[pt] Este trabalho analisa os critérios de caracterização de nomes compostos em Português, com o objetivo de obter informações que permitam o estabelecimento dos padrões gerais do processo de composição de palavras, de tal modo que se possa distinguir este tipo de entidade lingüística de outras combinatórias lexicais, como as locuções nominais e outros sintagmas freqüentes e estáveis no repertório da língua. De início, faz-se um exame das abordagens da composição por autores identificados com a tradição gramatical. Em seguida, feita a identificação dos aspectos deste processo de criação lexical que permanecem inexplicados pela gramática, e sempre com o objetivo de se definir e caracterizar a palavra composta, procede-se ao estudo das abordagens dos lingüistas estruturalistas e suas tentativas de conceituar a palavra enquanto unidade lingüística. Finalmente, analisam-se as visões dos pesquisadores pósestruturalistas e os critérios e testes diferenciadores por eles propostos. As conclusões das análises efetuadas revelam que, ao lado de algumas poucas formações, que se comportam como palavras compostas quando analisadas sob os quatro critérios - fonológico, morfológico, sintático e semântico - há outras que se diferenciam dos grupos sintáticos comuns quando investigadas por alguns ou apenas um destes parâmetros, em geral o semântico. A investigação também revela que há muitas seqüências que, consideradas rigorosamente sob as leis da morfologia, não configuram unidades morfológicas, embora, do ponto de vista lexical, estejam cristalizadas no idioma e sejam percebidas como unidades lexicais pelos falantes. / [en] This work analyzes different criteria normally used to characterize compounds in Portuguese, as opposed to clauses and other types of linguistic units such as idioms or collocations. Its main goal is to organize information in such a way as to establish general patterns for lexical compounding. Initially, an analysis of different approaches to compounding in Traditional Grammar literature is made. Then, as the unexplained aspects of compounding in those approaches are identified, the goal of defining compounds in Portuguese is pursued in the analysis of structuralist and posterior approaches and their attempts to define the word as a linguistic unit. The results of the research reveal that, even though a few formations do behave as compounds under all relevant - phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic - criteria, there are many others that differ from common syntactic sequences, only with respect to one of the mentioned parameters, more frequently the semantic one. We can also conclude from our analysis that many word sequences do not correspond to morphological units, in spite of the fact that they are lexicalized and thus perceived as lexical units by the speaker of Portuguese.

This essay deals with translation issues arising when translating a German source text – situated within the field of media communication and political science – into Swedish. More specifically, it focuses on translation problems and solutions in regard to extended participial modifiers and metaphorical expressions.From a translation perspective, complex German pre-nominal participial modifiers are known to pose a challenge to Swedish translators. This depends on language-specific restrictions within the nominal domain. In linguistic translation literature, it is commonly held, that complex pre-nominal participial modifiers cause – in Vinay & Darbelnet’s (1977) terminology – 'transpositions', yielding a Swedish relative clause. This widely held assumption again proved to be right. In some cases, however, other structural options were made use of such as abbreviated (participial) clauses. Also, depending on the complexity of the modifier, transpositions were involved which crossed one or more sentence boundaries. In contrast to complex nominal phrases with pre-nominal participial modifiers, metaphors are usually considered to be stylistically inappropriate in academic discourse. However, a closer examination of the metaphorical expressions appearing in the source text showed that they are almost without exception lexicalized or conventionalized and, therefore, not particularly artistic or daring. The analysis of the translation procedures involved when translating metaphorical expressions was limited to metaphors linked to the area of politics and career, mainly stemming from the conceptual domains: POLITICS IS WAR/A GAME and CAREER IS A JOURNEY. The analysis shows that German and Swedish have similar metaphors, building on those exact concepts. Still, literal translation was not applied in each and every case. In some cases, a neutral periphrasis or a formal equivalent was employed which resulted in a loss or change of some of the semantic aspects inherent to the original metaphor. Keywords: translation, nominal phrases, extended modifiers, metaphors

The following main aspects of Mtywaku's plays have been dealt with in the dissertation: (i) Sarcasm (ii) Conflict (iii) Style.

