This thesis observes grammatical terminology which can be found in the contemporary textbooks of the French language which have been published in the Czech Republic and France. Primarily, it deals with the question of word classes and their interpretation in the analyzed books. It works with the terminology (French and Czech) of the word classes. The crucial theme of this work is metalanguage used not only in the explications of the particular items of grammar but also in the tasks for the grammar exercises. The aim of this work is to find out a certain extent the textbooks use the linguistic terminology to. It also tries to discover whether they use national grammatical tradition. Last but not least it tries to learn whether the textbooks include the complete list of word classes.

No presente estudo descrevemos e analisamos, sob o viés morfossintático, as partes do discurso que se diferenciam no dialeto Timbira conhecido como Pykobjê- Gavião (Tronco Macro-Jê, Família Jê). Através de uma abordagem tipológicofuncionalista, discutimos (i) aspectos de tipologia e ordem de palavras, (ii) distinção entre as duas classes de palavras mais comuns no rol das línguas naturais do mundo, isto é, nome e verbo e (iii) demais classes de palavras observáveis nessa variante linguística, na medida em que se relacionam a nome e verbo. Veremos que os nomes funcionam em Pykobjê-Gavião, basicamente, como núcleo de argumento; ao passo que o verbo, que é mais fomentador de relações, tem como principal atribuição dentro da frase atuar como núcleo de predicado. Os verbos se dividem, por sua vez, em verbos intransitivos simples (único argumento: Sa, So ou Sio) ou intransitivos estendidos e verbos transitivos simples (dois argumentos: A e P) ou transitivos estendidos. Para fundamentar a análise utilizaremos, principalmente, Comrie (1985), Dik (1997), Dryer (1999), Givón (1997, 2001), Payne (1997) e Schachter (2007). / In this thesis, we have described and analyzed, under the bias morphosyntactic, the parts-of-speech systems we could differ in one Timbiras dialect, known as Pykobjê- Gavião (Macro-Jê Branch, Jê Family). Via a functional-typological approach, we have discussed (i) some aspects about language typology and word order correlations, (ii) some distinctions between noun and verb classes, i.e., the most usual word classes among all natural languages and (iii) some others word classes we could observe in this dialect to extent that they are related to noun and verb. We will see that the names work in Pykobjê-Gavião basically as the core of the argument, whereas the verb, which is high promoter relations, within the clause acts mainly as the core of the predicate. Verbs can be divided for analysis into intransitive verbs (single argument: Sa, So or Sio) or extended intransitive verbs and transitive verbs (two arguments: A and P) or extended transitive verbs. To support our analysis we will use, mainly, Comrie (1985), Dik (1997), Dryer (1999), Givón (1997, 2001), Payne (1997) e Schachter (2007).

No presente estudo descrevemos e analisamos, sob o viés morfossintático, as partes do discurso que se diferenciam no dialeto Timbira conhecido como Pykobjê- Gavião (Tronco Macro-Jê, Família Jê). Através de uma abordagem tipológicofuncionalista, discutimos (i) aspectos de tipologia e ordem de palavras, (ii) distinção entre as duas classes de palavras mais comuns no rol das línguas naturais do mundo, isto é, nome e verbo e (iii) demais classes de palavras observáveis nessa variante linguística, na medida em que se relacionam a nome e verbo. Veremos que os nomes funcionam em Pykobjê-Gavião, basicamente, como núcleo de argumento; ao passo que o verbo, que é mais fomentador de relações, tem como principal atribuição dentro da frase atuar como núcleo de predicado. Os verbos se dividem, por sua vez, em verbos intransitivos simples (único argumento: Sa, So ou Sio) ou intransitivos estendidos e verbos transitivos simples (dois argumentos: A e P) ou transitivos estendidos. Para fundamentar a análise utilizaremos, principalmente, Comrie (1985), Dik (1997), Dryer (1999), Givón (1997, 2001), Payne (1997) e Schachter (2007). / In this thesis, we have described and analyzed, under the bias morphosyntactic, the parts-of-speech systems we could differ in one Timbiras dialect, known as Pykobjê- Gavião (Macro-Jê Branch, Jê Family). Via a functional-typological approach, we have discussed (i) some aspects about language typology and word order correlations, (ii) some distinctions between noun and verb classes, i.e., the most usual word classes among all natural languages and (iii) some others word classes we could observe in this dialect to extent that they are related to noun and verb. We will see that the names work in Pykobjê-Gavião basically as the core of the argument, whereas the verb, which is high promoter relations, within the clause acts mainly as the core of the predicate. Verbs can be divided for analysis into intransitive verbs (single argument: Sa, So or Sio) or extended intransitive verbs and transitive verbs (two arguments: A and P) or extended transitive verbs. To support our analysis we will use, mainly, Comrie (1985), Dik (1997), Dryer (1999), Givón (1997, 2001), Payne (1997) e Schachter (2007).

