abstract: Over the centuries, definite articles in Romance languages have expanded their use to include generic, collective, and abstract nouns, essentially becoming noun markers. This usage is not confined to just a few languages, either, but is found in most, if not all, Romance languages, major and minor. This thesis examines the question of how this came to be, whether through diffusion from one language to all others, or through independent parallel development. I first trace the history of definite articles in three major Romance languages, French, Spanish, and Italian, starting with the emergence of the definite article in Late Latin as it derived from Classic Latin demonstratives. It includes an analysis of the use of definite articles in six works of literature, one in each language from the late thirteenth century, and one in each language from around the year 1500. The results show definite articles were used more frequently than expected in the earlier Spanish work, perhaps hinting at diffusion from Spain. Nevertheless, placing these results in historical context, I argue that this use arose through independent parallel development through the process that gave birth to definite articles in the first place - grammaticalization. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2019

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There are four phenomena that are particularly troublesome for theories of ellipsis: <br>the existence of sloppy readings when the relevant pronouns cannot possibly be bound; an ellipsis being resolved in such a way that an ellipsis site in the antecedent is not understood in the way it was there; an ellipsis site drawing material from two or more separate antecedents; and ellipsis with no linguistic antecedent. <br>These cases are accounted for by means of a new theory that involves copying syntactically incomplete antecedent material and an analysis of silent VPs and NPs that makes them into higher order definite descriptions that can be bound into.

This study deals with the Definiteness Effect (DE) in Chinese you existential sentences from pragmatic perspectives and the scope is confined to the formal written style with discourse environments. The data used for analysis is the United Daily News Corpus and the data selection is restricted to the definite NPs which are considered unacceptable in you existential sentences: proper names, pronouns, demonstratives, universal quantifications, most-NPs, and superlative. The data for analysis in this study consist of 119 natural occurrences and the results reveal that definite NPs can occur in you existential sentences and the contexts where they appear consist of adjunct clauses and complement clauses embedded under the matrix verb. It is also observed that you existential sentences can assert the existence of entities or events and definite NPs can represent given information. I suggest that the Definiteness Effect is a misnomer and the restriction imposed on you existential sentences is derived from the non-application of ¡§identification¡¨ in existential sentences. Definite NPs are only allowed in you existential sentences when they are used to identify the entities. If the postverbal NPs are to introduce or present the entities into the discourse, definite NPs are ruled out. In addition, it is argued that if the definite NPs are anaphoric and thus given information, they are used to draw the addressee¡¦s attention to the presence of entities or events; namely, they serve as focusing topics. It seems odd to view them only as topic-introducing constructions.

Zugl.: München, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2009

The definite integral has an interesting history. In this thesis we trace its development from the time of ancient Greece (500-200 B. C.) until the modern period. We place special emphasis on the work done in the nineteenth century and on the work of Lebesgue (1902). The thesis is divided into four parts arranged roughly chronologically. The first part traces the developments in the period from the fifth century B. C. until the eighteenth century A. D. Secondary sources were used in writing this history. The second part recounts the contributions of the nineteenth century. The original works of Cauchy, Dirichlet, Riemann, Darboux, and Stieltjes are examined, the third part is concerned with the development of measures in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This work leads to the Lebesgue integral. The final part is a brief survey of modern ideas. / Science, Faculty of / Mathematics, Department of / Graduate

This thesis analyzes the linguistic attitudes of natives from Santiago, Chile regarding three linguistic phenomena present in Chilean Spanish of Santiago: the fricative realization of the Spanish /tʃ/, the assibilated realization of /tɾ/ and the use of the definite article before the first names of people. The social factors of age, sex and socioeconomic status are acknowledged as possible factors contributing to the linguistic attitudes of the 64 participants interviewed.

This thesis presents a method to correct for non-positive-definiteness in linear viscoelastic material functions. Viscoelastic material functions for anisotropic materials need to be interconverted in a matrix coefficient prony series form, with a requirement of positive definiteness. Fitting is usually done as a uniaxial prony series, resulting in scalar coefficients. When these uniaxial coefficients are placed in a coefficient matrix, the required positive definiteness cannot be guaranteed. For those matrices that do not meet this requirement, finding the nearest symmetric semi-positive definite form of the matrix results in a viable prony series matrix coefficient with the required positive definiteness. These corrected prony series coefficients allow for material functions to be interconverted with minimal changes to experimental data.

The object of this paper is to define, to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of, and to consider the elementary properties of the Riemann definite integral of a bounded function.

This thesis describes the means of expressing the category of definiteness in Albanian. Inasmuch as this category has not been comprehensively analyzed in this language so far, the starting point of the thesis is the description of this category in English which, by contrast, has been subject to a detailed analysis by many authors from different aspects both theoretical and practical. Keywords: Albanian, English, definite article, definite form, reference, contrastive description