This thesis is a study of the proverbs of the nmampurusi in Northern Ghana. The Imampuruli language belongs to the Mole-Dagbani group. The power of the chiefdom of nmampurugu was greater than it is now, and is still declining. This work first tries to assess the importance of oral art and especially of proverbs in African culture. There follows the discussion of practical fieldwork methodology and some linguistic notes on the vernacular in which the collection has been made. The collection itself is a selection from 4,000 proverbs, leaving out repetitions and variants. It gives the vernacular text with a free translation, and more or less detailed explanations to show the meaning and possible context of each proverb. There are cross references and indications of frequency of occurence. The last part is devoted to a commentary on the collection. The main conclusion is that, because of the basically dynamic nature of the proverbs, no static analysis can ever be adequate. Consequently the work provides some preliminary indications towards a discovery of generative rules operating in proverbs within the semantic, structural, social and valuational dimensions, with examples from the text. The conclusion is that these proverbs cannot be studied in a detached way but that one must enter into dialogue with them.

The classification of late medieval literary cycles according to localised subject matter, such as the 'Matter of France', the 'Matter of Britain' and the 'Matter of Rome', has proven to be an enduring one in modern scholarship. This model has also been applied to Old Norse saga literature, particularly the fornaldarsögur, within which the 'Matter of Hrafnista' and the 'Matter of Gautland' have been identified as prominent examples. The latter cycle consists of Gautreks saga, Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar and Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, all of whose heroes are descended from and primarily based in Gautland (modern-day Götaland in central-southern Sweden). This cycle has not been explored in any great depth, to the same extent that other 'Matters' have been, and it is therefore the primary focus of this dissertation. The dissertation begins with a brief overview of previous scholarship on the ancient and medieval Götar and Götaland. This subject has long been of interest to scholars, not least because of the common identification of the Götar with the Geatas mentioned in Old English poetry, most notably Beowulf, but the matter is made notoriously problematic by sparse and sometimes unreliable evidence. Following this overview, introduction is made to Michel Foucault's theory of the heterotopia, a spatial framework which has only begun to be applied to Old Norse literature within the last decade. Indeed, this dissertation marks the first time that Foucault's heterotopia has been used as the theoretical framework for an extensive analysis of any Old Norse texts. An important contention of this dissertation is that the depictions of Gautland in Old Norse literature collectively fulfil Foucault's six criteria of the heterotopia, and furthermore that Gautland can productively be considered a literary heterotopia. Accordingly, after establishing the theoretical framework, I explore the main patterns of conceptualisation found in the depictions of Gautland across the main genres of Old Norse literature. The purpose of this survey is to provide context for a closer analysis of the construction of Gautland in the three 'Matter of Gautland' fornaldarsögur. Because these three sagas involve Gautish heroes and, accordingly, feature Gautland as an important space, they inevitably reflect a significant depth of conceptualisation of the region, and the rest of this dissertation employs the heterotopic framework to illuminate the ways in which this conceptualisation is manifested. Each of the three 'Matter of Gautland' sagas is analysed in turn, and certain aspects of the construction of Gautland, which happen to correspond strongly to individual principles of Foucault's heterotopia, are identified as common to all three. All three sagas deploy allusions to prominent traditions associated with Gautland, especially to the celebrated Brávellir and Ragnarr loðbrók legends, the effect of which is to imbue the Gautland of each saga with legendary veracity. All three sagas also construct Gautland within their own system of relational geopolitical space, although these constructions are manifested differently in each saga. Indeed, as well as common aspects, each saga also naturally contains many points of idiosyncratic distinction and nuance in their construction of Gautland as well. Both Gautreks saga and Hrólfs saga are argued to reflect contemporary Icelandic anxieties through structural aspects of their depictions of Gautland, while Gautreks saga and, to a lesser extent, Bósa saga, display a fundamental and significant interest in the geographical landscape of Gautland. In their emphatic correspondence with each individual principle of Foucault's heterotopia, the collective perspectives of the three 'Matter of Gautland' sagas provide unique insight into the medieval Icelandic conceptualisation of Gautland as a literary space.

