Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:07:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 KassiaKM_DISSERT.pdf: 954540 bytes, checksum: 24a8f4e968370a7ecb3897bf1b2e5f9f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-03-14 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / Considering the theoretical and methodological presuppositions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (cf. WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2006; LABOV, [1972] 2008), in this dissertation, we describe and analyze the process of variation/change involving the personal pronouns tu and voc?, and its extension in the pronominal paradigm in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), in three sets of personal letters written by people from Rio Grande do Norte (RN) along the 20th century. The discursive universe of those letters is news from the cities in which the informers lived and the themes from their everyday life (trade, jobs, trips, family and politics). Part of the analyzed letters integrate the written by hand minimum corpus of the Projeto de Hist?ria do Portugu?s Brasileiro no Rio Grande do Norte (PHPB-RN). We are based on previous studies about the pronominal system in BP Menon (1995), Faraco (1996), Lopes e Machado (2005), Rumeu (2008), Lopes (2009), Lopes, Rumeu e Marcotulio (2011), Lopes e Marcotulio (2011) e Martins e Moura (2012) , which register the form voc? replaces tu from the end of the first half of 20th century and attest the following situation: while (a) the imperative verbal forms, (b) the explicit subjects and (c) prepositional complement pronouns are favorable contexts for voc?, the (d) non imperative verbal forms (with null subject), (e) the non prepositional complement pronoun and (f) the possessive pronoun are contexts of resistance of tu. The results got in this dissertation confirm, partially, the statements defended by the previous studies regarding the favorable contexts for the implementation of voc? in BP: (i) there are, in the letters from the first two decades of 20th century (1916 to 1925), high frequency of the usage of the form voc? (98%); (ii) in the personal letters of RN especially in the love letters, in which there are higher recurrence of intimate subjects the discursive universe proved to be itself very relevant in the determination/conditions of the forms of tu; (iii) the unique feminine informer of our sample uses, almost categorically, the forms of tu in letters of the period from 1946 to 1972; (iv) the letters corresponding to the period from 1992 to 1994 present a significant usage of the forms associated to the innovating voc?, letting appear the change is already implemented in the system of BP and there are, in that set of letters, strong evidences that make us state the pronominal forms of non prepositional complement (accusative/ dative) related to tu are also implemented in a system with an almost categorical usage of voc? / Tendo em vista os pressupostos te?ricos metodol?gicos da Sociolingu?stica Variacionista (cf. WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2006; LABOV, [1972] 2008), nesta disserta??o, descrevemos e analisamos o processo de varia??o/mudan?a envolvendo os pronomes pessoais tu e voc?, e sua extens?o no paradigma pronominal no Portugu?s Brasileiro (PB), em tr?s conjuntos de cartas pessoais escritas por norte-riograndenses no curso do s?culo XX. O universo discursivo dessas cartas ? basicamente not?cias da cidade em que viviam os informantes e assuntos do cotidiano (com?rcio, trabalho, viagens, fam?lia e pol?tica). Parte das cartas analisadas integram o c?rpus m?nimo manuscrito do Projeto de Hist?ria do Portugu?s Brasileiro no Rio Grande do Norte (PHPB-RN). Tomamos por base estudos anteriores sobre o sistema pronominal no PB Menon (1995), Faraco (1996), Lopes e Machado (2005), Rumeu (2008), Lopes (2009), Lopes, Rumeu e Marcotulio (2011), Lopes e Marcotulio (2011) e Martins e Moura (2012) , os quais registram que a forma voc? suplanta o tu a partir do fim da primeira metade do s?culo XX e atestam o seguinte quadro: enquanto (a) as formas verbais imperativas, (b) os sujeitos plenos e (c) os pronomes complementos preposicionados s?o contextos favorecedores do voc?, as (d) formas verbais n?o imperativas (com sujeito nulo), (e) os pronomes complementos n?o preposicionados e (f) os pronomes possessivos s?o contextos de resist?ncia do tu. Os resultados obtidos nesta disserta??o confirmam, em parte, as asser??es defendidas pelos estudos anteriores sobre os contextos favor?veis ? implementa??o do voc? no PB: (i) h? nas cartas das duas primeiras d?cadas do s?culo XX (1916 a 1925) alta frequ?ncia de uso de formas do voc? (98%); (ii) nas cartas pessoais do RN, especialmente nas cartas de amor em que h? maior recorr?ncia de assuntos ?ntimos, o universo discursivo mostrou-se bastante relevante no condicionamento das formas de tu; (iii) a ?nica informante do sexo feminino da nossa amostra faz uso, quase categ?rico, das formas de tu, em cartas do per?odo que corresponde aos anos de 1946 a 1972; (iv) as cartas correspondentes ao per?odo de 1992 a 1994 apresentam um uso significativo das formas associadas ao inovador voc?, deixando transparecer que a mudan?a j? est? implementada no sistema do PB e h?, nesse mesmo conjunto de cartas, fortes evid?ncias que nos possibilitam afirmar que as formas pronominais de complemento n?o preposicionadas (acusativo/dativo) associadas ao tu est?o resistindo em um sistema com uso quase categ?rico de voc?

