Abstracts

Using panel data for the 20-year period from 1988 through 2007 across 17 of the nation's largest metropolitan areas, this research empirically shows that traffic congestion and the resulting personal time lost will crowd consumers out of the consumption of recreational goods. This research takes a step away from traditional studies in this field by focusing on the total loss in consumption expenditures from congestion as opposed to the shift in expenditures towards goods that can be obtained closer to home. This has implications for businessmen and -women who make their livelihood off of the recreation industry. It shows that while a prime location could mitigate the effects of poor urban planning and decaying infrastructure, there is a vested interest in having federal and state governments improve and expand the urban road networks.

It is human nature to wonder about what we do not know, and with the use of imagination, we are able to dream about possibilities that do not exist. Whether we believe what we imagine affects only ourselves and our own happiness, but, where the witches and wizards of Hogwarts are concerned, it is a different story. What they imagine, they are able to give the solidity of a physical reality. Intent, expectation, and belief all play a part in what reality exists for each individual. In the case of Muggles, it blinds them from the reality of the magic that surrounds them, but for witches and wizards, belief and expectation gives them the power to twist the world into what they want it to be.

The theme of exclusion and discrimination is prevalent throughout the story of Yang's American Born Chinese. Each of the three main characters has his or her own story. We learn over the course of the three stories how these characters are connected. These fragmented parts, or reflections, of the main character(s) are fascinating, particularly when viewed through a Lacanian lens. My intent is to use Lacanian theory (especially involving the Mirror Stage of development) to examine Yang's main characters, identify their stages of development in regard to Lacan's Mirror Stage, and, finally, explore the idea that the racial shadows these characters fear are simply alternate reflections of themselves.

Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that one of the common features of adolescent literature is that the text focuses on the struggles of the teenaged protagonists to learn their place within the power structures that they are surrounded by, rather than on the central character's growth over the course of the novel. While Garth Nix's Sabriel does not entirely fit into the paradigm that Trites describes, much of the text focuses on Sabriel and Touchstone's realization of their own mortality through their battle against the Dead creature Kerrigor. Although Sabriel is primarily a work of high fantasy, Nix uses abjections and ideas of the abject to highlight Sabriel and Touchstone's growing awareness as Beings-towards-death while simultaneously complicating how the boundary between life and death functions within the novel.

Twentieth-century horror author H. P. Lovecraft often wrote his tales about entities that were beyond the scope of human language. His tendency to label these creatures as 'indescribable' led to much criticism and his response in the form of the short story 'The Unnamable.' Justifying his claim about the limits of human language, the text serves not only as a clever jab at his critics but also as a clear statement of his beliefs regarding the inadequacy of language. Reading this through the lens of Lacanian psycholinguistics, Lovecraft's abandoning of language represents the inadequacy of the Symbolic to fully grasp and maintain encounters with the Real. This leads to a more devastating realization from both the Lovecraftian protagonist as well as the reader, as exposure to the Real and the subsequent failure of Symbolic systems calls into question the stability of Symbolic structures, most notably, concepts of reality itself.

Written in the fourteenth century, the medieval poem 'Pearl' is arguably the most elaborately constructed work existing from that time period. Part of a manuscript of four poems also containing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poem's intricate and circular use of layered numbering, concatenation, and alliteration demonstrates the author's skill; consequently, the poem's inherent ambiguity of meaning cannot merely be a flaw in writing. Given the complicated allegorical layering and language of the medieval poem, the scholarship attempting to decipher its meaning, its genre, and who or what the pearl represents has been extensive. Nearly all of this scholarship, however, centers on either a discussion of genre or the figure of the pearl. While both of these aspects are important to the understanding of the poem and its layered beauty, I will argue that the key remains in the figure of the narrator who exists as a consistent, if fractured, thread that runs the length of the poem. The author of 'Pearl' created a piece of literature that recognized the psychology of grief and the flaws of the various social networks of the time in dealing with death and grief. He explores the fractures that occur when a man cannot, or chooses not to, conform to those socially accepted modes of grieving.

