CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeiÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / Esta dissertaÃÃo aborda o comportamento semÃntico-discursivo do Aspecto verbal nas formas simples dos tempos: PretÃrito Perfeito e PretÃrito Imperfeito do modo Indicativo, em um corpus de seis inquÃritos do Banco de Dados PORCUFORT - PortuguÃs Oral Culto de Fortaleza. A fundamentaÃÃo teÃrica deste trabalho retoma algumas das principais pesquisas feitas, anteriormente, a respeito do Aspecto verbal; um estudo que trata da maneira como esta categoria à vista dentro da SemÃntica e do Discurso; alÃm da questÃo da referÃncia desta categoria no discurso e dos elementos lingÃÃsticos que, geralmente, auxiliam na sua caracterizaÃÃo, como: os circunstanciadores temporais e os argumentos do verbo. Na metodologia, apresentamos os fatores de anÃlise, quais sejam: parÃmetros de transitividade, tipos de verbo, figura e fundo e tipos de interpretaÃÃo. Assim, conseguimos perceber que esta categoria verbal possui caracterÃsticas semÃntico-discursivas que sÃo condicionadas nÃo apenas pela forma lexical ou morfÃmica dos verbos, mas tambÃm pelos argumentos que os acompanham e pelo contexto discursivo no qual estÃo inseridos. / This paper approaches the semantic-discursive behavior of the verbal Aspect in the simple forms of the tenses: Perfect Past and Imperfect Past of the Indicative mode, in a corpus of six inquiries of the database PORCUFORT - PortuguÃs Oral Culto de Fortaleza. The theoretical chapters of this work retake some of the main researches made, previously, regarding the verbal Aspect; a study that adopts the way as this category is seen inside of the Semantics and of the Speech; in addition to the subject of the reference of this category in the speech and of the linguistic elements that, generally, that aid in its characterization, like the adverbs of time and the verbs argument. In the methodology, we show the analysis factors, they are: parameters of transitivity, verb types, foreground and background, and interpretation types. Thus, we have noticed that this verbal category possesses semantic-discursive characteristics that are not just conditioned by the morphological or lexical form of the verbs, but also by the arguments that accompany them, and by the discursive context in which they are inserted.

Nesta tese observa-se o papel que a semântica e a pragmática desempenham, na gramática inicial (early grammar) da interlíngua de falantes de português, na compreensão de textos em inglês e em espanhol nos quais se relatam eventos passados e se empregam as oposições Present Perfect x Past Simple e Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido. Assumimos (MICHAELLIS, 1998) que um dos valores mais fortes das formas compostas dessas duas línguas é o resultativo e que como o português, na maioria das vezes, expressa o resultado de outros modos, o aprendiz vê naquelas apenas uma maneira de expressar ações passadas. Em função disso, ao analisar a estrutura da língua estrangeira, acaba atribuindo aos tempos compostos de ambas os valores aspectuais das perífrases [TER+Particípio] e [ESTAR+Gerúndio] do português, que em muitos casos não coincide com os valores das formas perifrásticas das línguas que estão aprendendo. Enquanto as perífrases da língua estrangeira têm o aspecto perfectivo resultativo, as do português têm valor imperfectivo continuativo. Tal fato, que afeta a compreensão do texto, não é percebido pelos aprendizes. Estes analisam primeiramente a sintaxe da língua-alvo (top-down procedure, Liceras, 2003a) uma vez que não têm acesso aos traços que desencadeiam a fixação de parâmetros para a realização do bottom-up. O padrão de atribuição dos valores das perífrases da L1 para a L2 aparece nas interlínguas do espanhol e do inglês, apontando para um mesmo processo, independente de a língua-alvo ser mais ou menos próxima do português. Testes com análise de variância comprovam que se trata de um mesmo processo para as duas línguas, que começa a partir da reestruturação da L1, sugerindo que a aquisição dessa é regida pelos princípios da GU, mas que a marcação de parâmetros não acontecerá como na L1, mas se dará via reestruturação de porções da L1. Os valores semânticos utilizados na interlíngua, nesse estágio, também são os da L1, o que aponta que, assim como acontece com a fonologia, a criança nasce com sensibilidade para acessar qualquer