This diploma thesis is a sociolinguistic analysis of speeches rendered in English by members of the European Parliament. The aim of this diploma thesis is to analyze the stylistic patterns in speeches of members of the European Parliament based on gender, as a sociolinguistic factor. This thesis is based on three main linguistic disciplines: grammar, stylistics and sociolinguistics. The practical part is based on a research of 100 randomly chosen members of the European Parliament, 50 men and 50 women, whose speeches rendered in English, were transcribed and analyzed by the quantitative method used for a comparison of linguistic features. This thesis predominantly focuses on grammatical analysis of parts of speech and syntax. It also deals with hyper- sentential links: cohesion and coherence. This thesis also includes profiles of MEP which, together with other sociolinguistic researches, help to interpret the results of a grammatical analysis. The practical part is concluded by profiles of hypothetic MEPs who are likely to render their speech in English.

Current representation schemes for automatic text classification treat documents as syntactically unstructured collections of words (Bag-of-Words) or `concepts' (Bag-of-Concepts). Past attempts to encode syntactic structure have treated part-of-speech information as another word-like feature, but have been shown to be less effective than non-structural approaches. We propose a new representation scheme using Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) as a technique to encode both semantic and syntactic structure, though in very different ways. This method is unique in the literature in that it encodes the structure across all features of the document vector while preserving text semantics. Our method does not increase the dimensionality of the document vectors, allowing for efficient computation and storage. We present the results of various Support Vector Machine classification experiments that demonstrate the superiority of this method over Bag-of-Concepts representations and improvement over Bag-of-Words in certain classification contexts.

Current representation schemes for automatic text classification treat documents as syntactically unstructured collections of words (Bag-of-Words) or `concepts' (Bag-of-Concepts). Past attempts to encode syntactic structure have treated part-of-speech information as another word-like feature, but have been shown to be less effective than non-structural approaches. We propose a new representation scheme using Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) as a technique to encode both semantic and syntactic structure, though in very different ways. This method is unique in the literature in that it encodes the structure across all features of the document vector while preserving text semantics. Our method does not increase the dimensionality of the document vectors, allowing for efficient computation and storage. We present the results of various Support Vector Machine classification experiments that demonstrate the superiority of this method over Bag-of-Concepts representations and improvement over Bag-of-Words in certain classification contexts.

La présente recherche porte sur la théorie des parties du discours dans l’Antiquité grecque et plus particulièrement sur la réflexion entourant les conjonctions. Le premier chapitre se concentre sur la définition de la conjonction trouvée dans la Poétique d’Aristote, de même que sur les autres passages du corpus aristotélicien qui permettent de mieux cerner les contours d’une entité grammaticale encore mal définie. Le second chapitre porte sur la conjonction dans les recherches logico-grammaticales de l’école stoïcienne. La définition stoïcienne de la conjonction, de même que les différentes catégories de conjonctions identifiées par les Stoïciens sont examinées. Le rôle central des conjonctions au sein de la théorie stoïcienne des propositions complexes est souligné et met en lumière l’interrelation étroite entre la logique et la grammaire à ce point du développement de la théorie grammaticale. Le chapitre final porte sur la définition et les catégories de conjonctions trouvées dans la Tekhnè grammatikè, un bref manuel de grammaire attribué au philologue alexandrin Denys le Thrace. L’influence de la théorie stoïcienne des propositions complexes sur cette première tentative de systématisation grammaticale est mise en lumière, de même que l’interférence de préoccupations philologiques. / This research is concerned with the theory of the parts of speech in Greek antiquity and more precisely with the topic of conjunctions. The first chapter examines the definition of the conjunction given in Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as the other texts of the Aristotelian corpus which allow us the get a better grasp on a still ill-defined grammatical entity. The second chapter deals with the conjunction within the logico-grammatical researches of the Stoic school. It examines the Stoic definition of the conjunction, as well as the various categories of conjunctions that were identified by the Stoics. The central role of conjunctions in the Stoic theory of complex assertions is emphasized, thus showing the close interrelation between logic and grammar at this point in the development of grammatical theory. The final chapter is concerned with the definition and the classes of conjunctions given in the Tekhnè grammatikè, a short grammatical treatise ascribed to the Alexandrian philologist Dionysius Thrax. It shows the influence of the Stoic theory of complex assertions on this first attempt at grammatical systematization, as well as the interference of philological concerns.

Adverbs constitute an important element in expressing circumstances. In our dissertation we try to present various types of adverbs in the language of texts which date back to 17th and 18th centuries (so-called Baroque period). The word-formation aspect of these adverbs and the development of their meaning are emphasized. Different semantic shifts of adverbs are observed as well as their usage with functions of different parts of speech (usually particles or conjunctions). The development of adverbs found in Baroque texts is compared both with older language period and with some results of their development in contemporary Czech.