This thesis presents a detailed description and analysis of several topics in the grammar of Bago, a Gur language spoken in the central-eastern region of Togo. It covers areas in the phonology, syntax, and semantics of the language. The first chapter provides background information about the history and culture of the Bago people prior to giving an overview of the geographical location and classification of the language, previous literature, data collection, and the methodology used in this thesis. The second chapter describes the sound system and syllable structure of the language. It also analyzes the vowel harmony and tonal patterns in Bago nouns and verbs. Chapter three gives a brief overview of the grammar of Bago, and chapter four describes number suffixes, semantics and phonological processes observed in the five classes of nouns. The fifth chapter is concerned with personal pronouns, as well as the question of how to encode reflexivity and reciprocity. A discussion of (in)definiteness encoding is presented in chapter six, which also contains a description of the demonstrative morphemes in the language. Chapter seven deals with nominal modification expressed in the language by means of adjectival roots, predicative nominals, and intransitive verbs. In chapter eight, we investigate the distribution of the copular verbs and the distinction between dynamic and stative verbs. A preliminary description and analysis of the factative and the imperfective aspects are presented in chapter nine, while the following chapter aims to describe modality and conditionality. Chapter eleven is concerned with clausal and constituent negation. The final chapter examines lexical, morphological, and syntactic causative constructions in Bago.

This thesis focuses on the Israeli detective genre. The Israeli detective genre is quite new in Israeli literature, not many works of the detective genre exist in Israel before 1980's, and even today, the detective genre is not so widespread in Israel. The thesis introduces four authors who represent the period from the beginnings of Israeli detective fiction until today. Batya Gur and Shulamit Lapid were chosen as representatives of the older period, Jair Lapid and Dror Mishani for the 21st century. The works chosen for the analysis are those which are parts of the detective series. Another criterion is the detective has to operate in Israel. The aim of the thesis is to outline the development of the detective novel in Israeli based on the example of selected works of these significant authors. In the opening, the thesis shortly presents a detective novel as a literary genre and also, as a literary genre in Israel. The main body of the thesis consists of four chapters on the authors and their approach to the detective genre while investigating several aspects. Firstly, it focuses on the characters who appear in the chosen novels as a detectives, criminals, and other characters. Secondly, the thesis concentrates on the background of the crime and investigation; where and under which circumstances...

Thesis (M.A.E.T.)--Covenant Theological Seminary, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-83).

Thesis (M.A.E.T.)--Covenant Theological Seminary, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-83).

Thesis (doctoral)--Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [290]-303).

