In this multi-methodological (Gee, 2011; Hult & D. Johnson, 2015) study, I examine Richard Ruiz's (2014) original concept of the epiphenomenal nature of language in language policy and planning (LPP) across social scales (Hult, 2013) in Hong Kong. While research in Hong Kong has focused on interactions between schools, teachers, students, parents, business, and the government, the work on non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) remains a neglected social scale. Addressing this gap, I examine the role of a local NGO, Hong Kong Unison (Unison), as a social actor involved in the negotiation of language-in-education policies for the city's ethnic minority students. Through the collection of one decade of publically accessible documents, I created a corpus of Unison's work. Corpus linguistics approaches and a wider-angle perspective to critical discourse analysis (cf. Tian, 2006, 2008) were combined in order to highlight salient patterns and discourses within the data (cf. Baker, 2016). Corpus and discursive analyses indicate that Unison is primarily involved in transforming language policies through their active role in increasing public awareness about the social, political, and educational difficulties ethnic minority students encounter in Hong Kong. Furthermore, the NGO’s ideologies reveal the epiphenomenal nature of LPP. Epiphenomenality reflects how decisions made about language are influenced and shaped by non-linguistic phenomena. Unison's negotiation of LPP demonstrates how their decisions about language are connected to issues of equality, justice, economic opportunity, educational attainment, and social advancement. These ideologies manifest themselves in dialogue across social scales, demonstrating Unison's impact in negotiating LPP in Hong Kong. This study, while providing more insight into LPP research by examining the role of a local NGO, continues to raise questions on how to best understand how multiple scales intersect in the policymaking process, and how the epiphenomenal nature of language shapes decision-making.

Commercial aviation is a vital part of the United States economy. It generates over $1 trillion annually, which is more than 5% of the U.S. GDP, and produces approximately 10 million jobs. Every year there is an increase in commercial air traffic. This is attributed to expanding trade between states and other countries, which requires larger amounts of cargo aircraft in operation, and also catering to the growing number of middle and upper class passengers who travel for business and pleasure purposes. A rise in commercial aviation leads to the use of more aviation fuel on a monthly and annual basis. This in turn leads to escalated levels of combustion by-products from jet and turbofan engines into the atmosphere. The negative effects of these by-products range from producing poor air quality and consequent health hazards to contributing to global warming. This study is aimed at assessing the impacts of aircraft emissions on the local air quality in Corpus Christi using the Emissions and Dispersion Modeling System. Flight data for the study was obtained from the Department of Transportation's Research and Innovative Technology Administration. Analyses of the emissions were compared on monthly, annual, engine type and airline provider bases. Climatic, economic and anthropogenic factors were identified in the analyses.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

(in English): French grammars define the word class adverbs as a very heterogeneous set distinguished particularly by its invariability and intransitivity. The aim of this thesis is to study the valency structure of certain French adverbs forming such a subset which to certain extent denies aforesaid definition. Therefore, the definition of adverbial valency and the characteristic of "inheritance" and "fading" of adverbial valency potential after a transformation from verbs and adjectives will be given. The outcomes of the theoretical part will then be verified by analysing the data presented in the electronic dictionary le Petit Robert completed by qualitative and quantitative analyses based on two written French corpuses: Frantext and L'Est Républicain. To describe the "inheritance" and "fading" of valency potential, the same method will be used to depict the set of the adverbs derived from the adjectives, which take prepositional phrases headed by the preposition de as their complement. This work will be based not only on the theory of general linguistics and grammar, but also on the knowledge of mathematical and corpus linguistics. Klíčová slova (anglicky): valence, adverbs, French, corpus linguistics.

This dissertation focuses on Spanish similes with adjective (like feliz como una perdiz) and its equivalents in Czech. First the theoretical frame is sketched: a summary of the evolution and of the actual situation of the investigation in the field of fraseology; a description of the corpora which were used as a source of the data; a characterization of the basic terms connected with the topic; a description of the function of phrasemes and simies in the process of communication; and a summary of some basic thoughts from cognitive linguistics. Then a semantic and contrastive analysis of the simies with selected adjectives (feliz, alegre, triste, tranquilo, furioso) comes. Finally we point out what each comparatum can tell about the meaning of the adjective, what we can tell about the comparata and its selection, and what can be said about the grade of stabilization of the examined simies. Then a tip follows: what more could be explored in this area and that there could be a possibility to use the results of such research for instance while creating a didactic material.

