Le verbe dar est une unité lexicale particulièrement riche en nuances significatives. Parmi les études qui ont abordé cette unité, certaines font l'hypothèse d'une désémantisation lors de la 'grammaticalisation' du verbe. Ce processus serait illustré notamment par l'existence du marqueur discursif dale ainsi que par les emplois de dar en tant que 'support' dans des constructions verbo-nominales plus ou moins lexicalisées ou dans périphrases verbales du type dar un golpe, dar que hablar. L'hypothèse envisagée dans cette étude – menée dans le cadre théorique de la linguistique du signifiant, qui prône l'unicité du signe linguistique – est que le verbe dar exprime une notion d'existence sous-jacente à tous ses emplois discursifs. Le signifié de langue de dar exprimerait l'accès à l'existence d'une entité b, pour le bénéficiaire c d'une opération conduite par une entité a. Cette notion d'existence serait présente dans toutes les occurrences d'un lexème qui n'apparaît jamais vidé – ne serait-ce que partiellement – de son contenu lexical. Afin de valider cette hypothèse, les différentes capacités référentielles du verbe dar seront analysées à travers un corpus de l'espagnol péninsulaire et de l'Amérique latine. / The Spanish verb dar is a lexical item particularly rich in nuances of meaning. Some of its senses have been studied under the « semantic bleaching » hypothesis consequent upon the « grammaticalization » of the verb. This process would reveal mainly in the discourse marker dale and in the use of dar as a « support verb » in nominal predicates like dar un golpe, dar un paseo, dar una mano de pintura, etc. According to the theoretical framework for this research, which accounts for the distinction between language and discourse as well as the unicity of the linguistic sign, an existential notion underlies every discourse realization of this verb. The notion conveyed by the signified of dar is that an entity B gains access to existence in the sphere of an entity C as a result of the action of an entity A. Hence, this existential meaning appears in every use of a lexeme whose semantic content is never affected.

Ce travail vise à déterminer s’il existe ou non une norme du subjonctif en français préclassique, et dans l’affirmative de la décrire et de la saisir. D’un point de vue morphologique, on constate que le français préclassique simplifie les paradigmes du subjonctif par un effet d’analogie, alors que l’ancien français avait tendance à les différencier nettement de l’indicatif. Nous noterons de plus l’importance du yod « désactualisant » qui se généralise aux première et seconde personnes du pluriel, devenant le marqueur privilégié de l’indétermination. La syntaxe du subjonctif de cette période se caractérise par une exceptionnelle liberté, la seule règle suivie par le locuteur étant d’utiliser le subjonctif lorsque l’énoncé appartient au « monde des possibles » et l’indicatif lorsqu’il entre dans le « monde du probable » (terminologie empruntée à Robert Martin). Aussi, tout au long de la période préclassique le système modal ne connaît aucune servitude grammaticale, n’obéissant à aucune règle mécanique mais seulement à des tendances et à une concordance d’ordre cinétique et modal. Malgré cette autonomie, le subjonctif est souvent écarté au bénéfice de l’indicatif, auquel nous incluons la forme en –rais, quand le discours ne traduit aucun effet stylistique ou rhétorique, car l’indicatif indique précisément le temps sur la chronogénèse. En revanche l’image temporelle du subjonctif est incomplète et insécable, « amorphe » et « in fieri » (terminologie de Gustave Guillaume). Pourtant, malgré cette inhérente imprécision temporelle, le subjonctif demeure irremplaçable en français préclassique pour son extraordinaire poésie. / The purpose of this work is to determinate whether or not a method of subjunctive mode existed in Preclassic French, and in the affirmative, to describe and to explain it. From a morphological point of view, we notice Preclassic French was the age of simplification and analogy, while medieval system was marked, on the contrary, by a tendency to differentiate the subjunctive’s forms in a characteristic way. Besides, the presence of the yod at first and second plural persons becomes widespread, expressing in a better way the indetermination and “desactualisation” compared to the medieval system devoid of the yod. Regarding the syntax of the subjunctive mode during this period, it is characterized by an incredible freedom: the only rule actually followed by the speaker consisted, in case of doubt, in using the subjunctive tense, the “world of the possible”, in opposition to the “world of the likely” which is specific to the indicative mode, both concepts belonging to Robert Martin’s terminology. All along the aforesaid historical period, it is particularly interesting to see to what extent the modal system remains free from restrictive grammatical regulations. Indeed, the subjunctive mode doesn’t obey mechanical rules, except some tendencies. It only obeys kinetic and modal concordances. Despite its autonomy, subjunctive mode was nevertheless frequently ruled out to the benefit of indicative mode, including the “forme en –rais”, especially when authors showed no interest in stylistic or rhetorical effects. In a matter of fact, while indicative mode gives a precise indication of the time, mental representation of the verb within the subjunctive has the distinctive characteristic to be incomplete and indivisible as well, qualified as “amorphe” and “in fieri” according to Guillaume’s terminology. However, despite its inherent temporal imprecision, writers of that time widely used the subjunctive mode, judged exceptionally poetic and therefore irreplaceable.

Esta dissertação apresenta um estudo de natureza sincrônica e quantitativa da variação entre aplicação x não-aplicação da regra de concordância verbal de 3ª e 1ª pessoas do plural. Os dados são oriundos da variedade do português popular falada por pessoas idosas residentes na zona rural dos estados de São Paulo e Minas Gerais, na área correspondente às trilhas das bandeiras paulistas. A variação da concordância verbal de 3ª pessoa do plural constitui um fenômeno comum no português do Brasil e tem sido amplamente documentada pela literatura lingüística, a qual evidencia que formas como Eles fala x Eles falam podem ser encontradas na fala de pessoas de diversas regiões brasileiras e de diferentes graus de escolaridade. São poucos os estudos que tratam da variação da regra de concordância com sujeitos de 1ª pessoa do plural (Nós fala x Nós falamos), manifestada em variedades populares do português brasileiro. Adotando os pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da Sociolingüística e da Lingüística Funcional, nosso objetivo é descrever, analisar e explicar os padrões de concordância encontrados, buscando identificar os fatores lingüísticos (semânticos, gramaticais, discursivos) e sociais que condicionam a realização ou a não-realização da regra formal de concordância verbal. / This research presents a synchronic and quantitative study of the variation between application x non-application of the subject-verb agreement rule with the 3rd and 1st plural persons. The data were collected from Popular Portuguese spoken by elderly who live in the rural areas of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, in the regions that coincide with the historical route of the Bandeirantes (members of colonial exploratory expeditions). The variation of subject-verb agreement with the 3rd plural person is an ordinary phenomenon in Brazilian Portuguese, and it has been extensively documented by linguistic literature, which gives evidence that forms as Eles fala x Eles falam can be found in the speech of people of various Brazilian regions and of different education degrees. Few are the studies that deal with the variation of subject-verb agreement with the 1st plural person (Nós fala x Nós falamos), displayed in popular varieties of Brazilian Portuguese. Using the theories of Sociolinguistics and Functional Linguistics, our goal is to describe, analyze and explain the patterns of agreement found, searching for linguistic (semantic, grammatical, discursive) and social factors that condition the application or the non-application of the formal subject-verb agreement rule.