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The subject of my Thesis is the syntactic interference of German in the French of the Moselle region. The geographical location of this Department, situated close to the German border, leads me to believe that French and German are in contact in this region given their geographic proximity and the history of the area. My Thesis is divided into two main sections. First, through a detailed analysis of relevant syntactic structures in French and German, I put forth several hypotheses concerning the syntactic interference of German in the French spoken in the Moselle Department. Then, I tested these hypotheses through extensive fieldwork by interviewing two different groups of speakers, young and old, and by analyzing those data produced which indicated some degree of German interference in French. I then submitted these data to the same speakers to obtain their grammaticality judgments. My analysis has led me to establish an important typological distinction between the sentences produced by the younger speakers and those produced by the elderly, and to uncover a hierarchy in the acceptability of the sentences submitted to these speakers, which I discuss and attempt to explain.

The purpose of this essay was to see what mistakes Swedish university students make when writing English essays and to focus on one specific mistake, namely the use of capital letters. Fifty essays written by students of Swedish origin were taken from the SWICLE (the Swedish Component of the International Corpus of Learner English), corrected and the mistakes were subsequently analysed. Furthermore, six Swedish school book series were examined in order to find examples of how Swedish pupils are taught how to use capital letters in English. The results showed that mistakes concerning capital letters were very common compared to other mistakes and that the students in the study seemed to have grasped some grammatical rules on the matter, but not all. Other common mistakes made in the essays were spelling mistakes and choice of words. Most common among the mistakes concerning capital letters were overuse of capital lettering and the lack of initial capital letters when writing weekdays, months and holidays. Only one out of the six school book series went deeper into the matter of when to use capital letters in English, which suggests that one of the reasons why capital letter mistakes are so common might be that the students are not extensively taught on the matter.

M.A. (Afrikaans) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

This dissertation is the product of research on the current usage of Kwalcwala, a language of the northern branch of the Wakashan language family spoken in British Columbia on the northern part of Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland. The focus of research is the context of indigenous language use and the importance of language as a marker of cultural identity. I also examine whether English has had any significant influence on the structure and vocabulary of Kwalcwala after prolonged contact between the two languages. I conclude that, although Kwalcwala is being replaced by English in most contexts of communication, it has been strategically maintained in certain contexts as a marker of cultural identity. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

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English loan words (ELWs) have become a considerable part of the contemporary Japanese vocabulary. Meanwhile, it has been shown that there are individual differences in the rate of ELW comprehension. Among the factors for low comprehension is age; people over 60 years old have been shown to comprehend fewer ELWs than the overall age group. As Japan is expected to soon enter the era of an aging society, the issue of ELW comprehension is likely to present serious social and personal problems. The purpose of this study was to identify the current state of frequently used ELWs in contemporary written Japanese, with particular attention to their frequencies, linguistic features, and comprehension rates by people over 60 years old. In order to identify the mediums that are likely to be problematic, three registers were examined: government white papers, books, and internet texts. The study found that the three registers differ in their overall frequencies of ELWs and distributions of the semantic categories, while the distributions of the types of borrowing are similar. It also found that ELWs in certain semantic categories have lower comprehension rates than other categories. Registers that regularly contain low-comprehension ELWs are likely to pose problems for readers over 60 years old.