L'objecte d'aquesta tesi ha estat el de defensar, a partir de l'exemple de l'obra de Francis Ponge, la plausibilitat referencial del llenguatge poètic, supòsit tot sovint rebatut a causa d'una radicalització del tòpic de l'autoreferencialitat poètica i per un planteig en suma restringit del concepte de la referencialitat. Però que un poema es constitueixi en tant que específica configuració significant no hauria d'implicar un menyscabament de la seva capacitat de representació, perquè si la poesia és creació mitjançant el llenguatge, tot allò que jutgem poètic no dimanaria sinó de la mateixa idiosincràsia de l'expressió verbal. Així doncs, hem argumentat, en primer lloc, l'efectivitat referencial del llenguatge ordinari per tal d'il·lustrar tot seguit la del poètic i, en particular, la que explicitaria el verb de Francis Ponge, atès que la poètica d'aquest autor es caracteritza, precisament, pel fet d'obstinar-se en una convençuda referencialitat: la que l'impel·lí a dirigir-se envers les coses; la que el dugué a submergir-se en les paraules. El objeto de esta tesis ha sido el de defender, a partir del ejemplo de la obra de Francis Ponge, la plausibilidad referencial del lenguaje poético, supuesto a menudo rebatido a causa de una radicalización del tópico de la autorreferencialidad poética y por un planteamiento en suma restringido del concepto de la referencialidad. Pero que un poema se constituya en tanto que particular configuración significante en modo alguno implicaría un menoscabo de su capacidad de representación, porque si la poesía es creación mediante el lenguaje, todo lo que juzgamos poético no dimanaría sino de la propia idiosincrasia de la expresión verbal. Así pues, hemos argumentado, en primer lugar, la efectividad referencial del lenguaje ordinario para ilustrar a continuación la del poético y, en particular, la que explicitaría el verbo de Francis Ponge, pues la poética de este autor se caracteriza, precisamente, por obstinarse en una convencida referencialidad: la que lo impulsó a dirigirse hacia las cosas; la que lo condujo a sumergirse en las palabras. / Starting from Francis Ponge's work, this PhD thesis argues for the referential plausibility of the poetic language. This assumption has often been contested partly because of the cliché of poetic self-referentiality and partly because the concept of referentiality has had an extremely restricted approach. This thesis suggests that, on the contrary, a poem's capability of becoming a particular and significant configuration does by no means imply a lessening of its representative force. Indeed: if poetry is creation by means of language, everything we judge as poetic stems solely from the idiosyncrasy of verbal expression. Thus, the thesis argues for the referential efficiency of ordinary language to then illustrate the referential efficiency of the poetic. It focuses in particular on the verbum as put forth by Francis Ponge. This author's poetics is best characterized by its persistence in a convinced referentiality, which leads Ponge to address things, and which takes him to sound the depths of words.

1 Abstract The dissertation Theoretical tools for categorization and functional explanations of relations in language is focused on linguistic categorization from the perspective of empirical gram- matical research. The primary aim is to present the theoretical and practical potential for the investigation of grammatical categories, stressing functional explanations of why cer- tain language structures are the way they are. The text is divided into two parts. (i) The first two chapters are devoted to the theoretical and methodological foundations of empirical linguistic research (including issues of metalanguage, language comparison, discreteness and gradience). Particular emphasis is placed on functional-evolutionary approaches, which describe grammar in interconnection with language use, and more specifically on func- tional explanations by means of frequency. (ii) In the following three chapters, the potential of corpus-based research is demonstrated in accordance with the principles adopted in (i). It is applied to the linguistic categories of possession and adjective comparison in Czech. Possession in Czech is described with regard to hypotheses based on statistical tendencies in language use. The main results of the research revealed the relationship between frequency of use and the animacy hierarchy,...

