Research has shown that courts and practising jurists increasingly use social work pre-sentence reports. Pre-sentence reports can be requested from probation officers and social workers in private practice. These reports are prepared with the purpose of assisting courts in determining the most appropriate sentence taking into account the criminal, the victim and the community. Worldwide research as confirmed by this investigation indicates that jurists generally regard the quality of pre-sentence reports as unsatisfactory. This research focussed on jurists' quality grading and their pointing out of shortcomings and problems regarding certain aspects of the pre-sentence report. Twenty respondents took part in this research among whom were advocates (some with senior status), regional magistrates, magistrates and attorneys with experience in the criminal court as well as being experienced in employing pre-sentence reports. The aspects of the pre-sentence reports concentrated on is the report format, report content, the discussion of the facts (evaluation), motivation underlying the recommendations, general appearance, use of assessment instruments, presentation in court, as well as skills and knowledge required to write the reports. The respondents were also requested to indicate they prefer the service of either a probation officer or a social worker in private practice. Their preferences are highlighted and discussed. / Thesis (M.A. (MW))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

A language comprehension mechanism that immediately starts processing language as it is encountered is typically thought of as one that speeds and facilitates spoken language comprehension. However, there exist cases where the earliest parts of a word or phrase encode information that is somewhat at odds with the remainder of the word or phrase in full. Examples of these "potentially misleading" cases include compound words where the initial subpart of the compound belongs to a different syntactic category than the entire compound (e.g., "popcorn", "greyhound"), or noun phrases where the initial element of the phrase signals perceptual properties possessed by the referent of the noun phrase (e.g., some Chinese Cantonese classifier-noun phrases). Using a visual-world methodology, this dissertation explores the kinds of unintended or "impulsive" activation that are triggered when listeners encounter such cases, as well as how syntactic and contextual cues can constraining this impulsive activation. Experiment 1 examines whether hearing compound subparts (e.g., "pop-" in "popcorn") activates conceptual associates across syntactic categories, and Experiment 2 examines whether this activation is moderated by listeners' expectations about the syntactic structure of the sentences they encounter. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate the processing of compounds whose initial subparts correspond to colour terms (e.g., "greyhound"). Experiment 3 explores whether these colour subparts trigger the activation of phrasal-level descriptions of non-target objects in the visual display, and whether this activation is influenced by the presence/absence of motivation to use colour descriptions when naming screen objects. Experiment 4 further explores whether a perceptual mismatch between a target object and the colour term in its name increases this impulsive activation. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates whether listeners use the perceptual information encoded in pre-nominal classifiers in Cantonese Chinese to guide their consideration of referential candidates whose perceptual properties do or do not match the classifier semantics. The findings from this dissertation point to the highly interactive nature of spoken language comprehension, suggesting that the kinds of impulsive activation under current discussion are rampant and automatic, but can also be suppressed to varying degrees by the syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues available to the listener.

Have you ever searched for something on the web and been overloaded with irrelevant results? Many search engines tend to cast a very wide net and rely on ranking to show you the relevant results first. But, this doesn't always work. Perhaps the occurrence of irrelevant results could be reduced if we could eliminate the unimportant content from each webpage while indexing. Instead of casting a wide net, maybe we can make the net smarter. Here, I investigate the feasibility of using automated document summarization and clustering to do just that. The results indicate that such methods can make search engines more precise, more efficient, and faster, but not without costs. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Computational Mathematics / MS / Thesis

The move towards larger vocabulary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems places greater demands on language models. In a large vocabulary system, acoustic confusion is greater, thus there is more reliance placed on the language model for disambiguation. In addition to this, ASR systems are increasingly being deployed in situations where the speaker is not conscious of their interaction with the system, such as in recorded meetings and surveillance scenarios. This results in more natural speech, which contains many false starts and disfluencies. In this thesis we investigate a novel approach to the modelling of speech corrections. We propose a syntactic model of speech corrections, and seek to determine if this model can improve on the performance of standard language modelling approaches when applied to conversational speech. We investigate a number of related variations to our basic approach and compare these approaches against the class-based N-gram. We also investigate the modelling of styles of speech. Specifically, we investigate whether the incorporation of prior knowledge about sentence types can improve the performance of language models. We propose a sentence mixture model based on word-class N-grams, in which the sentence mixture models and the word-class membership probabilities are jointly trained. We compare this approach with word-based sentence mixture models.

