THE VARIABLE GRAMMAR OF THE SPANISH SUBJUNCTIVE IN SECOND-GENERATION BILINGUALS IN NEW YORK CITY
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Program:
Hispanic & Luso Brazilian Literatures & Languages
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 NYC: Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Colombian and Cuban. We analyze data from 26 born in Latin America and 26 born or raised in NYC, totaling 52 transcriptions. The reference model is the mood usage of first-generation newcomers, not a standard Spanish normative framework. The objective was to examine the use of mood by way of descriptive and inferential analytical methods in order to determine whether or not the second-generation bilinguals' mood grammar has changed, and if so, to establish exactly where and how it differs from the first-generation. The research questions were: 1) Does the subjunctive use of second-generation NYC bilinguals differ from that of their first-generation NYC counterparts? 2) What are the syntactic and communicative contexts in which the subjunctive is used in the first and second generations? 3) What internal and external independent variables condition mood choice in both immigrant generational groups? 4) Is the second generation's use of mood such that grammatical command of mood appears developed and systematic? Or is there evidence of an incomplete or unsystematic mood grammar? Our findings corroborate the results from other studies centered on generational U.S. subjunctive use: the second generation generates fewer subjunctives and more indicatives than the first-generation, a finding supported by statistical significance. The two generations also differ significantly concerning the internal contexts where mood manifests, but command of mood does appear intact among the majority of the second generation, thus problematizing common notions such as attrition, incomplete acquisition, and to a degree, simplification. Furthermore, analyses concerning several external variables show that the first generation appears essentially homogenous with respect to their use of mood, whereas the second-generation displays far more variability. Finally, this dissertation contributes to the variationist-sociolinguistic knowledge of Spanish grammar in bilingual settings.
Entrapment and Enchantment: Nympholepsy and the Cult of the Girl Child
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Wayne Koestenbaum
Focusing on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1886), J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy (1911), Henry Darger's The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, and John Ashbery's Girls on the Run (1999), this dissertation investigates how the Victorian cult of the girl child may have its roots in another Victorian interest, ancient Greek culture. While this dissertation adds to the scholarship on literary pedophilia, it makes a distinction between the pedophile and the nympholept. Whereas the pedophile wishes to sexually possess children, the nympholept does not necessarily wish to sexually possess his nymph; rather, the nympholept is moved to create art inspired by his nymph, or girl child. This dissertation introduces the idea of sublimation into art to the discourse of girl children. Just as classical nymphs had to sublimate themselves into landscapes in order to escape their male pursuers, we see how the girl children in this study are sublimated into literary or visual art in order metaphorically to preserve themselves. While forging a connection between the cult of the girl child to nympholepsy, this study also connects nympholepsy to what Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment (1976) calls "enchantment," that is, using fantastical stories in order to navigate certain unknowns, mainly adulthood and death. This dissertation takes this a step further and asserts that nympholepts used enchantment as a means to entrap nymphs. While bringing up the inevitable charge of pedophilia, this project is not interested in the pedophile but in the nympholept and the means through which he sublimates a girl child into visual or literary art. The opening chapter examines Lolita alongside the taxonomy for classical Greek nymphs and explores both the minutia and larger themes in Lolita that relate to this classification. Chapter two examines Carroll's relationship to Alice Liddell in light of nympholepsy and the triangulation of pleasure between Carroll, Alice, and Alice's Adventures Under Ground, which the chapter recognizes as a highly eroticized fetish object. Chapter three studies the subversive sexuality and desires of Wendy Darling while arguing that Peter Pan, instead of being a little boy who refuses to grow up, is a Pan figure. The final chapter discusses how nympholepsy plays out in the art and writings of Darger and Ashbery's nympholepsy. The dissertation concludes with a creative epilogue that explores the theme of "reenchantment" that I discuss in chapter four.
Shifts in clinical attention and focus: Exploring the boundaries of reverie in the therapeutic process
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Therapists have times of greater attention and of less, and each therapist may have the experience of noticing that her attention has shifted from what the patient is saying toward those thoughts that have been stirred. This qualitative study examined psychotherapists' perspectives on shifts in clinical attention and focus in their treatment of their patients, and the ways in which their particular approach to psychotherapeutic work influence how therapists understand and negotiate these potentially complex clinical moments. The study (a) captures how senior psychotherapists view such experiences, (b) surveys the conditions under which clinicians share their responses, thoughts and processes with patients, and (c) examines how therapists negotiate what may be conflicting considerations or principles in arriving at how they handle the experience.
