A pilot-study was used to investigate, types of assistance, assessed needs, outcomes and effects of special-needs assistance given to a subsample of compulsory school pupils in an effort to develop an evaluation strategy for identifying educational impacts of specific special-needs inputs.  Preliminary results indicate a tendency for postive outcomes for most pupils in the pilot group (n = 11) but also that many pupils have residual difficulties.  Pupils with residual difficulties mostly required special education asssitance with Maths, English or Swedish.  More pupils also needed support with behavioral difficulties.  More research and an expanding knowledge base is required in order to effectively evaluate outcomes of teacher support.  Schools need help in devising different methods of assistance and particularly for pupils with behavioral difficulties.

In this thesis, I focus on scalar implicatures, presuppositions and their connections. In chapter 2, I propose a scalar implicature-based account of neg-raising inferences, standardly analyzed as a presuppositional phenomenon (Gajewski 2005, 2007). I show that an approach based on scalar implicatures can straightforwardly account for the differences and similarities between neg-raising predicates and presuppositional triggers. In chapters 3 and 4, I extend this account to “soft” presuppositions, a class of presuppositions that are easily suspendable (Abusch 2002, 2010). I show how such account can explain the differences and similarities between this class of presuppositions and other presuppositions on the one hand, and scalar implicatures on the other. Furthermore, I discuss various consequences that it has with respect to the behavior of soft presuppositions in quantificational sentences, their interactions with scalar implicatures, and their effects on the licensing of negative polarity items. In chapter 5, I show that by looking at the interaction between presuppositions and scalar implicatures we can solve a notorious problem which arises with conditional sentences like (1) (Soames 1982, Karttunen and Peters 1979). The main issue with (1) is that it is intuitively not presuppositional and this is not predicted by any major theory of presupposition projection. (1) I’ll go, if you go too. Finally, I explore in more detail the question of which alternatives should we consider in the computation of scalar implicatures (chapter 6). Traditionally, the answer has been to consider the subset of logically stronger alternatives than the assertion. Recently, however, arguments have been put forward in the literature for including also logically independent alternatives. I support this move by presenting some novel arguments in its favor and I show that while allowing new alternatives makes the right predictions in various cases, it also causes an under- and an over-generation problem. I propose a solution to each problem, based on a novel recursive algorithm for checking which alternatives are to be considered in the computation of scalar implicatures and the role of focus (Rooth 1992, Fox and Katzir 2011). / Linguistics

Cette thèse a pour objectif de rendre compte des relations entre syntaxe et phonologie dans l'expression du focus pragmatique, du focus sémantique [contrastif et non-contrastif] et du donné en français francilien. S'agissant là d'un domaine assez vaste, elle se concentre particulièrement sur trois phénomènes : l'asymétrie sujet-non-sujet dans le recours aux phrases clivées en réponse aux questions partielles, l'alternance des questions à mot-wh antéposé et des questions à mot-wh in situ dans l'expression des véritables demandes d'informations et enfin les ``effets d'intervention'' dans les questions partielles. Pour chacun de ces phénomènes, elle propose une formalisation dans le cadre de la Théorie de l'Optimalité, et plus particulièrement dans l'approche Strongly Parallel OT. Elle fait notamment usage des contraintes Stress-Focus, NotGivenProminent, Destress-Given, Head-I-Right [Hi], Op-spec ou encore Epp. Elle met le français en perspective avec des langues aussi variées que l'anglais, le coréen, l'italien, le japonais, le sotho du nord et le zoulou. / This dissertation has as its objective to investigate syntax-phonology interactions in the expression of pragmatic focus, semantic focus and givenness in Francilian French, the dialect of French spoken in the Paris metropolitan area. It concentrates on three puzzles : the subject-non-subject asymmetry in the use of cleft sentences as an answering strategy to wh-questions, the occurrence of both fronted and in situ wh-questions, and so-called wh-questions' intervention effects. The phenomena investigated are accounted for through the ranking of the constraints Stress-Focus, NotGivenProminent, Destress-Given, Head-I-Right [Hi], Op-spec and Epp, within the Strongly Parallel Optimal Theoretic approach. As this thesis offers a typological perspective, languages as varied as English, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Northern Sotho and Zulu are also discussed and contrasted to French.