The present thesis is divided into two parts. Part I is devoted to the study of Gribov ambiguity in gauge systems and its relation with the appearance of degeneracies in the symplectic structure of the corresponding reduced phase space after gauge fixation. Part II is concerned with classical dual field theories for three-dimensional Einstein gravity and the symplectic structure on coadjoint orbits of the corresponding asymptotic symmetry group.In Part I, the Gribov problem is studied in the context of finite temperature QCD and the structure of the gluon propagator is analyzed. The standard confined scenario is found for low temperatures, while for high enough temperatures deconfinement takes place and a free gluon propagator is obtained. Subsequently, the relation between Gribov ambiguity and degeneracies in the symplectic structure of gauge systems is analyzed. It is shown that, in finite-dimensional systems, the presence of Gribov ambiguities in regular constrained systems always leads to a degenerate symplectic form upon Dirac reduction. The implications for the Gribov-Zwanziger approach to QCD and the symplectic structure of the theory are discussed. In Part II, geometrical actions for three-dimensional Einstein gravity are constructed by studying the symplectic structure on coadjoint orbits of the asymptotic symmetry group. The geometrical action coming from the Kirillov-Kostant symplectic form on coadjoint orbits is analyzed thought Dirac's algorithm for constrained systems. By studying the case of centrally extended groups and semi-direct products, the symplectic structure on coadjoint orbits of the Virasoro and the BMS3 group are analyzed. This allows one to associate separate geometric actions to each coadjoint orbit of the solution space, leading to two-dimensional dual fiel theories for asymptotically AdS and asymptotically flat three-dimensional gravity respectively. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Les animaux, comme les hommes, prennent quotidiennement des décisions en ayant une connaissance imparfaite des résultats potentiels. De nombreuses études s’intéressent aux mécanismes de la prise de décision, et pourtant leur origine évolutive reste peu connue. Ce travail combine éthologie et économie expérimentale, et met en oeuvre une approche ontogénique (enfants - adultes) et phylogénétique (singes -grands singes) afin de mieux comprendre l’universalité et l’origine des mécanismes de la prise de décision chez les primates. La méthode expérimentale – un jeu d’échange mimant des choix en situation incertaine – a été appliquée de manière comparable à toutes les espèces et les résultats analysés à l’aide des modèles économiques classiques. En situation risquée, singes et grands singes ont intégré les probabilités de gains et de pertes dans leur décision, ce que les enfants de moins de 5 ans ont été incapables. Néanmoins, tous les groupes étudiés ont exprimés des erreurs de jugement qui confirment donc une origine évolutive ancienne.Face à l’ambiguïté, les primates non-humains ont su adaptés leurs stratégies et globalement maximiser leurs bénéfices. / Animals, like people, have to deal with imperfect knowledge of potential out comes when making everyday life decisions. Many studies focus on mechanisms of decision making, yet their evolutionary origin remains unknown. To better understand the universality and the origin of the mechanisms of decision making in primates, this work combines an onto genetic approach (children - adults) and phylogenetic (monkeys - apes) associated with ethology and experimental economics. The experimental method - a gambling game - has been applied in a similar way to all species, and the results have been analyzed using classical economic models. Under risk, monkeys and apes have incorporated the probabilities of gains and losses in their decision,whereas children under 5 years old were unable. However, all groups studied expressed errors of judgment, therefore confirming an ancient evolutionary origin. Under ambiguity, non-human primates have managed to adapt their strategies to maximize their overall benefits.

This thesis is an investigation into ambiguity and irony in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread [Begrebet Angest]. The frequent ambiguities in Kierkegaard’s texts have been discussed by several scholars, and Kierkegaard’s interest in irony is evident not only from his master’s thesis On the Concept of Irony, but also from his other texts. The irony in Kierkegaard has especially been expounded on by Roger Poole and Jacob Bøggild, who both consider irony to be at the heart of Kierkegaardian writing. Furthermore, the ambiguity in Kierkegaard can also be considered typical for the existentialist line of philosophy in general. Finally, both of these subjects tie in to the difficult subject of Kierkegaard’s ”indirect communication”, a subject discussed at length by Poole. The investigation falls into three parts. The first part is essentially a preparation: the concepts of ambiguity and irony are introduced, as is their relation to each other, and the discussion of these pertaining to Kierkegaard is paraphrased. An introduction to Kierkegaard’s indirect communicationis also provided. The second part constitutes the main body of the thesis. This part consists of a reading of The Concept of Dread with special attention brought to the ambiguities of this text. These ambiguities are numerous and in most cases fundamental concepts in the book’s line of reason including things such as dread itself, sin, guilt and the demonic. This reading follows the basic layout of the book itself, interspersed with remarks and topics discussed by other scholars, notably Jonna Hjertström Lappalainen and Gordon Daniel Marino. At the end of this part, the ironic readings of Poole and Bøggild are discussed in relation to the more “direct” reading proposed previously. Such readings put even greater emphasis on the ambiguity, as the text in its entirety is ambiguous. The third part is a tentative discussion of the conflicting accounts of Bøggild, Poole and Hjertström Lappalainen, and an attempt at reconciling these into a coherent view of The Concept of Dread. It is argued that ambiguity, while not equatable with indirect communication, is nonetheless a necessary prerequisite for communicating without compromising the individual’s subjective and concrete experience of the human condition. Finally, the Kierkegaardian notion of absolute freedom as discussed by Hjertström Lappalainen is considered in relation to the “existential concepts” fundamental to existentialist philosophy and, once again, the necessity of ambiguity is shown. The task of the ambiguous or ironic text is then to communicate the subjective, that which cannot be grasped in language, making necessary a certain “emptiness” or openness with regards to the central concepts.

This thesis investigates the field of amateur translation in Brazil, with particular emphasis on the translation of Morrissey’s lyrics for understanding purposes in four different sources: magazines, fansites, virtual communities and general websites. It examines whether existing theories on the translation of popular songs (Kelly 1987, and Low, 2003, 2005, 2008) find some resonance in the practice of amateur translators. The collective construction of meaning, and the social acceptance of the Target Text are essential parts of the process. The analysis follows Toury’s (1995) descriptive model in order to systematise how these translators operate. The Brazilian amateur translators’ regularity in the use of particular techniques to render meaning to lyrics for understanding purposes enables the description of their practice as a genre its own. Following the theoretical framework, chapters four, five and six focus on the translation of the main challenges amateur translators of Morrissey’s lyrics face. The translation of cultural aspects proved to be an exercise of creativity in which the translators had to provide equivalents to culture-specific items (Aixelá, 1996) that find no mirror in the target culture. Ambiguous lyrics tended to present translations as varied as the translators’ personal agendas, understanding of the lyrics or target language’s limitations, such as lack of neutral personal pronoun. The different humour and irony styles in source and target culture resulted in every group of translators finding their own strategies to render meaning. As the first project aiming to rationalise amateur translators of lyrics in Brazil, this study represents an attempt to enrich and broaden the discussion on the translation of pop songs, with special attention to the practices of translation for this type of texts in a country where the audience is high dependent on translations in order to understand the lyrics are in great demand.

The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the effects of acquiring a second language (L2) at later periods of language development and native-like homonym processing in the first language (L1) from the perspective of Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) using a cross-modal lexical decision task. To date, there is a lack of neurophysiological investigations into the effect that acquiring an L2 can have on processing strategies in the L1, and whether or not there is a precise age at which L2 exposure no longer affects native-like language processing. As such, my goal is to pinpoint this sensitive period specifically for homonym processing. To achieve this, I will present and discuss the results of two studies. The first study employs behavioural response measures using a cross-modal lexical decision task where participants simultaneously heard a sentence and made a decision to a visually-presented pseudoword or real word. The second study employs ERP measures using a novel ERP paradigm which investigates not only the main objective of this dissertation, but the second objective as well. This second objective is for this dissertation to become the first to evaluate the outcome of combining the cross-modal lexical decision task with ERPs. The behavioural and neurophysiological results for the monolingual group support the Reordered Access Model (Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988) while the results for the bilingual groups do not. The results of the current studies indicate that those bilinguals who acquired French as an L2 rather than as a second native L1 show increasing divergence from monolingual native speakers in L1 homonym processing, with later acquirers exhibiting an exponentially marked divergence. This was found even though the task was carried out in English, the L1 (or one of the L1s) of all participants. The diverging performances of the bilinguals from the monolinguals were apparent in behavioural responses as well as in the amplitude, scalp distribution, and latency of ERP components, These differences were unique to each group, which supports the hypothesis that the acquisition of an L2 influences processing in the L1 (Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). Specifically, the early and late bilingual groups exhibited a marked divergence from the monolingual group as they revealed syntactic priming effects (p<.001) as well as lexical frequency effects (p<.001). They also revealed the greatest P600-like effect as they processed target words which were inappropriately- related to the priming homonyms (such as skin in Richard had a shed in the back of the garden). This suggests a heightened sensitivity to surface cues due to the L2 influencing homonym processing in the L1 (Cook, 2003; Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). Comparatively, the monolingual group revealed equal N400-like effects for lexical ambiguities overall compared to the unrelated conditions, and a context-by-frequency-interaction slowing their processing of the target word that is appropriately-related to the subordinate reading of the priming homonym, suggesting that they are not as sensitive to these same surface cues. Importantly, these results confirm that using ERPs along with a cross-modal lexical decision task is a promising paradigm to further study language processing.

Compared to grammatical knowledge of language (what to use), the ability to use language appropriately depending on a context (how to use) is termed linguistic pragmatic knowledge. Throughout the elementary school years children developmentally not only acquire pragmatic knowledge but also increase their explicit grasp of pragmatic knowledge. This is termed metapragmatic knowledge. It includes the ability to infer meanings that are not expressed literally. In nonliteral uses of language, the speaker means something different from what is said. Among such nonliteral uses of language are indirect requests and irony. As children's metapragmatic knowledge has a positive relationship with their literate proficiency, on which success in school depends, children can benefit from the development of their metapragmatic knowledge in their academic achievement. The study of bilingualism has shown that bilingualism has a positive effect on children's metalinguistic development. Can metapragmatic knowledge be enhanced by increasing exposure to a second language (L2)? Bilingual pupils were given two tasks in which the children's levels of metapragmatic knowledge were investigated. The measure of metapragmatic knowledge consisted of two assessments: (a) understanding of indirect requests, and (b) understanding of irony. Participants listened to eight short stories in which brief interactions were presented in a multimedia, computer-based format. After each story, participants were asked a set of questions to probe subjects' attributions of the speaker's communicative intent and hearer's interpretation. L2 intensity was positively associated with metapragmatic knowledge measured by comprehension of requests. Conversely, the association between L2 intensity and metapragmatic knowledge measured by comprehension of irony was not necessarily positive. Those who scored higher had positive relationship between L2 intensity and their metapragmatic knowledge whereas those who scored lower had negative relationship between L2 intensity and their metapragmatic knowledge. In summary, L2 intensity is not always positively associated with any type of metapragmatic knowledge. This suggests that a larger amount of exposure to L2 is not necessarily beneficial to children's development of metapragmatic knowledge. Therefore, it is important to consider the levels of children's metapragmatic knowledge when planning an increase of exposure to L2 instruction. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

