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A collection of poems.

This study aimed to examine how variable exposure to language statistical patterns affects reading behaviour, specifically, eye-movements during reading. The statistical patterns of language affect how individuals store, produce and comprehend language. When reading, individuals with greater linguistic proficiency typically have been shown to rely less on language statistical information compared to less proficient readers. Based on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, however, it was hypothesized that spelling bias, a print-specific probabilistic cue, may only be utilized for representations with sufficient strengths of representation - through increased exposure to print in individuals, or through higher frequency of occurrence for individual words, since these individuals, and these words, would be expected to have representations of high quality in the reader’s mental lexicon. Undergraduate students with varying amounts of reading experience were presented with sentences containing English noun-noun compound words that varied in spelling bias, i.e. the probability of occurring in text either as spaced (window sill) or concatenated (windowsill). Linear mixed effect multiple regression models were fitted to the eye-movement data and demonstrated that compound words presented in their more supported format - i.e. the format with the highest bias, were read faster, but that this effect was modulated by reading experience, as measured by a test of exposure to print, as well as by word frequency. Only individuals with the most reading experience, and words with the highest frequencies benefited from this facilitatory effect of bias. This distributional property can thus be used during reading, but only when individuals' lexical representations are of sufficiently high quality. The results of this study thus suggest that future research considering the relationship between linguistic properties and reading must consider individual differences in reading skill and exposure. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

This master´s dissertation deals with the French compound words in ad text in the age of 70 years and after 2000. Dissertation is divided into two parts. The theoretical part describes the function of language in advertising, the levels of language, theories of advertising communication. Then, we defined the main elements of the magazine and compound words.In the second part, we continue with the analysis of lexemes stripped of Elle magazine, designed for both the period and taking into account promotional incentives for different types of compounds.

Cette étude porte sur la traduction de substantifs composés en japonais et en anglais vers le français. Ces deux langues-là permettent de produire des compositions enchaînées des types « NN », « NNN » etc. alors que cette forme de composition est beaucoup moins productive en français où l’on préfère souvent utiliser une préposition pour lier plusieurs substantifs. Dans la traduction de titres de brevets, souvent consistant entièrement en substantifs composés en japonais et en anglais, comment les traducteurs francophones s’attaquent-ils au problème de cette différence entre la langue source et la langue cible ? Les recherches antérieures ont produit des classifications diverses, parfois interlingues, pour l’analyse de substantifs composés. À partir d’un corpus composé de plus d’une centaine de titres de brevets comprenant plusieurs centaines de substantifs composés traduits par des traducteurs professionnels, ces classifications sont utilisées pour analyser les stratégies auxquelles recourent les traducteurs dans ce contexte très limité. Les résultats montrent entre autres une préférence marquée pour les compositions du type « N de N » en français et mettent au jour l’existence de certaines traductions très bien établies voire figées. / This study addresses the translation of compound nouns from Japanese and English into French. The former two languages allow for the production of concatenated compositions of the types "NN", "NNN" etc. whereas this form of composition is much less productive in French, which often prefers to use a preposition to link multiple nouns. In the translation of patent titles, often consisting entirely of compound nouns in Japanese and English, how do French-speaking translators tackle the problem of this difference between the source language and the target language? Previous research has produced various, sometimes interlingual, classifications for the analysis of compound nouns. From a corpus of more than a hundred patent titles comprising several hundred compound nouns translated by professional translators, these classifications are used to analyze the strategies used by translators in this very constrained context. The results show, among other things, a marked preference for compositions of the "N de N" type in French and reveal the existence of certain very well established or even fixed translations.

Thesis (DLitt (African Languages))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study explores the various elements which appear in compound nouns in Northern Sotho. The purpose of this study fill in an important gap in the Northern Sotho language studies as regards the morphological structure of compound nouns in Northern Sotho. This study is organized as follows: CHAPTER ONE presents an introduction to the study. The introductory sections which appear in this chapter include the aim of the study, the methodology and different views of researchers of other languages on compound nouns. Different categories which appear with the noun in the Northern Sotho compound are identified. CHAPTER TWO deals with the different features of the noun in Northern Sotho. It examines the various class prefixes, nominal stems/roots and nominal suffixes which form nouns. Nouns appear in classes according to the form of their prefixes. The morphological structures of the nouns have been presented. It also reviews the meanings, sound/phonological changes and origins of nouns. CHAPTER THREE is concerned with the nominal heads of compound nouns. It examines compounds that are formed through a combination of nouns, and compounds that are formed from nouns together with other syntactic categories. Arguments which defend the structure of different compounds with nominal heads are presented. CHAPTER FOUR explores compound nouns with verbal heads. It examines various elements of compound nouns with a verb as one of its components. The entire chapter includes examples that illustrate that when a verbal form appears with a noun, it is adapted to a noun by the addition of the relevant prefixes and suffixes. CHAPTER FIVE gives an overview of the findings, and presents the conclusions, of the research on compound nouns in Chapters Three and Four.