This PhD thesis provides a morpho-syntactic description of Northern Sotho from a computational perspective. While a number of publications describe morphological and syntactical aspects of this language, may it be in the form of prescriptive study books (inter alia Lombard (1985); Van Wyk et al. (1992); Poulos and Louwrens (1994)) or of descriptive articles in linguistic journals or conference proceedings (inter alia Anderson and Kotz´e (2006); Kosch (2006); De Schryver and Taljard (2006)), so far no comprehensive description is available that would provide a basis for developing a rule-based parser to analyse Northern Sotho on sentence level. This study attempts to fill the gap by describing a substantial grammar fragment. Therefore, Northern Sotho morpho-syntactic phenomena are explored which results in the following descriptions: <ul> <li> language units of Northern Sotho are identified, i.e. the tokens and words that form the language. These are sorted into word class categories (parts of speech), using the descriptions of Taljard et al. (2008) as a basis; </li> <li> the formal relationships between these units, wherever possible on the level of parts of speech, are described in the form of productive morpho-syntactic phrase grammar rules. These rules are defined within the framework of generative grammar. <br></li> </ul> Additionally, an attempt is made to find generalisations on the contextual distribution of the many items contained in verbs which are polysemous in terms of their parts of speech. The grammar rules described in the preceding chapter are now explored in order to find patterns in the co-occurrence of parts of speech leading towards a future, more general linguistic modelling of Northern Sotho verbs. It is also shown how a parser could work his way step-by-step doing an analysis of a complete sentence making use of a lexicon and the rules developed here. We have also implemented some relevant phrase grammar rules as a constraint-based grammar fragment, in line with the theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982). Here, we utilized the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) with the friendly permission of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). Lastly, the study contains some basic definitions for a proposed machine translation (MT) into English attempting to support the development of MT-rules. An introduction to MT and a first contrastive description of phenomena of both languages is provided. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / African Languages / unrestricted

The work in this thesis presents and evaluates a number of strategies by which English-learning children might discover the major open-class parts-of-speech in English (nouns, verbs and adjectives) on the basis of purely distributional information. Previous work has shown that parts-of-speech can be readily induced from the distributional patterns in which words occur. The research reported in this thesis extends and improves on this previous work in two major ways, related to the constructional status of the utterance contexts used for distributional analysis, and to the way in which previous studies have dealt with categorial ambiguity. Previous studies that have induced parts-of-speech from word distributions have done so on the basis of fixed “windows” of words that occur before and after the word in focus. These contexts are often not constructions of the language in question, and hence have dubious status as elements of linguistic knowledge. A great deal of recent evidence (e.g. Lieven, Pine & Baldwin, 1997; Tomasello, 1992) has suggested that children’s early language may be organized around a number of lexically-specific constructional frames with slots, such as “a X”, “you X it”, “draw X on X”. The work presented here investigates the possibility that constructions such as these may be a more appropriate domain for the distributional induction of parts-of-speech. This would open up the possibility of a treatment of part-of-speech induction that is more closely integrated with the acquisition of syntax. Three strategies to discover lexically-specific frames in the speech input to children are presented. Two of these strategies are based on the interplay between more and less frequent words in English utterances: the more frequent words, which are typically function words or light verbs, are taken to provide the schematic “backbone” of an utterance. The third strategy is based around pairs of words in which the occurrence of one word is highly predictable from that of the other, but not vice versa; from these basic slot-filler relationships, larger frames are assembled. These techniques were implemented computationally and applied to a corpus of child-directed speech. Each technique yielded a large set of lexically-specific frames, many of which could plausibly be regarded as constructions. In a comparison with a manual analysis of the same corpus