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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
431

A discourse structural approach to anaphora in Chinese

Wu, Guobin January 1995 (has links)
No description available.
432

Conceptual and procedural encoding in relevance theory : a study with reference to English and Kiswahili

Nicolle, Stephen M. January 1996 (has links)
No description available.
433

Spatial conceptualisation in Anglo-Saxon thought and experience : an interdisciplinary enquiry

Crabtree, Rachel January 1988 (has links)
No description available.
434

The evolution of case in Indo-European studies in semantic roles and sentence function

Booth, J. A. January 1980 (has links)
This study takes the form of a detailed investigation into the evolution and development of the inflectional system of nominal case in Indo- European. Part One is devoted to a critical appraisal of a semantic approach to case analysis, concluding that claims for a 'local' basis cannot be substantiated. In the introductory first chapter the frames of reference for the study are delineated and the basic tenets of three models (traditional grammar, case grammar and the theory of Kury~owicz) are reviewed. Chapter Two deals with the influential localist hypothesis; and Chapter Three makes a specific examination of the locative and ablative cases, which are perhaps the most obviously spatial in origin. Part Two provides a syntactic account for each of the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental cases in turn, arguing that it is only by giving due prominence to syntactic considerations and demands that inflectional cases can be satisfactorily handled. Part Three, which can be regarded as a synthesis of Parts One and Two, is concerned with the relationship between cases and prepositions, and there is some discussion as to the emergence of prepositions and their categorial status.
435

Needs, attitudes and motivation in foreign language learning : a case study of Kuwait university students studying ESP

Al-Busairi, Muhammad January 1990 (has links)
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the role of needs, attitudes and motivation in developing achievement in English as a foreign language for specific purposes. In order to set the stage, however, it is first necessary to review the research literature concerned with the influence of language aptitude and intelligence in the second/foreign language process. This introduction. is necessary because language aptitude and intelligence are the two learner variables which have been considered of prime importance for Language learning other than attitude and motivation The first chapter,which is an introduction, states the need for the study, reviews the literature on intelligence and aptitude as predictors of success in foreign language learning and presents the purpose for the study. The second chapter considers affective variables. It is divided into two parts. Part One focuses attention on affective factors, their importance to second language acquisition, their definition and their classification. Attention is directed mainly to two major classes of attitudes, external attitudes which are either educationally or socially relevant and internal attitudes which are idiosyncratic and result in self-esteem and anxiety. This classification leads to consideration of the specific role of attitudes and their importance as a source of motivation. In Part Two attention is directed to attitudes as they relate to linguistic achievement in second language learning and to other aspects of behaviour such as the drop-out phenomenon, class participation and inter-ethnic contact. The last section of this chapter is concerned with three representative and current models of second language acquisition which have incorporated a wide range of attitudes in their account of the language process. The third chapter is a review of empirical studies which investigate attitude/motivational variables and second language proficiency or achievement. It considers studies which deal with the impact of integrative and instrumental orientation on language proficiency or achievement and studies which show how a composite of the two orientations contributes to achievement in second language learning. Also, attention is directed to factors which might have led to these conflicting results and to findings which suggest, contrary to previous studies, that achievement variables are more powerful determinants of attitudes than attitudinal variables are of achievement. In the light of the literature reviewed in this chapter and in the preceding chapter the model suggested for the present study, reported in chapter 5, and the research hypotheses are presented. The fourth chapter reports a pilot run of a questionnaire constructed to be used in the main study. The data obtained through the questionnaire is presented, discussed and tabulated. Then recommendations regarding the main study were made and the five hypotheses addressed in Chapter 3 were restated with the expected outcomes of each. The fifth chapter is concerned with the Kuwait University Study. It first deals with the subjects and the data gathering instruments: the student questionnaire, the professor questionnaire and achievement measures. Each instrument is discussed as to content, form and administration and the procedures for data collection are given. Second, the results of the structured interview administered to the subjects' professors and the students' questionnaire are analysed and discussed. Thirdly, means and standard deviations of the dependent and independent variables according to college, course level, nationality and sex for each college separately and for the entire population are tabulated, presented and discussed. Fourthly, the correlation between each mean scale and subscale raw scores and GPA and final grade mean scores and multiple regression and a factor analysis run and rotated to a varimax solution are presented, tabulated and discussed. Finally, the five hypotheses addressed in Chapter 3 are listed with a description of each in a form of summary. The sixth chapter is devoted to summary, conclusions, implications and recommendations. It is divided into three sections. The first section summarizes the steps of the study and presents the conclusions that can be drawn from the results of the study. The second section is concerned with the implications of the results of the study for both future research and language instruction at Kuwait University. The third section concludes chapter six by making some recommendations.
436

A study of cohesion in Arabic based on Al-Jurjani's theory of Annazm

Bayshak, Maryam January 1991 (has links)
In the last few years the domain of the linguistic inquiry has been enlarged by recent development of the multidisciplinary investigation of language as a communicative tool. Earlier approaches to the study of language concentrated on the study of the sentence as a basic constituent of language. Therefore, the notion of discourse did not receive adequate attention in most of these approaches. Those aspects of language that make text coherent and are no less important than grammatical aspects were not dealt with. The study of language in communication which is called discourse analysis is concerned with various aspects of language that describe it In its actual interactional function. Those main aspects such as textuality, texture and cohesion have dominated the interest of many discourse practitioners in western linguistics In recent years. In Arabic linguistics, the syntactic and semantic signals that link sentences within a text have not received adequate attention. In our modest study of cohesion devices In Arabic we have tried to shed some light on those linguistic features which participate in connecting text parts. We have taken the theory of a nna?m which was developed by 'Abd al-Qahir alJurjani (5 th century AH/l ph century A.D) as the basis for our display of cohesive devices in Arabic text. We have attempted to show that the anna'4m devices suggested by al-Jurjani are of crucial relevance in the investigation and description of certain important characteristics of Arabic text. They are factors which contribute to the coherence of Arabic text and tools which facilitate the evaluation of Arabic discourse coherence. Cohesion IS displayed through four major devices each of which constitutes a single chapter in the thesis. Those devices are attaqdfm wa tta'khfr "fronting and backing", atta'rfJ w a ttankir "definiteness and indefiniteness", a IIJ a d12J "ellipsis" and a 1- wa~ 1 wa IJa$l "conjunctionand disjunction". This study is presented in a manner comparable with Halliday and Hasan's treatment of Cohesion in English.
437

A study of the development of scientific vocabulary in Arabic

Ali, A. S. M. January 1981 (has links)
No description available.
438

Towards a definition of schwa : an acoustic investigation of vowel reduction in English

Bates, Sally Alexandra Rosemary January 1995 (has links)
This thesis reports a single speaker acoustic study of vowel variability in connected speech. Over eight thousand vowel tokens taken from a corpus of read sentences are examined. The aim of the thesis is to achieve a better understanding of the nature of vowel reduction in English. Three questions are addressed. The first of these concerns the phonetic characterisation of schwa, the central or 'reduced' vowel. Schwa's contextual variability is assessed with reference to the question of whether or not it has an independent phonetic target. The second question concerns the role of stress in conditioning vowel reduction. Patterns of variability for sententially stressed and unstressed vowel tokens are examined in order to determine how far stress and context effects interact to influence vowel quality. The final question concerns the potential ditf erences between vowels with respect to inherent variability, that is, whether some vowels are inherently more susceptible to coarticulatory effects than other vowels. Maximal context-dependency for schwa strongly supports the hypothesis that it is completely unspecified for tongue position. The data indicate that it is also highly unspecified for jaw position. Evidence that schwa is targetless and can occupy almost any position in the vowel space depending on context, argues against the traditional concept of vowel reduction as an independent process of articulatory and/or acoustic centralisation. Greater context sensitivity for sententially unstressed vowels compared with their sententially stressed counterparts also supports an account of vowel reduction in terms of contextual assimilation. The results also indicate a continuum of underspecification. This ranges from-the more peripheral vowels /i, a, ɑ, ɒ, Ɔ/ which show the least contextual variability and which may be thought of as the most narrowly specified vowels to the more central vowels /I, ε , з, ᴧ, Ʊ/ and, in the present data, /u/, which show greater overall context dependency. It is proposed that greater acoustic stability for the more peripheral vowels reflects quantal acoustic properties and tighter articulatory and/or perceptual constraints on variability. Overall, the results support the view that vowel reduction represents a means of economising on articulatory effort. Schwa, the endpoint of the reduction process represents minimal articulatory effort insofar as it represents the straight-line interpolation between consonants and hence minimal resistance to coarticulatory effects. Shorter durations, greater context dependency and, in the case of the peripheral vowels, less extreme formant values for sententially unstressed compared with sententially stressed vowels reflects a reduction in articulatory effort and consequently less displacement from neutral. In view of the greater contextdependency observed for the more central vowels generally compared with the more peripheral vowels, the tense/lax alternation in phonological vowel reduction can also be interpreted as a saving on articulatory effort. A principal advantage of an account of English vowel reduction in terms of phonetic underspecification is that phonetic and phonological vowel reduction may be accounted for by the same mechanism.
439

Features and morphology in generalised phrase structure grammar

Cann, Ronnie January 1984 (has links)
No description available.
440

H.G. Wells and language

Hardy, Sylvia January 1991 (has links)
The thesis of this study is that H.G Wells had a coherent theory of language which derived from the most fundamental aspects of his thinking, and that this theory played an important part in his development as a writer. Throughout his life Wells was interested in the powers and limitations of language as a system of signification, and Chapter One traces the development of these ideas, particularly the way in which the psychology and philosophy of William James influenced his thinking, and suggests that in his early sociological writings, he anticipated later work in linguistics and psycholinguistics. The second chapter looks at Wells's approach to language as a social semiotic, and its importance in the communication of ideas, and it is argued that there was an unresolved conflict between Wells the social reformer, who wanted language to be unitary and universally comprehensible, and Wells the artist, who enjoyed the anarchic and subversive possibilities of linguistic diversity.;Chapters Three and Four explore this dichotomy in relation to the social and the subjective aspects of language use. Chapter Three draws on Marxist and sociolinguistic theories to examine the language of Wells's fictional characters in relation to social class. Chapter Four, looks at Wells's approach to psychoanalytic theory and the linguistic construction of the subject, and this is explored in relation to various theoretical approaches to discourse and narrative. In the last chapter, it is argued that Wells's style cannot be discussed in isolation from his ideas about language, and it must be seen, too, in the context of his dispute with Henry James and the development of literary Modernism.;The conclusion is that recent developments in narrative theory, particularly the work of Bakhtin, enable us to see qualities in Wells's realist prose which have been obscured by the Modernist aesthetic.

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