This thesis is a description of some aspects of the grammar of Sɛlɛɛ, a Ghana-Togo-Mountain (GTM) language, based on my own fieldwork. The thesis consists of an introduction and five papers. Paper (I), Noun classes in Sεlεε, describes the noun class system of Sɛlɛɛ. It consists of eight noun class prefixes, four marking singular and four plural. They are paired in irregular ways to form eight genders (singular-plural pairs). Nouns agree with determiners, numerals and interrogative qualifiers within the noun phrase and can be indexed on the predicate. Nouns are allocated to classes/genders based partly on semantic notions. Paper (II), Sεlεε (with Francesca Di Garbo), details the morphological encoding of diminution in Sɛlɛɛ either by the suffixes -bi, -bii, -mii, -e or -nyi alone or in combination with noun class shift. Augmentation is not expressed morphologically. Paper (III), The tense and aspect system of Sεlεε: A preliminary analysis, shows that Sɛlɛɛ, unlike most Kwa languages, has a rather elaborate tense system encompassing present, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal and future tenses. The aspectual categories are progressive, habitual and perfect. Both categories often amalgamate with first person singular subject clitics. Paper (IV), Standard negation in Sεlεε, deals with the negation of declarative verbal main clauses. This is primarily encoded by a high tone, sometimes combined with segmental morphemes, portmanteau negative tense-aspect morphemes and vowel lengthening. Each tense-aspect category has at least one particular negation strategy. Paper (V), Unravelling temperature terms in Sεlεε (with Francesca Di Garbo), investigates the grammatical constructions employed for temperature evaluations. Personal feeling is only encoded via subjects, while ambient and tactile evaluations are construed attributively and predicatively. A comparison of Selee and other GTM languages revealed similar noun morphologies but very different verbal morphologies. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Unpublished book chapter. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: In press. Paper 5: Unpublished book chapter.</p>

This dissertation aims to provide a grammatical description of Dameli (ISO-639-3: dml), an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 5 000 people in the Domel Valley in Chitral in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in the North-West of Pakistan. Dameli is a left-branching SOV language with considerable morphological complexity, particularly in the verb, and a complicated system of argument marking. The phonology is relatively rich, with 31 consonant and 16 vowel phonemes. This is the first extensive study of this language. The analysis presented here is based on original data collected primarily between 2003-2008 in cooperation with speakers of the language in Peshawar and Chitral, including the Domel Valley. The core of the data consists of recorded texts and word lists, but questionnaires and paradigms of word forms have also been used. The main emphasis is on describing the features of the language as they appear in texts and other material, rather than on conforming them to any theory, but the analysis is informed by functional analysis and linguistic typology, hypotheses on diachronical developments and comparisons with neighbouring and related languages. The description is divided into sections describing phonology, morphology and syntax, with chapters on a range of individual subjects such as particular word classes and phrase types, phonological and syntactical phenomena. This is not intended to be an exhaustive reference grammar; some topics are only touched upon briefly while others are treated in more detail and suggestions for further research are given at various points throughout the work.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 273-280). / Microfiche. / xiii, 280 leaves, bound 29 cm

