At least since the Neolithic, humans have largely lived in networks of small, traditional communities. Often socially isolated, these groups evolved distinct languages and cultures over microgeographic scales of just tens of kilometers. Population genetic theory tells us that genetic drift should act quickly in such isolated groups, thus raising the question: do networks of small human communitiesmaintain levels of genetic diversity over microgeographic scales? This question can no longer be asked in most parts of the world, which have been heavily impacted by historical events that make traditional society structures the exception. However, such studies remain possible in parts of Island Southeast Asia and Oceania, where traditional ways of life are still practiced. We captured genome-wide genetic data, together with linguistic records, for a case-study system-eight villages distributed across Sumba, a small, remote island in eastern Indonesia. More than 4,000 years after these communities were established during the Neolithic period, most speak different languages and can be distinguished genetically. Yet their nuclear diversity is not reduced, instead being comparable to other, evenmuch larger, regional groups. Modeling reveals a separation of time scales: while languages and culture can evolve quickly, creating social barriers, sporadic migration averaged over many generations is sufficient to keep villages linked genetically. This loosely-connected network structure, once the global norm and still extant on Sumba today, provides a living proxy to explore fine-scale genome dynamics in the sort of small traditional communities within which the most recent episodes of human evolution occurred.

El presente proyecto de investigación aborda la traducción de la variación lingüística, enfocándose específicamente, en los idiolectos y sociolectos de Ron Woodroof y Rayon, los dos personajes principales de la película Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013) cuyas diversidades lingüísticas construyen su identidad y caracterizan su comunicación. Al ambientarse en el estado sureño de Texas, es posible evidenciar un marcado dialecto sureño de clase baja por parte de Ron y un sociolecto propio de una clase social más alta por parte de Rayon. Esta investigación pretende analizar cómo se han traducido los aspectos lingüísticos individuales del idiolecto de estos personajes en la subtitulación y el doblaje al español latinoamericano del filme con el fin de reconocer las técnicas de traducción empleadas, que homogenizan los rasgos sociolectales de ambos personajes en la lengua meta. Es preciso partir de la noción de traducción restringida para identificar los aspectos que condicionan el trabajo de un traductor audiovisual y que le impiden lograr una equivalencia dinámica con el texto fuente (Mayoral, Kelly & Gallardo, 1988). Asimismo, en Dallas Buyers Club, la presencia del inglés sureño y sus matices lingüísticos son aspectos relevantes para la narración audiovisual, cuya carga connotativa se neutralizaría en el doblaje, al igual que sus características gramaticales en la subtitulación. / This study addresses the translation of linguistic variation, focusing on the idiolects and sociolects of Ron Woodroof and Rayon, the two main characters of Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013) whose linguistic diversities construct their identity and characterize their communication. Set in the southern state of Texas, it is possible to identify a noticeable southern dialect on Ron’s side and a higher social class sociolect on Rayon’s. This research aims to analyze how the individual linguistic aspects of these characters’ idiolect were translated in the Latin American dubbed and subtitled version of the film in order to recognize the translation techniques employed, which reached a standardized conception of both characters in the target language. It is accurate to start from the notion of constrained translation as well as the aspects that condition the work of an audiovisual translator and prevent him or her from achieving a dynamic equivalence regarding the source text (Mayoral, Kelly & Gallardo, 1988). Likewise, in Dallas Buyers Club, the presence of South American English and its linguistic nuances are important aspects whose connotative meaning is neutralized in dubbing as well as its grammatical characteristics in subtitling. / Trabajo de investigación

More and more institutes and health agencies choose knowledge graphs over traditional relational databases to store semantic data. The knowledge graphs, using some form of ontology as a framework, can store domain-specific information and derive new knowledge using a reasoner. However, much of the data that must be moved to the graphs is either inside a relational database, or inside a semi-structured report. While there has been much progress in developing tools that export data from relational databases to graphs, there is a lack of progress in semantic extraction from domain-specific unstructured texts. In this thesis, a system architecture is proposed for semantic extraction from semi-structured legacy surveillance reports of infectious diseases in animals and humans in Sweden. The results were mostly positive since the system could identify 17 out of the 20 different types of relations.

