No description available.

Many teachers of English are challenged with the question, "Why do we study these ancient myths?" The most obvious justification is the great contribution of mythology to music, literature, and other arts. However, the modern, questioning student is not entirely satisfied with this answer. A more practical appeal is made in this study of the contributions of mythology to modern language.

The amin with this paper is to investigate how a few of today’s idioms are interpreted, if there are any difference between generations in the interpretation and if the younger generation in higher extent than the older tends to interpret them in other ways. This have been investigated trough a quantitative web-based survey there the respondents were asked to state their interpretation of twelve idioms, also answer a few questions regarding their use of idioms. The collected material has been transformed into precent units. The respondent’s answers were categorized by age, one group with respondents born 1990 or earlier and one group with respondents born 1990 or later.  The research shows that idioms, of both groups, interprets by original meaning in high extent since more than a good half answer according standard interpretation. With the exception of a few idioms there least 50 % of the younger group stated another interpretation than the original.

No description available.

MER Mathivha Centre for African Languages, Arts and Culture / MA (Xitsonga)

No description available.

Kinyarwanda, like many other languages in contact, has adapted foreign words to meet the needs of its daily life vocabulary and activity. In addition to the lexical need filling, Kinyarwanda borrowed foreign words not only out of need for foreign words but also for prestige. This thesis is based on two hypotheses: Kinyarwanda has borrowed foreign words out of need in various areas; loanwords have been allocated to Kinyarwanda noun class system. This work has discussed and analysed how French and English loanwords have been allocated to key areas of influence and the nominal class system of Kinyarwanda. The data were collected from various sources, including publications, conversation, newspapers, Bible literature, school text books, commercial posters, hoardings. The study has analysed loanwords from French/English deceptive cognates in a bilingual context. This is a challenging task for other researchers who will have to deal with the complexity of deceptive cognate loanwords. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

The main aim of the thesis is to investigate how discourse entities are linked with topic chaining and discourse coherence by showing that the choice and the distribution of referring expressions is correlated with the center transition patterns in the centering framework. The thesis provides an integrated interpretation in understanding the behaviour of referring expressions in discourse by considering the relation between referential choice and the local and global coherence of discourse. The thesis has three stages: (1) to provide a semantic and pragmatic perspective in a contrastive study of referring expressions in English and Japanese spontaneous dialogues, (2) to analyse the way anaphoric and deictic expressions can contribute to discourse organisation in structuring and focusing the specific discourse segment, and (3) to investigate the choice and the distribution of referring expressions in the Map Task Corpus and to clarify the way the participants collaborate to judge the most salient entity in the current discourse against their common ground. Significantly, despite the grammatical differences in the form of reference between the two languages, the ways of discourse development in both data sets show distinctive similarities in the process by which the topic entities are introduced, established, and shifted away to the subsequent topic entities. Comparing and contrasting the choice and the distribution of referring expressions of the four different transition patterns of centers, the crucial factors of their correspondent relations between English and Japanese referring expressions are shown in the findings that the topic chains of noun phrases are constructed and are treated like proper names in discourse. This can suggest that full noun phrases play a major role when the topic entity is established in the course of discourse. Since the existing centering model cannot handle the topic chain of noun phrases in the anaphoric relations in terms of the local focus of discourse, centering must be integrated with a model of global focus to account for both pronouns and full noun phrases that can be used for continuations across segment boundaries. Based on Walker’s cache model, I argue that the forms of anaphors are not always shorter, and the focus of attention is maintained by the chain of noun phrases rather than by (zero) pronouns both within a discourse segment and over discourse segment boundaries. These processes are predicted and likely to underlie other uses of language as well. The result can modify the existing perspectives that the focus of attention is normally represented by attenuated forms of reference, and full noun phrases always show focus-shift. In addition, necessary extension to the global coherence of discourse can link these anaphoric relations with the deictic expressions over discourse segment boundaries. Finally, I argue that the choice and the distribution of referring expressions in the Map Task Corpus depends on the way the participants collaborate to judge the most salient entity in the current discourse against their common ground.