The subject of my graduation is an analyse of the language of Šimon Lomnický z Budče in his publication Instrukcí aneb Krátké naučení hospodáře mladého... (1586). The thesis reports about the characteristic of phonetic, formative and lexical side of his language. The main attention is devoted to the word-stock and its analyse from different points of view including the phraseology. The purpose of the thesis is an evaluation of the language of Šimon Lomnický as a representative of the period language at the turn of 16th and 17th century.

Com base em alguns dos principais trabalhos existentes na literatura gerativista sobre a "alternância do dativo" do inglês, identificamos e sistematizamos neste trabalho as principais restrições que, segundo a literatura, atuam na construção dativa (construção dativa preposicionada ou a de objeto duplo), bem como algumas das principais propostas de análise. Nosso intuito é mostrar como a evolução do estudo de uma construção particular envolve, muitas vezes de modo indireto e não explícito, aspectos importantes, mais gerais, da teoria lingüística. No caso particular deste trabalho, procuramos mostrar como o estudo da alternância nos permite identificar, entre outras coisas: (a) concepções importantes da relação entre sintaxe e léxico, e (b) os tipos de argumentação que podem ser utilizados para distinguir processos sintáticos de processos lexicais, bem como processos lexicais de vários tipos entre si. Quanto ao percurso das análises sobre a alternância dativa e as principais concepções teóricas que foram discutidas, procuramos enfatizar o fato de que há a gradativa evolução da teoria ao longo dos anos. Tomamos como ponto de partida para nossa discussão sobre a alternância a tese de doutorado de Richard Oehrle (1976). Oehrle toma como ponto de partida para sua discussão a visão "puramente transformacional" da alternância oferecida pelo "modelo padrão" da teoria gerativa. Desta perspectiva, a alternância dativa é um processo "fortemente produtivo": processos transformacionais afetam constituintes sem ter acesso a propriedades léxico-semânticas particulares deles. No entanto, por meio de uma análise detalhada da construção, Oehrle foi o primeiro a demonstrar que tal visão estava equivocada: a alternância dativa é um processo "semiprodutivo", sujeita a diferentes restrições que parecem operar sobre subclasses lexicais de verbos, fazendo que itens muito semelhantes em significado ora possam, ora não, aparecer numa ou noutra das estruturas dativas do inglês. As demais abordagens analisadas neste trabalho concentram-se na tentativa de localizar adequadamente os fatores que regem a alternância, seja dentro do léxico, ou da sintaxe, ou na relação entre os dois. / On the basis of some of the main works in the generative literature about the English Dative Alternation, we try to identify and systematize the main constraints that act upon the dative constructions, as well as some of the main proposals of analysis. Our aim is to show how the evolution of the study of a particular construction may involve, sometimes in an indirect, inexplicit manner, important general aspects of the linguistic theory. Here we intend to show how the study of the dative alternation allows us to identify: a) important conceptions of the relation between syntax and lexical, and (b) the types of argumentation that can be used to distinguish syntactic processes from the lexical processes, and lexical processes of different kinds among themselves. As regards the succession of the analyses of the dative alternation, we try to emphasize the fact that there is a gradual evolution of the theory throughout the years. We begin our discussion with the doctorate thesis of Richard Oehrle (1976). Oehrle takes as a starting point a "purely transformational" analysis of the dative alternation, as might be provided by the "standard model" of the generative theory. From the perspective of such an analysis, the dative alternation should be a very productive process: transformational processes affect constituents without having access to their particular lexical-semantics properties. However, through a very detailed analysis of the alternation, Oehrle was the first to show that this view is inadequate: the dative alternation is a semi-productive process, subject to different constraints that seem to operate on lexical subclasses of verbs; in particular, even items that are very similar in meaning sometimes can, sometimes cannot, appear in the alternation. The other approaches that will be analyzed in this dissertation are all attempts to identify the right place where different aspects of the construction should be accounted for - either within the lexicon, or within syntax, or in the relation between both.

