This study presents the findings of cross-sectional psycholinguistic research investigating the first-language acquisition of Turkish among heritage speakers in Germany. Studies in heritage language acquisition in the last decades have provided increasing evidence that heritage speakers do not always converge on the grammars of native speakers, which is predominantly explained in relation to estimates of reduced input and output conditions. Nonetheless, Montrul (2010) underlines the fact that estimates of input cannot be used as measurements and addresses the need for a well-established theoretical framework that will account for the development of heritage speakers’ linguistic system to explain why heritage speakers succeed - or fail - in language acquisition in the ways that they do. This study aims to fill this gap by looking at the phenomena from a developmental perspective within the formalisms of Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998, 2005), a well-established crosslinguistic approach to acquisition based on the architecture of the human language processor, but which has not previously been applied to Turkish. This study investigated the grammatical competence of twenty-four young heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany by testing their online processing of various Turkish grammatical structures, focusing on passives and subject relative clauses. The results demonstrate that the language acquisition of Turkish heritage speakers is developmentally constrained by availability of processing mechanisms. The participants displayed a clear hierarchy in their development, with competence in the processing of basic grammatical structures that are canonically mapped, but with gaps in the processing of complex structures such as passives and subject relative clauses that are non-canonically mapped and involve long-distance dependencies. This study thus contributes important insights both to theoretical accounts of acquisition of Turkish, and to the wider study of heritage language acquisition.

This thesis describes the phonology of the verbal forms in colloquial Ceylon Tamil, for the first time within the framework of generative phonology. It consists of an introduction, seven chapters, two appendices and a bibliography. The introduction includes a brief outline of the main features of Ceylon colloquial Tamil, a criticism of the previous work done in Ceylon Tamil, a brief note on the data that is taken up for investigation, and a discussion of the merits of generative phonology. In Chapter 1, the model that has been proposed to describe the phonology of the verbal forms in colloquial Ceylon Tamil is taken up for discussion. The present model differs from that of Chomsky and Halle (1968) in a number of respects. Chapter 2 provides the forms that have to be accounted for by the rules of the phonology. The constituent structure of a verb form, classification of verbal stems, the grammatical formatives, namely, the suffixes and the tense markers, the derivation of the verbal bases and the nominals and the formation of a complex verb are discussed in detail. All the phonological matrix insertion rules (PMIR) are found in this chapter. Chapter 3 deals with the positive conditions and the traffic rules. The redundancy rules and the phonological rules are dealt with in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. In Chapter 6, the output of the phonological component (i.e. the systematic phonetic representation) is informally related to articulatory terms of traditional phonetic description. While discussing the phonetic quality of each phoneticc segment, reference has been made to palatographic and kymographic evidence. Chapter 7 provides a summary of the rules of the phonology and a few examples to test the validity of these rules. Each example begins with its underlying surface syntactic form and ends with its systematic phonetic representation. The derivation of the latter from the former is illustrated step by step. Appendix I lists the verbal stems accounted for in the description. Appendix II lists the grammatical. formatives. These two are informally regarded as lexicon 1 and lexicon 2 respectively.

This study alms to shed light on foreign elements in language in general, and in particular Arabic elements in literary Turkish at a particular period in its history, the so-called post-Tanzimat period. In Chapter I some basic general characteristics of language are given, and the views of linguisticians on foreign elements in language are discussed. In addition the main characteristics of the two languages are summarized, and a short survey of Arabic elements in pre-Tanzimat Turkish is given. A brief account of the Tanzimat movement in Turkish history concludes the chapter. The second chapter provides biographical background of the four authors on whose works this study is largely based. Their views on language and on Arabic elements in Turkish are given so far as these are known. In the Chapters III and IV some Arabic grammatical factors, which have no direct equivalent in Turkish, or are fundamentally different in Turkish, are discussed and their appearance in Turkish is considered. In Chapter V which is on phonetics, the general views of linguisticians are considered with particular care, as linguistics is usually based on 'spoken language' whereas this study is on 'written language'. Then Arabic elements in Turkish are analysed from the phonetic point of view. In Chapter VI word formation is considered, and the1way in which Arabic elements are used for this purpose in' I Turkish is explained. The most common foreign element in linguistics, direct borrowing, is also mentioned. Chapter VTI deals with semantics: attention is concentrated on the change in the meaning undergone by Arabic words when taken into Turkish. The final Chapter stresses the need for further research into the whole subject and the paucity of basic reference material.

