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abstract: The historical study of sentence adverbs has, before now, been based mostly on models that emphasize the pragmatic and discourse-based motivations of processes of grammaticalization. This dissertation breaks from such tradition by exploring diachronic adverb development through syntactic and morphological lenses. A generative, feature-based approach is used that incorporates the cartographic architecture developed by Cinque and combines it with a more phenomenological approach to both grammaticalization and lexicalization. Cinque's hierarchy of speech-act, evaluative, evidential, and epistemic adverbs is analyzed. It is determined (through corpus data) that these subcategories have grown in use primarily during the Modern English era, and particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These four subcategories can be divided into two groups that are more general: speech-act adverbs, which arise from a (conditional) speech-act clause that undergoes ellipsis, and the other three types, which all arise from copula clauses. Each of these two groups is considered, and different methods of reanalysis by speakers are proposed for each. In addition, a revised model for categorizing adverbs is proposed. This model is based on morphological lexicalization (or univerbation) processes, thus accounting for the wide variety of adverbial source materials. Such lexicalization offers a pattern for sentence adverbial formation. Finally, Standard Chinese adverbials are briefly examined, with results indicating that they show very similar signs of lexicalization (within the limits of the writing system). / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2011

Narratives are there in everyone's lives. They are made up of stories that interest us, stories that we want to share with others. However, narrative is not only limited to the written or spoken word. It is made up of a complex system of units and devices which can be explored in many different genres and media. One such medium is Architecture. This thesis is an investigation in decoding the elements that are essential for a narrative. Comparing and analyzing the concept using other medium especially the cinematic medium as a point of reference to understand how it can be applied to architecture. Testing out these discoveries to create a visual arts school in Lugano. / Master of Architecture

Aligning Word2vec word embeddings using a compass in a system of Compass-aligned Distributional Embeddings (CADE) creates stable and accurate temporal word embeddings. This thesis seeks to expand the CADE framework into the area of dynamic topic modeling (DTM), where temporal word2vec embeddings can be used to describe temporally and unsupervised evolving topics. It also seeks to improve upon the CADE framework through a theoretical and experimental exploration of compass parameters, cluster and topic generation techniques, and topic descriptor creation. This method of Temporal Topic Embeddings with a Compass (TTEC) will be compared to other DTM techniques in the ability to create coherent and diverse clusters and will be shown to be competitive compared to traditional and transformer-aided DTM architectures. In addition to a qualitative discussion of results, there will be a political theoretical overview of the nature of this technique and potential use cases, with interviews from political actors of various backgrounds as to how the technique and machine learning as a whole can be used in the organizational setting. / Master of Science / Diachronic word embeddings look at how the context words appear in evolve over time. Dynamic Topic Modeling (DTM) is the ability to computationally discover topics and how they evolve over time. This thesis creates a DTM technique called Temporal Topic Embeddings with a Compass (TTEC) based off diachronic word embeddings, allowing a user to simultaneously look at word and topic evolution over time. There is also an exploration of the use case of TTEC and similar machine learning models within various political organizational settings through interviews.

O objetivo desta dissertação é apontar e descrever problemas de Terminologia referentes à variação diacrônica de uma terminologia, a partir da análise conceitual de duas estruturas referentes a dois modelos de processo (engenho e usina) de uma mesma área técnica - produção de açúcar -, separadas por um espaço determinado de tempo e submetidas a constantes revoluções lingüísticas e culturais. Para tanto, descrevemos quais fatores interferem nessas transformações; em que medida o grau de consolidação de um domínio representa sua sistematicidade; e procuramos comprovar, a partir de pesquisa diacrônica, que a dinâmica dos subsistemas de especialidades renova-se sob as mesmas regras de criação da língua geral. / The aim of this work is to point out and describe Terminology problems related to the diachronic variation of a terminology based on the conceptual analysis of two structures, concerning two process models (sugar plantation and factory) of a same technical area - sugar production, separated by a certain period of time and submitted to constant technological, linguistic and cultural revolutions. For this reason, we described the factors which interfere in those transformations; the manner that the consolidation level of a social sphere represents its systemic regularity; and we tried to prove, based on a diachronic research, that the dynamics of the speciality subsystems has the same functioning of the one that rules the general language.

O objetivo desta dissertação é apontar e descrever problemas de Terminologia referentes à variação diacrônica de uma terminologia, a partir da análise conceitual de duas estruturas referentes a dois modelos de processo (engenho e usina) de uma mesma área técnica - produção de açúcar -, separadas por um espaço determinado de tempo e submetidas a constantes revoluções lingüísticas e culturais. Para tanto, descrevemos quais fatores interferem nessas transformações; em que medida o grau de consolidação de um domínio representa sua sistematicidade; e procuramos comprovar, a partir de pesquisa diacrônica, que a dinâmica dos subsistemas de especialidades renova-se sob as mesmas regras de criação da língua geral. / The aim of this work is to point out and describe Terminology problems related to the diachronic variation of a terminology based on the conceptual analysis of two structures, concerning two process models (sugar plantation and factory) of a same technical area - sugar production, separated by a certain period of time and submitted to constant technological, linguistic and cultural revolutions. For this reason, we described the factors which interfere in those transformations; the manner that the consolidation level of a social sphere represents its systemic regularity; and we tried to prove, based on a diachronic research, that the dynamics of the speciality subsystems has the same functioning of the one that rules the general language.