Este trabalho investiga a interação da Estrutura Informacional (EI) de duas construções marcadas do português - as clivadas e os tópicos contrastivos - com propriedades semânticas e pragmáticas associadas a estas duas estruturas. No que concerne às clivadas, o trabalho investiga de que modo a EI interage com quatro propriedades "de significado" comumente associadas a esta construção: (a) a leitura "especificacional" da sentença como um todo; (b) o "efeito de exaustividade" associado ao constituinte focalizado; (c) o caráter "pressuposicional" da oração clivada; e (d) o caráter "denegador" da sentença clivada como um todo dentro do discurso. A principal conclusão é de que tanto a propriedade (b) quanto a (d) não parecem ser "inerentes" à clivada; em particular, a propriedade (b) - que é analisada como um subproduto de um tipo particular de foco, o "foco identificacional", no influente trabalho de Kiss (1998) - não parece ser um aspecto convencionalizado da EI, mas sim um efeito da interação entre as propriedades (a) e (c) - estas sim, "convencionais" relativamente às clivadas. Quanto aos tópicos contrastivos, o trabalho concentra-se no impacto de sua EI na estrutura do discurso; mais especificamente, este estudo procura esclarecer qual o papel da EI dos tópicos contrastivos - e o papel da EI em geral - no estabelecimento de "relações retóricas" como a de "contraste", normalmente equacionada ao significado da conjunção adversativa mas. A conclusão é de que a EI dos tópicos contrastivos, em conjunto com a EI não-marcada, é que parece induzir a relações retóricas de "contraste" - independentemente de elementos externos à EI, como expressões que, à semelhança do mas, veiculam convencionalmente contraste. Deste modo, teorias que se valham da EI para estruturar o discurso - como a de Büring (2003), por exemplo - parecem ser mais adequadas para lidar com este tipo de fenômeno do que outras que depositam a maior parte do poder descritivo nas relações retóricas em si, como a de Asher & Lascarides (2003). / This work investigates the interaction of the Information Structure (IS) of two marked constructions of Portuguese - the clefts and the contrastive topics - between semantic and pragmatic properties associated with those constructions. Concerning clefts, this work investigates how IS interacts with four "properties of meaning" commonly associated with cleft sentences: (a) the "specificational" reading of the sentence as a whole; (b) the "exhaustivity effect" associated with the focalized constituent; (c) the "presuppositional" character of the cleft clause; and (d) the "denying" character of the cleft sentence as a whole in the discourse. The main conclusion is that neither property (b) nor property (d) seem to be "inherent" properties of clefts; in particular, property (b) - which is analyzed as a sub-product of a particular kind of focus, the "identificational focus", in Kiss' (1998) influential paper - doesn't seem to be a conventionalized aspect of IS, but instead a product of the interaction between properties (a) and (c) - which are actually "conventionalized" with respect to clefts. As for contrastive topics, this work concentrates on the impact of its IS in discourse structure; more specifically, this paper tries to clarify what is the role of the IS of contrastive topics - and of IS in general - in the establishment of "rhetorical relations" such as "contrast", usually identified with the meaning of conjunctions like but. The conclusion is that the IS of contrastive topics, together with the non-marked IS, seems to induce rhetorical relations like "contrast" - independently of elements external to IS, like expressions that, as but, induce contrast conventionally. Thus theories that use IS to structure the discourse - like Büring's (2003), for instance - seem to be more adequate to deal with this kind of phenomenon than theories that place much of the descriptive power in rhetorical relations itself, as in Asher & Lascarides (2003).

