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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
41

The relevance of referring expressions : the case of diary drop in English

Scott, K. J. January 2010 (has links)
This thesis offers a pragmatic analysis of subjectless sentences in non-null subject languages, focusing on English ‘diary drop’ (as in ‘Saw a good film yesterday’). In chapter 1, I survey the data and discuss existing syntactic analyses (Haegeman & Ihsane 1999, 2001). While these generally acknowledge the importance of pragmatic factors in an overall account, no detailed investigation of their contribution has been proposed. In chapter 2, I consider subjectless sentences in child language, and suggest that relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95) can shed light on why such utterances occur. In chapter 3, I revisit the adult data, and having established that null subjects function as referring expressions, I consider two pragmatically-oriented approaches to the analysis of referring expressions: Accessibility Theory (Ariel, 1990) and the Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski, 1993). Both adopt the relevance-theoretic framework, but claim that relevance alone is insufficient to account for the data. In chapters 4 and 5, I develop a relevance-based account of referring expressions, and argue that we can do without the machinery of Accessibility Theory and the Givenness Hierarchy on two assumptions: first, that referring expressions encode procedural as well as conceptual meaning (Blakemore 1987, 2002), and second, that this procedural meaning does not identify the intended referent by appeal to considerations of Accessibility or Givenness. An important implication of my account is that the choice of referring expression not only affects reference resolution but can also contribute to what is implicitly communicated by an utterance. I provide detailed evidence for this. In chapter 6, I return to the original null subject data and show that my relevance-based approach sheds new light on how these utterances function in a non-null subject language. In Chapter 7, I draw general conclusions and revisit the conceptual-procedural distinction in light of the analyses proposed.
42

Aspects of aspect : the acquisition of viewpoint and situation aspect in Modern Greek

Panitsa, G. January 2010 (has links)
This thesis describes the acquisition of aspect in Modern Greek. The morphology, syntax and semantics of aspect are presented and discussed. We look especially at C. Smith's theory of viewpoint and situation aspect. Smith's situation aspect theory is based on the Vendlerian classification of verb phrases into Activity, Achievement, Accomplishment and State; plus a category of Semelfactives. As aspect is a property of the whole verb phrase, and in the light of its ‘interaction’ with aspectual adverbials, aspectual coercion is discussed. Further, we look at the role of adverbial expressions in the determination of aspect and at the positioning of aspectual adverbials in children’s grammars. The continuity and the maturation hypotheses are discussed in developing a theory of the acquisition of aspect and children's awareness and mastery of the system is examined. We carried out two experiments at a nursery school in Greece to look at viewpoint and situation aspect and their interaction in children's grammars. The first was a sentence-picture matching task and the second an elicited imitation task. We investigated patterns in the acquisition of viewpoint aspect by the children and how these were affected by situation aspect across the ages. It is shown that the way children combine aspectual adverbials with verbs marked for viewpoint aspect provides insights into their acquisition of the semantics of aspect. This is further looked at in terms of the means children employ towards an adult target response: omission of the aspectual adverbial; changing of the aspectual marking on the verb, substitution of one aspectual adverbial for another one. Regarding the positioning of aspectual adverbials in children’s grammars, it is found that they place them in immediately post-verbal position. Finally we examined children's comprehension of the semantics of perfective vs imperfective viewpoint aspect and their ability to successfully combine aspectual adverbials with verbs set for the perfective or imperfective value.
43

Descriptive pronouns revisited : the semantics and pragmatics of identification-based descriptive interpretations

Galery, T. N. January 2012 (has links)
This thesis confronts the semantic/pragmatic issues raised by identification - based descriptive uses of pronouns. The phenomenon, also known as deferred uses (Nunberg, 1993), arises when the correct understanding of a pronoun is dependent on the identification of a specific individual in the context that provides it with a descriptive (as opposed to a singular) interpretation. Moreover, the identification of the salient individual makes the interpretation available in a rather indirect way. For example, by pointing at a huge footprint in the sand and uttering ‘He must be a giant’, the speaker can convey the proposition that the footprint maker must be a giant, where the mental representation footprint (necessary for identification) and the representation the footprintmaker (the pronoun’s interpretation) are not identical. These uses also display interesting properties when it comes to their ability to provide antecedents for other pronouns. As such, they are at the cross-road of many topics in philosophy of language and linguistics, including indexicality, anaphora, and figurative uses of language (metonymy). In this thesis, I propose that the data is best accounted for by a combination of relevance-theoretic pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson 1995, Carston 2002), certain motivated assumptions about visual information processing, and the grammar formalism of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al 2001; Cann et al 2005). DS models pronouns as encoding procedures that introduce a variable-like entity (e.g. a metavariable), which needs to be replaced by a semantic value (of the appropriate type), allowing for descriptive constituents, which emerge as a result of relevance-driven processes of identification and inference, to provide the pronoun with the relevant descriptive interpretation. Alternatively, the pronoun can be replaced by a singular value that communicates a descriptive proposition as an implicature. The context and the pronominal form used determine which of these approaches is the best suited.
44

