This dissertation develops a new framework for reconstructing the diversity of a language at a given historical time period. It applies this framework to the problem of reconstructing the diversity of Arabic dialects immediately prior to the Islamic conquests, which spread speakers of these dialects across much of North Africa and the Middle East. The study first establishes a theoretical framework for reconstructing historical speech communities, defined as groups of speakers linked by shared allegiance. It then analyzes the tribal and non-tribal social organization in Pre-Islamic Arabia, and provides a detailed historical overview of how the Islamic conquests contributed to the Arabization of the conquered territories. Finally, the dissertation reconstructs the linguistic history of the Arabic demonstratives, using them as a variable to determine which speech communities existed in pre-Islamic Arabic, where they were located in time and space, and how the diversity of those communities is related to the diversity of modern Arabic dialects. / text

This thesis investigates the phonology of loanword adaptation focusing on English loanwords in Urban Hijazi Arabic (UHA). It investigates the segmental adaptations of English consonants that are absent in UHA as well as the various phonological adaptations of illicit syllabic structures. It is based on dataset of around 100 English loanwords that were integrated into UHA that contain several illicit consonants and syllable structures in the donor language. This dataset is compiled from different published sources along with a data collection exercise. The first significant source is Abdul-Rahim (2011) a dictionary of loanwords into Arabic, while the other one is Jarrah's (2013) study of English loanwords into Madinah Hijazi Arabic (MHA) adopting the on-line adaptation. The third source is original pronunciation data collected from current UHA speakers. Furthermore, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was consulted for the etymology and transcription of the English words. The goal is to provide a thorough analysis of these phonological patterns whether consonantal or syllabic ones found in the adaptation of English loanwords into UHA. To accomplish this, the adaptations have been analysed according to two theoretical frameworks: the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies Loanword Model (TCRSLM) proposed by Paradis and LaCharité (1997) and Optimality Theory (OT) introduced by Prince and Smolensky (1993). The different proposed analyses in this study facilitated an evaluation of the adequacy of each of these theories in accounting for the discussed phonological patterns found in UHA loan phonology. The thesis concludes that OT better explains the adaptations, but neither theory fully accounts for the variety of adaptations found in UHA.

Writing has a central role in UK higher education as a technology for, and signifier of, the learning, teaching and assessment of students. The nature and quality of student writing has also become an important issue outside the academy, particularly in the context of a globalised neo-liberal knowledge economy discourse which emphasises the importance of transferable and employability skills. Although there is a considerable body of research relating to student writing, the work that I undertook for earlier professional doctorate assignments suggested that the role of academic staff in regulating student writing was under-researched and under-theorised. The research carried out for this thesis sought to address this gap in knowledge by focussing on two central questions. Firstly, what role do academic staff play in regulating student writing? Secondly, how is this role shaped by the specific departmental, disciplinary and institutional contexts in which they are located? The research was undertaken in a criminology department in a post-1992 university in the UK. It was positioned in an academic literacies framework which conceptualises writing as a social practice, and drew on linguistic ethnographic methodologies to explore the written feedback that staff give on student writing. The written feedback encounter is where staff and student expectations about academic writing practices intersect, and is therefore a telling site for the study of educational discourses relating to knowledge and how it is represented. Data were collected from three main sources: written feedback and comments given by academic staff on 120 pieces of student work; 18 interviews with staff about academic writing; and institutional policies and procedures relating to marking, assessment and feedback. Employing a range of theoretical perspectives, including those informed by feminist and poststructuralist analysis, these texts were analysed to explore the relationship between institutional discourses, pedagogical practices and identity construction. My research showed that there was a considerable disjuncture between the institutional discourses which governed marking, assessment and feedback and the actual feedback practices of staff. Despite the strong scientific and positivist discourse that pervaded institutional documentation on assessment and feedback, some staff drew on a range of alternative pedagogical discourses and engaged in assessment practices which were more subjective and localised in nature. This gap between the institutional discourse and the situated literacy practices was mediated to some extent by the assessment coversheet and marking procedures which worked to provide an appearance of consistency and agreement to external audiences. This promoted a technical rational approach to feedback which obscured the epistemological and gatekeeping functions of feedback. The thesis concludes that the effective theorisation and teaching of student writing rests on an understanding of how academic staff construct and police the boundaries of appropriate knowledge in their discipline. This approach draws on existing academic literacies theories but argues for a more holistic model which understands academic writing as co-constructed through the practices of both students who produce the written work and the academic staff who mark it.

The native language of South Korea has come to contain a linguistic subset consisting of English and European loanwords and pseudo-loanwords. The notion that the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner is immersed in such a lexicon, and that this terminology can be utilized to effectively assist target language (Standard American English) vocabulary acquisition by the false-beginner through Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), was evaluated and examined. The empirical investigation employed a within-methods (i.e. experiment and survey) design. To this end, the researcher developed and deployed multimedia-based learning environments to empirically test research suppositions. In particular, to examine how the student’s knowledge of English words adapted for use in the South Korean vernacular – loanwords – is affected by their attitudes towards computerized instruction, their preference for certain methods of learning and teaching, and also by the attributes of computerized instructional packages. Ultimately, a method of instruction grounded in both CALL and linguistic theory was developed and its effectiveness for use with South Korean EFL learners in a university English program setting assayed. Scholarly accounts of the South Korean cultural learning style were also taken into consideration, and the implications such accounts hold for the implementation of CALL initiatives scrutinized. / The findings of this study are significant at the administrative, practitioner, and field level. Research outcomes indicate (a) computer use did not bias results obtained through CALL: (b) use of the L1 (first language) to assist foreign language acquisition produced positive learning gains, albeit marginal and limited, as evidenced by the persistent difficulty learners had in building new form-meaning connections between pseudo-loanwords in South Korean and English-equivalents; and, (c) multimedia-based learning developed on cultural and classroom expectations of learners, as found in the literature, was not as successful as that it was contrasted against. Consequently, results of the research come to support usability of CALL in the tertiary education sector, the existence of a ‘stabilized interlanguage’ on the South Korean peninsula and the need to re-profile the South Korean cultural learning style and student classroom expectations that pertain to EFL.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / The Thai government has proposed education reform programs to be competitive with its neighbours and globally. One major policy is to improve competency in English. Thailand has a long history of importing approaches for teaching English from western countries. For a complex variety of reasons the structural-based approaches have been the most influential ones on both teachers and bureaucrats. While these approaches enable Thais to communicate at the basic level, emphasising spoken language, they do not provide systematic guidance to write extended texts effectively. Thai educators have tended to import approaches literally without adequately researching the practicality and suitability of them. This thesis is an attempt to explore whether it is possible to adapt a recently evolved, western 'genre-based' approach to the teaching of English in Thailand. The research focuses on factual English writing because it is highly valued in government, commerce and industry. English and Thai rhetorical patterns differ significantly so students need to write their texts to meet English readers' expectations. To achieve this, students need to be taught to write explicitly. Soundly based in Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the genre-based approach teaches writing at whole text, paragraph and clause levels. It is concerned with realising appropriate generic structure for the different social communication tasks. This approach has the potential to improve Thai students' writing ability. The research project was primarily an ethnographic-case study that was carried out with the co-operation of 45 third year English major students for 14 weeks (from October, 1997 to February, 1998) at the Department of Foreign Languages, Khon Kaen University in northeast Thailand. It is centred on the Exposition genre because some Thai educators had noted that it was one of the most neglected in the Thai educational system, but one of the most valuable genres in western culture. The research outcomes showed that the genre-based approach had a significant positive impact on students' factual writing, showing gains in the control of generic structure and language features of the Exposition. Nevertheless, the research suggests that for the genre-based approach to be successfully implemented in a foreign language context such as Thai, a number of modifications are necessary. The genre-based approach provides students with insights into cultural expectations of writing in English and has the potential to contribute to the policy goals of the Thai government for the upgrading of English teaching and also contribute to its wish of achieving the education refonn agenda.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / The Thai government has proposed education reform programs to be competitive with its neighbours and globally. One major policy is to improve competency in English. Thailand has a long history of importing approaches for teaching English from western countries. For a complex variety of reasons the structural-based approaches have been the most influential ones on both teachers and bureaucrats. While these approaches enable Thais to communicate at the basic level, emphasising spoken language, they do not provide systematic guidance to write extended texts effectively. Thai educators have tended to import approaches literally without adequately researching the practicality and suitability of them. This thesis is an attempt to explore whether it is possible to adapt a recently evolved, western 'genre-based' approach to the teaching of English in Thailand. The research focuses on factual English writing because it is highly valued in government, commerce and industry. English and Thai rhetorical patterns differ significantly so students need to write their texts to meet English readers' expectations. To achieve this, students need to be taught to write explicitly. Soundly based in Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the genre-based approach teaches writing at whole text, paragraph and clause levels. It is concerned with realising appropriate generic structure for the different social communication tasks. This approach has the potential to improve Thai students' writing ability. The research project was primarily an ethnographic-case study that was carried out with the co-operation of 45 third year English major students for 14 weeks (from October, 1997 to February, 1998) at the Department of Foreign Languages, Khon Kaen University in northeast Thailand. It is centred on the Exposition genre because some Thai educators had noted that it was one of the most neglected in the Thai educational system, but one of the most valuable genres in western culture. The research outcomes showed that the genre-based approach had a significant positive impact on students' factual writing, showing gains in the control of generic structure and language features of the Exposition. Nevertheless, the research suggests that for the genre-based approach to be successfully implemented in a foreign language context such as Thai, a number of modifications are necessary. The genre-based approach provides students with insights into cultural expectations of writing in English and has the potential to contribute to the policy goals of the Thai government for the upgrading of English teaching and also contribute to its wish of achieving the education refonn agenda.

There is a need to have an automated system that can read family history books or other historical texts and extract as many genealogy facts as possible from them. Embley and others have applied traditional information extraction techniques to this problem in a system called OntoES with a reasonable amount of success. In parallel much linguistic theory has been developed in the past decades, and Lonsdale and others have built computational embodiments of some of these theories using Soar. In this thesis we introduce a system called OntoSoar which combines the Link Grammar Parser using a grammar customized for family history texts with an innovative semantic analyzer inspired by construction grammars to extract genealogical facts from family history books and use them to populate a conceptual model compatible with OntoES with facts derived from the text. The system produces good results on the texts tested so far, and shows promise of being able to do even better with further development.

No description available.

Submitted by Josimara Dias Brumatti (bcgdigital@ndc.uff.br) on 2017-03-23T14:05:53Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Final_Tese_DIASaline_2015.compressed.pdf: 4972948 bytes, checksum: 0b32c66978433db8156743f2a462240b (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Josimara Dias Brumatti (bcgdigital@ndc.uff.br) on 2017-03-23T14:37:30Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Final_Tese_DIASaline_2015.compressed.pdf: 4972948 bytes, checksum: 0b32c66978433db8156743f2a462240b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-03-23T14:37:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Final_Tese_DIASaline_2015.compressed.pdf: 4972948 bytes, checksum: 0b32c66978433db8156743f2a462240b (MD5) / A presente tese tem por objetivo investigar o status das construções de tópico na Língua de Sinais Brasileira (Libras). Visa-se, assim, oferecer discussão a respeito do papel assumido pelo tópico nessa língua semelhante à que tem sido feita em torno de línguas orais, tal como o Português Brasileiro (PB) (cf., dentre outros, GALVES, 2001; NEGRÃO, 1990; NEGRÃO & VIOTTI, 2000; ORSINI, 2003; PONTES, 1987; VASCO, 1999, 2006). Pretende-se, com isso, contribuir para a caracterização mais aprofundada dessas estruturas, propondo, por fim, uma representação formal para as mesmas, considerando-se as abordagens sobre a periferia esquerda (cf. RIZZI, 1997, 1999) e sobre o custo da computação (cf. CORRÊA & AUGUSTO, 2007, 2012). A hipótese é de que a Libras seja uma língua orientada para a sentença, cuja estrutura básica é a do tipo “sujeito > predicado”, a estrutura “tópico > comentário”, por sua vez, corresponderia àquela marcada nesta língua (cf., dentre outros, FERREIRA BRITO, 1995; QUADROS & KARNOPP, 2004). É possível assumir, dessa forma, que, em se tratando de uma estrutura marcada, possui realidade psicológica diferente e mais custosa do que aquela que representa a ordenação canônica na língua, isto é, “sujeito > predicado”, podendo ser essa diferença investigada em experimentos psicolinguísticos. Desse modo, tem-se, ainda, como objetivo desenvolver a implementação da metodologia experimental de investigação do fenômeno na Libras. Nesse sentido, foram adaptados/criados os seguintes tipos de experimento: (i) teste de julgamento de aceitabilidade; (ii) testes de produção induzida; (iii) teste com rastreamento ocular. Os resultados desses experimentos corroboram a hipótese de que a Libras seja língua de orientação para a sentença, isto é, sua ordenação básica seria “sujeito > predicado”. Entretanto, testada a condição de saliência para que um constituinte seja tomado como tópico, uma vez que a demanda discursiva evidencie um argumento interno como candidato, observa-se ser esse recurso uma estratégia significativa de representação da informação discursiva na sentença da Libras, competindo, em igualdade, com o sujeito. Tal estratégia foi muito pouco empregada quando da ausência desse contexto discursivo apropriado, isto é, sem saliência de um candidato a tópico de argumento interno. Para além desse aspecto, observou-se que a marca não manual associada à construção, levantamento de sobrancelhas, não parece ser indispensável para que usuários da Libras produzam e compreendam sentenças do tipo “tópico > comentário”, assim como o tipo de verbo, com concordância ou sem concordância, não parece ser restrição para que haja topicalização numa sentença da Libras. As análises dos experimentos indicam, ainda, que o tópico nessa língua possa estar deixando de corresponder a uma estratégia marcada, numa espécie de mudança em curso. / This doctoral dissertation investigates the status of the topic constructions in the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). The objective is offer a discussion about the topic‟s role in that language similar to what has been built around oral languages, as in Brazilian Portuguese (PB) (cf., dentre outros, GALVES, 2001; NEGRÃO, 1990; NEGRÃO & VIOTTI, 2000; ORSINI, 2003; PONTES, 1987; VASCO, 1999, 2006). The objective is also to contribute to the further characterization of these structures and eventually proposing a formal representation for them, considering the approaches to the left periphery (cf. RIZZI, 1997, 1999) and the cost of computing (cf. CORRÊA & AUGUSTO, 2007, 2012). The hypothesis is that Libras is a sentence – oriented language, whose basic structure is "subject > predicate," the "topic > comment", on the other hand, corresponds to the marked structure (cf., among others, FERREIRA BRITO, 1995; QUADROS & KARNOPP, 2004). Therefore, it is possible to assume that this marked structure is different and has a more costly psychological reality than the one representing the canonical ordering in that language, i.e., "subject> predicate". Being so, this difference can be investigated in psycholinguistic experiments. Thus, another aim is to develop the experimental methodology implementation for the Libras‟ phenomenon investigation. Then, the following types of experiment have been adapted/created: (i) acceptability judgment task; (ii) language production induced; (iii) tracking of eye movements. The results of these experiments confirm the hypothesis that Libras is a sentence – oriented language, that is, its basic order is "subject> predicate." However, once the most likely condition for a constituent to be taken as a topic is tested, since the discursive demand highlights an internal argument as a candidate, this feature is assumed to be a significant strategy for the representation of discursive information on Libras‟s sentence, competing equally with the subject. Such strategy has been very little used when this appropriate discursive context is absent, i.e., without a highlighted topic candidate for an internal argument. Furthermore, it was observed that the nonmanual topic marker, raised eyebrows, does not appear to be indispensable for Libras users to produce and understand sentences like "topic> comment", as well as the kind of verb – agreement verbs or plain verbs – does not seem to offer restriction for the topicalization in Libras. Thus, the analyses of the experiments also show that the topic in that language may be less marked, a kind of ongoing change in the language.

