Previous research has established the importance of the nouns and noun modification in academic writing because of their commonness and complexity. However, little is known about how noun modification varies across the rhetorical sections of research articles. Such a perspective is important because it reflects the interplay between communicative function and linguistic form. This study used a corpus of empirical research articles from the fields of applied linguistics and language teaching to explore the connection between article sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion; IMRD) and six types of noun modification: relative clauses, ing-clause postmodifiers, ed-clause postmodifiers, prepositional postmodifiers, premodifying nouns, and attributive adjectives. First the frequency of these six types of noun modification was compared across IMRD sections. Second, the study also used a hand coded analysis of the structure and structural patterns of a sample of noun phrases through IMRD sections. The results of the analyses showed that noun modification is not uniform across IMRD sections. Significant differences were found in the rates of use for attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and prepositional phrase postmodifiers. There were no significant differences between sections for relative clauses, ing-clause postmodifiers, or ed-clause postmodifiers. The differences between sections for attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and prepositional phrases illustrate the way the functions of these structures intersects with the functions of IMRD sections. For example, Methods sections describe research methods, which often have premodifying nouns (corpus analysis, conversation analysis, speech sample, etc.); this function of Methods sections results in a higher use of premodifying nouns compared to other sections. Results for structures of noun phrase across IMRD sections showed that the common noun modification patterns, such as premodifying noun only or attributive adjective with prepositional phrase postmodifier, were mostly consistent across sections. Noun phrase structures including pre-/post- or no modification did have differences across sections, with Introduction sections the most frequently modified and Methods sections the least frequently modified. The different functions of IMRD sections call for different rates of usage for noun modification, and the results reflected this. The results of this research benefit teachers of graduate students of applied linguistics in students' research reading and writing by describing the use of noun modification in the sections of empirical research articles and aiding teachers in the design of materials to clarify the use of noun modification in these IMRD sections.

This study analyzed hypothetical would-clauses presented in Korean high school English textbooks from two perspectives: real language use and Focus on Form approach. Initiated by an interest in the results of a corpus study, this study discussed hypothetical would-clauses in terms of how their descriptions in Korean EFL textbooks matched real language use. This study additionally investigated whether the textbooks presented the target language features in ways recommended by the Focus on Form approach. In the past few decades, authentic language use and the Focus on Form approach have received a great amount of attention in the SLA field. Recognizing the trend in SLA as well as necessities in Korean EFL education, the Korean government has incorporated these two into the current 7th curriculum. Such condition provided the momentum for the evaluation of the textbooks in these respects. The findings show that the language features were hardly supplemented by the information drawn from real language data. In addition, there were very few attempts to draw learner attention to language forms while keeping them focused on communication as recommended by Focus on Form approach. With increasing use of the English language, it is becoming more necessary for Korean EFL learners to use English in real life contexts where understanding correct nuances and delivering appropriate expressions may be important. Also, in EFL contexts like Korea, the students may have limited access to the target language input and little opportunities to produce outputs in extracurricular settings, so the integrated methodology of Focus on Form approach, rather than just using either one of structure-centered or meaning-oriented approach, would be of greater benefit to the students. However, the results strongly indicate that the textbooks neither incorporate the language features as they occur in naturally occurring language nor present them as to facilitate the learning of both form and meaning. This study suggests that greater use of real language data and more thorough application of Focus on Form methods in the textbook writing process should be seriously considered. Thus, this study could be useful for curriculum developers and textbook writers in creating curriculum and language materials concerning the incorporation of grammar patterns based on actual language use as well as in improving textbooks with respect to the Focus on Form approach.

The topic of this thesis is expressing lexical aspect in Czech and Italian. The theoretical part describes the aspectuality, at first in general, then in both Czech and Italian language. The first part aims to clarify the notion of grammatical and lexical aspect. The thesis also concentrates on semantics of Czech prefixes. The practical part deals with Czech verbs with multiple prefixes and their counterparts in Italian, or rather the thesis analyses how Italian express the lexical aspect. It is the contrastive analysis. The analysed data originate from the parallel corpora InterCorp version 13. Key words Lexical aspect/Aktionsart, verbal/grammatical aspect, verbs with multiple prefixes, prefixation, parallel corpora, InterCorp, Czech, Italian