valor semântico, mas existe um período crítico que faz com que a aquisição da L2 ocorra por reestruturação não apenas sintática mas também semântica dos valores da L1. A pragmática, por sua vez, será acessada, após a semântica, como uma sintonia fina do sentido / In this thesis, the roles of Semantics and Pragmatics in text comprehension tasks have been investigated in Portuguese speakers interlanguage early grammar. The texts in both English and Spanish had past events told employing Present Perfect x Past Simple and Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido pairings. We have adopted (Michaellis, 1998) that the English periphrasis has as its most salient meaning the resultative reading and have applied it to the Spanish periphrasis as well. Portuguese, on the other hand, expresses resultative meaning in different ways most of the times leading students to see in the Present Perfect and Pretérito Perfecto structures the past event meaning alone. Consequently, when analyzing the foreign language structures, learners end up assigning them the aspectual values which belong to the Portuguese [TER+Participle] and [ESTAR+Gerund] periphrases, despite their not sharing the same aspectual values most of the time, because the English and Spanish forms express the perfective and resultative aspect, while the Portuguese periphrasis indicates the imperfective and durative aspect. This mismatch affects text comprehension, but is not perceived by the students. Learners first analyze the target language structure (topdown procedure, Liceras, 2003a), once they cannot have access to the features which trigger the parameter setting, precluding a bottom-up procedure. The same pattern of value assignment from the L1 periphrasis to both L2 is noticeable in both English and Spanish interlanguages. Analysis of Variance tests have proven that both interlanguages undergo the same process, which starts from L1 reestructuring. This fact suggests that adult L2 learner will make use of UG principles, but will not set parameters the way children do, L2 will grow by reestructuring portions of L1. The semantic values applied in both English and Spanish interlanguages at this stage, are L1?s as well, allowing a comparison to the phonology acquisition. Children are born sensitive to any semantic value, but due to a critical period for semantics, adult L2 learners will acquire L2 semantic values by reestructing not only the syntax of L1 but also its semantic values. Learners will have access to pragmatics, after semantics, as a fine-tuned meaning

The first half of this thesis argues that scepticism about the evidential force of religious experiences is driven by concerns about the traditional practices used to discern between 'illusory' and 'genuine' experiences. As these practices require commitment to a particular tradition, we have no way of deciding which practice to trust. Furthermore, the tests the practices employ do not bear on whether the experiences are veridical; and they are too coarse-grained for theologians to use them to regulate religious beliefs or seek theological truth. The thesis argues that we should seek new ways of evaluating religious experiences, and beliefs based on them, which address the concerns. The fourth chapter develops a procedure in which parties to religious disagreements understand God to be a perfect being, and use shared moral beliefs from outside their religious tradition to assign probabilities to putative divine actions, including religious experiences. The likelihood the divine action occurred given those moral beliefs is the likelihood the religious experience was veridical, addressing the second concern. The procedure attends closely to different sources of doubt, so avoiding the coarse granularity traditional practices are charged with. The thesis thereby argues against a sceptical response to difficulties faced by religious experiential evidence by offering a non-sceptical alternative which is articulated in enough detail to show how these difficulties can be surmounted. The fifth chapter completes the description of the procedure and shows how it can be used to formalize disputes in philosophical theology concerning the evidential import of divine hiddenness and religious diversity. The sixth chapter defends the procedure's presumption that God is a perfect being by evaluating an Anselmian account of the reference of "God".

