Finding structure in language

Since the Chomskian revolution, it has become apparent that natural language is richly structured, being naturally represented hierarchically, and requiring complex context sensitive rules to define regularities over these representations. It is widely assumed that the richness of the posited structure has strong nativist implications for mechanisms which might learn natural language, since it seemed unlikely that such structures could be derived directly from the observation of linguistic data (Chomsky 1965).This thesis investigates the hypothesis that simple statistics of a large, noisy, unlabelled corpus of natural language can be exploited to discover some of the structure which exists in natural language automatically. The strategy is to initially assume no knowledge of the structures present in natural language, save that they might be found by analysing statistical regularities which pertain between a word and the words which typically surround it in the corpus.To achieve this, various statistical methods are applied to define similarity between statistical distributions, and to infer a structure for a domain given knowledge of the similarities which pertain within it. Using these tools, it is shown that it is possible to form a hierarchical classification of many domains, including words in natural language. When this is done, it is shown that all the major syntactic categories can be obtained, and the classification is both relatively complete, and very much in accord with a standard linguistic conception of how words are classified in natural language.Once this has been done, the categorisation derived is used as the basis of a similar classification of short sequences of words. If these are analysed in a similar way, then several syntactic categories can be derived. These include simple noun phrases, various tensed forms of verbs, and simple prepositional phrases. Once this has been done, the same technique can be applied one level higher, and at this level simple sentences and verb phrases, as well as more complicated noun phrases and prepositional phrases, are shown to be derivable

Cappadocian kinship

Cappadocian kinship systems are very interesting from a sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective because of the mixture of inherited Greek and borrowed Turkish kinship terms. Precisely because the number of Turkish kinship terms differs from one variety to another, it is necessary to talk about Cappadocian kinship systems in the plural rather than about the Cappadocian kinship system in the singular. Although reference will be made to other Cappadocian varieties, this paper will focus on the kinship systems of Mišotika and Aksenitika, the two Central Cappadocian dialects still spoken today in several communities in Greece. Particular attention will be given to the use of borrowed Turkish kinship terms, which sometimes seem to co-exist together with their inherited Greek counterparts, e.g. mána vs. néne ‘mother’, ailfó/aelfó vs. γardáš ‘brother’ etc. In the final part of the paper some kinship terms with obscure or hitherto unknown etymology will be discussed, e.g. káka ‘grandmother’, ižá ‘aunt’, lúva ‘uncle (father’s brother)’ etc

Need for learning management systems in higher education in subject that involve programming languages

Subjects that are teaching programming languages may contain different approaches\ud to learning, depending on the level of preparedness of students and the methodology used by\ud the teaching staff in the lectures and exercises. Because of the need for practical work in\ud programming, the introduction of e-learning support system for students can be as useful as it\ud is for them and for teachers. Attaching the materials to a local system (intranet) and the\ud possibility of accessing them and the program codes of classes, lessons and ancillary\ud materials for exercises can bring increased efficiency and increased degree of control of the\ud organization and behavior of students in class.\ud With the ability to simultaneous usage of necessary materials from the system,\ud explanations of the professor and the opportunity for practical work, students very quickly\ud can recognize the effects of learning and become more motivated for learning more content\ud during class. The professor, who had previously set the material to the system has a feedback\ud of student achievements in class, the problems that occurred and the way they were solved,\ud and the time they spent to solve the problem. Students themselves have the opportunity to see\ud whether they learned and can evaluate their knowledge through questions that are posed at\ud the end the lesson

