Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Computer Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-126). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR11872

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, 2004. / Title from PDF file as viewed 9/8/05. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [497]-508)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-130).

xvi, 138 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This study attempts to reconstruct Proto-Boro-Garo (PBG), the ancient language from which the modern Boro-Garo (BG) family evolved. BG is a largely underdocumented sub-branch of Tibeto-Burman that is spoken primarily in the Brahmaputra valley of northeastern India. While other comparative studies have focused on PBG phonology, this study concentrates on grammatical elements and syntactic structures. An initial reconstruction is attained by examining data from the limited number of descriptive grammars available on BG languages and using the comparative method to determine the oldest forms of grammatical elements. Where elements correspond across languages, they can be reconstructed for the common ancestor. When they do not, we have evidence for independent innovation. This is accounted for, when possible, by language-internal reconstruction. / Committee in Charge: Dr. Scott DeLancey, Chair; Dr. Spike Gildea

No description available.

A central claim of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993a) is that phonological variation can be modeled through the variable ranking of universal constraints. In this thesis, I test this claim by examining variation in the tongue root vowel harmony system in a number of closely related yet distinct Bantu languages of Congo and Zaire. The twenty-odd languages are drawn from each of Guthrie 1967's eight Bantu C. subgroups and are shown to vary along a number of dimensions. One is morphological, related to whether or not the harmonic element in the lexical root extends to prefixes and suffixes. This variation is shown to follow from the variable ranking of constraints that seek to ALIGN the harmonic feature, [retracted tongue root] ([rtr]) with the edges of the morphological domains STEM and WORD. A second parameter of variation concerns the relationship between high vowels and [rtr]. A third dimension involves the interaction of [rtr] with the low vowel [a] under harmony. Here, three patterns involving (i) low vowel assimilation, (ii) low vowel opacity, or (iii) low vowel transparency under harmony are shown to follow from the variable ranking of a few constraints. A significant theme that emereges in the study is recognizing and characterizing the distinct morphological and phonological domain edges involved in vowel harmony. An important contribution of this study is in bringing to light a language family where phonological tongue height, in this case expressed by the feature [low], is shown to be incompatible with tongue root retraction, as expressed in the feature [rtr]. Although the gestures of tongue body lowering and tongue root retraction are sympathetic in the articulatory dimension and in their acoustic effect, they are seen to be phonologically hostile, in fact, because of the redundancy relation between them. This redundancy-based phonological incompatibility is implemented via licensing-failure: [low] fails to "license" [rtr] because lowness implies retraction (Ito, Mester and Padgett 1994). / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

Most of the Web is published in languages that are not accessible to many potential users who are only able to read and understand their local languages. Many of these local languages are Resources Scarce Languages (RSLs) and lack the necessary resources, such as machine translation tools, to make available content more accessible. State of the art preprocessing tools and retrieval methods are tailored for Web dominant languages and, accordingly, documents written in RSLs are lowly ranked and difficult to access in search results, resulting in a struggling and frustrating search experience for speakers of RSLs. In this thesis, we propose the use of language similarities to match, re-rank and return search results written in closely related languages to improve the quality of search results and user experience. We also explore the use of shared morphological features to build multilingual stemming tools. Focusing on six Bantu languages spoken in Southeastern Africa, we first explore how users would interact with search results written in related languages. We conduct a user study, examining the usefulness and user preferences for ranking search results with different levels of intelligibility, and the types of emotions users experience when interacting with such results. Our results show that users can complete tasks using related language search results but, as intelligibility decreases, more users struggle to complete search tasks and, consequently, experience negative emotions. Concerning ranking, we find that users prefer that relevant documents be ranked higher, and that intelligibility be used as a secondary criterion. Additionally, we use a User-Centered Design (UCD) approach to investigate enhanced interface features that could assist users to effectively interact with such search results. Usability evaluation of our designed interface scored 86% using the System Usability Scale (SUS). We then investigate whether ranking models that integrate relevance and intelligibility features would improve retrieval effectiveness. We develop these features by drawing from traditional Information Retrieval (IR) models and linguistics studies, and employ Learning To Rank (LTR) and unsupervised methods. Our evaluation shows that models that use both relevance and intelligibility feature(s) have better performance when compared to models that use relevance features only. Finally, we propose and evaluate morphological processing approaches that include multilingual stemming, using rules derived from common morphological features across Bantu family of languages. Our evaluation of the proposed stemming approach shows that its performance is competitive on queries that use general terms. Overall, the thesis provides evidence that considering and matching search results written in closely related languages, as well as ranking and presenting them appropriately, improves the quality of retrieval and user experience for speakers of RSLs.

A survey of demonstrative usage in Classical Latin, an assessment of the syntactical significance of ille and iste in Late Latin, together with conditions favouring the evolution of the definite article, and an examination of articular usage in Old French up to the Chanson de Roland. / Master of Arts (MA)