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Written language provides a snapshot of linguistic, cultural, and current events information for a given time period. Aggregating these snapshots by studying many texts over time reveals trends in the evolution of language, culture, and society. The ever-increasing amount of electronic text, both from the digitization of books and other paper documents to the increasing frequency with which electronic text is used as a means of communication, has given us an unprecedented opportunity to study these trends. In this dissertation, we use hundreds of thousands of books spanning two centuries scanned by Google, and over 100 billion messages, or ‘tweets’, posted to the social media platform, Twitter, over the course of a decade to study the English language, as well as study the evolution of culture and society as inferred from the changes in language. We begin by studying the current state of verb regularization and how this compares between the more formal writing of books and the more colloquial writing of tweets on Twitter. We find that the extent of verb regularization is greater on Twitter, taken as a whole, than in English Fiction books, and also for tweets geotagged in the United States relative to American English books, but the opposite is true for tweets geotagged in the United Kingdom relative to British English books. We also find interesting regional variations in regularization across counties in the United States. However, once differences in population are accounted for, we do not identify strong correlations with socio-demographic variables. Next, we study stretchable words, a fundamental aspect of spoken language that, until the advent of social media, was rarely observed within written language. We examine the frequency distributions of stretchable words and introduce two central parameters that capture their main characteristics of balance and stretch. We explore their dynamics by creating visual tools we call ‘balance plots’ and ‘spelling trees’. We also discuss how the tools and methods we develop could be used to study mistypings and misspellings, and may have further applications both within and beyond language. Finally, we take a closer look at the English Fiction n-gram dataset created by Google. We begin by explaining why using token counts as a proxy of word, or more generally, ‘n-gram’, importance is fundamentally flawed. We then devise a method to rebuild the Google Books corpus so that meaningful linguistic and cultural trends may be reliably discerned. We use book counts as the primary ranking for an n-gram and use subsampling to normalize across time to mitigate the extraneous results created by the underlying exponential increase in data volume over time. We also combine the subsampled data over a number of years as a method of smoothing. We then use these improved methods to study linguistic and cultural evolution across the last two centuries. We examine the dynamics of Zipf distributions for n-grams by measuring the churn of language reflected in the flux of n-grams across rank boundaries. Finally, we examine linguistic change using wordshift plots and a rank divergence measure with a tunable parameter to compare the language of two different time periods. Our results address several methodological shortcomings associated with the raw Google Books data, strengthening the potential for cultural inference by word changes.

Durch ihr besonderes Verhalten haben psychologische Verben, und Experiencer-Objekt-Verben im Besonderen, in der linguistischen Forschung Berühmtheit erlangt. In vielen Sprachen konnte beobachtet werden, dass das Verhalten dieser Verben oft von grammatischen Generalisierungen abweicht, die über Prädikate und Strukturen bis dahin gemacht wurden. Diese so genannten 'psych properties' (Psych-Eigenschaften) betreffen zentrale linguistische Phänomene sowie sprachspezifische Eigenschaften und sie geben Anlass anzunehmen, dass Verben wie 'frighten' ('fürchten'), 'appeal to' ('gefallen') und 'worry' ('beunruhigen') eine besondere Stellung im grammatischen System einnehmen. Sie stehen hier Verben gegenüber die nicht primär mentale oder emotionale Konzepte ausdrücken, wie zum Beispiel 'call' ('anrufen'), 'warn' ('warnen') or 'visit' ('besuchen'). Die vorliegende Arbeit nimmt diese Beobachtungen auf und untersucht die besonderen Eigenschaften der Psych-Prädikate. / Psych verbs in general and experiencer object verbs in particular are exceptional because they often do not follow generalizations that have been made about verbs and structure types in the theory of grammar. Such so-called 'psych properties' can be observed in many languages and concern central linguistic but also language-specific phenomena. The existence of psych properties gives rise to the assumption that verbs such as 'frighten', 'appeal to' and 'worry' have a special position within the grammatical system as they stand in opposition to verbs that do not primarily express mental or emotional concepts, e.g., 'call', 'warn' or 'visit'. The present work addresses this divergence and investigates the characterizations of psych predicates.

