Two experiments examined processing of "near-nonsense" noun-noun combinations (e.g., dictionary treatment, olive signals). In the first experiment, readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing such combinations, or control sentences containing easy-to-interpret adjective-noun combinations. A preceding context sentence either did or did not support a specific interpretation of the critical noun-noun combination. The earliest measures of processing difficulty were not modulated by the context manipulation, but on later measures, the potentially helpful context did alleviate difficulty. In the second experiment, participants provided detailed interpretations of the critical combinations, with and without the potentially helpful context sentence; the results confirmed that the context sentences encouraged specific interpretations of these combinations. The results suggest that a noun-noun combination is initially interpreted without taking into account the immediate context, but that this context may ultimately play a critical role.

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Nominalisation is being considered as one of the tendencies of the contemporary German. The diploma thesis focuses not only on noun derivatives. This diploma thesis deals with the nominal style in general, which is rich on the derivative nouns and different kinds of noun-verb combinations. In contrary to verbal style, the nominal style occurs primarily in the written and professional language. However, some features are to be found even on level A1 and A2 and are used in everyday spoken language. The goal of this thesis is to analyse the textbooks for children and young adults and to find in what level occur the features of the nominal style in textbooks for secondary schools.

The diploma thesis is concerned with the effect of the grammatical gender of Czech nouns referring to inanimate entities on their semantic meaning and conceptualization. The thesis looks into the question whether masculines are conceptulized as "men" and feminines as "women". The thesis is divided into two main parts. In the first part, theoretical insight into the question of relation between language and thought is provided. In this part, foreign experiments related to our research question are mentioned as well. In the second part, two experiments accomplished in the Czech language are presented. The objective of experiment nr. 1 was to choose such semantic differential scales which according to Czech speakers distinguish the "female and male principle" the best. In experiment nr. 2, feminine and masculine gender variants of nouns were employed (e. g. "brambor - brambora"). Experiment nr. 2 contained two tasks. The first task used the semantic differential method. In the second task, participants were asked to choose a woman's or a man's voice that the inanimate entities would have in a cartoon movie. The results of the first task indicate that the grammatical gender of nouns did not affect the decision-making as individual nouns were marked on the semantic differential scales. However, there...

This graduation thesis concerns the active process of professional designations via the spectrum of gender linguistics and comparison of these designations in the Russian and Czech language. The main objective of the thesis is to point out differences in composition and frequency of using feminine nouns in both languages. Designations come from neologism dictionaries and media. Their normativity is verified with dictionaries the status of what is codifying.

This thesis aims to examine factors that influence the use of shell nouns in the writing production by Chinese and Swedish authors. Based on previous studies of shell nouns, this research establishes a theoretical model and a hypothesis is put forward: Though writing in the same genre, Chinese and Swedish authors have different ways of adopting shell nouns partially due to first language transfer. The verification of this hypothesis involves research samples from four corpora across two genres:Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners and Uppsala Student English Corpus made up of argumentations, and two self-established corpora composed of SCI research articles by Chinese and Swedish authors. It is found that in argumentative essays Chinese authors use significantly less shell nouns compared with Swedish authors and the lexico-grammatical patterns used by Chinese authors are not as diverse as those by Swedish authors. Whereas Chinese authors use the pattern the + N and this/that + N mostly, Swedish authors prefer the pattern the + N + that. As for the cohesive function,Swedish authors are more likely to use shell nouns to establish cataphoric reference. In research articles, however, the comparison shows that though Chinese authors still use significantly less shell nouns, especially cognitive shell nouns, the two groups of writers show no significant difference in choosing lexico-grammatical patterns, premodifiers or other classes of shell nouns. A qualitative analysis indicates that linguistic features including methods of texture, popularity of nouns, concrete and abstract dictions and sentence patterns result in the different use of shell nouns, which confirms the hypothesis. As the degree of difference is not the same in the two genres, a possible explanationis suggested: the genre “argumentation” has weak restriction compared with the genre “researcharticle”. It is the difference in genre restriction that makes Chinese and Swedish authors adopt similar or diverse ways of using shell nouns. A pedagogical implication of this thesis is th at language teachers should pay attention to the influence of genre in writing courses and conduct flexible teaching based on features of different genres.