Submitted by Ingrid Lima (ingrdslima@hotmail.com) on 2017-11-10T14:50:14Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) BARROS_Carolina_Pinheiro_O_falar_caboco_paraense_um_estudo_sobre_o_lexico_nos_municipios_de_santarem_oriximina_e_juriti_baixo_amazonas_pa_opt_opt.pdf: 4752911 bytes, checksum: 1c219cb1379e5c8f9fe518150640e3b7 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2017-11-10T15:07:04Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) BARROS_Carolina_Pinheiro_O_falar_caboco_paraense_um_estudo_sobre_o_lexico_nos_municipios_de_santarem_oriximina_e_juriti_baixo_amazonas_pa_opt_opt.pdf: 4752911 bytes, checksum: 1c219cb1379e5c8f9fe518150640e3b7 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2017-11-13T14:12:01Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) BARROS_Carolina_Pinheiro_O_falar_caboco_paraense_um_estudo_sobre_o_lexico_nos_municipios_de_santarem_oriximina_e_juriti_baixo_amazonas_pa_opt_opt.pdf: 4752911 bytes, checksum: 1c219cb1379e5c8f9fe518150640e3b7 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-11-13T14:12:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) BARROS_Carolina_Pinheiro_O_falar_caboco_paraense_um_estudo_sobre_o_lexico_nos_municipios_de_santarem_oriximina_e_juriti_baixo_amazonas_pa_opt_opt.pdf: 4752911 bytes, checksum: 1c219cb1379e5c8f9fe518150640e3b7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-06-08 / CAPES / The present research has a dialectal nature and was carried out in the Lower Amazon Region (PA). It followed the principles and parameters of Pluridimensional Dialecology supported by authors such as: Cardoso (2005), Correa (1980) e Azevedo (2013). It mainly addresses the level of specific lexical variants in three municipalities, which covers the mesoregion of the state of Pará, named Santarém, Oriximiná and Juruti. The objective of this study was: a) to map linguistic areas of the Lower Amazon, in this state, where there are possibly lexical variations in the semantic domains of farm, fishery, livestock, fauna, flora, world, biotype, man, etc. b) to characterize the residents of Santarém, Oriximiná and Juruti for the appropriation of specific lexicons in each municipality; c) to compare the results of the research according to the parameters of the dialectical research in the diatopic, diastrátic, diagenerational, and diassexual aspects, if they present data, respectively, productive; d) Identify the standard usage in the municipalities targeted by the survey for the regular distribution and higher frequency in the cartographic space. Respondents were eight in point of inquiry, obeying all the necessary dimensions for gender, education and age. Informants were divided into two age groups - 18 to 30 years and 50 to 65 years, and were also divided into male and female. With the acquisition of the answers collected in loco, carried out by means of a lexical questionnaire (QSL), containing 164 questions, elaborated according to the linguistic aspects of the regions, they were transformed into lexical letters, in order to collect the quantitative data of the lexical variants of the region, the norms of use and frequency, as contributed in their thesis Cristianini (2006), Pottier (1978) and Preti (1982). The results showed that there exists for each semantic domain a specific standard usage, which is represented in 50 semantic-lexical letters. / A presente pesquisa é de cunho dialetal e foi realizada na Região do Baixo Amazonas (PA). Seguiu-se os princípios e parâmetros da Dialetologia Pluridimensional aportados em autores como: Cardoso (2005), Correa (1980) e Azevedo (2013). Aborda, principalmente, o nível de variantes lexicais específicas em três municípios, que abrangem a mesorregião do Estado do Pará, a saber: Santarém, Oriximiná e Juruti. Objetivou-se também: mapear áreas linguísticas do Baixo Amazonas, no Estado do Pará, onde ocorrem variações lexicais nos domínios semânticos roça, pesca, pecuária, fauna, flora, mundo biótipo, homem etc.; caracterizar a fala dos moradores de Santarém, Oriximiná e Juruti pela apropriação de léxicos específicos em cada município; comparar os resultados da pesquisa segundo os parâmetros da pesquisa dialetológica na vertente diatópica, diastrática, diageracional, diassexual se apresentarem dados, respectivamente, produtivos; identificar a Norma de Uso nos municípios alvos da pesquisa pela distribuição regular e maior frequência no espaço cartográfico. Os entrevistados foram oito em cada ponto de inquérito, obedecendo às dimensões gênero, escolaridade e faixa etária. Os informantes se dividiram em duas faixas etárias, de 18 a 30 anos, e de 50 a 65 anos de idade, sendo quatro homens e quatro mulheres. Com a obtenção das respostas coletadas in loco por meio de um Questionário Semântico-Lexical, (QSL), contendo 164 questões, elaborado de acordo com os aspectos linguísticos das regiões, elaborei 50 cartas semântico-lexicais sobre as variantes lexicais mais produtivas na região do Baixo Amazonas, PA, caracterizando as normas de uso pela distribuição regular e alta frequência (CRISTIANINI, 2006), Pottier (1978) e Preti (1982). Os resultados mostram que existe para cada domínio semântico uma norma de uso padrão específica.

