Based on 160 hours of recording collected in the villages of Săbăoani, and Pildeşti, Romania, the present research attempts to describe the middle voice system of Northern Moldavian Hungarian (NMH), an endangered language spoken by no more than 3000 speakers. Defining the middle voice category semantically rather than formally, it is argued that the various middle situation types in NMH can be placed relative to one another on a “semantic map” based on shared semantic properties such as 1) the confinement of the development of the action within the agent’s sphere to the extent that the action’s effect accrues back on the agent itself, 2) the degree of volitionality of the Initiator/Agent, and 3) the degree of affectedness of the Initiator/Agent. Polysemy structures are examined against the background of a common semantic map derived on the basis of cross linguistic investigation of a given grammatical domain. In working toward this end a detailed description of major patterns of meaning inherent in the NMH middle system, examining three types of morphological middles, syntactic middles, and lexical middles is presented. Cases in which the same verb can occur with or without a middle marker apparently having the same meaning are discussed. Moreover, seemingly minimal pairs in which two different morphological constructions occur with the same verb are analyzed. A detailed analysis of the differences in form and function of the two reciprocal syntactic middle constructions in NMH is provided. Regarding reflexive syntactic middles it will be shown that depending on the case marking taken by the reflexive anaphoric operator the function conveyed is different such as reflexives, intensifiers, causers, and experiencer. Finally, cases in which the same verb can convey a middle meaning by using a morphological middle marker or by using a syntactic middle construction are analyzed showing that there are main differences in the meaning those two strategies convey. Thus, the present paper identifies specific semantic properties relevant to the middle voice system in NMH, sets up some hypotheses regarding the relations among middle and related situation types and proposes some diachronic predictions regarding the middle voice system of NMH.

Social exclusion is the restriction of participation in one’s community; it is the denial of access to rights, services, dignity and respect. Youth who are homeless experience social exclusion on numerous fronts, as they are marginal to the social, economic and civil worlds of Canadian society. This dissertation is a qualitative, participatory project on youth homelessness that prioritizes voice by employing a “methods from the margins” approach (Kirby & McKenna, 1989). During this project I worked with youth who have experienced homelessness (ages 16-25), first in focus groups (n=13) and, then, through interviews (n=30), to explore their views on topics connected to social exclusion. The youth guided the topics that I explored, which I connected to the features of social exclusion outlined by Silver and Miller (2003). Results of this study highlight that youth who are homeless do not describe their experiences in terms of social exclusion. The results of this work question the homogeneity of experiences of the youth in the age bracket of 16-25, and review findings through three specific age categories of youth being “not yet adults,” “new adults” and “adults.” My findings indicate that youth who experience homelessness perceive themselves to be more independent and mature than youth who have not experienced homelessness, questioning dominant constructions of both “youth” and “homelessness.” Youth respondents also mentioned a number of other difficulties they experienced because of homelessness, including discrimination and limited opportunities for education and conventional employment and access to housing. This highlights the multidimensionality of social exclusion. At various points in the thesis I discuss youths’ views on rights and social citizenship, pointing to the impacts of limited rights and social safeguards in a neo-liberal state. Recommendations are made for reducing the social exclusion of youth who experience homelessness through “housing-first” approaches to addressing homelessness.

Voice onset time (VOT) är en akustisk tidsparameter som återspeglar den talmotoriska samordningen. VOT betraktas även vara det mest tillförlitliga sättet att särskilja mellan tonande och tonlösa klusiler. VOT hos barn har tidigare studerats i logopediuppsatser vid Linköpings universitet (Lundeborg et al., 2012; Larsson & Wiman, 2011). I dessa arbeten har dock inga upprepade mätningar gjorts, varför det föreligger behov att fastställa hur konsistent barns VOT är. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur konsistent klusilproduktionen är hos svenska barn i femårsåldern, samt utreda förekomsten av eventuella könskillnader. I studien medverkade 31 barn, 13 flickor och 18 pojkar där medelåldern var 5:6 år. Barnen fick benämna bilder av minimala par med klusilord tre gånger. Samtliga testningar ljudinspelades. Inspelningarna analyserades därefter. Resultaten visade att barnen var förhållandevis konsekventa i VOT-värden vid de flesta klusilproduktionerna, variabilitet förekom mellan specifika klusilproduktionsomgångar. Bland de barn som hade förton vid produktionen av tonande klusiler noterades variabilitet i såväl förekomst som värde. Inga statistiskt signifikanta könsskillnader noterades.