Le langage n'est pas seulement une matière de communication ou de description, c'est aussi une représentation dans l'esprit du destinataire. Il génère des connaissances, et en modifie les symboles. C'est un outil de description et de création. Les institutions construisent aussi des réalités. La causalité présente aussi ces qualités. Elle s'applique aux "micro" et aux "macro" phénomènes, au concret, à l'abstrait. Elle a linguistiquement, les propriétés de compositionnalité, d'holisme, d'ancrage dans le réel, de prévisibilité expérimentale. Une double description en découle: c'est un lien entre cause et effet, et entre prémisses et conclusion argumentatives. Elle subsume la multiplicité des situations, des conceptions théoriques, des interprétations. Mais l'argumentation est par excellence le discours de la vraisemblance rhétorique. Cette thèse décrit si et comment le discours argumentatif est convaincant avec la cause. Une hypothèse théorique est proposée, des conceptions épistémologiques, psycholinguistiques et pragmatiques, pour décrire de plus près le mécanisme de basculement de la cause de re vers la cause de dicto. Une situation «idéale» est modélisée, une circularité spirale est constatée, au niveau des valeurs individuelles et collectives, elles-mêmes véhiculées par les constituants linguistiques de l'échange verbal. Plusieurs fils réflexifs en découlent, dont l'analyse grammaticale scolaire. / Language is not only a mater of communication or description, it’s also representations in the recipient’s mind. It generates an environment of knowledges, and modifies symbols. There is a switchover comes from the descriptive function to a creative one. Institutions build realities too. Causality is a way of creating both realities and flexible knowledges. It applies to micro/macro phenomena, concrete and abstract things. Linguistically it is compositional as much as holistic. Two properties are essential : anchoring in the real and robust predictability. A double description derives of this : cause is a link between cause and effect, and also between premises ans conclusion in argumentation. It is caracterised by multiplicity of situations, of theoretical conceptions, interpretations. But argumentation precisely presents a such plurality : the rhetoric discourse which it belongs, being dedicated to the likelihood. This thesis describes whether and how the argumentative discourse is convincing from the standpoint of the cause. A theoretical hypothesis is proposed, based on epistemological, psycho-linguistic, pragmatic conceptions, to describe more closely the mechanism of "tipping" of the cause de re to the cause de dicto. An "ideal" situation is proposed, a spiral circularity, at the level of individual and collective values, themselves conveyed by the linguistic, constituents of the verbal exchange. Several approaches is proposed of language in French, especially in school grammar analysis.

Thesis (M. Sc. (Computer Science)) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / The pronunciation of words and phrases in any language involves careful manipulation of linguistic features. Factors such as age, motivation, accent, phonetics, stress and intonation sometimes cause a problem of inappropriate or incorrect pronunciation of words from non-native languages. Pronunciation of words using different phonological rules has a tendency of changing the meaning of those words. This study presents the development of an automatic pronunciation assistant system for under-resourced languages of Limpopo Province, namely, Sepedi, Xitsonga, Tshivenda and isiNdebele. The aim of the proposed system is to help non-native speakers to learn appropriate and correct pronunciation of words/phrases in these under-resourced languages. The system is composed of a language identification module on the front-end side and a speech synthesis module on the back-end side. A support vector machine was compared to the baseline multinomial naive Bayes to build the language identification module. The language identification phase performs supervised multiclass text classification to predict a person’s first language based on input text before the speech synthesis phase continues with pronunciation issues using the identified language. The speech synthesis on the back-end phase is composed of four baseline text-to-speech synthesis systems in selected target languages. These text-to-speech synthesis systems were based on the hidden Markov model method of development. Subjective listening tests were conducted to evaluate the performance of the quality of the synthesised speech using a mean opinion score test. The mean opinion score test obtained good performance results on all targeted languages for naturalness, pronunciation, pleasantness, understandability, intelligibility, overall quality of the system and user acceptance. The developed system has been implemented on a “real-live” production web-server for performance evaluation and stability testing using live data.

