This thesis deals with idioms taken from contemporary newspapers. The purpose is to find out which idioms are known and used by native speakers of different ages and also to what extent the entries in the dictionaries offer accurate descriptions to the meaning of these idioms. We already know that idioms which have been modified, as often is the case in newspapers, are often more difficult to understand than others. The study has been conducted by means of questionnaires answered by native speakers in Germany. In order to assess the ability that German native speakers have to understand and use these idioms, I have chosen informants from three age groups; the first two groups of informants are grammar school students at a German Gymnasium, in the 7 and the 10 form respectively and the last group consists of adult speakers in Germany with university education. This last group conforms to the final phase of language acquisition. The results clearly show that younger generations - and to a certain extent older students and indeed educated adults - are less likely to understand idioms which have complex explanations in the dictionaries and/or whose meanings have been modified. Similarly, all age groups are more likely to understand idioms with simple explanations, those which appear frequently on the Internet and those whose meanings have not been modified, though there is a higher degree of “tolerance” when it comes to complex idioms among the adults. It is also clear that the meaning of an idiom cannot always be fully explained out of context. In most cases dictionaries offer an explanation that functions in most contexts, yet it is not uncommon for the meaning of an idiom to be complex and to vary more or less depending on the context. As a way to find out how frequent the idioms are, I have compared their frequency in www.Google.de and found that there is a clear correlation between high frequency in Google and the knowledge displayed by the informants.

Graphic texts, or graphic novels, have spent many years on shelves with comic books about superheroes and adventurers. They officially gained notoriety in 1992 with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and at this time, critics and scholars began to take notice. However, graphic novels have not been fully adapted by academia. Graphic novels have the ability to offer new levels of instruction and learning in upper-level classrooms.The following is a study in the multitude of uses of graphic text in academia. Chapter 1 looks at the history of graphic text to understand the present and future of graphic novels. Chapter 2 focuses on literacy issues to develop a basis for the use of graphic novels in the classroom. Chapter 3 offers a method of using graphic novels to broaden a students’ understanding of plays. Chapter 4 moves on to a study of graphic novels as works of literature. Through this look of historical data and an analysis and discussion of the modern form of graphic novels, we will come to the conclusion that graphic novels can be useful assets in the classroom when they are taken from the shelf of comic books and used to their full potential.

No description available.

The English translation of the Swedish compound fönsterbräda into windowsill, or the proper noun Danmark into Denmark makes perfect sense. But how about the compound fossilbränslefri as simply fossil fuel or the name Mälaren as Lake?  All four of these translations have been produced with the help of automatic machine translation. The aim of this paper is to present the expanding field of application of machine translation and some issues related to this type of translation. More specifically, the study has looked at Google Translate as one of the most commonly used machine translation systems online, and how it responds to the two linguistic categories that were selected for this small study: compound nouns and proper nouns. Besides analyzing these categories, two different text types were chosen: general information articles from a local authority website (Stockholm City) and patent texts, both of which belong to the expanding field of application of Google Translate. The results of the study show that in terms of compound nouns, neither of the text types proved to be significantly better suited for machine translation than the other and neither had an error rate below 20 %. Most of the errors related to words being erroneously omitted in the English output and words which were incorrectly translated in relation to context. As for proper nouns, the patent texts contained none and subsequently no error analysis could be made, whereas the general information articles included 76 proper nouns (out of a total word count of 810). The most prominent error related to the Swedish version not being maintained in the English output where it should have been, e.g. translating Abrahamsberg as Abraham rock. The errors in both of the linguistic categories had varying impact on the meaning of the texts, some of which distorted the meaning of the word completely, and some which were of minor importance. This factor, along with the fact that the reader of the text influences how the comprehension level of the text is perceived through their language and subject knowledge, makes it difficult to evaluate the full impact of the various errors. It can, however, be said that patent text could pose as a better option for machine translation than general information articles in relation to proper nouns, as this text type is likely to contain no or very few proper nouns.

Den här studien är en kritisk diskursanalys av ämnet kroppslig hälsa i skriftlig media. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur fenomenet kroppslig hälsa framställs i skriftlig media genom språket och dess användning. Analysmodellen vi använt oss av är formulerad av Norman Fairclough och det datamaterial vi använt oss av är av empirisk karaktär och insamlat från svensk skriven media i form av både rikstäckande press och lokalpress. I studien finns även ett avsnitt där vi presenterar tidigare forskning inom ämnet hälsa och diskursanalys. Forskningen presenteras genom fem teman: biopolitik, livsstil, individens ansvar, klass och könsskillnad utifrån ett hälsoperspektiv samt experthjälp. Den teori vi utgått ifrån för studien är främst den för den kritiska diskursanalysen, vi har även använt oss av Foucaults biopolitik vilken främst ges uttryck i diskussionsdelen.  Resultatet för studien presenteras i två delar utifrån Fairclouchs analysmodell; text samt diskursiv praktik. Resultatet redogör vi för med en rad olika teman vi formulerat utifrån den analys som gjorts. De teman som vi formulerat är: hotspråk, den stratifierade hälsan, anvisningar & imperativ, superlativ, vetenskapligt språk och den reella exemplifieringen (del ett). De huvudsakliga diskurser vi funnit i materialet är: den ohälsosamma diskursen, den hälsosamma diskursen, den vetenskapliga diskursen samt den utbildande diskursen (del två).

In this masters’ thesis report we present a graph theoretical method used for automatic bilingual lexicon acquisition with parallel texts. We analyze the concept of graph similarity and give an interpretation, of the parallel texts, connected to the vector space model. We represent the parallel texts by a directed, tripartite graph and from here use the corresponding adjacency matrix, A, to compute the similarity of the graph. By solving the eigenvalue problem ρS = ASAT + ATSA we obtain the self-similarity matrix S and the Perron root ρ. A rank k approximation of the self-similarity matrix is computed by implementations of the singular value decomposition and the non-negative matrix factorization algorithm GD-CLS. We construct an algorithm in order to extract the bilingual lexicon from the self-similarity matrix and apply a statistical model to estimate the precision, the correctness, of the translations in the bilingual lexicon. The best result is achieved with an application of the vector space model with a precision of about 80 %. This is a good result and can be compared with the precision of about 60 % found in the literature.

Between 1977 and 1980 I collected a nuber of texts on the northern Kenya coast Most were tape recorded by myself fiom oral performances, a few were written down or recorded by others Most of the current collection consists of texts gathered so, plus: the Mwiini material, provided by Chuck Kisseberth, originally provided or recorded in Barawa by M I. Abasheikh, and the Bajuni \"contemporary\" verse, taken form a publicly available cassette-recording by AM. Msallarn in the 1970.

Historical texts from the Swahili coast (Swahili-English): Upper Pokomo Elwana, Mwiini Bajuni Pate Amu, She la Matondoni, Mwani Asili ya Mphokomu Fumo Liongo A story. Proverbs and riddles Mashairi Saidi Haji talking about poetry. Kiteko, a story Verse by MA Abdulkadir, Women`s political songs. An old woman reminisces, Mbaraka Msuri, a hadithi. Ngano A story.

The purpose of the study is to develop both a descriptive and critical understanding towards the phenomenon of femicide in Turkey. First, the answers to the questions who commits femicide, where it takes place, what the ages of the victims and perpetrators are, in what ways femicide is committed and what are the &#039 / reasons&#039 / of committing femicide will be revealed through news reports of incidents of femicide. Second, the news texts of incidents of femicide will be analyzed based on the framework of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA). The discourse of framing the incidents will be identified. In particular, &#039 / justifying discourse&#039 / in the language of the news reports will be examined.

<p>In this masters’ thesis report we present a graph theoretical method used for automatic bilingual lexicon acquisition with parallel texts. We analyze the concept of graph similarity and give an interpretation, of the parallel texts, connected to the vector space model. We represent the parallel texts by a directed, tripartite graph and from here use the corresponding adjacency matrix, A, to compute the similarity of the graph. By solving the eigenvalue problem ρS = ASAT + ATSA we obtain the self-similarity matrix S and the Perron root ρ. A rank k approximation of the self-similarity matrix is computed by implementations of the singular value decomposition and the non-negative matrix factorization algorithm GD-CLS. We construct an algorithm in order to extract the bilingual lexicon from the self-similarity matrix and apply a statistical model to estimate the precision, the correctness, of the translations in the bilingual lexicon. The best result is achieved with an application of the vector space model with a precision of about 80 %. This is a good result and can be compared with the precision of about 60 % found in the literature.</p>