Wang Lidi. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-244). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 314-319. / by Osvaldo Adolfo Jaeggli. / Ph.D.

The primary purpose of the present study was to compare the quality of spontaneous language samples elicited from twelve low socioeconomic, normally developing, migrant Spanish-speaking subjects by their mothers in the home and by this investigator in the clinic. The subjects ranged in age from three years, one month to six years, nine months.

The purpose of this study was to compare NSST data (Lee, 1969, 1971) with data obtained in Portland, Oregon for children 4.0-4.11 years of age. The questions this study sought to answer were: 1) Is there a significant difference between the expressive and receptive scores obtained by Lee, (1969, 1971) and the scores obtained in Portland, Oregon? 2) What are the means, standard deviations and percentiles of the NSST scores of a select group of four-year-old children in Portland, Oregon?

This dissertation provides a formal and functional analysis of grammatical voice in Sasak, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. The research addresses two primary questions, which are (1) how does Sasak clause structure and morphosyntax vary across dialects? and (2) what shapes speakers’ syntactic production, namely grammatical voice choices? Answers to these questions are pursued via elicitation data, a corpus analysis, and results of two language production experiments. The first part of the dissertation examines how Sasak dialects differ syntactically and morphosyntactically. Data from embedded clauses, clitics, and possessive pronominal clitics are used to argue that that Central Sasak maintains two distinct transitive clause types despite the lack of the overt morphological contrast found with transitive verbs in Eastern Sasak. These data also support prior arguments (Davies, 1993; Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis, 1992; Shibatani, 2008) that Indonesian languages have either two grammatical subject positions, or both a subject and grammatical topic position in the case of Sasak. Many Austronesian languages spoken on Indonesia’s Java Island and surrounding islands share a cognate nasal prefix that is generally found in the presence of preverbal actors (Arka, 2009; Davies, 2005; Sneddon, 1996). This dissertation presents data from three Sasak dialects that show how multiple, morphologically distinct nasal prefixes in Sasak dialects (also noted by Austin, 2012) correlate with two syntactic facts: first, what argument may be extracted out of vP; and secondly, whether or not the lexical verb projects an internal argument. These facts are accounted for in a Minimalist framework (Chomsky, 1993, 2001) by permitting variation to target single features on syntactic heads (as proposed by Aldridge, 2008). The second half of the dissertation investigates what factors shape speakers’ grammatical voice choices. Speakers’ production patterns can clearly be understood as shaped by the structural properties of their specific language(s), and this is also true in Sasak. However, what about when multiple word orders and voice choices are possible? When languages allow for syntactic options, are there universal non-syntactic constraints that exert influence on the production and syntactic coding choices? This dissertation explores potential universal biases identified in literature that has grown out of Bock and Warren’s (1985:50) work on Conceptual Accessibility, or the “ease with which the mental representation of some potential referent can be activated in, or retrieved from, memory”. The specific biases examined for Sasak in the current work are Discourse Topicality (Givón, 1983), animacy (Branigan, Pickering, & Tanaka, 2008), and noun phrase length (MacDonald, 2013; Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). Results of a corpus analysis are combined with data from two production experiments, and show that both animacy and topicality affect voice selection in Sasak. Specifically, [+animate] and [+topical] noun phrases are produced earlier in a sentence, thereby affecting the grammatical voice produced. Also, Sasak speakers exhibit a ‘long before short’ bias (i.e., placing longer noun phrases before relatively shorter ones in utterances), affecting voice selection as well. Contextualized in cross-linguistic data, this supports the argument made in this dissertation that the cognitive effect of the semantic richness and salience of longer nouns is relative to the speaker’s stage in planning and producing an utterance.

<p>Denna rapport beskriver resonemanget kring framtagandet av en modul som tillåter användaren att, på ett lättanvänt sätt, skripta beteenden hos en redan existerande grafikmotor. Arbetsprocessen beskrivs steg för steg med definition av vad ett skript är, vad som ska kunna gå att skripta och vilka övergripande krav som ställs, design av tekniska lösningar, design av syntax, testning och till sist resultat. Resultatet varierade på de olika punkterna. Den underliggande tekniska lösningen blev lyckad då den uppfyllde kraven på modularisering, robusthet, flexibilitet och prestanda. Ur en tillämpbarhetssynpunkt blev resultatet även här tillfredsställande eftersom det visade sig vara fullt möjligt att skripta kloner på de tre försöksspelen (SkiiFree, BreakOut och Space Invaders) på ett sätt som kändes bra och rättfram. Dock blev resultatet inte lika lättanvänt som jag hade hoppats på. Jag upplevde att användandet av naturlig syntax i mitt fall försvårar för användaren istället för att underlätta förståelsen. Detta eftersom människor till stor del lär sig av att känna igen mönster och upprepningar och dessa elimineras till stor del när naturlig syntax används eftersom varje kommando i skriptkoden varierar så mycket utseendemässigt sinsemellan. Även rent generellt upplevde jag att skriptningsmetoden att svart på vitt skriva kod inte gjorde sig bäst för mitt syfte. Denna metod gör sig bättre då användarens möjligheter är mindre begränsade och denne arbetar på en lägre programkodsnivå. I syftet att på ett enkelt sätt kunna ändra beteendet i en existerande värld, snarare än att från grunden bygga upp en helt egen dito, vore det bättre att istället använda ett mer grafiskt användarinterface, helst helt integrerat i grafikmotorn. Examensarbetet gav mig en klar bild över de krav som ställs på en skriptmotorn och hur man kan gå till väga för att uppfylla dessa krav. Jag fick även, tack vare erfarenheterna med examensarbetet, insikter i fördelarna och nackdelarna med naturlig syntax för programkod.</p> / <p>This report describes the design and implementation of a module that provides the user a way to, in an easy-to-use manner, script the behaviours for an already existing graphics-engine. The work process is described step by step with definition of what a script is, what should be scriptable and what the general demands are, design of technical solutions, design of the codesyntax, testing and results. The result varies for the different aspects. The underlying technical solutions became successful since they fulfilled the demands for modularisation, robustness, flexibility and performance. The result also became satisfying from a relevance point-of-view because it is shown to be fully possible to script clones of the three test-games (SkiiFree, BreakOut and Space Invaders) in a way that felt good and forthright. However, the syntax was not as easy to use as I had hoped for. I found that the use of natural syntax might make it harder for the user to learn how to script rather than the opposite. This is, I think, because people to a large extent learn by recognizing patterns and these were less uniform with the use of a flexible natural syntax that can be varied freely. Also, I felt that the general method to write textual script-code in that sense was not the best for my purpose. For the purpose to modify the behaviours of an existing world, rather than building new ones from bottom up, it could be better to provide a more graphical user interface, preferable fully integrated into the graphics-engine. This work has given me insights into the requirements on a script engine and how these requirements can be met.</p>

