This thesis presents an analysis of participles in MA which show verbal and nominal features but are not nouns or verbs. Participles pattern with verbs, combine with adverbs and take objects. Like nouns, they partially agree with their subjects, are negated with mu or inflected ma and cannot appear in VSO order nor do they allow subject-drop. I propose that without the functional projection vP, bare VPs are not fully verbal. When participles occur in a finite present-tense sentence, they act like non-verbal predicates and the resulting copula construction conforms to Benmamoun’s (2008) framework of verbless sentences in Arabic. The existence of VP explains the verbal properties, and the absence of vP explains the nominal ones. The lack of vP explains lacking full agreement and using non-verbal negative particles with participles. Viewing participles as bare VPs is consistent with Croft’s (1991) de-verbalizing hierarchy where verb types range from being fully finite to completely nominalized forms.

Trois questions importantes se posent à l'élaboration de systèmes d'aide au diagnostic. Quels sont les éléments de la connaissance indispensables au diagnostic? Quelle forme doit prendre la représentation de la connaissance pour être facilement exploitée par l'ingénieur? Comment doit-on organiser ces éléments et quels sont les mécanismes de traitement impliqués qui facilitent l'adaptation du système informatique aux diverses installations rencontrées? C'est à ces questions que cette thèse s'adresse. L'objectif de cette thèse est d'élaborer un mode de représentation de la connaissance qui soit proche des formalismes et des modèles employés par l'ingénieur et qui puisse organiser la connaissance en entités correspondant aux éléments d'une installation à diagnostiquer. Cette représentation de la connaissance repose sur la notion de composante qui regroupe dans une entité les éléments de connaissance relatifs à cette composante. La composante procure la souplesse et rend explicite l'organisation fonctionnelle et structurelle des éléments physiques et conceptuels de l'installation. Chaque composante intègre la description des connaissances relatives aux entrées et sorties, aux paramètres internes, aux comportements, aux modèles de panne, aux fonctions et aux heuristiques de ces éléments. Pour faciliter l'exploitation de la représentation par l'ingénieur, le formalisme exprime les relations algébriques, qualitatives et descriptives des modèles utilisés par celui-ci. Pour ce faire, le formalisme combine les aspects algébriques de la connaissance avec la logique des prédicats, ce qui constitue un des aspects originaux de cette thèse. Ce lien avec la logique des prédicats apporte un support théorique qui met en relation la représentation avec celles présentées par d'autres auteurs du domaine. Cette thèse décrit le formalisme de la représentation et les mécanismes qui résolvent la dimension logique et la dimension algébrique de la connaissance représentée. Les mécanismes parcourent les liens définis entre les éléments de l'installation, tout en conservant les chemins d'inférences employés par ces mécanismes. Un prototype a été élaboré et plusieurs exemples sont résolus par celui-ci. [Résumé abrégé par UMI]

This dissertation is an investigation into compound verbal structures in Hiaki in which a verb of motion is modified by an adjoined lexical verb or verb phrase. It provides the first in-depth documentation and analysis of this structure in Hiaki, an endangered language indigenous to North America, and it explores the extent to which complex predicates of motion may be said to form a discrete class crosslinguistically, either in structural or semantic terms, by comparing Hiaki with genetically and typologically distinct languages such as Korean and Warlpiri. The study asks the following questions: 1) What is the underlying structure of a Hiaki compound verb? In particular, what is the structure when the head verb is intransitive and thus cannot take the second verb or verb phrase as its complement? 2) To what extent can complex motion predicates in different languages be said to map to identical underlying syntactic structures? That is, if we compare these constructions in Hiaki with those in languages with different surface morphosyntactic realizations, how do the allowable surface forms constrain the possible underlying structures? 3) Is there evidence to suggest a cline or typology of complex motion predicate constructions? The overall goals of the dissertation project are the detailed documentation, description and theoretical analysis of complex motion constructions in Hiaki, the crosslinguistic comparison of these constructions, and the expansion of an existing database of transcribed and interlinearized Hiaki texts.

A scale consisting of eight suggestions worded with specific sensory predicates was administered to a large undergraduate introductory psychology class. Following the presentation of the suggestions, Self-Scoring Forms were filled out to assess the subjects' response to auditory (A), visual (V), and kinesthetic (K) suggestions. prior to the conclusion of the session, subjects were asked to write a brief essay describing their experience of the suggestion portion of the session. Subject essays were content analyzed for the use of predicates (including, but not only A, V, and K). Frequency of usage of A, V, and K predicates were compared with responses to A, V, and K suggestions to determine the amount of consistency between preference for the use of a specific category of sensory predicates and responsiveness suggestions worded in similar language. No significant correlations between the use of specific sensory predicates and response to specific sensory suggestions were found.