In crucial times, such as natural disasters like Earthquakes, Floods, military attack, rescue and emergency operations, etc., it is not possible to maintain an infrastructure. In these situations, wireless Mobile Ad-Hoc networks can be an alternative to wired networks. In our thesis, due to the importance of MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Network) applications, we do research on MANET and its subtype IMANET (Internet based Mobile Ad-hoc Network). In MANETs, finding an optimum path among nodes is not a simple issue due to the random mobility of nodes and topology changes frequently. Simple routing algorithms like Shortest Path, Dijksta‟s and Link State fail to find route in such dynamic scenarios. A number of ad-hoc protocols (Proactive, Reactive, Hybrid and Position based) have been developed for MANETs. In this thesis, we have designed an IMANET in OPNET 14.5 and tested the performance of three different routing protocols namely OLSR (Optimum Link State Routing), TORA (Temporarily Ordered Routing Algorithm) and AODV (Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector) in different scenarios by varying the number of nodes and the size of the area. The experimental results demonstrate that among the three protocols, none of the routing protocol can ensure good quality HTTP and voice communication in all our considered scenarios.

Societies will always fail to live up to the expectations of citizens one way or another, independent of their economic and political standards. Albert Hirschman proposed that citizens then have the option of expressing their voice for social change. This paper sets up a rational choice model of voice to empirically test whether higher levels of political and economic grievance make it more likely for citizens of a country to have a collective voice. The main result from the probit regression is that an increase in the level of democracy has a negative effect on the probability of voice, all else being equal.

Throughout our history, the singing voice has been a fundamental tool for musical expression. While analysis and digital synthesis techniques have been developed for normal speech, few models and techniques have been focused on the singing voice. The central theme of this research is the development of models aimed at the characterization and synthesis of the singing voice. First, a spectral model is presented in which asymmetric generalized Gaussian functions are used to represent the formant structure of a singing voice in a flexible manner. Efficient methods for searching the parameter space are investigated and challenges associated with smooth parameter trajectories are discussed. Next a model for glottal characterization is introduced by first presenting an analysis of the relationship between measurable spectral qualities of the glottal waveform and perceptually relevant time-domain parameters. A mathematical derivation of this relationship is presented and is extended as a method for parameter estimation. These concepts are then used to outline a procedure for modifying glottal textures and qualities in the frequency domain. By combining these models with the Analysis-by-Synthesis/Overlap-Add sinusoidal model, the spectral and glottal models are shown to be capable of characterizing the singing voice according to traits such as level of training and registration. An application is presented in which these parameterizations are used to implement a system for singing voice enhancement. Subjective listening tests were conducted in which listeners showed an overall preference for outputs produced by the proposed enhancement system over both unmodified voices and voices enhanced with competitive methods.

