This thesis investigates the representation of Possession both in the lexicon and syntax within the Government and Binding framework. The relevant data come primarily from nominal and copular possessive constructions in French. / It is argued that the canonical realization for possessive NPs in French is the postnominal dative construction: (N NP$ sb{ rm +DAT /}$). Such dative phrases need not be governed by the licensing head; dative case is a default Case in French and the dative NP can be licensed under predication. This follows from the dyadic nature of the possessive relation which triggers binary branching at all levels of representation. / It is further argued that French has two copulas: avoir and etre. Their distributional difference follows from the fact that avoir is a Case assigner. This proposal allows for a unified analysis of possessive etre and avoir constructions in terms of Case. / Extending to ditransitive constructions, alternations of internal arguments can be accounted for if one posits that internal arguments must be thematically linked. The two internal arguments form a Small Clause, and their respective order follows from the nature of their thematic link.

The purpose of this study was to understand the experience of “school shifters” in Manitoba. School shifters are students who transferred from French immersion to French-language schools, thus changing schools and divisions for their secondary education. Through a study of the ethnolinguistic environment surrounding three cases, this study focuses on the local context, social practices, power elements and individual agency surrounding each case. By using a reflexive, ethnolinguistic case study methodology, this study treated each participant as a case while including the researcher’s own experience. Data was collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews (Fontana & Frey, 2000) and analyzed. Results showed that the participants’ experience had an impact on their beliefs with regards to the local context, social practices, power elements, identity formation and the importance of making new friends. This study concludes with a call for action that suggests improvements for French immersion and French-language programs in Manitoba.

No description available.

The study of cognitive representations and processes involved in personal pronoun interpretation allows one to investigate on a small scale the cognitive representations and processes of discourse comprehension. A review of the literature identifies four fundamental processes in personal pronoun interpretation: (A) syntactic constrains application, (B) gender, number, and person matching, (C) inferential selection, and, (D) discourse focus updating. A preliminary data collection from human performance has shown the importance of the application of syntactic constrains for pronoun interpretation. However, the level of specification for the representations and processes attained by the literature review and the preliminary experiment is not sufficient, therefore justifying the development of a more elaborate on-line pronoun interpretation process model. In order to attain a better model of the personal pronoun interpretation processes, the research approach has been to: (A) establish a strong link between the text linguistic features on one hand, and the cognitive representations and processes on the other hand through the construction-interpretation model, and (B) to reduce the gap between the experimental task specificity, and the general cognitive representations and processes assumed by the model. A second experiment, using experimental texts implementing a combination of many levels of representation, verified most of the model predictions. The model of the four interpretation processes as well as the empirical evidences support a point of view where the interpretation process for personal pronouns ends at various points during reading. The compound process of syntactic analysis and progressive semantic interpretation as well as the component processes associated with specific levels of representation explain the partiality of the pronoun interpretation process. The construction-interpretation model shows that the location of the execution of the interpretatio

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, Centre for European Studies and General Linguistics, 2000? / Bibliography: p. 219-229.

Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the Dept. of Educational & Counselling Psychology. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/05/12). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle, Paris III, 1992. / Cover title. Includes bibliographical references (p. [278]-304) and indexes.

Thesis--Leipzig. / Cover title. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [3]-7).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1922. / Vita mounted on last leaf. "Bibliographie": p. [83]-87.

Thesis--Catholic University of America. / Bibliography: p. xi-xxiii.