Search results for "Gram"
showing 10 items of 9069 documents
The Loss of Grammatical Gender and Case Features Between Old and Early Middle English: Its Impact on Simple Demonstratives and Topic Shift
2017
AbstractIn this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky & Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle Englishϸe(‘the’), we first discuss the formal properties o…
Software as ideology
2016
Software has become ubiquitous in higher education, especially often taken-for-granted Microsoft Word. Educational writing involves more than horizontal lines of text, but also multimodal representations. When students write in Word, the affordances of the program constrain what multimodal representations of knowledge they can and cannot make. Software such as Word is not neutral tool-kits, but also historical and semiotic constructs loaded with social values and ideologies. By taking a social semiotic approach to Word and SmartArt, this article shows how this software is pre-loaded with values and styles from office management. These values are then infused into education, in the case this…
Sandwich EPP hypothesis: Evidence from child Finnish
2010
It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected byv* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and thev*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional he…
Constructed Action, the Clause and the Nature of Syntax in Finnish Sign Language
2017
AbstractThis paper investigates the interplay of constructed action and the clause in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Constructed action is a form of gestural enactment in which the signers use their hands, face and other parts of the body to represent the actions, thoughts or feelings of someone they are referring to in the discourse. With the help of frequencies calculated from corpus data, this article shows firstly that when FinSL signers are narrating a story, there are differences in how they use constructed action. Then the paper argues that there are differences also in the prototypical structure, linkage type and non-manual activity of clauses, depending on the presence or non-prese…
Detransitivisation as a support strategy for causativebring
2016
This article presents diachronic corpus analyses of causativebring(bringcaus) which provide new insights into a fairly novel research paradigm in language change: the role of ‘Moderate Transitivity Contexts’ (MTCs) as a refuge for waning verbs and as a breeding ground for waxing verbs (see Mondorf 2010, 2011, 2016; Rohdenburg 2014b; Schneider & Mondorf 2015). It argues that the modulation of transitivity serves as a support strategy for a formerly well-established verb that is leaving the language.The potential of semantic transitivity for the development of explanatory principles in language change has been hinted at by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 279). Empirically investigating the d…
Shell nouns in English ? a personal roundup
2018
Els encapsuladors en anglès – una síntesi personal Aquest treball ofereix una retrospectiva personal sobre la noció i el fenomen discursiu de shell noun (o encapsulador, literalment nom closca). Després d’una breu introducció, discutirem alguns aspectes terminològics i metodològics i efectuarem algunes remarques sobre la classificació dels usos dels encapsuladors. Finalment, aportarem una revisió d’investigacions recents sobre l’origen i el desenvolupament diacrònic dels encapsuladors i de les construccions encapsuladores, i discutirem una sèrie de noves aportacions en l’estudi de l’encapsulació des de la introducció del concepte en els anys 90 del segle passat.
Cognitive representations of predicates and the use of past tenses in French: a developmental approach
1997
Two experiments examine how French 10-year-old children and adults relate past tenses to the semantic properties of predicate types in writing. Experiment 1 involved two tasks: graphically coding two predicate dimensions (durativity and resultativity), a task designed to assess cognitive representations of these predicates; and selecting past tenses in sentences which included previously evaluated verbs. Results show that (a) 10-year-olds and adults have comparable representations of durativity, but different ones for resultativity, (b) the adults associate process charac teristics and past tenses, but 10-year-olds do not. In Experiment 2, subjects only had to code graphically two dimensio…
Modelling of Systems for Real
2016
Modelling and Programming are often used together in system development. However, typically there is a large difference between the handling of modelling parts and the handling of programming parts. This leads to the fact that the transition between the two is not easy, and important information is lost as well as extra information has to be provided when combining modelling and programming. This paper shows how modelling and programming could work together in system development.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOREIGN LANGUAGE ENJOYMENT AND GENDER AMONG SECONDARY GRAMMAR SCHOOL STUDENTS
2018
In the context of second language acquisition, foreign language enjoyment (FLE) is a relatively new concept. For that reason, none of the few research carried out in the field thus far has been focused on whether gender might be an important determinant of either a high or a low level of FLE. Thus, the purpose of the present paper was to examine the influence of FLE on learning English as a foreign language, as well as to investigate this relationship from the perspective of gender. The results of this study revealed that there are no statistically significant differences between males and females in FLE, while such differences are found in terms of the sources of FLE each gender perceives …
Polish Adolescents’ Perceptions of English and Their Desire to Learn It
2016
In the process of foreign language learning the way in which students perceive the language may have a strong facilitative impact on their language acquisition process, especially when this perception is positive (Despagne, 2010). Unfortunately, it has not yet been clearly established whether the relationship between perceptions and foreign language achievement can be explained by the moderating power of the student’s desire to learn the foreign language. For the purpose of this paper it is hypothesized that the learner’s perception of the foreign language is strongly related to the desire to learn it, leading to higher achievement in cases of positive perception. In order to corroborate th…