by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven and Tomasello (2003), it is shown that most of the constructional frames identified in the manual analysis were also produced by the automatic techniques. After the identification of potential constructional frames, parts-of-speech were formed from the patterns of co-occurrence of words in particular constructions, by means of hierarchical clustering. The resulting clusters produced are shown to be quite similar to the major English parts-of-speech of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Each individual word token was assigned a part-of-speech on the basis of its constructional context. This categorization was evaluated empirically against the part-of-speech assigned to the word in question in the original corpus. The resulting categorization is shown to be, to a great extent, in agreement with the manual categorization. These strategies deal with the categorial ambiguity of words, by allowing the frame context to determine part-of-speech. However, many of the frames produced were themselves ambiguous cues to part-of-speech. For this reason, strategies are presented to deal with both word and context ambiguity. Three such strategies are proposed. One considers membership of a part-of-speech to be a matter of degree for both word and contextual frame. A second strategy attempts to discretely assign multiple parts-of-speech to words and constructions in a way that imposes internal consistency in the corpus. The third strategy attempts to assign only the minimally-required multiple categories to words and constructions so as to provide a parsimonious description of the data. Each of these techniques was implemented and applied to each of the three frame discovery techniques, thereby providing category information about both the frame and the word. The subsequent assignment of parts-of-speech was done by combining word and frame information, and is shown to be far more accurate than the categorization based on frames alone. This approach can be regarded as addressing certain objections against the distributional method that have been raised by Pinker (1979, 1984, 1987). Lastly, a framework for extending this research is outlined that allows semantic information to be incorporated into the process of category induction.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:23:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LAEL - Roberto Diniz Costa.pdf: 2645130 bytes, checksum: 0562e01165b5b50b5bb28a5ead342e23 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-10-27 / The main purpose of this study was to outline, describe what is widely called conversion and show, in an empirical way, how frequent this process is in order to point out which word classes are more converted in the English language. In order to achieve this objective, this study has found support in Corpus Linguistics, which is a Linguistics field that is concerned about analyzing any language empirically through corpora, which can be defined as authentic text compilations stored in computer files. Besides being supported by Corpus Linguistics, this dissertation has focused on the study of conversion, which is also called improper derivation in the prescriptive grammar. There is a great range of studies on the conversion process; however, very few of them has demonstrated empirically how frequent conversion is and they have seldom used authentic texts in their analysis. Therefore, this study has tried to fill this gap by being able to show empirically the limits towards conversion through the use of an authentic corpus, the British National Corpus. In order to achieve the objective of this study, the following questions have been stated: 1. What are the word classes that are most and least likely to be converted? 2. What is the conversion rate, in the selected corpus, between the words that are and are not involved in the conversion process? 3. In the selected corpus, what words show the widest array of grammar classes that can possibly be converted? 4. Are there any differences concerning the occurrence of conversion VII between the most frequent words and the words that show the widest array of grammar classes that can possibly be converted? If so, why? The corpus employed in the study was the British National Corpus, compiled from 100 million words. These words have been obtained from a wide array of sources, gathered in a way they could show a wide sample of spoken and written British English. It is obvious that, by dealing with a sample of the target language, the corpus might not represent a hundred percent of the language used. This way, it will always be an incomplete sample; therefore, when analyzing corpora, one should work with the concept of probability, which is really helpful to this study, once it made possible to show how probable conversion is. The results have indicated that conversion is a frequent process in the English language, once it involves 10 word classes and more than 36 million words. Moreover, it might be suggested that conversion is a living process in the English language and, through an empirical way, it is possible to point out that verbs, prepositions and pronouns are the most intrinsically related to conversion word classes. To sum up, this dissertation hopes that it has contributed to the study of conversion, since there are few studies that have demonstrated empirically how frequent conversion is. This work also presents and discusses the research limitations and its possible applications in the future, apart from pedagogical applications of the results / Este trabalho teve como objetivos principais delimitar e descrever o processo comumente chamado de conversão, demonstrar, de maneira empírica, sua freqüência para apontar as classes de palavras mais tipicamente convertidas na língua inglesa. Para tanto, o trabalho encontrou suporte teórico na Lingüística de Corpus, que se preocupa em analisar qualquer língua de maneira empírica, por intermédio de corpora, ou seja, compilações de textos autênticos armazenadas em formato de arquivo de computador. Além da Lingüística de Corpus, o projeto fundamentou-se no estudo da conversão, que é também chamada de derivação imprópria na gramática normativa. Há vários trabalhos que lidam com a questão da conversão; entretanto, nenhum deles demonstrou empiricamente quão freqüente a conversão é e quase nunca utilizaram textos autênticos como objeto de análise e exemplos. Desse modo, este trabalho buscou preencher essa lacuna, sendo, portanto, capaz de demonstrar empiricamente a extensão da conversão na língua inglesa por meio de um corpus autêntico, o British National Corpus. No intuito de operacionalizar os objetivos deste trabalho, foram elencadas as seguintes perguntas de pesquisa: 1. Quais são as classes de palavras mais e menos passíveis de serem convertidas na língua inglesa? 2. Qual é a proporção, no corpus selecionado, entre as palavras que estão envolvidas no processo de conversão e as que não são modificadas por esse fenômeno? 3. Quais são as palavras que apresentam maior repertório de classes de palavras passíveis de serem convertidas no corpus selecionado? IX 4. Há diferenças na freqüência do processo de conversão entre as palavras mais freqüentes e as que apresentam maior repertório de classes de palavras passíveis de serem convertidas? Em caso afirmativo, o que explica essa diferença? O corpus empregado na pesquisa foi o British National Corpus, (BNC), compilado a partir de 100 milhões de palavras obtidas da língua inglesa escrita e falada. As amostras de língua foram obtidas de uma grande variedade de fontes, reunidas de modo a mostrar um recorte abrangente do inglês britânico falado e escrito do final do século XX. É evidente que, por se tratar de uma amostra, o corpus pode não representar cem por cento da língua utilizada. Nesse sentido, será sempre uma amostra incompleta; dessa forma, ao estudar um corpus, devemos trabalhar com a questão de probabilidade, o que é extremamente útil para este trabalho, uma vez que nos permitiu determinar quão provável a conversão é. Os resultados indicaram que a conversão é um processo recorrente na língua inglesa, uma vez que envolve 10 classes de palavras e mais de 36 milhões de palavras. Além disso, pode-se sugerir que a conversão é um processo vivo na língua inglesa e, de maneira empírica, é possível apontar que as classes de palavras que estão mais intrinsecamente relacionadas à conversão são os verbos, as preposições e os pronomes. Por conseguinte, a pesquisa pretende ter contribuído para o estudo da conversão, uma vez que há poucos trabalhos que demonstrem, de maneira empírica, quão freqüente a conversão é. Desse modo, a pesquisa espera ter feito uma contribuição original para a área. O trabalho ainda apresenta e discute as limitações da pesquisa realizada, aponta possíveis desdobramentos deste estudo em pesquisas futuras e oferece sugestões dos resultados da pesquisa.

In the thesis Language Analysis of Baroque Sermon I deal with the morphological level of the Baroque sermon written by Karel Václav Černý Medotekoucí sláva na hůře Libanu (Fame on Liban Mountain) dating back to 1727. The thesis is a follow-up of my bachelor thesis analyzing the syntactic level of sermon. Besides this it involved the exposition concerning the Baroque time and the Saint John of Nepomuk. For this reason I do not state this information in my thesis. The thesis is based on the research of grammatical means applied in the text, as in view of the scope the thesis could not be focused on the lexical and stylistic level. Theoretical base are for me the present as well as the historical grammar books. I classify word classes acquired by excerption and focus on their characteristic features. I try to prove everything by examples found in the text. The target of this thesis is to compare the Baroque grammatical means with the means of the present Czech language.