No description available.

No description available.

Finnish belongs into the Finno-Ugric language family, and it is spoken by the vast majority of the people living in Finland. The motivation for this thesis is to contribute to the development of a semantic tagger for Finnish. This tool is a parallel of the English Semantic Tagger which has been developed at the University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL) at Lancaster University since the beginning of the 1990s and which has over the years proven to be a very powerful tool in automatic semantic analysis of English spoken and written data. The English Semantic Tagger has various successful applications in the fields of natural language processing and corpus linguistics, and new application areas emerge all the time. The semantic lexical resources that I have created in this thesis provide the knowledge base for the Finnish Semantic Tagger. My main contributions are the lexical resources themselves, along with a set of methods and guidelines for their creation and expansion as a general language resource and as tailored for domain-specific applications. Furthermore, I propose and carry out several methods for evaluating semantic lexical resources. In addition to the English Semantic Tagger, which was developed first, and the Finnish Semantic Tagger second, equivalent semantic taggers have now been developed for Czech, Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, and Welsh. All these semantic taggers taken together form a program framework called the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) which enables the development of not only monolingual but also various types of multilingual applications. Large-scale semantic lexical resources designed for Finnish using semantic fields as the organizing principle have not been attempted previously. Thus, the Finnish semantic lexicons created in this thesis are a unique and novel resource. The lexical coverage on the test corpora containing general modern standard Finnish, which has been the focus of the lexicon development, ranges from 94.58% to 97.91%. However, the results are also very promising in the analysis of domain-specific text (95.36%), older Finnish text (92.11–93.05%), and Internet discussions (91.97–94.14%). The results of the evaluation of lexical coverage are comparable to the results obtained with the English equivalents and thus indicate that the Finnish semantic lexical resources indeed cover the majority of core Finnish vocabulary.

This thesis is a descriptive grammar of Skolt Saami, a Finno-Ugric language spoken primarily in northeast Finland by less than 400 people. The aim of this thesis is to provide an overview of all the major grammatical aspects of the language. It comprises descriptions of Skolt Saami phonology, morphophonology, morphology, morphosyntax and syntax. A compilation of interlinearised texts is appended. Skolt Saami is a phonologically complex language, displaying contrastive vowel length, consonant gradation, suprasegmental palatalisation and vowel height alternations. It is also well known for being one of the few languages to display three distinctive degrees of quantity; indeed, this very topic has already been the subject of an acoustic analysis (McRobbie-Utasi 1999). Skolt Saami is also a morphologically complex language. Nominals in Skolt Saami belong to twelve different inflectional classes. They inflect for number and nine grammatical cases and may also mark possession, giving rise to over seventy distinct forms. Verbs belong to four different inflectional classes and inflect for person, number, tense and mood. Inflection is marked by suffixes, many of which are fused morphemes. Other theoretically interesting features of the language, which are covered in this thesis, include (i) the existence of distinct predicative and attributive forms of adjectives, (ii) the case-marking of subject and object nominals which have cardinal numerals as determiners, (iii) the marking of negation with a negative auxiliary verb and (iv) the apparent verb-second phenomenon which is observed in clauses displaying an auxiliary verb. Skolt Saami is a seriously endangered language and it is thus hoped that this grammar will serve both as a tool to linguistic researchers and as an impetus to the speech community in any future revitalisation efforts.