It is a widely held view that theory and practice are the two core elements of a teacher’s knowledge. What is less defined is how the two interact during the process by which teachers learn to be teachers and whether a case should be made for one being more important than the other. Academics have sometimes queried the notion of practice being a part of knowledge because of the difficulty of quantifying it in a tangible manner. Instead knowledge constructs that are theory based are preferred. The practice of asking participants on a teacher education course to reflect critically on their classroom actions is often used to generate theoretical knowledge from the practical. In my research I examine the nature of teacher knowledge from the perspective of participants on a teacher education course using interviews and email correspondence over the duration of the course and up to one year afterwards. I also explore the views of the researcher as teacher educator through a research artefact or scrapbook. From the data collected it seems that teachers undergo a continuous process of theory making from their practical experience and value this self-generated “practice theory” as the most important constituent of teacher knowledge. Their declarative knowledge is a way of acting in the classroom, but it goes beyond simple replication of actions they observe or are instructed to perform. A “practice theory” is constructed from moments of practice which are congruent with pre-formed views of teaching from their experience as learners and is validated by their personal constructs of success, including the response of their own learners. In looking at how teachers gain this knowledge, this thesis questions the paradigm of co-operative social learning which is often assumed to exist on teacher education programmes. Data suggests that course participants act as individuals seeking to survive a difficult process and exhibit a loyalty to their peers which renders the learning relationship with tutors less benign than is often assumed. This in turn calls into question the acceptance of critical reflection as a key part of teacher learning. The thesis also examines processes which are common to teacher education programmes such as observation and structured practice, and proposes that learning teachers’ experience sometimes contradicts what is often assumed to be good practice. The thesis highlights some considerations for teacher educators. It proposes an increased valuing of the practical and the existence of a practice theory, one that can provide knowledge constructs for teachers. In addition, it suggests a refocus for some activities on teacher education courses to make them more congruent with the real experiences of trainees.