In this thesis I aim to improve phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) in a number of ways by the use of text harmonization strategies. PBSMT systems are built by training statistical models on large corpora of human translations. This architecture generally performs well for languages with similar structure. If the languages are different for example with respect to word order or morphological complexity, however, the standard methods do not tend to work well. I address this problem through text harmonization, by making texts more similar before training and applying a PBSMT system. I investigate how text harmonization can be used to improve PBSMT with a focus on four areas: compounding, definiteness, word order, and unknown words. For the first three areas, the focus is on linguistic differences between languages, which I address by applying transformation rules, using either rule-based or machine learning-based techniques, to the source or target data. For the last area, unknown words, I harmonize the translation input to the training data by replacing unknown words with known alternatives. I show that translation into languages with closed compounds can be improved by splitting and merging compounds. I develop new merging algorithms that outperform previously suggested algorithms and show how part-of-speech tags can be used to improve the order of compound parts. Scandinavian definite noun phrases are identified as a problem forPBSMT in translation into Scandinavian languages and I propose a preprocessing approach that addresses this problem and gives large improvements over a baseline. Several previous proposals for how to handle differences in reordering exist; I propose two types of extensions, iterating reordering and word alignment and using automatically induced word classes, which allow these methods to be used for less-resourced languages. Finally I identify several ways of replacing unknown words in the translation input, most notably a spell checking-inspired algorithm, which can be trained using character-based PBSMT techniques. Overall I present several approaches for extending PBSMT by the use of pre- and postprocessing techniques for text harmonization, and show experimentally that these methods work. Text harmonization methods are an efficient way to improve statistical machine translation within the phrase-based approach, without resorting to more complex models.

This study investigates how Persian compound verbs are processed in the mental lexicon, through which we can infer how they are stored, organized, and accessed. The study focuses on investigating Persian compound verbs in light of psycholinguistic theories on polymorphemic word processing as well as linguistic theories of complex predicates. The psycholinguistic section details three experiments addressing the following three research questions: (1) whether compound verb constituents show significant priming in the masked-priming paradigm; (2) whether priming effects are constrained by semantic transparency; and (3) whether priming effects are due to morphological relatedness. This study revealed several findings: (1) compound verbs in Persian are decomposed into their constituents at early stages of processing, (2) at early stages of processing, decomposition is based on purely orthographic similarity, (3) although both transparent and opaque compound constituents were facilitated while processing, transparency had an impact on processing in the early stages of processing. Finally, the findings seem to support a parallel input effect or competing alternative effect for the verbal constituent of the transparent compound verb, as reflected in the slower facilitation for the verbal constituent compared to the nominal constituent. In theoretical studies on Persian complex predicates, the compound verb formation can be either lexical or syntactic. The overall evidence reflected in the linguistic data for Persian complex predicates presented in this dissertation as well as the results of the experimental studies carried out in this research seem to point towards lexical compounding in Persian compound verb formation. The evidence comes from (1) the nominalization of the compound, i.e. the possibility of using the compound verb as a noun; (2) the atelicity feature, i.e. the possibility of using the compound verb after the progressive expression dar haale ‘in the process of’, which indicates an incomplete action; and (3) the nonreferentiality of the nominal constituent in the compound verb, i.e. the nominal constituent cannot be followed by a pronoun that refers to it. On the other hand, the results of the experimental studies reported in this dissertation seem to support a lexical approach to compound verbs in Persian. The technique used in these experimental studies was masked priming paradigm, which investigates the prelexical and lexical processing. The results reveal constituent priming effects under masked priming technique. This indicates that Persian compound verb constituents are accessed at the prelexical stage of processing. Syntactic calculations are said to be done at later stages of processing. Therefore, the early processing of compound verb constituents leads us to the argument for the lexicality of Persian compound verbs.

Lexical compounding refers to the process of word formation through union of lexicalized morphemes. Given that young Chinese readers learn print vocabulary as unanalyzed whole, I am uncertain whether children can effortlessly decompose bound morphemes from disyllabic words for lexical compounding to occur. With this concern, I propose a lexical blending process in parallel with lexical compounding, where words are constructed from previously learnt words that have not yet been decomposed as morphemes. This thesis investigated the mechanisms behind the lexical blending process, as well as its role in word reading among young Chinese readers, in five studies Studies One and Two examined the factors that favor lexical blending to occur. In Study One, I located a high proportion of disyllabic words and bound morphemes within a corpus of Chinese textbooks in Hong Kong. Around 40-50% of disyllabic words in Grade One to Grade Three are composed of one or more bound morphemes, which set a favorable environment for lexical blending to occur. In Study Two, I found that younger readers tended to commit more selection errors, defined as “naming the target character as a character that forms a highly frequent two-character compound word with it” (Shu, Meng, Chen, Luan and Cao, 2005), than older readers during character reading, suggesting that their representations of bound morphemes were not precise. An experiment on morpheme name judgment demonstrated that bound morphemes and low frequency morphemes embedded in high frequency words were most prone to selection errors. I further examined the lexical blending process and its contribution to reading development in Studies Three and Four. Adopting a cross-sequential design in Study Three, I found that lexical blending concurrently and longitudinally predicted Chinese word reading, after lexical compounding and other reading-related variables were partialled out. In Study Four, I located lexical class and structural relation knowledge as significant component skills of lexical blending. The process of lexical blending proceeded first with structural arrangement of words, followed by morphological decomposition and union of morphemes to eventually form a blended word. I also tested Chinese dyslexic readers’ performance on lexical blending in Study Five. Dyslexic readers exhibited difficulties in lexical blending and all the related component skills, when compared with chronological-age (CA) matched controls. Process-wise, the dyslexic readers were weaker than CA controls in both structural arrangement and morphological decomposition, while having particular difficulties in the latter process. I conclude that lexical blending is an important word formation process for young Chinese readers. To aid mastery of lexical blending, readers should be aware of the syntax in phrases and sentences, as it provides cues on structural arrangement of blended words. In addition, I suggest explicit instruction on lexical blending skills in the curriculum, with a particular focus on morphological decomposition, in order to meet the learning needs of dyslexic readers. / published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy