Early in the genesis of Mauritian Creole (MC), the quantificational determiners of its lexifier language, French, incorporated into a large number of the nouns that they combined with, resulting in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions, yielding (in)definite, singular, plural and generic interpretations. These early changes were accompanied by the loss all inflectional morphology, as well as the loss of the French copula, and that of the Case assigning prepositions à ('of') and de ('of') which are used in partitive and genitive constructions respectively. I argue that these changes triggered a parametric shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and account for the fact that MC has a very different determiner system from its lexifier. My analysis is motivated by both Longobardi's (1994) claim that only DPs can be arguments, NPs cannot, and Chierchia's (1998b) seemingly incompatible claim that N can be an argument when it is Kind denoting. I provide detailed account of the emergence of the new MC determiners, from their first attestations in the early 18th century, to the end of the 19th century, when the determiner system settles into a form that is still used today. Following an analysis of the modern MC determiner system, I propose that MC nouns are lexically stored as argumental, Kind denoting terms, which share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals, such as their ability to occur in argument positions without a determiner. The new quantificational determiners are analyzed as 'type shifting operators' that shift Kinds and predicate nominals into argumental noun phrases. The singular indefinite article enn and the plural marker bann assign existential quantification over instances of Kind denoting count nouns, and the null definite determiner is an operator that quantifies over the totality of a set. The differential behaviour of MC count vs. mass nouns is accounted for in terms of the Number argument which must be realized for common count nouns. Some seemingly 'bare' nouns comprise a phonologically null definite determiner equivalent to French le/la and English the. Subject-object asymmetry of count nouns in MC provides evidence for the occurrence of this null element which requires licensing in certain syntactic environments. The Specificity marker la, which serves to mark anaphoric definiteness, is shown to be a 'last resort' means of licensing the null definite determiner. My syntactic analysis is within Chomsky's (1995b) Minimalist framework and a Formal Semantics (Partee 1986), both of which stipulate legitimate operator variable constructions. The loss of the French quantificational determiners, and that of the copula meant that early MC lacked overt sources of quantification at both the nominal and clausal levels. In my analysis of the emerging MC determiner system, I look at the new sources of quantification that arise in order to establish the referential properties of nouns, and I show how these various strategies are linked to the means by which the semantic features of Definiteness, Deixis, Number and Specificity are expressed, and also the means by which the syntactic function of predication is realized.

L'extraction d'information consiste habituellement à remplir, au départ d'un ensemble de documents, les champs d'un formulaire préalablement établi et articulé autour d'un scénario précis. Dans ce travail, nous cherchons à étudier la pertinence des bases de données syntaxiques du lexique-grammaire afin de répondre aux questions et enjeux posés par ce domaine d'application (adaptabilité, performance,...). La phrase élémentaire (couple <prédicat, compléments essentiels>) est l'unité significative minimale de cette théorie linguistique (M. Gross, 1975) qui réunit lexique et syntaxe en un unique formalisme. Chacune de ces phrases dessine le sens d'un prédicat au moyen de critères tant distributionnels que transformationnels. Dans un cadre générique, on ne peut malheureusement pas prétendre caractériser davantage ces phrases. Il convient en effet que l'analyse syntaxico-sémantique qui dérive de l'utilisation du formalisme s'adapte à toute situation d'énonciation. Toutefois, si on limite l'analyse dont il est question à un contexte ou sous-langage particulier, celui d'un scénario d'extraction par exemple, en d'autres termes, si nous bornons la situation d'énonciation, il est envisageable de préciser la sémantique du prédicat et de ses compléments essentiels. Les phrases élémentaires peuvent ainsi être appréhendées comme autant de motifs d'extraction.

Der vorliegende Tagungsband enthält alle Beiträge des 1. Herbsttreffens Patholinguistik, das am 24.11.2007 an der Universität Potsdam stattgefunden hat. Sowohl die drei Hauptvorträge zum Thema „Der Erwerb von Lexikon und Semantik – Meilensteine, Störungen und Therapie“ als auch die Kurzvorträge promovierter Patholinguisten sind ausführlich dokumentiert. Außerdem enthält der Tagungsband die Abstracts der präsentierten Poster. / These proceedings contain the contributions presented at the “1st Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik” that took place on November 24, 2007 at the University of Potsdam. Three main lectures focused on "The acquisition of lexicon and semantics - milestones, impairments, and intervention". In addition, the proceedings contain short presentations on patholinguistic research and the abstracts of the presented posters.

