This study is a synchronic descriptive analysis of the morphology of the Arabic dialect spoken by natives of the city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Hereafter, the dialect will be abbreviated 'DD' and also referred to as 'the dialect' or 'this dialect'. The central focus of this study is the morphological component of DD as it interplays with phonological processes. Definitions of words are provided in the form of English glosses and translations, and are elaborated upon when the need calls for it. Layout of Chapters. This dissertation is presented in the following order. Chapter one is introductory. The historical background of the Arabic language and Arabic diglossia are discussed in this chapter. In the same vein, four descriptive models that treat the development of the Arabic dialects are discussed. The present linguistic situation in the U. A. E. is also touched upon. The aim of this research process and the methodology followed in it are also explained in it. Additionally, chapter one contains a review of the literature on Gulf Arabic, of which DD is a dialect, or subdialect, and a review of related literature. Chapter two deals with the phonological system of DD. It covers consonants and vowels and their distribution, in addition to anaptyxis, assimilation, elision, emphasis, etc. Morphology is treated in chapters three through six. The morphology of DD verbs, including inflection for tense, number and gender, is dealt with in the third chapter. Because DD morphology is root-based, the triliteral root system, which is extremely productive, is explained in some detail. Chapter four deals with the morphology of DD nouns, including verbal nouns, occupational nouns, nouns of location, etc. Noun inflection for number and gender is also discussed in this chapter. The morphology of noun modifiers is treated in chapter five. This includes participles, relative adjectives, positive adjectives and the construct phrase. Pronoun morphology, and the processes associated with it, are covered in chapter six. The seventh chapter is the conclusion. It delineates the limitations of this study and contains specific comments on observations made in the process of this research. The contributions of this dissertation and suggestions for further investigation and research are also discussed in chapter seven.

The subject matter of this thesis are some aspects of the expression of explanations in spoken discourse. The study of explanations has occupied the attention of many researchers in social psychology and in neighbouring disciplines; the study of talk has occupied an even greater number. In the thesis I try to integrate certain areas of these two fields. Chapter one sketches the history of the concern with language which has characterised developments in the social sciences this century. This chapter is incidentally an introduction to some of the key themes of the thesis and to why I think research based on naturally occurring discourse is important. Research on explanations in social psychology has been dominated by research which has gone on under the heading of attribution theory. In chapter two I address a controversy in the application of concepts drawn from attribution theory to clinical psychology, namely whether or not people have fixed styles in the way that they attribute causes for outcomes. Studying family therapy sessions and interviews with parents with a coding procedure I show that the variety of possible styles is broader than has been suggested previously. Chapter three further pursues causal expressions as cases of explanations by asking what a causal statement is. The chapter opens with a discussion of how causes relate to reasons concluding that reasons are a species of cause. I then go on to use data from earlier work to study what expressions speakers use to make causal utterances. The direction of enquiry has been to suggest that rather than studying causal beliefs it is causal utterances that are under study. An utterance is, if you like, "situated", that is to say, what a speaker says is context-bound. I talk of "communicative constraints" operating here. Chapter four reviews some work in the study of conversation with an eye to elucidating the sense in which a speaker's utterances are a product of the situation in which they occur and to look at the researchability of this intuition. Practical and conceptual reasons suggest that the approach generally known as conversation analysis stemming from the study of ethnomethodology is the most interesting and fruitful way toproceed (in this context). Chapters five and six report studies of a computing advisory centre showing 1, the range of accounting procedures which occur as part of the business-at-hand in these sessions, 2, how speakers' utterances, can change within a single conversation. Chapter six looks at the integration of non-vocal behaviour and by considering data on this argues that the idea of normativity, rather than a quasi grammatical notion, is the appropriate level of explanation for the regularities which we find in human interaction. In moving away from beliefs as the object of analysis I could be accused of taking an anti-cognitive stance. Chapter seven explores cognitive versus interactional perspectives in communication. Chapter eight reflects on the approach which I have adopted and suggests how inspite, indeed through, its focus on situational events an account of the capacities drawn on in offering explanations can itself illuminate phenomena seen as beyond its grasp

La présente thèse en création littéraire comporte deux parties. La première est un recueil de poésie divisé entre les deux types de poésies orales que nous avons étudiés : le spoken word poetry et le slam de poésie. À travers cette expérience de création, notre objectif était de montrer les différences entre les deux styles ainsi que leur courbe évolutive. Pour y arriver, nous avons pris comme point de départ un poème dans le style plus traditionnel de la poésie. À partir de ce texte « sacrifié » (selon la méthode mise en place durant les soirées de Slam), nous avons donc organisé les poèmes en suivant notre adaptation aux exigences du slam de poésie et du spoken word poetry. À travers ce travail, nous avons aussi dressé un plan thématique pour compléter l’organisation du recueil. La seconde partie est composée de deux chapitres. Le premier est une étude théorique sur les différences entre les deux styles de poésie : il serait alors question de l’évolution progressive d’une poésie orale vers une autre en plus des orientations prises par chacune au fil des années. Comme genre littéraire, le spoken word, qui reste plus près des sources, est beaucoup plus libre que le Slam, qui s’implante dans le milieu actuel avec ses thèmes et doit suivre les règles rigides de la compétition. Le deuxième chapitre est un retour réflexif sur ma propre création à partir des notions vues au premier chapitre. Il explique en profondeur l’organisation de mon recueil de même que le plan thématique de ses deux parties.

