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This thesis presents a study of food assessments in Chilean Spanish interaction. The data consists of video recordings of six pairs of Chilean participants sampling British foods unknown to them. They tried each food at the same time and discussed their opinions. They were asked to do a joint ranking of these products to elicit sequences of agreement and disagreement. The data is analysed combining the methods of conversation analysis with those of interactional linguistics and the study of embodied interaction. There are three analytic chapters. The first one explores what constitutes a canonical assessment, i.e. aspects of the turn design of assessments in the particular context of the data and how they compare to the literature in English. The second analytic chapter is about the lead-up to an assessment. I explore how speakers initiate assessments (with particular attention to the role of eye gaze). The third analytic chapter deals with how non-lexical (and other) tokens and the co-occurring embodied aspects of their production (prosodic features, gestures, etc.) are designed and understood as projecting a stance towards the food. All things considered, this thesis contributes to filling a knowledge gap in relation to the study of assessments in the Spanish language. It also contributes the novelty of studying food assessments among non-experts. Finally, this thesis sheds light on how assessments arise in interaction and about the emergence of linguistic organisation through other non-verbal activities.

This thesis examines the crosslinguistic variation and acquisition of comparative constructions and proposes a fine-grained AP periphery along with an analysis of comparatives as constructions involving subtraction. More specifically, it is proposed that gradable predicates incorporate a Quantifier head and that comparative morphology is realised in two distinct heads above the Q-head: the higher C-head assigns case to the differential argument whereas the lower one, which is immediately above the Q-head checks the case of the standard phrase. Furthermore, I provide novel evidence for two types of comparative markers, a 'functional' one, which is the realisation of C2 if the gradable predicate does not move to C2, and a 'lexical' one, which is the comparative form of the quantity word that adjoins to a positive adjective. This analysis explains morphological facts as well as variation in case assignment in Greek varieties. As far as standard phrases are concerned I propose that there are three distinct types of standard phrases: adjunct standard phrases introduced by the phrasal standard marker, argument standard phrases comprised of the phrasal standard marker and a nominal (DP or relative clause) and exceptive phrases. Furthermore, the study of the distribution of polarity items and comparative negation in Romance comparatives as well as the acquisition of Italian comparatives suggest that negation found in comparatives is an overt realisation of the negative operator. This analysis explains a (universal) gap in the distribution of comparative negation, namely the unavailability of languages that license comparative negation but not polarity items.

This thesis examines the decline in non-native consonant discrimination at the end of the first year and perceptual asymmetries that were identified in course of experiments. In Study 1 & 2, 7- and 11-month-old monolingual infants from English speaking homes were tested on the Urdu affricate contrast /tʃʰ/ and /tʃ/. The order of presentation was counterbalanced. Younger infants discriminated the contrast, whereas older infants only showed discrimination when the non-native aspirated affricate /tʃʰ/ was presented first. This led to Study 3, in which the 11-month-olds from Study 2 were tested again at 15 months of age on the same Urdu affricate contrast, with a different word pair, with similar results. In order to test if the same results could be found in infants from a different language background, Study 4 tested bilingual infants from Urdu speaking homes at two age groups, 7- and 11-months of age, on non-native English /w/ vs. /v/. Study 4 found order effect irrespective of age. In both age groups, the discrimination score was higher when the unfamiliar /w/ was presented first. Lastly, in order to find out if these order effects are maintained in adulthood, monolingual English and bilingual Urdu adults were tested in Study 5 on both native and non-native /w/ vs /v/ and /tʃ/ vs /tʃʰ/ contrasts. Only Urdu adults showed asymmetry for the non-native English contrast. These asymmetries can be interpreted in light of the Magnet theory (Kuhl 1986; Kuhl 1991), which explains how prototypicality of a given token and the order in which tokens are presented effects discrimination in a speech perception task.

This thesis takes the adaptation of Arabic loanwords into Turkish as a case to reflect on and contribute to the ongoing debate of loanword phonology of the Perceptual approach (Boersma, 2009; Peperkamp & Dupoux, 2003; Peperkamp et al., 2008; Silverman, 1992), Phonological approach (LaCharité & Paradis, 2005; Paradis, 1995; Paradis & LaCharité, 1997, 2001, 2008; Peperkamp et al., 2008; Silverman, 1992) and a medial hybrid model of both phonetics and phonology (Kenstowicz & Suchato, 2006; Shinohara, 2004; Smith, 2006; Chang, 2008 and Dolus, 2013). The thesis includes two types of data: corpus-based and experimental. The corpus of the Arabic loanwords into Turkish comprises 1118 words from which vowel mappings and residual effects of gutturals on neighbouring vowels were identified. Based on the concept of uniformitarianism (Murray, 2013) present-day sound changes must have been governed by the same principles or laws which operated in the past. Thus, one of the goals of this work is to model the grammar of Osmanlica speakers in the perception of modern day Turkish speakers of the residual effects of vowels neighbouring gutturals. In these effects the Arabic vowels /a/ and /u/ are adapted as /a/ and /u/ in Turkish vowels neighbouring guttural sounds (emphatics, uvulars and pharyngeals); however, the vowel /i/ is borrowed as the Turkish high back unrounded vowel only surrounding emphatics and the uvular q and as /i/ elsewhere. It was concluded that the corpus data patterns can be best accounted for by using a hybrid model of phonetics, phonology (of both source and native language) and with the effects of orthography. In addition, the role of bilinguals as the active borrowers in the adaptation process is especially corroborated.

This thesis focuses on the relationship between undergraduate translation curricula on the one hand, and students’ needs and market demands on the other hand, using translator training in Saudi Arabia as an example. This case study provides strong support for the argument that market demands and student needs should be reflected in the curriculum of translation training courses. There is a shortage of research on the relationship between translation curriculum design and situational context, and the recommendations of my study are generalizable to other locations, especially those where translator education is still a relatively new subject of study. The tools used in this study are extended questionnaires of three stakeholder groups: (i) final-year students following translation courses at three universities in Saudi Arabia, King Saud University, Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University and Effat University; (ii) translation instructors teaching translation at those universities; and (iii) translators working in the Saudi translation market. The questionnaires administered to students and instructors enabled me to identify their perceptions of the needs of students and the market, while the questionnaires administered to translators working as professionals in the market enabled me to identify both the actual needs of the market and professionals’ view of the translation courses and their graduates. Follow-up interviews with a fourth important group of stakeholders, namely curriculum decision makers in translation departments, were conducted once I had identified the students’ needs and the demands of the market, and the thesis discusses the relationships between the views of all four stakeholder groups. It is my hope that the study will contribute to enhancing the development of curricula in undergraduate translation courses.

北海道大学 / 博士 / 理学

Hokkaido University (北海道大学) / 博士 / 理学

Hokkaido University (北海道大学) / 博士 / 理学