<div>Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity is a topic that has received considerable attention in various fields of applied linguistics, such as English for academic purposes, second language acquisition, language testing, and second language writing (Bulté & Housen, 2012). Many scholars in applied linguistics have recently argued that grammatical complexity has primarily been represented by clausal features (e.g., subordinate clauses), and it is important to study grammatical complexity as a multidimensional construct based on both clausal features and phrasal features (Biber, Gray & Poonpon, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009). Thus, this dissertation is a corpus-based investigation on how the use of noun phrases is influenced by two situational characteristics of a university context: academic level and first- and second-English language background.</div><div><br></div><div>I built my corpus by extracting 200 essays from British Academic Written English Corpus, which represents academic writing of (1) undergraduate and graduate students and (2) L1 and L2 students. Noun phrase complexity was then operationalized to the 11 noun modifiers proposed in the hypothesized developmental index of writing complexity features in Biber, Gray and Poonpon (2011). The 11 noun modifiers were extracted from the corpus and counted for statistical analysis via a set of Python programs. With a Chi-square test followed by a residual analysis, I found that both academic level and first- and second-English language background influenced noun phrase complexity but in distinct ways. The influence of academic level is primarily associated with three phrasal modifiers (i.e., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and appositive NPs) and two clausal modifiers (i.e., relative clauses and noun complement clauses). The undergraduate corpus includes more of the two clausal modifiers, whereas the graduate corpus has more of the three phrasal modifiers. This suggests that, in these 200 essays, graduate students tend to build more compressed NPs than undergraduate students. However, the influence of first- and second-English language background derives from a much broader range of noun modifiers, including eight noun modifiers (e.g., attributive adjectives, relative clauses, infinitive clauses). More diverse NP patterns with different noun modifiers are in the L1 corpus than in the L2 corpus. Surprisingly, the L2 corpus has more phrasal noun modifiers (i.e., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns), which has been argued to indicate advanced levels of academic writing. A qualitative analysis on selected essays reveals that some cases of attributive adjectives and premodifying nouns are repeatedly used by L2 students to help content development in their writing. Overall, this dissertation adds an additional piece of evidence on the importance of noun phrase complexity in writing research.</div><div><br></div>

This small-scale study examines the translation of a text about perfumes, focusing on how hyphenated premodifiers in the English source text were translated into Swedish. A quantitative analysis was carried out, where the various premodifying structures present in the source text were identified and categorized according to their individual constituents and frequencies of the various categories were calculated. A similar analysis was also performed regarding the corresponding structures found in the Swedish target text. The results were then compared to and contrasted with other recent studies. In the qualitative analysis, individual examples from the text were analysed more in depth, and the consequences of the translation choices made were discussed. The results demonstrated that English hyphenated premodifiers showed a great deal of structural variety. The most frequent structures were nouns occurring in the left-hand position and ed-participles occurring the right-hand position. A large majority of the hyphenated premodifiers were short, with only 5.5% consisting of three words or more. The results also showed that the most frequent corresponding structure in the Swedish target text were compound adjectives, which comprised 48.1% of all examples. The results of the qualitative analysis pointed at a tendency towards explication, especially when hyphenated premodifiers were restructured to postmodifying phrases and clauses. Furthermore, a tendency to simplify the hyphenated modifiers during the translation process was noted, especially when translating longer, phrasal modifiers. It was noted that many hyphenated premodifiers in the ST were metaphorical in nature. This was sometimes, but not always, also the case in the corresponding TT phrases.

In this thesis we focus on singulatives, which, according to S. Bevzenko, are most common in the Ukrainian language. In the study, we analyzed many meanings of the term singulative from different linguists and chose version of V. Musatov, which, in our opinion, is the most accurate. The theoretical part is dedicated to general information about singulatives, their presence and meaning in Slavic languages as well as classifications, by which researchers divide these nouns. The general stylistic characteristic of singulatives in Russian, where these nouns are investigated in more detail, is also presented in this part. In the practical part with the use of Hrinchenko's "Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language" (1907 - 1909), "Dictionary of the Ukrainian language" in eleven volumes (1970 - 1980) and the academic "Great explanatory dictionary of Modern Ukrainian language" (2009) we research singulatives in the Ukrainian language, including changing or preserving their lexical meanings and stylistic markings during 1909 - 2009, as well as their use in fiction and folklore. Key words: singulative, the Ukrainian language, word formation, noun, connotation

The past century has brought with it many changes to the English language. One of these is the drastic increase in complex nominal phrases, particularly premodifiers. This implies difficulties for translators, whose target languages may not have evolved in the same way, and who must then find other solutions. The aim of this essay is to investigate which kind of premodifier is most frequent in an academic text in English, and how the different kinds of premodifiers are translated into Swedish. Since the language pairs share many similarities, it was expected that many of the shorter premodifiers will keep their structure when translated. However, since Swedish cannot recreate the longer and more complex noun phrases, nor add multiple noun premodifiers in succession, it is also expected that several of the English premodifiers will be restructured into other constructions.The results show that the majority of the adjective/participial premodifiers kept their structure when translated into Swedish, and the tendency to restructure them into postmodifiers was low. Noun premodifiers were more likely to be restructured into postmodifiers, especially when they were more complex, though most of the noun premodifiers were restructured into compound nouns. The hyphenated premodifiers were the most likely to be restructured into different constructions, especially postmodifiers.In conclusion, since Swedish and English are similar in structure, many of the premodifiers were quite straightforward in translation, but several, especially longer and more complex noun phrases, can pose problems for a translator.

The identification of complex grammatical structures including noun clauses is of clinical importance because differences in the use of these structures have been found between individuals with and without language impairment. In recent years, computer software has been used to assist in analyzing clinical language samples. However, this software has been unable to accurately identify complex syntactic structures such as noun clauses. The present study investigated the accuracy of new software, called Cx, in identifying finite wh- and that-noun clauses. Two sets of language samples were used. One set included 10 children with language impairment, 10 age-matched peers, and 10 language-matched peers. The second set included 40 adults with mental retardation. Levels of agreement between computerized and manual analysis were similar for both sets of language samples; Kappa levels were high for wh-noun clauses and very low for that-noun clauses.

Noun clauses are grammatical constructions that are of relevance both to typical language development and impaired language development. These clauses have been part of published techniques for the clinical analysis of language samples, and computer software for the automated analysis of clinical language samples has attempted to identify noun clauses, with limited success. The present study examined the development and clinical use of noun clauses as well as the automated identification of these clauses. Two sets of language samples were examined. One set consisted of 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI) whose age ranged from 7;6 to 11;1 (years;months), 10 peers matched for language development equivalence, and 10 peers matched for chronological age. The second set of samples were from 30 children considered to be typically developing, who ranged in age from 2;6 to 7;11. Language sample utterances were manually coded for the presence of noun clauses (including wh- noun clauses, that- noun clauses, and gerunds.) Samples were then automatically tagged using software. Results were tabulated and compared for accuracy. ANCOVA revealed that differences in the frequencies of WH-infinitive noun clauses and gerunds were significant between the matched groups. "Zero that clauses" (that-noun clauses containing no subordinator that) and gerunds were significantly correlated with age. Kappa levels revealed that agreement between manual and automated coding was high on WH-infinitive clauses, gerunds, and finite wh-noun clauses.

In this paper we refuse the generalized idea within linguists working on Spanish word formation that compounds with a verbal element in Spanish language are nouns. Based on different criteria (morphological, syntactic and semantic) and attending the evolution of Spanish language, we like to show in contrast that these formations are adjectives.

What explains the shape of Zauzou noun phrases? Zauzou (Trans-Himalayan, China) noun phrases exhibit considerable diversity in both the choice of the phrase's primary reference type, and the presence of classifiers, demonstratives, modifiers, and case marking. This investigation uses a large, previously existing Zauzou textual corpus. The corpus was annotated for variables hypothesized to predict the variation in noun phrase form. Syntactic variables investigated include word order, subordination, subordinate role, and a new variable called "loneliness." Participant semantic variables include thematic role, agency, and affectedness. Referential semantic variables include boundedness, number, and animacy. The information packaging variable investigated is accessibility. Statistical analysis of the corpus revealed that case marking was predicted using a variable called "loneliness." This is where a multivalent verb has only one argument that is explicitly referenced in the clause. Lonely noun phrases are more likely to be case marked. The role of loneliness in motivating case marking confirms that disambiguation can be an explanation for differential case marking. Animacy and accessibility are important predictors of noun phrase weight. Overall, high animacy and high accessibility correspond to reduced noun phrase weight. Agency and thematic role were also significant variables. The Zauzou data makes clear that speech act participants occupy a unique role in the animacy hierarchy. Speech act participants are often unexpectedly light upon first mention, being referred to with a pronoun or zero anaphor. They are often unexpectedly heavy while highly activated, remaining a pronoun instead of reducing to a zero anaphor. Zauzou, like Mandarin and Cantonese, allows classifiers to be used with a noun but without a numeral. In Mandarin, this construction is used only with new or generic noun phrases. In Cantonese, this construction can be used with noun phrases of any accessibility value. Zauzou occupies a unique intermediate position. In Zauzou, a noun with bare noun phrase can occur with new or old noun phrases, but rarely with active ones. This thesis provides evidence for the importance of text corpora. Using a corpus allowed for the simultaneous inclusion of many variables as well as the consideration of genre effects. In addition, the annotated corpus produced in this investigation is an important output; it is available in the supplemental materials accompanying this thesis.

This study examines German noun compounds and their translations into Swedish. The aim of the study is to investigate to what extent the nominal compounds of the source text are translated with the same structure in the target text, and what consequences possible paraphrases could have for the target text. The first part of the analysis focuses on how the first constituent of the nominal compound and the complexity of the nominal compound affect the translation strategies. The second part examines ad-hoc compounds and how they are translated from German into Swedish. The material for the study comes from the article “Gesichter der Großstadt“ that appeared in the history magazine Geo Epoche 2021. The analysis was carried out on both a quantitative and a qualitative level.           The quantitative result shows that about 62 % of the source text noun compounds were translated with the same structure in the target language. However, in over a third of the cases, the noun compounds were translated with other structures. The translation strategy “nominal phrase with different attributes” was the second most used translation strategy with about 17 %, and the translation strategy “reduction” was the third most used strategy with about 15 %. However, these strategies were used much more frequently in the translation of complex nominal compounds and ad hoc compounds. This suggests that factors such as complexity and occurrence of a nominal compound affect the translation strategy.

This paper aims to investigate whether language use can account for the differences in code-switching within the article-noun phrase in children exposed to English and German, French and Russian, and English and Polish. It investigates two aspects of language use: equivalence and segmentation. Four children’s speech is derived from corpora of naturalistic interactions recorded between the ages of two and three and used as a source of the children’s article-noun phrases. We demonstrate that children’s CS cannot be fully explained by structural equivalence in each two languages: there is CS in French-Russian although French does, and Russian does not, use articles. We also demonstrate that language pairs which use higher numbers of articles types, and therefore have more segmented article-noun phrases, are also more open to switching. Lastly, we show that longitudinal use of monolingual articles-noun phrases corresponds with the trends in the use of bilingual article-noun phrases. The German-English child only starts to mix English articles once they become more established in monolingual combinations while the French-Russian child ceases to mix French proto-articles with Russian nouns once target articles enter frequent use. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies which report code-switching across different language pairs.