Este trabalho, ao analisar a expressividade do substantivo em João Cabral de Melo Neto, objetiva contribuir para um ensino produtivo de língua materna ao conceber a gramática concretizada em textos. O substantivo, visto pela tradição gramatical dentro dos limites da morfologia e da sintaxe, passa a ser resgatado como elemento responsável e criador de uma cadeia referencial ao construir um determinado objeto de discurso conforme postulam os pressupostos da Linguística Textual. Sirvo-me disso para redimensionar a análise estilística a que me propus, observando a classe em questão, sobretudo, como fator estético responsável pela dicção nua e expressiva sobre a qual se debruçou o poeta. No labor de seu fazer poético, esteve avesso ao comum do gênero poesia: o apreço pela rima e pela musicalidade, a exploração de conotações abstratas, a imersão pelo interior, o ritmo métrico, a autoconfissão marcada pelo emprego da primeira pessoa do singular. Ao se distanciar de tal perspectiva, Cabral ganha notoriedade entre os modernistas atentos à liberdade de pensamento e expressão artística, bem como entre os poucos poetas brasileiros que conseguiram atingir singularidade ao produzir uma estética baseada no menos e na subtração das formas linguísticas, privilegiando um léxico mais concreto na fronteira com o abstrato, a opção pela macroestrutura descritiva na materialização da realidade exterior e a imersão pelo ritmo sintático sobreposto às sílabas métricas no rompimento entre as fronteiras da poesia e da prosa. Diante de tantos aspectos, detive-me na morfossintaxe do substantivo como recurso largamente aproveitado na tradução do pensamento obsessivo acerca dos canaviais pernambucanos e de bailadoras espanholas. Em O cão sem plumas (1950), privilegiei a figura do sujeito na condição de tópico informacional que coincide, no texto, com as funções formal, semântica e estilístico-discursiva. Em Uma faca só lâmina (1955), o substantivo é analisado sob a perspectiva das inversões, desmembrada na literatura linguística como hipérbato, anástrofe, sínquise e prolepse. Já em Quaderna (1959), última obra do corpus, selecionei oito poemas que tratam da mulher, algo incomum em Cabral, e dediquei-me ao estudo do substantivo como núcleo de sintagmas nominais ligados a sintagmas preposicionados no intuito de projetar, na inteireza, a caracterização do termo referente, contagiada pelas crenças e pelo olhar do poeta-enunciador / This dissertation, while analyzing the expressiveness of the noun in João Cabral de Melo Netos work, aims to contribute to a productive teaching of the mother tongue when it conceives grammar materialized in texts. The noun, as seen by traditional grammar within the limits of morphology and syntax is now perceived as a creative element of a referential net as it builds a determined discourse object, as postulated by the assumptions of Textual Linguistics. I assume this point of view to put the stylistic analysis into a new perspective. I aimed to develop, observing the word class in question, specially as an aesthetic factor responsible for the expressive naked diction which the poet look into. In his poetic labour, the poet was against the common poetic genre, the appreciation for the rhyme and musicality, the exploration of abstract connotations, the immersion in the individuals self , the metrics, the self-confession stressed by the usage of the first person singular. Getting far from this perspective, Cabral becomes notorious among the modernists that were attentive to the freedom of speech and of thought and to the artistic expression, as well as being one of the few to produce an aesthetics based on the less and on the subtraction of the linguistics forms, focusing on a more concrete lexicus in the border of the abstract, the option for the descriptive macro structure in the materialization of the exterior of reality and the immersion in the syntactic rhythm overlapping the metric syllables in the breakthrough of the frontiers between prose and poetry. All these things considered, I privileged the morphosyntax of the noun as a resource vastly appreciated when translating the obsessive thinking in regards to the sugar cane fields in Pernambuco and Spanish dancers. In A Dog Without Feathers (1950), I privileged the subject as an informative topic that coincides, in the text, with the formal, semantic and stylistic-discursive functions. In A Knife All Blade (1955), the noun is analyzed in the perspective of inversions, split in linguistics literature as hiperbaton, anastrophe, and procatalepsis, whereas in Quaderna (1959), the last work of the corpus, I selected nine poems that talk about women, something unusual in Cabrals work, and I focused on the study of the noun as a nuclei of noun phrases linked to prepositional phrases in order to project, in wholeness, the characterization of the referred term, infected by the beliefs and by the eye of the enunciator-poet

M.A. (African Languages) / Various sets of nouns have been established as noun classes in Setswana as well as in other African languages. Generally speaking, a class of nouns is made up of words that have a specific prefix and are in turn linked with a unique set of concords which are morphophonemically related to the prefix. Each class is regarded to contain nouns sharing certain semantic features. However, these semantic characteristics are by no means clear-cut for every class. The purpose of this study is to analyze the semantic characteristics of the noun classes of Setswana. An approach different from that which is customary in describing the semantics of noun classes will be followed, in that I will attempt to establish those semantic features which uniquely characterize each class and distinguish it from other classes rather to list the various types of nouns occurring in it. The concept "core meaning" will be employed in this. regard. (See Section 1.7). In this chapter an overview will be given of the numbering and grouping of noun classes in publications on Setswana (1.2.1) as well as the prefixal morphemes employed (1.2.3). This will be followed by a discussion of the views of different authors on the semantics of the noun classes of Setswana (1.3) and of Bantu languages in general (1.4), the relation between noun classes and number (1.5), and semantic typologies of noun classes that have been suggested (1.6). The chapter will be concluded with a restatement of the aim of the research and of the method followed. The arrangement of the chapters that follow, is eclectic. Where there is a fairly simple singular-plural relation between two semantically similar classes, they will be grouped together for the purpose of discussion. Cf. Chapter 2 (CI 1, Ia, 2 and 2a), Chapter 3 (CI 3 and 4), Chapter 4 (Cl 7 and 8) and Chapter 5 (CI 9 and 10). Classes 5, 11 and 14 are grouped into one chapter (Chapter 6) because of their complex number relation to plural classes. A special chapter (Chapter 7)...

This dissertation studies leftward dislocation of object Noun Phrases in Mandarin Chinese within the framework of Government and Binding theory. Although the canonical word order in Chinese is S(ubject)-V(erb)-O(bject), it also exhibits OSV and SOV word orders. After an introduction in Ch. 1, I discuss OSV constructions in Ch.2. I argue that the S-initial object NP is moved there, since its association with a gap in the canonical object position obeys the subjacency condition. Based on several diagnostic tests, I propose that Chinese has two kinds of short-distance NP fronting: one is A’-movement and the other is A-movement. Adopting the Split Infl Hypothesis, I postulate a fully articulated clause structure for Chinese. In particular, I propose that the fronted NP in A-movement lands in [Spec AgrOP] as a kind of overt raising, while the one in A’-movement further leaves that spec position and is CP-adjoined. I also examine long-distance NP fronting, showing that it is invariably A’-movement. In Ch. 3, I investigate object shift, which yields SOV constructions. I argue that this syntactic process represents a type of A-movement, not A’-movement as concluded in previous studies. Specifically, I propose that the subject NP and the object NP in this construction overtly raise to [Spec AgrSP] and [Spec AgrOP] respectively. In Ch.4, I examine the interactions between an object wh-NP and dou, the adverb of universal quantification. I propose that wh-phrases, like indefinites, can be either presuppositional or existential. If they are within VP (i.e. remain postverbal), they are subject to existential closure and get an existential/interrogative reading. If, however, they are outside VP (i.e. shifted to the left of dou), they define the range of the quantifier dou and obtain the presuppositional/universal reading. The conclusion is that there is a strict correlation between the S-structure positions of the wh-phrase and its interpretations. The exhaustive list reading of the in-situ wh-object associated with the interrogative reading is derived from the fact that it is in the scope of dou at S-structure. In Ch. 5, I summarize the major findings of this dissertation and raise several issues for future research. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

In this thesis, I investigate the distribution and function(s) of gender in Tunisian Arabic. Based on the observation that gender can ll multiple functions and hence receive different interpretations in TA, I consider gender in this language to be subject to contextual allosemy. Allosemy is the equivalent of conditioned allomorphy at the level of LF (Wood, 2012; Marantz, 2013; Wood and Marantz, 2017) and is de ned as a phenomenon in which a single morpheme can have multiple semantic realizations. My proposal is based on the observation that the interpretation of gender is conditioned by its syntactic environment, more speci fically, by the class of the base noun and the function and interpretation of any node or abstract morpheme (e.g., number) that is parasitic of the n head hosting the class feature. The current predominant view of gender in syntactic theory is that it has a nominalizing function (Lecarme, 2002; Kihm, 2005; Lowenstamm, 2008; Acquaviva, 2009; Kramer, 2009, 2014, 2015; Hammerly, 2018). According to this view, gender is hosted on the n head, which selects the root, and assigns it a nominal category (assuming DM). However, Arabic has other uses for the feminine gender, most of them associated with number. This, I argue, originates from the diachronic trajectory of the feminine a x -a in Proto-Semitic, where it started out as a nominalizer, then a singulative a x, then a group marker, before finally marking feminine gender (Hasselbach, 2014a,b; Dali and Mathieu, 2019a). These subsequent layers of meanings associated with what is now known as gender are all present in the synchronic picture of Arabic. Through an exhaustive inventory of data and diagnostics, I show that the role of gender is pervasive within the Tunisian Arabic DP, and is not limited to nominalization. To account for these facts, I propose that gender is distributed among the different functional heads of the DP: Num, Q, D (see also Farkas 1990; Ritter 1993; Giurgea 2008; Croitor and Giurgea 2009; Steriopolo and Wiltschko 2010; Fassi Fehri 2012, 2018b,a; Dali and Mathieu 2019a). The present thesis also focuses on plurals. I show that plural markers can also be distributed along the nominal spine (Acquaviva, 2008; Harbour, 2008; Wiltschko, 2008, 2012; Butler, 2012; Mathieu, 2012, 2013, 2014; Kramer, 2016), accounting for their di erent functions (e.g., classifying, grouping, counting). These different functions associated with Arabic plurals are, I argue, due to the existence of a singulative operator that is not limited to the collective system, but is pervasive in Tunisian Arabic, as I show. Finally, these observations all suggest that one and the same abstract morpheme (e.g., the feminine and the plural) can receive different interpretations depending on the base they attach to and on their syntactic level, which motivates the allosemic analysis put forward in this thesis.

Two experiments examined processing of "near-nonsense" noun-noun combinations (e.g., dictionary treatment, olive signals). In the first experiment, readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing such combinations, or control sentences containing easy-to-interpret adjective-noun combinations. A preceding context sentence either did or did not support a specific interpretation of the critical noun-noun combination. The earliest measures of processing difficulty were not modulated by the context manipulation, but on later measures, the potentially helpful context did alleviate difficulty. In the second experiment, participants provided detailed interpretations of the critical combinations, with and without the potentially helpful context sentence; the results confirmed that the context sentences encouraged specific interpretations of these combinations. The results suggest that a noun-noun combination is initially interpreted without taking into account the immediate context, but that this context may ultimately play a critical role.

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Specifications of digital hardware systems are typically written in a natural language. The objective of this research is automatic information extraction from specifications to aid model generation for system level design automation. This is done by automatic extraction of the noun phrases and the verbs from the natural language specification statements. First, the natural language sentences are parsed using a chart parser. Then, a noun phrase and verb extractor scans these charts to obtain the noun phrases with their frequencies of occurrence. The noun phrases are then classified by semantic types. Also the verbs are automatically assigned their respective roots and classified. Finally, each sentence is summarized as a sequence of "chunks": noun phrases, verbs and prepositions. Vectors are generated from these chunks and imported into MS Excel for plotting occurrence graphs of noun phrases and verbs with respect to the sentences in which they occur. Finally, inter-term dependencies between noun phrases, and between noun phrases and verbs were studied. The frequencies of occurrence, the classification of chunks, the occurrence graphs and the inter-term dependencies together give useful information about the subject, the hardware components and the behavior of a system described by a natural language specification document. / Master of Science

The objective of this research was to extract simple noun phrases from natural language texts using two different grammars: stochastic context-free grammar (SCFG) and non-statistical context free grammar (CFG). Precision and recall were calculated to determine how many precise and correct noun phrases were extracted using these two grammars. Several text files containing sentences from English natural language specifications were analyzed manually to obtain the test-set of simple noun-phrases. To obtain precision and recall, this test-set of manually extracted noun phrases was compared with the extracted-sets of noun phrases obtained using the both grammars SCFG and CFG. A probabilistic chart parser was developed by modifying a deterministic parallel chart parser. Extraction of simple noun-phrases with the SCFG was accomplished using this probabilistic chart parser, a dictionary containing word probabilities along with the meaning, context-free grammar rules associated with rule probabilities and finally an algorithm to extract most likely parses of a sentence. The probabilistic parsing algorithm and the algorithm to determine figures of merit were implemented using C++ programming language. / Master of Science

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Esta dissertação investiga nomes nus e classificadores numerais do chinês mandarim, assim como a distinção lexical entre nomes contáveis e massivos do chinês. O objetivo deste trabalho é estudar e avaliar as possíveis denotações dos nominais do chinês mandarim. O texto é divido em três partes. Na primeira, investigam-se nomes nus do chinês mandarim, que manifestam número geral. Defende-se que o número geral não ocorre em sintagmas nominais em que existe numeral. No Chinês mandarim, nomes nus podem ser interpretados como indefinidos, definidos e genéricos de acordo com suas posições sintáticas e contextos em que ocorrem. A hipótese defendida na segunda parte da dissertação é a de que, no chinês mandarim, há distinção lexical entre nomes contáveis e massivos. Um fator importante na distinção contável-massivo do chinês mandarim é a presença de classificadores e suas relações com os nomes. Defende-se que a combinação entre os nomes e os classificadores é seletiva e, com base nisso, os nomes comuns do chinês podem ser divididos em nomes contáveis, nomes massivos, nomes coletivos, nomes abstratos e nomes próprios. Além de classificador, mais uma evidência para a contabilidade dos nomes do chinês é o morfema men. A terceira parte da dissertação avalia a presença de classificador nos sintagmas nominais com numerais. Defende-se que diferentes grupos de classificadores possuem diferentes funções: classificadores individuais são marcadores gramaticais de contabilidade e não têm a função individualizadora e, os outros grupos têm suas restrições na combinação com os nomes. A combinação entre numeral e classificador pode ser tratada como um núcleo complexo que ocorre morfologicamente como um item lexical, mas o numeral pode-se omitir dentro deste complexo e classificador não. Sendo assim, Os classificadores devem ser tratados como um sufixo na sua ocorrência dentro do complexo [Num-CL], mas como um clítico em outras ocorrências. / This dissertation investigates bare nouns and numeral classifiers in Mandarin Chinese, as well as the lexical distinction between count and mass nouns of Chinese. The goal of this work is to study and assess the possible denotations of nominals in Mandarin Chinese. The dissertation is divided in three parts. In the first part, the bare nominals in Mandarin Chinese will be investigated and they have general number. We argue that the general number can not happen in noun phrases when they contain numerals. In Mandarin Chinese, the bare nouns can be interpreted as indefinites, definites and generics, according to their syntactic positions and contexts in that they happen. The hypothesis presented in the second part of this dissertation is that in Mandarin Chinese, there is the lexical distinction between count and mass nouns. One important factor in this count-mass distinction of Mandarin Chinese is the presence of classifiers and their relationships with the nouns. We argue that, based on the selective combination between names and classifiers, the common nouns of Chinese can be divided in count nouns, mass nouns, collective nouns, abstract nouns and proper nouns. Besides the classifier, one more evidence for the accounting of Chinese\'s names is the morpheme men. The third part of the dissertation assesses the classifiers presence in the noun phrases with numerals. We argue that, different groups of classifiers have different functions: the individual classifiers are grammatical markers of accounting and they do not have the individualizing function, while the other groups have their restrictions in the combination with the nouns. The combination between the numeral and the classifier can be treated as a complex head that happens morphologically as a lexical item, but the numeral in which can be omitted in some contexts and the classifier can not. Thus, the classifiers should be treated as a suffix in his occurrence with the complex [Num-CL], but as a clitic in other occurrences.