Hungarian 'focus position' is typically thought of as a central example of a 'discourse configurational' phenomenon, since it not only involves the expression of information-structural (or 'discourse semantic') meaning through the manipulation of word order but also interacts syntactically with other elements of the sentence. In this thesis, I argue that this kind of phenomenon highlights fundamental theoretical problems with conventional assumptions about the relationships between linguistic form and different kinds of meaning and demonstrate that these problems have led to empirical inadequacies in the syntactic analysis of Hungarian. I propose an alternative analysis that makes use of a dynamic, incremental parsing-based approach to grammar, which in turn allows for the influence of inferential pragmatic operations (investigated in terms of Relevance Theory) at all stages in the process of interpreting linguistic form. This opens up possibilities of structural and interpretive underspecification that allow for the interpretation of the 'focus position' to be unified with the information-structural interpretation of sentences that do not contain a syntactically focused expression. This analysis explains the interaction of syntactic foci with other pre-verbal items. The burden of explanation is thus shifted away from specialised, abstract syntactic representations and onto independently necessary aspects of cognitive organisation. The use of 'discourse semantic' primitives---whether in terms of focus or exhaustivity---to encode the effects of the 'focus position' is shown to be both theoretically problematic and empirically inadequate. The information-structural meanings associated with the position must be viewed not as the input to interpretive processes but instead as the result of inferential processes performed in context. Reanalysis of the syntactic evidence shows the relevant position to be not merely pre-verbal, but underlyingly pre-tense, showing that the unmarked position of the main verb is essentially the same as that of syntactically focused expressions. This leads to an analysis whereby both 'neutral', topic-comment readings and cases of narrow focus emerge from inferences over a common interpretive procedure. This procedure is identified as 'main predication': the point in the parsing of a sentence at which the application of a single predicate effects the conversion of a mere description of an event into a truth-conditional assertion. Main predication is represented using neo-Davidsonian, event-based semantics (the effect of the main predicate being equivalent to that of the application of an existential quantifier over an event variable in the neo-Davidsonian approach) and made dynamic by the use of the epsilon calculus. This analysis predicts the postposing of any (otherwise pre-tense) 'verbal modifier' (VM) in the presence of a syntactic focus and the apparent information-structural ambiguity of VMs when they are pre-tense. Certain constraints on the distribution of quantifiers are also predicted, one such constraint being adequately characterisable only within a semantically underspecified, procedural account. The behaviour of the negative particle "nem" is also given a maximally simple explanation. The apparently variable scope of the negative operator is explicable without ad hoc syntactic mechanisms: the apparent wide scope reading associated with 'sentential' negation follows inferentially from narrow scope negation of temporal information. The syntactic positions of negation are predictable on this basis. In addition, the assumption of consistent narrow scope negation correctly predicts that VMs must postpose or receive a narrow focus reading in the presence of "nem".

Η παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία επικεντρώνεται στη διερεύνηση της επικινδυνότητας του αμιάντου. Για αυτόν, το λόγο πραγματοποιήθηκε μελέτη για τυχόν ύπαρξη ινών αμιάντου τόσο σε δείγματα πετρωμάτων που προέρχονται από το οφιολιθικό σύμπλεγμα του Γοματίου (Aνατολική Χαλκιδική) όσο και σε δείγματα αέρος που προέρχονται από την ευρύτερη περιοχή του Δρέπανου Αχαΐας καθώς παλαιότερα σε αυτήν την περιοχή δραστηριοποιούταν το εργοστάσιο παραγωγής αμιαντοτσιμέντου Ινοτσιμέντ Α.Ε. Αρχικά, γίνεται αναφορά στα ορυκτά του αμιάντου, στις φυσικοχημικές ιδιότητες αυτών, στις διαφορές ανάμεσα στα δύο είδη αμιάντου και στις χρήσεις αυτών. Στη συνέχεια πραγματοποιείται περιγραφή των επιπτώσεων του αμιάντου στην υγεία και παρατίθενται μία σειρά από ασθένειες οι οποίες είναι επικίνδυνες εως και θανατηφόρες για τον άνθρωπο. Έπειτα, γίνεται έκθεση κάποιων βασικών άρθρων της κείμενης ελληνικής νομοθεσίας που αφορά τον αμίαντο. Συγκεκριμένα, αναφέρονται άρθρα τα οποία πραγματεύονται: την προστασία των εργαζομένων, τις γενικές υποχρεώσεις των εργοδοτών, τις μετρήσεις και τον έλεγχο του περιβάλλοντος χώρου εργασίας, την προστασία του καταναλωτικού κοινού κ.α. Για την αξιολόγηση της ύπαρξης ινών αμιάντου από πετρώματα του οφιολιθικού συμπλέγματος του Γοματίου, πραγματοποιήθηκε μία σειρά από εργαστηριακές μελέτες οι οποίες είχαν ως στόχο τον προσδιορισμό του είδους του αμιάντου που ανιχνεύτηκε καθώς και το ποσοστό αυτού στα συγκεκριμένα πετρώματα. Αναλυτικότερα, έγινε πετρογραφική μελέτη σε οκτώ δείγματα σερπεντινιτών τα οποία αναλύθηκαν μακροσκοπικά και μικροσκοπικά (με τη χρήση πολωτικού μικροσκοπίου). Στη συνέχεια , πραγματοποιήθηκε ακτινολογική μελέτη των δειγμάτων με τη χρήση της περιθλασιμετρίας ακτίνων Χ και τον προσδιορισμό των ορυκτών με τη βοήθεια του λογισμικού προγράμματος ΕVA. Τέλος, με τη χρήση της ηλεκτρονικής μικροσκοπίας και του ανεξάρτητου λογισμικού πακέτου Sigma Scan προσδιορίστηκε το ποσοστό των ινών αμιάντου. Για την αξιολόγηση της ύπαρξης ινών αμιάντου στο Δρέπανο Αχαΐας, πραγματοποιήθηκε υπαίθρια διερεύνηση της περιοχής και συλλογή δειγμάτων με τη χρήση αντλίας δειγματοληψίας αέρα. Στη συνέχεια, πραγματοποιήθηκε διαφανοποίηση των δειγμάτων με τη μέθοδο ακετόνης-TRIACETIN και ύστερα έλαβε χώρα εξέταση των δειγμάτων αυτών με μικροσκόπιο αντίθετης πόλωσης (PCM) με σκοπό να υπολογιστεί η συγκέντρωση των ινών αμιάντου στον αέρα. / This thesis focuses on investigating the risk of asbestos. For that reason took place a research to detect any asbestos fibers in rock samples from the ophiolite complex of Gomati (Eastern Chalkidiki) and in air samples from the region of Achaia Drepano as previously in this region based the factory <<Ινοτσιμέντ Α.Ε.>>.