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Text in English / The ‘doing’ of gender in our society is constructed along the lines of power, knowledge and being. Power structures angle knowledge and understanding of transgender people and transgender lives in a way that relegates them almost to the museum to be observed as a spectacle or exotic objects. The emphatic frames of man and woman, even in South Africa where the Constitution is considered and understood to be liberal and generous, the life of a transgender body is an Other life. One is either male or female; any other form of doing and being gender suffers peripherisation and classification as special, different, strange or any other exteriorising definitions. This dissertation attempts to question the power or the tyranny of categorisations and classifications of man and woman, drawing from various discourses such as the medico-legal discourse classification. It further looks at how gender is being performed by transgender people. Further it aimed at gaining an in-depth understanding of the experiences and challenges of transgender people with regards to doing gender within a gendered society. The findings within the dissertation tells us, that the performativity of gender is not a neutral space, but enacted by various power structures and those who live outside the norms such as the transgender people, they are subjected to precariousness. It this dissertation seeks to contribute to an unmasking of some easy but harmful assumptions about gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality may not be taken for granted and assumed according to fixed templates but they are fluid, mobile and flexible beyond the limits of convention. / Psychology / M.A. (Psychology (Research Consultation))

Cette thèse propose une analyse approfondie de la dynamique des changements observés au sein d’une communauté de chasseurs-cueilleurs, les Baka du Gabon. Ce groupe se compose de moins de 1000 individus et parle une langue oubanguienne dans un environnement bantuphone. Une comparaison avec les autres langues du même sous-groupe linguistique met en évidence les spécificités du baka et met au jour des affinités entre cette langue et le monzombo. Ces deux groupes ethnolinguistiques semblent avoir entretenu des relations qui s’inscrivent dans une dynamique d’échange de compétences (chasse-cueillette vs pêche-maîtrise du fer). Ce type de complémentarité se retrouve dans les relations entre les Baka et leurs voisins bantu actuels, dont en particulier les Fang, pour ce qui concerne le Gabon.Le mode de vie des Baka demeure, encore aujourd’hui, largement marqué par la mobilité et la forêt. Toutefois, la sédentarisation imposée par voie gouvernementale, la contigüité avec les Fang de même que l’influence croissante de la mondialisation entraînent des transformations par rapport auxquelles les Baka cherchent à se positionner. Ces dernières touchent la langue (système et utilisation) de même que bon nombre de pratiques socioculturelles (habitat, mobilité, alimentation, subsistance, religion, etc.).La thèse s’efforce d’identifier ces transformations, de les décrire et d’en évaluer l’impact en tenant compte de la diversité des situations. Elle comporte, par ailleurs, une réflexion critique des principes de catégorisation fondée sur l’étude de plusieurs domaines lexicaux (faune, flore, maladie). Certains changements peuvent apparaître en surface sans pour autant remettre en cause, de manière fondamentale, leur attachement à la forêt et à certaines valeurs ancestrales. Toutefois, les différentes pressions exogènes (i.a. sédentarisation, mondialisation) et endogènes (i.a. attitude des individus, transmission) qui déterminent alors le degré d’avancement des différentes transformations, ne doivent pas être sous évaluées en tant qu’elles sont une menace pesant sur la langue, la connaissance de la flore et de la faune et certaines pratiques socioculturelles. / This thesis proposes a detailed analysis on the dynamic of change observed among the Baka from Gabon, a hunter-gatherer community. This group is composed of less than 1000 individuals speaking an Ubangian language inside a Bantu environment. By comparing their language with others from the same linguistic sub-group, some singularities from Baka and some resemblance with the Monzombo sub-group can be seen. These two ethnolinguistic groups, Baka and Monzombo groups, seem to have kept close contact based on skill exchanges (hunting/gathering and fishing/iron skills). This interaction is witnessed in the exchanges the Baka population preserves with their current Bantu neighbors, especially with Fang in Gabon.Nowadays, the Baka way of life is still characterized by their mobility and the forest. Nevertheless, due to a non-migratory lifestyle imposed by the State, the proximity with the Fang group and the growing globalization, dramatic changes are inflicted to the Baka community. Changes at which they are trying to adapt. These constraints do not affect only their language (system and use) but also many sociocultural habits such as settlement, mobility, food and means of support or religion.The aim of this thesis is to identify these ongoing transformations, to describe and to evaluate their impact bearing in mind the singularity of many contexts. An argumentative reflection on categorization principles is also proposed on lexical domains such as fauna, flora and diseases. Certain changes could arise without necessarily questioning their bonds to the forest and ancestral values. Nonetheless, both exogenous (globalization and a sedentary life) and endogenous pressures (individual behavior and culture transmission) determining the progress of different transformations should not be under evaluated as being a threat to the language, to the knowledge of the flora and fauna and to certain sociocultural practices.