With the progress of the network, peoples can communicate with each other easily. The popularization of the Broadband network makes many things that could be hard to achieved becoming possible. For example, video conference, distance education and on-line games have become a part of our daily life. However, most network services are client-server architecture. This kind of service need a expensive and powerful server. The restriction will makes it difficult to improve the quality of service. P2P (peer-to-peer) architecture embodies one of the key technical concepts of the internet and many internet users was attracted by it. A peer-to-peer computer network is a network that relies on computing power at the edges (ends) of a connection rather than in the network itself. It has been used in two kinds of applications which are file sharing and distributed computing. Instead of using P2P model, client-server architecture is used in muti-user conference. A software using P2P model still needs one of the users to become a server to deal with all the messages in the conference. When the number of the users increasing, the overhead of the server will increase linearly. This makes many communication softwares to limit the number of users in a conference. Therefore, most of the companies use an expensive and powerful server offering this kind of service. In this paper, we will implement a voice-conferencing system using P2P model and the technique of distributed computing. It makes the overhead of the server in logarithmic increase. In addition, we still can configure some low-end peers with a constant overhead. No mater how the number of users increase, these peers will have a constant overhead. With the good design, we can gurantee the quality of service easily.

Because Ministry of Transportation and Communication want to improve its service quality and increase its revenue, Unite Communication Technology Ltd. (UCT) bring up ¡§BOT of E-Commerce and Wireless Internet¡¨ to built up the service of wireless internet and e-commerce on the train and in the station. Under the project, this thesis address to operate the value-added service of VOIP business with wireless internet to boost the total return ratio. According to data collection and survey, the financial model was erected to evaluate the feasible of this new business model. To sum up the result, the NPV of the project is 50,227,238 in 19 years (the discount rate equal to 6.49), IRR reach to 23.93%, and payback period is 7.415 years. Although the payback period is long, in terms of sustained and stable profit in the future, the project is still valuable. Furthermore, UCT is a telecommunication company so that the project can use the bandwidth more efficiently to maximum the corporation revenue. Keywords¡GWireless Internet, Voice on Internet Protocol (VOIP), Financial Feasibility Analysis

This thesis investigates the impact of customer¡¦s voice and service requests to customer satisfactions and royalty in competitive service industry. The objective of the problem is to identify the customer¡¦s communication channel and enquiries are the main key factors of customer complaint response by data mining method and cross-factors analysis. We proposed to build the internal platform to collect and analyze the long term consumer¡¦s requirements to set the marketing policy and the service mechanism to meet quick response and increase customer service level.

This thesis aims to find out how animacy affects sentence structure choice in Turkish learners of L2 English. The study compares three different L2 English proficiency levels with each other as well to L1 English and L1 Turkish. In this way the effect of English, a rigid word order language, and Turkish, a free word order language on sentence structure choice have been compared. A picture description task was applied on 94 participants. The pictures depicted a transitive action taking place between an inanimate agent and an animate patient (animate condition) or between an inanimate agent and an inanimate patient. The subjects were given handouts with the pictures and were asked to write down what is happening in each picture. There were 60 Turkish learners of L2 English and 14 English participants in the study. Turkish learners of English belonged to level-1 (16 students), level-2 (25 students) and level-3 (19 students). In addition, 20 Turkish speakers were consulted for their knowledge of Turkish. It was hypothesized that in L2 English, animate entities would be accessed first and this will directly affect sentence structure choice through grammatical subject assignment or through word order. Thus, it was expected that when the learners are shown a picture depicting a transitive action taking place between an animate patinet and an inanimate agent, they would tend to use the passive in English, which assigns both a sentence-initial position and a subjecthood role to the animate entity. L2 proficiency level and native language were expected to play a role in determining the role of animacy on sentence structure choice. Chi-square analysis and odds ratio calculations were made. The results showed that animacy of the patinet affected sentence structure choice in L2 English by triggering the passivce usage in only level-3 (the most advanced group). Animacy of the patient affected native speakers of English in the same way, i.e. native English speakers tended to use the passive voice in the animate condition. No such effect was found in lower level learners of L2 English (i.e. level-1 and level-2) and Turkish native speakers. It was found that in the animate condition, Turkish native speakers tended to use the OSV word order more frequently than they did in the inanimate condition. This result suggested that in Turkish, animacy of the patient triggers the use of the OSV (Object, Subject, Verb) order rather than the passive voice. In short, the research results suggested that L2 proficency level and native language could play a role in determining how animacy affects sentence structure choice in L2.