Research and Innovation

Louis Malle's collaboration with oceanographer and environmental activist Jacques Cousteau on "The Silent World" was a training ground and foundational work for the budding French director in 1956. The specific treatment of three elements -the presence of recording technology, the observation of marine life, the use of sound- pervading the film as a documentary feature had a significant influence on Malle's narrative and aesthetic choices as soon as he turned to fiction two years later, with "Elevator to the Gallows" and "The Lovers" (and on to his early 1960s films -"Zazie dans le métro", "A Very Private Affair", "The Fire Within"). Malle's interest in the mediatisation of vision, his 'mechanistic" conception of cinema, his acute perception of the representational and narrational inadequacy of verbal language, his ethnographic concern (shared with Jean Rouch) for "an ethic of looking and listening", his disenchanted gaze on the man-machine, his shift between nature (animals) and mankind (in particular children) -all speak to a constant engagement with issues of realism, truth and objectivity, and, ultimately, to a more assertive political thrust than is ordinarily perceived in his early work.

Laura Demaría, professor of Spanish, has published her first novel. 

“A diferencia de Utopía, la isla prodigiosa que se desea y es un sueño, St. Louis y todos los lugares de este blues siempre han estado presentes sencilla y abrumadoramente. Aquí no se inventa nada, ni se desea lo inencontrable. "St. Louis Blues" afirma la inmanencia de la vida, describiendo, con palabras discretas y casi dolorosas, esos secretos con que esta va construyendo su evidencia: nuestros encuentros, nuestras pasiones, nuestras soledades, todo aparente, pero inasible; todo resonante pero incomprensible. Esta inmanencia nos rodea y también nos invade; pero ¿qué sentido tiene? Laura Demaría nos ofrece una narración de permanente suspenso: no duda que lo existente tenga sentido; pero ¿dónde está?, ¿qué cara tiene?, ¿es el lugar donde estoy y el ostro que veo en el espejo?, ¿o son también los lugares de los otros y sus pasiones? ¿Hay una respuesta? Con una sabiduría gozosa, esta narración recorre estas supremas preguntas.” - Jorge Aguilar Mora, professor emeritus of Spanish.

A phonological priming experiment reports inhibition for Russian prime-target pairs with onset overlap in native speakers. When preceded by the phonological prime /kabɨla/, the target /kabak/ (кобыла – КАБАК, mare – PUB) takes longer to respond than the same target preceded by a phonologically unrelated word. English-speaking late learners of Russian also show inhibition, but only for high-frequency prime-target pairs. Conversely, they show facilitation for low-frequency pairs. In semantic priming (e.g. carnation – DAISY), facilitation is observed for the same two lexical frequency ranges both in native speakers and learners of Russian, suggesting that the primes and targets in the low-frequency range are familiar to the nonnative participants. We interpret nonnative phonological facilitation for low-frequency words as evidence for sublexical processing of less familiar words that is accompanied by reduced lexical competition in nonnative lexical access. We posit that low lexical competition is due to unfaithful, or fuzzy phonolexical representations: nonnative speakers are unsure about the exact phonological form of low-frequency words. Such unfaithful representations are not strongly engaged in lexical competition and selection. High reliance on sublexical rather than lexical processing may be a general property of nonnative word recognition in case when the words are less familiar and have a low level of entrenchment.

Central America has long been pivotal to U.S. economic and geopolitical interests and the U.S. political and cultural imaginary because of the isthmus’s geographical location. Combined, U.S. interventions, local armed conflicts, and the migration flow from Central America produce the conditions that make possible the production of a U.S. Central American literature. In their works, U.S. Central American writers such as Tanya Maria Barrientos, Francisco Goldman, Héctor Tobar, Marcos McPeek Villatoro, and poets like Maya Chinchilla, Lorena Duarte, Leticia Hernández-Linares, and William Archila, among others, not only give visibility and voice to an array of U.S. Central American subjectivities but also contribute to an expansion of Latina/o literary history, now forced to reckon with Central America. This chapter examines the production of U.S. Central American literature before and beyond the age of neoliberalism.

This paper presentation investigates the concept of "bonding" through indexicality in membership registration confirmations and order acknowledgments via email from companies in the United States and Japan. These texts are part of a larger corpus of business email correspondence collected by the author in 2011-2017. The research builds upon recent papers on the topic of "bonding" as analyzed from theoretical perspectives such as stance-taking (Jaffe 2009), positioning (Bamberg 1997, 2004), and the concept of “ba” from emancipatory pragmatics (Fujii 2012). These two sub-genres of discourse are highlighted for several reasons. First, they are essential to the establishment of a "relationship" via email between company and customer, even though most of these texts were probably auto-generated upon receipt of a membership registration or placement of an order. Moreover, the regularity with which American and Japanese companies disseminate such emails allows us to perceive the generic conventions at work in the two languages, and in particular to identify the range of indexical expressions used to point to referents in the discourse. Finally, these emails reveal that the discursive practices with respect to indexicality differ in these contexts, with person deixis predominating in English, and social deixis in Japanese. Wetzel (2011) and Dean (2009) have demonstrated the fundamental importance of pronouns such as "you" in public signs and advertising texts in English. In contrast, Ide and Ueno (2011) have underscored the importance of linguistic expressions such as nouns with honorific prefixes and honorific predicative elements, which reflect the concepts wakimae ("discernment") and ba ("field"), when Japanese "place themselves in relation to the[ir] addressees in daily practice." This paper illustrates the indexical process of "bonding" between company and customer through these respective linguistic techniques in Japanese and American English business discourse.