This paper considers the problem of language change. Linguists must explain not only how languages are learned but also how and why they have evolved along certain trajectories and not others. While the language learning problem has focused on the behavior of individuals and how they acquire a particular grammar from a class of grammars ${cal G}$, here we consider a population of such learners and investigate the emergent, global population characteristics of linguistic communities over several generations. We argue that language change follows logically from specific assumptions about grammatical theories and learning paradigms. In particular, we are able to transform parameterized theories and memoryless acquisition algorithms into grammatical dynamical systems, whose evolution depicts a population's evolving linguistic composition. We investigate the linguistic and computational consequences of this model, showing that the formalization allows one to ask questions about diachronic that one otherwise could not ask, such as the effect of varying initial conditions on the resulting diachronic trajectories. From a more programmatic perspective, we give an example of how the dynamical system model for language change can serve as a way to distinguish among alternative grammatical theories, introducing a formal diachronic adequacy criterion for linguistic theories.

This dissertation provides an account of an often-noted change in the history of French: the shift in the expression of the internal argument of a small class of dynamic two-place verbs best represented by aider ‘to help’ from “dative”, i.e., as an indirect object with the preposition à, to “accusative”, i.e., as a direct object with no preposition. The change does not appear to be correlated with a change in the meaning of the verbs. Traditional commentators have viewed it as random, affecting only a few lexical items, rather than systematic. One of the central results of this thesis is that the valency change affects a class of some twenty verbs at approximately the same period and it follows the same time course. Moreover, three properties distinguish this class of verbs from all others taking indirect objects in French: following current ideas about the syntactic manifestation of verbs and their arguments, they have a non relational argument structure, they do not possess lexical directionality, and they select for first or third order entities. These facts suggest that a structural change underlies the change in the realization of the internal argument. Adopting Lightfoot’s (1999, 2006) “cue-based” approach to language change, it is proposed that the valency change is a result of the loss of a functional item encoding directionality. Directionality is a derived property in Medieval French, available in particular to prepositions. It is demonstrated that when à was able to encode direction, it was also able to license first and third order complements in a broader range of contexts, namely, with aider-type verbs. The loss of this functional item is also correlated with several other structural changes that occurred in the 16th and 17th century.

This dissertation provides an account of an often-noted change in the history of French: the shift in the expression of the internal argument of a small class of dynamic two-place verbs best represented by aider ‘to help’ from “dative”, i.e., as an indirect object with the preposition à, to “accusative”, i.e., as a direct object with no preposition. The change does not appear to be correlated with a change in the meaning of the verbs. Traditional commentators have viewed it as random, affecting only a few lexical items, rather than systematic. One of the central results of this thesis is that the valency change affects a class of some twenty verbs at approximately the same period and it follows the same time course. Moreover, three properties distinguish this class of verbs from all others taking indirect objects in French: following current ideas about the syntactic manifestation of verbs and their arguments, they have a non relational argument structure, they do not possess lexical directionality, and they select for first or third order entities. These facts suggest that a structural change underlies the change in the realization of the internal argument. Adopting Lightfoot’s (1999, 2006) “cue-based” approach to language change, it is proposed that the valency change is a result of the loss of a functional item encoding directionality. Directionality is a derived property in Medieval French, available in particular to prepositions. It is demonstrated that when à was able to encode direction, it was also able to license first and third order complements in a broader range of contexts, namely, with aider-type verbs. The loss of this functional item is also correlated with several other structural changes that occurred in the 16th and 17th century.

The aim of this study is to semantically analyze the use of marked and unmarked adjunct clauses in Middle Egyptian documentary texts in order to investigate the limits of choosing an unmarked form in more informal language use. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used in the analysis. The results show that marked adjunct clauses are more frequent than unmarked, and the choice between these two is to a great extent based on the semantic role of the clause. Additionally, unmarked forms can often be regarded as marked, e.g. by tense or mood, and the overall co(n)text, which indicates that markedness should be seen as a continuum, instead of two polar opposites marked and unmarked. Consequently, the results indicate that markedness – although in different forms – is the norm in non-literary Middle Egyptian texts, thus differing from the official language that is used in literary, royal, and religious texts. Furthermore, the present study has a diachronic dimension. The comparison between texts from the earlier and later Middle Kingdom clearly show the development in the use of adjunct clauses that took place between Old and Late Egyptian, when marked forms eventually became the norm in all language use. / Syftet med denna uppsats är att semantiskt analysera markerade och icke-markerade bisatser i mellanegyptiska dokumentära texter för att klargöra gränserna för användningen av icke-markerade former i ledigare språkbruk. För denna studie tillämpades både en kvalitativ och en kvantitativ metod. Resultaten visar att markerade bisatser är mer frekventa än icke-markerade, och att valet mellan dessa två former i stort sett beror på bisatsens semantiska roll. I många fall kan icke-markerade bisatser dessutom vara mer eller mindre markerade, bl.a. med hjälp av tempus och modus. Därför bör fenomenet markerad och icke-markerad betraktas som ett kontinuum istället för två motpoler. Resultaten tyder med andra ord på att markering – om än på olika sätt – är norm i det mindre formella mellanegyptiska språkbruket. Denna norm skiljer sig i detta avseende från det officiella språkbruket, som är typiskt i bl.a. litterära och religiösa texter. Denna studie innefattar dessutom en diakronisk del. Jämförelsen mellan tidigare och senare texter från Mellersta riket visar tydligt den utveckling i användningen av bisatser som skedde mellan gammalegyptiska och senegyptiska, då markerade bisatser till slut blev norm i allt språkbruk.