YouTube is a great place for attention and discussion. Individuals and companies canuse the context and the system for branding of their content. Previous research in thearea has had a larger focus on mass statistics and social patterns on YouTube asequations, rather than as a social platform with people using it. Our research focusedon the users and why they choose to involve themselves with the content of theSwedishMealTime channel on YouTube and what we could do as a producer to createa more established channel, since we run it ourselves. This gave us an opportunity toextract data from the statistics on both YouTube and the corresponding Facebookpage of SwedishMealTime. We sent out an online survey to our subscribers withquestions revolving around the channel and content, in order to gain more insight ofwhat kind of content they prefer. A netnographic study was made in combinationwith a survey to collect the data for the analysis. Our results suggest that a regularupload scheme, communication and interaction with subscribers and establishment ofthe channel increases the sense of belonging, which in turn increases the exposure ofthe channel and the number of users subscribing to it. Future research will requireinformation about more channels, to identify behaviour between them, and if thereare any patterns for a viral success.

It is my wish that the Sepedi language speakers, through the development and technologization of certain Sepedi ICT terminology, are able to operate a computer in their own language, and implement the new developed and technologized ICT terminology (technologization). The pupils and students at their various institutions should be made comfortable in using the developed and technologized Sepedi language terminology. In the long run the Sepedi language speakers should be ensured access to the web in order to find information about Sepedi language, culture and terms in disciplines such as ICT. It is recommended in this thesis that higher learning institutions offer bursaries to students to develop all South African languages in such a manner that they can be used in all high status functions.

The thesis talks about psychological aspects of English phrases acronym usage among adolescent students of primary and secondary schools. It looks at which acronyms adolescents use, how they understand, use and perceive them and finally what are the specifics of vulgar acronym use. The theoretical part introduces the term acronym and sets it into a broader context of language and specifically e-language. It further talks about adolescence and specifics of adolescent communication. As acronyms that adolescents use the most come from electronic communication, it is also given a fair amount of attention. The empiric part offers research results of a survey consisting of two questionnaires. The results show that due to electronic communication adolescents abbreviate language intensively. The most popular way of abbreviating are acronyms. They use only limited number of selected acronyms though. Adolescents use acronyms exclusively among themselves. They expect rejection from adults. Even though almost all of them use acronyms, not all perceive them positively. Vulgar acronyms are used often and are not perceived as as strong as their unabbreviated versions. Keywords: acronym, abbreviation, English phrases, e-language, electronic communication, adolescents

The purpose of this study is to see how second-language learners uses noun phrases in their written texts and oral speech as well as how they differ from each other. In order to answer this, the following questions have been formulated: What congruent errors are found in the noun phrases in the students' texts and oral speeches? Are there any differences in the use of noun phrases in the students' texts and oral speeches? The study is based on performance analysis, where student texts and transcribed recordings of students' oral speeches are analyzed. The result shows that congruence errors in the students' noun phrases are mostly due to the misuse of gender, definite form and numerus. The result also shows that the students had more congruence errors in the written texts, but there were similar, but fewer, mistakes in the oral speeches. This means that you cannot draw general conclusions about any differences between the written texts and the oral speeches.

La présente thèse étudie le rôle de l'accent prosodique (accent de mot vs. accent de syntagme) lors du traitement auditif de paires minimales ambigües (mots composés vs. syntagmes) du chinois mandarin. Deux types de paires minimales ont été utilisés: 1) Mots composés avec un ton neutre (ex: dong3xi0 « chose ») vs. Syntagme avec un ton plein (ex: dong3xi1 « est et ouest ») qui se distinguent par la réalisation du ton sur la syllabe finale ; 2) Mots composés Verbe-Nom (VN) (ex: 'chaofan « riz frit ») vs. Syntagmes Verbe-Objet (VO) (ex: chao'fan « frire du riz ») se distinguant par la position de l'accent prosodique. Nos données comportementales et neurophysiologiques démontrent que : 1) la syllabe finale est plus longue et l'étendue de la F0 est plus large dans les VO que dans les VN, 2) la prosodie assiste le système de traitement pour anticiper la structure morphologique des séquences ambigües, et 3) un traitement hiérarchique « de droite-à-gauche » des informations prosodiques en complément d'un traitement séquentiel « de gauche-à-droite » prend place en chinois mandarin. Prises dans leur ensemble, nos données précisent la description fonctionnelle et structurale du modèle Prosody-Assisted-Processing (PAP) pour le chinois mandarin. / The present thesis investigates the role of prosodic stress (i.e. lexical versus phrasal stress) on the auditory processing of Mandarin Chinese ambiguous compound /phrase minimal pairs. Two types of compound/phrase minimal pairs were used: 1) Compound word with a neutral tone (e.g. dong3xi0 "thing") vs. phrase with a full tone (e.g. dong3xi1 "east and west") distinguished by the final syllable tone realization; 2) Verb-Noun (VN) compound word (e.g. 'chaofan "fried rice") and Verb-Object (VO) phrase (e.g. chao'fan "fry the rice") distinguished by the position of the prosodic stress. Combined behavioral and neurophysiological data demonstrate that 1) the final syllable was more lengthened and the F0 range was larger in VO than in VN, 2) prosodic structure does assist the processing system in anticipating morphological structure, and 3) a right-to-left hierarchical processing of prosodic information in addition to a sequential left-to-right one is involved during the processing of ambiguous spoken sequences in Mandarin Chinese. Taken together, our findings allowed us to precise the functional and structural description of the Prosody-Assisted-Processing (PAP) model for Mandarin Chinese.

