Cette thèse doctorale, qui prend la forme de quatre articles, est une étude corrélationnelle mettant en relation le raisonnement moral et la légitimation des dynamiques d’intimidation par les pairs chez des adolescents de 3ème secondaire. L’objectif principal poursuivi était d’examiner la contribution de la désensibilisation morale aux conduites adoptées par les adolescents lors d’incidents d’intimidation à l’école. L’objectif secondaire était d’examiner l’importance accordée respectivement à des standards de conduite issus des domaines moral, conventionnel et personnel chez les adolescents impliqués dans des incidents d’intimidation. Le premier article expose la problématique de la légitimation des dynamiques d’intimidation par les jeunes en faisant état des croyances normatives et des caractéristiques des environnements scolaires qui y sont associées. L’article discute de l’écart qui s’observe entre l’opposition affirmée de la majorité des adolescents face aux conduites d’intimidation et leur récurrence dans les milieux scolaires et vient compléter une première section décrivant les conséquences de l’intimidation pour les communautés scolaires. Le deuxième article s’inscrit dans le cadre théorique de cette thèse et fait état des connaissances sur le raisonnement moral des élèves impliqués dans des dynamiques d’intimidation. Il présente une explication des conduites d’intimidation dans la perspective de la théorie des domaines de la connaissance sociale et dans celle de la théorie de l’agentivité morale. Ces approches ont été retenues pour opérationnaliser le concept de désensibilisation morale afin de rencontrer les objectifs de recherche poursuivis. Le troisième article rapporte la démarche utilisée pour vérifier l’hypothèse d’une relation positive entre les conduites d’intimidation et l’acceptabilité d’incidents d’intimidation hypothétiques, de même que l’hypothèse d’une relation positive entre les conduites d’intimidation et le désengagement moral chez les adolescents impliqués. Le quatrième article rapporte la démarche utilisée pour examiner les justifications sociomorales émises par différents profils d’adolescents impliqués dans des incidents d’intimidation de façon à associer leur conduite avec les domaines de connaissances normatives auxquels se rattachent leurs justifications. Les résultats obtenus sont ensuite discutés au chapitre suivant afin de mettre en évidence la contribution de chacune des approches morales retenues à l’explication des conduites en contexte d’intimidation et les caractéristiques du raisonnement moral associées aux rôles adoptés et des pistes d’intervention sont offertes. Finalement, cette thèse doctorale conclue que seul le niveau moyen de désengagement moral, un indice global de l’adhésion à des croyances normatives antisociales, contribue statistiquement à l’explication des conduites adoptées lors d’incident d’intimidation au-delà du sexe des participants. Quant au raisonnement sociomoral, il informe davantage sur la façon dont les circonstances d’incidents d’intimidation sont reliées à la désensibilisation morale des jeunes impliqués. Les adolescents qui prennent activement la défense de pairs intimidés étaient caractérisés par un raisonnement moral plus uniforme, tandis que le raisonnement des élèves qui intimident et de ceux qui demeurent passifs était caractérisé par la subordination de principes moraux, respectivement en faveur d’impératifs à caractère conventionnel et d’impératifs à caractère personnel. / This doctoral thesis, presented as four scientific articles, is a correlational study about moral reasoning and the legitimization of school bullying in third-year high school students. The primary objective was to investigate the contribution of moral disinhibition to the bullying incident roles adopted by teenagers. The secondary objective was to investigate the relative importance given to moral, conventional, and personal standards of conduct in students involved in bullying incidents. The first article acknowledges the problem that is the legitimization of bullying conducts by school communities and exposes related normative beliefs and school environment characteristics. It mainly discusses the gap between the vocal opposition to bullying conducts shown by most students and the occurrence of bullying incidents in schools. This completes a section exposing the consequences associated with bullying. The second article reviews recent literature about moral reasoning and its link to bulling incident roles. It also gives an explanation of bullying conducts from the viewpoints of the social domains theory and of the sociocognitive theory of moral agentivity. These theoretical paradigms were used in operationalizing the concept of moral disinhibition in order to meet study goals. The third article reports on the methodology used in order to verify the hypothesis of a positive relation between bullying conducts and acceptability of hypothetical bullying incidents, as well as the hypothesis of a positive relation between bullying conducts and moral disengagement in involved adolescents. The forth article reports on the methodology used in the investigation of sociomoral justifications from adolescents adopting different bullying incident roles in order to ascertain the relation between their conduct and the social domains from which stem their justifications. Results are discussed as to show the contribution of each approach to the explanation of bullying incident roles and the moral reasoning characteristics related to each role. Intervention guidelines are proposed as well. This doctoral thesis concludes that only moral disengagement mean scores, which work as a global indication of antisocial normative beliefs, explain bullying incident roles beyond participants’ gender. Sociomoral reasoning is better suited to understanding how bullying incidents’ characteristics promote moral disinhibition. Actively defending bullied peers wad linked to more uniform moral reasoning. On the other hand, bullying and pro-bullying conducts were linked to moral subordination in favor of conventional standards of conduct, and passive bystanding was linked to moral subordination in favor of personal standards of conducts.

