College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Computational modeling of the role of discourse information in language production and language acquisition(2015) Orita, Naho; Feldman, Naomi H; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of discourse information in language production and language acquisition. Discourse information plays an important role in various aspects of linguistic processes and learning. However, characterizing what it is and how it is used has been challenging. Previous studies on discourse tend to focus on the correlations between certain discourse factors and speaker/comprehender's behavior, rather than looking at how the discourse information is used in the system of language and why. This dissertation aims to provide novel insights into the role of discourse information by formalizing how it is represented and how it is used. First, I formalize the latent semantic information in humans' discourse representations by examining speakers' choices of referring expressions. Simulation results suggest that topic models can capture aspects of discourse representations that are relevant to the choices of referring expressions, beyond simple referent frequency. Second, I propose a language production model that extends the rational speech act model from \citeA{frank2012predicting} to incorporate updates to listeners' beliefs as discourse proceeds. Simulations suggest that speakers' behavior can be modeled in a principled way by considering the probabilities of referents in the discourse and the information conveyed by each word. Third, I examine the role of discourse information in language acquisition, focusing on the learning of grammatical categories of pronouns. I show that a Bayesian model with prior discourse knowledge can accurately recover grammatical categories of pronouns, but simply having strong syntactic prior knowledge is not sufficient. This suggests that discourse information can help learners acquire grammatical categories of pronouns. Throughout this dissertation, I propose frameworks for modeling speakers and learners using techniques from Bayesian modeling. These models provide ways to flexibly investigate the effects of various sources of information, including discourse salience, expectations about referents and grammatical knowledge.Item The Textualization of Pat Tillman: Understanding the Relationships Between Person, Discourse, and Ideology(2011) Herbig, Arthur William; Gaines, Robert N; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a critical examination of the ways in which the life and death of Pat Tillman were shaped into a discursive Pat Tillman. This is not a project that examines the life led by the person Pat Tillman. The discursive Pat Tillman can be found in the pages of magazines, on television, invoked by politicians, and even memorialized in song. It is Pat Tillman, the discursive creation, that is my focus. In this project I take for granted that Pat Tillman only existed in places like the pages of books or on film. What is not lost on me and should not be lost on the reader of this project is my own participation in this process. With this project I have entered into the very discourses that I seek to critique. This is an analysis of the existence of a Pat Tillman that many people still know and the ideas that help shape how that existence is communicated. My critique focuses on the existence of a discursive Pat Tillman as a rhetorical phenomenon, drawing upon scholarship that can inform an understanding of how the life of Pat Tillman became the material for public discourse. My analysis interconnects Michel Foucault's (1972) work on knowledge and discourse with Michael Calvin McGee (1990) referred to as rhetorical fragments, in order to provide a foundation for understanding the discursive existence of Pat Tillman. Using how discourse producer connected various facts, stories, and images with conceptions of heroism, masculinity, and the American Dream, I reveal how the life and death of Pat Tillman was used as the material to represent political and cultural positions that exist external to that life. Through an analysis of the various news reports, books, documentaries, blogs, and other mediated texts that were produced in response to the life and death of Pat Tillman, this study presents a clearer picture of what is meant by "fragmentation" in critical analysis.