This thesis explores the connection between linguistic theory, as embodied in a version of the Government - Binding (GB) model of syntax, and the parameter-setting theory of language acquisition. In Chapter 2, it is argued that by incorporating the criterion of epistemological priority, syntactic theory can move closer towards becoming a plausible model of language acquisition. A version of GB theory is developed which adopts this criterion, leading to several modifications, including the derivation of X-bar theory from more "primitive" grammatical sub-components, and a revision of the Projection Principle. This model is converted into a procedure for phrase-structure acquisition, employing sets of Canonical Government Configurations and Percolation Principles to map Case- and θ-relations onto phrase-structure trees. The chapter ends with a discussion of the "missing-subject" stage in the acquisition of English. Chapter 3 concerns auxiliaries. It is argued that parametric variation in auxiliary systems can be reduced to levels of association between INFL and V. The question of irregularity is dealt with through the Designation Convention of Emonds (1985), which makes a distinction between open- and closed- class grammatical elements, and a Parallel Distributed Processing model of learning. The last part of the chapter investigates the learning of the English auxiliary system, and in particular the errors known as "auxiliary overmarking". Chapter 4 investigates the syntax of Subject Auxiliary Inversion (SAI)-type rules. An account of inversion is developed based on the theory of predication, in which inversion-inducing elements are treated as "A'-type" subjects which must be linked to AGR in order to satisfy conditions on Predicate-licensing. A parametrization is developed based on the cross-linguistic examination of SAI-type rules. Chapter 5 concerns the acquisition of SAI. It is argued that there are no invariant "stages" in the development of inversion; rather, a proportion of children misanalyze (WH + contracted auxiliary) sequences as (WH + AGR-clitic) sequences and formulate grammars in which SAI is unnecessary. A "two-tiered" theory of syntactic acquisition is proposed to account for the observed developmental patterns. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

Notre étude porte sur deux éléments en contexte d’acquisition du polonais langue maternelle et du français langue étrangère. Le premier concerne l’acquisition des verbes. On constate un recours important à des verbes de base ou verbes génériques du type casser, couper, faire en acquisition du lexique verbal d’une langue maternelle et étrangère. Ces verbes peuvent être utilisés en emplois non conventionnels. Le second concerne les énoncés non conventionnels à pivot verbal du type Elle casse une tomate. Les énoncés non conventionnels sont classifiés comme des erreurs, des sur-extensions ou encore des métaphores. Cependant dans la lignée de certains auteurs, nous postulons que ce type d’énoncé est le reflet d’une flexibilité sémantique primordiale au cours de l’acquisition du lexique, notamment verbal, d’une langue maternelle et d’une langue étrangère. Le lexique verbal serait structuré par proximité sémantique.Notre population se compose d’enfants, en acquisition précoce et tardive du langage, et d’adultes polonais, tous sont en apprentissage du français.Nous avons fait passer un protocole expérimental consistant en deux tâches, une de dénomination d’action et une de reformulation d’action. Nos résultats comprennent des analyses statistiques et des analyses sémantiques. Ils montrent une production importante de verbes génériques et d’énoncés non conventionnels chez tout type de sujet. / Our study deals with two elements involved in the acquisition of Polish as a first language and of French as a foreign language.The first element is verbal acquisition. We observe that, when acquiring the verbal lexicon of a first and foreign language, learners use a large number of generic verbs such as to cut, to do, to break. These verbs may be used in non conventional statements.The second element is non conventional statements based on verbs, such as: “she is breaking a tomato”. These statements are considered as errors, over-extensions or metaphors. But we assert that these statements reflect a semantic flexibility which is essential to the acquisition of the lexicon when learning a first and second language. This also applies to the verbal lexicon, which we believe is organized through semantic proximity. This is in agreement with several other authors’ works.Our subjects are Polish adults and children. The children may be in the early or late stages of language acquisition. All are learning French.They were subjected to an experimental protocol which consisted in two tasks: action denomination and action reformulation. Our results include both semantic and statistical analysis. They reveal that all types of subjects produce a large number of generic verbs and non conventional statements.

abstract: Operational code analysis (OCA) is a common method of content analysis within the foreign policy analysis (FPA) literature used to determine the “operational code” of state leaders and, by extension, the foreign policy behaviors of their respective state. It has been tried and tested many times before, on many different world leaders from many different time periods, to predict what the foreign policy behavior of a state/organization might be based on the philosophical and instrumental beliefs of their leader about the political universe. This paper, however, questions if there might be types of politicians that OCA, conducted using the automated Verbs In Context System (VICS), has problems delivering accurate results for. More specifically, I have theoretical reasons for thinking that populist leaders, who engage in a populist style of communication, confound VICS’ analysis primarily because the simplistic speaking style of populists obscures an underlying context (and by extension meaning) to that leader’s words. Because the computer cannot understand this underlying context and takes the meaning of the words said at face value, it fails to code the speeches of populists accurately and thus makes inaccurate predictions about that leader’s foreign policy. To test this theory, I conduct the content analysis on speeches made by three individuals: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Narendra Modi, before and after they became the executives of their respective countries, and compared them to a “norming “ group representing the average world leader. The results generally support my hypotheses but with a few caveats. For the cases of Trump and Johnson, VICS found them to be a lot more cooperative than what I would expect, but it was also able to track changes in their operational code - as they transition into the role of chief executive – in the expected direction. The opposite was the case for Modi’s operational code. All-in-all, I provide suggestive evidence that OCA using VICS has trouble providing valid results for populist leaders. / Dissertation/Thesis / Summary Statistics and Calculations of Indices / Masters Thesis Political Science 2020

The aim of this essay is to determine how the polysemantic verb få can be translated from Swedish to German. Frequently used verbs often have more than one meaning. That makes translating difficult, because there is no verb in German which covers all aspects of få. This essay examines the nuances in meaning of the verb få, following the research of Viberg (2002/2012) and Ureland (1973). The theory is followed by a quantitative and qualitative study of the use and translation of the verb få in a non-fiction text. The analysis is mainly based on Viberg’s (2002/2012) works, who identifies eight meanings of få.  This essay examines the translation of the 43 examples of the verb få attested in the Swedish source text. It shows that there is no German verb which can cover all meanings of få, but that there are some that can be used to translate more than one meaning of the verb. But even those verbs are not fitting for every case of få, which suggests that the context is the main variable that determines a fitting translation. Even though it is possible to provide a pool of possible translations for all aspects of få, there are cases in which the translator will have to choose other words in order to express the meaning of få in an idiomatic way. This is especially important due to the fact that there are some aspects of få, i.e. the inchoative meaning, which, in German, cannot be expressed with verbs.

This diploma thesis focuses on semantic diversity of reporting verbs in French and English fiction. Among these verbs there are not only neutral or semantically marked transitive speech verbs but also intransitive ones or those that do not belong to the category of speech verbs but express different circumstances of a speech act. The objective of the thesis is to provide a contrastive analysis of reporting verbs in original and translated English and French fiction texts, their classification and evaluation of different factors that potentially affect their selection. The topic will be studied on the basis of the data from the parallel corpus Intercorp. The thesis attempts to contribute to a better understanding of reporting clauses. The outlined findings may be helpful especially to translators and fiction writers.

Le présent article se donne pour objectif d’examiner de façon critique les études précédentes sur le passif en Hawsa et de proposer, dans le cadre de lan théorie de l’énonciation de Antoine Culioli, une nouvelle approche. Le passif en Hawsa morphologiquement très simple offre une diversité complexe sur le plan sémantique. Cette complexité de signification ne peut être démêlée et appréhendée que par une approche transcatégorielle qui associe les différents types de procès, l’aspect et le passif dans leur interrelation nécessaire. Cette démarche a d’abord mis en évidence l’impossibilité de dériver le passif de l’actif. En second lieu, elle a permis de distinguer les types de passifs suivants : passif potentiel qui résulte de la combinaison du passif et de l’inaccompli, le passif résultatif obtenu avec l’accompli et qui se subdivise en passif conatif quand le verbe est discret et en passif qualitatif en haut degré avec les verbes denses. En fin, elle a permis de mieux comprendre le fonctionnement de certains verbes qui semblent avoir un comportement à priori singulier y compris le fonctionnement du passif dit « dégénéré » qui s’explique par le double rôle d’agent et d’agi du sujet grammatical.

Orientador: Juliana Bertucci Barbosa / Banca: Daniel Soares da Costa / Banca: Niguelme Cardoso Arruda / Resumo: Os recentes materiais didáticos destinados à aprendizagem de Língua Portuguesa no Ensino Fundamental II têm procurado desenvolver um trabalho de gramática direcionado aos mais diversos gêneros textuais. No que diz respeito ao ensino dos verbos, particularmente as formas de pretérito do modo indicativo, gêneros como relato de experiência, notícia de jornal, crônica, biografia, entre outros, contemplam o conteúdo das formas de passado no português brasileiro. Entretanto, percebe-se que ainda persiste um mero ensino das características morfológicas desse tempo verbal. Noções de aspecto, modalidade e uso são deixadas em segundo plano, ou simplesmente ignoradas. O Currículo do Estado de São Paulo propõe, com base nos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais, que o ensino gramatical seja voltado para o texto em seus mais variados gêneros, e que tenha respaldo na língua em situações de uso real. Por outro lado, os materiais de apoio do Currículo (Caderno do Aluno e Caderno do Professor) não concentram o ensino da gramática a essas situações de uso e acabam seguindo o mesmo padrão adotado pelos livros didáticos, nos quais sequer existem menções a valores aspectuais e modais dos verbos. O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar os resultados acerca da investigação e análise da abordagem dada às concepções de ensino de língua e aos estudos gramaticais nos materiais de apoio do Currículo do Estado de São Paulo e em alguns livros didáticos de Língua Portuguesa de 6º e 7º anos do Ensino Fundamental... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The newest schoolbooks for the learning of Portuguese language in Elementary Education try to develop a grammar teaching according to various text genres. When the subject is the teaching of verbs, particularly the forms of the past tenses in the indicative mood, text genres like experience report, newspaper report, chronicle, biography, and many others, include the contents of the forms of the verbs in the past in Brazilian Portuguese. However, it is very clear that there is still a mere teaching of the morphological characteristics of this tense. The verbal aspect, the modal verbs and the functions of verbs are not the main topic in the studies, or they are simply ignored. The Currículo do Estado de São Paulo - an official document that indicates the contents to be taught in public schools in São Paulo State - proposes, based on the PCN (Brazilian National Curriculum Parameters), that the grammar teaching must be focused on the text in its several genres, and has to consider the language in real use situations. On the other hand, the Currículo support materials (student's and teacher's notebooks) do not consider these situations in the grammar teaching, and the approach follows the same pattern adopted by the textbooks, in which there is not any mention about aspect values or modal verbs. The aim of this work is to present the results on the research and analysis of the approach of the language teaching concepts in the support materials of the Currículo do Estado de São Paulo and in some textbooks of the 6th and the 7th years in elementary school, with the focus on the grammatical studies about the verbs and, particularly, their inflected forms in the past tenses in the indicative mood, in Brazilian Portuguese. Considering the concepts of tense and verbal aspect, and the different perspectives of approach to the past tenses in the indicative mood in Portuguese (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

