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The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

The Degree of Certainty System in Written Spanish in Mexico

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

<p>Practitioners in threat assessment have considered direct threats as being high-level threats of future violence (O'Toole 2000: 9), but empirical studies testing the predictive validity of direct threats have contradicted this intuition (Dietz, Matthews, Martell et al. 1991; Smith 2006). Studies that include analyses of the deployment of English verbal roots (such as <em>kill</em>, <em>hurt</em>, etc.) have failed to show significant correlations between lexical choices and the occurrence of realized outcomes (Dietz, Matthews, Martell et al. 1991; Scalora, Baumgartner, Zimmerman et al. 2002a: 1360; Scalora, Baumgartner, Zimmerman 2002b: 46, Smith 2006). This analysis focused on inflectional affixes, rather than on lexical stems and aimed to uncover how formal choices made in specific acts of language use could predict the likelihood of realization of violent acts. Offender writings containing verb forms under study were collected from 201 crime scenes. A total of 169 were cases of single homicide. </p>

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Doctor of Philosophy
Level thesis:degree_level
Doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Literatures & Languages
Grantor
The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York
Year dc:date.available
2014

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Ruggles, Jaseleen
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Ricardo Otheguy

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Repository record dc:identifier
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/278
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-1277

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
City University of New York - Graduate Center
Base URL
academicworks.cuny.edu/do/oai/
Last updated
2026-07-24
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Ruggles, Jaseleen. The Degree of Certainty System in Written Spanish in Mexico. Doctoral thesis, The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York, 2014. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/278