This study analyses the intellectual output of Adya Gur Horon (Adolphe Gourevitch, 1907-1972), a Ukrainian-born, Russian-speaking, French-educated ideologue of modern Hebrew nationalism, and one of the founding fathers of the anti-Zionist ideology known as "Canaanism", whose heyday was mid 20th-century Israel. The dissertation's starting point is that if the "Canaanites" (otherwise the Young Hebrews) declared themselves to be above all a national movement independent of, and opposed to, Zionism, they should be analysed as such. In treating "Canaanite" support for the existence of an indigenous Hebrew nation in Palestine/Israel as equally legitimate as the Zionist defence of the Jews' national character (both ultimately constituting "imagined communities"), this work comes to the conclusion that the movement should indeed be classified as a fully-fledged alternative to Zionism; not a radical variation of the latter, but rather a rival national ideology. My chief assertion is that the key to a proper understanding of "Canaanism" is Horon's unique vision of the ancient Hebrew past, which constitutes the "Canaanite" foundational myth that stands in sharp contradiction to its Zionist counterpart. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Zionism and "Canaanism" are incompatible not only because they differ over history, but also because some of the basic socio-political notions they employ, such as national identity or nation-formation, are discordant. A methodology such as this has never before been applied to the "Canaanite" ideology, since most of those who have studied the movement treat "Canaanism" either as an artistic avant-garde or as a fringe variation of Zionism. This study demonstrates that, despite being sidelined by most researchers of "Canaanism", Adya Horon is beyond doubt the leading figure of the "Canaanite" movement. I believe that only by giving due weight to the divergence in national historiographies between "Canaanism" and Zionism can we grasp the former's independence from the latter, both intellectually and politically, without negating "Canaanism's" complex relationship with Zionism and the sometimes significant overlaps between the two. The dissertation makes systematic use of many newly discovered materials, including Horon's writings from the early 1930s to the early 1970s (some of them extremely rare), as well as his private archive. My study thus sits at the intersection of three fields of academic enquiry: nationalism studies; language-based area studies; and historiographical discourse analysis.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:48:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LeonardoAC.pdf: 6046620 bytes, checksum: ad9a9332aa6ef3e81e83f93b75f55894 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-05-19 / The Reconfigurable Computing is an intermediate solution at the resolution of complex problems, making possible to combine the speed of the hardware with the flexibility of the software. An reconfigurable architecture possess some goals, among these the increase of performance. The use of reconfigurable architectures to increase the performance of systems is a well known technology, specially because of the possibility of implementing certain slow algorithms in the current processors directly in hardware. Amongst the various segments that use reconfigurable architectures the reconfigurable processors deserve a special mention. These processors combine the functions of a microprocessor with a reconfigurable logic and can be adapted after the development process. Reconfigurable Instruction Set Processors (RISP) are a subgroup of the reconfigurable processors, that have as goal the reconfiguration of the instruction set of the processor, involving issues such formats, operands and operations of the instructions. This work possess as main objective the development of a RISP processor, combining the techniques of configuration of the set of executed instructions of the processor during the development, and reconfiguration of itself in execution time. The project and implementation in VHDL of this RISP processor has as intention to prove the applicability and the efficiency of two concepts: to use more than one set of fixed instructions, with only one set active in a given time, and the possibility to create and combine new instructions, in a way that the processor pass to recognize and use them in real time as if these existed in the fixed set of instruction. The creation and combination of instructions is made through a reconfiguration unit, incorporated to the processor. This unit allows the user to send custom instructions to the processor, so that later he can use them as if they were fixed instructions of the processor. In this work can also be found simulations of applications involving fixed and custom instructions and results of the comparisons between these applications in relation to the consumption of power and the time of execution, which confirm the attainment of the goals for which the processor was developed / A Computa??o Reconfigur?vel ? uma solu??o intermedi?ria na resolu??o de problemas complexos, possibilitando combinar a velocidade do hardware com a flexibilidade do software. Uma arquitetura reconfigur?vel possui v?rias metas, entre estas o aumento de desempenho. Dentre os v?rios segmentos em rela??o ?s arquiteturas reconfigur?veis, destacam-se os Processadores Reconfigur?veis. Estes processadores combinam as fun??es de um microprocessador com uma l?gica reconfigur?vel e podem ser adaptados depois do processo de desenvolvimento. Processadores com Conjunto de Instru??es Reconfigur?veis (RISP -Reconfigurable Instruction Set Processors) s?o um subconjunto dos processadores reconfigur?veis, que visa como meta a reconfigura??o do conjunto de instru??es do processador, envolvendo caracter?sticas referentes aos padr?es de instru??es como formatos, operandos, e opera??es elementares. Este trabalho possui como objetivo principal o desenvolvimento de um processador RISP, combinando as t?cnicas de configura??o do conjunto de instru??es do processador executadas em tempo de desenvolvimento, e de reconfigura??o do mesmo em tempo de execu??o. O projeto e implementa??o em VHDL deste processador RISP tem como intuito provar a aplicabilidade e a efici?ncia de dois conceitos: utilizar mais de um conjunto de instru??o fixo, com apenas um ativo em determinado momento, e a possibilidade de criar e combinar novas instru??es, de modo que o processador passe a reconhec?-las e utiliz?-las em tempo real como se estas existissem no conjunto de instru??o fixo. A cria??o e combina??o de instru??es ? realizada mediante uma unidade de reconfigura??o incorporada ao processador. Esta unidade permite que o usu?rio possa enviar instru??es customizadas ao processador para que depois possa utiliz?-las como se fossem instru??es fixas do processador. Neste trabalho tamb?m encontram-se simula??es de aplica??es envolvendo instru??es fixas e customizadas e resultados das compara??es entre estas aplica??es em rela??o ao consumo de pot?ncia e ao tempo de execu??o que confirmam a obten??o das metas para as quais o processador foi desenvolvido

The Íslendingasögur, written in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, primarily describe the lives of Icelanders during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Many of these lives involve encounters with foreign peoples, both abroad and in Iceland, who are portrayed according to stereotypes which vary depending on the origins of those people. Notably, inhabitants of the places identified in the sagas as Írland, Skotland and Vínland are portrayed as being less civilized than the Icelanders themselves. This thesis explores the ways in which the Íslendingasögur emphasize this relative barbarity through descriptions of diet, material culture, style of warfare, and character. These characteristics are discussed in relation to parallel descriptions of Icelandic characters and lifestyle within the Íslendingasögur, and also in the context of a tradition in contemporary European literature which portrayed the Icelanders themselves as barbaric. Innovatively, comparisons are made with descriptions of barbarians in classical Roman texts, primarily Sallust, but also Caesar and Tacitus. Taking into account the availability and significance of classical learning in medieval Iceland, the comparison with Roman texts yields striking similarities between Roman and Icelandic ideas about barbarians. It is argued that the depiction of foreigners in the Íslendingasögur is almost identical to that of ancient Roman authors, and that the medieval Icelanders had both means and motive to use Roman ideas for inspiration in their own portrayal of the world. Ultimately it is argued that when the medieval Icelanders contemplated the peoples their Viking Age ancestors encountered around the world, they drew on classical ideas of the barbarian to complement the mix of oral tradition, literary inspiration and contemporary circumstance that otherwise form the Íslendingasögur.