This study focuses on Opland’s (1993) argument that praise poetry must have a particular structure. He argues that a traditional praise poetry needs to have a structure similar to that of poetry written in one of the languages of the West, such as English. According to Opland, the various theorists who have looked at praise poetry have not yet solved the problem of structure in a praise poem. A related problem mentioned by Opland is the use of formula in poetry. The formula that Opland mentions is related to the concept of parallelism. His main concern is that if there is no parallelism, there can be no meter. This is a very important point, because in Setswana poerty, parallelism helps to facilitate the performance of a poem, where the poet’s actions and tone are part of the content of the poem. Some Setswana praise poems take the form of a narrative poem, for example, ‘Motata’ written by Serobatse (1987), and published in the anthology Motswako wa Puo. Other authors write metrical poems, such as ‘Masupatsela’ by Raditladi (1975) which appears in the Sefalana sa Menate. When one scrutinizes these two poems, one notes that they differ in terms of structure and style. This causes problems for the reader who may not be able to tell which one of the two is the real poem. He/she does not know whether a poem should take the form of a narrative or of a metrical poem. This leads to problems regarding the classification of these genres. In order to solve this problems three strategies have been used: (a) the description, (b) the interpretation and (c) the comparison of poems according to an adapted narratological model. Western poetry, African poetry, modern poetry, narrative poetry, performance and meter are described, interpreted and compared. Groenewald (1993) suggests that, because traditional African poetry is not written, listeners have to be able to identify meter simply by listening when the poet recites a poem. Essential metrical features are arranged in terms of sound, rhythm and ending. There are two metrical laws that govern this arrangement, and meter is discussed on the basis of these two rules. The first law is called the law of separation, which describes the separation of the clauses of a sentence. The second law is called the law of agreement, which has to do with the repetition of the stems. This shows a distinction between Western poetry and African poetry, in that African poetical meter relies on these two laws, while Western poetry does not. African poems also have an element of performance, which Opland (1998: 5-6) maintains is another distinguishing characteristic. Metrical principles might therefore be an aspect of performance that an examination of the written text alone cannot reveal. These two points help to distinguish between Western poetry and traditional Setswana poetry. This investigation has shown that a well-planned Setswana poem has a meter which differs from that of an English poem. Opland’s problems concerning the arrangement of praise poetry have been solved by showing a differnce between meter in Western poetry and meter in African poetry. / Thesis (DLitt (African Languages))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / African Languages / unrestricted

Face à la masse grandissante des données textuelles présentes sur le Web, le résumé automatique d'une collection de documents traitant d'un sujet particulier est devenu un champ de recherche important du Traitement Automatique des Langues. Les expérimentations décrites dans cette thèse s'inscrivent dans cette perspective. L'évaluation de la similarité sémantique entre phrases est l'élément central des travaux réalisés. Notre approche repose sur la similarité distributionnelle et une vectorisation des termes qui utilise l'encyclopédie Wikipédia comme corpus de référence. Sur la base de cette représentation, nous avons proposé, évalué et comparé plusieurs mesures de similarité textuelle ; les données de tests utilisées sont celles du défi SemEval 2014 pour la langue anglaise et des ressources que nous avons construites pour la langue française. Les bonnes performances des mesures proposées nous ont amenés à les utiliser dans une tâche de résumé multi-documents, qui met en oeuvre un algorithme de type PageRank. Le système a été évalué sur les données de DUC 2007 pour l'anglais et le corpus RPM2 pour le français. Les résultats obtenus par cette approche simple, robuste et basée sur une ressource aisément disponible dans de nombreuses langues, se sont avérés très encourageants / With the growing mass of textual data on the Web, automatic summarization of topic-oriented collections of documents has become an important research field of Natural Language Processing. The experiments described in this thesis were framed within this context. Evaluating the semantic similarity between sentences is central to our work and we based our approach on distributional similarity and vector representation of terms, with Wikipedia as a reference corpus. We proposed several similarity measures which were evaluated and compared on different data sets: the SemEval 2014 challenge corpus for the English language and own built datasets for French. The good performance showed by our measures led us to use them in a multi-document summary task, which implements a pagerank-type algorithm. The system was evaluated on the DUC 2007 datasets for English and RPM2 corpus for French. This simple approach, based on a resource readily available in many languages, proved efficient, robust and the encouraging outcomes open up real prospects of improvement.

