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Syftet med min undersökning var att lyfta fram hur förskollärare förhåller sig till användandet av Tecken som Alternativ och Kompletterande Kommunikation, TAKK, som komplement till talet i samlingssituationer. Metoden som användes var kvalitativa intervjuer, dessa har gjorts med fyra pedagoger, två som arbetar på yngrebarnsavdelning och två som arbetar på äldrebarnsavdelning.Sammanfattningsvis visar undersökningen att användningen av TAKK skiljer sig åt i många avseenden, inte enbart mellan yngre och äldrebarnsavdelningarna utan även förskollärare sinsemellan, men att det även finns många gemensamma tankar och erfarenheter hos respondenterna. Något som de har gemensamt är att alla fyra är positivt inställda till användandet av TAKK och de anser att det är ett roligt och utmanande arbetssätt. Det har framkommit under intervjuerna att TAKK anses av respondenterna vara är ett bra sätt att stimulera kommunikationen hos alla barn på deras avdelningar, och inte enbart de barn som har någon form av språkstörning. Något som skiljer dem åt är erfarenheten av TAKK och även mängden av tillfällen då TAKK används i samlingarna. / The purpose of this study was to show how preschool teachers relate to the use of AAC in gathering situation. Qualitative interviews have been used on four preschool teachers, two who work with younger children and two who work with older children to see if ACC uses different depending on the children's ages.The conclusion is at the use of AAC differs in many aspects, not only between the work with AAC in younger and older children departments but also among the preschool teachers experience. Similar thoughts and experiences emerged during the interviews with the respondents. They all have in common that all four have positive opinion about the use of ACC and they think it’s an interesting and challenging approach. AAC is considered by respondents to be a good way to stimulate communication among all children in their departments, not just the children who have language impairment. The respondents differentiate in their experience of AAC and in the amount of times which AAC is used in the gatherings.

Extensive literature has argued the important role that education plays in the process of language shift. Within this literature, it is widely acknowledged that education in which the target language is also the medium of instruction can make a positive contribution toward Reversing Language Shift. For users of minoritised languages in particular, having access to education in one’s own language has important status and educational consequences: helping to support the prestige of the target language and also reducing the kinds of educational inequalities that are often associated with minoritised languages. In keeping with the prime importance of language-as-medium education to language planning goals, there is a growing body of research which focuses upon Gaelic Medium Education in Scotland. The role that second or additional language education can play in Reversing Language Shift is acknowledged to a much lesser extent. This is especially true within the context of Scotland, where the relevant education provision within state secondary schools, Gaelic (Learners) Education, has only received passing recognition. This thesis aimed to address this gap in knowledge about the way in which education contributes to development goals for Gaelic in Scotland by questioning what, if any, role the Gaelic (Learners) Education programme has to play in the reversal of language shift. The first aim of the dissertation was to identify a theoretical foundation for the role that second or additional language education can play in Reversing Language Shift. Several prominent theoretical approaches were reviewed and a hypothesis posed that Gaelic (Learners) Education was beneficial to both Acquisition and Status development. Subsequent analyses of policies at the macro, meso, and micro levels confirmed the relevance of this hypothesis. However, it was also found that there was a lack of overt policy acknowledgement for Gaelic (Learners) Education in Scotland overall, suggesting that the stream was not regarded as being particularly relevant to Reversing Language Shift. The next aim of the thesis was to clarify the ways in which the stream could be used to help contribute to the reversal of language shift. This focused on identifying areas in which this educational programme could be improved. Using data elicited in semi-structured interviews with education professionals and gathered through surveys of pupils within GLE classes, several blockages for Gaelic (Learners) Education could be identified including aspects of capacity, opportunity and attitudes.

This thesis presents a computational text analysis tool called AFFECTiS (Affect Interpretation/Inference System) which focuses on the task of interpreting natural language text based on its subjective, non-factual, affective properties that go beyond the 'traditional' factual, objective dimensions of meaning that have so far been the main focus of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. The thesis presents a fully compositional uniform wide-coverage computational model of sentiment in text that builds on a number of fundamental compositional sentiment phenomena and processes discovered by detailed linguistic analysis of the behaviour of sentiment across key syntactic constructions in English. Driven by the Principle of Semantic Compositionality, the proposed model breaks sentiment interpretation down into strictly binary combinatory steps each of which explains the polarity of a given sentiment expression as a function of the properties of the sentiment carriers contained in it and the grammatical and semantic context(s) involved. An initial implementation of the proposed compositional sentiment model is de- scribed which attempts direct logical sentiment reasoning rather than basing compu- tational sentiment judgements on indirect data-driven evidence. Together with deep grammatical analysis and large hand-written sentiment lexica, the model is applied recursively to assign sentiment to all (sub )sentential structural constituents and to concurrently equip all individual entity mentions with gradient sentiment scores. The system was evaluated on an extensive multi-level and multi-task evaluation framework encompassing over 119,000 test cases from which detailed empirical ex- perimental evidence is drawn. The results across entity-, phrase-, sentence-, word-, and document-level data sets demonstrate that AFFECTiS is capable of human-like sentiment reasoning and can interpret sentiment in a way that is not only coherent syntactically but also defensible logically - even in the presence of the many am- biguous extralinguistic, paralogical, and mixed sentiment anomalies that so tellingly characterise the challenges involved in non-factual classification.