In recent years, statistical analyses, algorithms, and modeling of big data have been constrained due to computational complexity. Further, the added complexity of relationships among response and explanatory variables, such as higher-order interaction effects, make identifying predictors using standard statistical techniques difficult. These difficulties are only exacerbated in the case of small sample sizes in some studies. Recent analyses have targeted the identification of interaction effects in big data, but the development of methods to identify higher-order interaction effects has been limited by computational concerns. One recently studied method is the Feasible Solutions Algorithm (FSA), a fast, flexible method that aims to find a set of statistically optimal models via a stochastic search algorithm. Although FSA has shown promise, its current limits include that the user must choose the number of times to run the algorithm. Here, statistical guidance is provided for this number iterations by deriving a lower bound on the probability of obtaining the statistically optimal model in a number of iterations of FSA. Moreover, logistic regression is severely limited when two predictors can perfectly separate the two outcomes. In the case of small sample sizes, this occurs quite often by chance, especially in the case of a large number of predictors. Bhattacharyya distance is proposed as an alternative method to address this limitation. However, little is known about the theoretical properties or distribution of B-distance. Thus, properties and the distribution of this distance measure are derived here. A hypothesis test and confidence interval are developed and tested on both simulated and real data.

本研究參考王(2005)的研究，探討台灣國中生在英語現在完成式的學習表現。研究對象為台北縣120名國三學生，測驗學生在40分鐘內填答包含文法正確性判斷是非題、時態填充題及中英翻譯題共計50道題目。研究重點在：(1)受試者對時態和時貌的理解；(2) 現在完成式的誤用情形；(3) 現在完成式不同功能的習得，以及 (4) 母語的影響及對副詞的依賴狀況。研究發現如下：首先，學習者在中文及英文的時態時貌表現有理解上的困難，顯示他們並未真正理解中英文表達時間概念的差異。其次，現在完成式的誤用最常發生在現在簡單式及過去簡單式。他們習慣依賴常用於現在式的時間副詞或頻率副詞來決定使用時態，在看到這些副詞時，未真正理解上下文語境意涵而誤用成現在簡單式；而學習者對於過去已完成事件，未意識到其和現在的關聯及說話者態度，所以用過去式。這些結果顯示學習者並未真正理解英文現在式、過去式的真正涵義，也不了解現在完成式核心意涵及其語用功能為何。此外，現在完成式的四個主要功能中，學習者在表動作連續性的完成態 (continuative perfect)和表經驗的完成態 (experiential perfect)表現的最理想。而中文的影響顯示學習者習慣依賴副詞來決定使用時態為何，有副詞的句子或情境現在完成式的答對率偏高。研究進一步發現動詞特性會影響學習者對現在完成式的使用判斷，學生在狀態類動詞（包含心智類動詞）用於現在完成式的理解表現較差，此結果可能和中英文的差異有關。此外，檢視國中課本中現在完成式呈現方式的結果顯示這四種功能出現的語言輸入次數和學生的學習速率並未有直接關係，很可能是單句（不含上下文）的呈現方式讓學生有不完整的概念，因此建議教科書或文法書作者避免僅提供單句式例句及過度強調副詞的搭配。最後，教授現在完成式的老師本身應該對中文及英文的時間概念及時態、時貌有清楚的認識，無論是在給予講解範例、課堂練習或評量測驗，都應給予上下文情境讓學生能理解事件時間的相對應關係及覺察到說話者的觀點來決定是否該事件有現在關連性(current relevance) 而能正確使用現在完成式。本研究最後參考幾位研究者觀點及根據研究發現提出一些教授現在完成式的建議。 / This study explores Taiwanese junior high students’ performance on the English present perfect use. One hundred and twenty participants in Taipei County finished 50 questions out of three types of elicitation questions within 40 minutes. The test included a grammaticality judgment task, a blank-filling test and a translation task. The analyses focus on (1) learners’ awareness of tense/aspect; (2) misuses of other tense/aspect forms for the present perfect; (3) acquisition rates of the four functions of the present perfect, and (4) L1 interference and dependence on the adverbials. The main findings are as follows. First, the learners have difficulty acquiring the concept of tense/aspect for the difference of the temporal concepts of Chinese and English. Then, misuses of other tense/aspect forms for the present perfect mainly fall on simple past and simple present. The former misuse may result from the fact that learners do not see completed past events’ relations to the speech moment and neglect the speaker’s attitude; the latter misuse is observed to happen when learners rely much on certain temporal markings that goes mostly with the simple present and thus their judgment on tense/aspect use is misled. These results suggest that learners do not fully understand the semantics of the present simple and past simple, nor do they comprehend the semantic and pragmatic meanings of the present perfect. Furthermore, L1 interference can be witnessed in learner’s reliance on the adverbials. The accuracy rate increases in contexts with certain adverbials. As for the performance on the four uses of the present perfect, learners demonstrate satisfactory performance on the ‘continuative perfect’ and ‘experiential perfect’. A close look into learners’ errors also reveals that lexical aspect plays a role in the comprehension of the present perfect; learners have difficulty in using stative verbs (including mental verbs) in the present perfect. Such performance may result from the difference of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect between Chinese and English. A review on the presentation of the present perfect in the domestic textbooks then discloses that frequency of input alone cannot be responsible for the differentiated acquisition rates. It is, however, the isolated sentence patterns that lead the learners to form rudimentary concepts about the perfect aspect. It is therefore suggested that textbook or grammar book writers avoid sentential examples and overemphasis of its association with certain adverbials. Last but not the least, classroom teachers who are to teach the present perfect should equip themselves with the distinct concepts of tense/aspect between English and Chinese. On giving modeling examples, drill practices, or assessment, contexts should always be given for learners to anchor the relational concept of time so that they make appropriate tense/aspect uses.