Parataxe et subordination, ces deux termes, parfois antithétiques, sont problématiques du fait même de leur extrême polysémie. C’est de cette ambiguïté que naît l’objet d’étude, les constructions asyndétiques, au statut incertain entre intégration et indépendance. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons de réinterroger ce phénomène ancien et déjà bien connu en ancien français, en le mettant en regard des remises en question et avancées des recherches actuelles sur le sujet. Pour cela, il nous faut tout d'abord poser une définition de ce qu'est la subordination. Nous montrons ensuite que les constructions asyndétiques sont bien des cas de subordination. Cette thèse établit enfin que ce phénomène constitue, en ancien français du moins, une variante libre en syntaxe. Sa répartition et sa présence dans les textes a cependant très tôt diminué, mais l’existence de phénomènes parallèles en français moderne, tout comme d’autres indices, nous permettent de faire l’hypothèse que cette évolution tient d’une alternance oral / écrit. Cette thèse montre ainsi que les problèmes, comme les enjeux, ne diffèrent finalement pas, quel que soit l’état de langue et que la parataxe constitue bien une construction dans le système de la langue. / Parataxis and subordination, two sometimes antithetical terms, are problematic due to their high degree of polysemy. It is from this ambiguity that arises the subject of this study, asyndetic constructions, which have an uncertain status between integration and independence. In this dissertation we propose a reexamination of this ancient phenomenon, already well known in Old French, by placing it in the context of questions and advances in current research on the subject. In order to do this we must first give a definition of subordination. We then go on to show that asyndetic constructions are indeed a case of subordination. Finally, this dissertation shows that this phenomenon constitutes, at least in Old French, a free syntactic variation. Its dispersion and presence in texts diminished very early, but the existence of similar phenomena in Modern French, as well as other indicators, allow us to make the hypothesis that this evolution is due to an oral / written alternation. This dissertation thus shows that the issue related to subordination and parataxis do not actually differ, whether in Old French or Modern French, and that parataxis is indeed a construction in the language system.

This study is a comparative analysis of the syntax of adverbials in Chinese and Italian in the context of an anti-symmetric view of clause structure. Through a detailed investigation of selected sentence adverbs, aspect adverbs and manner adverbs, various similarities and differences between Italian and Chinese are identified. Chinese adverbials are mostly pre-verbal (with a few exceptions) while in Italian they can also appear after the verb. Such differences are plausibly accounted for through the verb-movement analysis: the Italian verb raises, overtly, to the left of adverbs, probably as a consequence of the rich inflectional morphology, while in Chinese the verb cannot overtly raise out of VP, due to the scarce inflectional morphology of the language. The traditional analysis of adverbs as adjuncts, coupled with directionality parameters, is not needed in order to explain the facts. The study shows that when adverbs such as the Italian adverb presto and the corresponding Chinese adverb kuai (‘quickly’) appear in different syntactic positions, they may receive different interpretations. This fact cannot be properly captured by the adjunct analysis, but it is predicted by the F-Spec hypothesis, according to which each class of adverbs occupies a specific syntactic position within the functional projections above VP. The double analysis of Italian bene (‘well’), which can be an adverb but can also (in specific cases) be interpreted as a predicate, is a clear example in support of the functional vs. predicational nature of adverbs, a fact also noted in the predicational analysis of the Chinese post-verbal V-deconstructions. Finally, Italian adverbs like stranamente (‘oddly’) are ambiguous between a clausal and a manner reading when appearing in post-verbal / pre-object position, while in Chinese the corresponding adverb qiguai shows the same ambiguity in the pre-verbal position. This, again, is associated with the possibility in Italian, but not in Chinese, for the verb to raise to the left of adverbs. Overall, the study supports the view that several word order and interpretative properties which differ between languages can be reduced to a few abstract syntactic principles. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy