In the Stockton Junior College it is common practices that the freshmen who have passed the English matriculation examination are allowed to make their own selection of courses in either the field of English or in the field of speech; those who have failed to pass the Subject A examination are obliged to enroll is a Laboratory English course in which special emphasis is given to increasing the affective use of English skills. Probably, Laboratory English i conceded to accomplish this most effectively or this obligation would not exist. Is this factually trust.

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southwestern China. The theoretical approaches taken are functional syntax and the discourse-based approach to language description and documentation. The aim of this dissertation is to describe the ways that the language's features and subsystems intersect to make Na a unique entity: analyticity; zero anaphora; OV word order; topic/comment information structure; a five-part evidential system; a conjunct/disjunct-like system that intersects with evidentiality and verbal semantics; prolific grammaticalization; overlap between nominalization and relativization and associated structures; representation of time through aspect, Aktionsarten, adverbials, and discourse context; and the Daba shamanic register. / text

The study of kana 仮名 development has only begun in the last fifteen years, with much scholarship focused upon discerning either the Heian origins of kana or such later developments as furigana 振り仮名 (phonetic guides) and spelling rules. However, these perspectives have largely overlooked a key moment in Japanese writing history: in 1900, the Meiji government standardized the kana, from hundreds of possible variant graphemes to the forty-six used today, one symbol per sound. From then on, what had commonly been known only as kana were divided into two groups: hiragana 平仮名, the standard set, and hentaigana 変体仮名, the set of all non-standard graphemes. This standardization represented a seismic shift in Japanese writing culture, affecting everything from education to aesthetics, and yet it occurred without any bureaucratic debate—or, it seems, any post-legislation public outcry. This study addresses the apparent incongruity by examining a variety of primary sources for evidence of a pre-Meiji acceptance of a standardized set of graphemes, before the official standardization in 1900. Arguing from this evidence, a convincing case is made that the kana made standard in 1900 had been historically recognized as distinct from all other variants, despite there being no demonstrable difference in their use in context. This project, by closely examining long-neglected sources, sheds new light on the issue of pre-modern Japanese script usage.

The dissertation provides a grammatical description of a cluster of Romani varieties, called 'Eastern Uzh Romani', which are spoken in Transcarpathian Ukraine in an area adjacent to the Slovak border. These varieties are associated with five traditional locations, two of which are situated in the city of Uzhhorod, representing an eastern margin of a North Central Romani dialect continuum. The focus is not only on describing the common characteristics of the entire Eastern Uzh dialect, but also on highlighting its variation with respect to specific features of the individual varieties. The description is based on first-hand data collected during numerous fieldwork trips of the author between 2007 and 2016. The dissertation is organised into thirteen chapters. Alongside the proper grammatical description, it provides a detailed overview of the speakers' historical, ethnocultural and sociolinguistic background. The main attention is given to describing inflectional, derivational as well as functional patterns of word classes. In addition, it discusses issues of phonology, including historical phonology within the North Central Romani context, and also covers various syntactic structures.

Aus der Einleitung: Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms that are successfully applied in many application domains. They provide the logical foundation for the Direct Semantics of the standard web ontology language OWL2. The light-weight DL EL, underlying the OWL2 EL profile, is of particular interest since all common reasoning problems are polynomial in this logic, and it is used in many prominent biomedical ontologies like SNOMEDCT and the Gene Ontology.

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The goal of this work is to describe the domain of predicative possession in South Saami, a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Sweden and Norway. Data has been elicited from native speakers of South Saami, and the analysis has been carried out within a general functional-typological framework. In South Saami, four different predicative possessive constructions are used: (1) a habeo-verb construc­tion, (2a) a genitive possessive without copula, (2b) a genitive possessive with copula, and (3) a locational possessive. The latter is not described in the grammars. The have-possessive and the genitive possessives occur frequently and are used to encode all notions of possession. The use of the locational possessive is restricted to inanimate possessors. Distri­bution of the constructions varies among the speakers. Examples for the have-possessive construction present the greatest structural variation. The four possessive constructions are set within a typological context. / Denna studie beskriver predikativ possession i sydsamiska, ett finsk-ugriskt språk som talas i Sverige och Norge. Materialet till studien eliciterades från sex sydsamiska modersmålstalare. Analysen genomfördes inom en typologisk-funktionalistisk inriktning. Analysen visar att i sydsamiskan används fyra olika konstruktioner för att uttrycka predikativt ägande: (1) en habeo-verbkonstruktion, (2a) en genitivkonstruktion utan kopula, (2b) en genitivkonstruktion med kopula, och (3) en lokativkonstruktion. Den senare omnämns inte i de existerande gramma­tiska beskrivningarna, och konstruktionen är begränsad till inanimata ägare. Verbkonstruk­tionen och de båda genitiv­konstruktionerna före­kommer frekvent i materialet och används för alla possessiva relationer. Fördelningen av de olika konstruktionerna varierar hos talarna. Den största strukturella variationen återfinns i habeo-verbkonstruktionen. De fyra possessivkonstruktionerna sätts i uppsatsen in i en typologisk kontext.