Scoping out of adjuncts : evidence for the parallelism between QR and WH-movement

Tanaka, M. January 2015 (has links)
What gives rise to reversal of quantifier scope has been a long-standing question in the study of linguistics. In the framework of Generative Grammar, it has been standard since May (1977) to analyse scope-shift as a form of covert movement, Quantifier Raising (QR). Evidence for this analysis comes from the fact that QR is sensitive to the very same island constraints that restrict overt movement (e.g. wh-movement). However, the widely assumed parallelism between scope-shift and wh-movement, which the theory of QR rests on, has not been experimentally examined in any depth. This thesis reports an experimental study that examined the parallelism between QR and wh-movement in terms of their sensitivity to the adjunct island constraint, in order to test the QR theory empirically. An experimental study based on acceptability judgement tasks was carried out in order to test QR and wh-argument extraction out of three types of non-finite adjuncts: bare participial gerunds, after-prepositional gerunds, and during-PPs. The outcome mostly revealed similarities in the locality of QR and wh-extraction, supporting a parallelism between the two, and hence the theory of QR. On the other hand, the outcome also suggested some differences between these two operations: wh-argument extraction out of a bare participial gerund is marginally acceptable, while QR out of the same environment is unacceptable. On the basis of this result, I argue that both QR and wh-argument extraction out of a non-finite adjunct are subject to the same syntactic constraint: a barrier-effect of the adjunct phase boundary. On the other hand, they are additionally subject to different constraints at the syntax-semantics interface. QR is subject to Scope Economy, whereas wh-extraction is subject to the Single Event Grouping Condition. The remainder of this thesis discusses how these assumptions can capture the parallelism and asymmetries between QR and wh-argument extraction.
45

The intelligibility of Nigerian English

Tiffen, B. W. January 1974 (has links)
The aim of this investigation was to measure the intelligibility of educated Nigerian speakers of English to British listeners and to analyse the main causes of intelligibility failure. The test material consisted of the following: I- Connected Speech, II - Reading Passage, III - Phonemes, IVA - Stress, IVB - Intonation. The speech of 24 Nigerian first-year university students - 12 Yoruba and 12 Hausa speakers - was recorded. An RP speaker was also recorded. The-recordings were played to 240 British listeners, each Nigerian speaker being assessed by 10 British listeners. A scoring system was devised for the tests of Connected Speech. The intelligibility scores ranged from 92.7% to 29.9%, with a mean score of 64.4%. The RP speaker's score (based on all 240 listeners) was 99.4%. Listeners' impressionistic judgements of the speakers' intelligibility correlated closely with the scores obtained on Test I. The most intelligible Nigerian speaker was 93% as efficient as the RP speaker, the mean Nigerian speaker was 65% as efficient, and the least intelligible Nigerian speaker 30% as efficient as the RP speaker. Test I- Connected Speech - was taken as the criterion of fundamental importance in assessing intelligibility. The other tests were regarded as subsidiary. - It was found that Connected Speech was significantly correlated with Reading and Stress, but not with the tests of Phonemes and Intonation. Partial correlation analyses showed that stress is the major component of all aspects of intelligibility. The errors leading to intelligibility failure were categorised into four groupings: - rhythmic/stress, segmental, phonotactic, lexical/syntactic. Rhythmic/stress errors (38.2% for all speakers) were the major cause of intelligibility failure. This was closely followed by segmental errors (33.0%). Phonotactic errors (20.00) were of lesser importance, while lexical/syntactic errors (8.8%) were of minor importance. Details of the actual phonetic errors are summarised in Chapters 11-13. The study concludes with some observations on the testing and teaching of oral English in the light of these findings.
46