This doctoral thesis is concerned with particles in modern Vietnamese. Although Vietnamese particles form a small group of synsemantic words, they play a very important role in expressing the attitude of the speaker to the hearer/listener and to the message content as well as expressing grammatical and modal relationships within the sentence. The group includes particles positioned at the end of the sentence, particles appearing before a word as well as at the beginning of a phrase or a sentence. Despite their important function, particles in Vietnamese still are a scarcely explored topic. Particles have been explored usually as part of grammar books; so far, there are only few monographs on the topic of particles. Almost all works deal with a small number of particles and focus especially on those appearing at the end of the sentence. This work is concerned with particles at the end of the sentence as well as particles preceding a word, a phrase, or a sentence. It examines whether particles in Vietnamese are a part of speech at all; it sets forth criteria for classification of particles; it performs their analysis based on actual situations where they appear and describes their semantic characteristics; furthermore, it offers a chart of particles including their possible combinations. Besides, the...

Orientador: Roberto Gomes Camacho / Banca: Angel Humberto Corbera Mori / Banca: Sandra Denise Gasparini Bastos / Resumo: Este trabalho estuda a relação entre a modificação sintática mediante o uso de orações relativas e de adjetivos e a organização morfossintática das línguas da amostra no que se refere às classes de palavras, com o intuito de conduzir a uma generalização tipológica. A hipótese que se investiga é a da possível correlação entre ausência de adjetivo como classe de palavra e ausência de oração relativa como construção a serviço da modificação nominal. A principal consequência dessa correspondência é a de o nome assumir a função modificadora do adjetivo e a construção nominalizada, a função modificadora da oração relativa. Assim, duas situações alternativas são investigadas nesta pesquisa, já que parece tanto improvável que uma língua empregue uma estratégia de relativização diferente de nominalização quando ela não dispõe de adjetivos enquanto classe morfológica como provável a situação inversa, em que a ausência de adjetivos é suprida por uma oração relativa no papel de modificador nominal. Para a realização deste trabalho, adota-se o enfoque funcional, essencialmente empírico, e os dados coletados são analisados por meio de comparação translinguística. O levantamento dos dados foi realizado em duas etapas: a primeira se refere à descrição da oração relativa em cada língua indígena, destacando a estratégia de relativização empregada por ela; e a segunda, à descrição das classes de palavra nessas línguas, especialmente a dos adjetivos e a dos advérbios, posições sintaticamente mais complexas. Por se tratar de uma investigação de cunho tipológico, o corpus de análise deve ser representativo, ou seja, as línguas que o compõem devem ser distantes genética, geográfica e tipologicamente. O corpus deste trabalho é composto por 30 línguas indígenas, previamente descritas em gramáticas, teses ou em outros... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This paper studies both the relationship between syntactic modification through the use of relative clauses and adjectives and the morphosyntactic organization of the sample languages with respect to parts of speech, in order to lead to a typological generalization. In this sense, the hypothesis under investigation is the possible correlation between the absence of the adjective as a word class and the absence of relative clauses as a construction for the nominal modification. The main consequence of this correspondence is that the noun assumes the modifier function of the adjective and that the nominalized construction assumes the modifier function of the relative clause. Thus, two alternative scenarios are investigated in this research, since it seems unlikely that a language employs a strategy of relativization different from the nominalization one when it does not have adjectives as a morphological class as likely the reverse situation, in which the absence of adjectives is supplied by a relative clause on the role of a nominal modifier. For this work, we adopt the functional approach, essentially empirical, in which data is collected by means of translingual comparison. The data collection was conducted in two stages: the first refers to the description of the relative clause in every Indian language, highlighting the strategy of relativization employed by it; and the second refers to the description of word classes in these languages, especially adjectives and adverbs, which take positions that are syntactically more complex. Because this is a typological investigation, the corpus of analysis must be representative, i.e. the languages under investigation must be genetically, geographically and typologically distant. The corpus of this work consists of 30 indigenous languages, previously described in grammar books, theses or in other descriptive materials such as manuals... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

MAAS / MER Mathivha Centre for African Languages, Arts and Culture

Some signs denoting substances and signs denoting events are formally and semantically related in the Czech sign language. These signs can be distinguished by different parameters. This study looked at the parameters of the relative duration of a signing, the use of mouthing, the juxtaposition of signs and the frequency and mode of motion. Signs denoting substances and signs denoting events can be clearly distinguished by those features n Czech sign language. Key words Czech sign language, sign languages, nouns, verbs, noun-verb distinction, word classes

The study explores the degree to which readers can use their previous linguistic knowledge, which goes beyond the immediate evidence in the input, to create mental representations of new words and how the employment of this knowledge may reduce the fuzziness of the new representations. Using self-paced reading, initial representations of novel identical forms with different grammatical functions were compared in native German speakers and advanced L2 German learners with L1 Czech. The results reveal that although both groups can employ general knowledge about German grammar when establishing new representations, the L1 native speakers outperform the L2 learners: Their new representations have more precise structure and are better differentiated from related representations with respect to their grammatical information. Modeling consequences of these findings are discussed in the context of the Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation and the Fuzzy Lexical Representation Hypothesis.