This thesis investigates the syntactic structure of determiner phrases (DP) and their distribution in pre- and postverbal subject positions in Standard Arabic (SA) and Saudi dialects (SUD). It argues that indefinite DPs cannot occupy preverbal subject positions unless they are licensed by modification. Working within the theory of syntactic visibility conditions (visibility of the specifier and/or the determiner) put forth by Giusti (2002) and Landau (2007), I propose that adjectives, diminutives or construct states (CS) together with nunation can license indefinite DPs in preverbal subject positions. The syntactic derivation of the licensed indefinite DP depends on its complexity. In other words, in the case of simple DPs (e.g., a noun followed by an adjective), the correct linear word order is achieved by the syntactic N-to-D movement which takes place in the syntax proper. By contrast, if the DP is complex as in diminutives or CSs, the narrow syntax may not be able to derive the correct linear order. Therefore, I propose a novel analysis that accounts for the mismatches between the spell out of the syntax and the phonological form. I argue that the derivation of diminutives and CSs is a shared process between the narrow syntax and the phonological component (PF). I show that movement operations after-syntax (Lowering and Local-dislocation) proposed by Embick and Noyer (1999, 2001, 2007), in the sense of Distributed Morphology (DM), can account for the mismatch. The last theoretical chapter of the thesis investigates the linguistic status of nunation. I argue that nunation is an indefinite marker that performs half of determination with a full lexical item satisfying the other half. As far as the subject position is concerned, the current thesis includes two experimental studies that investigate processing of syntactic subjects in different word orders (SVO/VSO) by two groups: Native speakers (NSs) and Heritage speakers (HSs) of Arabic whose dominant language is English. The first study aims to answer two questions: a) which word order is more preferred by NSs, SVO or VSO? and b) which word order requires more processing? The second study aims to answer the same questions but with different participants, HSs. It also aims to check whether or not the dominant language grammar affected the heritage language grammar. Results showed that VSO is more preferred than SVO by both groups. As far as processing is concerned, NSs significantly processed subjects in VSO faster the SVO; they showed no significant difference when processing postverbal subjects in definite and indefinite VSO. By contrast, HSs processed subjects in SVO faster than VSO; however, the difference was not significant. The slow processing of VSO shown by HSs might be attributed to the effect of the dominant language which has a different word order from the heritage language.

This thesis discusses four selected topics on Yoruba nominal expressions: the syntax of possessives, the construal of bare nouns, the marking of specificity and salience, and plural marking strategies. Regarding possessives, it is proposed that they have one base structure (a v P shell). The difference in surface linear order between verbal and nominal genitives is determined by which of the two arguments move. In nominal genitives, the possessum moves. In verbal genitives, it is the possessor that moves. Regarding the interpretation of Yoruba bare nouns, it is shown that they can be construed in one of three ways: as generics, as indefinites, or as definites. First, generics may be lexically conditioned (with permanent state predicates) or grammatically conditioned (with transitory predicates through the use of imperfective maa-n). Second, wherever a generic construal is illicit, an indefinite construal is licit. Third, definite construals are discourse-linked. Regarding specificity, it is shown that Yoruba overtly marks specificity on NPs with the element kan. Regarding salience, it is shown that definite DPs are morphologically marked as salient (by virtue of being unique, in an identity relation or additive) through the use of ndd. Finally, regarding plural marking, it is shown that Yoruba uses three different strategies: contextually, semantically, or morphologically determined plurality. It is proposed that the deployment of the PLURAL feature is determined by feature percolation or feature matching. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

M.A. (African Languages) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

This diploma thesis is dedicated to the topic of Terminative and resultative verbal periphrasis in Spanish and Portuguese and is divided into two parts, theoretical and practical. In the first part, we give a general summary and classification of verbal periphrasis with an emphasis on the terminative and resultative ones. Included with the theoretical description there is also a subchapter about the situation in the Czech language which mainly discusses the question of verbal aspect. Subsequently, the theoretical results are compared in the second part of this work which is dedicated to a corpus analysis. We outline the frequency of chosen periphrasis in corpus in different types of documents but also the Czech translations. For this purpose, we were working with a parallel corpus InterCorp, more precisely Spanish and Portuguese subcorpus, but also with monolingual Spanish corpus CREA and monolingual Portuguese corpus Corpus do Português. In this part we have chosen the following periphrasis for the analysis: tener + participle, llevar + participle, estar + participle and salir + participle in Spanish and ter + participle, ficar + participle and sair + participle in Portuguese. In both languages we have chosen both active and passive resultative periphrasis.