Nous étudions, dans la première partie de notre thèse, les polysimplexes d’un espace euclidien de dimension quelconque, c’est-à-dire les objets consistant en une juxtaposition de simplexes réguliers (de tétraèdres si la dimension est 3) accolés le long de leurs faces. Nous étudions principalement le groupe des symétries de ces polysimplexes. Nous présentons une façon de représenter un polysimplexe à l’aide d’un diagramme. Ceci fournit une classification complète des polysimplexes à similitude près. De plus, le groupe des symétries se déduit du groupe des automorphismes du diagramme. Il découle en particulier de notre étude qu’en dimension supérieure à 2, une telle structure ne possède jamais deux faces parallèles et ne contient jamais de circuit fermé de simplexes. Dans la seconde partie de notre thèse, nous abordons un problème classique de combinatoire : l’énumération des pavages d’un rectangle mxn à l’aide de dominos. Klarner et Pollack ont montré qu’en fixant m la suite obtenue vérifie une relation de récurrence linéaire à coefficients constants. Nous établissons une nouvelle méthode nous permettant d’obtenir la fonction génératrice correspondante et la calculons pour m <= 16, alors qu’elle n’était connue que pour m <= 10.

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Computations with polynomials are at the heart of any computer algebra system and also have many applications in engineering, coding theory, and cryptography. Generally speaking, the low-level polynomial computations of interest can be classified as arithmetic operations, algebraic computations, and inverse symbolic problems. New algorithms are presented in all these areas which improve on the state of the art in both theoretical and practical performance. Traditionally, polynomials may be represented in a computer in one of two ways: as a "dense" array of all possible coefficients up to the polynomial's degree, or as a "sparse" list of coefficient-exponent tuples. In the latter case, zero terms are not explicitly written, giving a potentially more compact representation. In the area of arithmetic operations, new algorithms are presented for the multiplication of dense polynomials. These have the same asymptotic time cost of the fastest existing approaches, but reduce the intermediate storage required from linear in the size of the input to a constant amount. Two different algorithms for so-called "adaptive" multiplication are also presented which effectively provide a gradient between existing sparse and dense algorithms, giving a large improvement in many cases while never performing significantly worse than the best existing approaches. Algebraic computations on sparse polynomials are considered as well. The first known polynomial-time algorithm to detect when a sparse polynomial is a perfect power is presented, along with two different approaches to computing the perfect power factorization. Inverse symbolic problems are those for which the challenge is to compute a symbolic mathematical representation of a program or "black box". First, new algorithms are presented which improve the complexity of interpolation for sparse polynomials with coefficients in finite fields or approximate complex numbers. Second, the first polynomial-time algorithm for the more general problem of sparsest-shift interpolation is presented. The practical performance of all these algorithms is demonstrated with implementations in a high-performance library and compared to existing software and previous techniques.