Esse trabalho analisa a palavra quilombo, de origem africana, integrada em duas variedades linguísticas latino-americanas: o português brasileiro e o espanhol do Prata. No Brasil o termo quilombo significa ‘comunidade de escravos fugidos’ e no Prata ‘prostíbulo’. Como explicar essa diferença? A partir do estudo de registros em dicionários, vocabulários e corpora, iremos discutir o caminho de integração do vocábulo assim como as definições e os comentários metalinguísticos e exemplos de uso encontrados em um conjunto de fontes lexicográficas e corpora das duas variedades linguísticas ibero-românicas. A análise do verbete e seus derivados, assim como a dos vocábulos relacionados, partem dos significados atribuídos à palavra nas fontes selecionadas. Analisam-se definições e comentários metalinguísticos, objetivando fazer uma reflexão crítica sobre as normas e os valores subjacentes às definiçoes nas fontes lexicográficas. Tudo indica que essas normas e valores, ou ideologias, estão por trás das acepções negativas que o vocábulo possui no Prata. / This study analyses an African-derived word, quilombo, integrated in two Latin-American linguistic varieties: Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish spoken in the River Plate region. In Brazil, quilombo means ‘maroon community’, but in Rio de la Plata it means ‘brothel’. How can we explain these differences? Through the analysis of its records in dictionaries, glossaries and corpora, this study discusses the ways in which the word was integrated as well as the metalinguistic comments, definitions and examples of use encountered in the selected lexicographical sources and corpora from the two Ibero-romance varieties. The analysis of the word entry and the derived and related forms in the selected sources is based upon the meanings ascribed to it. The metalinguistic comments and the definitions are analyzed aiming to critically reflect on the norms and values that the lexicographical sources express. The results indicate that these norms and values, or ideologies, are the reason behind the negative connotations of the word in the River Plate region. / Det här arbetet fokuserar på ett ord med afrikanskt ursprung, quilombo som finns i två latinamerikanska språkvarieteter: den brasilianska portugisiskan och spanskan från området kring Rio de la Plata. I Brasilien betyder quilombo ‘självständigt samhälle uppbyggt av förrymda slavar’, medan det i Rio de la Plata betyder ‘bordell’. Hur kan denna skillnad förklaras? Genom att analysera hur ordet registrerats i lexikon, gloslistor och korpusar diskuteras ordets väg in i språket samt de olika förklaringar, metalingvistiska kommentarer och användningsexempel som påträffats i ett urval lexikografiska källor och korpusar från båda de ibero-romanska språkvarianterna. Analysen av denna ingång och dess avledningsord och relaterade ord i de utvalda källorna utgår ifrån de betydelser som ordet tillskrivits. De metalingvistiska kommentarerna och betydelserna analyseras med med syftet att göra en kritisk reflektion kring de normer och värderingar som uttrycks i de olika källorna. Resultaten visar att dessa normer och värderingar, eller ideologier, kan vara anledningen till de negativa betydelserna av ordet i Rio del Plata området.