This case study explored the process of incorporating human rights into the operation of an international commercial organisation. Constructing a dialogue to bridge the gap between human rights discourse and commercial realities, this case study identified the unique roles required to develop dialogue and created a model as a diagnostic and educational tool. The roles specific to human rights consulting, of interpreter, Champoin and Enabler afforded effective penetration into the participating industry partner's operational levels. These roles emerged from the process of constructing a human rights discourse and tensions therein where the existing theory of organisational change and consulting was found to be inadequate for human rights intervention. Based on the data of industry partner's existing practices and human rights concerns and on the process of collecting and analysing this data, the model for education and implementation was constructed. It is a flexible tool for examining human rights practices from bottom up as well as top down of an organisation. This research showed that having a comprehensive picture of the complexities involved sas an effective method of exploration and making sense of human rights education and implementation in a multinational industrial setting. The construction of the roles and of the model relied on the central premise of willingness of a multinational corporation to examine its practices and take an autonomous position of corporate citizenship and responsibility. This was consistent with the participatory research design of the study. Theretically this research challenges the appropriateness of traditional organisational change concepts when dealing with human rights; provides a diagnostic and educational tool for human rights consulting; and points to further research in this area.

Abstract My thesis discusses the semantic and syntactic properties of Finnish verbless expressions of events in the light of two examples, the SOURCE construction (e.g. Oikeusasiamieheltä huomautus lit. ‘From the ombudsman a complaint’) and the GOAL construction (e.g. Pakistanille rangaistus lit. ‘For Pakistan a punishment’). I show that they express dynamic events in a way comparable to finite constructions. However, they are not elliptic structures but genuinely verbless constructions. The study is founded on Cognitive Construction Grammar and frame semantics, and the analysis is based on two types of data and two methods. First, I collected three sets of 500 newspaper headlines mostly from the Finnish Language Bank (the SOURCE construction, the GOAL construction, and several different verbless constructions), and analyzed them intuitively. Second, I collected paraphrases of 15 instances of the SOURCE construction and 20 instances of the GOAL construction in order to obtain information on how other native speakers of Finnish construe the data which I analyzed intuitively by myself. As a result of this experimental semantic test, I had 169–215 paraphrases per instance of the SOURCE construction and 133–165 paraphrases per instance of the GOAL construction. I then analyzed these paraphrases both semantically and syntactically. The thesis comprises four articles. In the article A case in search of an independent life: The semantics of the initial allative in a Finnish verbless construction, I show that the GOAL construction is polysemous and define eight senses for it. With the help of the established senses, I also justify analyzing the construction as an independent argument structure construction and not as an elliptic structure. The article Elävä LÄHDE: Alkuasemaisen ablatiivin