The Murderbot Diaries is a series of science fiction books that deal with the experiences of Murderbot, a human-machine construct. This study uses a corpus stylistics methodology to analyse the language of the books and looks for changes that occur in said language. The paper attempts to answer the question of how the development of the main character can be ascertained through the use of corpus stylistics methods. Using tools like the exploration of keywords, type/token ratio, semantic prosody, clusters and collocations, this thesis attempts to bridge the divide between quantitative and qualitative literary. From the application of these toolkits, insights such as Murderbot’s neurotic actions, love-hate relationships, and unusual vocabulary choices can be observed. This could serve as a starting point for further research that could be carried out on this series so as to arrive at further conclusions that might prove to be useful within the study of the science fiction genre.

L'image édifiante.Le rôle des images de référence en architecture. L'iconographie est la seconde nature de l'architecture, elle est à la fois son double et son ombre car sans cesse l'architecture se manifeste conjointement dans sa matérialité construite et dans des ensembles d'images, qu'ils soient inventaires, documentaires, prospectifs ou publicitaires.Outil de connaissance, de transmission, de diagnostic, d'investigation ou de projet, l'image agit sur l'architecture comme source d'inspiration noétique et poétique. Consciemment ou inconsciemment, la mémoire des images, de toutes les images, architecturales ou non, participe à l'édification des bâtiments.Le principe de la référence visuelle, énoncé d'abord comme le moyen d'échafauder, de démontrer et de partager des règles et des méthodes, s'avère déterminant pour la construction de l'édifice comme pour celle de l'architecte. En effet, dès Vitruve, les architectes furent encouragés à enrichir leurs œuvres de références piochées dans tous les domaines de la connaissance ; chaque corpus visant à mettre en évidence non seulement un savoir disciplinaire mais aussi le stock symbolique sans lequel un architecte ne saurait se situer ni s'affirmer comme tel. Quelles sont les conditions d'apparition de ces images ? Quel rôle jouent-t-elles dans le régime global d’un projet d’architecture ou d’urbanisme ? Comment et quand une image ou un ensemble d’images peuvent-ils inspirer ou déclencher un projet, le contextualiser, en révéler le hors champ, le stimuler ou le sublimer ? Comment ces iconographies agissent-elles sur la formalisation et la transmission des œuvres de ces architectes qui vagabondent entre l’espace et le temps grâce aux images ? Il s'agit aujourd'hui d'approfondir ces questions intuitives, en inscrivant le principe de la référence visuelle dans une perspective historique et théorique qui l'éclaire : les procédures contemplatives et divinatoires, les arts de la mémoire et la pratique contemporaine de l'atlas sont mis à contribution pour vérifier l'hypothèse que ces images pensantes sont pour l'architecte des outils de projet puissamment opérants. / The Edifying Image. The role of reference images within architecture. Iconography is architecture’s second nature; it is both its double and its shadow in that architecture reveals itself jointly in its constructed materiality and within numerous bodies of images, whether they are documentary, archival, prospective or commercial in nature.The image as an instrument of knowledge, transmission, diagnostics, investigation and projection, casts its influence over architecture in the guise of both noetic and poetic inspiration. Consciously or unconsciously memories of images, of all images, architectural or not, play a role in the construction of buildings.The tenet of visual reference, at first formulated as the means to devise, demonstrate and share rules and methods, was soon recognised to be as vital to the construction of an edifice as to the development of the architect himself. Indeed, since the days of Vitruvius, architects have been encouraged to enrich their oeuvres with references gleaned from every field of knowledge; each corpus sought not only to highlight the knowledge within the discipline but also the symbolic stock, without which an architect would not know how to position himself or even affirm himself as such. Under what conditions did these images appear? What role do they play in the overall scheme of an architectural or urban design project? How and when can an image or a series of images inspire or initiate a project, put it in context, reveal its hidden environment, stimulate or even sublime it? How does this iconography affect the formalization and transmission of the works of those architects, who drift between space and time by means of these images?Today it is important to deal with these intuitive questions in greater depth, by placing the principle of visual reference within an historical and theoretical perspective that sheds greater light on the subject: the contemplative and divinatory procedures, the art of recollection and the contemporary practice of atlas making are all called upon to test the hypothesis that these thinking images are to the architect, highly effective tools for his projects.