Worthy of the Light: Feminine Heroism in Die Zauberflöte
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Barbara Russano Hanning
"Worthy of the Light: Feminine Heroism in Die Zauberflöte" posits that the opera represents the apotheosis of a heroism depicted by Mozart in the female protagonists of his mature works (Konstanze and Blondchen in Die Entführung, the Countess and Susanna in Figaro, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni), with the possible exception of Così fan tutte (and arguably, in Fiordiligi, even there). This heroism encompasses moral and physical courage within the context of Christian theology, Masonic ideals, and Enlightenment philosophy (exemplified by the English philosophers and the American Revolution, rather than the French enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau). My premise challenges the prevailing view that Zauberflöte is misogynistic in its depiction of women.
Phonemic Awareness Instruction: Effects of Letter Manipulation and Articulation Training on Learning to Read and Spell
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Program:
Educational Psychology
This study investigated the effect of two types of phonemic awareness instruction on learning to read and spell words. English speaking preschoolers were taught to segment words into phonemes using either letters or letters combined with articulation pictures. Participants possessed letter name knowledge but were nonreaders prior to training. Triplets were formed based on similar scores on the segmentation, word reading and vocabulary pretests and members were randomly assigned to three conditions: letter manipulation only (LO), letter manipulation plus articulation (LPA), and no treatment control conditions. LO children were taught letter-sound correspondences and use of letters to spell phonemes in words. LPA children received LO training and in addition the use of articulatory pictures to spell phonemes. Control children remained in their classrooms.
Complicity and Criticism: "Neo-Geo" Art of the 1980's
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation examines the deconstructive underpinnings of the so-called Neo-Geo group of the 1980's and explores links between Neo-Geo and the Pictures or Appropriation artists of the late 1970's. Neo-Geo emerged in the early 1980's as one aspect of New York's nascent East Village arts scene. The movement--also dubbed Simulationism, Neo-Pop, Neo-Minimalism or Post-Abstraction--primarily encompassed eight independent-minded artists, including painters Ashley Bickerton (b. 1959), Peter Halley (b. 1953), Sherrie Levine (b. 1947), Allan McCollum (b. 1944), Philip Taaffe (b. 1953) and Meyer Vaisman (b.1960). These artists were attributed the Neo-Geo moniker in 1986 based on their use of geometric forms and their appropriation of art historical motifs and styles from well-established artists. Sculptors Jeff Koons (b. 1955) and Haim Steinbach (b. 1944) were initially labeled as Neo-Geo, then also as Commodity Artists beginning in 1986. The varied epithets for this group represent critics' attempts to understand and classify the broad range of mediums and appropriative methodologies employed by these artists. It has all along been a questionable act to characterize this group under one cohesive name, as if they constituted a singular movement. Many of these artists had been a part of the East Village scene since 1980 or earlier, but they were only discussed and labeled by the art press at a time when their work gained significant popularity among prominent collectors and dealers. While the Neo-Geo artists differ substantially, their work nonetheless explored some common themes and pursued some strategies in common. Neo-Geo artists created paintings and sculptures that functioned, in a sense, in a textual manner. This diverse group collectively shared an interest in examining the terms, limits and structures of art history and various aspects of the society-at-large, including commodity capitalism and digital culture, in a deconstructive manner. Rooted within an amalgamation of art historical sources, Neo-Geo built upon the strategies of Pop, Minimalist, Conceptualist and Pictures artists in the creation of a diverse body of work. As I demonstrate, Neo-Geo used pastiche and strategies of parodying certain art historical paradigms to create new dialogues within contemporary art.
