Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-133). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-123).

Thesis--M.A., University of Hong Kong. / Mimeographed.

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This dissertation provides an extensive analysis of how Mandarin, as a tenseless language, conveys futurity. It reveals that futurity in Mandarin is expressed primarily by future adverbials and future forms conveying irrealis modality. Modal auxiliaries and future-oriented verbs are two major types of future forms. It argues that although all the root modals and relevant modal main verbs can refer to the future, some epistemic modals cannot, even though the epistemic modals all allow future interpretation of their complements. The dissertation also investigates the interaction of the future modals and the aspectual viewpoint morphemes in Chinese. The perfective viewpoint morphemes -le and -guo and the imperfective viewpoint morphemes zai and -zhe appear with the future forms only in special contexts. It proposes that the compatibility of -le and -guo with a future form relies on the satisfaction of one of the two conditions: (1) -le and -guo do not share the reference time with the future form, and (2) -le and-guo are not immediately contained in the complement of the future form. Unlike -le and -guo, the appearance of zai and -zhe with a future form pertains to the compatibility of their aspectual meaning with the pragmatic uses of the future morpheme. / text

Assembly planning is difficult and tedious, but is necessary for complex products. This thesis presents a novel approach to automating assembly planning utilizing graph grammars. Computational geometric reasoning is used to produce a label rich graph from a CAD model. This graph is then modified by graph grammar rules to produce candidate assembly sequences which are run in conjunction with a tree search algorithm. An evaluation system then evaluates partial assembly sequences, which are used by the tree- search to find near-optimal assembly sequences. / text

This dissertation is a description of the grammar of Paresi. The Paresi people live in the State of Mato Grosso, near the city of Cuiabá. Paresi belongs to the Arawak family, and it is classified in a branch called Paresi-Xingu (Aikhenvald, 1999; Ramirez, 2001). This language is spoken by approximately 2000 speakers. The data for this thesis were collected mostly in the Formoso area. In this dissertation, I expand on the work of Rowan (1969, 1978, among other works), Silva (2009), and on my own work conducted in my Master's report (Brandão, 2010) in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of aspects of phonology, morphology, and syntax. The grammar is presented in eight chapters and an appendix with text samples. The first chapter includes general information about the speakers and the language. The second chapter describes the sound system. The segmental phonology is simple, with morphophonemic alternations on some roots and morphemes. The third chapter describes the closed words classes (pronouns, demonstratives, indefinites, numerals, quantifiers, postpositions, adverbs, interjections and ideophones). The fourth chapter examines nouns and the structure of noun phrases. The fifth and sixth chapters are descriptions of verb classes, valency, tense, aspect and modality. Verb roots can be intransitive, transitive, or ditransitive. There are three mechanisms to decrease valency and six mechanisms to increase valency. Paresi expresses time through tense, aspect, and temporal adverbs. It also distinguishes three modalities. The seventh chapter is about simple clauses and negation. In this chapter, evidence is presented for describing Paresi as an OV language. Finally, the eighth chapter, on clause combining, describes coordination and the three types of subordination: relative clauses, complementation and adverbial clauses. Grounded primarily in “basic linguistic theory”, this dissertation uses a Functional-Typological linguistic framework, informed by discussions about particular phenomena in the general linguistics literature. / text

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

It is stated that the study of Chinese grammar began after Ma Jianzhong published his Ma’s General Grammar which is considered as the very first book of Chinese grammar in 1898. It was the first time that a complete Chinese grammatical system was introduced and its influence was tremendous. Scholars in China started to pay attention to the study of Chinese grammar, and a number of Chinese grammar books were published at the beginning of 20th Century. These Chinese grammar books introduced grammatical systems similar to that in Ma’s General Grammar. Within these books, New Chinese Grammar by Li Jinxi was the most influential one. As scholars learnt more about grammar, they found the grammatical systems introduced by these two books and also other Chinese grammar books not perfect. They pointed out that these systems were established base on imitation of Western grammatical system and neither of them could fit Chinese language perfectly. Therefore scholars asked for a reform of Chinese grammar in 1930s. A group of scholars in Shanghai, represented by Chen Wangdao, started to discuss how to reform Chinese grammar in October 1938. Chen started the discussion by pointing out that the criterion of distinguishing between a verb and an adjective in Chinese should be different from that in Western languages as an adjective could be used as a predicate in Chinese sentences, while most Chinese grammar books at that time were using that criteria. This reflected defects of these Chinese grammatical systems. Fu Donghua and Jin Zhaozi then announced their own designs of Chinese grammatical system and aroused the attention of other scholars like Fang Guangdao and Zhang Shilu. They joined and contributed a lot in the discussion. The whole discussion had lasted for 4.5 years, and a number of grammatical issues were covered, for example, the object of the study of Chinese grammar, the morphology, the syntax and the establishment of Chinese grammatical system, the criticism of Chinese grammatical systems at that time, and also the relationship between the study of Chinese grammar and other branches of linguistics such as exegesis, etymology and lexicology. The thesis sets to examine different aspects of this Chinese grammar reform. Firstly the thesis discusses how and why this Chinese grammar reform took place, then introduces scholars who took part in it. Next the thesis looks into what scholars discussed, and looks into their proposals in reforming Chinese grammar together with other grammatical issues raised in their discussion. For example, is it practical to combine morphology and syntax of Chinese? Is it appropriate to design one grammatical system for both ancient and modern Chinese languages? How to categorize Chinese words? What should be considered in establishing a better Chinese grammatical system? Scholars shared different opinions on these issues. The thesis comments and criticizes these opinions. The thesis also examines the contribution and the influence of this Chinese reform in order to assess its importance in the history of the study of Chinese grammar. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy