Languages can differ with respect to the way in which transitive events are realized in transitive situations, resulting in different transitivity patterns. In particular, languages differ in the ways of linking the semantic notion `agent' with the grammatical notion `subject'. Based on a cognitive-functional approach, this study examines some differences between English and Korean with respect to the questions of how far and in what ways the linguistic realization of transitivity can be varied in terms of the semantic extension of transitivity from prototypes, variation in verb transitivity, and agency in transitive constructions. As for language-specific factors that characterize the difference in transitivity between English and Korean, it is proposed that English is more permissive than Korean in the way non-prototypical agents are realized as agentive subjects, resulting in a wider range of the semantic extension of agentivity from prototypical transitive constructions.Different linguistic preferences involving constructing some entities as a main causative factor (i.e., non-agentive subjects vs. agentive subjects) play a significant role in the conceptualization of transitive events, thereby leading to differences in the coding of causation in transitive clauses between the two languages. In English, the concept of agency can be more easily extended to include inanimate entities than it can be in Korean. Accordingly, English extends the notion of agent to a wider range of situations than Korean, hence allowing non-prototypical agents to be construed as agents. More specifically, the semantic features of prototypical agents in English (e.g., intention, result, responsibility, etc.) can be freely extended to inanimate causative situations in a greater degree than in Korean.A general typological difference between English and Korean in terms of competing notions of agentivity is that compared to Korean, English is freer in assigning a large number of different semantic roles to subjects without requiring concomitant morphosyntactic changes such as passivization (or intransitivization); English tends to overtly express agency, focusing on individual entities (both animate and inanimate) in transitive events, while Korean is reluctant to verbalize non-agentive elements, covering up their inanimacy by means of indirect expressions based on a result/effect clause and relying on different structural strategies (i.e., passive structures, lexical intransitive verbs, and inchoative forms).Finally, it is suggested that different linguistic manifestations in the notions of agency and causation between English and Korean lead to the varying degree of cognitive categories that structure the way in which the language speaker perceive and interpret transitive events, hence resulting in contrasting construals of agentivity (i.e., agent/cause/process-oriented expressions vs. result/effect-oriented expressions) in the expression of transitivity. / Department of English

Verhandeling ingelewer vir die graad Magister Artium in die Lettere an Wysbegeerte aan die Universiteit van Zululand, = Dissertation submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zululand, 1995. / Afri: = In bierdie verbandeling word bepaalde aspekte van oorganklikbeid in Afrikaans ontleed. Hoewel akademiese bandboeke, pedagogiese grammatikas en woordeboeke infonnasie oor oorgankl~eid bevat, word die begrip nfu-ens sistematies uiteengesit me. In die eerste boofstuk word On prinsipiele verantwoording gemaak vir die bestudering van oorganklikbeid in Afrikaans. Nadat daar in die ·tweede boofstuk On saaklike uiteensetting gegee is van die prinsipes waarop die kognitiewe grammatika berus, bied die derde boofstuk On oorsig van die sienings wat gevestigde Engelse en Afrikaanse grammatikabronne buldig oor oorganklikbeid. Die vierde en vyfde boofstukke gee onderskeidelik uiteensettings van die rolgrammatika as benadering om oorganklikbeid te bestudeer en die gestaltgrondslag waarvolgens entiteite binne On gebeure-opset waargeneem word tydens die aansetfase van roltoekenning. In die sesde boofstuk word die onoorganklike en oorganklike werkwoorde van letterlike gebeure bebandel. In boofstuk sewe word die gevolgtrekkings van die ondersoek aangebied. = Engl: Various aspects of transitivity in Afrikaans are analyzed in this dissertation. While academic handbooks, pedagogic grammars and dictionaries contain information regarding transitivity there is no source where it is presented systematically. The first chapter motivates the need for such a research project on transitivity in Afrikaans. The second chapter sketches the tenets underlying cognitive grammar. The third chapter reviews the way in which various English and Afrikaans textbooks approach transitivity. The fourth chapter details the way in which transitivity is dealt with in cognitive grammar. The fifth chapter deals with the gestalt perceptions that people form of entities during the onset phase of semantic role designation. Chapter six deals with Afrikaans intransitive and transitive verbs of literal events while the conclusions arrived at in the course of this project arc presented in chapter seven.

