As Chinese is a topic prominent language and English is a subject prominent language, there are many differences between these two languages. The present study investigates the influence of Chinese topic prominence constructions on the acquisition of English with the instrument of a translation task. 60 Chinese college students of two levels were divided into two groups according to their English proficiency level (the non-English majors for low level and the English majors for high level). The results were analyzed and calculated in terms of four types of topic prominence constructions: Noun phrases as topics, clauses as topics, verb phrases as topics and prepositional phrases as topics.     Through this study, it is found that the interlanguage of Chinese learners for English is characterized by topic prominence construction. What is more, Chinese learners of English can gradually decrease the use of topic prominence construction, turning into more target-like interlangage with the increase of their English proficiency level.   The findings of the present study contribute to a better understanding of Chinese English learners' interlanguage development from topic prominence to subject prominence. Furthermore, the results of the current study are significant for the English teaching in China. The language teacher should enhance the comparison between Chinese and English so that the learners could be more aware of the difference between these two languages and errors could be avoided.

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The aim of this essay was to examine the way preschool teachers and children converse during school meals, and also the way preschool teachers start and develop conversations during meals. The conversations were analyzed from the topic of conversation and the teachers' ways of using language acts such as questions, remarks, exhortations. The study was based on observations, tape recording and contact schedule. The result shows that the topic of conversation is significant for how involved teachers are in conversations during meals. The result also shows how conversations develop or end depending on what language acts teachers use. This is particularly clear when using questions and exhortations. The discussion of this study is mainly about the fact that teachers use of questions does not seem to make conversation progress. In several cases, teachers' shut conversations down by using language acts. The discussion also shows that conversation between children can develop and progress without the help of teachers. / Barns språkutveckling, och närmare bestämt hur förskollärare och barn samtalar vidmåltid är i fokus i följande undersökning. Studien syftar till att undersöka förskolläraressätt att påbörja och vidareutveckla samtal under måltider i förskolan. Samtalenanalyseras utifrån samtalsämne och förskollärarnas sätt att använda sig av olikaspråkhandlingar (frågor, påståenden och uppmaningar). Studien genomförs med hjälpav observationer, bandinspelningar och kontaktscheman. Resultatet visar attsamtalsämnena under måltiderna har betydelse för förskollärarnas delaktighet. Det visarockså hur samtalen vidareutvecklas alternativt stannar av genom de olikaspråkhandlingar, särskilt frågor och uppmaningar som lärarna använder sig av.Diskussionen berör särskilt förskollärarnas användande av frågor vilka inte direkt visarsig vidareutveckla samtalen i någon mening. I flera fall tystar förskollärarna istället nedsamtalen genom sina språkhandlingar. Vi berör även att barnens egna samtal i flera fallutvecklas utan förskollärarens delaktighet.

I divided this new type of composition, multi-type composition of a certain topic, into five categories, and the composition themes were designed in person by me; I also put them into practice in my teaching procedure in the junior high school composition class. After finishing collecting student works, I spent very long time classifying and commenting on them, and finally found that students had quite excellent performing in two respects, one is confirming the main ideas of the composition themes and how students chose their composition materials is the other. In this thesis I shall present the result of my study completely, including my designed composition themes, the teaching procedures of every theme, student works and given comments of those works.

This thesis investigates the contrastive predicate construction in Vietnamese under the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995). As an instance of the predicate doubling constructions, it contains two copies of a predicate built around the topic marker thì, in which the one preceding thì is a contrastive topic. It is shown that the relation between the two copies of the predicate is formed by A-bar movement. On the one hand, the dependency between the topic and the lower predicate is unbounded, and can cross a number of finite clauses. On the other hand, their dependency is island sensitive. In addition, the two copies of the predicate are required to be morphologically identical. These pieces of evidence suggest that the two copies of the predicate are links of a movement chain which exceptionally allows thephonetic realization of more than one chain link. In this construction, the two copies of the predicate are obligatorily pronounced because they are associated with specific phonological requirements. Not pronouncing either one of them would lead to the phonological crash. As for the higher predicate or the topic, its phonetic realization is triggered by the [Top] feature of the TopP whose the head is occupied by the topic marker thì. The lower copy, on the other hand, is forced to be pronounced due to the focus feature that it is associated with. This focus feature is derived from the semantic content that the construction conveys. It is argued that of the two copies of the predicate in this construction, the higher one which is the topic provides given information, while the lower copy, in contrast, expresses new information, not given in the context; thus must receive a focus reading and be spelled out. Accordingly, both the two copies are phonetically realized. This present study is the first to study the contrastive predicate construction, an instance of predicate doubling constructions, in Vietnamese. In the process of analysis, some aspects of Vietnamese grammar are introduced to the readers. Theoretically, this study provides a strong empirical support for the copy theory of movement in which copies of a movement are phonetically realized. To some extent, it has made some contributions to the theory of grammar.

Accompanying with the rapid growth of Internet, people around the world can easily distribute, browse, and share as much information as possible through the Internet. The enormous amount of information, however, causes the information overload problem that is beyond users¡¦ limited information processing ability. Therefore, recommender systems arise to help users to look for useful information when they cannot describe the requirements precisely. The filtering techniques in recommender systems can be divided into content-based filtering (CBF) and collaborative filtering (CF). Although CF is shown to be superior over CBF in literature, personalized document recommendation relies more on CBF simply because of its text content in nature. Nevertheless, document recommendation task provides a good chance to integrate both techniques into a hybrid one, and enhance the overall recommendation performance. The objective of this research is thus to propose a hybrid filtering approach for personalized document recommendation. Particularly, latent Dirichlet allocation to uncover latent semantic structure in documents is incorporated to help us to either obtain robust document similarity in CF, or explore user profiles in CBF. Two experiments are conducted accordingly. The results show that our proposed approach outperforms other counterparts on the recommendation performance, which justifies the feasibility of our proposed approach in real applications.

ABSTRACT From early the 20th century, luo hua sheng (¸¨µØ¥Í) has contributed a lot to the development of modern Chinese literature: fiction, essays, poetry, plays, fairy tales, and literary translations. He wrote a total of more than 400,000 words of literary creation. If one is to compare his literary work to those of his era and to other modern writers, although his works is limited in terms of quantity, he was able to intertwine realism and philosophy in his writings that have created a deep impact to his readers. This writings have vividly narrated and reflected his views, pursuits and literary concepts. Most of critics emphasizes that xu di shan (³\¦a¤s) creative works are distinctively unique, whirlwind romance, characters well developed, well constructed prose, and have perfectly intertwine the Southern China's and other Indochina slices of life. This would encompass their thinking, outlooks and religious views. Xu di shan (³\¦a¤s) and his other May Fourth Movement (¤­¥|¹B°Ê) era writer focused on short stories, however, his works stands out with his great pursuit in trying to find a new way of expression and in developing new aesthetic standards. His writings can be classified as bold and straight-forward as he developed a unique way of narrating the lines without being too detailed that made his audience easily misunderstood the whole scenario and get derailed with the whole story. This study focuses on the essence of literary development to include but not limited to: topic classification, analysis of novel structures, binary oppositions, actantial model. This paper made a thorough review of Xu's life experiences and literary accomplishments. Specifically, the writer have look into his writing styles and concept development in analyzing his works. In conclusion, the writer have identified that Xu's work can be classified into: ideals and realism; mortality and destiny; power distance and struggles; joys and sorrows of romance. This study aims to better understand the underlying thoughts in Xu's work as to its significance, interpretations and deeper meanings.

