In this paper, doubling in Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands is discussed. In both sign languages different constituents (including verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and whole clauses) can be doubled. It is shown that doubling in both languages has common functions and exhibits a similar structure, despite some differences. On this basis, a unified pragmatic explanation for many doubling phenomena on both the discourse and the clause-internal levels is provided, namely that the main function of doubling both in RSL and NGT is foregrounding of the doubled information.

Languages differ in the means they avail themselves of for the structural realization of information structure, where available options are word order, prosody and morphology. Turkish has long been characterized as predominantly using word order and its variation in realizing information structure, where certain positions in a sentence are associated with certain pragmatic functions related to information structure. Prosody has been proposed to play only a secondary role interacting with word order. Contrary to this widely established view, the thesis argues that the notion that sentential positions have pragmatic functions and word order variation is a syntactic means to realize these functions can be abandoned, without any loss of explanatory power, in favor of a tune-based perspective where prosody is the sole structural determinant of information structure. In this setting word order variations are argued to be prosodically motivated, in that Turkish phonology imposes some precedence constraints on intonational contours. Word order variation then turns out to be just a consequence as opposed to being a determinant in attaining the right information structure required by the discourse context. To substantiate these claims a tune-based account, based on Steedman&#039 / s account of English information structure, is proposed for the structural realization of information structure in Turkish, whereby information structural units are directly associated with prosodic phrases intonationally marked in certain ways. Validity of the account is tried to be established by intonational analysis of recorded speech data. As for the explanatory value, the information structure phenomena that has received positional explanation in the relevant literature, are tried to be captured only in prosodic terms, without committing to positions, syntactic strategies and such.

This study investigates the problem of quantifier scope ambiguity in natural languages and the various ways with which it has been accounted for, some of which are problematic for monotonic theories of grammar like Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) which strive for solutions that avoid non-monotonic functional application, and assume complete transparency between the syntax and the semantics interface of a language. Another purpose of this thesis is to explore these proposals on examples from Turkish and to try to account for the meaning differences that may be caused by word order and see how the observations from Turkish fit within the framework of CCG.

This thesis is a descriptive study of four contrastive discourse connectives in Turkish. The main aim of this study is to analyze the connectives with respect to their meaning and predicate-argument structure and lay out the similarities and differences among contrastive discourse connectives with the help of quantitative analysis. Although the study is limited with contrastive connectives, it will have implications on how to resolve discourse structure in general and illustrate how lexico-syntactic elements contribute to discourse semantics.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the difference between SVO and OVS sentences in spoken Russian, which is a language with flexible word order although the basic order is SVO. Two experiments were conducted to understand the nature of intonation. Experiment 1 shows that the Subject appears as kontrast in OVS sentences, and as background in SVO sentences. The F0 curve rises in the Object position when the Subject is kontrast in OVS sentences. The analysis of the results of Experiment 2 shows that the initial element of the sentence plays an important role in intonation. When it is kontrasted, it always has higher (Hz) frequency pitch accent than the final element. There is no difference between SVO and OVS sentences in this respect because the initial element has high pitch accent, whether it is the Subject or the Object. The verb has no pitch accent and it has a flat intonation regardless of the WO of the sentence (SVO, OVS).

<p>This project aims to investigate the impact of culture on the results of established methods of usability testing. The production and use of technologically advanced information and communication applications are no longer restricted to the Western world, and there are indications that usability testing procedures developed for use in, e.g., Europe or the US do not give reliable results in countries such as India, China or Malaysia. This project is an in-depth investigation of the cultural specifics that go into usability test situations in three countries: Denmark, India and China. In a second phase we want to explore possible developments of the testing methods in order to avoid cultural bias and produce comparable results across countries of the world</p> / This research is a part of project of Culturalusability. http://culturalusability.cbs.dk/

Text-to-speech synthesis enables the speech-impeded user of an augmentative and alternative communication system to partake in any conversation on any topic, because it can produce dynamic content. Current synthetic voices do not sound very natural, however, lacking in the areas of emphasis and emotion. These qualities are furthermore important to convey meaning and intent beyond that which can be achieved by the vocabulary of words only. Put differently, speech synthesis requires a more comprehensive analysis of its text input beyond the word level to infer the meaning and intent that elicit emphasis and emotion. The synthesised speech then needs to imitate the effects that these textual factors have on the acoustics of human speech. This research addresses these challenges by commencing with a literature study on the state of the art in the fields of natural language processing, text-to-speech synthesis and speech prosody. It is noted that the higher linguistic levels of discourse, information structure and affect are necessary for the text analysis to shape the prosody appropriately for more natural synthesised speech. Discourse and information structure account for meaning, intent and emphasis, and affect formalises the modelling of emotion. The OCC model is shown to be a suitable point of departure for a new model of affect that can leverage the higher linguistic levels. The audiobook is presented as a text and speech resource for the modelling of discourse, information structure and affect because its narrative structure is prosodically richer than the random constitution of a traditional text-to-speech corpus. A set of audiobooks are selected and phonetically aligned for subsequent investigation. The new model of discourse, information structure and affect, called e-motif, is developed to take advantage of the audiobook text. It is a subjective model that does not specify any particular belief system in order to appraise its emotions, but defines only anonymous affect states. Its cognitive and social features rely heavily on the coreference resolution of the text, but this process is found not to be accurate enough to produce usable features values. The research concludes with an experimental investigation of the influence of the e-motif features on human speech and synthesised speech. The aligned audiobook speech is inspected for prosodic correlates of the cognitive and social features, revealing that some activity occurs in the into national domain. However, when the aligned audiobook speech is used in the training of a synthetic voice, the e-motif effects are overshadowed by those of structural features that come standard in the voice building framework. / PhD (Information Technology), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2014