Some signs denoting substances and signs denoting events are formally and semantically related in the Czech sign language. These signs can be distinguished by different parameters. This study looked at the parameters of the relative duration of a signing, the use of mouthing, the juxtaposition of signs and the frequency and mode of motion. Signs denoting substances and signs denoting events can be clearly distinguished by those features n Czech sign language. Key words Czech sign language, sign languages, nouns, verbs, noun-verb distinction, word classes

Repetitions in child-directed speech (CDS) have been shown to vary over time, and are suggested to affect first language acquisition. Correlations between verbal contents of repetitions in CDS and children’s language development have been suggested. The verbal contents of repetitions in Swedish CDS have not yet been investigated. The aim of this study was to examine the verbal contents of repetitions in Swedish CDS during the child’s first 2 years and possible changes in proportions of repetitions during the same time span. Verbal contents of repetitions in parents’ speech in 10 parent-child dyads as the children were 3, 6, 9, 12 and 24 months old were investigated focusing on word classes, sentence types and whole-constituent change. The results were compared to the children’s productive vocabularies at the age of 30 months. Possible occurrences of item-based constructions and frequent frames in the repetitions were also examined. The overall results revealed patterns concerning change in verbal contents in repetitions over time and correlations between verbal contents in repetitions and child language development. Two proposals were made: parents adjust the complexity of their speech to linguistic developmental stages of their children, and linguistic variation in the input increases as the child grows older. / Repetitioner i barnriktat tal (BRT) har visat sig variera över tid, och har föreslagits påverka förstaspåksinlärning. Även ett samband mellan det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i BRT och barns språkutveckling har föreslagits. Det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i svenskt BRT har inte undersökts tidigare. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i svenskt BRT under barnets två första år och möjliga förändringar gällande andelen repetitioner under samma tidsperiod. Det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i föräldrars tal hos tio förälder-barn-dyader då barnen var 3, 6, 9, 12 och 24 månader gamla undersöktes med fokus på ordklasser, satstyper och förändringar gällande konstituenter. Resultaten jämfördes med barnens produktiva ordförråd vid 30 månaders ålder. Även den möjliga förekomsten av typbaserade konstruktioner (item-based constructions) och frekventa ramar (frequent frames) undersöktes. De övergripande resultaten uppvisade mönster gällande förändringar inom det verbala innehållet i repetitioner över tid samt ett samband mellan det verbala innehållet i repetitioner och barns språkutveckling. Två antaganden gjordes: föräldrar justerar komplexiteten i sitt tal efter språkliga utvecklingsfaser hos sina barn, och den språkliga variationen i inputen ökar med barnets ålder. / MINT: Modelling infant language acquisition from parent-child interaction (MAW 2011.007)

From Verbs to Nouns and Prepositions Departicipial Forms in Czech: Form, Function, Complementarity Olga Richterová Abstract The present work gives a rough overall picture of the behaviour of departicipial forms ending in - ící/oucí (e.g. vedoucí - leading or leader, or fungující - functioning, working) in synchronous written Czech. In literature, these forms are called participial adjectives, deverbal adjectives or derivatives of the present transgressive. The main focus of the dissertation is on the word-class categorization of the analyzed forms, defined by the variety of functions which departicipial forms fulfill. Part-of-speech membership recommendations belong to the main outcomes of the work, the description of verbal, nominal or even preposition-like behaviour of the analyzed forms being one of the most prominent goals of the whole effort. The analysis is centered around the most frequent form, vedoucí (including the lexical unit vedoucí k - leading to). The preservation of prepositional valency was identified as one of the criteria of possible prepositionalization of these forms. Given the absence of reliable tagging, the work is mainly based on manual analyses of random corpora samples. Furthermore, it makes an innovative use of a tool called 'p-kolokace' (p- collocations), which is based on two...