Linguistics

The development of international proficiency tests such as IELTS, which entail important decision making about people’s academic lives, requires complex processes to ensure item discrimination. Previous research has indicated that IELTS has been ineffective in omitting distractor components, which may offer limitations in differentiating among the candidates. Among all the sections, particular attention has been paid to the reading comprehension component and it is considered as a criterion for

This dissertation investigates the following central question: What is the internal structure of pronouns? I propose and investigate the hypothesis that contextual allomorphy is a key tool for (a) accessing the inventory of morphemes that make up a pronoun across languages and (b) tracking the patterns of their interactions. Namely, allomorphic alternations involve an interaction of two morphemes, the trigger and the target of allomorphy. Identifying the trigger and the target in pronominal form

This thesis studies the syntax and semantics of null objects in Spanish. Null objects are grammatical elements that, despite not being uttered, are interpreted and display syntactic structure (e.g., En esta escuela castigan Ø con dureza ‘In this school they punish harshly’; Buscaban defectos de forma, pero no encontraron Ø ‘They were looking for formal defects, but found none’). Despite the interest aroused by null objects in Romance languages, null objects of Spanish have gone almost unnoticed

Toponymy is the branch of Onomastics that studies place names. From among the subfields in Toponymy, in this work we focus on standardized toponymic repositories: toponymic lexical data bases. An adequate standardization of the major toponymy in the CPLP area assumes special relevance, as it embodies a normalizing function and is characterized by its enlarged scope. The Vocabulário Toponímico (VT – toponymic wordlist), studied here, is a digital toponymic resource, a specialized vocabulary that

AUTHOR: BEAUSETHA JUHETHA BRUWER ABSTRACT The Bilingual-Bicultural approach is considered the best approach to teach deaf learners. This approach also provides the best opportunity for deaf learners to become biliterate. Namibia too has adopted the Bilingual-Bicultural approach to teaching deaf learners and are a signatory to national and international policies and laws to ensure deaf learners are provided with the best opportunity for an education. Contrary to the adoption of the Bilingual-

AUTHOR: BEAUSETHA JUHETHA BRUWER ABSTRACT Sign Language-based Bilingual Education is a known Bilingual-Bicultural model that offers the best chance for a deaf learner to achieve academic success. Even though the Ministry of Education in Namibia also claims to have adopted this approach to teaching deaf learners, the education system still remains unable to produce deaf learners who can exit school with a valid grade twelve certificate. The study constitutes a programme evaluation design in

AUTHOR (STUDENT): ANDRIES VAN NIEKERK Abstract ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa’s history of segregation was a large contributing factor for lexical variation in South African Sign Language (SASL) to come about. Foreign sign languages certainly had a presence in the history of deaf education; however, the degree of influence foreign sign languages has on SASL today is what this study has aimed to determine. There have been very limited studies on the presence of loan signs in SASL and none have

English: The linguistic landscape (LL), comprised of items displaying written language in the public space, is the product of linguistic choices that are executed by a myriad of actors who are guided by numerous pragmatic or symbolic motivations. Written language in the public space has unique semiotic properties that extend beyond its communicative function. It indexes power relations and identities, and, as such, is utilised to impose or negotiate these. The LL is thus a symbolic construct fin

Linguistic landscape (LL) research is a recent development in the field of sociolinguistics. The LL is written language in the public space; and the study thereof focuses on the linguistic choices in the LL and the motivations behind these choices. Language in the LL has unique semiotic properties and the LL hence offers a new approach to investigate sociolinguistic themes. The themes most commonly addressed are language policy and linguistic diversity. As a result of the bidirectional relati

This dissertation investigates the syntax of clausal prefixes in Tigrinya, an Ethio-Semitic language which, despite its head-finality, exhibits clause-initial complementizers that attach as prefixes to embedded verbs (clausal prefixes). It challenges the view that prefixes in head-final languages have an intrinsic morphological property, proposing instead that their surface position results from specific syntactic constraints. Four main clausal prefixes are analyzed. Z(ɨ)-, found in relative cla

Writing an academic text can be challenging for English learners, including Indonesian students studying at Hungarian Universities (HUs). These students must learn to write in a second language while mastering grammatical structures and lexical resources, as well as distinguishing between academic English and conversational English in terms of conventional words, phrases,and sentence structures.This study is aimed at examining students’ experiences in English academic writing during their master

This dissertation explores the syntax of subsententials in Hindi/Urdu (H/U), with an empirical focus on sluicing and fragment answers. Such phenomena represent instances where all clausal material is unpronounced, except for a (wh-)phrase (e.g., A: Who did John see? B: Mary.). With evidence from various connectivity effects, I argue that a non-structuralist analysis of such configurations, which does not assume the presence of tacit material, is untenable. Rather, subsententials in this language

This research explores the complexity of experiences of learning English beyond the classroom in a challenging Algerian setting. Language learning has two dimensions, inside the classroom and beyond the classroom. Studies on language learning beyond the classroom are relatively scarce, in part because this dimension is to some extent hidden (Benson, 2011a). Furthermore, in the Algerian setting, studies about language learning and aspects such as autonomy are mostly classroom-based and depende

This thesis examines multimodal (im)politeness in telecinematic discourse and its subtitling. It brings together research in (im)politeness, audiovisual translation (AVT), multimodality and the pragmatics of fiction to provide concrete analytical frameworks to study how situated (im)politeness is expressed multimodally in an unfolding interaction and how multimodal (im)politeness is rendered in subtitling, which have received scarce attention in each of the mentioned research field. Using the

This PhD thesis arises from the lack of an in-depth study about Corrective Feedback (CF) in the Foreign Language (FL) classroom in Portugal. The research reported in this thesis, which is part of the field of linguistics and language teaching, aimed at investigating learners and teachers’ beliefs on oral CF, the several types of CF provided by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers and the effects of CF on the learners’ linguistic knowledge. The present research seeks to provide a signific

Viewpoint is the locus of consciousness in a given space or conceptual model of the world. Human beings make use of several linguistic resources to project their own viewpoint as well as viewpoints of other entities. These resources are organized into “semiotic channels” which are categories based on the mode of information being conveyed. These channels run the gamut from the manipulation of the acoustic signal to the choice and arrangement of words and even facial expressions and gestures. The