This thesis introduces the W2C Corpus which contains 97 languages with more than 10 million words for each of these languages, with the total size 10.5 billion words. The corpus was built by crawling the Internet. This work describes the methods and tools used for its construction. The complete process consisted of building an initial corpus from Wikipedia, developing a language recognizer for 122 languages, implementing a distributed system for crawling and parsing webpages and finally, the reduction of duplicities. A comparative analysis of the texts of Wikipedia and the Internet is provided at the end of this thesis. The analysis is based on basic statistics such as average word and sentence length, conditional entropy and perplexity. 1

Název práce: Quantifying Determiners from the Distributional Semantics View Autor: Maria Ximena Gutierrez Vasques Katedra: Ústav formální a aplikované lingvistiky Vedoucí diplomové práce: doc. RNDr. Markéta Lopatková, Ph.D. Abstrakt: Distribuční sémanika představuje moderní přístup k zachycení sémantiky přirozeného jazyka. Jedním z témat, kterým zatím v rámci tohoto přístupu nebyla věnována dostatečná pozornost, je možnost automatické detekce logických relací jako vyplývání. Tato diplomová práce navazuje na práci autorů Baroni, Bernar- di, Do and Shan (2012), kteří se zabývají relací vyplývání mezi kvantifikujícími výrazy. Citovaná práce využívá detekce pomocí SVN klasifikátorů natrénavaných na sémantických vektorech reprezentujících relaci vyplývání. Popisované exper- imenty se nezaměřovaly na nastaveni parametrů SVN klasifikátoru, proto se v této práci vracíme k původním experimentům popisujícím relaci vyplývání mezi kvantifikovanýmo jmennými konstrukcemi, navrhujeme nové konfigurace klasi- fikátoru a optimalizujeme nastavení parametrů. Dosaženou přesnost predikce porovnáváme s původními výsledky a ukazujeme, že SVM klasifikátor s kvadrat- ickým polynomiálním jádrem dosahuje lepších výsledků....

The following thesis deals with the topic of the contrast of phrasemes with a constituent black in German and Czech. The first, theoretical part of the thesis seeks to outline the basic terms as well as problematic points of the phraseological domain, which are of importance for the practical part. This concerns the phraseological terminology in general as well as the terminology of the contrastive phraseology. The practical part elaborates on the contrast of five phrasemes, picked from the Deutsch- tschechisches Wörterbuch der Phraseologismen und festgeprägten Wendungen (2010). These phrasemes have been looked up in DeReKo and InterCorp and subsequently analysed from the morpho-syntactic and semantic point of view. The result of this analysis should provide the answer to the question of whether the translation variants in the dictionary correspond with the actual written language usage or whether there is a discrepancy between those two areas.

This article presents the findings of a corpus linguistic analysis of the hashtags #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption, three lexical blends which have recently found widespread use across a variety of online media platforms. Focusing on the social media and microblogging site Twitter, we analyze a corpus of over 20,000 tweets containing these hashtags to examine how discourses of gender politics and gender relations are represented on the site. More specifically, our analysis suggests that users include these hashtags in tweets to index their individual evaluations of, and assumptions about, "proper" gendered behavior. Consequently, their metadiscursive references to the respective phenomena reflect their beliefs of what constitutes appropriate (verbal) behavior and the extent to which gender is appropriated as a variable dictating this behavior. As such, this article adds to our knowledge of the ways in which gendered social practices become sites of contestation and how contemporary gender politics play out in social media sites.