Le sakao est une langue océanienne parlée par plus de 1500 personnes, au nord-est de l'île d'Espiritu Santo, au Vanuatu. Cette thèse se fonde sur un travail de terrain de 8 mois au total. Après une présentation détaillée de la situation sociolinguistique de la région, elle décrit en détail la grammaire du sakao, à travers différents aspects : phonologie, morphologie, syntaxe et sémantique. Bien que présentant des traits caractéristiques de sa famille comme une tendance à la multiprédicativité, l'utilisation de séries verbales, ou encore le système de possession, la langue est assez innovante, notamment sur les plans phonologique et morphologique. L'ensemble de la thèse tente également de mettre en évidence les interactions entre structures intonatives et morphosyntaxe. Par ailleurs, cette thèse propose une étude détaillée de différents points, parmi lesquels : un marquage différencié de l'indéfini selon le mode REALIS/IRREALIS ; le système aspectuel et ses interactions avec le mode et l'Aktionsart ; le repérage spatial et la deixis (système à six degrés) ; et les notions de topicalisation, de focalisation, et de cadre discursif. La présente thèse comprend en annexe deux textes extraits du corpus oral, traduits et glosés, ainsi qu'une liste des différences majeures entre le sakao et le nkep, qui peuvent êtreconsidérés comme deux dialectes d'une même langue : le wanohe. / Sakao is an Oceanic language spoken by more than 1500 people in the north-east area of Espiritu Santo Island (Vanuatu, South Pacific). The present thesis is based on a total of eight months' fieldwork. After a thorough description of the sociolinguistic situation in the area, it describes the main phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic features of Sakao. Sakao presents characteristic features of an Oceanic language (e.g. a tendency toward multipredicativity, the use of serial verbs constructions, the expression of possession, etc.). However, this language is also innovative, especially regarding its phonology and its morphology. The entire thesis also attempts to highlight the interaction between intonation and morphosyntactic structures. The thesis also proposes a precise study of various issues, including the following: differential marking of the indefinite depending on the mood of the sentence; the aspectual system and its interactions with mood and Aktionsart; spatial reference and the six-degree deictic system; and the notions of topicalization, focus, and discourse frame. The appendix presents the transcription of two narratives from our oral corpus (together with their glosses and French translations), as well as a list of the main differences between Sakao and Nkep, considered here as two dialects of a same language: Wanohe.

Charles University Faculty of Arts Institute of South and Central Asia Subject: Languages of Asia and Africa PhD Thesis The Description of Namuzi Language Supervisor: Mgr. Veronika Zikmundová, Ph.D 2017 Štěpán Pavlík Abstract This is the description of one of the endangered languages spoken by cca 5000 people in Sìchuān province in China - the Nàmùzī language. It is considered to be part of the Naic or the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman. The description is based on the authentic data collected by the author during his two field trips to Xīcháng and Mùlǐ in winter 2011 and summer 2012. It is the first grammar description of this language in English and also the most comprehensive description of this language carried out to date. Chapter 1 provides the introduction on the sociolinguistic profile of this language, its genetic affiliation, previous research and methodology. Chapter 2 describes the phonology of the language, i.e. the syllable structure, description of initial consonants and consonant clusters, vowels and tones. Chapter 3 is the explanation of used analysis to define particular parts of speech. It introduces the criteria of defining word classes and the reasons for using functional approach. Chapter 4 contains the description of verbal classes, i.e. verbs, adjectival verbs and adverbs. Chapter 5...

The research studies the Southern Appalachian dialect present in five poems in Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems. The linguistic phenomena characteristic of Southern Appalachian English observed and analyzed in the poems include lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects. The research seeks to bring attention to this Appalachian woman writer as well as to bring understanding of her reasoning behind incorporating the dialect in her poetry. It establishes that the five poems by Range contain the lexicon, grammatical features, and phonological aspects of the SAE dialect. It holds meaning both grammatically and pragmatically within the context of the poem and Appalachia.