中文裡有一種特別的結構，稱為動賓複合詞(Verb-object compound)。根 據李與湯普森(Li & Thompson)觀察：從歷史的觀點來看，這種動賓複合 詞是從動賓詞組衍生得來。在本論文中，嘗試以貝克(Baker,1988)的併入 理論(Incorporation Theory)來證明他們的這個觀察。我們認為有一名為 「名詞併入」(Noun Incorporation)的句法移位律對動賓詞組產生作用。 在經過此規律作用後，動詞和它的直接賓語便在句法層次上結合成一帶動 詞性的複雜結構，此外，我們在此理論中，我們主張應加入一條構詞結合 律。此律在名詞併入後作用，把名詞併入後新產生的句法性複雜結構變換 成一構詞單位，即複合詞。這樣的解釋方式不只具有「解釋充份性」 (explanatory adequacy)，而且從歷史的觀點來看此一名詞併入現象，上 述方式也可以妥善地解決一個爭議已久有關動賓複合詞是否可以離合的問 題，以及有關雙重分類的動賓複合詞所造成的難題。藉著這樣的分析，我 們討論了八類動賓結構。這八類恰好形成一個漸次變化。其大抵反映出動 賓結構從詞組變成複合詞的詞彙化過程。至於此八類之間的句法變異，我 們發現其「分類差異」(status variation)與及物性變異(transitivity variation)是一些規律互相競爭(competition)與互補(complementation) 的結果。此現象在謝(Hsieh,1989)的交互作用理論(Interaction Theory) 中早已被指出。而此理論在解釋句法變異上的完善，更證明了我們先前利 用名詞併入方式分析動賓結構是正確的。 / In Mandarin Chinese, there is a special construction called verb-object compounds. It has been observed by Li & Thompson (1981) that the verb-object compounds are derived historically from verb-object phrases. In this thesis, we attempt to verify this observation by means of the Incorporation Theory by Baker (1988). We argue that a syntactic rule, noun incorporation, applies to verb-object phrases and combines the verb and its direct object together to form a syntactic verbal complex. A morphological merging rule is added into the Theory, and applies immediately after the former rule to transform the newly created syntactic construct into a morphological one, a compound. Such and approach not only achieves the explanatory adequacy, but also resolves the long-standing controversies on the expandability of verb-object compounds and the paradox of verb-object compounds with dual status, if we keep a historical view on the process of the noun incorporation. Based on this analysis, the eight types of verb-object constructions form a continuum which roughly reflects a lexicalization process from verb-object phrases to verb-object compounds. As for the syntactic variation--status variation and transitivity variation--among different types verb-object consrtuctions, it is found to be a result of the competition and complementation among some rules, a fact evidenced in Hsieh's (1989) Interaction theory. the success of the interaction account further justifies our incorporation analysis on verb-object construcitons.

<p>This thesis investigates the use of word order variation, in particular the variable use of subject-verb inversion and non-inversion in main declarative clauses, among adolescents in contemporary multilingual settings in Sweden. The use of non-inversion in contexts that in standard Swedish require inversion is sometimes claimed to be characteristic of varieties of Swedish spoken among adolescents in multilingual urban areas. The present study includes a wide range of data, both spontaneous and elicited, and explores how common the use of non-inversion is among a relatively large group of participants in different contexts, and how the use of non-inversion is influenced by different demographic, linguistic and socio-pragmatic factors.</p><p>The results show that non-inversions are used to a limited extent in all types of data in the studied population. Only certain individuals frequently employ non-inversions in some contexts. Further, no direct link is found between second language acquisition and the use of non-inversion in this study. Factors related to the issue of nativeness, for example participants’ reported age of onset of Swedish acquisition, only marginally explain the results. In general, examples of non-inversion are employed more extensively, and by more participants, in peer-peer interaction than with adults. The use of non-inversion appears to be part of some adolescents’ spontaneous language use in certain contexts. More importantly, however, the results suggest that some adolescents employ non-inversions as an active linguistic resource to express their identification with the multilingual environment and the different varieties of Swedish spoken there, to show solidarity with peers, to contest official school discourses, and to play around with linguistic stereotypes.</p>