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The thesis describes the usage of definite article with proper nouns in current Spanish language. Proper nouns distribution and their dependence of the definite article according to the grammar books and textbooks is explained in the first part. The proper nouns are divided into geographical and personal nouns and these two groups are classified into charts according to the usage of the definite article. The second part deals with the selective geographical nouns and their usage of definite article in Spanish speaking countries according to the corpus CREA. The achieved results are analysed in the last part.

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<p>With the advent of corpora documenting learner English, a new and interesting field of research has become available. Learner corpora provide a new type of data which can inform thinking both in second language acquisition research and in foreign language teaching research. Analyses of learner corpora normally report on features which are typically ‘overused’ and ‘underused’, when contrasted to comparable native speaker corpora, in addition to those which are ‘misused’ by the learners. Ringbom (1998) conducted a study in which he identified one common aspect of non-native speaker corpora: the high frequency of general nouns, such as people and thing.</p><p>The aim of this paper was to test Ringbom’s findings and attempt to identify how English as a second language learners’ usage of these particular nouns in written production differ from that of native speakers by conducting a corpus comparison of comparable learner and native speaker corpora. The results of this study clearly support Ringbom’s findings; additionally, it was found that the learners’ written production does not appear vaguer and ‘non-native like’ merely because they overuse the general nouns people and thing, but it also seems as if the learners use these nouns in a more restricted range of meanings whereas the natives’ usage is more diversified. Moreover, this study has identified some of the issues that teachers of English as a second language should be aware of when helping their students to avoid using the general nouns people and thing in a non-native like manner.</p>

Since the linguistic turn, many have taken semantics to guide metaphysics. By examining semantic theories proposed by philosophers and linguists, I argue that the semantics of a true theory in a natural language can serve as only a partial guide to metaphysics. Semantics will not always lead to determinate answers to questions of the form 'Does theory T carry an ontological commitment to Fs?' Further, semantics will never deliver answers to questions regarding the nature of Fs. If semantics is to be our guide, we must look to our best semantic theories to determine whether a theory carries ontological commitments to Fs. I develop criteria to determine when a semantic treatment is semantically adequate and should be counted amongst our best theories. Given these criteria, there can be more than one empirically adequate semantic treatment of a natural language theory. To determine ontological commitments I appeal to Quine's Criterion, which states that a theory has Fs in its ontology just in case it says or entails that there are Fs. To determine what a theory says and entails, we must appeal to semantic treatments. Since different equally adequate semantic treatments can yield different contents and entailments, Quine's Criterion delivers ontological commitments only relative to a semantic treatment. I then argue for a supervaluationist principle that delivers unrelativized, but possibly indeterminate, ontological commitments of a theory. Next, I apply my methodology to two case studies which exemplify two kinds of answers the supervalutationist principle might deliver concerning ontological commitments. I argue through an examination of data and formal treatments that plural expressions carry indeterminate ontological commitments to summed entities, while collective nouns carry determinate ontological commitments to group-like entities. Finally, I undertake an examination of what groups, things like teams, committees and courts, might be that accords with the minimal verdict delivered by the semantics of collective noun -- that they exist -- but which goes beyond this to examine their nature. I assess and reject the views of groups currently on offer and propose and defend a novel view of groups as realizations of structures. / text

Šio darbo tema – trumpųjų balsių vartojimas bendriniuose ir tikriniuose daiktavardžiuose. Pagrindinis darbo tikslas – apskaičiuoti ir palyginti trumpųjų balsių dažnius bendriniuose ir tikriniuose žodžiuose. Rašant šį darbą buvo norima kuo daugiau sužinoti apie trumpųjų balsių dažnumą: kurie balsiai ir kodėl vartojami dažniau arba rečiau, ar skiriasi trumpųjų balsių dažniai pradiniuose, vidiniuose ir galiniuose tiriamų žodžių skiemenyse, kokie dažnių skirtumai tarp kirčiuotų ir nekirčiuotų trumpųjų balsių. Norint apskaičiuoti trumpųjų balsių dažnius bendriniuose daiktavardžiuose, buvo tiriama 410 dažniausiai vartojamų daiktavardžių (žr. 1 priedą), turinčių bent vieną trumpąjį balsį, paimtų iš elektroninio dažninio žodyno „Bendriniai XX a. spaudos žodžiai“. Norint apskaičiuoti trumpųjų balsių dažnius tikriniuose daiktavardžiuose ir palyginti jį su bendrinių daiktavardžių trumpųjų balsių dažniais, iš elektroninio dažninio žodyno „Tikriniai XX a. spaudos žodžiai“ buvo išrinkta 500 dažniausių tikrinių žodžių (žr. 2 priedą), turinčių bent po vieną trumpąjį balsį. Tiriami tikriniai žodžiai buvo renkami iš žodyno skyriaus, kuriame pateikiamos garamtinės žodžių formos pagal bendrąjį vidutinį dažnį (taip pat, kaip ir bendriniai daiktavardžiai). Jei žodyje randami keli trumpieji balsiai, tai to žodžio dažnis sumuojamas tiek kartų, kiek tame žodyje yra trumpųjų balsių. Visuose darbo skyriuose ir jų poskyriuose pateikiamos trumpųjų balsių dažnių skritulinės diagramos, taip pat... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The topic of this work is use of short vowels in common and proper nouns. The main purpose of this work is to calculate and compare the frequencies of short vowels in common and proper nouns. When writing this work, it was tried to know more about the frequency of short vowels: which vowels were used more or less often, if the frequencies of short vowels differ in the first, average and last syllables of the researched words, what differences were between the frequencies of stressed and unstressed short vowels. In order to find the frequencies of short vowels in common words, 410 mostly used nouns were researched (see Appendix 1) which had at least one short vowel and were taken from the electronic frequency dictionary „Common Press Words of the 20 th Century“. In order to find the frequencies of short vowels in proper nouns and compare with the frequencies of short vowels of common nouns, 500 mostly used proper nouns were taken from the electronic frequency dictionary „Proper Press Words of the 20th Century“ (see Appendix 2) which had at least one short vowel. The researched proper nouns were chosen from the chapter of the dictionary where grammatical forms were presented according to their general average frequency (the same as common nouns). If a few short vowels were found in the word, the frequency of this word was summed as many times as there were short vowels in that word. In all the chapters and subchapters of this work, circle diagrams of the frequencies of short... [to full text]

Thesis (M. A. (African Languages)) --University of Limpopo, 2005 / Refer to the document

The English translation of the Swedish compound fönsterbräda into windowsill, or the proper noun Danmark into Denmark makes perfect sense. But how about the compound fossilbränslefri as simply fossil fuel or the name Mälaren as Lake?  All four of these translations have been produced with the help of automatic machine translation. The aim of this paper is to present the expanding field of application of machine translation and some issues related to this type of translation. More specifically, the study has looked at Google Translate as one of the most commonly used machine translation systems online, and how it responds to the two linguistic categories that were selected for this small study: compound nouns and proper nouns. Besides analyzing these categories, two different text types were chosen: general information articles from a local authority website (Stockholm City) and patent texts, both of which belong to the expanding field of application of Google Translate. The results of the study show that in terms of compound nouns, neither of the text types proved to be significantly better suited for machine translation than the other and neither had an error rate below 20 %. Most of the errors related to words being erroneously omitted in the English output and words which were incorrectly translated in relation to context. As for proper nouns, the patent texts contained none and subsequently no error analysis could be made, whereas the general information articles included 76 proper nouns (out of a total word count of 810). The most prominent error related to the Swedish version not being maintained in the English output where it should have been, e.g. translating Abrahamsberg as Abraham rock. The errors in both of the linguistic categories had varying impact on the meaning of the texts, some of which distorted the meaning of the word completely, and some which were of minor importance. This factor, along with the fact that the reader of the text influences how the comprehension level of the text is perceived through their language and subject knowledge, makes it difficult to evaluate the full impact of the various errors. It can, however, be said that patent text could pose as a better option for machine translation than general information articles in relation to proper nouns, as this text type is likely to contain no or very few proper nouns.

In language, there exists a distinction between abstract words and concrete words. It can be said that abstract words refer to generic concepts, while concrete words pertain to physical actions or objects associated with physical movement. With respect to the linguistic community, it is often claimed that French words function at a higher degree of abstraction than English words. However, this claim lacks empirical evidence. The present study aims to examine the usage of concrete and abstract words in word association tasks, which are part of Cultura: an intercultural, web-based project that brings foreign language students from different countries and linguistic backgrounds together in a telecollaborative exchange of ideas. Specifically, this study examines the degrees of abstraction of generic nouns in French and English. / text