Introdução: A ereção peniana é um processo neurovascular complexo iniciado através de estimulação sexual, que podem ser fatores físicos ou psicológicos com atuação de substâncias no endotélio vascular resultando no ato sexual satisfatório. Diversos fatores podem interferir de forma negativa no mecanismo fisiológico da ereção peniana, consequentemente, levando a disfunção erétil, tais fatores como hipertensão arterial sistêmica, diabetes mellitus, tabagismo e alcoolismo. O etanol é uma das substâncias mais consumidas nas diferentes sociedades, tornando-se, assim, alvo de inúmeros estudos que visam conhecer sobre sua toxicidade. Apesar da grande associação entre o consumo de álcool e o aumento da incidência da disfunção erétil, os mecanismos moleculares envolvidos ainda são poucos conhecidos. Devido a abundância, os microRNAs tem sido descrito envolvidos em diversas funções fisiológicas dos processos celulares, e além disso estão envolvidos em muitos processos fisiopatológicos, como, por exemplo, a disfunção erétil. Dentre os processos celulares, os microRNAs exercem funções anti ou pró apoptóticas. Embora a conexão dos microRNAs a apoptose esteja bem estabelecida, sua função em resposta a apoptose induzida pelo etanol permanece em grande parte desconhecida. Objetivos: Avaliar o mecanismo de apoptose, pela expressão de AIF e PARP, assim como dos seus microRNAs reguladores: miR-145, miR-210 e miR-486, nos corpos cavernosos de ratos submetidos a modelo de \"alcoolismo semivoluntário\". Material e métodos: Foram utilizados 12 ratos Wistar divididos em dois grupos: controle (C) e tratado com etanol (A) a 20% durante sete semanas. As amostras dos corpos cavernosos foram preparadas para o estudo morfométrico pela coloração de tricrômico de Masson, para o estudo da expressão protéica de AIF e PARP por imunohistoquímica e para o estudo da expressão gênica no tecido cavernoso do miR- 145, miR-210 e do miR-486, por PCR em tempo real. Resultados: A análise imuhistoquímica mostrou pouca marcação positiva nuclear para a proteína PARP e AIF nos corpos cavernosos dos animais dos grupos controle e tratado com etanol. Após análise da expressão dos microRNAs miR-145, -210 e -486, nos 12 animais estudados, não foram encontrados resultados com diferença estatística significativa entre os grupos controle e alcoolizado. Conclusões: A expressão gênica do miRNA -145 e miRNA-486 foi maior nos animais do grupo tratado com etanol quando comparado aos animais do grupo controle; A expressão gênica do miRNA - 210 foi maior nos animais do grupo controle quando comparado aos animais do grupo tratado com etanol; Foi observada correlação entre a expressão protéica de PARP e AIF e do miRNA -210, ambos com maior marcação positiva no grupo controle. / Introduction: Penile erection is a complex neurovascular process initiated through sexual stimulation, which can be physical or psychological factors with action of substances in the vascular endothelium resulting in the satisfactory sexual act. Several factors can negatively interfere in the physiological mechanism of penile erection, consequently leading to erectile dysfunction, such factors as systemic arterial hypertension, diabetes mellitus, smoking and alcoholism. Ethanol is one of the most consumed substances in different societies, becoming, therefore, the target of numerous studies that aim to know about its toxicity. Despite the large association between alcohol consumption and the increased incidence of erectile dysfunction, the molecular mechanisms involved are still poorly understood. Due to abundance, microRNAs have been described involved in various physiological functions of cellular processes, and in addition are involved in many pathophysiological processes, such as erectile dysfunction. Among the cellular processes microRNAs have anti-apoptotic or pro functions. Although the connection of the microRNAs to apoptosis is well established, their function in response to ethanol-induced apoptosis remains largely unknown. Objectives: To evaluate the mechanism of apoptosis, by the expression of AIF and PARP, as well as of its regulatory microRNAs: miR-145, miR-210 and miR-486, in the cavernous bodies of rats submitted to a model of \"semi-voluntary alcoholism\". Material and methods: 12 Wistar rats were divided into two groups: Control (C) and treated with ethanol (A) diluted 20% for seven weeks. Samples of the corpus cavernosum were prepared for morphometric study by Masson\'s trichrome stain, study for protein expression of CASPASE 3 (pro-apoptotic) by immunohistochemistry and study for gene expression of miRNA-21 (anti-apoptotic) in serum and the cavernous tissue. Results: The immunohistochemical analysis showed little positive nuclear marking for the PARP and AIF protein in the corpus cavernosum of the control and ethanol treated groups. After analysis of miR-145, -210 and -486 microRNA expression in the 12 animals studied, no statistically significant differences were found between the control and alcoholized groups. Conclusions: The gene expression of miRNA-145 and miRNA-486 was higher in the animals of the ethanol treated group when compared to the animals in the control group; Gene expression of miRNA - 210 was higher in the control group than in the animals treated with ethanol; A correlation was observed between the protein expression of PARP and AIF and of the -210 miRNA, both with greater positive marking in the control group.