This thesis explores the semantic and conceptual potential of the literary portmanteau word, with a view, more specifically, to examining the ways in which the term works to highlight questions of critical, ethical and disruptive activity. Formed from the combination of morphemes from two or more existing words (i.e., “human” + “document” = “humument”), the portmanteau word is a neologism that exists both within and beyond the frame of the authorised lexicon. Exploring this dynamic by way of three main areas of focus—“creating”, “mediating” and “activating”— this thesis adopts a thoroughgoing approach to portmanteau word functioning and logic, considering the term not only in relation to frame-stretching difference, semantic uncertainty and (potentially) mediative/ethical critical practice (as existing scholarship has tended mainly to do), but also with regard to the effortful and precarious activating of these concerns across different literary and geographical contexts. Up to now, academic work on the literary portmanteau word has generally considered the term in relation to two, largely non-overlapping sites of interest: Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939)—a pair of texts that remain central here in developing a working theorization of the portmanteau (“creating”), and in the explication of a Wakean critical ethics (“mediating”). Through exploring different responses to both Carrollian and Joycean portmanteau words, the first of these focuses approaches the term in relation to the semantic and critical effects of frame-stretching difference, contingency and structural uncertainty. In the second, the possible mediative ethics of this uncertainty is considered with reference to the ethics of deconstruction and to an analysis of selected passages from the Wake. The extension in this thesis, though, into the writing of Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite and Ivan Vladislavić works to further interrogate and complicate this Carrollian-Joycean understanding of the portmanteau word, making it less (but still) a matter of structural uncertainty and mediative ethics, and more a question of effort, risk and resistance. With Glissant and Brathwaite, this “activating” of portmanteau uncertainty in the (post)colonial Caribbean translates in different ways into a form of hard-fought, aesthetic opacity, the effortful creation (and interpretation) of which requires an always precarious, (re)cyclical mediation between structure and difference, self and other. With Vladislavić, in (post)apartheid South Africa, this “activating” of the portmanteau expresses itself as a complicatedly material concern with the necessary folly (and urgency) of ethical (re)construction following the collapse of apartheid socio-political structures. It is the contention of this thesis, then, that it is through such contextual, mess-making, “activating” elaborations as these that we arrive at a richer, more resistant understanding of the portmanteau word (in both linguistic and conceptual terms), and that, in a manner not at all unlike the creation of a portmanteau word itself, we help to enact a frame-stretching move into new and uncertain exploratory frames. / published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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The study of combinatorics on words dates back at least to the beginning of the 20th century and the work of Axel Thue. Thue was the first to give an example of an infinite word over a three letter alphabet that contains no squares (identical adjacent blocks) <i>xx</i>. This result was eventually used to solve some longstanding open problems in algebra and has remarkable connections to other areas of mathematics and computer science as well. In this thesis we primarily study several variations of the problems studied by Thue in his work on repetitions in words, including some recent connections to other areas, such as graph theory. In Chapter 1 we give a brief introduction to the subject of combinatorics on words. In Chapter 2 we use uniform morphisms to construct an infinite binary word that contains no cubes <i>xxx</i> and no squares <i>yy</i> with |<i>y</i>| &#8805; 4, thus giving a simpler construction than that of Dekking. We also use uniform morphisms to construct an infinite binary word avoiding all squares except 0??, 1??, and (01)??, thus giving a simpler construction than that of Fraenkel and Simpson. We give some new enumeration results for these avoidance properties and solve an open problem of Prodinger and Urbanek regarding the perfect shuffle of infinite binary words that avoid arbitrarily large squares. In Chapter 3 we examine ternary squarefree words in more detail, and in Chapter 4 we study words <i>w</i> satisfying the property that for any sufficiently long subword <i>w'</i> of <i>w</i>, <i>w</i> does not contain the reversal of <i>w'</i> as a subword. In Chapter 5 we discuss an application of the property of squarefreeness to colourings of graphs. In Chapter 6 we study strictly increasing sequences (<i>a</i>(<i>n</i>))<i>n</i>&#8805;0 of non-negative integers satisfying the equation <i>a</i>(<i>a</i>(<i>n</i>)) = <i>dn</i>. Finally, in Chapter 7 we give a brief conclusion and present some open problems.

The thesis reports six experiments investigating word recognition and reading in Arabic. Experiment 1 looked at the word superiority effect in Arabic word recognition using brief presentations of stimuli (five-letter real words, pseudo-words, non-words, and inverted real words) in a Reicher-Wheeler task. The results of this experiment showed advantages for the recognition of words over pseudo-words and illegal non-words, and for pseudo-words over illegal non-words. Experiment 2 was a follow-up experiment that also examined the word superiority effect in Arabic by using the lexical decision task. In this experiment, participants viewed briefly presented real words and legal non-words, with the results showing that Arabic real words were recognised quicker and more accurately than non-words. Experiment 3 investigated the landing position effects for three, five, and seven letter words in Arabic using eye movements while reading. The results showed that the preferred viewing location (PVL) is at the right of centre of words in Arabic, similar to that for Hebrew. Experiment 4 re-examined the optimal viewing position in Arabic word recognition using five-letter Arabic words and non-words in a lexical decision task. The results showed that participants recognised words most quickly and most accurately when fixating inter-letter locations at the middle of words, indicating that the OVP for Arabic word recognition is at a word’s centre. Experiment 5 used the Reicher-Wheeler task and Experiment 6 used the lexical decision task to re-examine the claim that an anatomical division in the human fovea has consequences for word recognition. The findings revealed the superiority of the right visual field for words displayed outside the foveal and no asymmetries for words displayed within foveal vision. Thus far the research has made an important advance on our understanding of processes involved in Arabic word recognition by revealing that word superiority and pseudo-word superiority effects similar to those reported in Latinate languages are also observed in Arabic, and that the OVP effect in Arabic differs from that found in English. The reading results indicate that, similar to other languages, parafoveal word length information is used to guide saccade targeting in Arabic.

This exam can be described as divided into three parts. First one is about the techniques of collages, where I explore and experiment with the possibilities of collages in practice and in philosophical terms. Second is about how words can create a space with meaning and symbolic value. And third is a combination of the two methods of interest into one concrete idea.

The study of combinatorics on words dates back at least to the beginning of the 20th century and the work of Axel Thue. Thue was the first to give an example of an infinite word over a three letter alphabet that contains no squares (identical adjacent blocks) xx. This result was eventually used to solve some longstanding open problems in algebra and has remarkable connections to other areas of mathematics and computer science as well. This thesis will consider several different generalizations of Thue's work. In particular we shall study the properties of infinite words avoiding various types of repetitions. In Chapter 1 we introduce the theory of combinatorics on words. We present the basic definitions and give an historical survey of the area. In Chapter 2 we consider the work of Thue in more detail. We present various well-known properties of the Thue-Morse word and give some generalizations. We examine Fife's characterization of the infinite overlap-free words and give a simpler proof of this result. We also present some applications to transcendental number theory, generalizing a classical result of Mahler. In Chapter 3 we generalize a result of Seebold by showing that the only infinite 7/3-power-free binary words that can be obtained by iterating a morphism are the Thue-Morse word and its complement. In Chapter 4 we continue our study of overlap-free and 7/3-power-free words. We discuss the squares that can appear as subwords of these words. We also show that it is possible to construct infinite 7/3-power-free binary words containing infinitely many overlaps. In Chapter 5 we consider certain questions of language theory. In particular, we examine the context-freeness of the set of words containing overlaps. We show that over a three-letter alphabet, this set is not context-free, and over a two-letter alphabet, we show that this set cannot be unambiguously context-free. In Chapter 6 we construct infinite words over a four-letter alphabet that avoid squares in any arithmetic progression of odd difference. Our constructions are based on properties of the paperfolding words. We use these infinite words to construct non-repetitive tilings of the integer lattice. In Chapter 7 we consider approximate squares rather than squares. We give constructions of infinite words that avoid such approximate squares. In Chapter 8 we conclude the work and present some open problems.

The study of combinatorics on words dates back at least to the beginning of the 20th century and the work of Axel Thue. Thue was the first to give an example of an infinite word over a three letter alphabet that contains no squares (identical adjacent blocks) <i>xx</i>. This result was eventually used to solve some longstanding open problems in algebra and has remarkable connections to other areas of mathematics and computer science as well. In this thesis we primarily study several variations of the problems studied by Thue in his work on repetitions in words, including some recent connections to other areas, such as graph theory. In Chapter 1 we give a brief introduction to the subject of combinatorics on words. In Chapter 2 we use uniform morphisms to construct an infinite binary word that contains no cubes <i>xxx</i> and no squares <i>yy</i> with |<i>y</i>| &#8805; 4, thus giving a simpler construction than that of Dekking. We also use uniform morphisms to construct an infinite binary word avoiding all squares except 0², 1², and (01)², thus giving a simpler construction than that of Fraenkel and Simpson. We give some new enumeration results for these avoidance properties and solve an open problem of Prodinger and Urbanek regarding the perfect shuffle of infinite binary words that avoid arbitrarily large squares. In Chapter 3 we examine ternary squarefree words in more detail, and in Chapter 4 we study words <i>w</i> satisfying the property that for any sufficiently long subword <i>w'</i> of <i>w</i>, <i>w</i> does not contain the reversal of <i>w'</i> as a subword. In Chapter 5 we discuss an application of the property of squarefreeness to colourings of graphs. In Chapter 6 we study strictly increasing sequences (<i>a</i>(<i>n</i>))<i>n</i>&#8805;0 of non-negative integers satisfying the equation <i>a</i>(<i>a</i>(<i>n</i>)) = <i>dn</i>. Finally, in Chapter 7 we give a brief conclusion and present some open problems.

The study of combinatorics on words dates back at least to the beginning of the 20th century and the work of Axel Thue. Thue was the first to give an example of an infinite word over a three letter alphabet that contains no squares (identical adjacent blocks) xx. This result was eventually used to solve some longstanding open problems in algebra and has remarkable connections to other areas of mathematics and computer science as well. This thesis will consider several different generalizations of Thue's work. In particular we shall study the properties of infinite words avoiding various types of repetitions. In Chapter 1 we introduce the theory of combinatorics on words. We present the basic definitions and give an historical survey of the area. In Chapter 2 we consider the work of Thue in more detail. We present various well-known properties of the Thue-Morse word and give some generalizations. We examine Fife's characterization of the infinite overlap-free words and give a simpler proof of this result. We also present some applications to transcendental number theory, generalizing a classical result of Mahler. In Chapter 3 we generalize a result of Seebold by showing that the only infinite 7/3-power-free binary words that can be obtained by iterating a morphism are the Thue-Morse word and its complement. In Chapter 4 we continue our study of overlap-free and 7/3-power-free words. We discuss the squares that can appear as subwords of these words. We also show that it is possible to construct infinite 7/3-power-free binary words containing infinitely many overlaps. In Chapter 5 we consider certain questions of language theory. In particular, we examine the context-freeness of the set of words containing overlaps. We show that over a three-letter alphabet, this set is not context-free, and over a two-letter alphabet, we show that this set cannot be unambiguously context-free. In Chapter 6 we construct infinite words over a four-letter alphabet that avoid squares in any arithmetic progression of odd difference. Our constructions are based on properties of the paperfolding words. We use these infinite words to construct non-repetitive tilings of the integer lattice. In Chapter 7 we consider approximate squares rather than squares. We give constructions of infinite words that avoid such approximate squares. In Chapter 8 we conclude the work and present some open problems.

No description available.