No description available.

PhD / M.E.R. Mathivha Centre for African Languages, Arts and Culture

The aim of this paper is to show that Swahili has several strategies to resolve verbal agreement with conjoined noun phrases. In section 2, I give a brief summary of the situation as depicted in grammatical descriptions of Swahili. I then present a number of examples - mainly taken from Muhammed Said Abdulla`s (1976) novel Mwana wa Yungi hulewa - illustrating different strategies of agreement with conjoined NPs. In section 4, I present an analysis of one of the strategies discussed and argue that the choice of different strategies is not only based on dialect or speaker variation, but rather can be related to information structure and the dynamics of interpretation.

La présente thèse étudie le rôle de l'accent prosodique (accent de mot vs. accent de syntagme) lors du traitement auditif de paires minimales ambigües (mots composés vs. syntagmes) du chinois mandarin. Deux types de paires minimales ont été utilisés: 1) Mots composés avec un ton neutre (ex: dong3xi0 « chose ») vs. Syntagme avec un ton plein (ex: dong3xi1 « est et ouest ») qui se distinguent par la réalisation du ton sur la syllabe finale ; 2) Mots composés Verbe-Nom (VN) (ex: 'chaofan « riz frit ») vs. Syntagmes Verbe-Objet (VO) (ex: chao'fan « frire du riz ») se distinguant par la position de l'accent prosodique. Nos données comportementales et neurophysiologiques démontrent que : 1) la syllabe finale est plus longue et l'étendue de la F0 est plus large dans les VO que dans les VN, 2) la prosodie assiste le système de traitement pour anticiper la structure morphologique des séquences ambigües, et 3) un traitement hiérarchique « de droite-à-gauche » des informations prosodiques en complément d'un traitement séquentiel « de gauche-à-droite » prend place en chinois mandarin. Prises dans leur ensemble, nos données précisent la description fonctionnelle et structurale du modèle Prosody-Assisted-Processing (PAP) pour le chinois mandarin. / The present thesis investigates the role of prosodic stress (i.e. lexical versus phrasal stress) on the auditory processing of Mandarin Chinese ambiguous compound /phrase minimal pairs. Two types of compound/phrase minimal pairs were used: 1) Compound word with a neutral tone (e.g. dong3xi0 "thing") vs. phrase with a full tone (e.g. dong3xi1 "east and west") distinguished by the final syllable tone realization; 2) Verb-Noun (VN) compound word (e.g. 'chaofan "fried rice") and Verb-Object (VO) phrase (e.g. chao'fan "fry the rice") distinguished by the position of the prosodic stress. Combined behavioral and neurophysiological data demonstrate that 1) the final syllable was more lengthened and the F0 range was larger in VO than in VN, 2) prosodic structure does assist the processing system in anticipating morphological structure, and 3) a right-to-left hierarchical processing of prosodic information in addition to a sequential left-to-right one is involved during the processing of ambiguous spoken sequences in Mandarin Chinese. Taken together, our findings allowed us to precise the functional and structural description of the Prosody-Assisted-Processing (PAP) model for Mandarin Chinese.

The aim of this study is to present how English borrowings (loanwords and phrases) are integrated into Swedish grammar and spelling rules. The hypothesis is that borrowings appearing in the unchanged form in Swedish occur much more frequently in internet forums than in press. The study is based on the analysis of a material consisting of around 70 English borrowings found in different entries from one of the largest Swedish online discussion forums, flashback.org. The whole corpus comprises of 661 randomly selected entries. Each of the 70 borrowings appears in every possible spelling variant and grammatical form. The statistics presenting the number of occurrences of a given borrowing come from 38 corpora available at Språkbanken. The material collected from online forums and from the newspapers and magazines, make it possible to compare the quantity of borrowings in these two types of media.  The study consists of a theoretical and a practical part. The former introduces the topic of borrowings while the latter is devoted to the analysis of the specific examples contained in the material.    The theoretical part begins with the presentation of the most popular classifications of borrowings appearing in the linguistic literature. Subsequently, there is a description of the three processes that each borrowed word must undergo before it appears in the recipient's language: the introduction, distribution, and establishment. At last is presented the way in which the grammatical type and the meaning of borrowings change when they enter the recipient's language.    The practical part focuses on the analysis of the examples. The borrowings are divided in nouns, adjectives, verbs and borrowed phrases. The study consists in a thorough investigation of all of the spelling variants and grammatical forms of individual words as well as in an observation of the number/frequency of their occurrence in both media. The study confirmed the hypothesis set out in the beginning, namely, that English borrowings that appear in Swedish in an unchanged form more frequently occur in the online discussion forums than in the press. It is also observed that nouns are the most numerous English borrowings encountered in Swedish, internet forums contain borrowings with a greater number of grammatical forms and spelling variants than the press and the phenomenon of borrowing complete English phrases occurs more often on the online forums than in the press.