Expert finding is an Information Retrieval (IR) task that is used to find the needed experts. To find the needed experts is a noticeable problem in many commercial, educational or governmental organizations. It is highly crucial to find the appropriate experts, when seeking referees for a paper submitted to a conference or when looking for a consultant for a software project. It is also important to find the similar experts in case of the absence or the inability of the selected expert. Traditional expert finding methods are modeled based on three components which are a supporting document collection, a list of candidate experts and a set of pre-defined topics. In reality, most of the time pre-defined topics are not available. In this study, we propose an expert finding system which generates a semantic layer between domains and experts using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). A traditional expert finding method (voting approach) is used in order to match the domains and the experts as the baseline method. In case similar experts are needed, the system recommends experts matching the qualities of the selected experts. The proposed model is applied to a semi-synthetic data set to prove the concept and it performs better than the baseline method. The proposed model is also applied to the projects of the Technology and Innovation Funding Programs Directorate (TEYDEB) of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (T&Uuml / B

Cheng Ching-wen has a wide variety of interests in writing, including novel, short story, fairy tale, literature, political review, miscellaneous writing and translation of Western literary works. Cheng has been engaged in writing for fifty years and accomplished a tremendous amount of quality work. This thesis would focus on three of Cheng¡¦s novels. Structure of the thesis would be the first part which has been finalized after several modifications. Chapter One Explain the reason why to choose Cheng¡¦s novels as the topic of this thesis. Chapter Two Study the writer¡¦s life and creation background. Analyze how his special growing background, learning process, friends and reading preference impact on his writing. Also, discuss the relationship between his inspirations and his works from the three geographic environments where he grew up. Chapter Three Discuss the origin of Cheng¡¦s creation ideas. Analyze Cheng¡¦s creation style and the formation of his tragic philosophy of life from the perspectives of Western literary works and the philosophy of life. Chapter Four Explore how Cheng creates the image of a novel character through artistic portrayal of characters and analyze Cheng¡¦s language style from three perspectives. Chapter Five Discuss Cheng¡¦s novels from four major topics: suffering common people, the greatness of mother¡¦s love, life of the peasantry in Taiwan and the forbidden political issues. Based on these topics, explore the ideas that Cheng embodies in these three novels. Chapter Six Conclusion: Summarize Cheng¡¦s creations and writing style. Keywords: Cheng Ching-wen, Novel, Topic, Tragedy,A Study on Cheng Ching-wen¡¦s Novel

<p> </p><p>The aim of this essay was to examine the way preschool teachers and children converse during school meals, and also the way preschool teachers start and develop conversations during meals. The conversations were analyzed from the topic of conversation and the teachers' ways of using language acts such as questions, remarks, exhortations. The study was based on observations, tape recording and contact schedule. The result shows that the topic of conversation is significant for how involved teachers are in conversations during meals. The result also shows how conversations develop or end depending on what language acts teachers use. This is particularly clear when using questions and exhortations. The discussion of this study is mainly about the fact that teachers use of questions does not seem to make conversation progress. In several cases, teachers' shut conversations down by using language acts. The discussion also shows that conversation between children can develop and progress without the help of teachers.</p> / <p>Barns språkutveckling, och närmare bestämt hur förskollärare och barn samtalar vidmåltid är i fokus i följande undersökning. Studien syftar till att undersöka förskolläraressätt att påbörja och vidareutveckla samtal under måltider i förskolan. Samtalenanalyseras utifrån samtalsämne och förskollärarnas sätt att använda sig av olikaspråkhandlingar (frågor, påståenden och uppmaningar). Studien genomförs med hjälpav observationer, bandinspelningar och kontaktscheman. Resultatet visar attsamtalsämnena under måltiderna har betydelse för förskollärarnas delaktighet. Det visarockså hur samtalen vidareutvecklas alternativt stannar av genom de olikaspråkhandlingar, särskilt frågor och uppmaningar som lärarna använder sig av.Diskussionen berör särskilt förskollärarnas användande av frågor vilka inte direkt visarsig vidareutveckla samtalen i någon mening. I flera fall tystar förskollärarna istället nedsamtalen genom sina språkhandlingar. Vi berör även att barnens egna samtal i flera fallutvecklas utan förskollärarens delaktighet.</p>