The environmental crisis challenges us to look at our relationships with the rest of the world, human, animal, vegetable, and mineral. That the resources of our faith could apparently not foresee or prevent the environmental crisis leads many to suspect that this faith is complicit with the crisis, and it prompts us to reexamine our theologies to…

This dissertation explores the phonetic mechanisms of the sound change known as rhotacism (/s/ greater than /z/ greater than /r/) which is observed in Italic, Germanic, and Sanskrit, among other languages, employing lab-based methods of "experimental historical phonology" (Ohala 1974), and approaching sound change from the theoretical standpoint…

This study explores the interplay of bilingualism, identity, literacy and culture for CubanAmerican students in the Cuban diaspora. I contextualize their experiences within the social, historical, and political background of Cuban immigration, situating their stories within the conflicting narratives of Cuban-American imagination in the U.S., to…

The replication of the U.S. cultural models in business and social organizations is a common practice in Latin America. In Ecuador, a university operates under the liberal arts model, understanding it as a replication of an U.S. cultural model, in an environment where the Ecuadorian cultural beliefs and values constitute the national cultural…

This morphosyntactic dissertation study compares the use of MOOD (indicative & subjunctive) in first- and second-generation Spanish speakers in New York City. The data for this study are from a transcription of naturalistic Spanish conversations with New Yorkers of different generations, representing the six primary Spanish-speaking groups in…

Deponency has been treated with inconsistency in studies of Greek grammar with adverse implications to exegesis of the NT. In recent years, some grammarians have denied that deponency is a valid expression of voice. This work serves to contribute to a better understanding of this phenomenon in the Koine period so that the NT can be interpreted…

This study examines a major linguistic event underway in New York City. Of its 10 million inhabitants, nearly a third are speakers of Spanish. This community is socially and linguistically diverse: Some speakers are recent arrivals from Latin America while others are lifelong New Yorkers. Some have origins in the Caribbean, the historic source of…

The University of Delaware has embraced a global admissions initiative with minimal experience in international endeavors and a limited budget for international recruitment. This EPP serves as exploratory research for improving our understanding of the international student market in Latin America and working more effectively with international…

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that promote transformative learning experiences of college-level adult learners of foreign languages. This study was conducted to analyze how college-level adult learners of foreign languages experience transformative learning through educational and non-educational experiences. Mezirow's…

This study outlines the development of Portuguese and Spanish verbal morphology from Latin in the context of the Hispanic branch of Romance, with a focus on the conjugational classes, whose number has been reduced to only three in this branch of Western Romance. It is innovative in approaching the topic as a study of sequential productive grammars…

This dissertation offers new approaches to an old and well-known problem in the study of the development of Romance varieties: duplicate lexis or doublets. Traditional analyses of duplication are narrow in scope both in what qualifies as a doublet (the popular/learned opposition has dominated, to the exclusion of other pairs) and in channels of…

This study discusses the results of a content analysis of 75 Latina biographies for primary and pre-adolescent students that were published over a 16-year period, spanning from 1995 to 2010. Significant to this study was how Latinas were represented in the biographies and what changes can be seen over time. Using a rubric based on research by…

"The Style and Structure of 'Minnesang'" approaches a broad corpus of the medieval German love lyric from the perspective of historical phraseology and formulaicity. Overturning previous concerns of prosodic restriction in verse and the misapplication of contemporary notions of fixity, the dissertation provides an overview of…

The opportunity to learn for African American and Latino children is extremely limited in a large number of US classrooms. Many societal issues are to blame, but high-stakes testing has exacerbated this problem. The pressure to increase test scores has caused a narrowing of the curriculum, particularly in low-performing schools, most of which are…

This dissertation examines how borrowed derivational morphemes such as "-age," "-ity," "-cion," and "-ment" became productive in the English language, particularly in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. It endeavors to expand our current understanding of morphological productivity as a historical phenomenon--to account for not only…