<p> This thesis investigates word order change in infinitival clauses from Object-Verb (OV) to Verb-Object (VO) in the history of Latin and Old French. By applying a variationist approach, I examine a synchronic word order variation in each stage of language change, from which I infer the character, periodization and constraints of diachronic variation. I also show that in discourse-configurational languages, such as Latin and Early Old French, it is possible to identify pragmatically neutral contexts by using information structure annotation. I further argue that by mapping pragmatic categories into a syntactic structure, we can detect how word order change unfolds. For this investigation, the data are extracted from annotated corpora spanning several centuries of Latin and Old French and from additional resources created by using computational linguistic methods. The data are then further codified for various pragmatic, semantic, syntactic and sociolinguistic factors. This study also evaluates previous factors proposed to account for word order alternation and change. I show how information structure and syntactic constraints change over time and propose a method that allows researchers to differentiate a stable word order alternation from alternation indicating a change. Finally, I present a three-stage probabilistic model of word order change, which also conforms to traditional language change patterns.</p>

This study investigates the correlations between information structure and syntactic structure with particular reference to Spanish. After a detailed consideration of notions like "topic" and "focus" and several topicalizing and focusing mechanisms (such as Clitic left-dislocation, Pronominal left-dislocation, Topicalization, Right-dislocation and Focus Preposing), two different "topical" elements are distinguished: Sentence Topic (STopic) and Background. These elements do not co-occur and each of them combines with Focus to form two different articulations: STopic-Focus and Background-Focus. The STopic-Focus articulation is pragmatically, syntactically and phonologically unmarked both in English and Spanish. It can be uttered out-of-the-blue, it involves a preverbal subject, and it is expressed through unmarked rightmost focus-related accent. However, the Background-Focus articulation, which has very specific contextual restrictions, is marked syntactically in Spanish (by the left- or right-dislocation of Background elements) and phonologically in English (by non-rightmost marked focus-related accent). From this point of view, information structure is closely correlated with syntactic structure in Spanish: STopics occupy a preverbal specifier position while Background elements occupy dislocated positions. This informational-syntactic correlation is accounted for as follows. So-called NP-movement is viewed as a topic-driven movement, which explains the contrast between topical preverbal subjects and focal postverbal subjects: only subjects with a Topic feature (an optional D feature) raise to the preverbal specifier position. The dislocated position of Background elements has to do with escaping the domain of projection of the focus feature. This explains the otherwise mysterious contrast between ungrammatical Bare Noun (BN) preverbal subjects and grammatical BN dislocated phrases (both considered to be topics up to now). BNs cannot reach the preverbal subject position, since this is a position only reached by DPs with a topic feature. However, they are allowed in adjoined, dislocated positions, since these positions can be occupied by any type and number of Background elements. Thus, some of the differences between Spanish and English arise from the fact that the topic and focus features are syntactically active in Spanish, but only phonologically active in English.

Free word order phenomena in natural language is often attributed to a syntactic movement rule called Scrambling. Currently there is some controversy regarding the nature of this rule. According to the predominant view (Saito (1985), Webelhuth (1989)) Scrambling is A'-movement. According to the alternative view (Mahajan (1987, 1989b)) Scrambling is an instance of WH-movement. The former view is strongly justified by the fact that Scrambling shares a large number of properties with WH-movement (Webelhuth (1989)). The latter view is supported by the fact that Scrambling appears to be immume to weak crossovers effects, and that scrambled elements are able to license anaphors. This study is devoted to reconciling the claim that Scrambling is A'-movement with the aforementioned facts which seem to argue otherwise. A novel theory of binding is developed based on the assumption that both A- and A'-positions may license anaphors, and a novel approach to weak crossover phenomena based on Reinhart's Bound Pronoun Rule is proposed. Interestingly, the same notion of binding turns out to be the crucial element in each theory.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, Madison 1975. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is a critical stylistic analysis of the meanings of the lexemes 'feminism', 'feminist(s)' and 'feminist' in UK national newspapers, 2000-2009. It uses the textual-conceptual functions set out in Jeffries (2010a) to investigate the linguistic contexts in which these lexemes occur within the data in order to assess to what extent the movement, the people who represent it, and things that are described as feminist are imbued with different textually constructed meanings. The analysis tests previous studies' findings concerning portrayals of feminism and feminists in the media. Expanding on and responding to this research, this study reports on five main findings: • 'Feminism', 'feminist(s)' and 'feminist' have positive, as well as negative, meanings. • 'Feminism' and 'feminists' are a western phenomenon, with different types in the past and present. • 'Feminism' has a complex meaning, with no single, universal definition and a variety of types. • 'Feminism' is presented as having undergone changes in meaning, as antonymous to other ideas and containing opposed meanings. • Portrayals of 'feminism' are complex, with articles recognising and contesting different meanings of the lexemes. These findings both confirm and question previous studies, which have argued that feminism and feminists are portrayed negatively in newspaper texts. It provides linguistic evidence to support claims made by other non-linguistic studies of the same genre and time period: that portrayals of feminism are 'fragmented' (Mendes, 2011a, p. 49) and that they present feminism as consisting of approved and disapproved types (Dean, 2010). I also discuss the lexemes 'feminism', 'feminist(s)' and 'feminist' in with regard to contested meaning, using critical stylistic tools to analyse how newspaper articles textually construct different meanings of the lexemes, and explicitly discuss and compare different definitions. The thesis argues that the analysis of textual meaning can be used to explore how the meanings of a lexeme or set of lexemes that 'involve ideas and values' (Williams, 1983, p. 17) are constructed in a variety of ways through the linguistic context in which they occur. I also reflect on the usefulness of the textualconceptual functions in the manual analysis of a large dataset, identifying ways in which an analysis that seeks to provide as full as possible an account of the textual construction of meaning can produce findings not possible through other means of analysis.