Conceptual-intentional bootstrapping in the acquisition of the English verb

Parr, N. January 2012 (has links)
In the thesis I argue that intentionality, infant subjective knowledge and metacognitive growth, all interact to constrain and focus language acquisition to an inevitable and successful outcome. Neither innate UG, nor emergent usage based theories adequately address these elements and the literature review reveals that some or all them are either assumed, side-lined or left unconsidered by standard bootstrapping hypotheses. When foregrounded however, these elements can be demonstrated to provide a bridge between the conceptual and syntactic systems. I show that initially, infants’ utterances focus on the ‘here-and-now’ in joint attention, and they express infant subjective knowledge about how dynamic properties are attributive of substantive objects/entities. Uses of apparent nominal and verbal forms lack their typical grammatical function. Infants around 18months old, experience an inherent meta-cognitive development, which enables them to collate representations of Manifest Events, alongside a contrasting, constructed representation of a desired or intentional state of affairs. These Complex Events involve sub-events which are not currently in shared attention. Associated utterances involve intentions and desires, which require them to be understood by others. The acquisition of a conventional means of expression is therefore paramount. The research presents three sets of corpus studies based on 22,000 infant utterances, and includes exemplification from diary evidence, to show the inevitable bootstrapping effect of such intentional utterances. Complex Events require a predicate that describes an intentional state change and also a means to refer to a theme object that ‘measures out’ the change. In effect, it requires the use of Verbs and DPs. In contrast to other theories I show that it is only Complex Events that are the locus for the advent of grammatical categories [V] and [DP] and that a surprisingly simple, minimalist Merge process licensed by a selectional feature afforded by ‘it’, effectively bootstraps the syntactic system for English.
47

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) revisited : evidence from a psycholinguistic investigation of grammatical gender abilities in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children

Silveira, M. January 2011 (has links)
This thesis is about Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in children. Its aim is twofold: 1. To provide a theoretical analysis of the field of SLI and discuss its controversies from a novel angle and 2. to present the outcome of a behavioural study which evaluated abilities related to gender agreement in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with language impairment. In the first part, I develop a critique of the field, focusing on the multiplicity of conceptions of the term language embraced by different disciplines that study the disorder. A critical review of how the field of SLI has developed in recent decades reveals that the conceptual fluctuation in the use of the term language has, in many ways, impeded progress in the field. I claim that the only way SLI could be a valid category is if studies focus on basic language skills which, under typical conditions, are acquired spontaneously, without any formal instruction. In Part II, I report an experimental study carried out on the basis of the approach to SLI advocated in Part I. I present a series of experiments that explore the processing of grammatical gender agreement in the Determiner Phrase (DP), in a range of lexical, morphophonological and morphosyntactic conditions in Brazilian Portuguese. Participants were six children with language impairment and 60 typically developing children, including equal numbers from middle class and working class backgrounds. Results showed that gender agreement was very robust for the two groups of typically developing children but problematic for children with SLI, particularly when adjective agreement and gender assignment to novel nouns were involved. The pattern of errors observed and the theoretical discussion throughout Part II suggest that the processing of determiner/noun agreement is a different phenomenon from the processing of noun/adjective agreement, which is vulnerable in children with SLI. In addition, their difficulties with novel nouns suggest that they may require more exposure to input than typically developing children to acquire the gender of nouns.
48

The syntax of Greek polydefinites

Velegrakis, N. January 2011 (has links)
The thesis is concerned with the phenomenon of polydefiniteness in Greek. The term polydefinite refers to instances of adjectival modification in which the same definite determiner is multiply realized (to pseftiko to chrisso to roloi 'the fake golden watch'). Polydefinites present free word order variation. It is argued that the construction should be syntactically analyzed on a par with close appositive DPs. Both close appositives and polydefinites are associated with a structure of mutual adjunction, in which the top node inherits non-conflicting properties of both its daughters. The word-order freedom of the construction follows naturally from this proposal, without having recourse to unmotivated syntactic movement. A new interpretive mechanism is proposed, under the name R(eferential)-index mechanism, to capture the semantic effects of the construction (such as the obligatory restrictive reading). I compare my syntactic analysis to LCA-based competitors and argue that my account is superior in a number of respects. Turning to the interpretation of polydefinites, it is argued that the structure assigned to the construction reflects the empirical fact that polydefinites present weak markedness effects. I also discuss the interpretive properties of the R-index mechanism. This proposal allows a natural characterization of the distinction between internal and external modification. This dichotomy is then shown to be instrumental in capturing syntactic and interpretive constraints on determiner spreading. Furthermore, I investigate what happens in Greek indefinites (ena pseftiko chrisso roloi 'a fake golden watch'), which present the same word order variation as polydefinites, but without indefinite determiner spreading. It is shown that analyzing Greek indefinites on a par with Romance indefinites (e.g. French, Spanish) is unwise, because of differences in ordering possibilities and the obligatory restrictiveness associated with Greek post-nominal adjectives. I suggest instead that Greek indefinites with post-nominal adjectives should be analyzed similarly to Greek polydefinites. Following a suggestion in the literature, I argue that the indefinite ena is in fact a quantifier and that the Greek indefinite determiner is phonologically null. On this view, Greek indefinites may exhibit hidden determiner spreading. A tempting correlation that has been suggested in literature is between the Greek polydefinite and the Modern Persian Ezafe constructions. It is explained that these constructions cannot be analyzed similarly to each other due to major syntactic, semantic and configurational differences. They do not constitute therefore, the two sides of the same coin, since their nature is rather different.
49