This dissertation seeks to ask and answer the following question. What is the semantic and/or syntactic value of the articular infinitive in New Testament Greek? It is argued that the article primarily serves as a function word when used with the infinitive. That is, when the article appears in conjunction with the infinitive, it expresses a grammatical-structural relation that may not otherwise be apparent. The article does not determine the infinitive as definite. Therefore, it is not correct to say (as many do) that the article can have the same significance with the verbal noun as it does with any other noun (e.g. anaphora, marker of definiteness, substantivizer, etc.). Nor is it correct to say that the article adds no meaning at all to the infinitive. On the contrary, the structural significance of the article is prominent when the articular infinitive appears in the New Testament. Chapter one introduces this thesis as well as setting forth the history of research and my methodology. Chapter two demonstrates that the Greek article differs from the other kinds of determiners in that it often is used without its semantic weight as a determiner. In such cases the article appears as a pure function word. Chapters three and four demonstrate how this thesis arises from an inductive study of the articular infinitive in New Testament Greek. The inductive study is broken down by the major formal characteristic that divides articular infinitives: those governed by prepositions (chapter 4) versus those that are not governed by prepositions (chapter 3). Chapter five compares and contrasts New Testament usage with analogous constructions in the LXX to see if the thesis is consistent with this body of literature. Chapter six summarizes the implications that the thesis has for New Testament Greek grammar and for exegesis in the New Testament. / This item is only available to students and faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If you are not associated with SBTS, this dissertation may be purchased from <a href="http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb">http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb</a> or downloaded through ProQuest's Dissertation and Theses database if your institution subscribes to that service.

Magister Artium - MA / Globalization has evidently led to an increase in the flow of immigrants across the world, a fact that has and continues to play a significant role in the development of studies on immigration, immigration patterns and the psycho-social struggles that immigrants face; of which identity negotiation in the new context is included. A number of works have been done on the identity negotiation and identity-forming process of immigrant youth. This study attempts to highlight, rather specifically, the unique challenges that 1.5 generation immigrant youth have in forming their identities. Rumbaut coined the term “one-and-a-half generation” to describe “children of Cuban exiles who were born in Cuba but have come of age in the United States” (1976:8). Thus the 1.5 generation immigrant youth constitutes children who were born in their country of origin but was raised and received the education and important experiences in the host country. Hence, the issue of identity becomes important for adolescents such as the 1.5 generation growing up in Diasporic settings. How they come to define who they are, their place in the world and others’ perception of them have significant implications for their successful integration into their new societies (Ogbuagu, 2013). This study takes a socio-cultural approach to investigating the identity negotiation and construction of 1.5 generation Congolese immigrant youth. Sociocultural linguistics refers to an interdisciplinary field which considers language as a sociocultural phenomenon; hence positioning identity as a phenomenon that is socially constructed through language and hence, performed within interaction and conversations.

The main a i m of this stud y is to contri bute t o the e x pl i cation of the central discourse notion , ' co herence ' , by comparing t he d e ns i ties of differen t te xtual features in more cohe rent a nd l e s s cohe rent studen t a c ademic writing . The l a tte r ty pe of writing i s defined as that sub-genre of e x posi t ory wr i ting tha t is required f rom studen ts in the study o f "co ntent " sub j ects , with composition writi ng e xcluded . A corpus o f studen t academ i c te x t s was assessed i mpressionistic al ly f or c ohere nce by three rater s, using Bamberg ' s Ho lis t i c Coherence Sca l e ( Bamberg 1983 ; 1984) as a gu id e , an d s o eac h t e x t ' s Holi stic Coherence Rat ing (HCR ) was der i v ed . The te x t ual fea tu r es investiga t ed are r e f erence and c onjuncti ve cohes i o n and errors in these domains, a n d also relat i onal coherence, th i s l atter term ref erring to the wa y s in whic h the funct i onal units of te x t cohere wit h one another in terms of binary r elation s (c f . Crombie 1985a; 1985 b) such as Reason-Res ult a nd Means- Purpose. One of the k e y bac kground assumptions of the study is that te xts are c ommunicati ve phenomena , and a f ter a cr i tical review of various approac hes t owards the e x p li cation of ' coherence ' in text l inguistics and in quanti t ative ( corpus-based) writing research, an a n al y t i cal f ramework is developed in which subcategories of reference and conjunctive cohesion, and errors in these domains, are defined not only formally, but also in terms of how they function in the conte x t of communication - with specific reference to the pragmatic conte x t of student academic writing . Relational coherence is also included i n this framework, and the study develops a measure for the quantification of the amount of relational coherence in a text - the Relational Coherence Quotient. Sample analyses demonstrating the application of the framework to the texts form part of the study. The main findings of the study are: that the application of the analytical framework identifies considerably more features that correlate significantly with Holistic Coherence Ratings than do two other quantitative writing research approaches; that the functionally defined features correlate more significantly with the HCR ' s than the formally defined features; and that the most strongly significant correlation with HCR ' s was revealed by relational coherence, as quantified by the Relational Coherence Quotient. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phil.(Linguistics)