Submitted by Geandra Rodrigues (geandrar@gmail.com) on 2018-08-31T11:36:01Z No. of bitstreams: 1 rachelterrignocunhareis.pdf: 2353630 bytes, checksum: 3f0886407ff853318bb9961c5e287455 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2018-09-03T16:37:31Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 rachelterrignocunhareis.pdf: 2353630 bytes, checksum: 3f0886407ff853318bb9961c5e287455 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-09-03T16:37:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 rachelterrignocunhareis.pdf: 2353630 bytes, checksum: 3f0886407ff853318bb9961c5e287455 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-07-13 / A presente dissertação objetiva investigar o uso de dicas nas modalidades oral e verbal para inferência lexical em inglês, como língua estrangeira, em Histórias em Quadrinhos Eletrônicas (HQtrônicas). Foram implementadas HQtrônicas, com dicas em links e sem dicas, com base em teorias de aprendizagem mediada pelas novas tecnologias. Esse estudo experimental foi realizado para testar os ambientes de leitura enquanto auxiliadores na realização de inferência e aprendizagem de vocabulário. No plano teórico, este trabalho fundamenta-se na Teoria Cognitiva do Aprendizado Multimídia de Mayer (1997; 2001) que busca explicar o processamento da informação em ambiente de aprendizagem multimodal, e nos pressupostos da Abordagem Conexionista (ELLIS, 1998; LEITE, 2008; ZIMMER, 2008). No âmbito da metodologia, o experimento foi aplicado a 162 participantes de nível elementar de inglês como língua estrangeira, divididos em dois grupos: experimental e controle. O grupo experimental é subdividido em grupos A, B e C, no total de 132 alunos. O grupo A recebeu dicas orais e verbais, o grupo B recebeu dicas orais e o grupo C apenas dicas verbais. O grupo controle, grupo D, é composto de 30 alunos. Esse grupo não recebeu dica. Essa distinção foi feita, a fim de investigarmos os impactos das dicas no processo de inferência lexical de alunos de inglês como língua estrangeira. Para a análise foram considerados os resultados obtidos nos testes de vocabulário e questionários de avaliação. Os resultados indicam que o uso de dicas pode contribuir significativamente para a inferência e aprendizado de vocabulário, com destaque para o uso integrado de dicas orais + verbais. Com esta pesquisa, buscou-se fornecer subsídios teóricos e práticos para a elaboração de exercícios de inferência lexical e ainda contribuir para a disseminação do uso do gênero HQtrônicas no ensino e aprendizado de línguas estrangeiras. / The present work is aimed at investigating the use of the oral and written tips in lexical inference of English, as foreign language, in the reading of webcomics. For this, two webcomics were prepared, with and without tips, based on new technology learning theories. This experimental study was accomplished in order to test the reading environments as auxiliaries in lexical inference and learning. On theoretical grounds, the work is based on the assumptions of the Cognitive Theory of the Multimedia Learning by Mayer (1997; 2001) which seeks to explain the information processing in a multimodal learning environment, and on the assumptions of the Connectionism Approach (ELLIS, 1998; LEITE, 2008; ZIMMER, 2008). In the methodology, the experiment was applied to 162 students of English as Foreign Language teaching and learning in elementary level, divided into two groups: experimental and control group. The experimental group is subdivided into groups A, B and C, composed by 132 students in total. Group A received oral and written tips, group B received oral tips and group C received just the written tips. The control group, group D is composed by 30 students. It did not receive any tips. This distinction was made, in order to investigate the impact of the tips in the lexical inference of English learners as a foreign language. In the analysis it was used the data generated in vocabulary test and the evaluated research questionnaire data. The results show that the use of tips may contribute significantly to inference and vocabulary learning. We highlight the use of oral and written tips together. We hope to provide, through this research, theoretical and practical allowance for development of lexical inference exercises, and we also expect to contribute with the dissemination of the genre webcomics in the teaching learning of foreign languages.

The question of how language evolved has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Compared to seemingly more complex phenomena such as syntax, word meanings are usually seen as relatively easy to explain. Mainstream accounts in psycholinguistics and evolutionary linguistics assume that word meanings correspond to stable concepts which are prior to language and derive straightforwardly from human perception of structure in the world. Taking a cognitive linguistic approach based on psycholinguistic evidence, I argue instead that word meanings are conventions, grounded, learned and used in the context of communication. The meaning of a word is the sum of its contexts of use, with particular features of these contexts made more or less salient by mechanisms of attentional learning and communicative inference. Evolutionarily, word meanings arise as an emergent product of humans’ adapted tendency to infer each other’s intentions using contextual cues. They are then shaped over cultural evolution by the need to be learnable and useful for communication. This thesis presents a series of experiments that test the effect of these pressures on the origins and development of word meanings. Experiment 1 investigates the origins of strong tendencies for words to specify features on particular dimensions (such as the shape bias). The results show that these tendencies arise via attentional learning effects amplified by iterated learning. Dimensions which are less salient in contexts of learning and use drop out of word meanings as they are passed down a chain of learners. Experiments 2, 3 and 4 investigate the structure of word meanings produced during either paired communication games or individual labelling of images by similarity. While communication alone leads to word meanings that are unstructured and poorly aligned within pairs, communication plus iterated learning leads to word meanings that increase in structure and alignment over generations. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates the interaction of event structure and developing conventions in shaping word meanings. The structure of events in an artificial world is shown to influence lexicalisation patterns in the languages conventionalised by communicating pairs. Event features that are less predictable across communicative contexts tend to be more strongly associated with the conventions in the language. Overall, the experiments show that rather than straightforwardly reflecting pre-linguistic conceptualisation, word meanings are also dynamically shaped by learning and communication. In addition, these processes are constrained by the conventions that already exist within a language. This illuminates the mixture of convergence and diversity we see in word meanings in natural languages, and gives insight into their evolutionary origins.