This research is a practical attempt to develop academic writing pedagogy at secondary level in New Zealand because from interviews with teachers, personal experience and literature in the professional journal for teachers of English in New Zealand, English in Aotearoa, it appears that this would be a useful enterprise. Literature relating to this, and extending to the related contexts of the UK and Australia has been reviewed. The approach taken is an investigation of top-rated senior secondary writing in subject English, using elements of Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The concepts of SFG chiefly drawn upon, namely, Theme and linguistic metafunctions, and their application to the data are presented and explained. This grammatical model was chosen because it allows the interface of grammatical structure and linguistic function to be explored, which in turn permits insight into how the qualities of top-rated writing may be formulated grammatically. This insight may then become part of teaching resources in academic writing by way of both pre- and in-service training material for teachers. Over 100 top-rated English literature essays (graded by teachers) were collected from students, via their schools, so that the data obtained were authentic. Two samples were collected: timed and untimed writing. Each sentence of each essay was typed into one of nine Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, representing locations within the essay. The nine locations were: three introduction locations: initial sentence, medial sentences, terminal sentence; three paragraph locations (all paragraphs in the body of the essays, not introductions or conclusions): initial sentence, medial sentences, terminal sentence; and, three conclusion locations: initial sentence, medial sentences and terminal sentence. The initial grammatical elements and their metafunction(s) for each sentence were categorised. Percentages in each category for each location were calculated so that individual locations could be compared for grammatical and metafunctional characteristics. Grouped locations were also considered where this seemed felicitous; for instance, introductions were compared to conclusions or medial sentences compared to boundary sentences (initial and terminal). Comparisons were also made between the timed and untimed samples. The results showed that some grammatical structures could be associated with particular grouped locations and metafunctional characteristics were not independent of location. The research was also able to suggest grammatical means to achieve metafunctional effects that align with descriptors for writing given by examination boards. For example, clear, logical organisation of writing is highly valued by examination boards. This is achieved by means of elements that perform the textual linguistic metafunction. A variety of grammatical elements to perform this function and their most prominent locations were identified. It is intended that the findings may be a highly directed way to help teachers address some of the writing challenges faced by their students at secondary level.

This research is a practical attempt to develop academic writing pedagogy at secondary level in New Zealand because from interviews with teachers, personal experience and literature in the professional journal for teachers of English in New Zealand, English in Aotearoa, it appears that this would be a useful enterprise. Literature relating to this, and extending to the related contexts of the UK and Australia has been reviewed. The approach taken is an investigation of top-rated senior secondary writing in subject English, using elements of Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The concepts of SFG chiefly drawn upon, namely, Theme and linguistic metafunctions, and their application to the data are presented and explained. This grammatical model was chosen because it allows the interface of grammatical structure and linguistic function to be explored, which in turn permits insight into how the qualities of top-rated writing may be formulated grammatically. This insight may then become part of teaching resources in academic writing by way of both pre- and in-service training material for teachers. Over 100 top-rated English literature essays (graded by teachers) were collected from students, via their schools, so that the data obtained were authentic. Two samples were collected: timed and untimed writing. Each sentence of each essay was typed into one of nine Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, representing locations within the essay. The nine locations were: three introduction locations: initial sentence, medial sentences, terminal sentence; three paragraph locations (all paragraphs in the body of the essays, not introductions or conclusions): initial sentence, medial sentences, terminal sentence; and, three conclusion locations: initial sentence, medial sentences and terminal sentence. The initial grammatical elements and their metafunction(s) for each sentence were categorised. Percentages in each category for each location were calculated so that individual locations could be compared for grammatical and metafunctional characteristics. Grouped locations were also considered where this seemed felicitous; for instance, introductions were compared to conclusions or medial sentences compared to boundary sentences (initial and terminal). Comparisons were also made between the timed and untimed samples. The results showed that some grammatical structures could be associated with particular grouped locations and metafunctional characteristics were not independent of location. The research was also able to suggest grammatical means to achieve metafunctional effects that align with descriptors for writing given by examination boards. For example, clear, logical organisation of writing is highly valued by examination boards. This is achieved by means of elements that perform the textual linguistic metafunction. A variety of grammatical elements to perform this function and their most prominent locations were identified. It is intended that the findings may be a highly directed way to help teachers address some of the writing challenges faced by their students at secondary level.

This thesis analyses 'incomplete sentences' in languages which utilise distinctively agglutinative components in their morphology. In the grammars of the languages dealt with in this thesis, there are certain types of sentences which are variously referred to as 'elliptical sentences' (Turkish eksiltili c�mleler), 'incomplete sentences' (Uzbek to'liqsiz gaplar), 'cut-off sentences' (Turkish kesik c�mleler), etc., for which the grammarians provide elaborated semantic and syntactic analyses. The current work attempts to present an alternative approach for the analysis of such sentences. The distribution of morphemes in incomplete sentences is examined closely, based on which a system of analysis that can handle a variety of incomplete sentences in an integrated manner is proposed from a morphological point of view. It aims to aid grammarians as well as researchers in area studies by providing a simple description of incomplete sentences in agglutinative languages. The linguistic data are taken from Turkish, Uzbek, and Japanese, with special reference to (Bukharan) Tajik.