The dissertation starts with a historical and philosophical survey to understand the etymological sense of the word and to see how ethical values, law norms, cultural and social aspects have transformed the concept accordingly.Such universal theme is seen through various scholars’ perspectives from ancient Greek pre-socratic philosopher Zenone di Elea to the contemporary American philosopher Martha Nussbaum and the Indian economist Amartya Sen that decline such complex term with the ability to reason, living a good life, democracy and equality, with the access to health, education and income. The research continues with an interview to four different groups of people: elementary school children, teenagers, adults and over 65 persons that answer to a few questions about examples of recognition, denial and improvement of dignity in their lives. In the last part of the survey five adults are interviewed about dignity at work with a series of questions ranging from their role inside the company, their relationships with staff and management, information, support, wellness, safety at workplace. Five more people are interviewed on their health experiences with physicians and at the hospital to get their feedback on help, practical information, wellness and empathy. Such analysis is deepened at school with five teachers’ interview on their approach to teaching attitudes, agreement on education vision and mission, collaborative approach with the principal staff and student care, respect, tolerance, inclusion, sense of community. Another group of five adults have responded to questions related to family relationships, transmitted values, use of technology, family lifestyle, freedom, privacy, sharing perspectives and mutual respect. Data analysis and comments conclude the study.

The study focuses on the ways in which these Hispanic artists use linguistic and stylistic resources within a heteroglossic framework to perform resistance identities while highlighting the differences and similarities between first and second-generation immigrant participants. The speakers' linguistic and textual displays in Instagram are geared by and express translocal affective and sociocultural alignments and affinities while resisting hegemonic ideologies of racial categorization and stigmatization of Latinxs in the US. Theoretically and methodologically the investigationstudy draws on sociolinguistics, language ideologies, critical race theory, and discourse analysis. Special attention is given to aspects of translocality and Hip-Hop Nation Language (HHNL, Alim, 2009), agency, and the ways in which they themselves make sense of and account for their actions through linguistic awareness. Within a mixed-methodology framework, this study criticizes the use of Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) and highlights the analytical usefulness of triangulation.

This review discusses a number of recent studies focusing on the role of phonological and morphological structure in lexical access of Russian words by non-native speakers. This research suggests that late second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers of Russian in several ways: Lower-proficiency L2 learners rely on unfaithful, or fuzzy, phonological representations of words, which are caused either by problems with encoding difficult phonological contrasts, such as hard and soft consonants, or by uncertainty about the phonological form and form-meaning mappings for low-frequency words. In processing morphologically complex inflected words, L2 learners rely on decomposition to access the lexical meaning through the stem and may ignore the information carried by the inflection. The reviewed findings have broader implications for the understanding of nonnative word recognition, and the role of L2 proficiency in lexical processing.

Two auditory lexical decision tasks explore the role of case form (citation or oblique) and the type of inflection (overt or zero). In native speakers, the study reports an additional processing cost for both overtly and zero-inflected oblique-case nouns compared to the same nouns in the citation form. It is interpreted as the cost of checking the recomposed word within the inflectional paradigm rather than the cost of affix stripping, because there is no affix to strip in zero-inflected words. Conversely, nonnative speakers of Russian in Experiment 1 do not show additional processing costs either for case form or inflection type, which suggests that they do not process the morphological information encoded in the inflection. In Experiment 2, we add a new manipulation to the nonword condition such that the nonwords illegally combine real stems and real inflections to emphasize the need for processing the inflection. This time, nonnative speakers show additional processing costs for oblique-case nouns, and their sensitivity to case increases with proficiency, with only high-proficiency nonnative speakers demonstrating native-like sensitivity. We show that citation forms are processed faster than oblique forms regardless of inflection, and that nonnative speakers’ engagement of morphological information is task and proficiency-dependent.

For several decades, researchers have studied the field of heritage language (HL) teaching and learning. The intention of this review is to analyze these studies in order to find broader and more specific applications to inform the current situation in the Hebrew class. These ap- plications are limited for several reasons. First, virtually all HL studies focus on the children of immigrants who speak or are learning the new region’s majority language while attempting to preserve their HL (usually their home language). Most young American Hebrew learners, apart from a number of children of Israeli immigrants, speak English as their home and first language (L1). Second, though prior studies of HL learning are numerous, the research usually consists of qualitative case studies focusing on one aspect of learning (for example, attitudes toward the teacher, reactions to class activities, or parental influences on learning). There is very little in-depth analysis or connection of results and implications. Third, “He- brew” is an umbrella term1 that includes biblical, liturgical, literary, modern and other genres and uses of the language and that can be meaningful for social, communal, reli- gious, affective, nostalgic, nationalistic, and instrumental reasons. It is difficult to pinpoint which Hebrew we can study and compare to other HLs.