Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed January 9, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 258-271).

The association between receptive language skills and reading comprehension has been established in the research literature. Even when the importance of receptive skills for reading comprehension has been strongly supported, in practice lower levels of skills tend to go unnoticed in typically developing children. A potentially more visible modality of language, expressive skills using speech samples, has been rarely examined despite the longitudinal links between speech and later reading development, and the connections between language and reading impairments. Even fewer reading studies have examined expressive skills using a subgroup of speech samples – narrative samples – which are closer to the kind of language practitioners can observe in their classrooms, and are also a rich source of linguistic and discourse-level data in school-aged children. This thesis presents a study examining the relationship between expressive language skills in narrative samples and reading comprehension after the first two years of formal reading instruction, with considerable attention given to methodological and developmental issues. In order to address the main methodological issues surrounding the identification of the optimal linguistic indices in terms of reliability and the existence of developmental patterns, two studies of language development in oral narratives were carried out. The first of the narrative language studies drew data from an existing corpus, while the other analysed primary data, collected specifically for this purpose. Having identified the optimal narrative indices in two different samples, the main study examined the relationships between these expressive narrative measures along with receptive standardised measures, and reading comprehension in a monolingual sample of eighty 7- and 8-year-old children attending Year 3 in the UK. Both receptive and expressive oral language skills were assessed at three different levels: vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Regression analyses indicated that, when considering expressive narrative variables on their own, expressive grammar and vocabulary, in that order, contributed to explain over a fifth of reading comprehension variance in typically developing children. When controlling for receptive language however, expressive skills were not able to account for significant unique variance in the outcome measure. Nonetheless, mediation analyses revealed that receptive vocabulary and grammar played a mediating role in the relationship between expressive skills from narratives and reading comprehension. Results and further research directions are discussed in the context of this study’s methodological considerations.

I present a simple Simultaneous Abstraction Calculus, where the familiar lambda-abstraction over single variables is replaced by abstraction over whole sets of them. Terms are applied to partial assignments of objects to variables. Variants of the system are investigated and compared, with respect to their semantic and proof theoretic properties. The system overcomes the strict ordering requirements of the standard lambda-calculus,and is shown to provide the kind of "non-selective" binding needed for Dynamic Montague Grammar and Discourse Representation Theory. It is closely related to a more complex system, due to Peter Aczel and Rachel Lunon, and can be used for Situation Theory in a similar way. I present versions of these theories within an axiomatic, property-theoretic framework, based on Aczels Frege Structures. The aim of this work is to provide the means for integrating various semantic theories within a formal framework,so that they can share what is common between them, and adopt from each other what is compatible with them.

Si on estime que la grammaire est une construction intellectuelle et non pas un objet naturel et que, par conséquence, elle prend les formes variables en fonction du contexte linguistique, pourquoi devrait-elle être la même pour les locuteurs natifs et pour les étrangers ? Cette recherche se situe dans le contexte polonais d’enseignement / apprentissage du français en tant que langue étrangère. Plus particulièrement, elle concerne le passé composé et l’imparfait qui sont des temps dont l’utilisation s’avère très souvent un obstacle pour les apprenants polonais dans leur parcours d’apprentissage du français. Ce phénomène est dû en particulier au fait que les descriptions que l’on propose aux apprenants polonophones ne prennent que très rarement en compte le fait que le passé composé et l’imparfait n’ont pas la même valeur aspectuelle que les verbes perfectifs (dokonane) et les verbes imperfectifs (niedokonane) respectivement, en polonais. Ainsi, l’objectif de cette étude a-t-il été d’élaborer une description contextualisée de ces temps du français, censée être plus opérationnelle pour les apprenants polonophones que celles adossées à des descriptions traditionnelles, puisque fondée sur les catégories appartenant à leur culture métalinguistique. À cette fin, il a été analysé comment s’articulent, par rapport au passé composé et à l’imparfait, quatre types de savoirs circulant dans le contexte éducatif polonais. Il s’agit notamment des savoirs savants issus des sciences du langage, des savoirs divulgués par différentes formes de transposition didactique, des savoirs d’expertise professionnelle des enseignants et enfin des savoirs dits « ordinaires » constitués des représentations linguistiques des locuteurs polonophones. / If we consider that grammar is an intellectual construct and not a natural object and therefore it may takes various forms depending of the linguistic context, why should it be the same for native speakers and foreigners?This study is located in the Polish context of teaching / learning of French as a foreign language. In particular, it concerns the passé composé and imparfait, the use of which is often the first hurdle for Polish students learning French. This is due to the fact that descriptions which are suggested to polish students, rarely take into account the fact that the passé compose and the imparfait respectively, don’t have the same aspectual value as the perfective and the imperfective verbs in polish.Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a contextualized description of the tenses in question, which would be more operational for Polish learners, being based on their metalinguistic culture rather than traditional descriptions.For this purpose, we’ve analyzed the ways of expression of four types of knowledge circulating in the Polish educational context in relation to the passé composé and imparfait. These include knowledge from scholars of linguistics, knowledge disclosed by various forms of didactic transposition, knowledge derived from professional experience of teachers and finally the so-called "colloquial" knowledge, which consists of linguistic representations of Polish students.

This thesis aims to elucidate the translation process by devising a way of retrieving evidence of this process from its output. It further aims to assess the claims made by some scholars concerning the possible existence of Translation Universals. In order to isolate the interaction of texts and contexts, a corpus of American short stories was created, with their translations into Persian published after the 1979 Revolution. Three complementary methodologies gave a rounded picture: (1) Corpus-based Descriptive Translation Studies; (2) The pragmatic and rhetorically-based approach of Thinking Translation devised at St Andrews; and ‎(3) The analytical framework mostly established by Halliday in his Systemic Functional Grammar.‎ Approaching the process of translation in the specific order devised in this thesis provided four vantage points to analyse the data in a systematic way from linguistic, discourse, cultural and literary views before reaching what are at once the most personal and most characteristic aspects of a translator's work. The research begins with a literature review of the field and an account of linguistic constraints and of all Translation Universals hypothesised so far, followed by an extensive analysis of data in two consecutive chapters. With reference to the choices made in this corpus, it is discussed in the Conclusions chapter that most of the Translation Universals so far claimed are not in fact universal. It is the role of the translator which has emerged as the determining factor in producing a translated text, and thus as the key to resolving the issues explored in this thesis. It seems there are no constraints beyond the translator's reach, and there are no parameters which do not involve the translator, who introduces his or her own choices, or manipulates certain parameters. Only when they have done so, will the translation, as both process and product, be accomplished.