists attempting to study negation have not ventured out of the confines of grammar. This work studies negation from a socio-cognitive point of view, treating negation as a cognitive process as well as a product of human interaction. The thesis invokes in large part, the stratificational approach to discourse proposed by Copeland and Davis which in turn is influenced by the Prague School and by text linguistics. Of primary concern in this work is the propositional blocking that typically characterizes negation together with the identification of some of the relational contexts in which blocking takes place. Four dominating contexts/functions of negation are proposed. They are: (1) denying presuppositions, (2) representing old information, (3) asserting new information without denying old information, and (4) giving expression to the speaker's attitudes, expectations, etc. The thesis also emphasizes that the above functions are not necessarily exhaustive. It does however, indicate a departure from older approaches to the study of negation.Item Functional German grammar: A pedagogical application of Fleming's "Communication Analysis" (Ilah Fleming)(1995) Feicht, Sherry Lane; Copeland, James E.In her Communication Analysis (1988) Ilah Fleming developed a model of language analysis that treats all strata of language as a network of interplay. Through the application of her philosophy and methodology to language teaching, grammar instruction becomes a part of an integrated system of morphotactic, propositional, and discourse strategies. Functional areas, like case, voice, and transitivity, are customarily treated as morphotactic in language texts. Following Fleming's model, these are taught as propositional, their functional operations are clarified, and their relationship to both morphotactic and discourse structures are revealed.Item German and English noun phrases: a transformational- contrastive approach(1971) Barrows, Ward Keith; Copeland, James E.The paper presents a contrastive approach to German and English based on the theory of transformational grammar. In the first chapter, contrastive analysis is discussed in the context of foreign language teaching. It is indicated that contrastive analysis in pedagogy is directed toward the identification of sources of interference for students of foreign languages. It is also pointed out that some differences between two languages will prove more troublesome to the student than others. The second chapter presents transformational grammar as a theory of language. Basic assumptions and concepts are discussed, among them the central dichotomy of competence vs performance. Chapter three then presents the structure of a grammar written in accordance with these assumptions and concepts. The universal base hypothesis is presented and adopted. An innovation is made in the componential structure of a transformational grammar: a lexical component is created, whereas the lexicon has previously been considered as part of the base. Chapter four presents an illustration of how transformational grammars may be used contrastively. After a base is presented for English and German, lexical components and some transformational rules are contrasted. The final chapter returns to contrastive analysis, but discusses it this time from the point of view of linguistic typology in general. Uspensky's proposal of a metalanguage as a universal standard of comparison is shown to be analogous to the transformational-contrastive approach as presented here.Item Irony in conversational German: A linguistic approach(1989) Barbe, Johanna Katharina; Copeland, James E.This study examines irony predominantly as it appears in German spontaneous spoken discourse. The main data employed for the study are four conversational texts, each of which has a different irony content. In Chapter One I survey the literature on irony in the fields of rhetoric, literature, and literary criticism, as well as its treatment in linguistic frameworks (based on Austin 1962/1975, Searle 1969). I then compare the function and use of irony in German spontaneous conversation with counterparts in pre-composed conversation. In Chapter Three I discuss some uses of irony in non-Western cultures as contrasted with the functions of irony in modern German culture. Irony emerges as a mode of experience that is closely related to the culture of its inception. This aspect of irony is particularly evident in the difficulties encountered in the internal translation (paraphrase) of ironic discourse (pre-composed as well as spontaneous) or translation from one language or culture to another. In Chapter Four I examine difficulties in translation of instances of irony. Finally, in Chapter Five I distinguish irony from related tropes and concepts. Irony employs a feature of quality, which has usually been associated with opposition. I have expanded the concept of opposition and added the feature of multilayeredness as a necessary condition. Irony is seen here for the most part as an intended incongruence. A pair of readings co-exist, producing the incongruence. Both remain present in an interactive way. I conclude that irony, even though extensively studied and described, remains resistant to precise definition and demarcation. Irony is not only employed as a nonce phenomenon at the propositional level, it can also function as a pervasive feature of discourse, a lifetime, an era, or even of life itself.Item Knowledge, Consciousness, and Language: Some Possible Sources of Discourse Phenomena(Rice University, 1980-04) Davis, Philip W.; Copeland, James E.; Electronic version made possible with funding from the Rice Historical Society and Thomas R. Williams, Ph.D., class of 2000.Item Phonological chunking in German and English: Segment, juncture, and boundary(1990) Gagliano, Eugene Felix; Copeland, James E.Linguistic knowledge implies the ability to identify and manipulate phonological segments of various sizes. Such "chunks" are often, although not always, demarcated by phonetic clues to phonological organization. The American Structuralists in the 1930's-1950's posited a demarcative phoneme called "juncture," which raised questions about the legitimacy of phonological analyses which rely on grammatical information about the language. Data from language games, diachronic resegmentation, and phonological reduction all show that a competent speaker can "chunk" phonological material in a variety of ways. The field linguist, the armchair analyst, and the ordinary listener are all playing the same segmentation game, listening for phonetic clues to linguistic structure.Item Stratification in the phonology of German(1970) Iverson, Gregory Keith; Copeland, James E.Recent formulations of generative phonologies have most often been based on the transformational model; this thesis, however, utilizes the theory of language advanced by Sydney M. Lamb to develop the phonological subcomponent, exclusive of stress and intonation, of a stratificational grammar of Modern Standard German. An explicit account in graphic notation is given of the morphonic alternation pattern as well as of the hypophonemic and phonemic strata.Item Two-Dimensional Phonotactics in a Generative Grammar of German(Rice University, 1969-07) Copeland, James E.; Electronic version made possible with funding from the Rice Historical Society and Thomas R. Williams, Ph.D., class of 2000.