This dissertation provides a formal syntactic analysis of complex-path motion predicates in Ghanaian Student Pidgin (GSP) – an English-lexified expanded pidgin spoken by (mostly male) students in Ghanaian high schools and universities – within the Generative Constructivist framework. The data for the study was collected from three speakers with an instrument consisting of a battery of animated video-clips designed to elicit and contrast the following set of parameters that correspond to the various subcomponents of a motion event – path, telicity, result and agentivity. With regard to the path subcomponent, the dissertation found that GSP is able to express the 3-D vectorization of the path in motion predicates via verbal morphology in Serial Verb Constructions – a proposal which had already been argued by some earlier researchers (Benedicto, Cvejanov, & Quer, 2008; Benedicto & Salomon, 2014; Zheng, 2012). On the issue of the Telicity subcomponent, this dissertation follows in the footsteps of Borer (2005) who argues (among other things) that an event is telic when the functional projection, Asp_Q, is assigned range by a subject-of-quantity internal constituent. However, where this dissertation forges new ground is in proposing that, in motion predicates, it is not the internal constituent that assigns range to Asp_q, as usually assumed, but rather the reaching of an endpoint (which obtains in GSP as the reach substructure). Additionally, the dissertation also shows that this is only compatible with a reachable (i.e. non-projective) XP_loc – a connection made possible by analyzing the internal structure of the XP_loc along the lines of Svenonius, 2008, 2010). The chapter on the Resultative subcomponent shows that the Resultative substructure (unlike some prevailing analysis, e.g. Ramchand, 2008) is independent of Telicity. Finally, with regard to agentivity, the dissertation makes a crucial discovery about the structural difference between initial contact and continuous contact agentives – i.e. the additional functional projection of a grammacticalized <i>make</i> (present in initial contact agentives, but absent from continuous contact agentives) which signals the separation of the figure from the agent. <br>

The present thesis consists of an introduction and the following papers: The aspect-evidentiality system of Middle Mongol. Ural-Altaic Studies, 13. (forthcoming) The tense-aspect system of Khorchin Mongolian. In: Pirkko Suihkonen &amp; Lindsay Whaley (eds.), Typology of Languages of Europe and Northern and Central Asia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (forthcoming) Aspect and epistemic notions in the present tense system of Khalkha Mongolian. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. (forthcoming) Factual vs. evidential? - The past tense forms of spoken Khalkha Mongolian. In: Ad Foolen, Helen de Hoop, &amp; Gijs Mulder (eds.), Empirical Approaches to Evidentiality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (under review) Its purpose is to give an account of tense, aspect and evidentiality in three Mongolian varieties: Middle Mongol (MM) as spoken in the Mongol Empire, Khalkha Mongolian as spoken in the Mongolian state, and Khorchin Mongolian as spoken in eastern Inner Mongolia, China. MM started out with a tripartite tense distinction and a medium-sized aspectual system. Its past evidential system was tripartite with suffixes for firsthand, non-firsthand and evidentially neutral information. In Khorchin, which developed under the influence of Mandarin and Manchu, evidentiality was lost, and tense was simplified into a past / non-past distinction, alongside with a discontinuous proximal future / past marker. The aspect system underwent some changes, but retained its complexity. Khalkha, which developed under the influence of Turkic and Tibetan, underwent some shared innovations with Khorchin, but retained participles as a multifunctional unit within finite predicates, so that its aspectual system grew more complex. The past evidentiality distinctions of MM were basically retained, but the introduction of present tense evidentiality brought a number of changes: the evidentially neutral value shifted to signaling assimilated knowledge, and discontinuous future uses were introduced for all past markers. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Accepted. Paper 2: Accepted. Paper 3: Accepted. Paper 4: Submitted.</p><p> </p>

This diploma thesis focuses on the French analytic predicates with event nouns with the suffix -ation. It is divided into two parts, a theoretical and a practical one. The theoretical part starts with a description of the analytic predicates and their caracteristics on which are based the tests used for identification of this type of predicates. It is followed by the description and typologies of the event nouns which represent one of two fondamental constituents of the analytic predicates. Then the work deals the process of nominalization, and the importance of the delimitation, sense and characteristics of the French suffix -ation is highlighted. The practical part analyses the most frequent French event nouns with the suffix -ation. First of all, a sample of thirty most frequent French nouns in -ation is selected, then the ethymology of these nouns is researched and their action sens is tested. After that, this work treats the valency of the action nouns and their collocability with verbs.

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"Efficient querying over streaming data is a critical technology which requires the ability to handle numerous and possibly similar queries in real time dynamic environments such as the stock market and medical devices. Existing DBMS technology is not well suited for this domain since it was developed for static historical data. Queries over streams often contain relative window predicates such as in the query: ``Heart rate decreased to fifty-two beats per second within four seconds after the patient's temperature started rising." Relative window predicates are a specific type of join between streams that is based on the tuple's timestamp. In our operator, called Juggler, predicates are classified into three types: attribute, join, and window. Attribute predicates are stream values compared to a constant. Join predicates are stream values compared to another stream's values. Window predicates are join predicates where the streams' timestamp values are compared. Juggler's composite operator incorporates the processing of similar though not identical, query functionalities as one complex computation process. This execution strategy handles multi-way joins for multiple selection and join predicates. It adaptively orders the execution of predicates by their selectivity to efficiently process multiple continuous queries based on stream characteristics. In Juggler, all similar predicates are grouped into lists. These indices are represented by a collection of bits. Every tuple contains the bit structure representation of the predicate lists which encodes tuple predicate evaluation history. Every query also contains a similar bit structure to encode the predicate's relationship to the registered queries. The tuple's and query's bit structures are compared to assess if the tuple has satisfied a query. Juggler is designed and implemented in Java. Experiments were conducted to verify correctness and to assess the performance of Juggler's three features. Its adaptivity of reordering the evaluation of predicate types performed as well as the most selective predicate ordering. Its ability to exploit similar predicates in multiple queries showed reduction in number of comparisons. Its effectiveness when multiple queries are combined in a single Juggler operator indicated potential performance improvements after optimization of Juggler's data structures."