La relativa sistematización de la actuación de la metonimia, siendo un procedimiento creativo para la renovación semántica del léxico, es el punto de partida de esta Tesis, que propone un modelo de seguimiento de la repercusión de la metonimia sobre el léxico del español actual. La Tesis se estructura en cuatro partes, a las que se suman las conclusiones. En primer lugar, se introducen los objetivos y metodología del trabajo, así como la perspectiva adoptada con relación al cambio lingüístico: nos planteamos un estudio sincrónico, según los patrones sistemáticos de actuación del procedimiento. En la segunda parte, desarrollamos una lingüística de la metonimia, superando las restricciones que imponía su caracterización en los tratados retóricos como figura de significación aplicada ad hoc sobre el léxico. Para esta lingüística es medular la condición de contigüidad semántico-referencial en el marco de actuación del procedimiento, que está constituido por un entorno sintagmático infra-discursivo en el que se tiene una categorización lingüística del continuum del mundo. La actuación sistemática de la metonimia tiene que ver con la previsibilidad de las relaciones de contigüidad que perturba en este sintagma virtual. La proyección en el nivel sintáctico discursivo de estos desórdenes relacionales ocasiona incompatibilidades semánticas como resultado de una sustitución paradigmática que otorga a la metonimia su dimensión de tropo. Otros tropos y figuras retóricos, como la sinécdoque, la metalepsis y la hipálage, son caracterizados asimismo en esta parte como procedimientos metonímicos, en tanto que implican una transferencia denotativa, si bien se señalan las condiciones específicas que los diferencian de la metonimia, ya sean relativas al tipo relacional perturbado, o a las características de los polos denotativos relacionados. Especial atención hemos otorgado a la elipsis, por su convergencia con la metonimia cuando genera léxico autónomo y, por tanto, adquiere una dimensión trópica. En la tercera parte, y como resultado de la descripción del procedimiento, delimitamos los parámetros de observación de la metonimia en un diccionario, según su manifestación en los distintos niveles lingüísticos, y los aplicamos también a la relación entre acepciones, estudiando la que se ha llamado metonimia polisémica. A continuación, presentamos los índices lexicográficos para su identificación en el Diccionario del español actual (1999) de Manuel Seco, Olimpia Andrés y Gabino Ramos, que constituye nuestro corpus de estudio. Estos índices nos han proporcionado un patrón de seguimiento de la metonimia en el estado de lengua que recoge este diccionario, lo que ha hecho posible la creación de una base de datos informatizada que constituye la cuarta parte de la Tesis: LexAMET, donde se tiene una recopilación de más de 2.000 palabras del español con una o varias acepciones metonímicas, extraídas de una muestra de 21.000 palabras de nuestro corpus. En esta base de datos clasificamos los cambios semánticos atendiendo al procedimiento metonímico que ha actuado: metonimia, sinécdoque, elipsis metonímica, símbolo metonímico, metalepsis, hipálage, metalogía. Con LexAMET se tiene un recurso lingüístico para la identificación de la intervención de la metonimia en un estado de lengua del español. / This thesis deals with the sistematization process of metonymy as a creative process for the semantic renewal of lexicon. The project proposes a monitoring model to assess the impact of metonymy in contemporary Spanish lexicon.The thesis is structured in four parts plus the final conclusions. In the fist part, our aims and methodology are detailed, together with our view on the linguistic change. We develop a synchronic study, according to the systematic patterns by which the metonymy process acts.In the second part, we develop a metonymy linguistic, going beyond the classic limitations that appeared in theoretical works which considerer metonymy as a meaning figure applied ad hoc to the lexicon.The key for this linguistic is the semantic-referential continuity condition in the acting framework of the process. This process is built by an under-discursive syntagmatic setting where a linguistic categorization of the world's continuum is established. The systematic acting of metonymy is closely linked with the foreseeable continuity relationships that this virtual syntagm disturbs. The projection of these relationship disturbances in the syntactic discursive level produces semantic incompatibilities as the result of a paradigmatic substitution that makes metonymy acquire its trope dimension. Other tropes and rhetorical figures, such as synecdoche, metalepsis and hypallage, are considered as metonymic processes as they imply a denotative transference. We highlight, however, the specific conditions that differentiate them from metonymy, whether the conditions regard the relational type under disturbance or the characteristics of the denotative poles under relation. Ellipsis has been paid special attention, as it overlaps with metonymy when generating autonomous lexicon, thus acquiring a trope dimension. In the third part, and as a result of the process description, we establish the descriptive parameters of metonymy in a dictionary, according to its manifestation in various linguistic levels, and we apply them to the relationship between meanings, studying what has been called polysemic metonymy. Following this study, we show the lexicographic rates for the identification of metonymy in the Diccionario del español actual (1999), by Manuel Seco, Olimpia Andrés y Gabino Ramos. This dictionary makes up our corpus in the study.These rates have provided us with a monitoring pattern of metonymy in the Spanish language recorded in this dictionary, what has allowed us to create an electronic database to which we have devoted the fourth part of our study: LexAMET. This database compiles more than 2000 Spanish words with one or more metonymic sense, taken from our 21000 words corpus.In this database we classify the semantic changes according to the metonymic process in action: metonymy, synecdoche, metonymic ellipsis, metonymic symbol, metalepsis, hypallage, metalogy. LexAMET can be thus defined as a linguistic resource for the identification of metonymy in the Spanish language.

Les systèmes de traduction statistique à base de segments traduisent les phrases un segment à la fois, en plusieurs étapes. À chaque étape, ces systèmes ne considèrent que très peu d’informations pour choisir la traduction d’un segment. Les scores du dictionnaire de segments bilingues sont calculés sans égard aux contextes dans lesquels ils sont utilisés et les modèles de langue ne considèrent que les quelques mots entourant le segment traduit.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons un nouveau modèle considérant la phrase en entier lors de la sélection de chaque mot cible. Notre modèle d’intégration du contexte se différentie des précédents par l’utilisation d’un ppc (perceptron à plusieurs couches). Une propriété intéressante des ppc est leur couche cachée, qui propose une représentation alternative à celle offerte par les mots pour encoder les phrases à traduire. Une évaluation superficielle de cette représentation alter- native nous a montré qu’elle est capable de regrouper certaines phrases sources similaires même si elles étaient formulées différemment. Nous avons d’abord comparé avantageusement les prédictions de nos ppc à celles d’ibm1, un modèle couramment utilisé en traduction. Nous avons ensuite intégré nos ppc à notre système de traduction statistique de l’anglais vers le français. Nos ppc ont amélioré les traductions de notre système de base et d’un deuxième système de référence auquel était intégré IBM1. / Phrase-based statistical machine translation systems translate source sentences one phrase at a time, conditioning the choice of each phrase on very little information. Bilingual phrase table scores are computed regardless of the context in which the phrases are used and language models only look at few words surrounding the target phrases. In this thesis, we propose a novel model to predict words that should appear in a translation given the source sentence as a whole. Our model differs from previous works by its use of mlp (multilayer perceptrons). Our interest in mlp lies in their hidden layer that encodes source sentences in a representation that is only loosely tied to words. We observed that this hidden layer was able to cluster some sentences having similar translations even if they were formulated differently. In a first set of experiments, we compared favorably our mlp to ibm1, a well known model in statistical machine translation. In a second set of experiments, we embedded our ppc in our English to French statistical machine translation system. Our MLP improved translations quality over our baseline system and a second system embedding an IBM1 model.

An important strand of research has investigated the question of how children acquire a morphological system using offline data from spontaneous or elicited child language. Most of these studies have found dissociations in how children apply regular and irregular inflection (Marcus et al. 1992, Weyerts & Clahsen 1994, Rothweiler & Clahsen 1993). These studies have considerably deepened our understanding of how linguistic knowledge is acquired and organised in the human mind. Their methodological procedures, however, do not involve measurements of how children process morphologically complex forms in real time. To date, little is known about how children process inflected word forms. The aim of this study is to investigate children’s processing of inflected words in a series of on-line reaction time experiments. We used a cross-modal priming experiment to test for decompositional effects on the central level. We used a speeded production task and a lexical decision task to test for frequency effects on access level in production and recognition. Children’s behaviour was compared to adults’ behaviour towards three participle types (-t participles, e.g. getanzt ‘danced’ vs. -n participles with stem change, e.g. gebrochen ‘broken’ vs.-n participles without stem change, e.g. geschlafen ‘slept’). For the central level, results indicate that -t participles but not -n participles have decomposed representations. For the access level, results indicate that -t participles are represented according to their morphemes and additionally as full forms, at least from the age of nine years onwards (Pinker 1999 and Clahsen et al. 2004). Further evidence suggested that -n participles are represented as full-form entries on access level and that -n participles without stem change may encode morphological structure (cf. Clahsen et al. 2003). Out data also suggests that processing strategies for -t participles are differently applied in recognition and production. These results provide evidence that children (within the age range tested) employ the same mechanisms for processing participles as adults. The child lexicon grows as children form additional full-form representations for -t participles on access