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No. of bitstreams: 1 nhoato_h_me_sjrp.pdf: 2121124 bytes, checksum: e1ba29217152a7f50efc81fe4758f38c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-07-02 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / O objetivo do trabalho é analisar funcionalmente os modificadores adjetivais do SN com base na motivação semântica do referente nuclear: se entidades de primeira ordem ou Indivíduos ou se entidades de segunda ordem ou Estados de Coisas (LYONS, 1977; HENGEVELD, 2008), priorizando as propriedades pragmáticas e semânticas dos adjetivos na variedade do português brasileiro falado no noroeste do Estado de São Paulo. A análise, de natureza funcionalista, vincula-se ao arcabouço teórico proposto pela Teoria da Gramática Funcional (DIK, 1997a) e pela Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008) que proveem uma classificação semântica dos constituintes do sintagma nominal com base nas suas propriedades de referência a entidades do mundo e na atribuição de propriedade de modificação a essas entidades. Para análise da relação que os modificadores estabelecem com o núcleo dos sintagmas nominais, este trabalho volta-se para a classificação proposta por Negrão et al. (2014), que separam os adjetivos em argumentais e predicadores de núcleo, ou seja, itens lexicais que assumem uma posição aberta pelo substantivo deverbal e os que abrem posições temáticas que são, por seu lado, saturadas por um substantivo-núcleo. Para análise dos aspectos semânticos dos modificadores utilizam-se as classificações propostas por Castilho (2010), Castilho e Moraes de Castilho (1993), Cinque (2010) e Neves (2010). A amostra examinada é extraída do córpus IBORUNA coletado pelo Projeto ALIP, que foi concebido no interior do Grupo de Pesquisa em Gramática Funcional (GPGF) da UNESP de São José do Rio Preto. Os dados mostram, em primeiro lugar, que, de certo modo, independentemente do tipo de entidade envolvido no núcleo, de primeira e de segunda ordem, a posição pós-nuclear é a preferência grandemente majoritária dos adjetivos na codificação morfossintática. Além disso, a distribuição em anteposição e posposição tem uma regularidade motivada por traços semânticos específicos do modificador. A posição pré-nuclear, mesmo com baixa frequência, está vinculada a traços pragmáticos e semânticos específicos. Esses resultados demonstraram a atuação de motivações semânticas e, em menor parte, pragmáticas, condicionando o preenchimento de posições específicas dos modificadores no interior do sintagma nominal. / The aim of this study is to analyze, from a functional perspective, the adjectival modifiers of Noun Phrases, focusing on the semantic motivation of the Noun Phrase head: whether headed by first-order entities or Individuals or second-order entities or States-of-Affairs (LYONS, 1977; HENGEVELD, 2008). The purpose of this work is to give some priority to the pragmatic and semantic properties of adjectival modifiers in the variety of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the northwest of São Paulo State. In order to do so, the analysis based on a functional perspective is aligned to the theoretical framework of The Theory of Functional Grammar (DIK, 1997a) and of the Functional Discourse Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008). These authors provide a semantic classification of the constituents of the Noun Phrases which is based on their reference to entities (Individuals or States-of-Affairs) of a world and they analyze the process of modification of these entities by the attribution of a property. The analysis of the relationship between modifiers and the head of the Noun Phrases, initially, considers the classification proposed by Negrão et al. (2014), who distinguish adjectives in arguments and predicates. This distinction means that lexical items that, on the one hand, take a position open by the deverbal noun and, on the other hand, those who open a thematic positions taken by the nuclear referent of the Noun Phrase. Moreover, to analyze the semantic aspects of the modifiers, this study considers the classifications proposed by Castilho (2010), Castilho and Moraes de Castilho (1993), Cinque (2010) and Neves (2010). The sample examined was extracted from the IBORUNA Corpus, which was conceived by the Functional Grammar Research Group (Grupo de Pesquisa em Gramática Funcional), of São Paulo State University (UNESP) at São José do Rio Preto. The analysis shows, firstly, that: regardless of the type of entity involved in the head, whether first or second order, the modification after the head (postmodification) is where the adjective is largely preferred to occur in Morphosyntactic Encoding. In addition, the distribution through the place before the head (premodification) and postmodification in relation to the Noun Phrase head is provided with a high degree of regularity motivated by specific semantic features of the modifier. Secondly, the premodification, even if it is applied with low frequency in the data, is properly aligned to pragmatic and semantic specific features. Finally, these results show how semantic motivations and, less frequently, pragmatic ones, are involved in the fulfilling of specific positions of adjectives inside the Noun Phrase. / FAPESP: 2016/00661-5