merkitystyypit verbittömässä konstruktiossa is a similar treatment of the SOURCE construction for which I define four senses. In the article Mihin verbittömien konstruktioiden merkitystyypit perustuvat? Skemaattiset ja polyseemiset tapahtumanilmaukset, I connect the previous results explicitly with my theoretical framework. I provide an explanation for these constructions’ polysemy and mechanisms of expressing events. Usually, both of these properties of argument structure constructions are associated with verbs. In the joint article Semantic roles and verbless constructions: A Finnish challenge for verb-centered approaches written with Seppo Kittilä, the discussion is extended to cover also other Finnish verbless constructions. The article provides a more theoretical perspective on the topic: we link the dynamic meanings of the constructions to the concept of semantic roles and argue for the view that the concept should be divided into the concepts of argument roles and participant roles. / Tiivistelmä Käsittelen tutkimuksessani suomen kielen verbittömien tapahtumanilmausten semanttisia ja syntaktisia ominaisuuksia kahden esimerkkitapauksen avulla: LÄHDE-konstruktion (esim. Oikeusasiamieheltä huomautus) ja KOHDE-konstruktion (esim. Pakistanille rangaistus). Osoitan, että ne ilmaisevat dynaamisia tapahtumia siinä missä verbilliset konstruktiotkin mutta eivät kuitenkaan ole elliptisiä rakenteita vaan aidosti verbittömiä. Tutkimukseni rakentuu kognitiivisen konstruktiokieliopin ja kehyssemantiikan sekä kahdenlaisen aineiston ja menetelmän varaan. Ensinnäkin koostin pääasiassa Kielipankin osakokoelmista mutta osin myös muista lähteistä kolme 500 otsikon kokoista toteutuma-aineistoa (LÄHDE-konstruktio, KOHDE-konstruktio ja useat erilaiset verbittömät konstruktiot). Niiden analyysi perustuu intuitiiviseen semanttiseen luokitteluun. LÄHDE- ja KOHDE-konstruktiosta käytössäni olivat lisäksi kokeellisen semantiikan tuottamat parafraasiaineistot: selvitin, miten koehenkilöt tulkitsevat 15 LÄHDE-konstruktion ja 20 KOHDE-konstruktion intuitiivisesti analysoimaani toteutumaa. LÄHDE-konstruktion testi tuotti 169–215 parafraasia otsikkoa kohden, KOHDE-konstruktion 133–165. Analysoin ne sekä semanttisesti että syntaktisesti. Tutkimukseni koostuu neljästä artikkelista. Artikkelissa A case in search of an independent life. The semantics of the initial allative in a Finnish verbless construction esitän, että KOHDE-konstruktio on polyseeminen. Määrittelen sille kahdeksan merkitystyyppiä, joiden avulla myös perustelen, miksi kyseessä on itsenäinen argumenttirakennekonstruktio eikä elliptinen rakenne. Artikkelissa Elävä LÄHDE. Alkuasemaisen ablatiivin merkitystyypit verbittömässä konstruktiossa käsittelen vastaavasti LÄHDE-konstruktiota, jolle määrittelen neljä merkitystyyppiä. Artikkelissa Mihin verbittömien konstruktioiden merkitystyypit perustuvat? Skemaattiset ja polyseemiset tapahtumanilmaukset kytken tulokset selvemmin teoreettiseen viitekehykseeni. Selitän, miksi tarkastelemani konstruktiot ilmaisevat tapahtumia ja ovat polyseemisia, vaikka niissä ei ole verbiä, johon sekä tapahtuman ilmaiseminen että argumenttirakennekonstruktion polyseemisyys yleensä yhdistetään. Seppo Kittilän kanssa kirjoittamassani yhteisartikkelissa Semantic roles and verbless constructions. A Finnish challenge for verb-centered approaches laajennamme suomen verbittömien konstruktioiden tarkastelun LÄHDE- ja KOHDE-konstruktion ulkopuolelle ja yhä teoreettisemmalle tasolle. Liitämme verbittömien konstruktioiden tapahtumamerkitykset semanttisen roolin käsitteeseen sekä perustelemme, miksi se pitäisi jakaa argumentti- ja osallistujaroolin käsitteiksi.