Subordinating and coordinating linkers

Philip, J. N. January 2012 (has links)
This thesis is concerned with syntactic mechanisms for the marking of grammatical relationships. It is argued that there is a class of semantically vacuous functional heads serving only as a syntactic means of marking such relationships – either subordination or coordination. These heads are known as linkers. Through studying restrictions on the structural and linear distribution of linkers cross-linguistically, the thesis sheds light on varied areas of syntax: the nature of projection in morphology and syntax; word order principles; and the place of coordinate structures within phrasestructure principles. The morphosyntax provides two possible mechanisms for marking a grammatical relationship. Firstly, an affix marking the relationship can attach directly to any member of the relationship. This member of the relationship then enters the syntactic derivation, but the affix has no syntactic status in its own right. Alternatively, the relationship can be marked by a syntactic object in its own right – a semantically vacuous projecting functional head (a linker). In this latter case, the relationship is marked by the linker structurally intervening between the members of the relationship: its projection must dominate one member, and cannot dominate the others. When combined with principles of extended projection, this leads to the restriction that, in marking a subordination, or Head-Dependent, relationship, such linkers can only appear as the highest head in the extended projection of the Dependent. This prediction is tested empirically by determining the possible distribution and constituency of linkers predominantly in the complex noun phrase. We next consider how the structural distribution of linkers is mapped onto linear order. It is proposed that there are two types of word order constraints available in natural language: those relating to harmony, which are universal and obey a fixed ranking; and those referring to specific features of a head – either lexical category or features referring to semantics. Given their status as semantically vacuous functional heads, only the first type of word order constraint, relating to harmony, applies to linkers. It is shown using Optimality Theory that this theory successfully accounts for the absence of certain disharmonic word orders cross-linguistically. Finally, we consider the implications of the restrictions on the structural and linear distribution of linkers for linkers marking the coordination relationship (that is, syntactically independent coordinators). It is argued that coordination is a symmetric structure, headed by a potentially infinite number of coordinands. It is shown that any difference in the distribution of coordinating and subordinating linkers should be attributed to the unique syntax of the coordinate structure.
50

The limits of expression : language, poetry, thought

Kolaiti, P. January 2010 (has links)
The following analysis takes as its starting point a divergence in views on what philosophers and linguists call ‘effability’ or ‘expressibility’ (the extent to which it is possible, through the use of a public language, to make one’s thoughts available to others). While philosophers and linguists (Searle, Katz, Recanati) defend stronger or weaker forms of effability, the ‘struggle of the poet to defeat the ineffable’ is a recurring motif in most 20th century critical thinking. In trying to explain this apparent divergence, I reconsider a wide range of interdisciplinary issues of particular interest to linguists, psychologists, literary theorists and philosophers of art; these include the limits of linguistic expression, the role of perceptual representations in our mental tapestry, the existence or otherwise of a property of literariness or essence of art, the distinctiveness of the poetic/ artistic mind and the nature of aesthetic experience. In due course, my discussion brings to light a novel account of the possible evolutionary origins of art and sketches an empirically tractable model of aesthetic experience that lend us significant insight on the actual mental goings-on behind the poet’s discontent with language. In view of the distinct ways in which, as it will be argued, an artistic mind is creative and the psycho-cognitive particularities of the kind of action art is, the ‘struggle of the poet to defeat the ineffable’ is soon ranked as a problem of an entirely different order than had been previously thought. The thesis takes the thread from the empirical observation that the limitations of speaking out the contents of the mind are so much more intensely felt in the literary mentality, in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of this very mentality, of the kind of action art is and the mind that brings it to light.

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