Les contrariétés de décisions de justice sont extrêmement nocives. D’une part, elles représentent une menace pour la cohérence du droit. D’autre part, elles pèsent lourd sur la situation des parties, mettant ces dernières dans des situations inextricables. En tant que mode juridictionnel de règlement des litiges, l’arbitrage international n’échappe pas à ce phénomène. Au contraire, les spécificités de la matière en font un terrain de prédilection pour le développement des contrariétés de décisions. En effet, les contrariétés résultent de la conduite parallèle de procédures portant sur des questions litigieuses identiques, sur lesquelles sont portées des appréciations divergentes. Or, l’arbitrage international se présente comme un facteur d’aggravation de ces causes classiques de contrariété, à savoir la concurrence juridictionnelle et l’incohérence des solutions. Le risque de contrariété y est à la fois fréquent et varié. Il se présente dans diverses configurations, opposant tantôt des décisions étatiques d’encadrement de l’arbitrage, tantôt une sentence arbitrale et une décision étatique ou encore deux sentences arbitrales.En dépit de la gravité du problème et de la fréquence du risque de contrariété, l’arbitrage international paraît mal armé pour y faire face. Il est confronté d’une part aux limites de l’efficacité des remèdes curatifs, qui se contentent souvent d’écarter la contrariété d’un territoire donné, et, d’autre part aux difficultés de mise en œuvre des remèdes préventifs. / The phenomenon of conflicting decisions is extremely hazardous. On the one hand, they represent a threat to the coherence of the legal systems. On the other hand, it places a burden on the parties, putting them in an inextricable situation. Being a jurisdictional dispute resolution method, international arbitration does not escape this phenomenon. On the contrary, the specificities of arbitration make it the territory of predilection for the appearance of conflicting decisions. In fact, conflicting decisions result from the conduction of parallel proceedings concerning identical issues, which receive a different analysis. International arbitration aggravates the classical causes resulting in conflicting decisions. These causes are the competition between jurisdictions and the incoherence of the solutions.The risk of the existence of conflicting decisions is frequent and it presents itself is several manners. It can oppose national courts’ decisions assisting and controlling the arbitration, an arbitral award and a national court’s decision or even two arbitral awards.Despite the gravity of the problem and the frequency of the risk of having conflicting decisions, international arbitration seems unarmed to deal with it. Firstly, it is confronted with the limited efficiency of the curative solutions, and secondly, with the difficulties of applying preventive solutions.

Magister Artium - MA / Technical documentation comes in a variety of forms such as installation or operation manuals, quick reference guides, maintenance manuals, user manuals, policy and procedure manuals or marketing brochures and flyers (Walsh, 2012). What all these sub-genres have in common is that the texts that correspond to them seek to inform and give instruction about procedures, behaviour and actions related to products (Schäffner & Wiesemann, 2001: 49). Manuals have been described as “the complete reference source for a product’s operation, maintenance and safety” (Cowley & Wogalter, 2011: 1773). For the purpose of this study, we will focus on one form of technical documentation, namely user manuals. The terms “documentation” and “manuals” will be used interchangeably. Although there are probably as many manuals as there are products in our homes, these user manuals have not frequently been the subject of academic study in the South African context. The relative lack of research into user manuals is especially regrettable at a time when new product liability legislation and trade regulations (e.g. the Consumer Protect Act of South Africa, 2008) have enhanced the profile of product manuals in public and regulatory discourse. As a result of this relative neglect, it is not known how understandable, relevant and therefore empowering users of products find these manuals. There is also not much knowledge concerning the level of compliance in manuals to the provisions of product liability legislation. This study therefore proposes to investigate the comprehensibility and usability of user manuals associated with two products (blenders) marketed in South Africa. It will draw on theories and methods of analysis associated with technical writing, analysis of terminological consistency, genre and multimodality, to evaluate the selected manuals from the standpoint of a subset of the criteria listed in Section 22(2) of the Consumer Protection Act of South Africa, No. 68 of 2008, which was later amended in 2011. The methodology for the proposed study will combine text analysis (by the researcher) with comprehension and usability tasks performed by selected participants. Data from these sources will be collated and analysed to determine the conformity of the manuals to criteria in the Consumer Protection Act of South Africa, and the effect the manuals have on product users. Areas for optimising (improving) the manuals will also be identified.

This thesis is focused on the study of restrictive focusing adverbs in the Czech and Spanish languages. The thesis is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. The theoretical part describes the exclusion focusing adverbs in both languages using secondary literature. The practical part uses the parallel corpus to examine what lexical equivalents correspond to individual Czech focusing adverbs, and shows their individual semantic or positional differences in detail.