The purpose of this study was to examine the Polish language of immigrants who came to the United States during or after World War II and to test two related hypotheses: 1. Speakers of Polish use a number of lexical intrusions. 2. Lexical intrusions differ in scope depending on whether those speakers had immigrated with minimal education or they received at least 12 years of schooling prior to their immigration. The study was conducted in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in January and February of 1990. The sample consisted of 16 informants whose interviews were recorded and analyzed in terms of lexical borrowings, cultural branches, and parts of speech. Findings supported the two hypotheses.

Humans possess a rich semantic knowledge of words and concepts which captures the perceivable physical properties of their real-world referents and their relations. Encoding this knowledge or some of its aspects is the goal of computational models of semantic representation and has been the subject of considerable research in cognitive science, natural language processing, and related areas. Existing models have placed emphasis on different aspects of meaning, depending ultimately on the task at hand. Typically, such models have been used in tasks addressing the simulation of behavioural phenomena, e.g., lexical priming or categorisation, as well as in natural language applications, such as information retrieval, document classification, or semantic role labelling. A major strand of research popular across disciplines focuses on models which induce semantic representations from text corpora. These models are based on the hypothesis that the meaning of words is established by their distributional relation to other words (Harris, 1954). Despite their widespread use, distributional models of word meaning have been criticised as ‘disembodied’ in that they are not grounded in perception and action (Perfetti, 1998; Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002). This lack of grounding contrasts with many experimental studies suggesting that meaning is acquired not only from exposure to the linguistic environment but also from our interaction with the physical world (Landau et al., 1998; Bornstein et al., 2004). This criticism has led to the emergence of new models aiming at inducing perceptually grounded semantic representations. Essentially, existing approaches learn meaning representations from multiple views corresponding to different modalities, i.e. linguistic and perceptual input. To approximate the perceptual modality, previous work has relied largely on semantic attributes collected from humans (e.g., is round, is sour), or on automatically extracted image features. Semantic attributes have a long-standing tradition in cognitive science and are thought to represent salient psychological aspects of word meaning including multisensory information. However, their elicitation from human subjects limits the scope of computational models to a small number of concepts for which attributes are available. In this thesis, we present an approach which draws inspiration from the successful application of attribute classifiers in image classification, and represent images and the concepts depicted by them by automatically predicted visual attributes. To this end, we create a dataset comprising nearly 700K images and a taxonomy of 636 visual attributes and use it to train attribute classifiers. We show that their predictions can act as a substitute for human-produced attributes without any critical information loss. In line with the attribute-based approximation of the visual modality, we represent the linguistic modality by textual attributes which we obtain with an off-the-shelf distributional model. Having first established this core contribution of a novel modelling framework for grounded meaning representations based on semantic attributes, we show that these can be integrated into existing approaches to perceptually grounded representations. We then introduce a model which is formulated as a stacked autoencoder (a variant of multilayer neural networks), which learns higher-level meaning representations by mapping words and images, represented by attributes, into a common embedding space. In contrast to most previous approaches to multimodal learning using different variants of deep networks and data sources, our model is defined at a finer level of granularity—it computes representations for individual words and is unique in its use of attributes as a means of representing the textual and visual modalities. We evaluate the effectiveness of the representations learnt by our model by assessing its ability to account for human behaviour on three semantic tasks, namely word similarity, concept categorisation, and typicality of category members. With respect to the word similarity task, we focus on the model’s ability to capture similarity in both the meaning and appearance of the words’ referents. Since existing benchmark datasets on word similarity do not distinguish between these two dimensions and often contain abstract words, we create a new dataset in a large-scale experiment where participants are asked to give two ratings per word pair expressing their semantic and visual similarity, respectively. Experimental results show that our model learns meaningful representations which are more accurate than models based on individual modalities or different modality integration mechanisms. The presented model is furthermore able to predict textual attributes for new concepts given their visual attribute predictions only, which we demonstrate by comparing model output with human generated attributes. Finally, we show the model’s effectiveness in an image-based task on visual category learning, in which images are used as a stand-in for real-world objects.

