Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Linguistics." Includes bibliographical references (p. 368-394).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2002. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 320 p., also contains graphics. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: David R. Dowty, Dept. of Linguistics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-320).

Over recent years cultural geography has refrained the parameters within which landscape and human agency are examined. Textual sources, social conditions, and ideological programmes are all seen as having a bearing on the shape of the environment and the human reaction to it. This thesis considers landscape change on the periphery of Tokyo known before 1868 as Edo) within the general framework of this new cultural geography and the specific context of the history of Japan's largest city. Situated in the northeastern outskirts of the city on the banks of its main river, Miukvjima was before about 1900 a place of recreation and diversion. Its temples, shrines, and ornamental gardens were a favoured site for blossom viewing and, in general terms, for dad, trips from the city centre. Around the turn of the century, however, factories were built, and the area was transformed within a few decades into an industrial periphery specializing in the manufacture of textiles, leather, matches, and other light industrial goods. The thesis contains two principal arguments, The first relates to the process of landscape creation and appreciation It is argued that the Japanese sensibility to space is informed by an innate appreciation of its symbolic content and by an exceptionally close assdciation between place itself and its textual and pictoral representation, The second relates to the process of urban change in the context of a modernising city. it is argued that alternative views of the urban environment arose but that, despite these differing interpretations, open space did not become an arena for contention. By examining the nature and process of urban change as well as perceptions of a chosen environment, the thesis sets out the structural context of rapid social transformation.

This dissertation contributes to a fuller description of the French c'est-cleft by reporting on three empirical studies on its meaning and use, and presenting a unified account of the cleft couched in Stochastic Optimality Theory. The first two studies in this dissertation explore the meaning of the cleft, more specifically the exhaustive meaning. First, the results from a forced-choice task, designed to test the level of exhaustivity of the cleft compared to exclusive sentences and canonical sentences, show that the cleft does not behave like the other two sentence forms. This is taken to indicate that the exhaustivity associated with the cleft is not truth-conditional. Instead, I argue that exhaustivity arises from a pragmatic constraint on the way speakers use language. This argument is supported further in the second study, a corpus study that shows there is no categorical ban on the type of NP that can occur in post-copular position in a cleft. In fact, the cleft interacts felicitously with a number of expressions such as universal quantifiers and additives, which have been claimed to never appear in post-copular position. This corpus study further shows that the primary aspect of the cleft is not to convey exhaustivity, but instead to convey contrast or correction. Finally, the third study, a semi-spontaneous production experiment, helps make precise the situations in which an element is clefted. The results demonstrate that there is a clear asymmetry between the way grammatical subjects or non-subjects are marked: focused subjects are mostly clefted whereas focused non-subjects generally remain in situ. Moreover, the experiment shows that there exists some amount of free variation: subjects can be realized via prosody and non-subjects can be clefted. I conclude my research by proposing that the non-random alternation cleft/canonical is not a categorical phenomenon, but is gradient and explained by a set of constraints on French' syntax, prosody and pragmatics. The cleft is used to provide contrast or a total answer to the question under discussion. / text

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Philosophy / Master / Master of Philosophy

To be useful for communication language must be grounded in perceptions of the world, but acquiring such grounded language is a challenging task that increases in difficulty as the length and syntactic complexity of utterances grow. Several state of the art methods exist to learn complex grounded language from unannotated utterances, however each requires that the semantic system of the language be completely defined ahead of time. This expectation is problematic as it assumes not only that agents must have complete semantic understanding before starting to learn language, but also that the human designers of these systems can accurately transcribe the semantics of human languages in great detail. This paper presents Reagent, a construction grammar framework for concurrently learning the syntax and semantics of complex English referring expressions, with an emphasis on spatial referring expressions. Rather than requiring fully predefined semantic representations, Reagent only requires access to a set of semantic primitives from which it can build appropriate representations. The results presented here demonstrate that Reagent can acquire constructions that are missing from its starting grammar by observing the contextual utterances of a fully fluent agent, can approach fluent accuracy at inferring the referent of such expressions, and learns meanings that are qualitatively similar to the constructions of the agent from which it is learning. We propose that this approach could be expanded to other types of expressions and languages, and forms a solid foundation for general natural language acquisition.

A database schema should consist of structures and semantic integrity constraints. Se mantic integrity constraints (SICs) are invariant restrictions on the static states of the stored data and the state transitions caused by the primitive operations: insertion, dele tion, or update. Traditionally, database design has been carried out on an ad hoc basis and focuses on structure and efficiency. Although the E-R model is the popular concep tual modelling tool, it contains few inherent SICs. Also, although the relational database model is the popular logical data model, a relational database in fourth or fifth normal form may still represent little of the data semantics. Most integrity checking is distributed to the application programs or transactions. This approach to enforcing integrity via the application software causes a number of problems. Recently, a number of systems have been developed for assisting the database design process. However, only a few of those systems try to help a database designer incorporate SICs in a database schema. Furthermore, current SIC representation languages in the literature cannot be used to represent precisely the necessary features for specifying declarative and operational semantics of a SIC, and no modelling tool is available to incorporate SICs. This research solves the above problems by presenting two models and one subsystem. The E-R-SIC model is a comprehensive modelling tool for helping a database designer in corporate SICs in a database schema. It is application domain-independent and suitable for implementation as part of an automated database design system. The SIC Repre sentation model is used to represent precisely these SICs. The SIC elicitation subsystem would verify these general SICs to a certain extent, decompose them into sub-SICs if necessary, and transform them into corresponding ones in the relational model. A database designer using these two modelling tools can describe more data semantics than with the widely used relational model. The proposed SIC elicitation subsystem can provide more modelling assistance for him (her) than current automated database design systems.

Temporal monoreferentials in French (hier, aujourd'hui, demain, the names of the days and the names of the months), although used frequently, were never the subject of a comprehensive study before Curat (1999), resulting in imprecision and inconsistency in their classification. Defining their status is thus at the centre of this study, which shows that hier, aujourd'hui, demain and the names of the days are substantives, but unlike other substantives, they can, in themselves, refer to a «sole individual* and play the role of noun phrases without a determiner. Their usage without a determiner depends on their link to the nexus ego-hic-nunc (they are defined by the time of their enunciation) and the unicity of their referent. They do, however, require the presence of a determiner once detached from that nexus or when they refer to several referents (real or not). A more or less strong lexical predisposition for «nynegocentric» (i.e speaker referential) deicticity allows their lexeme to have a special link with the nexus ego-hic-nunc, and the nexus thus imposes the monoreferential constraint - hence the use without a determiner. In first place on the scale of nynegocentric deicticity are the terms which make up the enunciative framework (je, tu, ici, etc.). Hier, aujourd'hui and demain are placed second: they but rarely accept the presence of a determiner. Next are the names of the days, which may be used with or without a determiner, followed by the other substantives which require the presence of a determiner for reference purposes. One can thus conclude that hier, aujourd'hui, demain and the names of the days make up a subcategory of common nouns. The operation of the names of the months differs from that of the names of the days in terms of both syntax and reference (they seldom vary in number, refer to one individual, and function without a determiner most of the time, independently of any link with the nexus ego-hic-nunc); it more closely reflects that of proper nouns. They form a subcategory of proper nouns. The approach used, based primarily on the work of Kleiber and Curat, was grammatical, semantic and deictic.