One of Virginia Woolf's earliest attempts at fiction, Melymbrosia puts its own immaturity in sharp focus by closely tracing the evolution of a technique that comes to define the author's style. For while in Woolf's later work the inner minds of her characters are used as narrative lenses, they are here mostly left blank and inscrutable. Therefore, Melymbrosia might function as a means of sketching out the mind's features and borders. This elucidation of identity's components and composition is a parallel project to the plot's primary action: a voyage in which a young woman attempts to define who she is and how she fits into the world as she perceives it. Using the tools of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I argue that in Melymbrosia Woolf proposes a model of identity in which one is defined by one's emptiness, silenced in one's attempted signification, and ultimately isolated and alone.

This study seeks to interrogate the intersection of feminist thought and Utopia by exploring two texts that differ radically in their era and presentation but share common iterations of a woman's powerful space. By drawing on feminist scholarship, the paper will deconstruct 'Sultana's Dream,' a protofeminist Indian short story written in 1905 along with the 'Take Back the Night' march (which started in the 1970s and continues today), using the guidebook for the march as well as editorial commentary surrounding individual marches. The purpose of bringing these two texts into conversation is to demonstrate a continued condition within the discourse of gendered Utopia, in which gaining exposure is privileged over effecting change.

This paper addresses the abjection of the female reproductive body in Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn. This abjection is apparent through several authorial choices on Meyer's part, notably the switch in narrative perspective following Bella's (and the reader's) discovery of her pregnancy. The problem of this narrative switch is twofold: First, by switching away from Bella's first person narrative point of view Meyer is, in essence, denying Bella her own voice (and arguably agency) during her pregnancy and subsequent birthing process. Second, it allows the depictions of the pregnant body to remain, always, other. Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this paper works to join a long-standing discourse on the depictions of female sexuality and reproduction in popular literature.

Constructed as a companion piece, Margaret Atwood's recent publication, Year of the Flood, has generated new eco-critical interest in her 2003 post-modern success, Oryx and Crake. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood invites her readers into a world that reflects the aftermath of a war fought between Nature and Culture. Atwood establishes Nature and Culture as individual gendered entities involved in a deathly struggle over reproduction and environmental rights. I argue that in its quest for survival in an inhospitable environment, Culture's obsession with bio-genetic engineering begins to overstep Nature's traditional evolutionary processes, thus creating a tension as each attempts to gain control over creation and their habitat.

Several of my classes at Eastern Michigan University have led to critical and creative confrontations with the controversial German filmmaker, Werner Herzog. Having become especially captivated by his DVD director's commentary, I took the chance during my Sound Poetry class to manipulate clips from his commentary to produce new audio creations. These sound poems give me the opportunity to use my cognate experience in music composition and allow me to simultaneously wallow in the musical poetry of his declarations while exploring the problematic contradictions at play in his aesthetic. Because of my cautious admiration of Herzog, the pieces balance between homage and satire but ideally exude an exuberant playfulness more than anything else.

The Buff Ruins' is a lyric essay that compares the recent economic downfall of Detroit with the diseased memoirs of an author who has endured several failed personal relationships. Mixing social commentary with the violence of language, it means to explore the fragmented nature of memory through aphorisms and stream of consciousness.

Seen from Space' is a lyrical essay about a walk through the University of Michigan campus whose landscape activates imagined, remembered, and virtual journeys through the receding flood waters of New Orleans and the rising tide of China's Three Gorges Dam, while skirting the slippery fulcrum of hereditary dementia that insinuates itself into the narrator's ever-revising sense of self. The experience creates a polymorphous narration that parallels the walk itself, informed and complicated by personal memories, readings, and the film 'Moon,' in which the protagonist finds himself unable to communicate directly with his wife and family and caught in a cycle of longing and alienation.

In attempting to explain how children are able to acquire words so rapidly, Markman (1994) proposes a set of constraints on word-learning, including the mutual exclusivity constraint: that each object may be assigned only one label. However, Markman doesn't account for bilingual learners, who must assign at least two labels to each object. The following study modifies Markman's own methodology to test for mutual exclusivity in a bilingual learner of English and German. The methodology proposed advances Markman's central idea while at the same time providing insight into how bilingualism is possible. By gauging a subject's willingness to attach an unfamiliar label in one language to an object whose label in another language is familiar, one can assess whether they are relying on mutual exclusivity when learning new words. The results of such a study provide valuable new insights into the nature of language acquisition.