This diploma thesis mainly deals with valuation of steel structures from the perspective of an investor. Today there are several types of steel constructions, which assemble is partly done in workshop, so called “bridge-workshop”, and the rest of the assembling is done directly at the building site. That is the main difference from the construction industry. This fact makes financial valuation of whole thesis very difficult, because construction companies often do not state detailed breakdown of their activities. The main goal of this thesis is to suggest procedure how to value steel constructions in a phase of documentation processing, workshop production, transportation and technological equipment construction at the site.

<p>In the current information age, massive amounts of data are gathered, at a rate prohibiting their effective structuring, analysis, and conversion into useful knowledge. This information overload is manifested both in large numbers of data objects recorded in data sets, and large numbers of attributes, also known as high dimensionality. This dis-sertation deals with problems originating from high dimensionality of data representation, referred to as the &ldquo;curse of dimensionality,&rdquo; in the context of machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. The described research follows two angles: studying the behavior of (dis)similarity metrics with increasing dimensionality, and exploring feature-selection methods, primarily with regard to document representation schemes for text classification. The main results of the dissertation, relevant to the first research angle, include theoretical insights into the concentration behavior of cosine similarity, and a detailed analysis of the phenomenon of hubness, which refers to the tendency of some points in a data set to become hubs by being in-cluded in unexpectedly many <em>k</em>-nearest neighbor lists of other points. The mechanisms behind the phenomenon are studied in detail, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective, linking hubness with the (intrinsic) dimensionality of data, describing its interaction with the cluster structure of data and the information provided by class la-bels, and demonstrating the interplay of the phenomenon and well known algorithms for classification, semi-supervised learning, clustering, and outlier detection, with special consideration being given to time-series classification and information retrieval. Results pertaining to the second research angle include quantification of the interaction between various transformations of high-dimensional document representations, and feature selection, in the context of text classification.</p> / <p>U tekućem &bdquo;informatičkom dobu&ldquo;, masivne količine podataka se<br />sakupljaju brzinom koja ne dozvoljava njihovo efektivno strukturiranje,<br />analizu, i pretvaranje u korisno znanje. Ovo zasićenje informacijama<br />se manifestuje kako kroz veliki broj objekata uključenih<br />u skupove podataka, tako i kroz veliki broj atributa, takođe poznat<br />kao velika dimenzionalnost. Disertacija se bavi problemima koji<br />proizilaze iz velike dimenzionalnosti reprezentacije podataka, često<br />nazivanim &bdquo;prokletstvom dimenzionalnosti&ldquo;, u kontekstu ma&scaron;inskog<br />učenja, data mining-a i information retrieval-a. Opisana istraživanja<br />prate dva pravca: izučavanje pona&scaron;anja metrika (ne)sličnosti u odnosu<br />na rastuću dimenzionalnost, i proučavanje metoda odabira atributa,<br />prvenstveno u interakciji sa tehnikama reprezentacije dokumenata za<br />klasifikaciju teksta. Centralni rezultati disertacije, relevantni za prvi<br />pravac istraživanja, uključuju teorijske uvide u fenomen koncentracije<br />kosinusne mere sličnosti, i detaljnu analizu fenomena habovitosti koji<br />se odnosi na tendenciju nekih tačaka u skupu podataka da postanu<br />habovi tako &scaron;to bivaju uvr&scaron;tene u neočekivano mnogo lista k najbližih<br />suseda ostalih tačaka. Mehanizmi koji pokreću fenomen detaljno su<br />proučeni, kako iz teorijske tako i iz empirijske perspektive. Habovitost<br />je povezana sa (latentnom) dimenzionalno&scaron;ću podataka, opisana<br />je njena interakcija sa strukturom klastera u podacima i informacijama<br />koje pružaju oznake klasa, i demonstriran je njen efekat na<br />poznate algoritme za klasifikaciju, semi-supervizirano učenje, klastering<br />i detekciju outlier-a, sa posebnim osvrtom na klasifikaciju vremenskih<br />serija i information retrieval. Rezultati koji se odnose na<br />drugi pravac istraživanja uključuju kvantifikaciju interakcije između<br />različitih transformacija vi&scaron;edimenzionalnih reprezentacija dokumenata<br />i odabira atributa, u kontekstu klasifikacije teksta.</p>

Diploma thesis The Relationship between the Computer Game and its Audiovisual Pattern deals with the similarities and differences between the computer games and audiovisual works. The thesis presents some theories reflecting different points of view to the influence and blending of these media forms. Those theories are the base for a suggestion of typology of games and movies adaptations that were made according to a pattern. In each of three suggested categories, there are mentioned some particular examples of computer games that were inspired by movie or series and also examples of movies that were inspired by computer game. The final chapter is a case study which compares the computer game Lost: Via Domus to its audiovisual pattern - series Lost.

The dissertation deals with semantic relations between adjectives and deadjectival verbs in Czech. It focuses on the question how the property scale conveyed by adjectives is encoded in the semantics of deadjectival verbs. After the first chapter which presents the topic of the dissertation, in the second chapter, I describe the theoretical and methodological context of contemporary linguistics from a broader perspective in order to relate the theoretical and methodological procedures present in this paper to the current linguistic development. The third chapter pursues the semantics of adjectives in Czech and various approaches to their classification. It presents a scalar classification of adjectives according to which adjectives denote a scale of some property, i.e. an ordered set of degrees along a dimension. With support of empirical research (based on a questionnaire survey and corpus data) I show that it is possible to implement the scalar model into the description of Czech adjectives. This approach states that adjectives are one of many means in language that serve to express measurement (and attribute it to objects and individuals). At the end of the chapter, I propose a classification of Czech adjectives and generalize prototypical semantics of adjectival classes by vector constructions...

Fans and fandoms are ever more salient aspects of our everyday lives offline and linked to the Internet's growing influence also online, particularly on social media. While fans have generally been pathologized via mass media but also early academic representations especially prior to the founding of the interdisciplinary Fan Studies in the 1970s/1980s, which sought to actively counter negative fan representations and foreground fans' creative productivity, nowadays, even though many types of fans have been 'mainstreamed' and are generally accepted, specific fan types are still systematically discriminated against - even within Fan Studies - along the lines of socio-demographic variables. These marginalised fans are predominantly female, young, queer and non-white. Moreover, even though Fan Studies define fan identity as one of their focal concerns, linguistic research on fan identity, particularly regarding its narrative and interactive construction, has widely been neglected. However, as narrative interaction and specifically small stories (as propsed within the small story paradigm by Bamberg &amp; Georgakopoulou, 2007/8) have been found to play a very important role in the construction of identity, the investigation of how fan identity is constructed via small stories and - given the centrality of collective fandoms for fans - specifically shared (group) stories can severely contribute to fan (identity) research. Thus, combining decidedly linguistic research on narrative fan identity construction and the inclusion of previously marginalised fan communities, this thesis focuses on the construction of fan identity of Taylor Swift fans (Swifties) - a predominantly female and young fandom that has been ridiculed by mass media and dominant discourses - via shared stories. More specifically this study analyses the construction of Swiftie fan identity via shared stories both online in nicknames on Tumblr and Twitter and face to face in the form of a positioning analysis investigating the interactions of a Zoom focus group made up of five German Swifties. This research finds that within Swiftie nicknames Swiftie fan identity is centrally constructed by means of variously highly condensed, combined and/or personalised references (to shared stories of the overarching Swiftie community). The focus group interactions then reveal various positioning practices that are strongly intertwined with (often) more elaborate shared stories, which are 'shared' by the Swiftie participants both with regards to experiences on the story level and their interactive co-construction on the level of interaction. Despite their diverging local manifestations both within the investigated Swiftie nicknames and focus group interactions shared stories are centrally utilised to construct and communicate Swiftie fan identity as a particularly collectively experienced and defined ingroup identity that confers belonging and further functions as a shield against outgroup discrimination. Further research should then enlarge the present investigative focus to include also other online platforms and fan communicative acts, supplementary and also offline implemented focus groups and field studies, more heterogenous participants with regard to often neglected socio-demographic variables (next to age and gender) as well as other (marginalised) fandoms outside of the Swiftie community.