Maintaining cognitive health is often a pressing concern for aging adults, and given the world's shifting age demographics, it is impractical to assume that older adults will be able to rely on individualized human support for doing so. Recently, interest has turned toward technology as an alternative. Companion robots offer an attractive vehicle for facilitating cognitive exercise, but the language technologies guiding their interactions are still nascent; in elder-focused human-robot systems proposed to date, interactions have been limited to motion or buttons and canned speech. The incapacity of these systems to autonomously participate in conversational discourse limits their ability to engage users at a cognitively meaningful level. I addressed this limitation by developing a platform for human-robot book discussions, designed to promote cognitive exercise by encouraging users to consider the authors' underlying intentions in employing creative metaphors. The choice of book discussions as the backdrop for these conversations has an empirical basis in neuro- and social science research that has found that reading often, even in late adulthood, has been correlated with a decreased likelihood to exhibit symptoms of cognitive decline. The more targeted focus on novel metaphors within those conversations stems from prior work showing that processing novel metaphors is a cognitively challenging task, for young adults and even more so in older adults with and without dementia. A central contribution arising from the work was the creation of the first computational method for modelling metaphor novelty in word pairs. I show that the method outperforms baseline strategies as well as a standard metaphor detection approach, and additionally discover that incorporating a sentence-based classifier as a preliminary filtering step when applying the model to new books results in a better final set of scored word pairs. I trained and evaluated my methods using new, large corpora from two sources, and release those corpora to the research community. In developing the corpora, an additional contribution was the discovery that training a supervised regression model to automatically aggregate the crowdsourced annotations outperformed existing label aggregation strategies. Finally, I show that automatically-generated questions adhering to the Questioning the Author strategy are comparable to human-generated questions in terms of naturalness, sensibility, and question depth; the automatically-generated questions score slightly higher than human-generated questions in terms of clarity. I close by presenting findings from a usability evaluation in which users engaged in thirty-minute book discussions with a robot using the platform, showing that users find the platform to be likeable and engaging.

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SANTOS, Andrea Feitosa. Movimento do verbo e categorias vazias em I e V em um fragmento de gramática computacional do português. 2009.96f.Dissertação (Mestrado em Linguistica) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Departamento de Letras Vernaculas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Linguística, Fortaleza-CE, 2009. / Submitted by nazareno mesquita (nazagon36@yahoo.com.br) on 2012-06-21T16:00:03Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2009_diss_AFSantos.pdf: 616159 bytes, checksum: 59bd79e8c618b1d231d8b7b98b8f767e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Maria Josineide Góis(josineide@ufc.br) on 2012-06-22T16:39:36Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2009_diss_AFSantos.pdf: 616159 bytes, checksum: 59bd79e8c618b1d231d8b7b98b8f767e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2012-06-22T16:39:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2009_diss_AFSantos.pdf: 616159 bytes, checksum: 59bd79e8c618b1d231d8b7b98b8f767e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / This work has a theoretical and methodological framework that is divided into two complementary areas: the Language and Computational/Implementacional. For its computational stamp, the first scope of this work is directly linked to the processing of natural language (PNL). Thus, it implements an automatic syntactic analysis (parsing) of expressions of Portuguese in a computational program from the Python library of NLTK, whose tests are represented in tree configurations that show slash categories of finite sentences of Portuguese. Although the stamp computing, this research elaborates a grammar fragment, modeled to capture specific features of linguistic structure of Portuguese, based on the formal model of description linguistic known as Context Free Grammar (CFG) Based on Features, with the purpose of demonstrate how the library of NLTK programs supports the implementation of parsers for analyzing the feature structure. For its stamp of language, it analyzes, according to X-bar Theory and the Minimalist Program, sentences in European and Brazilian variants of Portuguese, obtained from surveys in electronic corpora available on the web. And this work describes and discusses the category IP (inflectional phrase) within the hierarchical structure of constituents, according to the hypothesis of syntactic operation of visible and invisible movement of elements of language, specifically the movement of the verb / Esse trabalho possui um recorte teórico-metodológico que se decompõe em dois domínios complementares: o Linguístico e o Computacional/Implementacional. Pelo seu cunho computacional, o escopo primeiro desse trabalho está diretamente ligado ao processamento de língua natural (PLN). Desse modo, implementa-se uma análise sintática automática (parsing) de expressões de língua portuguesa em programas da biblioteca em Python do NLTK, cujas análises são representadas em forma de configurações arbóreas que demonstram categorias vazias de sentenças finitas do português. Ainda pelo cunho computacional, esse trabalho elabora um fragmento de gramática, modelado para capturar traços específicos da estrutura linguística do português, com base no modelo formal de descrição linguística conhecido como Gramática Livre de Contexto (CFG) Baseada em Traços, com a finalidade de demonstrar como a biblioteca de programas do NLTK dá suporte à realização dos analisadores sintáticos na análise da estrutura de traços. Pelo seu cunho lingüístico, analisa-se, de acordo com a Teoria X-barra e o Programa Minimalista, frases nas variantes europeia e brasileira da língua portuguesa, obtidas de pesquisas em corpora eletrônicos disponíveis na web. E ainda nesse trabalho, descreve-se e discute-se a categoria IP (sintagma flexional) dentro da sua estrutura hierárquica de constituintes, de acordo com a hipótese da operação sintática de movimento visível e não visível dos elementos linguísticos, especificamente o movimento do verbo

CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeiÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / Esse trabalho possui um recorte teÃrico-metodolÃgico que se decompÃe em dois domÃnios complementares: o LinguÃstico e o Computacional/Implementacional. Pelo seu cunho computacional, o escopo primeiro desse trabalho està diretamente ligado ao processamento de lÃngua natural (PLN). Desse modo, implementa-se uma anÃlise sintÃtica automÃtica (parsing) de expressÃes de lÃngua portuguesa em programas da biblioteca em Python do NLTK, cujas anÃlises sÃo representadas em forma de configuraÃÃes arbÃreas que demonstram categorias vazias de sentenÃas finitas do portuguÃs. Ainda pelo cunho computacional, esse trabalho elabora um fragmento de gramÃtica, modelado para capturar traÃos especÃficos da estrutura linguÃstica do portuguÃs, com base no modelo formal de descriÃÃo linguÃstica conhecido como GramÃtica Livre de Contexto (CFG) Baseada em TraÃos, com a finalidade de demonstrar como a biblioteca de programas do NLTK dà suporte à realizaÃÃo dos analisadores sintÃticos na anÃlise da estrutura de traÃos. Pelo seu cunho lingÃÃstico, analisa-se, de acordo com a Teoria X-barra e o Programa Minimalista, frases nas variantes europeia e brasileira da lÃngua portuguesa, obtidas de pesquisas em corpora eletrÃnicos disponÃveis na web. E ainda nesse trabalho, descreve-se e discute-se a categoria IP (sintagma flexional) dentro da sua estrutura hierÃrquica de constituintes, de acordo com a hipÃtese da operaÃÃo sintÃtica de movimento visÃvel e nÃo visÃvel dos elementos linguÃsticos, especificamente o movimento do verbo / This work has a theoretical and methodological framework that is divided into two complementary areas: the Language and Computational/Implementacional. For its computational stamp, the first scope of this work is directly linked to the processing of natural language (PNL). Thus, it implements an automatic syntactic analysis (parsing) of expressions of Portuguese in a computational program from the Python library of NLTK, whose tests are represented in tree configurations that show slash categories of finite sentences of Portuguese. Although the stamp computing, this research elaborates a grammar fragment, modeled to capture specific features of linguistic structure of Portuguese, based on the formal model of description linguistic known as Context Free Grammar (CFG) Based on Features, with the purpose of demonstrate how the library of NLTK programs supports the implementation of parsers for analyzing the feature structure. For its stamp of language, it analyzes, according to X-bar Theory and the Minimalist Program, sentences in European and Brazilian variants of Portuguese, obtained from surveys in electronic corpora available on the web. And this work describes and discusses the category IP (inflectional phrase) within the hierarchical structure of constituents, according to the hypothesis of syntactic operation of visible and invisible movement of elements of language, specifically the movement of the verb

This study investigates undergraduate students’ vocabulary size, and their use of formulaic language. Using the Vocabulary Levels Test (Laufer and Nation 1995), it measures the vocabulary size of native and non-native speakers of English and explores relationships between this and course of study, gender, age and home language, and their academic performance. A corpus linguistic approach is then applied to compare student writers’ uses of three high-frequency verbs (have, make and take) relative to expert writers. Multiword units (MWUs) featuring these verbs are identified and analysed, focusing on delexical MWUs as one very specific aspect of depth of vocabulary knowledge. Student and expert use of these MWUs is compared. Grammatically and semantically deviant MWUs are also analysed. Finally, relationships between the size and depth of students’ vocabulary knowledge, and between the latter and academic performance, are explored. Findings reveal that Literature students had larger vocabularies than Law students, females knew more words than males, and older students knew more than younger ones. Importantly, results indicated a relationship between vocabulary size and academic performance. Literature students produced more correct MWUs and fewer errors than Law students. Correlations suggest that the smaller students’ vocabulary, the poorer the depth of their vocabulary is likely to be. Although no robust relationship between vocabulary depth and academic performance emerged, there was evidence of an indirect link between academic performance and correct use of MWUs. In bringing together traditional methods of measuring vocabulary size with an investigation of depth of vocabulary knowledge using corpus analysis methods, this study provides further evidence of the importance of vocabulary knowledge to academic performance. It contributes to debates on the value of a sound knowledge of high-frequency vocabulary and a developing knowledge of at least 5000 words to academic performance, and the analysis and quantification of errors in MWUs adds to our understanding of novice writers’ difficulties with these combinations. The study also explores new ways of investigating relationships between size and depth of vocabulary knowledge, and between depth of vocabulary knowledge and academic performance. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)