Cette thèse est consacrée à l’étude des syntagmes nominaux sémantiquement pluriels en chinois mandarin et aux interprétations collective et distributive qui leur sont associées. Elle offre une analyse des formes de pluralité suivantes : le syntagme coordonne par gen, les nominaux modifiés par le suffixe -men, ainsi que les sujets ou les objets des groupes verbaux modifies par quan (‘tout’-flottant). A propos du syntagme coordonne par gen, nous montrons que la conjonction gen dans le syntagme ‘A gen B’ lexicalise une contrainte de pluralité nominale par le biais de restrictions sur les conjoints. Notre argument est bâti sur trois points principaux, à savoir que la catégorie des conjoints est nécessairement [+N], que le syntagme coordonne par gen n’introduit que des individus pluriels dans le discours et que ce syntagme porte la valeur sémantique pluriel [+Pl]. Nous passons aussi en revue différents types de prédicats afin de retracer la distribution des interprétations collective et distributive des syntagmes coordonnés par gen. Ensuite, nous nous penchons sur le suffixe -men et sur l’expression formée par ce suffixe et un nom commun ou un nom propre. Notre examen couvre principalement deux questions, celle de la nature de -men et celle de la (in)définitude de l’expression suffixée par -men en mandarin. Nous soutenons que -men n’est pas un marqueur collectif mais plutôt un marqueur pluriel. Cependant, ce marqueur n’est pas obligatoire, à la différence des marqueur du pluriel tels que -s dans les langues occidentales, le mandarin étant une langue à classificateur. Quant à l’(in)définitude de l’expression suffixée par -men, nous admettons que c’est un pluriel défini, mais ceci du fait que -men ne s’attache qu’aux pronoms personnels et aux noms d’humains, noms qui occupent le hautde la hiérarchie d’animacité. Donc l’expression suffixée par -men hériterait de la définitude en partie de la nature de son domaine fortement individué. Enfin, nous nous intéressons a l’interprétation distributive des syntagmes nominaux dans la phrase ou figure l’adverbe quan (‘tout’-flottant). Nous affirmons que quan impose la lecture distributive de manière autonome et nous en proposons une analyse en tant que modificateur de prédicat d’évènement. Quan cible un nominal relie par un θ-rôle et encapsule dans ce rôle l’instruction de distribution. La distributivité renforcée par quan implique une relation distributive entre deux entités : le nominal qui est sémantiquement pluriel et l’évènement pluriel / The thesis invested the research on the semantically plural nominal phrases in Mandarin Chinese and on their collectif and distributif interpretations. It offered an analysis of the following form of pluralities : the coordinated phrase with gen, the nominals modified by the suffix -men, and the subjects or the objects of the VP modified by quan (the floating quantifier). Concerning the coordinated phrase with gen, we will show that the conjunction gen of the phrase ‘A gen B’ lexicalize the constraint of the plurality via the restrictions on the conjoint elements. Our argument is mainly based on three points : 1) the category of the conjuncts is necessarily [+N] ; 2) coordinated phrases with gen introduce only the plural individuals in the discourse and 3) this nominal phrase characterizes the semantic plural value [+Pl]. We will also examine the different types of predicates in order to retrace thedistribution of collective and distributive interpretations of the coordinated phrases with gen. Then, we look into the suffix –men and the expressions formed by this suffix and a common noun or a proper noun. The investigation will mainly concern two questions : the question of the nature of –men and the question of the (in)definitude of the expressions suffixed by –men in Mandarin Chinese. We will argue that –men is not a collectif marker, but preferably a plural marker. However, different from plural markers in the western languages for exemple –s, the marker –men in Mandarin Chinese which is typically a classifer language, is not obligatory. Regarding the (in)definitude of the expressions suffixed by -men, we will admit that they are definite plurals, because of the fact that –men attaches only to only to personal pronouns and humain nouns, the nouns which occupy a high hierarchy of animacity. In consequence, the expressions suffixed by –men partly inherit the definitude of the nature of its considerably individuated domain. Finally, we are interested in the distributive interpretation of the nominal phrases in the sentences wherethe adverbial quan (the floating quantifier) appeares. We will claim that quan imposes the distributive reading in an autonomous manner and we will put forward an analysis of adverbial quan as a modifier of event predicate. Quan targets nominals linked by θ-roles and encapsulate in this role the instruction of distribution. The distributivity reinforced by quan involves a distributive relation between two entities : the nominal which is semantically plural and the plural event.