level and elaborate their full-form lexical representations of -n participles on central level. These results are consistent with processing as explained in dual-system theories. / Ein wichtiger Forschungsbereich hat anhand von offline Daten erforscht wie Kinder das morphologische System erwerben. Die meisten dieser Studien haben berichtet, dass Kinder die regelmäßige und die unregelmäßige Flexion unterschiedlich anwenden (Marcus et al. 1992, Weyerts & Clahsen 1994, Rothweiler & Clahsen 1993). Diese Studien haben dazu beigetragen den Erwerb und Organisation von linguistischem Wissen besser zu verstehen. Die offline Methoden messen morphologische Verarbeitung allerdings nicht in Echtzeit. Bis heute ist wenig darüber bekannt wie Kinder flektierte Wortformen in Echtzeit verarbeiten. Die vorliegende Arbeit hat diese Frage in 6- bis 11jährigen monolingualen Kindern (in zwei Altersgruppen) und in einer Erwachsenen-Kontrollgruppe anhand von -t Partizipien (z.B. gemacht), -n Partizipien ohne Stammveränderung (z.B. geschlafen) und -n Partizipien mit Stammveränderung (z.B. gebrochen) untersucht. Dekomposition von Partizipien und deren ganzheitliche Speicherung in assoziativen Netzwerken wurden auf zwei Repräsentationsebenen (zentrale Ebene, Zugriffebene) und, auf der Zugriffsebene, in zwei Modalitäten (Produktion, Verstehen) experimentell getestet. Ein cross-modal priming experiment untersuchte die zentrale Repräsentation von Partizipien. Volle morphologische Primingeffekte sprechen für eine dekomponierte Repräsentation, partielle Primingeffekte für ganzheitliche aber verbundene Repräsentationen. In einem speeded production experiment wurde die auditive Zugriffsrepräsentation und in einem lexical decision experiment die visuelle Zugriffsrepräsentation von Partizipien untersucht. (Ganzwort-) Frequenzeffekte wurden als Beleg für Ganzwortrepräsentationen gewertet. Bezüglich der zentralen Ebene zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass -t Partizipien aber nicht -n Partizipien dekomponiert repräsentiert sind. Bezüglich der Zugriffsebene zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass -t Partizipien entsprechend ihrer Morpheme repräsentiert sind und zusätzlich Ganzwortrepräsentationen haben können, zumindest im Altersbereich von Neun- bis Elfjährigen (Pinker 1999 and Clahsen et al. 2004). Weitere Ergebnisse zeigten, dass -n Partizipien auf der Zugriffsebene Ganzwortrepräsentationen haben, und dass -n Partizipien ohne Stammveränderung die morphologische Struktur enkodieren können (cf. Clahsen et al. 2003). Die Daten weisen auch darauf hin, dass die Verarbeitungsstrategien für -t Partizipien, zumindest in Neun- bis Elfjährigen, unterschiedlich angewandt werden. Die Ergebnisse werden als Evidenz dafür interpretiert, dass Kinder (in dem getesteten Altersbereich) dieselben Verarbeitungsmechanismen für Partizipien nutzen wie Erwachsene. Das kindliche Lexikon wächst, wenn Kinder zusätzliche Ganzwortrepräsentationen für -t Partizipien auf der Zugriffsebene bilden und ihre Ganzwortrepräsentationen für -n Partizipien auf der zentralen Ebene ausdifferenzieren. Diese Ergebnisse sind konsistent mit den Annahmen dualer Verarbeitungstheorien.

El objetivo de esta tesis, es reunir información gramatical suficiente que permita determinar qué características deben reunir las bases verbales del español para ser capaces de originar un adjetivo deverbal de participio (ADP), y, basados en ello, poder describir cómo opera el proceso de activación de valor especializado en los términos N+ADP del dominio de la economía. Estas construcciones sintácticas mínimas son muy productivas en los discursos de ámbitos especializados, sin embargo la naturaleza híbrida de la forma participial acarrea muchos conflictos a la tarea de Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural (PNL). Esta aproximación al análisis de los ADP es lingüística, está anclada teóricamente en la Teoría Comunicativa de la Terminología (TCT) e intenta ser el punto de contacto entre teoría y aplicación. / The goal of this thesis is to pinpoint the grammatical information that is necessary to determine which Spanish verb stems give rise to an adjectival participle (AP). This information will allow us to describe the linguistic indicators that, within the domain of economy, activate a specialized meaning in those terms that have the structure AP+noun. These syntactic minimal constructions are highly productive in specialized discourse. Nevertheless, the hybrid nature of the participial form invokes many conflicts in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. This descriptive approach to the adjectival participles is linguistic in nature, based on the Communicative Theory of Terminology (CTT), intends to be the point of contact between theory and application.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-68).