Hobson et al. (Brown, Hobson. Lee y Stevenson, 1997; Hobson, Brown, Minter y Lee, 1997)ha ve updated the issue of the similarities between autism and congenital blindness. In the pre­ sent paper the empirical evidence in favor of the existence of autistic-lik features in the lan­ guage of blind children is reviewed. and new data from the author's research, are offered. The following topics are examined: (a) The use of personal pronouns, (b) the use of imitations and formulaic speech, (e) the egocentric use of speech, and (d) the capacity for iniciating conver­ sations and for conversational contingency. The analysis puts into question the similarity bet­ ween blind children and autistic children, and seems to disconfirm Hobson 's theory. / Hobson et al. (Brown, Hobson. Lee y Stevenson, 1997; Hobson, Brown, Minter y Lee, 1997) han investigado la similitud entre el autismo y la ceguera congénita. En este artículo se revisa la evidencia empírica a favor de la existencia de rasgos autistas en el lenguaje de los niños ciegos de nacimiento, a la vez que se aportan nuevos datos de investigaciones del autor. Se centra el interés en (a) el uso de los pronombres personales, (b) el uso de imitaciones y habla formuláica, (c) el uso egocéntrico del lenguaje, y (d) la capacidad de iniciar conversaciones y de contingencia conversacional. El análisis pone en cuestión la supuesta similitud entre los niños ciegos y los autistas, además parece refutar la teoría de Hobson.

Pidginspråk är kontaktspråk som uppstår under ansträngda sociolingvistiska förhållanden. De anses vara de mest reducerade språkliga system som ändå möjliggör en lyckad kommunikationinom ett specifikt socialt sammanhang. Det saknas idag forskning som undersöker hur pidginspråk bildar sina språkliga system. Den aktuella studien ska vara ett steg mot mer kunskap inom området och ämnar analysera hur pidginspråk bildar sina personliga pronomenparadigm. Förekomsten av nio olika grammatiska drag har kartlagts hos 18 pidginspråk, deras lexifierare och viktigaste substratspråk. Uppgifterna hämtades genom litteratursökningar och sammanställdes i tabeller i datorprogrammet Excel. Resultatet visar att samtliga undersökta drag förekommer bland pidginspråken men med varierande frekvens. Uppgifterna indikerar att substratspråken har en framträdande roll i processen när pidginspråken bildar sina personliga pronomenparadigm. / Pidgins are contact languages that emerge under strained sociolinguistic circumstances. They are seen as the most reduced linguistic system that can still enable successful communication in a specific social context. To this date there is a lack of research investigating how pidgins form their linguistic systems. The present study is intended to be a step towards extended knowledge within the field and aims to investigate how pidgins form their personal pronoun paradigms. The occurrence of nine different grammatical features in 18 pidgins, their lexifiers and most important substrates has been surveyed. The data was collected through literature search and compiled in tables in the computer program Excel. The results show that all surveyed features occur among the pidgins but the frequencies vary. The data indicates that the substrates have a prominent role in the process of pidgins forming their personal pronoun paradigms.