Simple Subject-Verb Agreement: a Morphosyntactic Path to Arabic Variations

The analytic object of this dissertation is to formally model the Arabic subject-verb agreement aspects, more particularly, the verbal agreement with simple subject DPs. It aims to define how φ-agreement is formally manifested across the Arabic varieties, more specifically, Standard Arabic and the current dialects, and hopes to draw the latter varieties’ interrelation. In other words, this thesis hopes to advance the overall understanding of subject-verb agreement in Arabic and contribute to a clearer and simpler view of a number of specific syntactic phenomena. Most important of all, the subject DP relative order with respect to the verbal predicate influences the possible subject-verb-agreement choices attested in Standard Arabic (SA), whereby a subject-verb (SV) order shows full agreement in all φ-features, but a verb-subject (VS) order shows only partial agreement, typically, in Gender and Person. Nonetheless, full subject-verb agreement in VS order is robustly found in different dialects of the Arab world, in which the Number feature is obligatory. Remarkably, not only is the partial agreement attested in SA absent in the modern dialects, but also Gender and Number morphology distinctions may often be minimized. On the one hand, a masculine agreement is syncretic whenever the agreement relation is established between a verbal predicate and dual or plural subject DPs, whether they are masculine or feminine. On the other hand, plural and dual nouns trigger plural agreement on the agreeing verbal predicate; the plural number is syncretic whenever the subject DP is plural or dual. What’s more, the Arabic (traditional) texts have an abundance of examples that do not conform to the SA norm of agreement and whose well-formedness is unquestionable, suggesting that the agreement asymmetry may not be absolute. These observations urge an in-depth investigation, assuming that they may present profound paradoxes when analyzed via the standard Agree-based mechanism. Despite the dissimilarity between SA and the modern dialects in terms of subject-verb agreement, these varieties are mostly alike in other matters. For these reasons, I believe that any account to the subject-verb agreement must take these points into consideration. To my knowledge, there has been no detailed analysis devoted to the interrelation between the standard variety and the modern dialects in terms of subject-verb agreement. So, believing that any syntactic account to the subject-verb agreement in Arabic ought to be flexible to cover the various agreement phenomena, I argue that the various (often outwardly non-canonical) agreement patterns in Arabic are manifestations of the core syntactic Agree mechanism. Their agreement behavior is often attributed to a fundamental mismatch between the syntactic and morphological components, subject to variety/dialect-specific requirements. In simple terms, taking the core properties of the Agree-based system to feature valuation (Chomsky, 2000 et seq.), the assumptions in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993; 1994; Halle, 1994, among others), and the feature geometry advocated by Harley & Ritter (2002), among others, I posit that these agreement patterns attest very general conditions on the agreement and φ-feature manifestations in Arabic, defined in terms of restrictions on T’s φ-Probe that agrees with the subject DP. Overall, given the formulation of the conditions advanced, the agreement facts across the Arabic varieties, I believe, arise naturally and predictably from the interaction of Agree, conditions on T’s φ-Probe, and postsyntactic requirements

Wars of position : language policy, counter-hegemonies and cultural cleavages in Italy and Norway

This thesis investigates the development of the present-day linguistic hegemonies within Italy and Norway as products of ongoing linguistic ‘wars of position’. Language activist movements have been key actors in these struggles, and this study seeks to address how such movements have operated in attempts to translate their linguistic ideologies into de facto language policy through mechanisms such as political agitation, propaganda and the use of language in public spaces. It also reveals which other extra-linguistic values and ideologies have become associated with or allied to these linguistic causes in recent years, how these ideologies have affected language policy, and whether such ideological alliances have been representative of language users’ ideologies. The study is informed by an innovative methodological framework combining the theories and metaphors of Antonio Gramsci (including hegemony and wars of position as well as his linguistic writings) with the theories of Stein Rokkan on cultural-political cleavage structures and the relationships between centres and peripheries. These constructs and relationships are thereafter documented as ideologically defining strands running through the history of the movements studied, through reference to activist periodicals and party newspapers. In Italy, the focus of the research is on the Lega Nord (Northern League), a far-right populist autonomist political movement. The Lega has sought to legitimise its imagination of a northern nation (‘Padania’) by portraying the dialects of northern Italy as minority languages, emphasising the hegemonic relationship between the Italian national language and northern dialects. The movement has also used this perception of northern dialects as peripheral and suppressed by Italian to bolster its depiction of ‘Padania’ as a wealthy periphery allegedly held back by central and southern Italy. Although this campaign has achieved some successes in increased visibility of dialects in public spaces, dialects largely remain restricted to ‘low’-status domains. In Norway, the thesis devotes special attention to the post-war efforts of the counter-hegemonic campaign for the Nynorsk standard of Norwegian, which was devised as a common denominator for Norwegian dialects, as opposed to the hegemonic standard Bokmål, which is a Norwegianisation of written Danish. In opposing the challenges of globalisation and centralisation, the Nynorsk movement has retained a radical character and is generally associated with a left-wing variant of nationalism, a key part of the Norwegian cultural cleavage structure. The social argumentation of the Nynorsk movement was instrumental in its successful promotion of dialects, now seen as an unstigmatised means of spoken communication in all social contexts