本論文旨在探討近義詞的相關議題，特別是要檢視其背後的概念結構與表層的語法功能。透過「方便」與「便利」的研究，本文就這對近義詞在語意上的差異做深入並有系統地分析，並期以此解釋他們在語法層次上不同的表現。 　　以框架語意學(Frame Semantics)為理論架構，本研究發現近義詞「方便」與「便利」會引導出「方便框架」(CONVENIENCE frame)與「不方便框架」 (INCONVENIENCE frame)，而這兩個語意框架雖有相對應的框架成分(frame element)，實質上卻是引發出不同的概念型態。近一步說明這對近義詞在語意上的差別，「方便」與「便利」對於他們所涉入的複雜事件(complex event)持不同的觀點：「方便」主要是專注在結果次事件(result-subevent)並採受恩者(BENEFICIARY)的觀點；而「便利」則較專注在原因次事件(cause-subevent)並採動作者/施恩者(AGENT/BENEFACTOR)的觀點。此外，由於「方便」與「便利」具備了正面、值得嚮往的特質，這也解釋了何以「方便框架」比「不方便框架」有更高程度的目的性(intentionality)。 　　為檢視近義詞在概念上的差異是否會反映於在他們的語法表現上，本研究闡明了「方便」與「便利」的語法功能及其使用分布的情況、以及參與角色(participant role)的凸顯類型(profiling pattern)。結果顯示「方便」與「便利」主要有五種語法功能，即名詞化、修飾名詞、修飾動詞、不及物動詞謂語、及物動詞謂語，最常使用的語法功能為名詞化與動詞謂語(包含及物與不及物)。此五種語法功能皆會突顯某些參與角色，但主要都是突顯了「目的」(PURPOSE)與「手段」(MEANS)；而其他參與角色也會在不同語法功能的使用中被突顯，並且這些突顯類型皆可由「方便」與「便利」在概念上的差異來做解釋。 　　總結來說，本論文闡釋了近義詞「方便」與「便利」在概念上不同的偏好會導致他們在語法上有不同的表現；此外，「方便」與「便利」在參與角色的凸顯類型上亦不相同，這說明了，「方便」與「便利」是屬於不同的構式(construction)。最後，本論文也再次確認了詞彙背後的語意概念會決定其語法的表現。 / The purpose of this thesis is to approach the issue of near-synonyms via the examination of their respective underlying conceptual structures and surface syntactic functions. Specifically, the present study aims to furnish a fine-grained and systematic analysis of the semantic differences between the near-synonymous pair fangbian and bianli that shall better explain their differential syntactic behaviors. 　　Based on the theoretical framework of Frame Semantics, this study found that the conceptual structures of fangbian and bianli are associated with the frames of CONVENIENCE and INCONVENIENCE. While pertaining to a corresponding set of frame elements, the two frames actually prompt distinct conceptualizations. Precisely, fangbian and bianli differ in their perspectivization of the complex event involved: fangbian focuses on the result-subevent and takes the BENEFICIARY’s perspective whereas bianli on the cause-subevent and takes the AGENT/BENEFACTOR’s perspective. In addition, the fact that convenience is desirable and thus typically intended also explains the stronger intentionality involved in the CONVENIENCE frame than in the INCONVENIENCE frame. 　　To investigate whether conceptual differences between the near-synonyms would be manifested in their syntactic behaviors, this thesis further elucidated the syntactic functions and their distribution of fangbian and bianli as well as the profiling of the participant roles in each syntactic function. In particular, five main syntactic functions of fangbian and bianli were identified: nominalization, nominal modifier, verbal modifier, intransitive verbal predicate and transitive verbal predicate; each serves to profile distinct participant roles, mostly PURPOSE or MEANS. Moreover, the profiling of other participant roles can be accounted for by the perspectival distinction between the near-synonymous pair. Finally, the distribution of syntactic functions of fangbian and bianli demonstrated that the usage of the near-synonyms as verbal predicate and nominalization is the most dominant categories. 　　To conclude, this thesis has shown that the conceptual preferences of fangbian and bianli in terms of their perspectivization lead to their different syntactic behaviors. Moreover, the near-synonymous pair also differs in their profiling of the participant roles; in other words, they display distinct profiling patterns and therefore pertain to different constructions. Finally, it still holds for the present study that the semantics of a word drives its syntactic behaviors.