Students

Anne Stoughton is a PhD student. Her interests are speech and listening, and she is interested in corpus linguistics from an SLA and pedagogical perspective. Her work to date in corpus linguistics has concentrated on comparing frequency-based versus text-dispersed methods for identifying keywords in podcasts and analyzing if podcasts can be conversational using Biber’s multi-dimensional analysis.

Anne is currently a teaching assistant for the Story of English and has worked as an instructor teaching English to college-aged and adult English learners at both Coconino Community College, the Program in Intensive English at NAU, and ELS Center in Illinois. She has also taught first year composition at NAU and at Northern Illinois University. 

Nur Yağmur Demir is a Ph.D. student at NAU. She received her BA (Boğaziçi University – 2016) and MA (Middle East Technical University – 2021) in English Language Education in Turkey. She has several years of experience in teaching English and Turkish in EFL contexts. She currently works as a composition instructor at NAU. She is interested in analyzing computer-mediated communication, pragmatics, English as Lingua Franca and register with a corpus linguistics perspective. 

The Use and Functions of the Pragmatic Marker You Know in Professional ELF Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study

This ongoing project investigates the impact of social variables on the use of the pragmatic marker “you know” in professional ELF spoken discourse. While ELF has been studied linguistically, research on its connection with social variables is limited. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, analyzing “you know” in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to explore its functions. Preliminary findings suggest 'you know' primarily serves as a textual/discourse organizer, with no significant link to power relations.

Exploring Linguistic Characteristics of Online ELF Registers: A Corpus-based Analysis of Informational Blogs and Interactive Discussions

This study aims to expand the ELF and register variation literature by investigating online written ELF registers with a corpus linguistics approach. Two sub-corpora of Written English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings corpus (WrELFA) are analyzed: informational (academic) blogs and the interactive discussions that take place under these blogs. The main goal is to explore the inherit linguistic characteristics of online registers produced by ELF users.

Dilara Dikilitas joined the Applied Linguistics Ph.D. program at NAU in 2023. She received her M.A. in TESL-Applied Linguistics from NAU and B.A. in TEFL from the Middle East Technical University. Currently, she teaches English Composition classes at NAU. Her research interests include World Englishes; linguistic discrimination; and issues of inequity, particularly in spoken modality. 

An Investigation of Pause Location in Spoken English Corpora

This corpus-based study investigates the pause behavior of speakers of three L1 backgrounds from two English-spoken corpora: The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and The Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC). Descriptive statistics and binomial logistic regression were used for analysis. The study answers two research questions: (1) In what ways do L1 speakers of English, French, and Spanish differ in terms of the location and type of pause produced in English interviews? (2) Does L1 background and/or presence vs. absence of a clause boundary have an effect on what type of pause (silent vs. filled) is produced? The results show that the L1 Spanish group differed considerably from the other groups with regard to both frequency and location of pauses. Additionally, both L1 and the presence of a clause boundary were found to be predictors of pause type. 

Politeness in Instructors’ Feedback: Does the modality matter?

This corpus-based study intends to contribute to the newly emerging area of research, features of teachers’ feedback to students through the lens of politeness and impoliteness. The study examined teachers’ use of politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Pearson, 1988) and impoliteness strategies (Culpeper, 2010) in two feedback modalities: screencast and written, focusing on the impact of feedback modality on the type of strategies. Three instructors’ feedback comments on 20 students’ essays were taken from the Writing Feedback Corpus (WFC) and coded for politeness and impoliteness strategy. 

Kelly Kendro is a first-year PhD student who uses existing and ad-hoc language corpora to investigate language variation, including internet-mediated language change.

Extralinguistic markers of political affiliation: A corpus analysis of Parler and Twitter

Poster presented at AAAL 2023; manuscript in preparation

Collaborators: Scott Jarvis (NAU), Abby Almas (University of Utah)

In spoken language, speakers may signal in-group affiliation through vocal cues such as intonation or phonemic variation. In written online discourse, these cues are unavailable by virtue of the medium; they may instead be approximated through extralinguistic style markers including non-standard usage of capitalization, punctuation, or emoji. Text-based interactions on social media have been identified as potential areas of interest for researchers aiming to study the manifestation of these patterns. This project investigates whether non-standard capitalization is one such indicator of political affiliation in social media posts. We use corpus data from Twitter and Parler to compare the frequency of non-standard capitalization as well as the nature of those words. We ask two research questions, namely: i) do the frequency of non-canonical capitalization significantly differ between the corpora, and ii) are there patterns in which words were capitalized (i.e., political or ideological words)? 

Internet-influenced shifts in compound word formation and usage frequency

Poster presented at HDLS 15

Collaborators: Scott Jarvis (NAU)

Most empirical work investigating how the internet has influenced and affected language is constrained to novel tools for linguistic analysis and concerns about how abbreviations, acronyms, and other common characteristics of “textspeak” may be detrimental to language knowledge and production, particularly in younger speakers. However, an understudied intersection of internet and language development is the adoption of new words into the common lexicon. In this study, we track and compare the emergence and standardization of new words both pre-Internet and in the Internet era. In English, compound words historically follow a typical progression during development and usage, wherein a two-word phrase begins functioning as a single lexical item, which may present as a hyphenated word before ultimately emerging as a single-word compound. Though there are some exceptions or variations to this pattern, it can largely be identified through analyses of historical corpora. We use the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to investigate how emergence during the Internet era differed from pre-Internet word emergence. Specifically, we ask whether there are era-based differences in: i) form frequency such that newer words do not follow the historical orthographic sequence, and ii) how quickly words become widely-used.

Alexander Holmberg is currently a second-year PhD student at NAU. He received his BA in English in 2019 from Western Oregon University. He has been teaching English in various ESL/EFL scenarios since 2017. His research interests include ESL/EFL writing, data-driven learning, English for Academic Purposes, and learner corpora. 

Writing Across Levels: A Corpus Study of Student Writing

Vocabulary acquisition is essential to language learning, but deciding which vocabulary to teach and exclude can be complicated. Additionally, many successful writing techniques can be overlooked in an ESL setting, like using hedges in academic writing. This study examines similar academic writing by first-year and fourth-year international students at Western Oregon University and compares them with fourth-year domestic students using the MICUSP corpus. Areas of comparison were the use of hedge words from Aull (2019) and various vocabulary lists from AntWordProfiler. Data from the results can be used to improve ESL/EFL classroom techniques and activities.