This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Guna, a Chibchan language of Panama with an approximate 40,000 speakers. The aim of the dissertation is to provide a description of the language that is linguistically relevant and at the same time straightforward and readable for a wider audience that may include the community of Guna speakers. This work fills a gap that exists in the literature for Guna. Great work has been done about Guna in diverse areas and disciplines. However, as the Guna population seeks to become more involved in their own representation (Howe 2010), there exists a great need for a document that bridges the understanding of Guna linguistics with the community's efforts of language maintenance and revitalization. In order to accomplish this, chapters are written in such a way that topics can be easily located, linguistic concepts are fully explained, and the language used to describe specific linguistic phenomena is straightforward. The dissertation is organized as follows: Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the academic and cultural context in which the dissertation was written and the methodology used in data collection and writing; Chapter 2 describes the phonology of the language and explains different orthographies that have surfaced for Guna; Chapter 3 presents the roots/bases and the formatives that attach to them; Chapter 4 builds on the previous chapter to describe phrases that have nouns and modifiers as heads; Chapter 5 discusses verbal morphology; Chapter 6 gives a description of sentence formation, which includes different syntactic phenomena such as type of predicates, word order, and pragmatically determined word orders; Chapter 7 serves as a bridge between Chapters 6 and 8 as it describes serial verb constructions, structures with two verbs that function as one predicate; and Chapter 8 is an account of clause combinations in the language. Although Guna is still spoken and learned by children, its dwindling percentage of native speakers makes it an endangered language. Therefore, this grammar is a contribution to the field of linguistics and to the efforts of revitalization and maintenance within the community. / text

Certain aspects of sculptural assemblage remain largely unexamined in an academic context. I contend that this mode of practice is not in need of theorisation, but that it can fruitfully be brought into dialogue with philosophy. Doing so may shed light upon assemblage and the contextual thinking which frames it. I undertake the re-evaluation of this medium by means of a reflexive engagement with the processes and concerns of my own assemblage practice. By detailing the shifts and movements of my own making, I explore the tensions and connections inherent in the historical development of this media. I discuss a connection (or family resemblance) between aspects of my sculptural practice and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s methods of grammatical disruption and displacement. I argue that thinking about sculptural assemblage grammatically provides a way of re-framing the relationship between my artworks and their contexts. This in turn facilitates an examination of the practical and philosophical implications of the ‘fittingtogether-ness’ of assemblage. It also brings into view a possible re-thinking of relations in a way that emphasises connective potential rather than difference or similarity.

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Against the background of conservatism, liberalism, and counter-reaction among linguists, this study will survey the degrees of liberality shown by the writers of a group of present-day handbooks and grammars toward six disputable issues.

Georgian is remarkably different from Indo-European languages. The language has several linguistic phenomena that are challenging both from theoretical and computational points of view. In addition, it is low- resourced and insufficiently studied from the computational point of view. In the thesis, we model morphology and syntax of a core fragment of the language in a formal grammar. Namely, the formal grammar is written in the HPSG framework - one of the most powerful grammar frameworks nowadays. We also implement the grammar in TRALE - a grammar implementation platform, which is faithful to "hand-written" HPSG-based grammars. Note that this is the first application of HPSG to Georgian.

The current study examined the role of complexity and initial variability of exemplars during learning in verb generalization. Children and adults learned two novel verbs in the context of two novel creatures across two sessions. After a second training session, participants completed a generalization task during which they were required to identify the verbs when presented with seven novel creatures of varying levels of complexity. Performance was compared across age group and condition. Participants who initially learned the verbs in the context of a single, simple exemplar demonstrated a higher proportion of correct responses than participants who initially learned the verbs with both a simple & complex exemplar. These results provide evidence that fewer exemplars during initial training of novel verbs may increase learning in young children, as well as some evidence that complex exemplars may increase the difficulty of learning and generalizing verbs. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis. 1980. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 247-254. / Ph.D.

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