This thesis comprises four separate studies of the same material: a ten-minute Swedish Sign Language monologue. Study I describes the form, meaning, and use of the sign INDEX-c, a pointing toward the chest traditionally described as a first person pronoun. It is argued that INDEX-c is used not only with specific reference to the signer or a quoted signer, but also with non-specific reference. Contrary to what has been reported, INDEX-c is used not only for constructed dialogue, but also in constructed action. The analysis reveals two separate forms, as well, labeled as reduced INDEX-c and distinct INDEX-c, respectively. Study II describes the activities of the non-dominant hand when it is not part of a two-handed sign. A continuum is suggested, moving from different rest positions that do not contribute to the discourse content, via mirroring of the dominant hand, for example, to instances where the non-dominant hand produces signs of its own while the dominant hand remains inactive, i.e. dominance reversal. Several of the activities of the non-dominant hand, including the four types of buoys that are described, help structure the discourse by indicating the current topic. Study III uses Mental Space Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory to describe the use of signing space for reference. A correlation is shown between discourse content and the area in the signing space toward which signs are meaningfully directed, and also between these directions and which types of Real Space blends the signer mainly uses: token blends or surrogate blends. Finally Study IV looks in more detail at three segments of the discourse and their Real Space blend structure. An initial analysis of eight interpretations into spoken Swedish is also conducted, focusing on whether preselected content units (discourse entities and relations) are identified. A large number of Real Space blends and blended entities are argued to result in less successful renditions measured in terms of preselected content units. / För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se

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The aim of this degree project has been to examine, analyze and describe which intra-linguistic factors influence how relative clauses are formed in Old English. The key to successfully performing the task of identifying which factors influences the relative causes is to examine how these factors are distributed among the relative clauses in the text. The main focus of this investigation thus was to investigate how the grammatical features of the antecedents of the relative clauses in Old English were distributed. By analyzing a text sample of the work of the Old English writer Ælfric, taken from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus at the University of Toronto, also known as the Toronto Corpus, several features of the antecedent will ideally become evident as influencing factors. The relative clauses that are found to be relevant for this investigation in the Ælfric text sample have been categorized and analyzed in order to identify any grammatical pattern that could indicate which factors influence how relative clauses in Old English are formed. The findings have been analyzed according to quantitative and statistical principles, and the chi-square test has been employed to verify the statistical significance of these findings. By doing this some linguistic factors have been verified as influencing factors.

The introduction of gendered third person pronouns in written Chinese in the late 1910s has been hailed as one of the seismic linguistic shifts of May Fourth (1919), a period which was rife with debates on the position of women and men in Chinese society. While research on the topic has mainly framed this event as being about linguistic progress and about “her,” little attention has been paid to the specific ways in which the new pronouns were vocally opposed, quietly subverted, or leveraged by writers of the period and how this affected gender representation in literary texts, especially at a time when literature was deemed the foremost tool for the unification of the language and the education of the people.Rather than focusing on “the invention” of a third person feminine as customary of existing scholarship, my dissertation aims to retrieve the diversity of literary uses of linguistic gender that often went hand in hand with political goals. As the introduction of a new feminine pronoun ushered in the formerly gender-inclusive third-person pronoun being rewritten as masculine, I scrutinize the works of four writers representative of both early adopters and outspoken opponents of the new pronouns: Liu Dabai 劉大白 (1880-1932), Ling Shuhua 凌叔華 (1900-1990), Zhao Yuanren 趙元任 (1892-1982), and Xiao Hong 蕭紅 (1911-1942). Together, they exemplify different generations of writers working with a variety of genres (prose, poetry, drama, translation) and a variety of linguistic and social movements. This corpus allows to uncover not only how each of them plays with linguistic and gendered norms prevalent at the time (through homophony, creation of characters, deictic shifts, etc.), but also how genre itself impacted pronominal manipulations. These debates are contextualised against an historicization of “pronouns” as a linguistic category which came to be understood as open-ended and “lacking” gender over the course of the nineteenth century. This dissertation probes how these views paved the way for a wide variety of gendered pronouns being quickly incorporated after 1917 when the stakes moved from a specialty issue of interest to literary translators and linguists to one that involved institutionalizing the language and gender equality in general.Beyond its contribution to the field of Republican Chinese literature, this dissertation shows how relevant Chinese literary “pronominal politics” from 1917-1937 are to contemporary debates on inclusive writing and helps (re)place sinophone literature on the map of contemporary theoretical developments in pronoun studies, historical and comparative linguistics, translation studies, and feminist literary studies, where Anglo-European canonical works tend to remain overwhelmingly the focus of inquiry. / Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the personal pronoun “we” in a political debate using Conversation Analysis as research method. More specifically, the thesis aims to identify and analyse how the speakers of a political debate use “we” to express different referential domains in terms of group affiliation. Consequently, to support the thesis’s aim, the following research questions have been devised: What different categories of “we” can be found in the debate? How and when are these different categories used to manifest group affiliation and what do they accomplish?

La résolution des pronoms est le processus par lequel un pronom anaphorique est mis en relation avec son antécédent. Les humains en sont capables sans efforts notables en situation normale. En revanche, les systèmes automatiques ont une performance qui reste loin derrière, malgré des algorithmes de plus en plus sophistiqués, développés par la communauté du Traitement Automatique des Langues. La recherche en psycholinguistique a montré à travers des expériences qu'au cours de la résolution de nombreux facteurs sont pris en compte par les locuteurs. Une question importante se pose : comment les facteurs interagissent et quel poids faut-il attribuer à chacun d'entre eux ? Une deuxième question qui se pose alors est comment les théories linguistiques de la résolution des pronoms incorporent tous les facteurs. Nous proposons une nouvelle approche à ces problématiques : la simulation computationnelle de la charge cognitive de la résolution des pronoms. La motivation pour notre approche est double : d'une part, l'implémentation d'hypothèses par un système computationnel permet de mieux spécifier les théories, d’autre part, les systèmes automatiques peuvent faire des prédictions sur des données naturelles comme les corpus de mouvement oculaires. De cette façon, les modèles computationnels représentent une alternative aux expériences classiques avec des items expérimentaux construits manuellement. Nous avons fait plusieurs expériences afin d'explorer les modèles cognitifs computationnels de la résolution des pronoms. D'abord, nous avons simulé la charge cognitive des pronoms en utilisant des poids de facteurs de résolution appris sur corpus. Ensuite, nous avons testé si les concepts de la Théorie de l’Information sont pertinents pour prédire la charge cognitive des pronoms. Finalement, nous avons procédé à l’évaluation d’un modèle psycholinguistique sur des données issues d’un corpus enrichi de mouvements oculaires. Les résultats de nos expériences montrent que la résolution des pronoms est en effet multi-factorielle et que l’influence des facteurs peut être estimée sur corpus. Nos résultats montrent aussi que des concepts de la Théorie de l’Information sont pertinents pour la modélisation des pronoms. Nous concluons que l’évaluation des théories sur des données de corpus peut jouer un rôle important dans le développement de ces théories et ainsi amener dans le futur à une meilleure prise en compte du contexte discursif. / Pronoun resolution is the process in which an anaphoric pronoun is linked to its antecedent. In a normal situation, humans do not experience much cognitive effort due to this process. However, automatic systems perform far from human accuracy, despite the efforts made by the Natural Language Processing community. Experimental research in the field of psycholinguistics has shown that during pronoun resolution many linguistic factors are taken into account by speakers. An important question is thus how much influence each of these factors has and how the factors interact with each-other. A second question is how linguistic theories about pronoun resolution can incorporate all relevant factors. In this thesis, we propose a new approach to answer these questions: computational simulation of the cognitive load of pronoun resolution. The motivation for this approach is two-fold. On the one hand, implementing hypotheses about pronoun resolution in a computational system leads to a more precise formulation of theories. On the other hand, robust computational systems can be run on uncontrolled data such as eye movement corpora and thus provide an alternative to hand-constructed experimental material. In this thesis, we conducted various experiments. First, we simulated the cognitive load of pronouns by learning the magnitude of impact of various factors on corpus data. Second, we tested whether concepts from Information Theory were relevant to predict the cognitive load of pronoun resolution. Finally, we evaluated a theoretical model of pronoun resolution on a corpus enriched with eye movement data. Our research shows that multiple factors play a role in pronoun resolution and that their influence can be estimated on corpus data. We also demonstrate that the concepts of Information Theory play a role in pronoun resolution. We conclude that the evaluation of hypotheses on corpus data enriched with cognitive data ---- such as eye movement data --- play an important role in the development and evaluation of theories. We expect that corpus based methods will lead to a better modelling of the influence of discourse structure on pronoun resolution in future work.

This report describes a quantitative analysis performed to compare two different methods on the task of pronoun resolution for Swedish. The first method, an implementation of Mitkov’s algorithm, is a heuristic-based method — meaning that the resolution is determined by a number of manually engineered rules regarding both syntactic and semantic information. The second method is data-driven — a Support Vector Machine (SVM) using dependency trees and word embeddings as features. Both methods are evaluated on an annotated corpus of Swedish news articles which was created as a part of this thesis. SVM-based methods significantly outperformed the implementation of Mitkov’s algorithm. The best performing SVM model relies on tree kernels applied to dependency trees. The model achieved an F1-score of 0.76 for the positive class and 0.9 for the negative class, where positives are pairs of pronoun and noun phrase that corefer, and negatives are pairs that do not corefer. / Rapporten beskriver en kvantitativ analys som genomförts för att jämföra två olika metoder för automatisk pronomenbestämning på svenska. Den första metoden, en implementation av Mitkovs algoritm, är en heuristisk metod vilket innebär att pronomenbestämningen görs med ett antal manuellt utformade regler som avser att fånga både syntaktisk och semantisk information. Den andra metoden är datadriven, en stödvektormaskin (SVM) som använder dependensträd och ordvektorer som särdrag. Båda metoderna utvärderades med hjälp av en annoterad datamängd bestående av svenska nyhetsartiklar som skapats som en del av denna avhandling. Den datadrivna metoden överträffade Mitkovs algoritm. Den SVM-modell som ger bäst resultat bygger på trädkärnor som tillämpas på dependensträd. Modellen uppnådde ett F1-värde på 0.76 för den positiva klassen och 0.9 för den negativa klassen, där de positiva datapunkterna utgörs av ett par av pronomen och nominalfras som korefererar, och de negativa datapunkterna utgörs av par som inte korefererar.

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The introductory study presents overall Apollonius Dyscolus, the most significant ancient greek grammarian. It deals with his person, important technical issues of his work, and particularly with his grammar study, focusing on fundamental grammar classifications and thougt structure. The introductory study is accopanied by the translation of a few introductory chapters (GG II,1,1,3.1-17.17) of Apollonius' treatise Περὶ ἀντωνυμίας (Peri antonymias, On Pronouns), and by scholarly commentary to the translation.

文章討論了潮汕澄海話虛指的第三人稱"伊"的語法特點并進行澄海話、普通話和粤語蒙受結構的對比分析。第一部分描寫了澄海話三種虛指代詞"伊"的相關結構──"乞伊"結構、"佮伊"結構和"V伊R"結構的語法特點。"乞伊"結構和"佮伊"結構各可分為A、B兩類，兩種結構內部分別在動詞的選擇、"伊"的所指和"乞/佮"的隱現上表現出不同。兩種結構之間的主要差別則在於主語的題元角色及"乞/佮"的句法位置高低上。"V伊R"結構是"佮伊"結構的一種條件變體，主要用於表達祈使等語氣。 / 文章第二部分分析了澄海話三種蒙受結構的生成機制。并進一步概括出"伊"的種類:從所指對象題元角色的角度可以分為兩類，一是施事或致事、二是蒙事；從所指對象位置的角度也可以分為兩類，一是所指在句中，二是所指在句外。以及"伊"的句法位置：一是，位於"中間層次"；二是，緊鄰輕動詞。 / 文章第三部分嘗試以澄海話蒙受結構的分析方法為角度和基礎，分別分析普通話蒙受結構"V他O"和粤語蒙受結構"VR佢"。通過三種方言蒙受結構的對比分析，我們看到三種方言類型上的不同，也驗證了劉丹青（2001）、鄧思穎（2006）的分析：澄海閩南話是"最弱的SVO"，動詞傾向於留在原地；粤語是"最強的SVO"，動詞傾向於長距離移位；普通話是"溫和的SVO"，動詞移位但距離不長。 / This thesis discusses the syntax of the Chinese non-referential pronoun 伊 yi ‘it’ in Chenghai Southern Min in three different affective constructions: keyi 乞伊 construction, kaiyi 佮伊 construction and V伊R construction. After examining the syntactic and semantic properties of these three yi affective constructions, we figure out that firstly there are two types of keyi 乞伊 construction and two types kaiyi 佮伊 construction. Secondly keyi 乞伊 construction differs from kaiyi 佮伊 construction in theta-roles of the subject and the position of yi. Thirdly V伊R construction is a conditioned variant of keyi 乞伊 construction. The following part we explore the hierarchical order of these three yi affective constructions, and we employ high and middle applicatives to capture their syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies. In this part yi is classified into two ways according to the property of the object it refers to. For example, in keyi 乞伊 construction, yi always refers to a causer or a agent, and in kaiyi 佮伊 construction, yi refers to an affectee. In both constructions, yi is situated in a middle position which close to light verbs. The last part of this paper compare the affective constructions of Chenghai Southern Min with affective constructions of Mandarin and Cantonese. The main differences among these three dialects match with the claim proposed by Liu(2001) and Tang(2006): Chenghai Southern Min is the weakest SVO construction in which verbs prefer to stay in situ; Cantonese is the strongest SVO construction in which verbs prefer to take long-distance movement; Mandarin is the moderate SVO construction in which verbs will move but won’t move far. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / 金佳. / Thesis (M.Phil.) Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-93). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Jin Jia.