The development of phonological representations remains a hot topic within both the developmental and neural network literature. Historically, theoretical accounts have fallen within one of two camps: the accessibility account which proposes that phonological representations are adult-like from infancy (Rozin & Gleitman, 1977; Liberman, Shankweiler & Liberman, 1989) and the emergent account which proposes that phonological representations become gradually restructured over development (Metsala & Walley, 1998; Ventura, Kolinsky, Fernandes, Querido & Morais, 2007; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Within this thesis we tested predictions made by the accessibility account and key variants of the emergent account using data from both behavioural (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) and neural network studies (Chapter 5). The novel measures used within Chapters 2 to 4 were devised to allow us to contrast implicit measures of phonological representation (PR) which probe the segmentedness of the representations themselves, with explicit PR measures which tap into children’s conscious awareness of phonological segments. Within Chapter 2 we present evidence that while explicit awareness of phonological structure is dependent on letter-sound knowledge, implicit sensitivity to the segments within words emerges independent of literacy. Within Chapter 3 a longitudinal study investigated the segmentedness of children’s phonological representations at the rime and phoneme level. These results demonstrate that implicit sensitivity to both rime and phoneme segments is driven by vocabulary growth and is not dependent on letter-sound knowledge. The results within Chapter 3 also suggest that, while awareness of rime segments emerges naturally through oral language experience, explicit awareness of individual phonemes is related to letter-sound knowledge. In Chapter 4 we explored the idea of global versus phonemic representation using a mispronunciation reconstruction task. We found that sensitivity to both global and phonemic similarity increased over time, but with global sensitivity reaching adult levels early on in development. In Chapter 5 a neural network was trained on the mappings between real acoustic input and articulatory output data allowing us to simulate the development of phonological representations computationally. The simulation data provide further evidence of a developmental increase in sensitivity to both global and phonemic similarity within a preliterate model. Taken together, the results provide strong evidence that as children’s vocabularies grow they become increasingly sensitive to both the global properties and segmental structure of words, independent of literacy experience. Children’s explicit awareness of phonemes, on the other hand, seems to emerge as a consequence of learning the correspondence between letters and sounds. Within the context of the wider literature, the current results are most consistent with the PRIMIR framework which predicts early detailed phonetic representations alongside gradually emerging phonemic categories (Werker & Curtin, 2005). This thesis underlines the importance of using implicit measures when trying to probe the representations themselves rather than children’s conscious awareness of them. The thesis also represents an important step towards modelling the emergence of segmental representation computationally using real speech data.

This thesis advances a specific model of 1-syntax, based on Hale and Keyser (1993, 1994) and Dechaine (1996) as a point of departure, and also proposes a general theory of the relation between the lexicon and the syntax. One of the essential proposals that I make is the F\mctionalization Principle, which permits a lexical head to project a functional projection if and only if the meaning of the head is represented by 1-syntactic structure without any extra semantic features. I refer to this type of head as a light head. The Functionalization Principle leads us to a principled account of various lexical and functional uses of lexical items such as a passive morpheme -en and have. Examples that support my analysis range from adjectival and verbal passives (e.g. Mary is very pleased and The glass was broken by BUI), to constructions of alienable and inalienable possession (e.g. John has Jive bucks and John has blue eyes), to causative/experiential constructions (e.g. John had his students walk out of class), and to perfect constructions (e.g. Lucie has advised the prime minister). Furthermore, the analysis of possessive have is extended to possessive nominals (e.g. John's cat and John's eyes). I also examine the implications of the theories of 1-syntax and 1- functors for Case. I propose that 1-syntactic structure partly determines inherent Case whereas the 1-functor checks what I call l-Junctor Case through the Spec-head relation. Furthermore, I show that these analyses of inherent Case and 1-functors account for essential properties of possessive D (a genitive marker -*s), some Hindi marked subject constructions and Japanese experiential transitive constructions. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate