Note: In the print original, page 38 appears to be missing, and there are two different page 272s.

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The Tunisian Berber (or Shilha) vernaculars are among the least described Afroasiatic (Hamito-Semitic) languages to this day. Although they have been provisionally assigned to the North-Berber group within the Berber branch of Afroasiatic, their immediate affiliation remains an open question. The principal task of this present work is to describe the phonology, morphology and syntax of Douiret. Less central to the aims of the study is the analysis of the basic wordstores of the three surviving Shilha varieties which include Douiret, Chninni (or Chenini) and Ouirsighen (Jerba). The Shilha variety of Douiret is chosen for this study because it still retains some fundamental elements of Berber structure which are not very dissimilar to other Berber languages such as Kabyle and Tamazight. The research shows that Tunisian Berber still survives today, but its future remains uncertain in the face of the forces of urbanisation, economic migration and lack of government support all of which may contribute hypothetically to its likely death. This study will be pursued with reference to the social and cultural context of the Tunisian Berber vernaculars. Research on the nature of language contact bewtween Tunisian Arabic and Shilha is practically non-existent and in this study, is a secondary concern. The strong influence of the local Arabic superstratum on Shilha in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexis is also investigated, as well as the presence of Berber elements in the distinctive Arabic dialect of Tunisia. As the thesis title suggests, this study should not be taken as the last word on Berber in Tunisia. The little available data on Berber in Tunisia makes the task harder in establishing a clear picture of its structure and relationship with other Berber languages such as Kabyle and Tamazight. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) (Education)

Results of a production experiment on the placement of sentence accent in German are reported. The hypothesis that German fulfills some of the most widely accepted rules of accent assignment— predicting focus domain integration—was only partly confirmed. Adjacency between argument and verb induces a single accent on the argument, as recognized in the literature, but interruption of this sequence by a modifier often induces remodeling of the accent pattern with a single accent on the modifier. The verb is rarely stressed. All models based on linear alignment or adjacency between elements belonging to a single accent domain fail to account for this result. A cyclic analysis of prosodic domain formation is proposed in an optimality-theoretic framework that can explain the accent pattern. Japanese <i>wh</i>-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the <i>wh</i>-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of <i>Multiple Spell-Out</i> in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a <i>wh</i>-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and <i>wh</i>-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out.

This article presents a situation description production experiment investigating the interaction between syntax and information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger- Congo family spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put the object in narrow informational focus or narrow corrective focus while controlling for the tonal structure of the target word. Contrary to the prediction that corrective focus is marked by fronting and morphological marking of the focused constituent the data suggest that the in-situ strategy is the preferred one.

This is the 13th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. It is the first part of a series of Linguistic Fieldnote issues which present data collected by members of different projects of the SFB during fieldwork on various languages or dialects spoken worldwide. This part of the Fieldnote Series is dedicated to data from African languages. It contains contributions by Mira Grubic (A5) on Ngizim, and Susanne Genzel & Frank Kügler (D5) on Akan. The papers allow insights into various aspects of the elicitation of formal correlates of focus and related phenomena in different African languages investigated by the SFB in the second funding phase, especially in the period between 2007 and 2010.

This thesis by publication presents a study on English adpositions (e.g. to, in, at, from, in frontof, through). It attempts to offer a solution to the following three outstanding problems, whichare presented in each of the three parts making up the thesis, preceded by a general introduction(chapter 1) and followed by the general conclusions (chapter 7). The first part includes chapter2, and discusses the problem of What is the relation between adpositions and the non-linguistic,visual content they represent. The second part includes chapters 3 and 4, and discusses theproblem ofwhat is a proper compositional theory of the Syntax and Semantics of adpositions.The third part includes chapters 5 and 6, and discusses the problem of what is the psychologicalreality of this theory, regarding adults and children’s data.The following three solutions are suggested. First, the relation between adpositions and theircorresponding visual information is an isomorphism: adpositions capture how we “see” possiblespatio-temporal relations between objects, at a flexible level of fine-grainedness. Second, aproper compositional treatment of adpositions treats each syntactic unit (in front, of ) as offeringa distinct semantic contribution, hence spelling out a restricted instance of a spatio-temporalpart-of relation. Third, this compositional treatment of adpositions can also stand as a theory ofon-line interpretation in adults and a theory of their acquisition in children.These three answers are couched within a single theoretical approach, that of Discourse Representation Theory, and offer a unified solution to three apparently distinct problems regardingspatial adpositions and their linguistic properties.

Den här uppsatsen analyserar språkkomplexitet i inrikesartiklar i Svenska Dagbladet och Expressen från åren 1952, 1982 och 2012. Syftet med undersökningen är att studera eventuella mönster och tendenser i vad som kännetecknar språkkomplexitet i artiklarna för respektive tidning och år och hur språkkomplexiteten förändrats över tid. Analysen genomförs med stöd i etablerade teorier om stilistik och lingvistisk komplexitet. Vidare analyseras artiklarnas språkkomplexitet både kvantitativt och kvalitativt med ett särskilt analysverktyg som utvecklats i den här studien för att just undersöka lingvistisk komplexitet. Exempel på variabler som undersöks med koppling till språklig komplexitet är menings- och ordlängd samt variabler nära kopplat till tidningsformatet som fått lite skrivit om sig inom stilistiken, exempelvis antal repliker och längd på stycken. Undersökningens resultat visar att artiklarna i både Svenska dagbladet och Expressen inte, som resultat i tidigare forskning påpekat, gått en rak väg mot mindre komplext språk: artiklarna från 1982 har genomgående ett språk som är mindre komplext än artiklarna från 2012. Mest komplexa är 1952 års artiklar. En förklaring till den höga språkkomplexiteten i 1952 års artiklar sträcker sig bortom bruket av ord och meningar: styckeindelning och utformning samt flitigt användande av kommatering gör att artikeltexterna upplevs som mer komplexa. Ett annat resultat med tydligt utslag var bruket av repliker som för båda tidningarna ökat kraftigt i de nutida artiklarna.

The beginning of the twentieth century saw a boom economy for the coal and coke industry. Located in the Crowsnest Pass of Alberta, the coal mining town of Lille existed for about a decade in the early twentieth century, from approximately 1901-1912. Towns such as this are ephemeral in nature, and as such, offer interesting opportunities to investigate a very definite period in time. Lille can provide a unique snapshot of life in the Canadian Rockies at the beginning of the last century. <p>Two archaeological investigations were carried out upon this time slice in 1979 and early 1981. Further analysis of artifactual material was undertaken in order to reconstruct life in a company town. The present study combines the two archaeological assemblages for study. It focuses upon material remains found at the town site, as well as spatial relationships between different residences and parts of the business district. Lille is discussed using a framework of corporate paternalism as it was a company town and it is hypothesized that there are stratified residential areas based upon occupational status. The degree to which inhabitants followed this ascribed status is investigated through their material remains. Additional factors affecting the town and its residents, such as company policy, union strikes and the coal market will be discussed. This examination of Lille provides an opportunity to explore daily life in remote mining communities in the early 20th century.

The Uses of Objects Task is a widely used assessment of creative performance, but it relies on subjective scoring methods for evaluation. A new version of the task was devised using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a computational tool used to measure semantic distance. 135 participants provided as many creative uses for as they could for 20 separate objects. Responses were analyzed for strategy use, category switching, variety, and originality of responses, as well as subjective measure of creativity by independent raters. The LSA originality measure was more reliable than the subjective measure, and values averaged over participants correlated with both subjective evaluations and self-assessment of creativity. The score appeared to successfully isolate the creativity of the people themselves, rather than the potential creativity afforded by a given object.