Dans le cadre de cette étude sur l’intégration de l’emprunt à l’arabe dialectal en français et de l’emprunt au français en arabe dialectal dans l’ouest algérien, nous avons tenté, tout au long de notre travail, de manifester notre intérêt pour l’arabe dialectal algérien, et son rapport avec la langue française.Cette étude sur l’intégration phonologique et morphologique d’emprunts porte essentiellement sur des verbes et des substantifs, divisés en trois chapitres. À chaque étape de notre analyse, nous avons cherché à mettre en évidence le fonctionnement du verbe – ou du substantif – en arabe dialectal en nous appuyant sur deux types de lexèmes : ceux qui viennent de l’arabe dialectal et ceux qui sont empruntés au françaisDans le premier chapitre, qui est composé de deux parties, nous avons essayé d’étudier, dans une première partie, les différents substantifs et verbes existant en arabe dialectal, ensuite, nous avons vu dans une deuxième partie, les adaptations au niveau phonologique et morphologique avec des exemples proposés en arabe dialectal algérien.Dans le deuxième chapitre, nous avons analysé uniquement au niveau phonologique l’adaptation des substantifs et des verbes empruntés au français en arabe dialectal à partir d’exemples tirés de notre corpus oral. Ce dernier, nous a permis de voir et d’analyser les différents discours au niveau phonologique en prenant en considération les emprunts, en l’occurrence les verbes et les substantifs, utilisés par nos interlocuteurs.Dans le troisième et dernier chapitre de cette étude, nous avons opté pour la variété de la langue française, bien représentée à l’ouest du pays dans la presse écrite d’expression française, où les items issus des variétés locales parlées en Algérie sont présents. Il s’agit du français de type algérien, observé l’adaptation morphologique d’emprunts à l’arabe dialectal dans le français dans les pratiques langagières des journalistes de la presse écrite, utilisé par un chroniqueur à partir d’exemples tirés de notre corpus écrit.Nous avons pu constater, dans le cadre de cette étude sur l’emprunt en Algérie, que ce phénomène linguistique demeure un des principaux procédés qui contribuent à l’enrichissement du français local et des discours médiatiques, plus particulièrement dans l’ouest algérien. / As part of this study on the integration of French dialectal borrowing into French and the borrowing of French in dialectal Arabic in western Algeria, we have tried, throughout our work, to demonstrate our interest in Algerian dialect Arabic and its relation to the French language.This study on the phonological and morphological integration of borrowings focuses on verbs and nouns, divided into three chapters. At each stage of our analysis, we sought to highlight the functioning of the verb - or noun - in dialectal Arabic by relying on two types of lexemes: those from dialectal Arabic and those borrowed from French.In the first chapter, which is composed of two parts, we tried to study, in a first part, the different nouns and verbs existing in dialectal Arabic, then, we saw in a second part, the adaptations at the phonological level and morphological with examples offered in Algerian dialect Arabic.In the second chapter, we analyzed only at the phonological level the adaptation of nouns and verbs borrowed from French in dialectal Arabic from examples taken from our oral corpus. The latter allowed us to see and analyze the different speeches at the phonological level by taking into account the borrowing, in this case the verbs and nouns used by our interlocutors.In the third and last chapter of this study, we opted for the variety of the French language, well represented in the west of the country in the French-language print media, where items from local varieties spoken in Algeria are present. This is the Algerian-French kind of language, observed the morphological adaptation of borrowing to dialectal Arabic in French in the language practices of the journalists of the written press, used by a chronicler from examples taken from our written corpus.We have seen in this study, which this linguistic integration of borrowings in Algeria remains one of the main processes that contribute to the enrichment of local French and media discourses, especially in western Algeria.