This essay deals with the issue of readability, the term readability referring to what it is that makes a reader perceive a text as difficult or easy. Some factors are related to the reader but there are also those which depend on the text as such, one such factor being style which is the one that will be focused on in this essay. The investigation is based on the analysis and comparison of a complete version and an abridged version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the questions to be investigated are whether the author of the abridged version has succeeded in making it less complicated, and if he or she has done so by considering stylistic features said to be affecting readability. Further, this essay is divided into four chapters. The first chapter contains the background for the analysis and is divided into 4 parts dealing with the following aspects: the definition of readability, early research on readability, later research on readability, and difficult and easy language. Chapter two describes the limitations made and the method used for the analysis which involves looking at the noun phrase, the verb phrase, and the clause. Chapter three gives a detailed description of the corpus investigated. Moving on to chapter four, this is where the results of the investigation are presented. This is done by dividing it into four different subchapters, each of them dealing with issues related to the different areas described in the method. Each of the subchapters then begins with the presentation of the results for each edition which is then followed by a comparative discussion. The essay ends with a conclusion part where conclusions regarding the four areas presented in the analysis are made along with the answering of research questions.

<div>Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity is a topic that has received considerable attention in various fields of applied linguistics, such as English for academic purposes, second language acquisition, language testing, and second language writing (Bulté & Housen, 2012). Many scholars in applied linguistics have recently argued that grammatical complexity has primarily been represented by clausal features (e.g., subordinate clauses), and it is important to study grammatical complexity as a multidimensional construct based on both clausal features and phrasal features (Biber, Gray & Poonpon, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009). Thus, this dissertation is a corpus-based investigation on how the use of noun phrases is influenced by two situational characteristics of a university context: academic level and first- and second-English language background.</div><div><br></div><div>I built my corpus by extracting 200 essays from British Academic Written English Corpus, which represents academic writing of (1) undergraduate and graduate students and (2) L1 and L2 students. Noun phrase complexity was then operationalized to the 11 noun modifiers proposed in the hypothesized developmental index of writing complexity features in Biber, Gray and Poonpon (2011). The 11 noun modifiers were extracted from the corpus and counted for statistical analysis via a set of Python programs. With a Chi-square test followed by a residual analysis, I found that both academic level and first- and second-English language background influenced noun phrase complexity but in distinct ways. The influence of academic level is primarily associated with three phrasal modifiers (i.e., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and appositive NPs) and two clausal modifiers (i.e., relative clauses and noun complement clauses). The undergraduate corpus includes more of the two clausal modifiers, whereas the graduate corpus has more of the three phrasal modifiers. This suggests that, in these 200 essays, graduate students tend to build more compressed NPs than undergraduate students. However, the influence of first- and second-English language background derives from a much broader range of noun modifiers, including eight noun modifiers (e.g., attributive adjectives, relative clauses, infinitive clauses). More diverse NP patterns with different noun modifiers are in the L1 corpus than in the L2 corpus. Surprisingly, the L2 corpus has more phrasal noun modifiers (i.e., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns), which has been argued to indicate advanced levels of academic writing. A qualitative analysis on selected essays reveals that some cases of attributive adjectives and premodifying nouns are repeatedly used by L2 students to help content development in their writing. Overall, this dissertation adds an additional piece of evidence on the importance of noun phrase complexity in writing research.</div><div><br></div>

The past century has brought with it many changes to the English language. One of these is the drastic increase in complex nominal phrases, particularly premodifiers. This implies difficulties for translators, whose target languages may not have evolved in the same way, and who must then find other solutions. The aim of this essay is to investigate which kind of premodifier is most frequent in an academic text in English, and how the different kinds of premodifiers are translated into Swedish. Since the language pairs share many similarities, it was expected that many of the shorter premodifiers will keep their structure when translated. However, since Swedish cannot recreate the longer and more complex noun phrases, nor add multiple noun premodifiers in succession, it is also expected that several of the English premodifiers will be restructured into other constructions.The results show that the majority of the adjective/participial premodifiers kept their structure when translated into Swedish, and the tendency to restructure them into postmodifiers was low. Noun premodifiers were more likely to be restructured into postmodifiers, especially when they were more complex, though most of the noun premodifiers were restructured into compound nouns. The hyphenated premodifiers were the most likely to be restructured into different constructions, especially postmodifiers.In conclusion, since Swedish and English are similar in structure, many of the premodifiers were quite straightforward in translation, but several, especially longer and more complex noun phrases, can pose problems for a translator.

What explains the shape of Zauzou noun phrases? Zauzou (Trans-Himalayan, China) noun phrases exhibit considerable diversity in both the choice of the phrase's primary reference type, and the presence of classifiers, demonstratives, modifiers, and case marking. This investigation uses a large, previously existing Zauzou textual corpus. The corpus was annotated for variables hypothesized to predict the variation in noun phrase form. Syntactic variables investigated include word order, subordination, subordinate role, and a new variable called "loneliness." Participant semantic variables include thematic role, agency, and affectedness. Referential semantic variables include boundedness, number, and animacy. The information packaging variable investigated is accessibility. Statistical analysis of the corpus revealed that case marking was predicted using a variable called "loneliness." This is where a multivalent verb has only one argument that is explicitly referenced in the clause. Lonely noun phrases are more likely to be case marked. The role of loneliness in motivating case marking confirms that disambiguation can be an explanation for differential case marking. Animacy and accessibility are important predictors of noun phrase weight. Overall, high animacy and high accessibility correspond to reduced noun phrase weight. Agency and thematic role were also significant variables. The Zauzou data makes clear that speech act participants occupy a unique role in the animacy hierarchy. Speech act participants are often unexpectedly light upon first mention, being referred to with a pronoun or zero anaphor. They are often unexpectedly heavy while highly activated, remaining a pronoun instead of reducing to a zero anaphor. Zauzou, like Mandarin and Cantonese, allows classifiers to be used with a noun but without a numeral. In Mandarin, this construction is used only with new or generic noun phrases. In Cantonese, this construction can be used with noun phrases of any accessibility value. Zauzou occupies a unique intermediate position. In Zauzou, a noun with bare noun phrase can occur with new or old noun phrases, but rarely with active ones. This thesis provides evidence for the importance of text corpora. Using a corpus allowed for the simultaneous inclusion of many variables as well as the consideration of genre effects. In addition, the annotated corpus produced in this investigation is an important output; it is available in the supplemental materials accompanying this thesis.

This paper aims to investigate whether language use can account for the differences in code-switching within the article-noun phrase in children exposed to English and German, French and Russian, and English and Polish. It investigates two aspects of language use: equivalence and segmentation. Four children’s speech is derived from corpora of naturalistic interactions recorded between the ages of two and three and used as a source of the children’s article-noun phrases. We demonstrate that children’s CS cannot be fully explained by structural equivalence in each two languages: there is CS in French-Russian although French does, and Russian does not, use articles. We also demonstrate that language pairs which use higher numbers of articles types, and therefore have more segmented article-noun phrases, are also more open to switching. Lastly, we show that longitudinal use of monolingual articles-noun phrases corresponds with the trends in the use of bilingual article-noun phrases. The German-English child only starts to mix English articles once they become more established in monolingual combinations while the French-Russian child ceases to mix French proto-articles with Russian nouns once target articles enter frequent use. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies which report code-switching across different language pairs.

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Based on a contrastive and variationist approach, this research work sheds light on the study of the structure of the Noun Phrase in Cameroon Pidgin English in contrast with Standard British English. Among other relevant topics, the following aspects of the NP are considered: the system of pronouns, nominal anaphora, the system of articles, the deictic implementation, quantification, intensification and reduplication.

