Concerning American Parenthetical Expressions in Syntax offers an introductory study of the oddity of parenthetical expressions (or PEs) across American dialects of English from a data-driven, syntactic point of view. CAPES presents the results from over 42,000 speaker judgments of audio files containing spoken utterances with parentheticals. These utterances test the possible interpolation points of four pragmatically defined categories of parentheticals "u2013 Vocatives, Mitigatory PEs, Evidential PEs, and Expletives "u2013 as well as some of the possibilities for multiple PEs appearing in the same utterance. These possible interpolation points have been tested in coordination with complex structures and movement operations. Analysis of these data has shown that there are significant differences in patterns of grammatical interpolation points for each of these categories. Despite the clear distinctions present in these categories"' interpolation profiles, some positions remain more likely than others to grammatically allow PEs. These positions are, in decreasing order of likelihood, the left edge, the right edge, following the first (i.e. highest) subject, and preceding an embedded CP. The data have also shown sensitivity to movement operations which suggest that they attach at the surface level of syntactic development. Expletives have been proven to stand alone in many respects, being the least likely of all the studied categories to be grammatically allowed in an utterance-internal position. Additionally, though the data show that up to four PEs may be stacked at the left edge, this is only possible when the Expletive is the leftmost PE. / Teresa Renee Grubb

Concerning American Parenthetical Expressions in Syntax offers an introductory study of the oddity of parenthetical expressions (or PEs) across American dialects of English from a data-driven, syntactic point of view. CAPES presents the results from over 42,000 speaker judgments of audio files containing spoken utterances with parentheticals. These utterances test the possible interpolation points of four pragmatically defined categories of parentheticals â"u20ac"u201c Vocatives, Mitigatory PEs, Evidential PEs, and Expletives â"u20ac"u201c as well as some of the possibilities for multiple PEs appearing in the same utterance. These possible interpolation points have been tested in coordination with complex structures and movement operations. Analysis of these data has shown that there are significant differences in patterns of grammatical interpolation points for each of these categories. Despite the clear distinctions present in these categoriesâ"u20ac™ interpolation profiles, some positions remain more likely than others to grammatically allow PEs. These positions are, in decreasing order of likelihood, the left edge, the right edge, following the first (i.e. highest) subject, and preceding an embedded CP. The data have also shown sensitivity to movement operations which suggest that they attach at the surface level of syntactic development. Expletives have been proven to stand alone in many respects, being the least likely of all the studied categories to be grammatically allowed in an utterance-internal position. Additionally, though the data show that up to four PEs may be stacked at the left edge, this is only possible when the Expletive is the leftmost PE. / Teresa Renee Grubb

Formulaic language (FL) has long been a research topic investigated by various schools of researchers. Most of the previous researches focused on English as Second Language. The applicability of the past research results to other languages, especially Chinese as a second language, is still uncertain.The present study attempts to investigate the classroom teaching of Chinese formulaic language and its effects on students writing performance. Two sections of 3rd year Chinese L2 learners at Brigham Young University were chosen to participate the research, serving as the treatment group and the control group respectively. Both groups were required to write on the same topics at different times in a semester. 80 responses from four topics were then chosen to analyze the effects of using Chinese FL.Results show that among the four types of Chinese FL, both collocations and transitions are used frequently, while the other two types of Chinese FL are less used by participants from the experimental group. Except the first topic, the adoption of Chinese FL does contribute to more Chinese characters in the writing responses of the participants from the experimental group, which reveal learners confidence in Chinese writing after the FL training. Also, both the remarkably higher average scores for each topic and the decreasing error rates demonstrate that the adoption of Chinese FL teaching positively influences participants writing performance. Lastly, the contributions of the four different types of Chinese FL to participants better writing performance are also discussed.