This dissertation investigates transitivity alternations, with particular reference to Amharic. The lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic properties of morphological causatives, experiencer predicates, applicative constructions and complex predicates formed by light verbs are examined in detail. It is claimed that transitivity alternations are an artefact of Event-type alternations and follow from universal principles such as Event Headedness. It is argued that the valency difference between various verb classes reduces to whether the Root of the verb is specified or underspecified for Event Headedness. / Two levels of phrase structure, l-syntax and s-syntax, are recognized in the study. It is argued that productive causatives are generated in s-syntax, whereas morphological causatives which are sensitive to the Event-type of the Root are generated in l-syntax. A unified structural analysis is given for a number of superficially unrelated constructions including Subject Experiencer predicates, perception verbs and possessive predicates. It is argued that the quirky Case and agreement properties of such predicates can be handled by motivating inherent Case assignment. This analysis is further extended to account for the benefactive applicative of unaccusatives. / The role of light verbs in transitivity alternation is explored in detail. It is shown that light verbs are independent verbs that spell-out Event-types. The study argues that the polysemous relationship between predicates is best accounted for by a single argument structure rather than by positing multiple lexical entries.

No description available.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Corruption as a concept is viewed differently by various disciplines, but there seems to be consensus that it relates to the misuse of public office for private gain. Studies in the social sciences, mainly political science, economics, sociology and law, have provided valuable insights into the subject, for example, its causes, manifestations and consequences. In a country such as Nigeria, corruption is said to have cost the country up to $20 trillion between 1960 and 2005, and it could cost up to 37% of its GDP by 2030 if the situation is not urgently addressed. The paradox, however, is that although all successive leaders of the country have consistently articulated their anti-corruption posture in national speeches, they get accused by their successors of not being tough on corruption both in word and in deed. Regrettably, there have been relatively few close textual analyses of presidential speeches carried out within analytical frameworks in linguistics that have the potential of revealing how presidents can simultaneously talk tough and soft on corruption, a contradiction that could well explain the putative anti-corruption posture of the country’s leaders and the ever deepening corruption in the land. It is against this backdrop that this study draws on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in order to examine language choices related to the theme of corruption in speeches made by Nigerian presidents from 1957 to 2015. The objectives of the study are to (1) provide an overview of how the discourse on corruption has evolved in Nigerian presidential speeches from 1957-2015; (2) determine specific facets of the construal of corruption from the dominant choices made from the system of transitivity (process, participants, circumstance) in speeches by different presidents and at different time points in their tenure in office; (3) analyse how the interpersonal metafunction of language is enacted in the speeches by the presidents through the system of appraisal for a strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation; (4) interrogate from a critical discourse analysis standpoint the interest, ideological, partisan or other bases for the choices made in the speeches from the systems associated with the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions of language; and (5) to evaluate the different presidents in terms of how the above analyses position them in relation to combating corruption.

This study investigated the unidimensional assumption underlying choice behavior by examining the transitivity properties of rats' choice behavior. In Experiment 1, two variables of reinforcement, amount and delay, were manipulated simultaneously in a two lever choice situation. The conditions of strong transitivity were not present in either reponse count or indifference-measured choice behavior, indicating that choice behavior was not distributed along a single dimension with ratio scale characteristics. Moderate transitivity conditions were characteristic of both response and indifference- measured choice which was consistent with a single dimension possessing interval scale characteristics. In Experiment 2, only one reinforcement variable, amount, was manipulated. Strong transitivity was present in both response and indifference measures of choice, indicating that subjects' choice behavior was consistent with a single dimension with ratio scale characteristics. In addition, one of two subjects in Experiment 1 and two of two subjects in Experiment 2 fit Baum's expression of the matching law with response-count measured choice. The indifference measure of choice failed to fit the matching law in either experiment. The measure of choice which fit the matching law also conformed to a single dimension with interval scale characteristics. Since the response-count measure of choice behavior in both Experiments 1 and 2 was moderately transitive, the transitivity properties were consistent with fits to the matching law. The occasional presence of such behaviors as biting the levers, chewing on the cue lights and position bias may have decreased subjects' sensitivity to the amount of reinforcement variable and contributed to undermatching. The indifference measure of choice exhibited moderate transitivity in both experiments but did not fit the matching law. These results show that tests of transitivity are useful in examining the characteristics of the functional relation between behavior and its reinforcing consequences. Further research is required to determine the usefulness and the limitations of the indifference measure of choice behavior. The results were similar to other investigators' in showing that strong transitivity was not an automatic property of choice behavior and must be tested rather than assumed.

The main topic of this thesis is nonrigid image registration for medical applications. We start with an overview and classification of existing registration techniques. We develop a general nonrigid image registration algorithm. It uses spline functions to describe the deformation and uses multi-scale strategy to search for the optimal transformation. Then we present a new registration operator that is transitive and symmetric. We investigate the theoretical implication of these properties and apply this operator to the registration of sequences of MR cardiac images. In the second part of the thesis, two methods, one 2D and one 3D, for validation of nonrigid image registration algorithms are proposed and compared to a manual validation strategy. Both methods provide pairs of deformed images as well as corresponding true displacement fields with known accuracy. Nonrigid registration algorithms can be run on the pairs of images and their outputs can be compared to the true displacement fields that were generated manually by five observers. While these phantom validation studies do not provide physically correct deformations, they are certainly a useful way to test the algorithm's ability to recover various deformation patterns.