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the synchronic variation in usage of the word bro in English speaking TV shows that aired 2017, by extracting data from The TV Corpus. In today’s society bro is becoming more and more frequent in use and the increase seems to be partly due to the high level of nuance the word has. It can be used in several situations. This is shown in the results where the categories of gender, age, race/ethnicity, relationship and context are presented. Combined, the examined material shows that the most common situation for the usage of bro is a white adult male saying it to his white adult male friend in a work-related context. This suggests a trend where bro has developed from only meaning brother to also mean friend or more specifically, male friend, nowadays. This kind of development is not unusual for clipped words, that is, shortened words that retain a meaning similar to the original word.  The results of this study suggest that bro is becoming more integrated into the language and that bro seems to be a word tied to a masculine stereotype. However, further studies are needed to determine all the nuances of the word bro and how it will continue to evolve in the future.

No description available.

Overall patterns of language use variation across oral proficiency levels of 1,243 Japanese EFL learners and 20 native speakers of English using the linguistic features set from Biber (1988) were investigated in this study. The approach combined learner corpora, language processing techniques, visual inspection of descriptive statistics, and multivariate statistical analysis to identify characteristics of learner language use. The largest spoken learner corpus in Japan, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Japanese Learner English (NICT JLE) Corpus was used for the analysis. It consists of over one million running words of L2 spoken English with oral proficiency level information. The level of the material in the corpus is approximately equal to a Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) range of 356 to 921. It also includes data gathered from 20 native speakers who performed identical speaking tasks as the learners. The 58 linguistic features (e.g., grammatical features) were taken from the original list of 67 linguistic features in Biber (1988) to explore the variation of learner language. The following research questions were addressed. First, what linguistic features characterize different oral proficiency levels? Second, to what degree do the language features appearing in the spoken production of high proficiency learners match those of native speakers who perform the same task? Third, is the oral production of Japanese EFL learners rich enough to display the full range of features used by Biber? Grammatical features alone would not be enough to comprehensively distinguish oral proficiency levels, but the results of the study show that various types of grammatical features can be used to describe differences in the levels. First, frequency change patterns (i.e., a rising, a falling, a combination of rising, falling, and a plateauing) across the oral proficiency levels were shown through linguistic features from a wide range of categories: (a) part-of-speech (noun, pronoun it, first person pronoun, demonstrative pronoun, indefinite pronoun, possibility modal, adverb, causative adverb), (b) stance markers (emphatic, hedge, amplifier), (c) reduced forms (contraction, stranded preposition), (d) specialized verb class (private verb), complementation (infinitive), (e) coordination (phrasal coordination), (f) passive (agentless passive), and (g) possibly tense and aspect markers (past tense, perfect aspect). In addition, there is a noticeable gap between native and non-native speakers of English. There are six items that native speakers of English use more frequently than the most advanced learners (perfect aspect, place adverb, pronoun it, stranded preposition, synthetic negation, emphatic) and five items that native speakers use less frequently (past tense, first person pronoun, infinitive, possibility modal, analytic negation). Other linguistic features are used with similar frequency across the levels. What is clear is that the speaking tasks and the time allowed for provided ample opportunity for most of Biber’s features to be used across the levels. The results of this study show that various linguistic features can be used to distinguish different oral proficiency levels, and to distinguish the oral language use of native and non-native speakers of English. / Teaching & Learning

Mors mystica es un estudio sobre los límites de la Modernidad. Estudiando el declive del feudalismo, se cuestionan los lindes –e incluso la validez misma– de las categorías de lo moderno y lo premoderno. Un análisis de las ontologías lingüísticas y las teorías de la subjetividad de los místicos mediterráneos e, hispanos en particular, permite sistematizar un paradigma alternativo de modernidad definido en simultánea oposición al feudalismo saliente y al incipiente individualismo del sujeto autónomo moderno. La existencia de esta cosmovisión al alba de la Modernidad triunfante desvela la complejidad histórica de un proceso que no es ni puramente secuencial ni impecablemente hermético; muestra, empero, que entre los siglos XI y XVII la identificación entre lo premoderno y el discurso teológico no es menos problemática que la de lo moderno y lo secularizante. Atendiendo a este concepto de mors mystica entendida como producción en negativo de una subjetividad ya no feudal, pero no exactamente moderna en sentido que habría de adoptar, el presente ensayo propone leer la predilección de la mística por el deceso como una original vía para propiciar la formación de subjetividades contraindividualistas. En el contexto del Bajomedievo y las Guerras Europeas de Religión, los místicos conciben un individuo definido mediante el acto de muerte –del ego– por amor al otro. / Spanish

<p>  </p> <p>The present thesis presents a study conducted using corpus linguistics and variationist methods in order to explore the system of intensifiers in a corpus of Middle High German. The data consisted of a sample of adjectives from different texts from the Middle High German period (1050-1350). The study of intensifiers (e.g. <em>sehr ‘</em>very<em>’, wirkick ‘</em>really<em>’, ganz ‘</em>quite<em>’</em>) has been a topic of much discussion, mainly in English. On the contrary, there is little research on the system of German intensifiers (e.g. <em>sehr, wirklich, ganz</em>). The analysis of data resulted in amplifiers being the most frequent type of intensifiers. Besides the thesis drew the distribution of the most frequent variants found in the sample, and the overall occurrence of intensifiers among different text types. Furthermore, the results suggest that the rate of intensification is relatively low and remains low throughout most of the Middle High German period, but is higher in courtly texts and religious legends than in other types of texts. These findings were comparable to the previous research done, suggesting that intensification of adjectives in German behaved similarly to what have been observed in English. </p>

The lack of terminology in Zulu can be overcome if it is developed to meet international scientific and technical demands. This lack of terminology can be traced back to the absence of proper language policy implementation with regard to the African languages. Even though Zulu possesses the basic elements that are necessary for its development, such as orthographical standards, dictionaries, grammars and published literature, a number of problems exist within the technical elaboration and standardisation processes: * Inconsistencies in the application of standard rules, in relation to both orthography and terminology. * The lack of standardisation of the (technical) word-formation patterns in Zulu. (Generally the role of culture in elaboration has largely been overlooked). * The avoidance of exploiting written technical text corpora as a resource for terminology. (Text encoding by means of corpus query tools in term extraction has just begun in Zulu and needs to be properly exemplified). * The avoidance of introducing oral technical corpora as a resource for improving the acceptability of technical terminology by, for instance, designing a type of reusable corpus annotation. This study contributes towards solving these problems by offering a practical approach within the context of the real written, standard and oral Zulu language, mainly within the medical terminological domain. This approach offers a reusable methodological foundation with proper language exemplification that can guide terminologists in terminological research, or to some extent even train them, to achieve effective technical elaboration and eventual standardisation. This thesis aims at attaining consistent standardisation on the orthographical level in order to ease the elaboration task of the terminologist. It also aims at standardising the methods of word- (term-) formation linking them to cultural factors, such as taboo. However, this thesis also emphasises the significance of using written and oral technical corpora as terminology resource. This, for instance, is made possible through the application of corpus linguistics, in semi-automatic term extraction from a written technical corpus to aid lemmatisation (listing entries) and in corpus annotation to improve the acceptability of terminology, based on the comparison of standard terms with oral terms. / Linguistics / D. Litt et Phil. (Linguistics)

“Creating Community in Isolation: The History of Corpus Christi’s Molina Addition, 1954-1970” examines the history of the Molina Addition in Corpus Christi, Nueces County, Texas, and its serving district, the West Oso Independent School District, from 1954 to 1970. Specifically, this essay begins with an analysis of the elite-driven campaign to annex the blighted Molina Addition in September and October 1954. The city intended to raze the neighborhood and develop middle-class homes in place of the newly annexed neighborhood. Following the annexation of the Molina Addition, African American and ethnic Mexican residents initiated protracted struggles to desegregate and integrate schools that served their area, the West Oso Independent School District, as detailed in the chapter, “The West Oso School Board Revolution.” The chapter examines the electoral “revolution” in which Anglo rural elites were unseated from their positions on the school board and replaced by African American and ethnic Mexican Molina Addition residents. The third chapter, “Building Mo-Town, Texas,” focuses on residents’ struggle to install indoor plumbing, eliminate pit privies, construct paved roads, and introduce War on Poverty grants to rehabilitate the neighborhood. This chapter also offers a glimpse into the social life of Molina youth during the 1960s.