The present study aims to explore how deictic personal pronouns are used in political speeches by the two American presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, during the 2020 United States presidential election. Donald Trump’s usage of the personal pronouns I, you, he/she, we and they is analysed and compared to Joe Biden’s usage of the same personal pronouns. The study has shown that Joe Biden has a preference for the first-person singular pronoun I while Donald Trump has a similar preference towards the third-person plural pronoun they. Both candidates also use the pronoun we just as often, however, Joe Biden’s we is mostly the universal we, referring to all Americans, while Donald Trump’s we is mostly the royal we, referring to his government. This study shows that the same deictic pronouns can be used to indicate inclusion and exclusion.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:23:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Francisco A C Quintana.pdf: 2124100 bytes, checksum: f85404911510c4798824cb1b1fc1c80b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-05-04 / This investigation is a study of the personal pronouns TÚ, VOS y USTED in Paraguayan Spanish and aims to verify the reach of the VOS pronoun, a variant of the second person of the singular used in Paraguayan Spanish, instead of TÚ, an informal personal pronoun, and USTED, a formal personal pronoun, both registered in Spanish normative grammar. The work is based in the speech of nine Paraguayan subjects, university professors, four of them male and five female, with age from 29 to 51 years, all doctors, masters or specialists in different areas. Data was colleted from audio recordings of classes given by the teachers, a situation taken as formal. The option for subjects having graduate degrees and members of high middle-class obeyed to a sociolinguistic rule according to which changes in language take more time to arrive at social classes with a greater spending power and more formal schooling, as well as to more aged people and men. The speech of subjects with this profile comes to be monitored by normative grammar, which also determines more conservative linguistic uses. In addition, these uses have a greater probability of happening in formal situations. Thus, the work is inserted in two linguistics trends: (1) Sociolinguistics, that is to say, the study of the spoken, observed language, deciphered and analyzed within a social context, and (2) Pragmatics, that is to say, the study of language in relation to who one speaks with, who one speaks to and where one speaks. With this aim in view, two types of analysis were done: a quantitative one, checking the instances of the three pronouns in the corpus recordings, and a qualitative, which describes situations of use of those pronouns during the classes. The results showed that: in the first place, the use of VOS for the second person of the singular is heavily present in the speech of Paraguayan university professors in the classroom, followed by USTED, whereas TÚ has only two instances. Secondly, the qualitative analysis of statements or pieces of statements of the different teachers, about different topics and different class situations, pointed to a polarity between not only situations of formality and informality in the personal relationships between teachers and students, but also in direct speech, when the teacher brought to light fake situations of relationship between hierarchically different people as regards function in social terms. Also the degree of face exposing of one of the teachers showed the passage from the registry of VOS to the one of USTED / Esta pesquisa refere-se ao estudo dos pronomes de tratamento TÚ, VOS e USTED no espanhol paraguaio e tem como objetivo verificar a abrangência do pronome VOS, variante da segunda pessoa do singular usada no espanhol paraguaio, em detrimento do pronome TÚ, pronome de tratamento informal, e do USTED, de tratamento formal, ambos da gramática normativa da língua espanhola. O trabalho tem como base a fala de nove sujeitos paraguaios, professores universitários, sendo que quatro são do sexo masculino e cinco, do feminino, na faixa etária entre 29 e 51 anos, divididos entre doutores, mestres e especialistas, de diferentes áreas de formação. O corpus foi montado a partir de gravações em áudio das aulas proferidas pelos professores, considerada situação de formalidade. A escolha de sujeitos de alta escolaridade e de classe media alta obedeceu a um preceito sociolingüístico de que mudanças na língua levam mais tempo para atingir as classes sociais de maior poder aquisitivo e escolaridade, assim como, faixas etárias mais avançadas e homens. No que se refere aos sujeitos de alta escolaridade, uma vez que suas falas passam a ser monitoradas pela gramática normativa, esta, por sua vez, passa a determinar os usos lingüísticos mais cristalizados. Além disso, tais usos têm maior probabilidade de ocorrer em situações de formalidade. Dessa forma, o trabalho insere-se dentro de duas vertentes da Lingüística: (1) a Sociolingüística, isto é, o estudo da língua falada, observada, descrita e analisada dentro de um contexto social, e (2) a Pragmática, isto é, o estudo da língua relacionado com quem a fala, para quem fala e onde o faz. Para tanto, foram realizadas análises de dois tipos: quantitativa, com o levantamento da freqüência de ocorrência dos três pronomes nas gravações do corpus, e, qualitativa, descrevendo situações do uso de tais pronomes, durante as aulas. Os resultados mostraram que: em primeiro lugar, o uso do pronome de tratamento VOS, para a segunda pessoa do singular, é observado com grande expressividade na fala dos professores universitários paraguaios em situação de aula, seguido por USTED, e tendo sido encontradas apenas duas ocorrências do pronome TÚ. Em segundo lugar, a análise qualitativa de enunciados ou trechos de enunciados dos diversos professores, a partir dos diferentes tópicos e situações de aula, apontou para uma polaridade entre, não somente, situações formalidade e informalidade, no trato entre professores e alunos, mas também no discurso direto, quando o professor encenava situações entre pessoas de função hierarquicamente diferentes em termos sociais. Também o grau de exposição da face de um dos professores mostrou a passagem de um registro de VOS para USTED

This dissertation is about the nature of perspectival thoughts and the context-sensitivity of the language used to express them. It focuses on two kinds of perspectival thoughts: ‘subjective' evaluative thoughts about matters of personal taste, such as 'Beetroot is delicious' or 'Skydiving is fun', and first-personal or de se thoughts about oneself, such as 'I am hungry' or 'I have been fooled.' The dissertation defends of a novel form of relativism about truth - the idea that the truth of some (but not all) perspectival thought and talk is relative to the perspective of an evaluating subject or group. In Part I, I argue that the realm of ‘subjective' evaluative thought and talk whose truth is perspective-relative includes attributions of knowledge of the form 'S knows that p.' Following a brief introduction (chapter 1), chapter 2 presents a new, error-theoretic objection against relativism about knowledge attributions. The case for relativism regarding knowledge attributions rests on the claim that relativism is the only view that explains all of the empirical data from speakers' use of the word "know" without recourse to an error theory. In chapter 2, I show that the relativist can only account for sceptical paradoxes and ordinary epistemic closure puzzles if she attributes a problematic form of semantic blindness to speakers. However, in 3 I show that all major competitor theories - forms of invariantism and contextualism - are subject to equally serious error-theoretic objections. This raises the following fundamental question for empirical theorising about the meaning of natural language expressions: If error attributions are ubiquitous, by which criteria do we evaluate and compare the force of error-theoretic objections and the plausibility of error attributions? I provide a number of criteria and argue that they give us reason to think that relativism's error attributions are more plausible than those of its competitors. In Part II, I develop a novel unified account of the content and communication of perspectival thoughts. Many relativists regarding ‘subjective' thoughts and Lewisians about de se thoughts endorse a view of belief as self-location. In chapter 4, I argue that the self-location view of belief is in conflict with the received picture of linguistic communication, which understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. I argue that understanding mental content and speech act content in terms of sequenced worlds allows a reconciliation of these views. On the view I advocate, content is modelled as a set of sequenced worlds - possible worlds ‘centred' on a group of individuals inhabiting the world at some time. Intuitively, a sequenced world is a way a group of people may be. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on sequenced worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. In chapter 5, I show that one of the advantages of this model is its compatibility with both nonindexical contextualism and truth relativism about taste. I argue in chapters 5 and 6 that the empirical data from eavesdropping, retraction, and disagreement cases supports a relativist completion of the model, and I show in detail how to account for these phenomena on the sequenced worlds view.

This study analyses the comparative frequency of “direct reader address” in English and Swedish walking guidebook texts. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of specific linguistic features that constitute “direct reader address”, the study aims to highlight the importance of considering reader expectation of a text, i.e. the target culture’s text conventions when translating. The linguistic features in focus are those which help to establish a familiar relationship between reader and writer and thus set up an imaginary dialogue. These are: second-person pronouns, first-person inclusive plural pronouns and verbs in the imperative mood. A translation corpus of walking-guidebook extracts (10 English originals, 11 Swedish originals and their English translations) and my own Swedish-to-English translation of such a text were analysed in order to a) determine to what extent “direct reader address” is used in Swedish and English original walking guidebooks; b) determine to what extent “direct reader address” is retained and used in English translations of Swedish walking guidebooks; and c) discuss the implications of this for translators of such texts. The results of the investigation show that although “direct reader address” does appear in both Swedish and English original guidebooks, it is more prevalent in English ones. Imperative verbs are the most common of all the relevant linguistic features. The results also show that the trend is not only to retain in English translations what “direct reader address” existed in Swedish originals but also sometimes to add “direct reader address” for reasons of syntax and idiomatic usage. The implications are that a target culture’s text conventions are consequential when translating a walking guidebook because they relate to reader expectation, in particular in relation to linguistic features of “direct reader address”. To translate well, and where deadlines allow, it is recommended that a translator’s strategy should try to address reader expectation.

La présente thèse constitue une étude typologique contrastive des allomorphies pronominales dans deux langues finno-ougriennes : en hongrois et en mordve erzya. On entend ici par typologie contrastive une approche typologique fondée sur la mise en contraste des structures de deux ou plusieurs langues, y compris des langues de la même famille linguistique, afin d’explorer des propriétés à la fois spécifiques et universelles. De ce point de vue, le hongrois et le mordve s’avèrent particulièrement pertinents en termes de structuration des systèmes de marques pronominales, en raison de propriétés morphologiques caractéristiques de l’ouralien central et oriental, tels que l’existence d’une double conjugaison (subjective et objective, voire « objective définie », en mordve), qui induit des séries allomorphiques complexes, tout en suivant des principes réducteurs universels (syncrétisme, sous-spécification et surspécification de certaines marques ou conditions de marquage morphonologique). Cette thèse comprend neuf chapitres, distribués sur trois volets. Le premier volet décrit les structures et les étapes de la modélisation des systèmes pronominaux dans les deux langues. Dans le premier chapitre, nous présentons des généralités historiques et structurales du hongrois et du mordve erzya, ainsi que la place que ces langues occupent parmi les langues finno-ougriennes, du point de vue de la classification et de la typologie. Une série de particularités importantes pour la compréhension des deux systèmes, en termes d’organisation structurale, concerne les propriétés allomorphiques des unités fonctionnelles et relationnelles de type pronominal, telles que l’harmonie vocalique, les suffixes casuels, le système verbal, et l’ordre des mots. Le deuxième chapitre concerne le lien entre les pronoms personnels et des catégories grammaticales fondamentales telles qu’animacité, nombre, personne, définitude, et aboutit à la conclusion que c’est le pronom personnel qui est particulièrement marqué par ces catégories grammaticales – les mêmes qui peuvent avoir, dans les langues du monde, une incidence sur la construction ou l’organisation des systèmes de classes flexionnelles. Le troisième chapitre présente une approche historiographique du hongrois et du mordve erzya; le quatrième chapitre propose une réanalyse de la flexion pronominale erzya, en suivant les mêmes principes que ceux jadis préconisés par András Kornai dans son analyse du système de la flexion nominale du hongrois (Kornai 1994), dans la mesure où ce modèle morphologique traite l’affixation comme une opération sur des traits combinés. Le deuxième volet de cette recherche développe des études de cas exploratoires dans une perspective de TAL : un corpus d’erzya littéraire et un corpus d’erzya biblique sont analysés contrastivement en suivant les démarches et le paramétrage requis par le logiciel Trameur. Le troisième volet sort de l’analyse des registres stylistiques au sein d’une langue donnée pour revenir à une typologie contrastive structurale hongrois-mordve. Dans le dernier chapitre, nous proposons une synthèse de ces deux aspects de la typologie contrastive : contrastes de registres