http://linguistlist.org Latest Diss Issues en-us Copyright 2008 The LINGUIST List linguist@linguistlist.org linguist@linguistlist.org http://backend.userland.com/rss Thu, 25 Feb 2016 20:40:03 EST 60 http://linguistlist.org/images/lllogo-large.png http://linguistlist.org http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-967.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-967.html Tesfaye Bayou <tesfaye57@yahoo.com> Wed, 24 Feb 2016 10:17:38 EST Institution: Addis Ababa University
Program: Documentary Linguistics and Culture
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2015

Author: Tesfaye Negash Bayou

Dissertation Title: Documentation and Grammatical Description of Komo

Linguistic Field(s): Language Documentation

Subject Language(s): Komo (xom)

Dissertation Director:
Wondwosen Tesfaye

Dissertation Abstract:

The dissertation has two parts. Part one examines a grammar of Kwom (''Komo''). Part two provides representative texts from the archived corpora and word lists. Kwom (''Komo'') is little known and least studied language in Ethiopia. It belongs to the Koman language family within the Nilo-Saharan phylum. It is an endangered language due to people’s movement and contact with dominant languages.

Extensive fieldworks have been taken place to collect and archive corpus of 30 hours of authentic audio and video recordings of oral genres. 2 hours and 30 minutes of different representative types of audio and video recordings have been annotated, transcribed, glossed and translated. Over 3687 words have been documented. The documentation is the base for the language description. The corpora have been archived at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The documentation methods are participant observation, elicitation, observed communicative events, staged communicative events and recordings of oral genres to achieve the following specific purposes:

-To record and document linguistic practices of Kwom people.
- To annotate audio & video recordings of speech events with translation and transcription.
- To document list of words with transcriptions and translations into English.
- To describe the grammar of the language.
- To facilitate accessibility of the work to the Kwom people and interested researchers.

The grammatical description of the language has three parts: phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax. Many issues like acoustic description, distributions, contrast of suspicious pairs of consonants and vowels, and tones have been thoroughly discussed. Alphabet of the language has also been suggested. The language’s noun morphology, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, numerals, conjunctions, noun phrases, copula clauses, the negative and interrogative constructions of nominal clauses, verbs have been described in detail in the morphology part. Regarding the language’s syntax, declarative clauses, relative clauses, complex clauses and word order of the language have been thoroughly dealt.



[Linguist List announcement 27.967]]]> http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-860.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-860.html Agnieszka Patejuk <aep@ipipan.waw.pl> Tue, 16 Feb 2016 14:44:41 EST Institution: Polish Academy of Sciences
Program: N/A
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2015

Author: Agnieszka Patejuk

Dissertation Title: Unlike Coordination in Polish: an LFG account

Dissertation URL: http://nlp.ipipan.waw.pl/Bib/pat:15.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax

Subject Language(s): Polish (pol)

Dissertation Director:
Adam Przepiórkowski

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation focuses on two coordination phenomena which are non-standard: conjuncts are not identical categorially or they do not correspond to the same grammatical function. It is based on rich attested data taken from the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) and retrieved using Google. It offers a carefully formalised LFG analysis of these phenomena which is not an isolated grammar fragment – it was implemented in XLE as a part of POLFIE, a large scale LFG grammar of Polish. Such a design makes it possible to verify the proposed analysis, taking interactions with various phenomena into account – these include especially agreement, structural case assignment and control. Interactions with these phenomena are also addressed in this work and their formalisation is provided.

The issue of coordination of unlike categories was noticed in constraint-based theories of grammar as early as 1985, see the discussion in Sag et al. 1985. In LFG such coordination was mentioned in the so-called COMP vs OBJ debate (e.g. Alsina et al. 2005), but since this discussion focused on how particular grammatical functions should be defined, no formalised account of coordination of unlike categories was offered and no constraints necessary to handle this phenomenon were provided. As a result, this debate did not touch upon the issue of imposing different constraints on particular conjuncts under coordination, which turns out to be problematic in LFG because of the way in which disjunctive statements are interpreted in this context. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by discussing how unlike category coordination can be modelled in LFG and showing in detail how the lexicon should be designed to account for the coordination of unlike categories.

On the other hand, there is the phenomenon of coordination of different grammatical functions – it is known under a wide range of names, including hybrid coordination, lexico-semantic coordination and – more narrowly – coordinated wh-questions. This dissertation provides evidence that real coordination is involved in this phenomenon. It shows that conjuncts must belong to the same semantic type and that the range of possible types is usually restricted to wh-words and items which express various quantifiers, though it also discusses less frequent conjunct types (together with how they can be modified). Different types of dependents may be coordinated: arguments, modifiers and even particles. Furthermore, conjuncts do not have to be dependents of the same head – they may belong to different substructures of the relevant f-structure. The dissertation offers a formalised analysis which takes into account main (most frequent) classes of conjuncts taking part in such coordination.

The dissertation is organised into 3 parts. The first part, assuming no previous knowledge of LFG, introduces necessary basics of this formalism and provides some information about selected phenomena of Polish syntax which are important in the following discussion, including subject-verb agreement and structural case assignment. The second, main, part discusses rich data related to the two selected non-standard coordination phenomena which are the focus of this work and provides formal LFG analyses of coordination of unlike grammatical categories and coordination of different grammatical functions. The third, last, part describes the implementation of the theoretical analyses presented earlier in this work.