La présente thèse traite des chaînes de magasins. Le but est de comprendre comment ces entreprises ont cherché à conquérir les clients (ou consommateurs) des petites villes et des villages, territoires inexplorés de l’histoire du commerce de détail et de la consommation. La notion de « conquête des clients » désigne deux activités fondamentales du commerce de détail. La première est de mettre les marchandises à la disposition des consommateurs : c’est la fonction principale du secteur, selon les économistes. La seconde consiste à capter ces consommateurs. Capter, selon la définition de Franck Cochoy, c’est tenter « d’avoir prise, d’attirer vers soi, de garder ce ou ceux que l’on a attiré(s) » (Cochoy 2004, p. 12). La période considérée court de 1920 à 1960 : ces années voient le développement des chaînes dans les petites localités suisses, et permettent d’aborder la conquête des clients dans des contextes économiques variés, de crise, de guerre et d’abondance. L’ouvrage se base principalement sur l’étude des archives de la société Gonset, active dans la partie occidentale du pays. Il ne s’agit cependant pas seulement d’accumuler des connaissances sur ce détaillant helvétique et ses concurrents. L’objectif est aussi d’enrichir l’histoire du commerce de détail, l’histoire de la consommation et la sociologie économique grâce à l’étude du cas suisse. Ce pays, en effet, est un cadre privilégié pour appréhender la conquête des clients hors des grandes villes : son réseau urbain se compose principalement de petites villes et de villages. / This thesis deals with chain stores. Its goal is to understand how these firms have endeavoured to conquer the customers (or consumers) of small towns and villages, unexplored territories of the history of retail trade and consumption. The concept of “conquest of customers” refers to two basic activities of retail trade. The first is to put the goods at the consumers’ disposal, which is the main function of the sector, according to economists. The second is to “capt” (capter in French) these consumers. To “capt”, according to Franck Cochoy’s definition, means to “try to exert a hold over, or attract to oneself, or retain those one has attracted” (Cochoy 2007, p. 204). The period under examination covers from 1920 through 1960. Those years witness a significant increase of chain stores in small Swiss communities and enable us to approach the conquest of customers in varied economic contexts, in times of crisis, of war and of abundance. This publication is mainly based on the study of Gonset Company’s archives, active in the western part of the country. However, it is not merely a matter of accumulating knowledge about this Swiss retailer and his competitors. The objective is also to enrich the history of retail trade, the history of consumption, and economic sociology thanks to the study of the Swiss case. This country, indeed, is an ideal framework to take account of the conquest of customers outside major cities: its urban network is mainly composed of small cities and villages.