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The first part of this thesis addresses the following questions: where in the syntactic tree, and at what representational level is an NP Case-checked. To this end, it presents converging data from French, Welsh and Irish, which suggest (i) that Case-checking may be accomplished under a variety of functional projections (subject to parametric variation); and (ii) that Case positions are--at least partially--independent of the A/A$ sp prime$-distinction. It furthermore presents evidence from Irish and Welsh--VSO languages in which NPs typically raise to their Case position only at LF--that NPs are, under certain conditions, Case-checked at S-structure. / Chapter 2 investigates word order and cliticisation in Standard French and Quebec French interrogatives and proposes a typology of interrogatives. Chapter 3 and 4 account for complementizer variation, pre-verbal particles and agreement patterns in Welsh and Irish under a Case-theoretic approach. / The second part of this thesis concerns the conditions on the availability of structural accusative Case. A theory of structural Case is proposed according to which accusativity is a configurational rather than a lexical property--i.e., resulting from syntactic geometry and not from lexical feature specifications on verbs. To this end, a comparison between the syntactic mapping of stative and perfective predicates in Irish and English is undertaken.

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

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No. of bitstreams: 1 nhoato_h_me_sjrp.pdf: 2121124 bytes, checksum: e1ba29217152a7f50efc81fe4758f38c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-07-02 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / O objetivo do trabalho é analisar funcionalmente os modificadores adjetivais do SN com base na motivação semântica do referente nuclear: se entidades de primeira ordem ou Indivíduos ou se entidades de segunda ordem ou Estados de Coisas (LYONS, 1977; HENGEVELD, 2008), priorizando as propriedades pragmáticas e semânticas dos adjetivos na variedade do português brasileiro falado no noroeste do Estado de São Paulo. A análise, de natureza funcionalista, vincula-se ao arcabouço teórico proposto pela Teoria da Gramática Funcional (DIK, 1997a) e pela Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008) que proveem uma classificação semântica dos constituintes do sintagma nominal com base nas suas propriedades de referência a entidades do mundo e na atribuição de propriedade de modificação a essas entidades. Para análise da relação que os modificadores estabelecem com o núcleo dos sintagmas nominais, este trabalho volta-se para a classificação proposta por Negrão et al. (2014), que separam os adjetivos em argumentais e predicadores de núcleo, ou seja, itens lexicais que assumem uma posição aberta pelo substantivo deverbal e os que abrem posições temáticas que são, por seu lado, saturadas por um substantivo-núcleo. Para análise dos aspectos semânticos dos modificadores utilizam-se as classificações propostas por Castilho (2010), Castilho e Moraes de Castilho (1993), Cinque (2010) e Neves (2010). A amostra examinada é extraída do córpus IBORUNA coletado pelo Projeto ALIP, que foi concebido no interior do Grupo de Pesquisa em Gramática Funcional (GPGF) da UNESP de São José do Rio Preto. Os dados mostram, em primeiro lugar, que, de certo modo, independentemente do tipo de entidade envolvido no núcleo, de primeira e de segunda ordem, a posição pós-nuclear é a preferência grandemente majoritária dos adjetivos na codificação morfossintática. Além disso, a distribuição em anteposição e posposição tem uma regularidade motivada por traços semânticos específicos do modificador. A posição pré-nuclear, mesmo com baixa frequência, está vinculada a traços pragmáticos e semânticos específicos. Esses resultados demonstraram a atuação de motivações semânticas e, em menor parte, pragmáticas, condicionando o preenchimento de posições específicas dos modificadores no interior do sintagma nominal. / The aim of this study is to analyze, from a functional perspective, the adjectival modifiers of Noun Phrases, focusing on the semantic motivation of the Noun Phrase head: whether headed by first-order entities or Individuals or second-order entities or States-of-Affairs (LYONS, 1977; HENGEVELD, 2008). The purpose of this work is to give some priority to the pragmatic and semantic properties of adjectival modifiers in the variety of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the northwest of São Paulo State. In order to do so, the analysis based on a functional perspective is aligned to the theoretical framework of The Theory of Functional Grammar (DIK, 1997a) and of the Functional Discourse Grammar (HENGEVELD; MACKENZIE, 2008). These authors provide a semantic classification of the constituents of the Noun Phrases which is based on their reference to entities (Individuals or States-of-Affairs) of a world and they analyze the process of modification of these entities by the attribution of a property. The analysis of the relationship between modifiers and the head of the Noun Phrases, initially, considers the classification proposed by Negrão et al. (2014), who distinguish adjectives in arguments and predicates. This distinction means that lexical items that, on the one hand, take a position open by the deverbal noun and, on the other hand, those who open a thematic positions taken by the nuclear referent of the Noun Phrase. Moreover, to analyze the semantic aspects of the modifiers, this study considers the classifications proposed by Castilho (2010), Castilho and Moraes de Castilho (1993), Cinque (2010) and Neves (2010). The sample examined was extracted from the IBORUNA Corpus, which was conceived by the Functional Grammar Research Group (Grupo de Pesquisa em Gramática Funcional), of São Paulo State University (UNESP) at São José do Rio Preto. The analysis shows, firstly, that: regardless of the type of entity involved in the head, whether first or second order, the modification after the head (postmodification) is where the adjective is largely preferred to occur in Morphosyntactic Encoding. In addition, the distribution through the place before the head (premodification) and postmodification in relation to the Noun Phrase head is provided with a high degree of regularity motivated by specific semantic features of the modifier. Secondly, the premodification, even if it is applied with low frequency in the data, is properly aligned to pragmatic and semantic specific features. Finally, these results show how semantic motivations and, less frequently, pragmatic ones, are involved in the fulfilling of specific positions of adjectives inside the Noun Phrase. / FAPESP: 2016/00661-5

This essay deals with the issue of readability, the term readability referring to what it is that makes a reader perceive a text as difficult or easy. Some factors are related to the reader but there are also those which depend on the text as such, one such factor being style which is the one that will be focused on in this essay. The investigation is based on the analysis and comparison of a complete version and an abridged version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the questions to be investigated are whether the author of the abridged version has succeeded in making it less complicated, and if he or she has done so by considering stylistic features said to be affecting readability. Further, this essay is divided into four chapters. The first chapter contains the background for the analysis and is divided into 4 parts dealing with the following aspects: the definition of readability, early research on readability, later research on readability, and difficult and easy language. Chapter two describes the limitations made and the method used for the analysis which involves looking at the noun phrase, the verb phrase, and the clause. Chapter three gives a detailed description of the corpus investigated. Moving on to chapter four, this is where the results of the investigation are presented. This is done by dividing it into four different subchapters, each of them dealing with issues related to the different areas described in the method. Each of the subchapters then begins with the presentation of the results for each edition which is then followed by a comparative discussion. The essay ends with a conclusion part where conclusions regarding the four areas presented in the analysis are made along with the answering of research questions.

<div>Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity is a topic that has received considerable attention in various fields of applied linguistics, such as English for academic purposes, second language acquisition, language testing, and second language writing (Bulté & Housen, 2012). Many scholars in applied linguistics have recently argued that grammatical complexity has primarily been represented by clausal features (e.g., subordinate clauses), and it is important to study grammatical complexity as a multidimensional construct based on both clausal features and phrasal features (Biber, Gray & Poonpon, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009). Thus, this dissertation is a corpus-based investigation on how the use of noun phrases is influenced by two situational characteristics of a university context: academic level and first- and second-English language background.</div><div><br></div><div>I built my corpus by extracting 200 essays from British Academic Written English Corpus, which represents academic writing of (1) undergraduate and graduate students and (2) L1 and L2 students. Noun phrase complexity was then operationalized to the 11 noun modifiers proposed in the hypothesized developmental index of writing complexity features in Biber, Gray and Poonpon (2011). The 11 noun modifiers were extracted from the corpus and counted for statistical analysis via a set of Python programs. With a Chi-square test followed by a residual analysis, I found that both academic level and first- and second-English language background influenced noun phrase complexity but in distinct ways. The influence of academic level is primarily associated with three phrasal modifiers (i.e., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and appositive NPs) and two clausal modifiers (i.e., relative clauses and noun complement clauses). The undergraduate corpus includes more of the two clausal modifiers, whereas the graduate corpus has more of the three phrasal modifiers. This suggests that, in these 200 essays, graduate students tend to build more compressed NPs than undergraduate students. However, the influence of first- and second-English language background derives from a much broader range of noun modifiers, including eight noun modifiers (e.g., attributive adjectives, relative clauses, infinitive clauses). More diverse NP patterns with different noun modifiers are in the L1 corpus than in the L2 corpus. Surprisingly, the L2 corpus has more phrasal noun modifiers (i.e., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns), which has been argued to indicate advanced levels of academic writing. A qualitative analysis on selected essays reveals that some cases of attributive adjectives and premodifying nouns are repeatedly used by L2 students to help content development in their writing. Overall, this dissertation adds an additional piece of evidence on the importance of noun phrase complexity in writing research.</div><div><br></div>

The past century has brought with it many changes to the English language. One of these is the drastic increase in complex nominal phrases, particularly premodifiers. This implies difficulties for translators, whose target languages may not have evolved in the same way, and who must then find other solutions. The aim of this essay is to investigate which kind of premodifier is most frequent in an academic text in English, and how the different kinds of premodifiers are translated into Swedish. Since the language pairs share many similarities, it was expected that many of the shorter premodifiers will keep their structure when translated. However, since Swedish cannot recreate the longer and more complex noun phrases, nor add multiple noun premodifiers in succession, it is also expected that several of the English premodifiers will be restructured into other constructions.The results show that the majority of the adjective/participial premodifiers kept their structure when translated into Swedish, and the tendency to restructure them into postmodifiers was low. Noun premodifiers were more likely to be restructured into postmodifiers, especially when they were more complex, though most of the noun premodifiers were restructured into compound nouns. The hyphenated premodifiers were the most likely to be restructured into different constructions, especially postmodifiers.In conclusion, since Swedish and English are similar in structure, many of the premodifiers were quite straightforward in translation, but several, especially longer and more complex noun phrases, can pose problems for a translator.

What explains the shape of Zauzou noun phrases? Zauzou (Trans-Himalayan, China) noun phrases exhibit considerable diversity in both the choice of the phrase's primary reference type, and the presence of classifiers, demonstratives, modifiers, and case marking. This investigation uses a large, previously existing Zauzou textual corpus. The corpus was annotated for variables hypothesized to predict the variation in noun phrase form. Syntactic variables investigated include word order, subordination, subordinate role, and a new variable called "loneliness." Participant semantic variables include thematic role, agency, and affectedness. Referential semantic variables include boundedness, number, and animacy. The information packaging variable investigated is accessibility. Statistical analysis of the corpus revealed that case marking was predicted using a variable called "loneliness." This is where a multivalent verb has only one argument that is explicitly referenced in the clause. Lonely noun phrases are more likely to be case marked. The role of loneliness in motivating case marking confirms that disambiguation can be an explanation for differential case marking. Animacy and accessibility are important predictors of noun phrase weight. Overall, high animacy and high accessibility correspond to reduced noun phrase weight. Agency and thematic role were also significant variables. The Zauzou data makes clear that speech act participants occupy a unique role in the animacy hierarchy. Speech act participants are often unexpectedly light upon first mention, being referred to with a pronoun or zero anaphor. They are often unexpectedly heavy while highly activated, remaining a pronoun instead of reducing to a zero anaphor. Zauzou, like Mandarin and Cantonese, allows classifiers to be used with a noun but without a numeral. In Mandarin, this construction is used only with new or generic noun phrases. In Cantonese, this construction can be used with noun phrases of any accessibility value. Zauzou occupies a unique intermediate position. In Zauzou, a noun with bare noun phrase can occur with new or old noun phrases, but rarely with active ones. This thesis provides evidence for the importance of text corpora. Using a corpus allowed for the simultaneous inclusion of many variables as well as the consideration of genre effects. In addition, the annotated corpus produced in this investigation is an important output; it is available in the supplemental materials accompanying this thesis.

This paper aims to investigate whether language use can account for the differences in code-switching within the article-noun phrase in children exposed to English and German, French and Russian, and English and Polish. It investigates two aspects of language use: equivalence and segmentation. Four children’s speech is derived from corpora of naturalistic interactions recorded between the ages of two and three and used as a source of the children’s article-noun phrases. We demonstrate that children’s CS cannot be fully explained by structural equivalence in each two languages: there is CS in French-Russian although French does, and Russian does not, use articles. We also demonstrate that language pairs which use higher numbers of articles types, and therefore have more segmented article-noun phrases, are also more open to switching. Lastly, we show that longitudinal use of monolingual articles-noun phrases corresponds with the trends in the use of bilingual article-noun phrases. The German-English child only starts to mix English articles once they become more established in monolingual combinations while the French-Russian child ceases to mix French proto-articles with Russian nouns once target articles enter frequent use. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies which report code-switching across different language pairs.

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