This thesis investigates the relationship which both academic vocabulary and lexical bundles have to academic performance at university. While academic vocabulary is defined in terms of the University Word List (Coxhead, 2000), lexical bundles are identified as groups of four words that commonly co-occur, such as on the other hand and as a result of. A corpus of student essay writing in a single discipline, psychology, was developed over the course of a three-year undergraduate degree. To provide a benchmark against which to compare the student academic writing, a corpus of published articles in the same discipline was developed. The VocabProfile program (Cobb, 2002) was used to establish the density of academic vocabulary in the student essays. Similarly, the density of lexical bundle use was analysed by means of WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012). The densities were then correlated against students’ academic performance as measured by their essay results. Comparisons were also made between the use of academic vocabulary and lexical bundles by first- and additional-language speakers, and by first- and third-year students. A keyness analysis enabled comparisons of academic vocabulary and bundle usage by high and low achievers. An additional aspect of this study was the comparison of densities of academic vocabulary and lexical bundles found in the IELTS writing test and in student essays, and the correlation of IELTS reading and writing test scores to students’ academic performance. The students’ vocabulary knowledge was also tested by the application of receptive and productive vocabulary tests, and the results compared to their academic performance. Results indicate that the 10 000-word level is a stronger predictor of academic performance than either the 5000-word level or academic vocabulary, and that there is a significant relationship between the density of lexical bundle use by students and their academic performance. Both vocabulary measures are therefore arguably better predictors of academic performance than the IELTS test scores. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

This diploma thesis occupies itself with the subject of near synonymy, concretely with adjectives. On the basis of corpus linguistic methods two pairs of near synonyms have been researched - verschieden/unterschiedlich and bedeutend/bedeutsam. The 15 primary collocators (according to the syntactic position of each adjective) have been examined using the InterCorp parallel corpus methods in order to find out the most frequent Czech equivalence. Keywords: lexical-semantic relations, near synonymy, lexicography, corpora, cooccurrence analysis, Self Organizing Maps, CCDB

