A comunicação multilíngue é uma tarefa cada vez mais imperativa no cenário atual de grande disseminação de informações em diversas línguas. Nesse contexto, são de grande relevância os sistemas de tradução automática, que auxiliam tal comunicação, automatizando-a. Apesar de ser uma área de pesquisa bastante antiga, a Tradução Automática ainda apresenta muitos problemas. Um dos principais problemas é a ambigüidade lexical, ou seja, a necessidade de escolha de uma palavra, na língua alvo, para traduzir uma palavra da língua fonte quando há várias opções de tradução. Esse problema se mostra ainda mais complexo quando são identificadas apenas variações de sentido nas opções de tradução. Ele é denominado, nesse caso, \"ambigüidade lexical de sentido\". Várias abordagens têm sido propostas para a desambiguação lexical de sentido, mas elas são, em geral, monolíngues (para o inglês) e independentes de aplicação. Além disso, apresentam limitações no que diz respeito às fontes de conhecimento que podem ser exploradas. Em se tratando da língua portuguesa, em especial, não há pesquisas significativas voltadas para a resolução desse problema. O objetivo deste trabalho é a proposta e desenvolvimento de uma nova abordagem de desambiguação lexical de sentido, voltada especificamente para a tradução automática, que segue uma metodologia híbrida (baseada em conhecimento e em córpus) e utiliza um formalismo relacional para a representação de vários tipos de conhecimentos e de exemplos de desambiguação, por meio da técnica de Programação Lógica Indutiva. Experimentos diversos mostraram que a abordagem proposta supera abordagens alternativas para a desambiguação multilíngue e apresenta desempenho superior ou comparável ao do estado da arte em desambiguação monolíngue. Adicionalmente, tal abordagem se mostrou efetiva como mecanismo auxiliar para a escolha lexical na tradução automática estatística / Crosslingual communication has become a very imperative task in the current scenario with the increasing amount of information dissemination in several languages. In this context, machine translation systems, which can facilitate such communication by providing automatic translations, are of great importance. Although research in Machine Translation dates back to the 1950\'s, the area still has many problems. One of the main problems is that of lexical ambiguity, that is, the need for lexical choice when translating a source language word that has several translation options in the target language. This problem is even more complex when only sense variations are found in the translation options, a problem named \"sense ambiguity\". Several approaches have been proposed for word sense disambiguation, but they are in general monolingual (for English) and application-independent. Moreover, they have limitations regarding the types of knowledge sources that can be exploited. Particularly, there is no significant research aiming to word sense disambiguation involving Portuguese. The goal of this PhD work is the proposal and development of a novel approach for word sense disambiguation which is specifically designed for machine translation, follows a hybrid methodology (knowledge and corpus-based), and employs a relational formalism to represent various kinds of knowledge sources and disambiguation examples, by using Inductive Logic Programming. Several experiments have shown that the proposed approach overcomes alternative approaches in multilingual disambiguation and achieves higher or comparable results to the state of the art in monolingual disambiguation. Additionally, the approach has shown to effectively assist lexical choice in a statistical machine translation system

Работа посвящена теоретическому обоснованию, разработке и экспериментальной проверке методики формирования англоязычной лексической компетенции средствами динамического оценивания. В первой части работы рассматриваются теоретические вопросы методики обучения английской лексике, исследуются современные методы оценивания уровня лексической компетенции учащихся. Особое внимание уделяется методике, базирующейся на применении динамического оценивания при обучении иностранному языку в целом, и лексике в частности. Во второй части работы описывается эксперимент, целью которого является исследование влияния динамического оценивания на усвоение новых слов при обучении лексике английского языка. Для проверки эффективности разработанной методики в работе проводится сравнение результатов применения двух разных методик: традиционной (в контрольной группе) и разработанной (в экспериментальной группе). Для проведения обучения в экспериментальной группе была разработана и применена специальная процедура динамического оценивания, включающая пять шагов, применяемых в строго определенной последовательности, чтобы соответствовать концепции «зоны ближайшего развития» Выготского. В качестве инструмента для отбора и проверки качества усвоения новой лексики в работе используется тест, базирующийся на применении шкалы Vocabulary knowledge scale (VKS) (5-ти уровневая шкала, позволяющая измерить степень знания слова). Для обработки полученных результатов применяются статистические методы. Полученные в ходе эксперимента результаты показали, что применение динамического оценивания действительно оказывает положительное влияние на усвоение новых слов при обучении лексике английского языка и способствует развитию способностей к наиболее эффективному усвоению материала обучающимися. Результаты проведенного исследования могут помочь в разработке эффективных методик преподавания английской языка, в частности, применения мнемотехники для запоминания активной английской лексики. / The paper considers theoretical foundation, development and experimental application of the methodology of English lexical competence formation by means of dynamic assessment. The first part of the paper deals with theoretical issues of English vocabulary teaching and investigates modern methods of assessing lexical competence of students. Emphasis is placed on the methodology based on the use of dynamic assessment in teaching a foreign language in general, and vocabulary in particular. The second part of the work describes the experiment aimed at studying the effect of dynamic assessment on the assimilation of new words while learning English vocabulary. To test the effectiveness of the developed methodology, the work compares the results of the application of two different methods: traditional (in the control group) and dynamic (in the experimental group). To conduct training in the experimental group, a special dynamic assessment procedure was developed and applied, which includes five steps, applied in a strictly defined sequence in order to correspond to the concept of Vygotsky's "Zone of proximal development". The Vocabulary knowledge scale (VKS) (5-level scale, allowing to measure the degree of knowledge of the word) test is used as a tool for selecting and testing the quality of mastering the new vocabulary. Statistical methods are used to process the results. The results of the experiment demonstrated positive effect of application of dynamic assessment on the assimilation of new words when teaching English vocabulary. Dynamic assessment contributes to the development of the ability to most effectively assimilate the material by students. The results of the study can help to develop effective methods of teaching English, for example, the use of mnemonic techniques to memorize active English vocabulary.