This thesis analyses 'incomplete sentences' in languages which utilise distinctively agglutinative components in their morphology. In the grammars of the languages dealt with in this thesis, there are certain types of sentences which are variously referred to as 'elliptical sentences' (Turkish eksiltili c�mleler), 'incomplete sentences' (Uzbek to'liqsiz gaplar), 'cut-off sentences' (Turkish kesik c�mleler), etc., for which the grammarians provide elaborated semantic and syntactic analyses. The current work attempts to present an alternative approach for the analysis of such sentences. The distribution of morphemes in incomplete sentences is examined closely, based on which a system of analysis that can handle a variety of incomplete sentences in an integrated manner is proposed from a morphological point of view. It aims to aid grammarians as well as researchers in area studies by providing a simple description of incomplete sentences in agglutinative languages. The linguistic data are taken from Turkish, Uzbek, and Japanese, with special reference to (Bukharan) Tajik.

Buscando uma visão mais particular de analisar a estrutura informacional, este trabalho apresenta uma análise do tópico e do foco sentencial em paralelos. A análise da distribuição da informação na sentença, ou estrutura informacional, é uma área ainda nova de pesquisa, com diversos termos, bem como sentidos para esses termos, surgindo frequentemente. A presente análise tem por objetivos dissociar o foco e o tópico como complementos um do outro, mostrando uma possibilidade de análise em que o foco e o tópico ocorrem em seus próprios níveis de análise – os paralelos – o que lhes torna mais autônomos e, ainda assim, mais próximos em determinadas análises. O foco é o elemento que recebe maior destaque neste trabalho, que compara ambos os paralelos, porém analisa mais sentenças e problemas envolvendo questões referentes ao foco, como a existência de um tipo de foco informacional secundário, aqui chamado de foco auxiliar, o qual tem como objetivo indicar uma nova informação não solicitada. Ainda, no tratamento dado ao paralelo do foco, relações entre o foco e implicaturas estão presentes. O tópico, por outro lado, é um elemento que ainda necessita de pesquisas mais profundas, estando aqui apresentado de uma forma mais inicial. O desenvolvimento do tópico aqui presente está relacionado a questões mais básicas, mas nem por isso menos importantes. / Looking for a particular way of analyzing the information structure, this work presents an analysis of sentential topic and focus in parallels. The way information is distributed in a sentences, or its information structure, is a research subject still beginning to develop, with many terms, as well as meanings for those terms, coming up often. This analysis aims at dissociating focus and topic as complements of each other, showing a possibility of analysis in which these elements occur in different levels of analysis – the parallels – which allow them more autonomy, as well as closer in some analysis. Focus is the element that will be dealt with more in the present work, which compares both parallels, but analyzes more sentences and problems concerning the focus, such as the existence of a secondary information focus, which is called auxiliary focus, that aims at providing new information that has not been asked for. Also, in the focus parallel, the relation between focus and implicature is dealt with. Topic, on the other hand, is an element that still needs deeper research, here being introduced concerning more basic problems, but still important ones.

Buscando uma visão mais particular de analisar a estrutura informacional, este trabalho apresenta uma análise do tópico e do foco sentencial em paralelos. A análise da distribuição da informação na sentença, ou estrutura informacional, é uma área ainda nova de pesquisa, com diversos termos, bem como sentidos para esses termos, surgindo frequentemente. A presente análise tem por objetivos dissociar o foco e o tópico como complementos um do outro, mostrando uma possibilidade de análise em que o foco e o tópico ocorrem em seus próprios níveis de análise – os paralelos – o que lhes torna mais autônomos e, ainda assim, mais próximos em determinadas análises. O foco é o elemento que recebe maior destaque neste trabalho, que compara ambos os paralelos, porém analisa mais sentenças e problemas envolvendo questões referentes ao foco, como a existência de um tipo de foco informacional secundário, aqui chamado de foco auxiliar, o qual tem como objetivo indicar uma nova informação não solicitada. Ainda, no tratamento dado ao paralelo do foco, relações entre o foco e implicaturas estão presentes. O tópico, por outro lado, é um elemento que ainda necessita de pesquisas mais profundas, estando aqui apresentado de uma forma mais inicial. O desenvolvimento do tópico aqui presente está relacionado a questões mais básicas, mas nem por isso menos importantes. / Looking for a particular way of analyzing the information structure, this work presents an analysis of sentential topic and focus in parallels. The way information is distributed in a sentences, or its information structure, is a research subject still beginning to develop, with many terms, as well as meanings for those terms, coming up often. This analysis aims at dissociating focus and topic as complements of each other, showing a possibility of analysis in which these elements occur in different levels of analysis – the parallels – which allow them more autonomy, as well as closer in some analysis. Focus is the element that will be dealt with more in the present work, which compares both parallels, but analyzes more sentences and problems concerning the focus, such as the existence of a secondary information focus, which is called auxiliary focus, that aims at providing new information that has not been asked for. Also, in the focus parallel, the relation between focus and implicature is dealt with. Topic, on the other hand, is an element that still needs deeper research, here being introduced concerning more basic problems, but still important ones.