This dissertation probes children's metalinguistic awareness of syntactic ambiguity (as in the sentence The man is poking the monkey with a banana, where the PP with a banana can be understood in two ways, associated with either the monkey or the poking). Several studies suggest that children do not spontaneously detect syntactic ambiguity until the second grade (e.g., Wankoff, 1983; Cairns et al., 2004). However, syntactic ambiguity detection contributes to reading comprehension skills in second and third graders (e.g., Cairns et al., 2004; Yuill, 2009). This research suggests the hypothesis that syntactic ambiguity awareness should contribute to reading development. Specifically, the theoretical model known as the Simple View of Reading posits that the main components of reading are decoding and linguistic comprehension. Syntactic ambiguity detection could contribute to linguistic comprehension because it helps a listener to overcome comprehension difficulties caused by misinterpreting an ambiguous sentence. Thus, it is important to better understand the early development of syntactic ambiguity awareness. If its connection to reading begins younger than second grade, it might be incorporated into early reading curricula and intervention strategies, which are more effective when applied earlier. This dissertation includes three manuscripts that are or will be submitted for publication. The first manuscript reports on a study that laid the foundation for the following two by testing whether 3- to 5-year-olds access both interpretations of a syntactic ambiguity using a truth value judgment task. The results showed that children do entertain both interpretations, indicating that comprehension should not be an impediment to syntactic ambiguity detection. This study is currently in revisions at First Language (Zimmer, 2016a). The second manuscript reports on a study that tested whether 4- to 7-year-olds can detect ambiguous sentences using a task that differs from those used in previous studies. My study used a picture selection task that tested for conscious awareness by having children teach a puppet why multiple pictures could match one sentence. I developed a scoring system for children's explanations that allowed for more gradient measures of early ambiguity awareness than previous research. The results showed that a small proportion of 4- to 7-year-olds are aware of syntactic ambiguity, and many others are beginning to show indications of such awareness (e.g., they select both pictures but their explanations are not yet adult-like). This manuscript is submitted to The Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (Zimmer, 2016b).The third manuscript reports on a study that tested whether 6- to 7-year-olds can learn syntactic ambiguity detection and whether the learning correlates with improvement at reading readiness measures. Participants were divided into two groups: an ambiguity group that did four weeks of games to teach syntactic ambiguity detection, and a control group that did four weeks of math games. I found that children in the ambiguity group improved more at ambiguity detection and at reading readiness tests than those in the control group. This showed that syntactic ambiguity detection is a learnable skill for children as young as 6 and suggests that its connection to reading is in place that young as well. Thus, this skill could be a valuable addition to early reading curricula and intervention strategies. This manuscript will be submitted to Applied Psycholinguistics (Zimmer, 2016c).

Cette thèse appartient au domaine de la théorie de la décision en situation d'incertitude. Elle vise à comprendre, décrire, et représenter les choix individuels dans différents contextes de décision. Notre travail se concentre sur le fait que le comportement économique est souvent influencé par la structure et le déroulement de la résolution de l'incertitude. Dans une première expérience nous avons confronté nos sujets à différents types d'incertitude – à savoir du risque (probabilités connues), de l'incertain (probabilités inconnues), du risque composé et de l'incertain composé – en utilisant des mécanismes aléatoires particuliers. Le chapitre 1 analyse l'hétérogénéité des attitudes individuelles face à l'ambiguïté, au risque composé et à l'incertain composé alors que dans le chapitre 2, le modèle d'espérance d'utilité à dépendance du rang est utilisé comme outil de mesure afin d'étudier en détails ces attitudes au niveau individuel. Le chapitre 3 confronte à l'expérience l'interprétation de l'ambiguïté en terme de croyances de second ordre et propose une méthode d'élicitation de la fonction qui caractérise l'attitude face à l'ambiguïté dans les modèles « récursifs » de décision face à l'incertain. La seconde partie de la thèse s'intéresse aux comportements de décision individuelle dans un contexte dynamique et est composée de deux études expérimentales indépendantes. Néanmoins, elles reposent toutes deux sur la décomposition de l'axiome d'indépendance en trois axiomes dynamiques: conséquentialisme, cohérence dynamique et réduction des loteries composées. Le chapitre 4 rapporte les résultats