The so-called passive in Māori has been the topic of a long-standing debate in the linguistics literature. Its frequency, especially in past tense narratives, makes this construction an atypical passive. It has been suggested that the passive in Māori is used with perfective (Clark 1973) and dynamic (Bauer 1997) events, and when the clause contains an affected direct object (Chung 1978). This thesis finds that all of these suggestions are correct, but, rather than a passive construction, it is ergative, so that Māori has split-ergativity. As predicted under the Transitivity Hypothesis (Hopper & Thompson 1980), the most transitive clauses in Māori have ergative marking, and less transitive clauses are accusatively marked. Transitivity is understood as a property of an entire clause, involving a number of factors, and the most important features of transitivity in Māori are PARTICIPANTS, AFFECTEDNESS OF O, ASPECT and PUNCTUALITY. Clauses that are low in transitivity are uniformly accusative, in both their morphology and syntax. However, highly transitive clauses, which we expect to follow ergative alignment, have some evidence of syntactic accusativity. This mixed behaviour follows directly from the Inverse Grammatical Relations Hypothesis (Manning 1996). Manning claims syntactic constructions like control, binding and imperative addressee are accusatively aligned in all languages, because they are restricted at argument structure. Languages can only be ergative at the level of grammatical relations, where syntactic processes such as relative clauses, question formation and topicalisation are restricted. It then follows that ergativity is only present in Māori at gr-structure in the most highly transitive clauses. We also look at Māori from a diachronic perspective, and see that it differs from its Eastern Polynesian sisters, which are all accusative. Māori is different because the extension of the imperfective pattern did not spread to all transitive clauses, thus preventing a reanalysis of imperfective clauses as active.

Orientador: Maria Helena de Moura Neves / Banca: Rosane de Andrade Berlinck / Banca: Juliano Desiderato Antonio / Resumo: O objetivo geral do estudo é a observação, no uso efetivo da língua, de construções vigentes examinando-as em confronto com cânones prescritos em obras normativas da atualidade. O objetivo específico é o exame da tensão entre o que propõe essas obras e o que ocorre na língua escrita de 1900 a 1950 quanto à regência de alguns dos verbos mais tratados pelos manuais normativos: esquecer(-se), lembrar(-se), pagar, perdoar, assistir, obedecer, ir e chegar. Paralelamente se buscará um confronto com os resultados obtidos em pesquisa anterior, na qual se estudou a regência verbal na segunda metade do século passado. A análise se serviu de uma amostra do corpus do Laboratório de Lexicografia da Faculdade de Ciências e Letras de Araraquara (UNESP), que contém cerca de duzentos milhões de ocorrências. A investigação, de base funcionalista, concentra-se nos processos ligados à manifestação da transitividade verbal. / Abstract: The general goal of this research is the observation of real constructions in the effective use of the language, examining them in confrontation with prescribed models in normative manuals. The specific goal of the research is the examination of the tension between what these manuals propose and what occurs in the written language, in the period between 1900 and 1950, according to the regency of some of the most treated verbs in the normative Portuguese manuals: esquecer(-se) (to forget), lembrar(-se) (to remember), pagar (to pay), perdoar (to forgive), assistir (to watch), obedecer (to obey), ir (to go) and chegar (to arrive). Besides, it will be made a confrontation with the results of a previous research, in which it was studied the verbal regency in the second half of the last century. The analysis has a sample of the corpus of the Laboratory of Lexicographical Studies of the College of Sciences and Letters of Araraquara (UNESP), which has almost two hundred million occurrences. The investigation, that has a functionalist basis, is concentrated in the processes linked to the manifestation of the verbal transitivity. / Mestre

<p> Five to eight year old children were subjects in this study which examined relationships among the Piagetian operations of class inclusion, transitivity and seriation. Behavioral and verbal measures were taken of the latter two and the stimuli varied along size and weight dimensions. Transitivity and seriation were related on the verbal level only. Behavioral measures showed less relationship across operations and dimensions than verbal measures and doubts were raised as to the adequacy of using behavioral measures alone in assessing operational understanding. Only one measure of class inclusion showed any relationship to transitivity and seriation. Independent tests revealed that while simultaneous combinativity may be a component ability of all these operations, successive combinativity definitely was not.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)