Selon la théorie du syntagme nominal développée par Wilmet (2003), la notion de caractérisant est une notion fonctionnelle qui désigne tous les « accompagnateurs » du nom (ou déterminants) qui modifient l’extension du nom. Cette notion est indépendante des catégories morpho-syntaxique puisqu’on trouve parmi les caractérisants des adjectifs, des syntagmes prépositionnels, des noms, des adverbes, des propositions relatives voire des phrases entières.<p>Les linguistes du français se sont surtout intéressés à la position absolue de l’adjectif (antéposition ou postposition au nom), mais peu à leur ordre relatif. Il était intéressant d’étendre le point de vue à tous les caractérisants parce que le mélange de caractérisants de différentes natures, en particulier la séquence relative de l’adjectif et du complément du nom, pose d’intéressantes questions linguistiques. La notion fonctionnelle montre également sa valeur dans un cadre comparatiste, car différentes langues ne rendent pas le même concept avec la même catégorie morpho-syntaxique.<p>Notre théorie est que la séquence des caractérisants, tant en antéposition qu’en postposition, est régie par une hiérarchie de critères morpho-syntaxiques et sémantiques, en particulier par leur valeur classificatrice, descriptive ou spécificatrice. On a souvent classé les adjectifs en fonction de leur appartenance à une classe sémantique ontologique (couleur, forme, matière…). En réalité, de très nombreux adjectifs et caractérisants n’entrent pas dans ces catégories et ce type de classification n’est pas le premier critère à l’œuvre dans l’ordre des mots. <p>Le syntagme nominal apparaît dès lors comme structuré en différentes couches concentriques autour du nom ;il est délimité en antéposition par les quantifiants et en postposition par les caractérisants spécificateurs qui lui font en quelque sorte pendant. On observera dès lors d’intéressants phénomènes de sens et d’acceptabilité grammaticale dans le jeu des quantifiants et des caractérisants. Inversement, la position relative d’un caractérisant influe sur sa valeur. On pourrait résumer ces effets de sens par la formule :on dit d’abord ce que c’est, ensuite comment c’est, et enfin lequel c’est. De manière très générale donc, on observe que l’orientation des déterminants se fait selon un axe intrinsèque-extrinsèque ou objectif-subjectif.<p>L’étude d’expressions dans d’autres langues et dans des domaines spécialisés (cuisine, appellations officielles incluant des adjectifs géographiques, localisation de logiciels et chimie organique) permet de valider cette hypothèse tout en montrant que l’ordre des mots est un phénomène de génération, propre à chaque langue car la traduction modifie la nature morpho-syntaxique et peut modifier la valeur des caractérisants. <p>La partie technique de la thèse a exploité des techniques de traduction assistée par ordinateur, de traduction automatique et de traitement du langage, elle a fait appel aux langages de balisage standards de la famille XML pour la représentation des corpus et des règles ainsi que pour la réalisation des procédures. Les corpus spécialisés ont été constitués par alignement de corpus monolingues ou par traduction. Ils ont tous été mis au format XML ;les règles de traduction ont été formalisées dans le même format et elles ont été implémentées en XSLT. La formalisation des corpus en assure la portabilité et facilite les recherches de structures grammaticales sur un corpus catégorisé. Les corpus parallèles sont en outre d’une grande aide pour les traducteurs. Enfin, l’automatisation permet de valider les règles linguistiques proposées. / Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Thesis (DLitt (African Languages))--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / Definiteness is generally viewed as a morpho-syntactic category. It is grammatically marked by articles in languages such as English, but not all languages have a formal grammatical encoding for this category. The nominal preprefix (NPP) in languages such as Dzamba is not an equivalent to the English article system; however, it displays a close association with definiteness. Northern Sotho is non-articled, and it does not possess the NPP in its grammatical system. As a grammatical category, definiteness is the grammaticalisation of a pragmatic category of identifiability, which is present in all languages. Identifiability, as a means of referent tracing, plays a vital role in communication. The main aim of this study is to investigate how the phenomenon of definiteness manifests itself in Northern Sotho. The introductory chapter describes the purpose and aim of the study, its theoretical approach and methodology, as well as its organisation. The second chapter presents an overview of the previous major works on definiteness. It begins with the literature on the category in general, and moves on to the literature on definiteness in African Languages. These previous studies agree on the central issues of this category. The speaker utters a definite noun phrase (NP) if he presupposes that the addressee will be in a position to locate and to identify the referent of the NP uniquely or inclusively. Chapter 3 examines noun phrases that are regarded as definite in Northern Sotho; and the factors that contribute to such a reading. Pragmatic factors, i.e. existential presupposition, transparent contexts and anaphoric reference make major contributions to the interpretation of a noun phrase as definite. Nominal determiners and quantifiers whose semantic content suggests locatability, uniqueness and/or inclusiveness give a noun phrase definite reference. Such determiners and quantifiers include the demonstrative, possessive with locative gona/ntshe, the universal quantifier, etc. Proper names and pronouns have unique reference. Chapter 4 investigates indefinite noun phrases in Northern Sotho. Bare noun phrases in this language such as mang (who), lefeela (nothing) and aretse (unknown thing/place) are incompatible with definiteness. Their semantic content suggests that their referent cannot or should not be uniquely identified. Nominal modifiers such as -ngwe (another/different/ a certain), -fe (who/which) and šele (another/different/strange) are also incompatible with unique identifiabilty and they, therefore, accord a noun phrase indefinite reference. Nouns with generic interpretation and nouns in idioms do not uniquely refer to particular individuals. Chapter 5 looks into the ambiguity of bare noun phrases in Northern Sotho. It examines such a phrase in the subject position, the object position and the complement position of prepositional phrases. Nominal modifiers such as the adjective, the relative and the possessive are incorporated into noun phrases to see how they affect the reading. The question of subject inversion (SI) is also investigated. Lastly opaque contexts are discussed, and the ambiguity created by opacity-creating operators is examined. The final chapter of the study presents the main findings.