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.

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.

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.

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.

Traditionally, children's formal introduction to print has occurred when they enter primary school around five years of age. The progress of this literacy development typically has been from the child's spoken language into reading. In this approach writing emerges out of reading experience. Montessori's theory suggests that children can come to literacy via writing, specifically via the sounds of the alphabet. Her approach rests on the view that the alphabet can represent the sounds of spoken language. Given the sounds/symbols to write the child can learn to map spoken language to print. As children explore the print system in writing they will build up knowledge and understanding sufficient to support easy access to reading. According to Montessori the pre-school years offer an optimal time for this development to occur. She maintains that where literacy acquisition emerges out of spoken language via writing into reading the potential for creative written expression may be more available to the child than where the progression is first into reading. In this latter approach the thoughts and conventions of other writers (reading) may limit the child's expression. Theoretical issues regarding young children's capacities to learn as well as issues surrounding the writing/reading precedence are discussed. To examine the process from children's spoken language into writing, a series of naturalistic observations were carried out in three Montessori classes. Children's progress from oracy to literacy and the learning environments which facilitated this process are documented and discussed. In presenting the children's learning environments an informal exposition of Montessori's approach to language learning at the pre-school level is given.

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Computer Processing of Oriental Languages. Language Technology for the Knowledge-based Economy: 22nd International Conference, ICCPOL 2009, Hong Kong, March 26-27, 2009. Proceedings

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Submitted by BRUNA FARIA CAMPOS DE FREITAS (brunafcf1@hotmail.com) on 2018-03-23T11:09:55Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Final - Bruna Faria.pdf: 715422 bytes, checksum: cd579068881cc64b5b76b11ce7d9b43d (MD5) / Rejected by Milena Maria Rodrigues null (milena@fclar.unesp.br), reason: Bom dia Bruna, Para aprovação no Repositório Institucional da UNESP, serão necessárias algumas correções na sua Dissertação. Solicitamos que realize uma nova submissão seguindo as orientações abaixo: - O trabalho deverá conter ficha catalográfica: http://www.fclar.unesp.br/#!/biblioteca/servicos/elaboracao-de-fichas-catalograficas/ Em caso de maiores dúvidas, entrar em contato com as bibliotecárias da Seção de Referência (Camila ou Elaine). Agradecemos a compreensão. on 2018-03-23T11:52:58Z (GMT) / Submitted by BRUNA FARIA CAMPOS DE FREITAS (brunafcf1@hotmail.com) on 2018-03-23T13:27:49Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Final - Bruna Faria.pdf: 758170 bytes, checksum: 0867a8ad7972025d473c5ee2313c59d2 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Milena Maria Rodrigues null (milena@fclar.unesp.br) on 2018-03-23T14:31:34Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 freitas_bfc_me_arafcl.pdf: 758170 bytes, checksum: 0867a8ad7972025d473c5ee2313c59d2 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-03-23T14:31:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 freitas_bfc_me_arafcl.pdf: 758170 bytes, checksum: 0867a8ad7972025d473c5ee2313c59d2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-07-31 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Esta dissertação tem como objetivo identificar quais os contextos linguísticos e extralinguísticos que propiciam a ocorrência da monotongação dos ditongos orais decrescentes na fala de moradores da cidade de Uberaba- MG. Entende-se por “monotongação” o processo de redução do ditongo, que perde sua semivogal e passa a uma vogal simples, como ocorre em “c[ay]xa” > “c[a]xa” (HORA; RIBEIRO, 2006). Sendo assim, sabendo que a língua portuguesa sofreu e sofre variações e mudanças à medida que é utilizada por seus falantes, faz-se necessário que se realizem pesquisas na área de Variação Linguística objetivando uma abordagem científica do tema. Para isso, organizamos um corpus de língua falada, representativo da comunidade urbana de Uberaba – MG, por meio de entrevistas, que foram embasadas no modelo laboviano. Foram entrevistados 24 informantes de escolarização e sexo diferentes. Após essa etapa, as entrevistas foram transcritas ortograficamente e, posteriormente, foram selecionadas as ocorrências de palavras com ditongo decrescente e com a monotongação do ditongo decrescente, estas, por sua vez, foram transcritas foneticamente também. As ocorrências foram quantitativamente analisadas, com a ajuda do programa estatístico GOLDVARB X, segundo fatores linguísticos e extralinguísticos, levando em consideração a variável dependente: monotongação ou não dos ditongos decrescentes. Os resultados obtidos mostraram que, na fala do uberabense, há a preferência pela forma monotongada dos ditongos /aj/, /ej/ e /ow/ e que tal preferência é condicionada, principalmente, por fatores linguísticos, tais como o contexto fonológico seguinte, a extensão da palavra e a tonicidade. Em relação aos fatores considerados extralinguísticos, como sexo, idade e escolaridade, no que diz respeito ao fenômeno da monotongação no português mineiro de Uberaba, eles pouco influem, ou até mesmo nada influem sobre sua realização. / This dissertation aims to identify the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts that allow the occurrence of the monotongation of the descending oral diphthongs in the speech of residents of the city of Uberaba - MG. Monotongation is the process of reducing the diphthong that loses its semivowel and changes into a simple vowel, as in "c[ay] xa" > "c [a] xa" (HORA; RIBEIRO, 2006). Thus, knowing that the Portuguese language has had variations and changes as it is used by its speakers, it is necessary to carry out a research in the area of Linguistic Variation with a scientific approach onto the theme of this work. Thereon, we organized a corpus of spoken language through interviews with the representative urban community of Uberaba - MG, which was based on the Labovian model. Twenty-four (24) informants of different schooling and sex were interviewed. After this step, the interviews were orthographically transcribed and, later, the occurrence of words with descending diphthongs and the monotongation of the descending diphthongs were selected, which, in turn, were also transcribed phonetically. The occurrences were quantitatively analyzed with the help of the GOLDVARB X statistical program according to linguistic and extralinguistic factors, taking into account the dependent variable: monotongation or not of the descending diphthongs. The results obtained showed that in the Uberabense speech there is a preference for the monotong form of the diphthongs /aj/, /ej/ and /ow/ and that such preference is mainly conditioned by linguistic factors such as the following phonological context, the extension of the word and the tone. In relation to factors considered extralinguistic, such as sex, age and schooling, with respect to the phenomenon of monotongation in the Portuguese of Uberaba, they have little or no influence on their achievement.