<p>This essay analysed how gender is established in students’ texts. The aim of the study was to find out if the students in a class in an upper secondary school were able to produce texts where female and male subjects were not influenced by prevailing gender roles. The analysis was based on Halliday’s Functional Grammar Theory. Furthermore, the results are interpreted in the light of the guidelines of the Curriculum and the Education Act. To fulfil the aim of this essay 32 texts were analysed from the extra linguistic factor of gender.</p><p>                      The linguistic factors examined were verbs (dynamic/stative, transitive/intransitive), if the subjects function as actors or not were the factors used to establish if there is a difference between how females and males are represented in the texts. Furthermore the use of adjectives, nouns and predicatives modifying the grammatical subjects were also taken in consideration in the analysis. The hypothesis was based on a previous study made on the teaching book <em>Blueprint A </em>and the results from this current study were compared to the results from that study. The study finds that in the texts examined females are established as more stative than males and because of that it is possible to draw conclusions that the teaching book can influence the student in their writing but also that school not always uphold the goals of the Curriculum and the Education Act in the issue regarding gender equality.  </p><p><strong> </strong></p><p> </p>

This thesis provides a syntactic and semantic analysis of bare arguments and classifiers in Thai as well as accounting for its nominal word order. Adopting the Nominal Mapping Parameter (Chierchia 1998), it is argued that Thai nouns are names of kinds. Kinds are of type <s,e>, which are allowed to appear without overt determiners in argument position. For this reason, Thai nouns cannot directly combine with a quantifier without the help of a classifier. The study shows that Thai arguments behave like English bare arguments (bare plurals and mass nouns) in that they exhibit scopelessness and can be interpreted with different meanings such as weak indefinite, generic and kind interpretations. Unlike English bare arguments, the Thai counterparts may also have a definite interpretation. This is because Thai lacks an overt definite determiner. In addition, the thesis provides a unified analysis for the occurrence of Thai classifiers in different contexts. It is assumed that a classifier occurs in a quantified context to provide a portion of a kind (Krifka 1995, Chierchia 1998). The thesis further proposes that a classifier occurs in a non-quantified context where there is no overt numeral when the noun phrase is specific. A specific noun phrase includes those appearing with a demonstrative, the numeral ‘one’ or a modifier. As for the word order within the nominal domain, it is proposed that the noun, although merged at the bottom of the Specific Phrase underlyingly, always appears in the initial position to check an uninterpretable nominal feature in the Specific head.

This thesis provides a syntactic and semantic analysis of bare arguments and classifiers in Thai as well as accounting for its nominal word order. Adopting the Nominal Mapping Parameter (Chierchia 1998), it is argued that Thai nouns are names of kinds. Kinds are of type <s,e>, which are allowed to appear without overt determiners in argument position. For this reason, Thai nouns cannot directly combine with a quantifier without the help of a classifier. The study shows that Thai arguments behave like English bare arguments (bare plurals and mass nouns) in that they exhibit scopelessness and can be interpreted with different meanings such as weak indefinite, generic and kind interpretations. Unlike English bare arguments, the Thai counterparts may also have a definite interpretation. This is because Thai lacks an overt definite determiner. In addition, the thesis provides a unified analysis for the occurrence of Thai classifiers in different contexts. It is assumed that a classifier occurs in a quantified context to provide a portion of a kind (Krifka 1995, Chierchia 1998). The thesis further proposes that a classifier occurs in a non-quantified context where there is no overt numeral when the noun phrase is specific. A specific noun phrase includes those appearing with a demonstrative, the numeral ‘one’ or a modifier. As for the word order within the nominal domain, it is proposed that the noun, although merged at the bottom of the Specific Phrase underlyingly, always appears in the initial position to check an uninterpretable nominal feature in the Specific head.