intralangue, contraste de structures interlangues, en fonction d’un ensemble de paramètres partagés. La synergie entre la méthode lexicométrique et la typologie générale constitue l’un des principaux apports heuristiques de cette thèse, dont le but est de développer une typologie des langues finno-ougriennes qui tienne davantage compte de la contrastivité des structures et de leur relativisme que des grands traits catégoriels interlangues, davantage sujets aux biais empiriques et méthodologiques que peuvent recéler les grands corpus. / This dissertation provides a contrastive and typological study of pronoun allomorphy in two Finno-Ugric languages: Hungarian and Erzya Mordvin. Contrastive typology is a typological approach aiming at contrasting the structures of two or more languages, including from the same language family, to explore specific and universal properties. From this standpoint, Hungarian and Mordvin are particularly relevant as to the structure of pronoun markers, due to some morphological characteristics of the central and eastern languages of the Uralic language family, such as double conjugation paradigms (subjective and objective, moreover the "objective definite inflectional paradigm" in Mordvin). This results in complex allomorphic patterns, while following universal principles (syncretism, sub-specification and over-specification of certain markers, or the conditions of morphonologic exponence). The first part describes the structures and modelling stages of the pronominal system in both languages. In the first chapter, we present historical and structural generalities about the Hungarian and Mordvin Erzya languages, and the place they occupy within the Finno-Ugric group, from the point of view of classification and typology. A series of important features to understand the two systems in terms of structural organization, concerns the allomorphic properties of functional and relational units of pronominal type such as vowel harmony, the casual suffixes, the verbal system, and word order. The second chapter deals with the relationship between personal pronouns and basic grammatical categories such as animacity, number, person, definiteness, and concludes that it is the personal pronoun that is most marked by these grammatical categories - the same that may affect, in the languages of the world, the construction or organisation of inflectional classes. The third chapter is a historiographical approach of Hungarian and Erzya to show the outline of the research on the evolutionary periods of both systems. The fourth chapter provides a reanalysis of pronominal inflection in Erzya, following the same principles as those previously recommended by András Kornai's analysis of the nominal inflection system of Hungarian (Kornai, 1994), as it deals with the morphological model considering affixation as an operation on the combined features. The second part of this research develops exploratory case studies from the perspective of NLP (French: TAL) a literary corpus and a biblical corpus of Erzya are analysed following the steps and the settings required by the Trameur software. The third part departs from the contrastive analysis of stylistic registers within a given language to return to a Hungarian-Mordvin contrastive structural typology. In the last chapter, we propose a synthesis of these two aspects of contrastive typology: contrasting registers of intralanguage, contrast-linguistic structures, based on a set of shared parameters. The synergy between the lexicometric method and the general typology is one of the main contributions of this thesis’s heuristics to develop a typology of Finno-Ugric languages that takes greater account of the contrastivity of structures and their relativism as major categorical traits of interlanguage, resulting more sensitive to empirical and methodological biases that may conceal a large corpus.

Language adaptation of foreigners is always accompanied by a number of problems connected to the acquisition and the use of the language which becomes the primary communicative tool in the new environment. Ignoring and underestimating these problems typical of a particular language community can result in a failure to master the target language and consequently in the unsuccessful integration in the new society. This thesis is aimed at specific problems in the area of morphosyntax and phonetics, characteristic of Russian-speaking students of Czech. At the same time, it warns about the danger of overestimating positive transfer from Russian and emphasizes the necessity of using special didactic approach in teaching this group of foreign-language speakers. The analysis of the chosen language phenomena is based on the data from the Database of the voice recordings of spoken Czech by native speakers of Russian and the Database of language mistakes in Czech made by speakers whose native language is another Slavic language, which were created, among others, for the purpose of this thesis. The attention is specifically focused on the use of the reflexive se/si, forms of the auxiliary verb to be in the past tense, short forms of personal pronouns in spoken and written production of Russian-speaking...