This literature-based thesis studies the phenomenon of the regular plural inside compounds according to Giegerich’s (1999) stratal model of English morphology. The strata of his model are defined by their bases: stratum 1 is root-based and stratum 2 is word-based. The model overcomes the failings associated with earlier stratal models defined by their affixes (e.g., Kiparsky, 1982). However, assigning compounding and the regular plural to the same word stratum following Giegerich’s (1999) model leaves an open question in terms of what restricts the interaction between both rules to prevent the generation of ill-formed compounds such as *toys box and *trucks driver. Another question emerges: Should the regular plural inflection be assigned to stratum 2? This question is important because the answer affects how we discuss the interaction between the regular plural and compounding. For example, how do we account for the interaction between a stratum-2 rule and a syntactic rule if we are not dealing with an interaction of two lexical rules at the same stratum? This thesis challenges the theory that inflectional morphology is separate from the lexicon (Anderson, 1988, 1982; Perlmutter, 1988) with supporting evidence from the properties of the possessive inflection. This research contributes significantly to the literature in its analysis of a number of compounds within texts extracted from books, which demonstrates that the internal regular plural morpheme has an evident semantic function that restricts it from appearing inside compounds (that is, on stratum 2 of the base-driven stratification model). The study thereby challenges Lieber and Štekauer’s (2009) view that the internal regular plural morpheme is purposeless and therefore should be regarded as a linking element. I also argue that the possessive inflection is assigned to stratum 2 and can interact with compounding to form possessive compounds, but is restricted by the semantic feature of the non-head element.

<p>Bilingualism and its effect on individuals have been studied within different disciplines. Although the first psychological study of bilingualism was couducted by Cattell as early as 1887, only a few studies have exclusively investigated the effect of bilingualism on memory systems’ functioning. In the field of cognitive psychology of bilingualism, there is some evidence for the positive influence of bilingualism on children’s cognitive ability across various domains but there is little knowledge about the relationship between bilingualism and memory in a lifespan perspective. This thesis’s main aim was to investigate memory systems’ functioning and development in bilingual individuals. To this end, two studies were performed: a cross-sectional study of bilingual children (Study I) and a longitudinal study of young and older adults (Study II). The purpose of Studies I and II was to determine whether there are differences between monolinguals and bilinguals regarding various memory systems’ functioning. Study I compared monolingual and bilingual children’s performance on episodic and semantic memory, and Study II investigated performance on episodic and semantic memory in bilingual younger and older adults. Specifically, these studies aimed to examine a) which memory systems will be affected more as a function of language, and b) to what extent the differences would manifest themselves during a subject’s lifespan. The purpose of Study III was to explain the relation among word representations, lexical access and lexical selection in a bilingual word production paradigm. In this study, a model of bilingual production was developed to explain the results and clarify the role of automatic and controlled processes in using two languages. The results of Studies I and II showed a superiority of bilinguals over monolinguals as well as a variation of association between memory performance and bilingualism across different periods of adulthood. It appears that the lifelong experience of managing two languages enhances control processes, which in turn play an important role in enhancing memory performance. Using a “dual mechanism model”, Study III explains the efficiency of inhibitory processing when having two languages activated.</p>

