http://hdl.handle.net/10106/1147 http://hdl.handle.net/10106/1198 Language and the shaping of the Arab-American identity Almubayei, Dalal S. This study is an attempt to shed light on the interaction between language and the ethnic, cultural, and religious identities of Arab-Americans. It employs two focus groups consisting of Arab-Americans who share a group dialogue about the aspects of language and identity. The groups differ in terms of two variables: age and generation. Participants shared their experiences, life stories, feelings, and perspectives about the role of Arabic and English in their lives. The older participants emphasized a concern of language and ethnic identity loss among their U.S. born children, while younger participants talked about the importance of Arabic to belong and identify with first-generation parents and other Arabs in the homelands. Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10106/1197 Argument realization of Chinese result and phase complements Huang, Han-Chun This paper discusses result complements and phase complements in Chinese, both of which are postverbal elements. Despite their surface similarity, they are different with respect to argument realization. While the result complements allow complicated argument realization (in terms of semantic host, verbal transitivity, and subcategorization of objects), the phase complements function as lexical aspect markers, or Aktionsarten, and do not participate in argument realization. I adopt a constructional approach, particularly Boas’s (2003) event-frames and linking rules. Inverted causative resultative constructions in Chinese are also discussed. They are strong evidence for “constructional participants” that interact with event participants in determining syntactic realizations. Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10106/1196 A perception study on the third tone in Mandarin Chinese Cao, Rui Sarmah, Priyankoo This experimental study examines the role of the shape of the pitch contour in the perception of the Mandarin Chinese tone 3.2 A set of stimuli was constructed by varying the pitch of tone 3 on two conditions: (1) varying the duration of the dip (or turning point) and (2) varying the timing of the turning point (duration of the slope). The manipulated pitch contours of tone 3 were presented to the native speakers of Mandarin Chinese in two sets: (a) a set of speech stimuli and (b) a set of non-speech stimuli. The participants of the experiment were asked to perform a judgment task in order to identify the tone. The results were analyzed and it was found that there is a specific range of the stimuli in both conditions where tone 3 is perceived by native Mandarin Chinese speakers. Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:58:59 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10106/1195 Preliminary tone analysis of possessed nouns in Chicahuaxtla Trique Matsukawa, Kosuke Chicahuaxtla Trique is one of the Trique languages spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. Among three Trique languages, Chicahuaxtla Trique has the most complicated tone system and its tone system has not been fully understood yet. When a noun is possessed, a contrastive tone on the final syllable of a noun stem is often changed with a post-clitic pronoun and, less frequently, with an independent pronoun in Chicahuaxtla Trique. In this paper, I will analyze the tone patterns for possessed nouns in Chicahuaxtla Trique based on my fieldwork data. Although the analysis is still at the preliminary stage and more comprehensive data gathering is necessary, this study is a significant first step to understand the complicated tone patterns for possessed nouns in Chicahuaxtla Trique. Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:58:59 GMT