This corpus-based study investigates the most frequent occurring prepositional verbs collocated with the Japanese syntactic compound verb -kiru and aims to establish how the prepositional verb affects the semantic meaning of the verb-kiru construct. The study uses sketchengine’s online database, “Japanese Web2011”, which contains around 8 billion Japanese terms collected from the internet from various online sources from 2011 and onwards. From my results I was able to establish the most frequent occurring prepositional verbs in a -kiru construct from the database, and through a concordance analysis I was able to identify three semantic meanings incurred by the syntactic compound verb -kiru: the semantic meaning of completion, the dual semantic meaning of completion and extremity and the semantic meaning of extremity. Further analysis showed that the semantic meaning of extremity exists in the deep structure of the sentence and when transformed to the surface structure the semantic meaning shifts to that of completion.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate several potential indicators of successful academic writing and their connection to assignment grades as a possible path toward better teaching of academic writing at the upper secondary level in Sweden. These indicators are referencing (REF), academic vocabulary (AV), and reporting verbs (RV). Our research questions were to examine to what extent the final grades on independent research synthesis papers at Malmö University relate to the use of these three indicators. To that end, we quantitatively assessed the indicators’ relationship to grades (U/G/VG) on 28 4th-year teaching students’ independent research synthesis papers. We examined REF from two perspectives: quality of sources and source integration. AV was assessed by examining the percentage of words in student texts that appeared in the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). We assessed RV as an indicator by calculating the frequency of RVs in student texts and which types of RVs they favored, as measured by the ARGUE/SHOW/FIND/THINK framework of RV usage. We found very small positive connections between AV percentage, RV frequency, and grades, but small negative connections between measures of reference quality and grades, and found that there were no meaningful differences in RV usage between the three different groups. However, we found that measures of source integration related strongly to the grades on the papers. Numerous factors could explain our findings, notably the small sample size, our unique RV master list, and the rigorous supervision process of these papers at Malmö University. To establish any conclusive results, further research is required.

En aquest estudi s’analitza l’evolució diacrònica dels verbs metre i posar. Més concretament, se’n defineix l’estructura semàntica i els processos de gramaticalització més importants que han experimentat. La investigació tracta un tema nou en la recerca sobre la sintaxi i la semàntica històrica del català i ofereix una resposta a una singularitat d’aquesta llengua dins la major part de les llengües romàniques: el verb metre, ben viu durant el període medieval, experimenta una davallada sobtada des de començaments del segle XV. Alhora, el verb posar, amb uns usos fins aleshores més restringits, comença a assumir-ne els significats. Aquesta tendència no coincideix amb l’observada en llengües veïnes en les quals perviu actualment el verb metre. L’estudi es fonamenta en les dades obtingudes d’un corpus informatitzat, el CIMTAC, que incorpora textos del català antic, modern i contemporani. A l’hora d’estudiar el canvi lingüístic s’han fet servir teories actuals que ofereixen una bona resposta als fenòmens observats. En aquest sentit, s’ha adoptat un marc teòric pres de la Lingüística Cognitiva i de la Gramàtica de Construccions; en concret, s’ha aplicat la Teoria de la Inferència Invitada (Traugott i Dasher 2002; Traugott 2012) i els conceptes de subjectivació (Traugott i Dasher 2002) i intersubjectivació (Narrog 2012; Nuyts 2001; 2005). Així mateix, s’han tingut presents els diferents estudis sobre gramaticalització (Traugott i Trousdale 2013; Lehman 1995, Haspelmath 1998; 2004; Garachana 2015; 2017) i l’auxiliarització dels verbs (Heine 1993; Langacker 1995). Podem sintetitzar les aportacions concretes d’aquesta recerca en les següents: a) Els verbs de moviment bàsics com ara metre i posar, seguint la tendència ja estudiada per Montserrat (2007) amb venir i arribar, són la font conceptual per a la gènesi de perífrasis verbals que expressen nocions aspectuals (com ara el canvi d’estat o la incoativitat), més abstractes i esquemàtiques. b) El triomf de posar sobre metre potser s’ha d’explicar atenent a les restriccions semàntiques i pragmàtiques que pesaven sobre el segon. En un futur caldrà esbrinar la influència que hi pogueren tenir altres sinònims (sobretot, ficar). c) La combinació de les eines teòriques de la Semàntica Cognitiva i la Pragmàtica amb l’anàlisi de l’ús lingüístic reflectit en els corpus textuals digitalitzats és una via d’estudi del canvi lingüístic de molt de rendiment.