This thesis describes the features of the phonology, morphology and syntax of Oksapmin, a Papuan (Non-Austronesian) language of Papua New Guinea. Oksapmin is spoken by around 8000 people, most of whom reside in the Tekin valley in Sandaun Province. The analysis in this thesis is based on the study of data from both elicitation and text collection undertaken on two field trips between 2004 and 2006: from May to October 2004, and from October 2005 to January 2006. / A general introduction is provided in Chapter 1, phonology, phonotactics and morphophonology are discussed in Chapter 2, word classes in Chapter 3, demonstratives in Chapter 4, nouns in Chapter 5, postpositions in Chapter 6, noun phrase syntax in Chapter 7, verbs in Chapter 8, coverbs in Chapter 9, clausal syntax in Chapter 10, phrasal clitics in Chapter 11, and clause combining in Chapter 12. Four sample texts are provided as appendices. Sound files are provided on the accompanying CD for many of the examples scattered throughout the thesis, as well as for all the texts in the appendices. / The most interesting and important grammatical subsystem in Oksapmin is the evidential one, which permeates various areas of the grammar. Without proper knowledge of this system, one cannot make a single grammatical sentence in the language. Recall that evidentiality is, roughly speaking, when a speaker marks how he or she came about the knowledge on which a given utterance is based. Evidentiality in Oksapmin is indicated with past tense verbal inflection, with enclitics, and with a number of other constructions. The evidential system is typologically unusual in that the primary contrast it marks is participatory/factual versus visual/sensory evidence; this distinction is made in the verbal inflection. Participatory/factual evidentials are not widely attested cross-linguistically, and those systems that do exist have been largely ignored in the typological literature. / Some of the other areas of grammar discussed in this thesis include prenasalised consonants with nasal allophones, noun phrases with a complex syntactic structure, a range of demonstratives which distinguish for elevation, a large vocabulary of kin terms including a set of dyadic kin terms, extensive use of complex predicates consisting of a light verb plus a coverb, and a variety of clause combining strategies including clause chaining.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The main goal of this study is to provide a grammatical analysis of small clauses in Afrikaans. A proper analysis of this phenomenon has not yet been attempted in the literature on Afrikaans syntax. However, within the framework of generative grammar, including the most recent versions of Minimalist Syntax, extensive research has been conducted on the small clause phenomenon for a wide range of other languages. In these studies, various types of small clause constructions have been identified. For the purpose of this study, a systematic analysis is given for seven of these small clause construction types, focusing specifically on the Afrikaans data. In order to establish whether the Afrikaans small clause constructions exhibit the same characteristics as those found in other languages, a taxonomy is given of their Dutch, English, West Flemish and Polish counterparts as described by, among others, Hoekstra (1988a, 1992), Bennis, Corver and Den Dikken (1998), Citko (2008) and Haegeman (2010). It is against this background that the characteristics of the different Afrikaans small clause constructions are described. In addition, an explication is given of the various proposals regarding the underlying structure of such constructions. Based on proposals by Oosthuizen (2013), it is argued that a small clause construction is a projection of a particular functional category, namely a defective light verb, sc-v. It is claimed that such a light verb analysis can provide an adequate account of the Afrikaans facts. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die hoofoogmerk van hierdie studie is om ’n grammatikale analise van beknopte sinne (“small clauses”) in Afrikaans te verskaf. ʼn Behoorlike analise van hierdie verskynsel is nog nie tevore aangebied in die literatuur oor Afrikaanse sintaksis nie. Binne die raamwerk van generatiewe grammatika, insluitend die mees onlangse versies van Minimalistiese Sintaksis, is daar egter uitgebreide navorsing gedoen oor die verskynsel van beknopte sinne in ʼn verskeidenheid ander tale. In die betrokke studies is verskeie tipes beknopte sin-konstruksies geïdentifiseer. Vir die doel van hierdie studie word ’n sistematiese analise gegee van sewe van hierdie konstruksie-tipes, met spesifieke fokus op die Afrikaanse data. Ten einde vas te stel of die Afrikaanse beknopte sin-konstruksies dieselfde eienskappe toon as dié in ander tale, word ’n taksonomie verskaf van die ooreenstemmende konstruksies in Nederlands, Engels, Wes-Vlaams en Pools, soos beskryf deur onder meer Hoekstra (1988a, 1992), Bennis, Corver en Den Dikken (1998), Citko (2008) en Haegeman (2010). Dit is teen hierdie agtergrond dat die eienskappe van die verskillende Afrikaanse beknopte sin-konstruksies beskryf word. Verder word ʼn uiteensetting gegee van verskeie voorstelle oor die onderliggende struktuur van sulke konstruksies. Gebaseer op voorstelle deur Oosthuizen (2013), word daar geargumenteer dat ’n beknopte sin-konstruksie ’n projeksie is van ’n spesifieke funksionele kategorie, naamlik ’n defektiewe ligte werkwoord, sc-v. Daar word aangevoer dat so ’n ligte werkwoord-analise ’n toereikende verklaring kan bied van die Afrikaanse feite.

We study the inference of models of the analysis by reduction that forms an important tool for parsing natural language sentences. We prove that the inference of such models from positive and negative samples is NP-hard when requiring a small model. On the other hand, if only positive samples are considered, the problem is effectively solvable. We propose a new model of the analysis by reduction (the so-called single k-reversible restarting automaton) and propose a method for inferring it from positive samples of analyses by reduction. The power of the model lies between growing context-sensitive languages and context-sensitive languages. Benchmarks using targets based on grammars have several drawbacks. Therefore we propose a benchmark working with targets based on random automata, that can be used to evaluate inference algorithms. This benchmark is then used to evaluate our inference method. 1

My thesis investigates the universality of the Matrix Language Frame model developed by Myers-Scotton (2002). The work tests the model by using bilingual data which display code-switching between French and the low variety of Lingala. The main concern of the work is to test the constraints that are posited in terms of principles of the model and which claim that the Matrix Language dictates the morphosyntactic frame of a bilingual Complementizer Phrase (CP). In the light of the findings of this study, it was shown that the ML model failed to account for a number of situations; and such was the case of the Morpheme Order Principle and double morphology, specifically with the outsider late system morphemes.

The subject of the diploma thesis is syntactical analysis of the collection of sermons Vejtažní naučení (1740) by Antonín Koniáš. The aim of the thesis is the research of grammatical and lexical means used in this text to express relations in compound sentences. The thesis is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. In the theoretical part we give information about Koniáš´s life and work, further we characterize the basic syntactical phenomena and define the baroque compound sentence. In the practical part we deal with individual paratactic relations, especially we have the frequency of coordinating means in view. Subsequently we summarize the results of our work, we assess the found out coordinating means and compare them with those in the contemporary Czech language.

Normas linguísticas são os usos instituídos pelos falantes da língua. Há normas consagradas pela tradição literária, por exemplo, e há normas consagradas pela tradição das comunidades. Quando estas não são aceitas, pode se dar o conflito, motivado pela não aceitação da nova norma, ou da norma diferente, geralmente acompanhada de avaliações negativas. Tomando os pronomes pessoais ele/lhe acusativos, me inicial e se sujeito (usando outras categorias quando a situação for favorável) como referência, procura-se investigar os motivos que levam a tais conflitos. Usa-se um conjunto de pensamentos provenientes da sociolinguística, do funcionalismo, da linguística histórica, da tradição gramatical, que, juntos, dão sustentação à problemática, sem levantar corpus exaustivo para descrição e explicação de regras da língua, motivo por que essas teorias são aproveitadas, enfaticamente, apenas em suas bases teóricas gerais. Os exemplos são esparsamente colhidos em fontes diversas: livros, canções, textos literários, ensaios, mas principalmente em notícias veiculadas na internet. É o que basta para um exame crítico da questão abordada. Para tanto, foram cotejados os posicionamentos da normatividade (a língua ideal, homogênea) com os da normalidade (a língua em uso, heterogênea). No entrementes é que estão as causas dos conflitos: a ideia de que a escrita representa o modelo certo, a resistência às mudanças e variações, o imaginário social que decide o certo e o errado, a ideologia avessa à evolução da língua e os conselhos do tipo não use e evite vão desgastando a concepção de língua. Para posturas como essas, não são aceitos os usos estigmatizados, embora abundantemente usados nos veículos de comunicação sociais / Linguistic rules are usage-established by speakers of the language. There are rules validated by the literary tradition, for example, and there are rules validated by the tradition of the community. When the latter are not accepted, conflict may ensue, motivated by non-acceptance of the new standard or different standard, usually accompanied by negative evaluations. Taking as a reference, from Brazilian Portuguese, personal pronouns ele/lhe accusative, initial me and se subject (using other categories when the situation is favorable), we seek here to investigate the reasons that lead to such conflicts. We use a set of thoughts from sociolinguistics, functionalism, historical linguistics and grammar tradition, which together lend foundation to the problem, forsaking the need for a comprehensive corpus for the description and explanation of the rules of language, the reason why these theories are utilized only in their general theoretical basis. Examples are sparsely collected from several sources: books, songs, literary texts, essays, but mostly from reports on the internet. That suffices for a critical examination of the issue addressed. For that purpose, standpoints of normativity (the ideal language, homogeneous) and normalcy (the language in use, heterogeneous) were compared. It is in the space in between that lie the causes of conflicts: the idea that the written mode is the model of correctness, resistance to changes and variations, the social imaginary that decides what is right and wrong, ideology inimical to the evolution of language, prescriptions such as "do not use" and "avoid", which wear out the concept of language. For postures such as these, stigmatized uses are not accepted, although they are abundantly used in social communication vehicles

Submitted by ALINE MARA FERNANDES null (alinemaraf@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-07-19T00:57:37Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Aline Mara Fernandes_doutorado.pdf: 8608630 bytes, checksum: 37557e2e427164282e4f176d5da189ea (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Ana Paula Grisoto (grisotoana@reitoria.unesp.br) on 2016-07-20T13:56:22Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 fernandes_am_dr_sjrp.pdf: 8608630 bytes, checksum: 37557e2e427164282e4f176d5da189ea (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-20T13:56:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 fernandes_am_dr_sjrp.pdf: 8608630 bytes, checksum: 37557e2e427164282e4f176d5da189ea (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-06-10 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Este trabalho, inserido na área de avaliação de proficiência de professores de língua estrangeira, investigou o uso da metalinguagem para explicação gramatical em língua inglesa a partir de dados coletados em contexto real de uso da língua em dois cursos de Licenciatura em Letras. Os objetivos centrais desta pesquisa foram: (1) discutir o uso da metalinguagem em dois contextos de formação de professores de língua estrangeira e o desenvolvimento da competência metalinguística de futuros professores; (2) caracterizar a explicação gramatical em língua inglesa pela análise de sua estrutura textual, a partir de amostras de falas de professores e alunos em aulas, seminários e teste oral do EPPLE (Exame de Proficiência para Professores de Línguas Estrangeiras) e (3) propor um quadro de especificações de teste para a elaboração de tarefas do teste oral do EPPLE que contemplem a explicação gramatical. Para alcançar esses objetivos, foi realizada a descrição de aulas de língua inglesa coletadas nos dois cursos de formação de professores de língua estrangeira, de modo a obter um panorama do uso da metalinguagem para explicação gramatical. Foram também analisados trechos de seminários apresentados pelos alunos  professores em formação  e trechos de gravações do desempenho dos alunos no teste oral do EPPLE, aplicado nos anos de 2012 e 2013. A esse conjunto de dados, em uma primeira etapa, aplicamos uma metodologia baseada na Linguística Sistêmico-Funcional, de análise da estrutura esquemática (EGGINS, 2012) para a caracterização da explicação gramatical. Observamos uma estrutura típica na realização da explicação gramatical nos três tipos de eventos comunicativos analisados (aulas, seminários e teste oral), marcada especialmente pela descrição do uso linguístico e pela exemplificação, além de outros elementos secundários, como fornecimento de prática e elicitação de participação dos alunos pelo professor. Tendo em vista a recorrência da explicação gramatical nos dados e dos elementos que compõem sua estrutura esquemática, foi possível afirmar seu lugar no domínio de linguagem específico do professor. Foi apresentado também um levantamento do léxico empregado por (futuros) professores no fornecimento da explicação gramatical, capaz de auxiliar na elaboração e na avaliação das tarefas orais. A segunda etapa deste estudo foi dedicada à discussão sobre especificações de teste, com base na literatura da área de avaliação de língua (por ex. FULCHER; DAVIDSON, 2007; O’SULLIVAN, 2012); à descrição do construto do EPPLE, com base em estudos e publicações realizadas no escopo do projeto desse exame (por ex. CONSOLO et al, 2009, 2010; CONSOLO E TEIXEIRA DA SILVA, 2007, 2014; ANCHIETA, 2015); e, por fim, à criação de especificações de teste para elaboração de tarefas para o teste oral do EPPLE. A caracterização da explicação gramatical, desenvolvida na primeira etapa de análise dos dados, permitiu delimitar traços específicos desse uso da metalinguagem possíveis de serem incluídos em tarefas de teste e em critérios de avaliação da proficiência oral em língua inglesa. Com este estudo, esperamos contribuir para a descrição do domínio de linguagem do professor de LE, para documentação do EPPLE e para o desenvolvimento de materiais de teste direcionados a elaboradores e avaliadores do exame. / This study, inserted in the area of language testing, investigates the use of metalanguage for grammatical explanation in English from data collected in contexts of real language use in two undergraduate language courses in Brazil. The main objectives of this research study are: (1) to discuss the use of metalanguage in two different contexts of foreign language teacher education and the development of metalinguistic competence of teachers-to-be; (2) to study grammatical explanation in English through analysis of its textual structure, based on samples of teachers’ oral language in lessons, oral presentations and the oral test of EPPLE (Proficiency Examination for Foreign Language Teachers), and (3) propose a test specifications sheet for the development of tasks for the EPPLE oral component that include grammatical explanation. In order to achieve these objectives, we described a number of English lessons observed in the two language university courses and analyzed excerpts from students’ oral presentations and from their performance in the EPPLE oral test, in 2012 and 2013. For the first part of data analysis, we used a methodology based on Systemic Functional Linguistics, for describing the schematic structure (EGGINS, 2012) of the grammatical explanation. We observed a structure that is typical in the performance of grammatical explanation in the three kinds of communicative events studied (lessons, oral presentations and oral test), which is marked especially by the description of the linguistic use and by the use of examples. Moreover, secondary elements of the schematic structure are the provision of practice and teachers’ elicitation of students’ participation. Considering the recurrence of grammatical explanation in the data and its structural elements, it is possible to assert its place in foreign language teachers’ specific linguistic domain. We also mapped the lexicon used by teachers in giving grammatical explanation to students, which is believed to bring benefits for task development and scoring. The second phase of this study consists of discussions about test specifications, based on the literature on language testing (for instance, Fulcher & Davidson, 2007; O’Sullivan, 2012); description of EPPLE construct, based on studies and publications in the scope of this examination project (for instance, Consolo et al, 2009, 2010, Consolo & Teixeira da Silva, 2007, 2014, Anchieta, 2015); and finally the design of test specifications for the development of tasks for the EPPLE oral test. The study of the grammatical explanation textual characteristics permitted us to delineate specific traits of this metalinguistic use which could be included in test tasks and in criteria for English oral proficiency assessment. With this research study, we intend to contribute to the description of the language domain of foreign language teachers, to the EPPLE documentation and to the generation of test materials aimed at the EPPLE developers and examiners.