Cette recherche est centrée sur l'étude des valeurs aspectuelles des noms de sentiment (N_sent) et des verbes collocatifs dans les constructions verbo-nominales (CVN). L'aspectualité est étudiée en tant que catégorie lexico-grammaticale, au niveau syntagmatique (au sein des CVN) mais elle englobe également le lexique et la syntaxe de la phrase. Le travail est mené dans une perspective contrastive français – russe et ce, sur des corpus informatisés de données issues des deux langues. Nous avons constitué deux types de corpus : comparable (comportant les textes originaux, 60 M de mots, de la base de Frantext et Ruscorpora) et parallèle (coprus de traduction, 10 M de mots, aligné avec le logiciel Alinea d'O. Kraif). Les questions qui sous-tendent ce travail concernent les trois points suivants. En premier lieu, nous nous interrogeons si les CVN de sentiment peuvent véhiculer l'aspect. Nous vérifions cela grâce à l'analyse de la combinatoire syntaxique et lexicale de ces constructions. En deuxième lieu, nous nous posons la question de savoir s'il existe une relation aspectuelle entre le N_sent et le verbe collocatif. Cette affinité aspectuelle peut être révélée à partir des traits aspectuels inhérents des N_sent (duratif/ponctuel) et les propriétés aspectuelles des verbes (accompli/inaccompli/global en français vs imperfectif/perfectif en russe) : vivre (duratif) dans le bonheur (duratif) / žit' (imperfectif) v sčast'e (duratif) ; s'enflammer (ponctuel) de colère (ponctuel) / vspyxnut' (perfectif) ot gneva (ponctuel). En troisième lieu, notre travail sur les corpus bilingues français-russe nous amène à des problématiques d'ordre contrastif. Nous estimons que l'approche contrastive permet de mieux expliciter les similitudes et les différences aspectuelles au sein des CVN dans les deux langues, ainsi que de mettre en évidence les différences dans l'expression de l'aspect en français et en russe. Pour ce faire, nous analysons les équivalents des CVN dans les deux langues : les équivalents aspectuels et les équivalents structuraux. Ainsi, notre méthodologie nous a amenée à des conclusions intéressantes qui pourront s'avérer utiles en linguistique contrastive et en traductologie, ainsi qu'en linguistique de corpus et en didactique des langues. La contribution de ce travail de thèse consiste en plusieurs points que nous synthétisons ci-dessous : - À notre connaissance, beaucoup de travaux ont été faits sur l'aspect des verbes et peu sur l'aspect des noms. Nous avons proposé une étude de l'aspectualité à partir du nom en tant que « base » de la construction verbo-nominale. Cette étude a mis en contraste les deux traditions linguistiques (russe et française) dans l'étude des N_sent et de leur aspect. - Nous avons effectué une étude détaillée et systématique de la combinatoire des N_sent, ce qui nous a permis d'identifier leur aspect au sein des CVN. - Le travail sur les deux types de corpus nous a permis de récolter des données quantitatives sur les CVN dans les deux langues, sur les textes originaux et traduits. L'analyse qualitative de ces corpus nous a permis de faire des études spécifiques pour chaque type de corpus. Ainsi, le corpus comparable permet d'effectuer la recherche sur l'aspectualité des CVN, tandis que le corpus parallèle fournit des éléments nécessaires pour l'étude des équivalents fonctionnels de traduction (essentiellement de type formel). Les équivalents formels russes des CVN françaises sont en majorité aussi des CVN pour tous les N_sent étudiés, sauf strax (peur). Ce dernier est traduit le plus souvent en tant que verbe (bojat'sja, ispugat'sja (craintre, s'épouvanter). On trouve également parmi ces équivalents en russe des constructions impersonnelles (mne strašno (à moi peureusement)). / This dissertation work is realised as a contrastive analysis which aims the identification of the aspectual differences between two linguistic systems, French and Russian. Our methodology is based on the analysis of two types of data corpora : comparable and parallel. The subject of this research concerns the study of aspectuel values of Nouns of emotion and their collocative verbs, especially in the Verb+Noun constractions. We have chosen these structures as a location of the field of aspectuality which, beeing lexicon-grammar categorie, touches the lexicon as well as the syntax of a phrase. The identification of the aspectual values of these combinations comes from their lexical and syntactic combinatory. It is composed of different parameters (settings) : aspectuel features of the Noun (bi-nominal structures, adjectives-modifiers and determinants) and aspectual features of the Verb (grammatical aspect, lexical aspect and phases). Our scientific contribution consists in a study of the aspectuality as a linguistic category touching the Nouns of emotion in French and in Russian. The main results of this research tend to confirm our hypotheses about inherent aspect of the seven Noun of emotion studied in French and in Russian (admiration/vosxiščenie, amour/ljubov', angoisse/trevoga, bonheur/sčast'e, colère/gnev, joie/radost', peur/strax) and their aspectual relations with Verbs whithin Verb+Noun constructions.

Denna studie är en korbusbaserad undersökning som behandlar distributionen av olika funktioner hos pronomenet hen i sociala medier mellan 2012 och 2017. Sedan 2012, året då en stor debatt om hen briserade, har pronomenet börjat ta plats i svenska språket. Med data från korpusarna Bloggmix, Twittermix, Flashback och Familjeliv hämtade från Språkbankens textsamling med hjälp av sökverktyget Korp, analyseras totalt 186 hen. Data har taggats i åtta kategorier: könsöverskridande hen, anonymiserande hen och okänt kön, indefinit och generiskt hen, meta-hen, substantiverat hen, icke-mänskligt, otydligt och övrigt. Resultatet visar att den dominerande funktionen hos hen är anonymiserande hen och okänt kön med totalt 47%. Den andra mest förekommande användningsformen i materialet är generiskt hen med totalt 28%. Funktionen Meta-hen täcker totalt 13%. Detta resultat tyder på att pronomenet debatteras mindre i sociala medier i jämförelse med resultat från tidigare forskning där meta-hen visade sig vara den dominerade användningen under tidigare år (Ledin & Lyngfelt, 2013: 168). Istället är det mer vanligt att använda hen för att till exempel anonymisera, eller så är det inte möjligt att yttra sig om könsidentiteten hos en person då könet är okänt, och att det även istället är mer vanligt att använda pronomenet för att generalisera i olika sammanhang. Ett ytterligare resultat är att användningen av hen har ökat i både Bloggmix och Familjeliv fram till 2016, i Flashback noteras en trend av användningen som går både upp och ner över tid, och i Twittermix minskar användningen över tid. / This thesis is a corpus-based study, which aims to investigate both the distribution and function of the pronoun hen in social media platforms, during the time period 2012-2017. Since 2012, the year when a broad debate sparked regarding the use of hen, the pronoun has increasingly been incorporated into the Swedish language. By using the search-tool Korp, and the collection of texts provided by Språkbanken, 186 occurrences of hen have been analyzed. These occurrences were extracted from various social media corpora, specifically Bloggmix, Familjeliv, Flashback and Twittermix. The data were tagged into eight different categories: Könsöverskridande (Non-gender), Anonymising and Unknown-sex, Indefinite and generic, Meta, Nominalised, Non-human, Unclear and Other. The results show that the dominant function of hen are the anonymized- and unknown-hen, comprising up to 47% of all cases. Also, the second most prominent function is the Generic-hen, with a total of 28%. Finally, the function Meta-hen, covers about 13% of all occurrences. These result indicate that the pronoun is debated less in social media compared to results from previous studies where Meta-hen proved to be the dominant use in previous years (Ledin & Lyngfelt, 2013: 168). Instead it is more common to use hen in order to anonymize, for example, or when it is not possible to comment on the gender identity of a person when the sex is unknown, and that it is more common to generalize in different contexts instead. Moreover, it can be noted that the use of hen had increased on both Bloggmix and Familjeliv until 2016. Conversely, the data shows that its use on Flashback fluctuated over time, and showed a constant decline on Twittermix.

O número de estrangeiros interessados em aprender o português tem aumentado na última década, em consequência do crescimento da economia brasileira e do aumento da presença de multinacionais no Brasil. Esse fato se mostra pelo aumento do número de inscritos no exame de proficiência de português CELPE-Bras e de estudantes estrangeiros que ingressam nas universidades brasileiras. A maioria destes estudantes são de língua espanhola e precisam escrever seus textos acadêmicos em português. A proximidade das línguas portuguesa e espanhola apresenta-se tanto como um elemento positivo quanto como um obstáculo, pois oculta as diferenças e impede o domínio da língua portuguesa, mantendo, na fala e na escrita em português, interferências do espanhol. O maior número destas interferências acontece no nível lexical. Uma das alternativas para tratar os problemas em textos de aprendizes de uma língua é o emprego de ferramentas computacionais de pós-processamento e de suporte ao processo de escrita. No entanto, o número de recursos e ferramentas disponíveis para auxiliar a escrita de português como língua estrangeira é muito reduzido, diferentemente do cenário para a língua inglesa. Esta pesquisa propôs a criação de recursos e ferramentas de suporte à escrita no nível lexical como primeiro passo para a melhoria da qualidade linguística dos textos em português produzidos pelos nativos do espanhol. A Linguística de Córpus foi utilizada como metodologia para viabilizar a análise de erros de aprendizes. As ferramentas de auxílio utilizam léxicos bilíngues compilados por meio de técnicas de tradução, baseadas em alinhamento de córpus paralelos. Dado o número insuficiente de erros previamente anotados para suportar a detecção automática de erros, esta pesquisa propôs métodos baseados em modelo língua e na geração artificial de erros. A geração de erros artificiais se apresentou como um método eficiente para predizer erros lexicais dos aprendizes. As contribuições obtidas com a metodologia baseada em tradução automática para gerar auxílios à escrita entre línguas próximas, considerando a análise de erros lexicais extraídos de córpus de aprendizes, foco desta pesquisa, são: (i) do ponto de vista teórico, o levantamento e quantificação dos principais problemas causados pelas marcas do espanhol, deixadas nos textos acadêmicos em português escritos por nativos do espanhol; (ii) do ponto de vista de geração automática de recursos linguísticos, léxicos bilíngues de cognatos e falsos cognatos; léxico bilíngue de marcadores discursivos; léxico de expressões formulaicas que aparecem nos textos científicos e léxico bilíngue de verbos relacionados com pesquisa científica em português e, (iii) do ponto de vista da criação de subsídios para a área de auxílio à escrita científica, o projeto e avaliação de auxílios para suportar a escrita científica em português por nativos do espanhol. / In the last decade, as a result of Brazilian economic growth and the increased presence of multinationals in the country, the interest of foreigners in learning Portuguese rose. This fact is also noted by the number of students enrolled in the Portuguese proficiency exam, CELPE-Bras and the number of foreigner students entering at the Brazilian Universities. Most of these students are Spanish speakers and need to write the dissertation or thesis in Portuguese. The similarity between Portuguese and Spanish is considered as a positive element that often becomes an obstacle, because similarity and closeness frequently conceal differences and hinder learners from mastering the Portuguese, keeping interferences from their native Spanish both when speaking and writing in Portuguese. The largest number of this interference occurs at the lexical level. One alternative to deal with errors of second language learners is the use of computational post-edit tools and tools to support the writing process. However, the number of resources and tools available to help improve Portuguese writing as a foreign language is very small, unlike the scenario into English. This research proposed the creation of resources and writing support tools at the lexical level as a first step to improving the linguistic quality of the texts produced by Portuguese native Spanish. Corpus linguistics was used as a methodology to enable the learners error analysis. The writing support tools use bilingual lexicons compiled through translation techniques based on alignment parallel corpus. Given the insufficient number of errors previously annotated to support automatic error detection, this research proposed methods based on language model and artificial generation of errors. The generation of artificial errors introduced himself as an efficient method for predicting lexical errors of learners. The contributions obtained with the methodology based on automatic translation to generate written supports between similar languages, considering lexical error, extracted by the analysis of learners corpus, focus of this research are: (i) the theoretical point of view, the survey and quantification of the main problems caused by the Spanish marks, left in the academic texts written in Portuguese by native Spanish; (ii) the automatic generation of language resources point of view, bilingual lexicons of cognates and false cognates; bilingual lexicon of discourse markers; bilingual lexicon of formulaic expressions that appear in scientific texts and bilingual lexicon of verbs related to scientific research in Portuguese and, (iii) the point of view of creating subsidies for the area of support scientific writing, design and evaluation of aid to support scientific writing in Portuguese by native Spanish speakers.

The aim of this study is to examine to what extent Swedish writers, who write in English, use the modals must, have to and have got to. The hypothesis being tested argues that the core modal must is not being challenged by the emerging modals have to and have got to in this non-native variety of English. The objective of this thesis is to be accomplished by attempting to answer the following research questions: 1) What is the frequency and usage of the English modals must, have to and have got to in the material? 2) How do the frequencies in the Swedish material compare with the frequencies in the British and American corpora and to the previous studies? 3) How do the Swedish writers use the modals with regard to epistemic and deontic meaning? The study is corpus based, and the corpora used consist of Swedish newspapers in English (SWENC) and material from blogs and tweets which are written in English by Swedes (SESMC). These are compared with the press sub-corpora in BE06 (the British 2006 corpus of CQP web at Lancaster) and in AE06 (the American 2006 corpus of CQP web at Lancaster), which represent British and American native varieties of English. The method is quantitative and the results are presented after the process of normalization. The results show that must, have to and have got to are used in SWENC and SESMC although, to greatly varying degrees. The core modal must is more frequently used in the Swedish corpus than in the British and American sub-corpora. The emerging modal have to is used more frequently than must in all three corpora. The second emerging modal have got to is very seldomly used. Additionally, a qualitative examination of the modals and their meanings reveal that the writers in SWENC and SESMC use the older modal must alongside the newer have to and newest modal have got to, but with a preference for a toned-down style of language. The conclusion drawn is that the core modal must is indeed being challenged by the emerging modal have to even in the non-native variety of English.

The aim of this study is to discover if Swedish writers use American or British spelling, vocabulary and grammar when writing a text in English. The focus is on differences in spelling categories, lexical variation between the two varieties as well as differences in the usage of non-finite complementation. This is a quantitative study based on material from the Swedish in English Newspapers Corpus (SWENC), the Blogs in English by Swedes Corpus (BESC), and the Corpus of English Tweets by Swedes (CETS). The results show that Swedish writers of English prefer to use British English spelling, American English vocabulary and that they tend to imitate American English grammar usage when it comes to non-finite complementation. The conclusions are that the English of Swedish writers is affected by the standards of the English used in at least two of the countries in the Inner Circle, i.e. American and British English, and that it seems to be influenced both by what is taught in school and what the writers see and hear in the media.

Cette thèse propose une méthode pour alimenter une ontologie, une structure de concepts liés par des relations sémantiques, par des termes français, anglais et allemands à partir de corpus spécialisés comparables. Son apport principal est le développement des méthodes d'extraction utilisant des ressources endogènes apprises à partir de corpus et d'ontologie. Exploitant des n-grammes de caractères, elles sont disponibles et indépendantes vis-à-vis de la langue et du domaine. La première contribution porte sur l'utilisation des ressources morphologiques et morphosyntaxiques endogènes pour extraire des termes mono- et polylexicaux à partir de corpus. La deuxième contribution vise à exploiter des ressources endogènes pour identifier leurs traductions. La troisième contribution concerne la construction des familles morphologiques endogènes servant à alimenter l'ontologie. / This thesis proposes a method of enrichment and population of an ontology, a structure of concepts linked by semantic relations, by terms in French, English and German from comparable domain-specific corpora. Our main contribution is the development of extraction methods based on endogenous resources, learned from the corpus and the ontology being analyzed. Using caracter n-grams, these resources are available and independent of a particular language or domain. The first contribution concerns the use of endogenous morphological and morphosyntactic resources for mono- and polylexical terms extraction from the corpus. The second contribution aims to use endogenous resources to identify translations for these terms. The third contribution concerns the construction of endogenous morphological families designed to enrich and populate the ontology.

In Zimbabwe, translation studies is yet to be recognized as a discipline worthy of study in its own right, hence, not much research has been carried out into the theory and practice of translation. Furthermore, there is no tertiary institution that offers professional translation courses. In light of this information most translations are carried out by untrained/partially trained translators with only a few translators who have gained experience over time. The aim of this study was to investigate strategies used by Ndebele translators in the translation of specialized terms and cultural taboos in selected HIV/AIDS texts, as well as factors that can be used to improve the translation situation of Zimbabwe. Three main theoretical approaches were used in a complementary fashion, namely Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), Cultural Studies and Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS). DTS provided the researcher with a theory to understand the Ndebele translations in their wider environment; Cultural Studies provided the researcher with the means by which to understand Ndebele culture and taboos; Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) provided the researcher with the methodological tools and analytical techniques to analyse the corpus of texts. An English-Ndebele Parallel Corpus (ENPC) was created using fourteen English source texts and their corresponding Ndebele translations. The ENPC was interrogated by means of ParaConc, a parallel concordancing program. The study found that when translating specialised terms, Ndebele translators used strategies such as a general or neutral word, cultural substitution, paraphrasing and omission. The strategy of omission was misused in most cases because Ndebele translators omitted valuable information which did not reach the target readers. With regards to translation strategies that contributed to term creation, it was found that Ndebele translators relied on external as well as internal resources. The translators used strategies such as pure loan words; pure loan words preceeded by an explanation and indigenised loan words. From the Ndebele language itself, the translators resorted to semantic shift, compounding, coinage and paraphrasing, among others. From the ENPC it is clear that Ndebele translators did manage to transfer the message from English to Ndebele to an extent. However, the ENPC has to be used with caution by other researchers since the translations included in the corpus are full of errors such as misinterpretations of the source texts, mistranslations, incorrect terms and incorrect orthography. This factor points to a dire need to establish translation as an academic discipline and profession in Zimbabwe so as to elevate the quality of translations and offer better translation services to all users.

Second language (L2) researchers and teachers have increasingly come to believe that using a computer-based corpus can be extremely helpful in the language classroom. The purpose of this study is to examine whether corpora can be used outside of the classroom in order for students to improve their essays independently. No previous study has tried to examine students' essays in relation to corpus use so that this study is exploratory. Seven international students wrote five essays on specific topics and then corrected their errors through corpus research. Two experiments were conducted with different students and followed three steps: receiving information about how to use the BYU COCA, writing and correcting, and interviews with students. I examined quantitatively the number and types of errors that students were able to correct in two experiments and reported qualitatively on students' interview responses.