How can I as a storyteller talk about humans and nature and the relation between us and the natural world? How can storytelling contribute to create interest and engagement in nature and the environment? In this project I have investigated different ways of talking about nature, climate and humans, trying to find a different voice and angle on this everlasting important theme. Through practical research I have tried different strategies, voices and moods, with the result being a very personal approach to nature and environmental anxiety in a short, dark, poetic film. / <p>The full thesis contains copyrighted material</p><p>which has been removed in the published version.</p>

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When hearing speech, listeners begin recognizing words before reaching the end of the word. Therefore, early sounds impact spoken word recognition before sounds later in the word. In languages like English, most morphophonological alternations affect the ends of words, but in some languages, morphophonology can alter the early sounds of a word. Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has a pattern of 'initial consonant mutation' that changes initial consonants: Pog 'kiss' begins with [ph], but phog 'kissed' begins with [f]. This raises questions both of how listeners process words that might begin with a mutated consonant during spoken word recognition, and how listeners relate the mutated and unmutated forms to each other in the lexicon. We present three experiments to investigate these questions. A priming experiment shows that native speakers link the mutated and unmutated forms in the lexicon. A gating experiment shows that Gaelic listeners usually do not consider mutated forms as candidates during lexical recognition until there is enough evidence to force that interpretation. However, a phonetic identification experiment confirms that listeners can identify the mutated sounds correctly. Together, these experiments contribute to our understanding of how speakers represent and process a language with morphophonological alternations at word onset.

No description available.

Dialogue promises a natural and effective method for users to interact with and obtain information from computer systems. Statistical spoken dialogue systems are able to disambiguate in the presence of errors by maintaining probability distributions over what they believe to be the state of a dialogue. However, traditionally these distributions have been derived using generative models, which do not directly optimise for the criterion of interest and cannot easily exploit arbitrary information that may potentially be useful. This thesis presents how discriminative methods can overcome these problems in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Dialogue State Tracking (DST). A robust method for SLU is proposed, based on features extracted from the full posterior distribution of recognition hypotheses encoded in the form of word confusion networks. This method uses discriminative classifiers, trained on unaligned input/output pairs. Performance is evaluated on both an off-line corpus, and on-line in a live user trial. It is shown that a statistical discriminative approach to SLU operating on the full posterior ASR output distribution can substantially improve performance in terms of both accuracy and overall dialogue reward. Furthermore, additional gains can be obtained by incorporating features from the system's output. For DST, a new word-based tracking method is presented that maps directly from the speech recognition results to the dialogue state without using an explicit semantic decoder. The method is based on a recurrent neural network structure that is capable of generalising to unseen dialogue state hypotheses, and requires very little feature engineering. The method is evaluated in the second and third Dialog State Tracking Challenges, as well as in a live user trial. The results demonstrate consistently high performance across all of the off-line metrics and a substantial increase in the quality of the dialogues in the live trial. The proposed method is shown to be readily applied to expanding dialogue domains, by exploiting robust features and a new method for online unsupervised adaptation. It is shown how the neural network structure can be adapted to output structured joint distributions, giving an improvement over estimating the dialogue state as a product of marginal distributions.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第18415号 / 情博第530号 / 新制||情||94(附属図書館) / 31273 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科知能情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 奥乃 博, 教授 河原 達也, 教授 髙木 直史, 講師 吉井 和佳 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

This study investigated the language use of deaf adult bilinguals in conversation with each other in workplace settings, and with their deaf and hearing children in home settings. The aim was to gain insight into the Auslan-English language contact outcomes that might be found in these settings, and what factors influenced these outcomes. The results indicated that the most unique use of language by deaf bilinguals was that of simultaneous use of both spoken English and Auslan, and it was this simultaneous use which facilitated the two examples of code-switching (defined as a complete change of language from Auslan to spoken English) that was found in the data. The other two contact outcomes of significance were frequent transference of English into Auslan, and the equally frequent use of fingerspelling, which has a pivotal role in filling the gap in Auslan, a language with no orthographic form. The study also revealed that Auslan (a signed language) was the language in which many issues of identity were expressed by deaf bilinguals, regardless of whether the individual was a first or second language learner of Auslan. The results confirmed that these language and identity factors did influence the language contact outcomes.