[Linguist List announcement 27.860]]]> http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-825.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-825.html Tom Juzek <tom.juzek@googlemail.com> Mon, 15 Feb 2016 10:51:18 EST Institution: University of Oxford
Program: D.Phil. in Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2016

Author: Tom S Juzek

Dissertation Title: Acceptability Judgement Tasks and Grammatical Theory

Dissertation URL: http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b276ec98-5f65-468b-b481-f3d9356d86a2

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                            Syntax

Dissertation Director:
Mary Dalrymple
Greg Kochanski

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis considers various questions about acceptability judgement tasks (AJTs).


In Chapter 1, we compare the prevalent informal method of syntactic enquiry, researcher introspection, to formal judgement tasks. We randomly sample 200 sentences from Linguistic Inquiry and then compare the original author judgements to online AJT ratings. Sprouse et al., 2013, provided a similar comparison, but they limited their analysis to the comparison of sentence pairs and to extreme cases. We think a comparison at large, i.e. involving all items, is more sensible. We find only a moderate match between informal author judgements and formal online ratings and argue that the formal judgements are more reliable than the informal judgements. Further, the fact that many syntactic theories rely on questionable informal data calls the adequacy of those theories into question.


In Chapter 2, we test whether ratings for constructions from spoken language and constructions from written language differ if presented as speech vs as text and if presented informally vs formally. We analyse the results with an LME model and find that neither mode of presentation nor formality are significant factors. Our results suggest that a speaker’s grammatical intuition is fairly robust.


In Chapter 3, we quantitatively compare regular AJT data to their Z-scores and ranked data. For our analysis, we test resampled data for significant differences in statistical power. We find that Z-scores and ranked data are more powerful than raw data across most common measurement methods.


Chapter 4 examines issues surrounding a common similarity test, the TOST. It has long been unclear how to set its controlling parameter δ. Based on data simulations, we outline a way to objectively set δ. Further results suggest that our guidelines hold for any kind of data.


The thesis concludes with an appendix on non-cooperative participants in AJTs.



[Linguist List announcement 27.825]]]> http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-824.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-824.html Lengji Danjuma <ldanjuma.danjuma@gmail.com> Mon, 15 Feb 2016 10:49:17 EST Institution: University of Maiduguri-Nigeria
Program: PhD General Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2015

Author: Lengji Nudiya Danjuma

Dissertation Title: Move-α , Top and Pro Within the Minimalist Program: A Cross-Linguistic Analysis of: Ngas, Hausa and Fulfulde

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories
                            Syntax

Subject Language(s): Fulfulde, Adamawa (fub)
                            Hausa (hau)
                            Ngas (anc)

Dissertation Director:
Aishatu Iya Ahmed
Mohammed Munkaila

Dissertation Abstract:

Move-alpha (move-α), TOP and PRO are Government and Binding (GB) and Principles and Parameter Theory (PPT) concepts which this research analyses within the Minimalist Program (MP) using the split-CP hypothesis. TOP is a grammatical category and a position that serves as the landing site for move-alpha. PRO is the subject of infinitivals, the subject of Control theory: one of the modules of GB, the theory determines the possible antecedents of PRO. This research is a cross-linguistic analysis, using data from Ngas (Angas) and Hausa both Chadic languages and Fulfulde: an Atlantic-Congo language. The primary source of data collection was interviews along with the use of structured questionnaire. The Ngas informants were speakers of standard Ngas as agreed by the Ngas Language and Translation Board. The informants for Hausa and Fulfulde were native speakers of Kananci (Kano Hausa) and Adamawa Fulfulde, respectively. Our analysis shows that Topic constructions in: Ngas, Hausa and Fulfulde all have a declarative force head of ForceP which is optional and the head of TopP which is null and an abstract topic affix with a Top-specifier feature which requires a topic constituent as its specifier. Focus constructions have a strong overt head feature (Focus Marker FM) which attracts the focus constituents to spec-FocP. FM is optional in Hausa but obligatory in Ngas and Fulfulde. Force head is obligatorily null in Hausa and Fulfulde but optional in Ngas. PRO is the subject of the infinitival clause with an affixal infinitival particle affixed to the verb and a –WH CP marked by a declarative force in Fulfulde. In both Ngas and Hausa, there is an intuited subject which is indicated as PRO and CP is null. Both Ngas and Hausa have an abstract infinitival particle. Theta-role is assigned to PRO indirectly via merger with a V-bar compositionally in Ngas, Hausa, and Fulfulde. The status of move-alpha (move-α) as regards TOP and PRO is that of an operational procedure of Merge, Attract, Agree, Raising and Move (Affix Hopping) in Fulfulde and Merge, Attract, Agree and Raising in Ngas and Hausa. There is a typological asymmetry in the operation of move-alpha (move-α): only in Fulfulde in the analysis of PRO a classical movement operation of move-alpha (move-α) occurs: Affix Hopping applies: -a the infinitival particle is affixed to the verb wam. A typological asymmetry in the operations of Topic and Focus constructions is observed: Topic constructions do not exhibit any occurrence of Topic Markers. Focus constructions exhibit Focus Markers as in Ngas: ɗo; Hausa: ce/ne and Fulfulde: on. Theoretically, the typological asymmetry observed between Chadic and Atlantic-Congo in the operation of the three syntactic elements of move-alpha (move-α ), TOP and PRO confirms the binary selection of syntactic operations in Universal Grammar (UG). Indeed, the Minimalist Program (MP) adequately meets the adequacy conditions of classical Generative Grammar by describing and analyzing the syntactic elements of move-alpha (move-α), TOP and PRO in these three African languages: Ngas, Hausa and Fulfulde.



[Linguist List announcement 27.824]]]>