This thesis proposes a fine-grained semantic classification of what is traditionally named agent nouns in French; it is thus a study of semantic derivation. Our classification was elaborated starting from 1573 agent nouns extracted from the dictionary Le Nouveau Petit Robert. The definitions of several agent nouns in Le Nouveau Petit Robert represent paraphrastic reformulations that are sufficiently close, which allows us to distribute these nouns into semantically more specific subclasses. We have identified 22 subclasses of agent nouns; these subclasses, along with the corresponding lexical units, were described by means of the formalism of lexical functions proposed by Meaning Text theory. We also elaborated definition templates for lexical units of each subclass as well as generalized government patterns (? subcategorization frames) for them. The interest of our work lies in the fact that the suggested classification allows for a more uniform and a more coherent global description of agent nouns. / Le présent travail porte sur une classification sémantique détaillée de ce qu’on appelle traditionnellement les noms d’agent [= S1] en français. Notre classification a été élaborée à partir de 1573 noms d’agent extraits du Nouveau Petit Robert. Les définitions de plusieurs noms d’agent dans le Nouveau Petit Robert représentent des reformulations paraphrastiques suffisamment proches, ce qui permet de repartir ces noms en sous-ensembles sémantiquement plus spécifiques. Nous avons identifié 22 sous-classes de noms d’agent ; ces classes et les lexies correspondantes ont été décrites au moyen du formalisme des fonctions lexicales proposé par la théorie linguistique Sens Texte. Nous avons également élaboré des définitions lexicographiques généralisées pour les lexies de chaque sous-classe, ainsi que leurs schémas de régime (? cadres de sous-catégorisations) généralisés. L’intérêt de notre travail réside dans le fait que la classification proposée mène vers une description globale plus uniforme et plus cohérente des noms d’agent.

Bioinspired design methods are a new and evolving collection of techniques used to extract biological principles from nature to solve engineering problems. The application of bioinspired design methods is typically confined to existing problems encountered in new product design or redesign. A primary goal of this research is to utilize existing bioinspired design methods to solve a complex engineering problem to examine the versatility of the method in solving new problems. Here, current bioinspired design methods are applied to seek a biologically inspired solution to geoengineering. Bioinspired solutions developed in the case study include droplet density shields, phosphorescent mineral injection, and reflective orbiting satellites. The success of the methods in the case study indicates that bioinspired design methods have the potential to solve new problems and provide a platform of innovation for old problems. A secondary goal of this research is to help engineers use bioinspired design methods more efficiently by reducing post-processing time and eliminating the need for extensive knowledge of biological terminology by applying natural language processing techniques. Using the complex problem of geoengineering, a hypothesis is developed that asserts the usefulness of nouns in creating higher quality solutions. A designation is made between the types of nouns in a sentence, primary and spatial, and the hypothesis is refined to state that primary nouns are the most influential part of speech in providing biological inspiration for high quality ideas. Through three design experiments, the author determines that engineers are more likely to develop a higher quality solution using the primary noun in a given passage of biological text. The identification of primary nouns through part of speech tagging will provide engineers an analogous biological system without extensive analysis of the results. The use of noun identification to improve the efficiency of bioinspired design method applications is a new concept and is the primary contribution of this research.

This thesis is a description of some aspects of the grammar of Sɛlɛɛ, a Ghana-Togo-Mountain (GTM) language, based on my own fieldwork. The thesis consists of an introduction and five papers. Paper (I), Noun classes in Sεlεε, describes the noun class system of Sɛlɛɛ. It consists of eight noun class prefixes, four marking singular and four plural. They are paired in irregular ways to form eight genders (singular-plural pairs). Nouns agree with determiners, numerals and interrogative qualifiers within the noun phrase and can be indexed on the predicate. Nouns are allocated to classes/genders based partly on semantic notions. Paper (II), Sεlεε (with Francesca Di Garbo), details the morphological encoding of diminution in Sɛlɛɛ either by the suffixes -bi, -bii, -mii, -e or -nyi alone or in combination with noun class shift. Augmentation is not expressed morphologically. Paper (III), The tense and aspect system of Sεlεε: A preliminary analysis, shows that Sɛlɛɛ, unlike most Kwa languages, has a rather elaborate tense system encompassing present, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal and future tenses. The aspectual categories are progressive, habitual and perfect. Both categories often amalgamate with first person singular subject clitics. Paper (IV), Standard negation in Sεlεε, deals with the negation of declarative verbal main clauses. This is primarily encoded by a high tone, sometimes combined with segmental morphemes, portmanteau negative tense-aspect morphemes and vowel lengthening. Each tense-aspect category has at least one particular negation strategy. Paper (V), Unravelling temperature terms in Sεlεε (with Francesca Di Garbo), investigates the grammatical constructions employed for temperature evaluations. Personal feeling is only encoded via subjects, while ambient and tactile evaluations are construed attributively and predicatively. A comparison of Selee and other GTM languages revealed similar noun morphologies but very different verbal morphologies. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Unpublished book chapter. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: In press. Paper 5: Unpublished book chapter.</p>

The English suffix -s is usually used to mark third person singular present tense, noun plurals, possessives, and in some adverbs, but it is also used in words like news, linguistics, measles, billiards, belongings, riches, oats, shivers, scissors, etc. In the literature so far, words like these have been studied mainly from the diachronic perspective, according to their morphological features and within the realm of count and mass nouns, and the suffix -s has been called a plural marker, possessive marker, pseudo-morpheme, or nominalizer. But these functions identified for the English suffix -s can't successfully explain usages of the suffix -s in all the non-plural English nouns, especially those that are not abstract nouns.In this dissertation a survey on the use of English non-plural nouns in -s is conducted with middle school students, college freshmen, college seniors, college professors and staff members as subjects using six different grammatical tests. It is found that the High School group and Staff Members always stand out as different from College Students and Professors suggesting that education level or the heterogeneousness of education levels does play a role in affecting the subjects' use of the English non-plural nouns in -s. In the survey, the subjects' performance in different types of tests is statistically different indicating that different kinds of tests affect the subjects' performance and grammaticality judgment differently.The FROWN-based study shows that most of these English non-plural nouns in -s are not used very frequently in contemporary American English, revealing that most of the English reference grammars are using obsolete or historical examples. The corpus-based study also tells us that most of the cases of these English non-plural nouns in -s are in non-subject positions, making it harder for us to test the number status of these words. But this large number of non-subject cases just means that we can't tell whether these words are intrinsically plural or singular and in fact except for only a few clearly marked plural cases there is a strong tendency towards generic interpretations for these non-plural nouns in -s. Actually it is this in-determinateness that makes the appearance of the new morpheme or new functions of old morphemes possible.The data from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed, Online (OED), supports Stahlke, Cheng & Sung's (forthcoming) argument that in the late 16th and early 17th century a new morpheme--the nominalizer -s, was developed in the English language to turn adjectives and concrete nouns into abstract nouns. The data on the historical semantic development of English non-plural nouns in -s from the OED also reveals the process of a semantic shift of Adj. -+ Sing. N -+ Pl. N -+ Col. N - Gen. N. This process of semantic shift is strongly evidenced by the disappearance of singular forms of the English non-plural nouns -s in the late 16th and early 17th century and successfully explains why the English nouns in -s have the generic interpretation and require singular verb agreement. / Department of English

The purpose of the present study was to investigate Korean EFL learners' judgments of countability of English nouns because a correct judgment of noun countability is a key factor for the appropriate use of English indefinite articles and noun phrases. To investigate the subjects' judgments of noun countability and how they are related to the use of English indefinite articles and noun phrases, fourteen hypotheses were set forth and four task types were designed.Participants were 115 Korean college EFL students and they were given four tasks: a task of judgment of countability of nouns in isolation OCT), a task of judgment of countability of nouns in context (JCC), a fill-in-the-blank task (FB), and an error correction task (EC).Overall the subjects showed a flexible notion of countability. There was a statistically significant difference between their performance of JCI and JCC. There was a positive relation between their judgments of countability in three contexts (isolation, context, and overall context) and their performance on the indefinite articles in FB.There was no relationship between their performance of JCC and OJC (overall judgment of countability) and the indefinite articles in EC.With respect to JCI, a statistically significant difference was found between the performance of the low and advanced learners and between the performance of the intermediate and advanced learners, but it was not found between the performance of the low and intermediate learners.In regard to JCC, no statistically significant difference was found between the performance of the low and intermediate learners and between the performance of the intermediate and advanced learners. A statistically significant difference was found only between the performance of the low and advanced learners.The participants performed better on the count use of concrete nouns than on the noncount use of concrete nouns, whereas they performed better on the noncount use of abstract nouns than on the count use of abstract nouns.There was an interaction between proficiency and the noncount use of concrete nouns, while no interaction was found between proficiency and the count use of abstract nouns. / Department of English

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1982. / Bibliography: leaves 156-160. / Microfiche. / ix, 160 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

Number is a grammatical category found in nearly every language around the world (Corbett, 2000). The syntactic expression of number is referred to as grammatical number. In English and French, two number categories are in use: singular and plural. Nouns that are written more frequently in their singular form are called singular-dominant, while those that are written more frequently in their plural form are called plural-dominant. Several lexical decision and picture naming studies have found that grammatical number and noun dominance interact, resulting in a surface frequency effect for singular-dominant nouns only. Singular-dominant nouns are recognized/named significantly faster in their singular form than in their plural form, while plural-dominant nouns are recognized/named equally fast in both forms (e.g., Baayen, Burani, & Schreuder, 1997; Biedermann, Beyersmann, Mason, & Nickels, 2013; Domínguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999; New, Brysbaert, Segui, Ferrand, & Rastle, 2004; Reifegerste, Meyer, & Zwitserlood, 2017). The objective of this thesis is to extend our understanding of the singular-dominant noun surface frequency effect in English and French by adopting three procedures. First, advanced linear mixed modelling techniques were used to improve statistical power and accuracy. Second, the noun dominance ratio technique (Reifegerste et al., 2017) was applied to investigate whether the surface frequency effect remains significant when noun dominance was treated as a continuous variable. Third, a determiner-noun number agreement task was created to determine whether the surface frequency effect could be reproduced in a novel task. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, two lexical decision tasks (LDTs) were conducted. Results revealed that in both English and French, singular nouns were recognized faster than plural nouns while the noun dominance effect was non-significant. The interaction between grammatical number and noun dominance was significant in French and marginally so in English. The interaction pattern was identical in both languages, singular-dominant nouns demonstrated a surface frequency effect while plural nouns did not. In Study 2, three determiner-noun number agreement tasks (NATs) were conducted. Results revealed that in both English and French, plural nouns were recognized faster than singular nouns. No other effects were significant. Incorporating irregular singular nouns (e.g., bonus) and plural nouns (e.g., mice) as foils produced the same results. In Study 3, two LDTs and one NAT were conducted. Lexical decision results revealed that in both English and French, singular nouns were recognized faster than plural nouns. However, the effects of noun collectivity and animacy were significant in English only; non-collective nouns were recognized faster than collective nouns while inanimate nouns were recognized faster than animate nouns. Number agreement results revealed that in English, plural nouns were recognized faster than singular nouns; no other effects reached significance. Taken together, my studies confirm that a strong surface frequency effect exists during visual word recognition for singular-dominant nouns. However, the surface frequency effect does not extend to the formation determiner-noun number agreement decisions, which were influenced nearly exclusively by grammatical number.

Resumo: A continuidade categorial é uma propriedade indiscutível da linguagem para a tradição funcionalista, que a trata como um verdadeiro universal linguístico. Além de buscar evidência sistemática para a comprovação desse axioma, o principal objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a estrutura argumental da nominalização, num esforço concentrado por demonstrar que esse mesmo princípio universal é metodologicamente útil e teoricamente válido para postular relações intralinguísticas de continuidade categorial mesmo entre classes aparentemente discretas como as de substantivo e verbo. A trajetória percorrida para a sustentação da hipótese da continuidade categorial passa necessariamente pela comprovação de uma hipótese secundária, a de preservação de valência, postulada por Dik (1985; 1997), segundo a qual a estrutura argumental é parte constitutiva da nominalização. Essa busca não teria êxito se a trajetória percorrida não utilizasse um atalho necessário, representado pela teoria prototípica de categorização. De fato, postular a existência de categorias intermediárias, como a de nominalização, implica necessariamente a existência de membros mais prototípicos de uma categoria. A existência de estrutura argumental, que sinaliza a representação de entidades de ordem superior, permite aproximar a nominalização de membros não-prototípicos da categoria dos verbos como formas não-finitas, enquanto a ausência de estrutura argumental, que sinaliza a representação de uma entidade de primeira ordem, permitiu aproximá-lo de membros prototípicos da categoria dos substantivos / Abstract: Category continuity is an undisputable language property for the functionalist tradition, which treats this principle as a true axiom. Besides seeking systematic evidence for confirming this principle, the main objective of this study is to analyze the argument structure of nominalization as an effort to demonstrate that this very principle is both methodologically useful and theoretically valid to postulate intralinguistic relations of category continuity even between such apparently discrete word classes as nouns and verbs. The path for giving support to the category continuity hypothesis necessarily involves confirming a secondary one, that is, the valence preservation hypothesis, as postulated by Dik (1985, 1997), in which the argument structure is a constituent part of nominalization. However, that search would not be so successful if the path did not pass by a necessary shortcut, represented by the prototypical theory of categorization. In fact, to postulate the existence of intermediate categories, such as nominalization, necessarily imply the existence of more prototypical members of that category. The existence of argument structure, which indicates the representation of higher-order entities, allows inserting the nominalization into such nonprototypical members of verbs as non-finite forms, while the absence of argument structure, which indicates the representation of a first-order entity, allows inserting it into the prototypical members of nouns

The main topic of this thesis is the analytic predicate with event nouns with the suffix -ement in French. It is divided into two parts, the theoretical and the practical one. In the first theoretical part we concentrate on the description of the analytic predicate and we also introduce some test for its identification. The next parts are dedicated to the particular components of this predicate: to the light verb and the predicative noun with a particular emphasis on event nouns, for which we examine their possible typologies. After this we focus on the suffix ement itself, its characteristics as well as the characteristics of nouns, which are created by this suffix. The last topic which we cover is the concurrence between suffixes -ement and age. In the practical part, we begin by describing used methods thanks to which we received needed data as well as our instruments. Then we divided the extracted nouns with the suffix ement according to their meaning into a few groups and we continued by verifying their eventive meaning. Subsequently we concentrated on the collocability of chosen nouns with verbs and we finished by comparing the suffix ement with suffix -age.

This diploma thesis deals with gender markers of nouns denoting animals in contemporary English. The differences will be researched in technical texts published in both the online and print versions of scientific magazines. The work is divided into two main parts. The theoretical part will describe predominantly grammatical categories of nouns (number, countability, determination, gender, case) connected with gender issues. The first half of the practical part concentrates primarily on observation of animal names, collectives, or their forms in singular and plural. The second half is engaged exclusively in singular pronouns as they able to distinguish masculine, feminine and neutral gender in animals.