Impacts of power sector reforms on rural electrification in the Philippines : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Inspired by neo-liberal principles, waves of electricity industry reforms have swept the world over the last two decades. To a great extent, the traditional government-extended electrification service was transferred to the hands of private actors and market forces. While these reforms are expected to bring about efficiency gains as a result of market liberalization and private competition, the provision of electrification service to relatively poorer rural areas is less certain. In this light, it is of great interest in development studies to therefore understand the impacts of these reforms on the delivery of public service goals in cash-strapped developing countries like the Philippines. Through assessments of relevant Philippine government data and case study findings, this thesis outlines how the restructured Philippine electricity industry has impacted on the accessibility, service quality and affordability of electrification, especially in rural areas. In a nutshell, electricity industry restructuring in the Philippines resulted in better delivery of public service goals to the rural beneficiaries, but not necessarily resulting from privatization, competition and deregulation that is fostered by a free market regime

Assimilation of Voicing in Czech Speakers of English: The Effect of the Degree of Accentedness

Czech and English are languages which differ with respect to the implementation of voicing. Unlike in English, there is a considerable agreement between phonological (systemic) and phonetic (actual) voicing in Czech, and, more importantly, the two languages have different strategies for the assimilation of voicing across the word boundary. The present study investigates the voicing in word-final obstruents in Czech speakers of English with the specific aim of ascertaining whether the degree of the speakers’ foreign accent correlates with the way they treat English obstruents in assimilatory contexts. L2 speakers, divided into three groups of varying accentedness, were examined employing categorization and a voicing profile method for establishing the presence/absence of voicing. The results suggest that speakers with a different degree of Czech accent do differ in their realization of voicing in the way predicted by a negative transfer of assimilatory habits from Czech

Collecting a corpus of Dutch SMS

In this paper we present the first freely available corpus of Dutch text messages containing data originating from the Netherlands and Flanders. This corpus has been collected in the framework of the SoNaR project and constitutes a viable part of this 500-million-word corpus. About 53,000 text messages were collected on a large scale, based on voluntary donations. These messages will be distributed as such. In this paper we focus on the data collection processes involved and after studying the effect of media coverage we show that especially free publicity in newspapers and on social media networks results in more contributions. All SMS are provided with metadata information. Looking at the composition of the corpus, it becomes visible that a small number of people have contributed a large amount of data, in total 272 people have contributed to the corpus during three months. The number of women contributing to the corpus is larger than the number of men, but male contributors submitted larger amounts of data. This corpus will be of paramount importance for sociolinguistic research and normalisation studies

Effects of corpus-based instruction on phraseology in learner English

This study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A contrastive interlanguage analysis approach (Granger, 2002) was adopted to compare the phraseology of key items in the learner corpus with that found in the reference corpus. Comparison is also made with a learner corpus of reports produced by a previous cohort of students who had not used the reference corpus. Students who had done DDL tasks used a wider range of genre-appropriate phraseology and produced a lower number of stock phrases than those who had not. The study also finds evidence that students use more phrases encountered in paper-based concordancing tasks than in hands-on tasks.Unlike in previous DDL studies, observations of the learning of a specific text-type through DDL in the present study are based on the comparison with both a control learner corpus and an expert corpus.The study also considers the use of DDL with a large class size

Holistic corpus-based dialectology

This paper is concerned with sketching future directions for corpus-based dialectology. We advocate a holistic approach to the study of geographically conditioned linguistic variability, and we present a suitable methodology, 'corpusbased dialectometry', in exactly this spirit. Specifically, we argue that in order to live up to the potential of the corpus-based method, practitioners need to (i) abandon their exclusive focus on individual linguistic features in favor of the study of feature aggregates, (ii) draw on computationally advanced multivariate analysis techniques (such as multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis), and (iii) aid interpretation of empirical results by marshalling state-of-the-art data visualization techniques. To exemplify this line of analysis, we present a case study which explores joint frequency variability of 57 morphosyntax features in 34 dialects all over Great Britain.Este artigo debruça-se sobre o esboço propositivo de futuras direções para a dialetologia baseada em corpus. Defendemos uma abordagem holística para o estudo da variabilidade linguística geograficamente condicionada, e apresentamos uma metodologia adequada para tal - a dialetometria baseada em corpus. Mais especificamente, defendemos que para que se obtenham todos os resultados esperados da metodologia de corpus, pesquisadores devem: (i) abandonar seu foco exclusivo em traços linguísticos individuais em favor do estudo dos agregados de traços, (ii) amparar-se em métodos computacionais avançados de técnicas de análise multivariada (tais como escalagem multidimensional, análise de clusters, e análise de componente principal), e (iii) auxiliar a interpretação de resultados empíricos através da utilização do estado da arte em técnicas de visualização. A fim de exemplificarmos essa linha de análise, apresentamos um estudo de caso que explora a variabilidade da frequência agregada de 57 traços morfossintáticos de 34 dialetos da Grã-Bretanha