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This study is an examination of how a word’s syntactic category, word length, and usage frequency might impact a speaker’s use of communicative pause. Previously collected between and within utterance language samples from 21 people with aphasia (Harmon, 2018) were evaluated in this study. Participants consisted of 11 individuals diagnosed with mild or very mild aphasia and 10 individuals with moderate aphasia;15 who exhibited fluent subtypes and 6 non-fluent subtypes of aphasia. Data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used to code the word frequency and syntactic category of each word in the language samples. Generally, speakers with both non-fluent and fluent aphasia produced more monosyllabic words of very high frequency with a greater percentage of function words than content words. Analyses revealed no significant correlations between the pause duration for either the word length or word frequency for either group of speakers. In relation to syntactic category, no significant differences in pause duration were found between content and function words in the between utterance condition. However, non-fluent speakers preceded content words with significantly shorter pause durations within utterances when compared with the function words. Due to differences in sample sizes between the speaker and syntactic groups, non-parametric statistics were used for some comparisons. In addition, this study does not fully account for the influence of fillers and incomplete words. Despite these limitations, this study will contribute to the research regarding communicative speech pause in speakers with aphasia and provide insight into more useful diagnostic and treatment strategies.

This study investigates how migration to Ghana affects the language use and language choice of East African migrant students and workers in specific domains. The study explores strategies employed by these migrants to negotiate challenges encountered during communication in selected linguistic spaces to meet their socioeconomic needs in Ghana. The paper also aims to explore the effect of migration on their language use both in Ghana and their home countries. Specific linguistic spaces considered include residential, work/campus, and market environments. The main findings of the study show that due to the completely different linguistic landscape in Ghana, migration compels East African migrant students and workers to use English or learn Ghanaian local languages, especially, in domains such as their places of residence, work/campus and the market place, rather than their preferred language choice, which would be Kiswahili. Particularly, to negotiate in communicative situations at the market places, they usually have to resort to strategies such as soliciting interpretation assistance from local people and/or using signs and body gestures.

In the present paper the focus is put on the strategies of rendering the names of the Supreme God of Israel in Biblia Hebraica in Bantu languages. The data from 3 Swahili versions and a Zulu version of the Bible is examined, with some additions from the Dabida version. Different names of the Supreme God are used in the canonical text. The two principal names are YHWH and ’elohim. Since the period of the Second Temple it has been forbidden to pronounce YHWH, the proper name of the God of Israel. The Hebrew tradition (known as qere-ketiv) preserved the writing of the four letters of this name YHWH, but it was to be read as ’adonay (‘Lord’ in Hebrew), or as ’elohim (‘God’ in Hebrew) in certain cases. In biblical and religious texts in different languages (but not in Hebrew) the Tetragrammaton YHWH is sometimes rendered as Yahveh or Yehovah (with some orthographic variants). This situation is examined in our paper, as well as the ways of rendering the Hebrew lexeme tseva’ot. Special attention is paid to the usage of the name Allah as the name of the Only Supreme God corresponding to the Hebrew name ’elohim. The crucial issue of correlation between the binary masculine/feminine gender system in Biblical Hebrew, on the one hand, and the noun class system in Bantu languages, on the other, is discussed in the final part of the paper.

It has been suggested recently that Heidegger's philosophy entails a linguistic idealism because it is committed to the thesis that meaning determines reference. I argue that a careful consideration of the relationship between meaning and signification in Heidegger's work does not support the strong sense of determination required by this thesis. By examining Heidegger's development of Husserl's phenomenology, I show that discourse involves a logic that articulates meaning into significations. Further analysis of Heidegger's phenomenological method at work shows that while meaning serves as a condition of possibility of signification in the sense that all possibilities for a term's signification are latent in the meaning of that term, meaning under-determines signification and hence reference.