Reproduction de : Habilitation à diriger des recherches : Informatique : Avignon : 2008. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. 219 p. Bibliogr. p. 191-219. Bibliogr. de l'auteur p. 172-176.

The study investigates the constructed relationship between gender, language, and power in a type of conventional, informal discussion, commonly referred to as adda in Bengal. This research focuses on everyday contestations of authority and some ways that are differently framed by men and women, and as well as some implications of these strategies as they negotiate and position themselves within the setting of adda in Austin, Texas, a place away from Bengal. The corpus consists of a segment of recorded data within mixed-group interaction, including both men and women, among native Bengalis who are currently from Texas as well as from Bengal. I use conversation analysis as a methodology to analyze the sequential production of meaning, and study how participant roles emerge and are negotiated through the lens of an adda setting. The study investigates the transformation of a discussion between men and women into a format of debate, which is common in adda, and the strategies employed by the participants to seize the floor. The strategies analyzed include: collaboration between women to disagree with the male participants’ positions and vice-versa. Questioning as a practice can be a very powerful device within the situated space, as it demands a response from the recipient. The study builds on the recent scholarship on the multifunctional use of tag questions and contributes by adding a new perspective on how the tag-questions are employed by women as an interactional strategy to become co-tellers in the discussion. From the very outset, the study focuses on the use of tag-questions and how they are implemented in an interactional framework (by either men or women). The broader aim of this report is to use tag-question as a primary data set because of their complexity. The act of questioning is a very complex activity as it involves the context and positioning of the speaker as well as the recipient and how they both act and react to the question. In the segment analyzed in the report, women use tag question to question the men’s authority claims, but the questions are interpreted by men as a re-framing to a teacher-student paradigm, and undermine the women’s position. The female participants also create interruptions to redirect and reformulate the topic, in order to become co-tellers in the discussion. In exploring these strategies, I examine both the embodied behavior and the speech styles of both men and women. / text

This dissertation investigates the peculiar behavior of negative polarity items in questions and argues that a unified account of their distribution across declarative and interrogative constructions is feasible. These items are acceptable in questions, despite the fact that questions do not prima facie share anything in common with the other environments in which NPIs surface. Specifically, given current analyses of questions there is no way to argue that questions give rise to downward-entailing inferences, which is what otherwise unifies all other NPI licensing environments. In Chapter 2 I argue for a new semantics of questions wherein strength of exhaustivity is encoded not in different answer-hood operators (cf. Heim 1994), but rather in terms of the presence/absence of a null only that adjoins at the level of the question nucleus, building on an observation by Guerzoni and Sharvit (2007) that question strength appears to be the determining factor in whether or not a question allows NPIs. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on the distribution of NPIs in constituent questions and shows how the analysis put forward in Chapter 2 can account for an array of facts, namely their distribution both in the question nucleus, and in the restrictor of the wh-phrase. Further predictions related to NPIs that had not been discussed before are examined, such as how their scope relative to adjunct wh-phrases affects their acceptability, as well as the distributional differences between weak and strong NPIs. In Chapters 4 and 5 we turn to non-wh questions, namely alternate and polar questions. In Chapter 4 I argue that alternate questions can and should be given an analysis akin to that of wh-questions based on both old and new empirical evidence that the distribution of NPIs is sensitive to the same set of restrictions. In Chapter 5 I argue, contrary to previous analyses, that the acceptability of NPIs is not a function of strength, but rather of how polar questions are interpreted, namely as speech act conditionals. Lastly, Chapter 6 focuses on complex questions and puts forward an analysis of these questions that sets the stage for an arguably unified semantics of all types of questions. / Linguistics

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Session ID: TH-B1-2 / SCIS & ISIS 2010, Joint 5th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems and 11th International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems. December 8-12, 2010, Okayama Convention Center, Okayama, Japan

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

The underlying purpose of the study was to learn more about how elementary-aged children deal with tests purporting to measure critical thinking skills. This involved four related purposes: (a) development of a testing instrument, (b) analysis and evaluation of the test instrument, (c) to determine the difference of performance between grades, and (d) identification of commonality factors among the tests.