Woman's Work: Ruth Maleczech as Mabou Mines Performer, Director & Manager
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Abstract
Fashioning Performance Careers in New York, 1869-1899: How Female Performers Negotiated Changing Ideas of Womanhood
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Although they worked outside the home, the majority of nineteenth-century female performers built careers within, not in spite of, domestic ideology. Their choice contrasts with those of their more transgressive sisters, like Sarah Bernhardt, who flouted the ideal. This study of over seven hundred women who performed in New York City during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century examines how they created careers and public characters by combining values found within domestic ideology with changes in the notions of womanhood brought about by the experience of the Civil War.
THE USE OF LE BY L1 CHINESE SPEAKERS AND THE ACQUISITION OF LE BY L2 CHINESE LEARNERS
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
GITA MARTOHARDJONO
The perfective marker V-le is claimed to be one of the most problematic items in the acquisition of L2 Chinese, perhaps because no unified and comprehensive treatment of it exists in the literature. Although much has been written on this topic, the semantic and pragmatic functions of V-le have remained elusive. While linguists and grammarians all agree that V-le performs multiple functions, there has been no consensus on its meaning and usage. Adding to this complex situation is that V-le is not always syntactically obligatory in Mandarin Chinese. Even though scholars are well aware of the phenomenon of "optionality" with Chinese aspect markers, disagreement and ambiguity prevail. Smith (1997) claims that V-le, like other aspect markers in Chinese, is always syntactically optional. Li and Thompson (1981) claim that the use of V-le depends largely on the speaker's viewpoint as to whether an event is "bounded" or not. Both seem to suggest global optionality. In contrast, textbooks written for Chinese L2 learners discuss V-le as obligatory in various different contexts. Having found no established and unified treatment of V-le that reflects native speaker's knowledge regarding its obligatory and optional use, we conducted a larger survey of 482 native speakers, 316 adolescents and 166 adults, in an attempt to capture some generalizations on the obligatory and optional use of -le in various contexts. Our results show a range of frequencies, from very high (98% to 100%) in the context of accomplishment predicates and activity predicates as the first event in a sequence; to high (67% to 84%) in the context of achievement predicates; to variable (31% to 64%) in the context of resultative verb complements. We argue that this pattern of V-le suppliance can be derived by positing a hierarchy of boundedness in the predicate and that it follows a redundancy principle in discourse. The results from learners' data suggest that they acquired the knowledge of the perfective marking in the obligatory context after 300-400 hours of classroom instruction. They consistently used -le with accomplishment verbs and activity verbs as the first event in a sequence. They also consistently omitted -le with resultative verb complements, a hint of their implicit understanding of the semantic cues given by the predicates. In sum, the learners had a good understanding of the semantic properties of the verb class and had acquired a good, but not yet native-like, knowledge about the interaction between the perfective marker V-le and the lexical and semantic properties of different verb type categories.
The role of Mdm2 in estrogen-mediated breast cancer cell proliferation
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Estrogen signaling is important in breast cancer development and progression. Mdm2, a negative regulator of the p53 tumor suppressor, is often over-expressed in estrogen receptor positive breast cancers. To study the role of Mdm2 in the estrogen-mediated breast cancer cell proliferation, we examined the effect of estrogen on the p53-Mdm2 pathway in estrogen receptor positive and p53 wild-type MCF-7 breast cancer cells. Estrogen-mediated increase in cell proliferation correlated with increased Mdm2, but no concomitant decrease in the p53 protein level. Blocking Mdm2 expression with inducible shRNA inhibited estrogen-mediated cell proliferation and colony formation in soft agar. Mdm2 knockdown in the presence of estrogen increased p21 and the percent of cells in the G1 phase. Interestingly, knockdown of p53 had no effect on the estrogen-mediated cell proliferation. Estrogen also up-regulated the Mdm2 protein levels in cells exposed to the DNA damaging agent, etoposide, and the Mdm2 inhibitor, Nutlin-3. In turn, estrogen inhibited etoposide- and Nutlin-3-induced transcription of puma, a pro-apoptotic p53 target gene, without changing the p53 protein levels or p53 recruitment to the chromatin. The decrease in puma gene transcription correlated with a decrease in Puma protein and an increase in Bcl-2 protein, an anti-apoptotic estrogen receptor target. Overall, our findings suggest that estrogen signals to an Mdm2-mediated pathway to provoke cell proliferation and that this pathway is associated with inhibition of the G1 checkpoint.