Cette étude vise à fournir une description détaillée de l’évidentialité en anglais dans une approche contrastive avec le tibétain. Elle repose sur un corpus spécialement recueilli au Tibet et en Angleterre (TSC et CSC/LAC, 2010-2012, 10 h.). Le tibétain possède un système évidentiel complexe et grammaticalisé dont la description peut fournir une grille d’analyse préliminaire pour notre étude de l’évidentialité en anglais. Des exemples authentiques et des données quantitatives issus du corpus nous permettent d’illustrer et de compléter les descriptions du groupe verbal tibétain dans plusieurs travaux pionniers antérieurs à la présente recherche (Tournadre & Sangda Dorje 1998) afin de poser les bases de la sémantique évidentielle. Les marqueurs évidentiels qui émergent dans les parties tibétaine et anglaise du corpus sont examinés afin de déterminer les paramètres qui motivent leur utilisation. Les marqueurs tibétains sont principalement grammaticaux et intégrés à des paradigmes syntaxiques : copules, suffixes verbaux et enclitiques. Les marqueurs évidentiels anglais sont lexicaux ou semi-grammaticaux : verbes de perception, verbes de cognition, verbes de discours, modaux, adverbes, conjoints, parenthétiques et marqueurs de discours (Nuyts 2001a, Cappelli 2007, Sanders & Sweetser 2009, Mortensen 2010, Whitt 2010, Gisborne 2010, Miller 2008, Boulonnais 2010, Gurajek 2010, Kaltenböck et coll. 2011, Heine 2013). Cette description de l’évidentialité en tibétain et en anglais nous permet d’analyser les conséquences d’un rendu grammatical ou lexical de cette notion (Talmy 2000, Bybee et coll. 1994, Nuyts 2001a, Boye & Harder 2009). Des analyses quantitatives et qualitatives du corpus contrastif et sur large corpus illustrent les différences de complexité, d'optionalité, de fréquence, de restriction sémantique, de prise en charge, de statut informatif, et de stratégie de discours dans les deux systèmes.Enfin, nous réévaluons la dichotomie, souvent considérée comme acquise, entre évidentialité grammaticale et lexicale (Aikhenvald 2004). Nous avançons que les marqueurs évidentiels des deux langues se positionnent à différents endroits sur un continuum multidimensionnel lexique-grammaire. Cette étude ne remet pas en question que le système évidentiel tibétain est plus grammaticalisé que le système anglais, mais démontre que ce dernier présente tous les signes d’une grammaticalisation partielle. Nous concluons ainsi que l’évidentialité est une notion pertinente et nécessaire pour une description linguistique complète de l’anglais. / This study aims to give a detailed description of evidentiality in English in contrast with Tibetan. It is based on a specialised corpus collected in Tibet and in England (TSC and CSC/LAC, 2010-2012, 10 h.).Tibetan has a complex and grammaticalised evidential system, and its description can provide a preliminary analytical grid for a semantic assessment of English evidentiality. Athentic examples and quantitative data from the corpus illustrate and supplement the analyses of the Tibetan verb phrase from previous research (Tournadre & Sangda Dorje 1998), in order to lay the foundation of the semantics of evidentiality. The evidential markers that emerge in the Tibetan and English sections of the corpus are examined so as to determine the parameters that motivate their usage. Tibetan evidentials are mainly grammatical and paradigmatised: copulas, verb suffixes and enclitics. English evidentials are either lexical or semi-grammatical: perception verbs, cognition verbs, speech verbs, modals, adverbs, conjuncts, parentheticals and discourse markers (Nuyts 2001a, Cappelli 2007, Sanders & Sweetser 2009, Mortensen 2010, Whitt 2010, Gisborne 2010, Miller 2008, Boulonnais 2010, Gurajek 2010, Kaltenböck et al. 2011, Heine 2013).This survey of Tibetan and English evidentiality provides precise data for the analysis of the consequences of a grammatical or a lexical rendering of this notion (Talmy 2000, Bybee et al. 1994, Nuyts 2001a, Boye & Harder 2009). Qualitative and quantitative evidence illustrates the differences in complexity, optionality, frequency, semantic restriction, speaker commitment, informative status and discourse strategy in the two systems. Finally, this study reassesses the assumed dichotomy between grammatical and lexical evidentiality (Aikhenvald 2004), arguing that evidentials in both Tibetan and English inhabit a lexicon-grammar multidimensional continuum, merely in different positions. This study does not question that the Tibetan evidential system is more grammaticalised than the English one, but it shows that the latter presents all the signs of partial grammaticalisation. This reassessment leads to the conclusion that evidentiality is a relevant and necessary notion for a thorough linguistic description of English.

Ce travail se propose d’étudier la postposition totale ou partielle de l'énoncé rapportant dans le discours rapporté direct et indirect. L’approche grammaticale, dite "classique" du discours rapporté (DR) en général et des incises en particulier se heurte à l’extrême diversité des données empiriques à ce sujet. Envisager les incises sous l’angle formel d’un phénomène grammatical, c’est à la fois en dessiner les contours, mais également poser les limites inhérentes à toute forme. Confrontés à la réalité des incises, les contours rassurants de la forme se distendent jusqu’à en donner une image déformée voire paradoxale sous certains aspects, bien loin des clichés véhiculés par l’emploi métalinguistique de ce terme en français. Il s’agit de s’intéresser au fonctionnement spécifique des incises de DR en anglais, de réhabiliter, en quelque sorte, la position incise dont elles tirent leur nom. Cette réhabilitation de nature textuelle, fondée sur l’étude de leur métamorphose au fil des textes, permettrait d'envisager les incises comme un lieu de stratégie narrative plus qu'un élément de rupture énonciative. / This thesis investigates the use of reporting clauses and reporting parentheticals in final and medial position in direct and indirect (reported) speech. Traditional grammatical models seem to offer no satisfactory explanation as regards to final and medial positions of the reporting clause or parenthetical within the sentence. Though grammatical descriptions give formal structure to the phenomenon, they also tend to limit its scope and need to be stretched to accommodate the reality of reporting clauses and parentheticals in literary texts.Analysing medial and final reporting clauses within the framework of French théorie de l’énonciation shows that they blur the frontier between reported and non-reported speech more often than not. From a literary point of view, medial and final positions can be considered as choices made for stylistic reasons, in which case the emphasis is put on reporting clauses as creating textual cohesion rather than causing rupture within the narrative.

From a historical perspective, punctuation marks are often assumed to only represent some of the phonetic structure of the spoken form of that text. It has been argued recently that punctuation today is a linguistic system that not only represents some of the phonetic sentence structure but also syntactic as well as semantic information. One case in point is the observation that the semantic difference in differently punctuated parenthetical phrases is not reflected in the intonation contour. This study provides the acoustic evidence for this observation. Furthermore, this study makes recommendations to achieve natural-sounding text-to-speech output for English parentheticals by incorporating the study's findings with respect to parenthical intonation. The experiment conducted for this study involved three male and three female native speakers of Canadian English reading aloud a set of 20 sentences with parenthetical and non-parenthetical phrases. These sentences were analyzed with respect to acoustic characteristics due to differences in punctuation as well as due to differences between parenthetical and non-parenthetical phrases. A number of conclusions were drawn based on the results of the experiment: (1) a difference in punctuation, although entailing a semantic difference, is not reflected in the intonation pattern; (2) in contrast to the general understanding that parenthetical phrases are lower-leveled and narrower in pitch range than the surrounding sentence, this study shows that it is not the parenthetical phrase itself that is implemented differently from its non-parenthetical counterpart; rather, the phrase that precedes the parenthetical exhibits a lower baseline and with that a wider pitch range than the corresponding phrase in a non-parenthetical sentence; (3) sentences with two adjacent parenthetical phrases or one embedded in the other exhibit the same pattern for the parenthetical-preceding phrase as the sentences in (2) above and a narrowed pitch range for the parenthetical phrases that are not in the final position of the sequence of parentheticals; (4) no pausing pattern could be found; (5) the characteristics found for parenthetical phrases can be implemented in synthesized speech through the use of SABLE speech markup as part of the SABLE speech synthesis system. This is the first time that the connection between punctuation and intonation in parenthetical sentences has been investigated; it is also the first look at sentences with more than one parenthetical phrase. This study contributes to our understanding of the intonation of parenthetical phrases in English and their implementation in text-to-speech systems, by providing an analysis of their acoustic characteristics.