Grounded in Halliday’s systemic functional approach to the study of language and his three metafunctions of language, a new model called an Eclectic Model of Mind Style (EMMS) is presented in this thesis. Its building involved the examination of existing research on mind style and further systematic incorporation of some of the existing concepts, approaches and methodologies into one overarching model that could assist scholars in a more comprehensive understanding of the character’s mind style. The goal of the model is to provide an analytical tool for stylistic analysis of the fictional characters’ mind styles by demonstrating various stylistic effects used by authors in depiction of fictional characters in their novels. The building of the model involved two stages: the first stage comprised the detailed review of the scholarly research on the notion of mind style with the focus on the workings of the deviant minds. During this process, the outlines of the new model including its major categories have gradually emerged and finally, the EMMS has been built to be used as an inclusive analytical tool for stylistic analysis. Testing the proposed model by applying it to the analysis of the two selected fictional characters has become the next logical step bringing forth the second stage of the thesis writing process. During this stage, the two novels and their main characters have been chosen, namely: Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Don Tillman in Graeme Simsion’s (2013) The Rosie Project. The primary focus of the analysis has been on exemplifying application of the EMMS categories to identifying the foregrounded use of stylistic features by the two characters and testing the EMMS analytical potential. The findings show the EMMS analytical potential for stylistic research and possible use in other areas of language studies, as well as the necessity for its further testing.

Poetry translation evaluation from ancient Chinese to English has been subjective in China. This is caused by the indefinable and intangible notion of ‘poetic spirit’, which is often used in influential translators’ criteria, and by the lack of a systematic investigation of translation evaluation. The problem of subjective criteria has remained unresolved for nearly a century. In order to improve the subjective criteria of poetry translation evaluation, this thesis is an attempt to make objective evaluations of the English translations of an ancient Chinese poem using stylistic theories. To make an objective criticism, it is necessary to offer evidence which is based on systematic and reliable criteria and replicable evaluation procedures. By applying stylistic theories to both the source text and the target texts, it is possible to make a judgement based on the stylistic features found in the texts themselves. Thus, objective evaluation of poetry translation from ancient Chinese to English can be made. This research is qualitative with the data consisting of one ancient Chinese poem as the source text and six English translations as the target texts. It carries out stylistic analyses on the data with two approaches based on the cognitive stylistic concept of figure and ground and the linguistic stylistic theory of foregrounding. The target texts are judged by the evidence of locative relations and foregrounding features. This research also explores and proposes a practical framework for poetry translation. The research findings suggest how to make objective poetry translation evaluations and improve translation techniques. They also point out the need to integrate stylistics with translation evaluation to make improvements in the field.

This research uses literary resources as evidence against the argument that names are potentially semantically meaningless entities. A secondary goal is to highlight and discuss the value of onomastics from both a literary and linguistic perspective. The thesis proposes a methodology for the assessment of literary sources based on genre, arguing that names, and genre in turn, may be defined through their respective engagement with thematic considerations, providing a relevant critical structure by which to assess the application or construction of names within fiction. The proposed methodology is first used to assess the placenames within dystopian literature, taking Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), and Zamyatin’s We (1924) as exemplar texts for the genre. The emblematic themes identified within the onymic patterns (propaganda, classification and regulation) all share a common thematic root: power and control. In order to assess the validity of this approach, the fictional worlds depicted in a selection of other dystopic texts are also examined. A special study is made of terrapsychology and fictional ontology, as well as of three distinct subgenres of the gothic. Case studies of the latter are each focused around a different ontological mode (fictional, part-fictional, and non-fictional placenames), covering the fantastic world of Peake’s Gormenghast setting (two texts published in 1946 and 1950), Lovecraft’s variant New England county (six texts, 1922 to 1936), and the representative contemporary setting of Brook’s World War Z (2006), respectively.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of English, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-89).

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-09T12:28:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012-05-31Bitstream added on 2015-04-09T12:48:05Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000816190.pdf: 3081939 bytes, checksum: b0ebdc8476111cd237a3bda41e77ba75 (MD5) / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Este trabalho teve por objetivo analisar os padrões de usos que o autor grego Apolodoro (I d.C.) fez do aspecto verbal, por meio de uma abordagem empírica, a partir de uma base de dados informatizados e estatisticamente verificados. Tratou-se de uma pesquisa exploratória na qual foi utilizada a metodologia fornecida pela Linguística de Corpus, pois no seu conceito fundamental a linguagem é um sistema probabilístico e deve ser estudada por uma abordagem empírica. A pressuposição desta visão da linguagem é a de que as possibilidades teóricas dos traços linguísticos não coincidem com a frequência de ocorrências. Essa diferença é não somente significativa do ponto de vista estatístico, como também ela evidencia que é característico da linguagem a existência de (i) regularidade nos padrões apresentados e (ii) sistematicidade nas variações. Como padrões da linguagem foram considerados os padrões colocacionais. O corpus escolhido foi a obra Biblioteca, cuja autoria é atribuída a Apolodoro, séc. I d.C. Este corpus, portanto, é adequado para o estudo do padrões de usos aspectuais porque é composto de textos autênticos, em língua natural. A identificação do aspecto verbal se deu pela localização da desinência pertinente ao tema verbal correlato, com índice de mais alta frequência, utilizando o programa AntConc, que gerou uma lista de palavras (word list) elencando os verbos contabilizados. A partir das ocorrências de verbos levantadas foi estabelecido o aspecto verbal mais frequente para que se definisse a unidade de análise. O critério de seleção dos aspectos verbais se deu pela oposição de temas verbais, considerando-se a oposição dos três temas verbais: tema do presente, tema do perfeito e tema do aoristo. O corpus utilizado no programa AntConc não estava etiquetado. A fim de proceder à análise foi utilizada a etiquetagem morfossintática constante ... / The aim of this work was to analize the patterns of aspect usages in Greek writer Apollodorus, by means of empirical approach, from a electronic database and statistically tested. The main methodological underpinning for the exploratory research was provided by Corpus Linguistics because in the fundamental concept language is a probabilistic system and it must be studied by an empirical approach. The assumption of this view of language is that the theoretical possibilities of linguistic features do not correspond with the frequency of occurrence. This difference is not significant only in statistical point of view, it demonstrates that is typical of language the presence of (i) a regular pattern showed and (ii) a systematic variations. As language patterns were considered collocational patterns. The corpus chose was the work Library (Biblioteca in portuguese), whose authorship is attributed to Apollodorus, first century CE. This corpus is therefore suitable for the study of patterns of aspect usages because it is composed of authentic texts in natural language. The identification of verbal aspect was due to the ending location of the pertinent verbal correlate with higher rate of frequency, using the program AntConc, which generated a word list listing the verbs accounted for. From the occurrences of verbs chosen was established the most frequent verbal aspect in order to define the unit of analysis. The selection criterion was given verbal aspects of the opposition of verbal stems, considering the opposition of three verbal stems: present stem, perfect stem, and aorist stem. The corpus used in the AntConc program was not tagged. In order to examine, POS tagging was used to steady in the Perseus Digital Library. Among the sample of verbal occurrences, the stem of the aorist had the highest frequency. Through statistical analysis, collocational pattern infinitive + participle was the most frequent