Wood is a highly versatile renewable material (with carbon sequestering properties), that is light in weight, has good strength properties in both tension and compression while providing good rigidity and toughness, and good insulating properties (relative to typical structural materials). Engineered wood products combine the benefits of wood with engineering knowledge to create optimized structural elements. Cross-laminated timber (CLT), as one such engineered wood product, is an emerging engineering material which provides great opportunities for the building industry. While building with wood has many benefits, there are also some concerns, particularly decay. Should wood be exposed to elevated amounts of moisture, rots and moulds may damage the product or even risk the health of the occupants. As CLT panels are a relatively new engineered wood product, the moisture characteristics have yet to be properly assessed. Consequently, the amount of decay risk for CLT in building applications is unknown, and recommended protective actions during design construction and operation have yet to be determined. The goal of this research was to determine the moisture durability of CLT panels in wall assemblies and address concerns related to built-in construction moisture. The approach used to address the problem was to first determine select moisture properties of CLT panels through experimental approaches, and then use the results to calibrate a hygrothermal model to quantify the risks of wall assemblies. The wall assemblies were simulated in six different cities across Canada, representing a range of climates: Vancouver, B.C., Edmonton, A.B., Winnipeg, M.B., Ottawa, O.N., Québec City, Q.C., and St. John, New-Brunswick. The risks associated with moisture exposure during construction are also considered in the simulations. The experimental phase of the research was limited to moisture uptake tests. These tests were utilized to determine the liquid water absorption coefficient for four different types of full scale panels (2’x2’) and 12 clear wood samples. The panels were either made of 5-ply of Western-SPF, Eastern-SPF, Hemlock-Fir, or 3-ply of a generic softwood provided by a European CLT manufacturer; the clear samples were all cut from the same nominal 2x6 SPF-grade lumber. The panels were installed in a drying rack and gravimetrically tracked to assess the drying rates of the panels. Finite resources precluded more thorough material testing, but a parametric study was conducted to determine the relative impact of the missing material data on the final simulation results. In the hygrothermal simulations, four main wall assembly types were considered- those with either exterior or interior insulation, and those using either vapour permeable or impermeable air-water barriers. Various types of insulation and vapour control were also modelled. The simulations were run for a variety of interior relative humidities. The metric for comparison between the simulations was the water content of a 4mm thin layer on the extreme lamina of a CLT panel system. The results of the simulation suggest that vapour impermeable membranes, when install on dry CLT panels (less than 14% M.C.) do not pose moisture risks in any of the climates considered. However, when high levels of construction moisture is considered, only vapour permeable membranes controlled moisture risks by allowing the CLT panel to dry both to the interior and to the exterior.

The pursuit of the perfect language intrigued and obsessed the literary circle of the seventeenth century, as political turmoil and chaos initiated the desire for the stable even in the aspect of language. As the perfect language is self-explicative, it indicates a perfect correspondence between the signifier and the signified in order to guarantee the purity and singleness of the meanings to avoid confusion and ambiguity inevitably occurring, for instance, in postlapsarian language. The concept of the perfect language, nevertheless, finds evidence in Milton¡¦s prelapsarian world, where unfallen Adam is endowed with divine insights to discern the nature of the animals and translate his comprehension into perfect matching names. However, the presumption of the perfect language in the prelapsarian Eden is challenged by critics as the preconditioned absoluteness could not possibly exist for it would have preempted any possibilities of inferring, implying, and guessing from the context. In my thesis, I argue that languages marked by gender as masculine and feminine dominate in the characterization and narratives of Adam and Eve, for gender is the sole mark distinguishing the first couple along with their hierarchical roles as man and man¡¦s helper. I examine Eve¡¦s gendered discourse in particular as Eve as a lesser vessel turns out to be the main target of Satan¡¦s verbal temptations and sophistries. I analyze the traits of gendered discourses and discuss how they render Eve more vulnerable, disadvantaged, and disempowered in face of Satan¡¦s rhetoric and eloquence. Also scrutinized are the critics¡¦ viewpoints concerning Eve¡¦s gendered discourse, which significantly reveals certain ingrained biases attached to stereotypical expectations for women shown in the critics¡¦ word choices and arguments in regard of Eve.