There are now extensive behavioral and neuropsychological evidence to indicate that semantic information of a word can be activated without conscious awareness. However, semantic activation alone may not be sufficient for observing semantic priming effects in masked lexical decision task. In the following study, two tasks were used: lexical decision and semantic categorization. Conscious awareness of the prime was systematically manipulated by varying the duration of the prime and by varying the placement of the mask in the prime-target presentation sequence. Priming effects were observed in the semantic categorization task at prime durations of 42 milliseconds but no semantic priming was observed for the same prime duration in the lexical decision task. However, semantic priming effects began to emerge in lexical decision at the longer prime durations (55 & 69 ms) and under the least effective prime-mask presentation sequences. It is proposed that semantic activation alone is not sufficient for semantic priming effects in the lexical decision task but that central executive involvement is necessary, if only at the lowest level, for facilitatory effects to be observed. Furthermore, no such central executive involvement appears to be required for the semantic categorization task. The priming effects obtained in this task is interpreted in terms of a "decision priming" effect.

Understanding interactions among words is fundamental for natural language applications. However, many statistical NLP methods still ignore this important characteristic of language. For example, information retrieval models still assume word independence. This work focuses on the creation of lexical affinity models and their applications to natural language problems. The thesis develops two approaches for computing lexical affinity. In the first, the co-occurrence frequency is the calculated by point estimation. The second uses parametric models for co-occurrence distances. For the point estimation approach, we study several alternative methods for computing the degree of affinity by making use of point estimates for co-occurrence frequency. We propose two new point estimators for co-occurrence and evaluate the measures and the estimation procedures with synonym questions. In our evaluation, synonyms are checked directly by their co-occurrence and also by comparing them indirectly, using other lexical units as supporting evidence. For the parametric approach, we address the creation of lexical affinity models by using two parametric models for distance co-occurrence: an independence model and an affinity model. The independence model is based on the geometric distribution; the affinity model is based on the gamma distribution. Both fit the data by maximizing likelihood. Two measures of affinity are derived from these parametric models and applied to the synonym questions, resulting in the best absolute performance on these questions by a method not trained to the task. We also explore the use of lexical affinity in information retrieval tasks. A new method to score missing terms by using lexical affinities is proposed. In particular, we adapt two probabilistic scoring functions for information retrieval to allow all query terms to be scored. One is a document retrieval method and the other is a passage retrieval method. Our new method, using replacement terms, shows significant improvement over the original methods.

This dissertation addresses an unanswered question in Arabic psycholinguistics. Arabic words are characterized by their nonconcatenative structure, in which a consonantal root that encodes the main semantic content is interleaved with a derivational pattern (called "binyan", pl. "binyanim"), which is typically vocalic but may also contain consonantal elements and contributes grammatical information. The canonical example of the Semitic root and binyan system is the combination of root /ktb/ which denotes the broad semantic sense of "writing" with verbal binyan /CaCaC/ (with Cindicating a root consonant) to form [katab] "he wrote" and with nominal place binyan/maCCaC/ to form [maktab] "office". Although significant work has been done on the psycholinguistic reality of Arabic morphemes by exploring various phonological, morphological and semantic features across numerous experimental modalities in both the visual and auditory domains (Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson, 2004, 2005, 2011), no study has investigated the roles of base/morpheme frequency and surface/word frequency and their implications for underlying morphological structure in the lexicon of Arabic as has been done for English, Dutch, and Finnish (Baayen et al., 1997; Alegre and Gordon, 1999; New et al., 2004; Taft, 1979, 2004). Competing models of word recognition propose various integrations of morphology. Whole-word models suggest that there are no separate representations for morphemes, and that the co-activation of related words can be attributed to similarity in form and meaning (Norris and McQueen, 2008; Tyler et al., 1988). Decomposition models posit that words are recognized by accessing the words' constituent morphemes (Meunierand Segui, 1999; Taft et al., 1986; Wurm, 2000). Hybrid models incorporate multiple pathways to recognition. Words are either recognized holistically or by their constituent morphemes depending on multiple factors (Balling and Baayen, 2008; Taftand Nguyen-Hoan, 2010; Lopez-Villasenor, 2012). Of most relevance to the current study is the role of the productivity of the words' derivational affixes: words with unproductive affixes are processed holistically whereas words with productive affixes are processed as a function of their morphemes. This dissertation presents results from four auditory lexical decision experiments performed with native Jordanian speakers in Amman, Jordan, and provides evidence that binyan productivity determines whether the frequency of the base morpheme affects the speed of recognition. By manipulating root and word frequency for three binyanim, one more productive and two less productive, I provide evidence that verbs in the productive binyan are fully decomposable during lexical access and verbs in less productive binyanim are recognized holistically. For a more productive binyan, I examine Binyan I of the form /CaCaC/, and two less productive binyanim are Binyan VIII of the form /iCtaCaC/and Binyan X of the form /staCCaC/. These results together support a hybrid model of lexical access in which some words are recognized via decomposition into the morphemes they are composed of, and others are recognized by their whole word form. These results are consistent with those of Balling and Baayen (2008); Taft and Nguyen-Hoan (2010); Bertramet al. (2000), among others, as derivational affix productivity is the deciding factor determining whether a word will be recognized holistically or decomposed during lexical access.