The Ezafat suffix '-e/ye' is an important part of Farsi noun phrases, adjective phrases, and prepositional phrases. More importantly, a noun phrase cannot form a constituent without the Ezafat Suffix. Its occurrence is syntactically motivated by the presence of a following right-branching modifier or complement within the phrase, and it significantly contributes to the semantics of the phrases in which it is used. I provide an introduction to the underlying structure of the suffix and an analysis of its behavior, and I attempt to determine its precise role in the mapping from underlying form to surface form, within generative syntax. This provides insights about an aspect of Farsi syntax in particular, and about syntactic theory more generally.

Sinhala is a language spoken by around 19 million people in Sri Lanka. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Sinhala as a language shows unique characteristics in terms of its classification of verbs. In addition to the traditional categorization of verbs as transitive and intransitive, Sinhala grammar makes use of a semantic distinction of verbs known as Volitive and Involitive verbs. While the properties of volitive verbs conform to current semantic and syntactic linguistic theory, involitive verbs display unique behaviors in the language in terms of verb morphology, case assignment, and theta properties. This study, through a semantic and syntactic analysis of Sinhala involitives, reports the extent to which the involitive construction in colloquial Sinhala conforms to or deviates from the Chomskyan theories of case assignment and the theta criterion.

In recent years, some linguists have become focused on the diverse and fascinating way different languages and communities treat and perceive temperature. Studies have been carried out on Japanese and several European languages. These studies show remarkable differences in the number of distinct temperature terms they have and the nuances these encode, shedding light on the way humans perceive and interpret physical sensations. Here we present the first study of this kind on a Native American language, Eastern Ojibwe, referred to by speakers as Anishinaabemowin. Its complex word structures and requisite morphological encoding of temperature source provide a challenge for established theories in this field. Influenced by external cultural practices, the perception of temperature as something fully subjective and anthropocentric is shifting in Ojibwe communities, and a new perspective where temperature can be treated as an objective, abstract scale is taking hold.

This paper presents an analysis of aspects of agreement and word order patterns in Ibibio, a pro-drop, Subject-Verb-Object, Lower-Cross language spoken in Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria. Determiner Phrases in Ibibio non-imperative finite clauses obligatorily co-occur with corresponding agreement markers or clitics that encode the phi-features of person and number, but the clitics may occur without their DP counterparts. Subject and [+human] object clitics must agree with lexical and functional heads, or the construction is disallowed. Thus, in addition to DP _ verb agreement, there is also DP agreement with mood, tense, and aspect phrases. The 'dropping' of a human DP object in Ibibio and its representation by a clitic results in a switch from SVO to a superficial SOV word order. This paper intends to examine the multiple agreement phenomenon and the SOV word order in Ibibio language.

Many Romance languages have different words for 'girl' and 'boy' but retain the same word for 'three' and 'louse': different kinds of words change at different speeds over time. Much research remains in order to discover why this is the case and which semantic domains these words represent. By tagging two Indoeuropean (a 95 language-list and an 11 language-list) and one Austronesian (a 400 language-list) comparative word-database semantically and by wordclass, I endeavor to show that there is a system to which different semantic domains change at what speed. I believe this avenue of semantic-based research can complement recent statistical phylogenetic studies to shed further light on the basic semantic categories in cognition.

As an instructor of English as a Second Language composition classes, I spend countless hours providing written feedback on my L2 students' essays. This is an exhausting process, and I have begun questioning the effectiveness of this feedback and whether the time I spend offering comments is helping the students become more proficient writers. This project allowed me to examine the initial thought process that leads me to make the feedback decisions that I do. I examined the rationale behind my feedback provision (the decisions I make about which errors to address, and the way in which I choose to address the error[s]) in the context of a student essay on which I provided written feedback comments. This project resulted in the development of a 'Pre-Feedback Questionnaire' that I will use with future ESL composition classes.