No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

In this thesis, a set of defining properties of grammatical variables is proposed, taking particular account of the precise extent to which variants should be required to be equivalent, semantically and pragmatically. These principles are then applied in a variationist analysis of negation and interrogation in spoken French, with data from a corpus from the Somme, northern France. Computer-assisted data-handling techniques are employed, notably the Oxford Concordance Program. For the (ne) variable, a large proportion of the data is analysed in terms of preformed sequences, which strongly favour the omission of the negative particle. There is also evidence that age is the most important extra-linguistic constraint, but this is interpreted as being a case of age-grading rather than of change in progress, as has sometimes been supposed. It is suggested that the negative particle has all but disappeared from northern French vernacular styles. To check the pragmatic equivalence of variant interrogative structures, a taxonomy of communicative functions is set up, drawing from research on speech acts, conversational structure and communicative grammar. The interrogatives in the corpus are then classified in terms of this taxonomy. In Yes/No interrogatives, clitic inversion is found to be completely absent from the corpus, and the minority use of est-ce 92! is shown to be motivated by pragmatic and socio-pragmatic factors, ie it is often used when the speaker does not expect an answer. from the addressee, or to encode politeness. WH interrogatives constitute one of the most complex grammatical variables studied so far, with six variant structures occurring in the corpus, and the choice among them being constrained by a large number of linguistic, discoursal and pragmatic factors. In order to take account of the unacceptability of some structures in certain contexts, the notion of "semi-variable" tokens is proposed. This is reflected in the method of calculating each variant's relative frequencies, as these exclude those contexts where the variant would be unacceptable, or non-equivalent to the structure actually used. The productive use of clitic inversion in the corpus is seen to be minimal, and the choice of the WH-final structure (as opposed to a WH-fronted one) is shown to be motivated overwhelmingly by discoursal considerations. The female informants are found to favour the est-ce que structure (partly, again, for politeness), whereas the male speakers use rather more of a non-standard variant.

The thesis discusses the variety of English that is spoken today in Brunei Darussalam and assesses its status as a 'New English'. Using a corpus of spoken data which was recorded and transcribed by the author, the thesis attempts to produce an empirically based linguistic description of the grammatical, lexical and discourse features found in spoken Brunei English and to discuss the ways in which these features differ from the equivalent features in Standard British English. The final part of the study is concerned with the pedagogical and language planning implications of recognizing the existence of a Bruneian variety of English, and with proposing an appropriate English language teaching model for the Bruneian education system.

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.

The assignment of grammatical gender in German is a notoriously problematic phenomenon due to the apparent opacity of the gender assignment system (e.g. Comrie 1999: 461). Various models of German gender assignment have been proposed (e.g. Spitz 1965, Köpcke 1982, Corbett 1991, Wegener 1995), but none of these is able to account for all of the German data. This thesis investigates a relatively under-explored, recent approach to German gender assignment in the form of Optimal Gender Assignment Theory (OGAT), proposed by Rice (2006). Using the framework of Optimality Theory, OGAT claims that the form and meaning of a noun are of equal importance with respect to its gender. This is formally represented by the crucial equal ranking of all gender assignment constraints in a block of gender features, which is in turn ranked above a default markedness hierarchy *NEUTER » *FEMININE » *MASCULINE, which is based on category size. A key weakness of OGAT is that it does not specify what constitutes a valid gender features constraint. This means that, in theory, any constraint can be proposed ad hoc to ensure that an OGAT analysis yields the correct result. In order to prevent any constraints based on 'postfactum rationalisations' (Comrie 1999: 461) from being included in the investigation, the gender features constraints which have been proposed in the literature for German are assessed according to six criteria suggested by Enger (2009), which seek to determine whether there is independent evidence for a gender features constraint. Using an independently-verified constraint set, OGAT is then tested on a sample of 592 nouns systematically selected from the Duden Rechtschreibung. The results indicate that OGAT is relatively successful in its predictions when compared to other approaches but that it cannot account fully for the sample data. Accordingly, a revised version of the theory is proposed (OGAT II), which involves the ranking of certain gender features constraints. It is found that OGAT II is able to account for the genders of around 95% of nouns in the sample. A number of specific aspects of OGAT II are then tested by means of an experiment in which native German speakers are required to assign genders to 26 pseudo-nouns. The results suggest that OGAT II comes the closest of the systems discussed in the literature to modelling how native speakers assign gender in German.

Welsh grammatical gender exhibits several unusual properties. This paper argues that these properties are necessarily connected. The argument is based on a series of corpus investigations using techniques from statistical natural language processing, specifically distinguishing properties that exhibit significant statistical patterns from those which can be used to make useable predictions. Specifically, it’s shown that the grammatical properties of Welsh gender are such that its unusual statistical properties follow.

No description available.

Research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that for many languages, children gain an early command of gender. However, often in these languages gender marking is quite overt and provides a clear one-to-one correspondence between a marker and the gender encoded. In Welsh, gender marking is more complex. Gender is marked by mutations, a set of morphophonological changes that affect the initial consonants of words, and the mapping between mutation and gender is quite opaque. Two mutation types are used in part to mark feminine gender: both feminine nouns modified by the definite article and adjectives following feminine nouns undergo Soft Mutation, and the feminine gender of the possessive adjective ei is marked by Aspirate Mutation on the modified noun. The four studied in this thesis examined children's productive command of gender as expressed in the mutation of nouns modified by the definite article, of adjectives modifying nouns, and of nouns modified by the homonymic feminine and masculine possessive adjective. Mutation in non-gendered contexts was also examined. Subjects were 4- to 9 1I2-year-old children from North Wales. First, a seminaturalistic study was conducted to obtain knowledge about children's ability with gender marking. A Cloze procedure was also used to elicit children's production of masculine and feminine forms, both real words and nonsense forms, in a variety of linguistic contexts. Some of these contexts provided cues to gender status, some did not. The data obtained indicated that the acquisition of the Welsh gender system is a drawn-out process, and children have not mastered the system even by 9 112years of age. In addition, children become proficient in marking feminine nouns modified by the definite article and adjectives modifying feminine nouns before they do so on nouns modified by feminine ei. Results suggest that when a language has a complex gender system that is marked by opaque morpho-phonological processes the course of development is protracted and variable.