d'une expérience de décision individuelle sur les facteurs de violations de chacun de ces axiomes. Le chapitre 5 présente une catégorisation conceptuelle des comportements individuels dans des problèmes de décision séquentiels face au risque. Le cas des agents ne se conformant pas à l'axiome d'indépendance y est étudié de façon systématique et les résultats d'une expérience spécialement conçue pour tester cette catégorisation sont présentés. / This thesis belongs to the domain of decision theory under uncertainty and aims to understand, describe and represent individual choices in various decision contexts. Our work focuses on the fact that economic behavior is often influenced by the structure and the timing of resolution of uncertainty. In a first experimental part, we confronted subjects with different types of uncertainty, namely risk (known probabilities), uncertainty (unknown probabilities), compound risk and compound uncertainty, which were generated using special random devices. In chapter 1 we analyze the heterogeneity of attitudes towards ambiguity, compound risk and compound uncertainty whereas in chapter 2, we use rank dependent expected utility as a measuring tool in order to individually investigate these attitudes. Chapter 3 confronts the interpretation of ambiguity in term of second order beliefs with the experimental data and proposes a method for eliciting the function that encapsulates attitudes toward ambiguity in the “recursive” or multistage models of decision under uncertainty. The second part of the thesis deals with individual decision making under risk in a dynamic context and is composed of two independent experimental studies. Both of them rely on the decomposition of the independence axiom into three dynamic axioms: consequentialism, dynamic consistency and reduction of compound lotteries. Chapter 4 reports experimental data about violations of each of the three axioms. Chapter 5 presents a conceptual categorization of individual behavior in sequential decision problems under risk, especially those which do not conform to the independence axiom. We propose an experiment specially designed to test the predictions of this categorization.

ABSTRACT: Puns are short humorous texts that play on structural ambiguity in order to create incongruous scripts. The perception of their humour requires considerable pragmatic manipulation, which may present problems for L2 learners, which is why many scholars agree that they are best reserved for more advanced students. Using a combination of Quantitative and Qualitative analysis of data yielded from a survey containing puns and referential jokes, this study confirms that humour through puns is largely inaccessible to Swedish High School learners of English, with ambiguity being the main obstacle across the test groups. However, since language play has been proven to be facilitative to language learning, and since students themselves express a wish to be able to participate in humorous interaction, learners may well benefit from working with puns and language play in the classroom in order to gain greater linguistic abilities and well-rounded communicative competence.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2015-12-14T16:06:08Z No. of bitstreams: 1 carolinacaniatoportes.pdf: 771544 bytes, checksum: bf41443fb93ad0640c90bd3a0c0eaa0d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2015-12-14T20:37:16Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 carolinacaniatoportes.pdf: 771544 bytes, checksum: bf41443fb93ad0640c90bd3a0c0eaa0d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-12-14T20:37:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 carolinacaniatoportes.pdf: 771544 bytes, checksum: bf41443fb93ad0640c90bd3a0c0eaa0d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-03-16 / Nossa pesquisa pretende analisar como se constitui o realismo no filme O Espelho, tendo como norte três conceitos principais: a ambiguidade, o tempo e a atenção. Esses conceitos serão trabalhados a partir da perspectiva de três referenciais teóricos. O primeiro deles, o crítico André Bazin, nos dará base para pensarmos a ambiguidade a partir de seus estudos sobre o neorrealismo italiano. O segundo, Gilles Deleuze, que propõe o nascimento de uma nova imagem caracterizada, principalmente, por sua relação com o tempo. E Jorge Larrosa, que, a partir de seus estudos sobre o conceito de experiência e atenção, nos ajuda a pensar a relação realidade-filme-espectador. A partir dessas perspectivas, tentaremos enxergar as particularidades da construção narrativa de O Espelho na sua relação com o espectador, inserindo o filme em uma discussão mais ampla sobre o realismo no cinema. / This research aims to analyze how the realism emerge in the iranian film The Mirror, through three main concepts: ambiguity, time and attention. These concepts will be think from the perspective of three different authors. The first of them, the critic André Bazin, will give us the basis to think the ambiguity through his studies of Italian Neorealism. The second author is Gilles Deleuze, who proposes the birth of a new image characterized primarily by its relationship with the time. And Jorge Larrosa, who, through his study about the concept of experience and attention, help us to think the relationship between reality-movie-viewer. From these perspectives, we will try to see the narrative particularities of The Mirror in its relationship with the viewer, also entering the film in a broader discussion of the realism in cinema.