The thesis deals with the relation of semantic opposition in the discourse of advertising. The aim of the thesis is to identify the techniques of advertising language based on the use of antonymy and describe their manipulative strategies. The thesis consists of two parts. The first is theoretical. It introduces the topics of advertising language and antonymy. It presents the views on definition of advertising, describes the influence of media on the language of advertising and summarizes the ba- sic advertising principles. Further, it defines antonymy and presents basic classification systems of opposites. Second part starts with the description of the research methodology and the database of advertisements created for the sake of the thesis. The following chapter analyses dis- tribution of classes of antonymy and describes individual advertising techniques and their manipulative force.

Notre travail de recherche est consacré à l'analyse, d'un point de vue aspectuel, du rôle de la morphologie dérivationnelle dans le processus de construction du sens aspectuel lexical. Le préfixe RE- est très intéressant parce que sa structure processuelle est complexe. Il implique une relation entre un procès présupposé et un procès posé et cette relation est établie par un troisième procès, intermédiaire, qui crée un lien de continuité, de reprise ou d'interruption. L'activation de ces liens est notamment dépendante du sens de la base lexicale du dérivé et du sens aspectuel de cette même base. Le préfixe RE- est donc un opérateur de dérivation dont une des valeurs est aspectuo-temporelle et agit sur deux dimensions de la temporalité linguistique : la première est quantitative, il s'agit de l'itération ; la seconde est qualitative, elle traduit la relation temporelle établie entre les trois procès signifiés par le dérivé. / Our research is centered on the analysis of the role of morphological derivation in the elaboration of the lexical aspectual meaning. The prefix RE- is particularly interesting because of the complexity of its processual structure. RE- implies a relation between a presupposed process and a posited process, and this relation is established by a third - intermediate - process, which can signify continuity, resumption or interruption. The activation of this relation depends in particular on the meaning of the lexical base of the derived term and on the aspectual meaning of this base. The prefix RE- is thus an operator of derivation which possesses a temporal/aspectual value acting on two dimensions of linguistic temporality : the first, iteration, is quantitative, and the second is qualitative, as it expresses the temporal relation established between the three processes signified by the derived term.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Psychology / Richard J. Harris / The use of different language learning methods for the purposes of acquiring foreign language vocabulary has long been explored but studies have often failed to take into account the potential effects on lexical processing. The current study examined the effectiveness of the Keyword, Context and Paired-Associate learning methods in acquiring foreign language vocabulary, but primarily focusing on the lexical and conceptual organization effects that each method may have on a foreign language learner. Three main theories/models (i.e., Word Association, Concept Mediated and Revised Asymmetrical Hierarchical) have been used to explain the organization of bilingual lexical, conceptual stores and connections between each store, but studies have not examined the addition of a third language (i.e., L3) and the potential connections created between new L3 and the two existing language stores. It was predicted that since low-proficiency bilinguals would create lexical models which heavily rely on translation equivalents, thus, the use of non-elaborative learning methods would assist in creating only lexical translation links, while more sophisticated elaborative methods would be successful in creating direct access to the conceptual meaning. The current study further explored the potential effects of language learning methods on comprehension ability, requiring the creation of situation models for comprehension. Finally, the present study explored the immediate and delayed effects of language learning methods on both vocabulary acquisition and comprehension ability. Results from the current study indicated that all learning methods were successful in creating and conceptual connections between the languages and the conceptual store, while Keyword learners had significantly better scores on certain trial types. Differences in terms in lexical and conceptual strength are suggested since differences in RTs and scores were found between some of the learning methods. Furthermore, in terms of comparisons across time, repeated testing learners attained better scores on all trial types in comparison to learners who were only tested at Time 2. Lastly, when assessing if lexical links could be created to a non-associated highly fluent second language known by the bilingual, results indicated that each language learning method successfully created such lexical connections, but these links were weaker in strength than those of the base language that was used during learning. Based on the current results, new models of lexical access are proposed which vary based on the use of language learning methods. The current findings also have strong implications and applications to the field of foreign language acquisition, primarily for bilingual language learners acquiring an L3.