Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The current study is an acoustic investigation of the three-way obstruent contrast between voiceless aspirated, voiceless unaspirated and voiced stops in the medial position of tone sandhi domains...Show moreThe current study is an acoustic investigation of the three-way obstruent contrast between voiceless aspirated, voiceless unaspirated and voiced stops in the medial position of tone sandhi domains in Lili Wu Chinese, a language that has an aspiration-induced tonal split in lexical tones. The main focus of the thesis was to examine the acoustic realizations of the three-way stop contrast. By analyzing acoustic data from twenty old-generation Lili Wu native speakers, we found that f0 perturbation was employed by speakers to contrast phonological voicing: voiced stops introduced lower f0 contours to the following vowels than the voiceless ones. Durational data on consonant release (c/v ratio) and difference in phonation types (H1*-H2*) were adopted as two cues to contrast aspiration: voiceless aspirated stops tend to be associated with greater c/v ratio and H1*-H2* differences than voiceless unaspirated ones.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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Many sociolinguistic studies see a difference in the language of men and women. This study explores the differences in gendered language use in the letters written by Marian Evans and those written...Show moreMany sociolinguistic studies see a difference in the language of men and women. This study explores the differences in gendered language use in the letters written by Marian Evans and those written under her better-known male pseudonym, George Eliot. By combining gender theory, social history, and computational linguistics, this study argues that Marian Evans took up a pseudonym and a more masculine writing style to succeed in the male-dominated literary world. Machine learning indeed shows that the letters signed as George Eliot were classified as belonging to a male-writing style.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis is a synchronic study of the derivation of ordinal numerals from cardinal numerals in several different dialects of Dutch, combining a dialectological and a formal linguistic approach....Show moreThis thesis is a synchronic study of the derivation of ordinal numerals from cardinal numerals in several different dialects of Dutch, combining a dialectological and a formal linguistic approach. Ordinals are formed with one of two ordinal suffixes, -de or -ste, both of which occur in all Dutch varieties. However, there is variation among several dialects in Flanders (Belgium): they exhibit stem-suffix combinations which differ from those in Standard Dutch (SD), giving forms like zeven-ste and twaalf-ste for SD zeven-de and twaalf-de. The thesis investigates the patterns of this variation and offers motivations for those patterns. Novel data acquired through an online questionnaire show that there are three patterns: SD, a core Flemish pattern and a transitional pattern in between. These patterns show a clear geographical distribution. I propose that the distribution of the two suffixes can be largely explained by syllable weight in the transitional system and that an analysis in terms of the final stem consonant or in terms of foot weight cannot capture all the facts.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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In this study, the grammar and basic lexicon of the Sayan languages (Turkic), spoken in Russia and Mongolia, are compared by means of the features found in WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). The...Show moreIn this study, the grammar and basic lexicon of the Sayan languages (Turkic), spoken in Russia and Mongolia, are compared by means of the features found in WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). The main goal of this thesis is to provide a comparative study on four Sayan languages, namely Tuvan, Tofa, Soyot, and Dukha. Tuba, the fifth Sayan language, became extinct before it was described and studied and, therefore, it is excluded from the linguistic study. The data in this study came from the grammars by Anderson & Harrison (1999 and 2006, Tuvan), Rassadin (1971, 1978 and 2010, Tofa and Soyot) and Ragagnin (2011, Dukha). Another question that will be discussed in this thesis is the reason why Tuvan is not moribund, while its sister and daughter languages are. To answer this question, I looked at the history of the Sayan peoples and their current social status. Of all Sayan languages, Tofa showed the least Mongolian influences. This is probably because the Tofa people moved away from the Tuva Basin before the Mongols had a linguistic influence on the Tuvan language. Together with data from the grammars and historical information, a Sayan tree diagram is reconstructed. From the history and the current social status of the Sayan peoples could be concluded that the number of speakers and isolation together form the reason why Tuvan is not extinct and flourishes, while the other Sayan languages struggle to survive.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis is a cross-dialectal grammar-sketch of the Western dialect group of Lamaholot, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. It is a synthesis of the author’s own fieldwork data...Show moreThis thesis is a cross-dialectal grammar-sketch of the Western dialect group of Lamaholot, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. It is a synthesis of the author’s own fieldwork data with the existing literature on the various dialects that belong to this group. Western Lamaholot has a little over 20 distinct phonemes, a strong tendency towards CV-syllables, and penultimate stress. It has SV and AVP word order but frequently shows fronting of non-focused elements. It makes use of serial verbs and a lot of the function words that are used are grammaticallized serial verbs. Nouns show a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession in possessive constructions. Some verbs are inflected for person and number through prefixes, and intransitive verbs sometimes get subject agreement suffixes. Adjectives, pronouns, and in some dialects demonstratives and numerals get a suffix -n, historically derived from genitive markers, when they are used as noun modifiers. This thesis discusses controversial topics in the Lamaholot literature such as the phonemic status of long vowels, the existence of adjectives as a separate class from verbs, and the exact function of -n. It also lists elements that vary between dialects such as object marking on verbs, word-final consonants, and possessive constructions.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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Agreement with conjoined noun phrases is an interesting topic of research for languages that have a gender distinction in the plural. The central aim of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive...Show moreAgreement with conjoined noun phrases is an interesting topic of research for languages that have a gender distinction in the plural. The central aim of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive account of agreement with conjoined noun phrases in one such language: Icelandic. It is generally assumed that there are two agreement options with conjoined noun phrases in languages: resolution and agreement with one conjunct. The focus in this thesis is on the availability of these options in Icelandic, and whether the distribution of resolution is affected by two typological hierarchies: The Individuation Hierarchy and the Agreement Hierarchy. Another principal aim is to establish whether the gender resolution rules that have been described for the language are always used by speakers and to what extent agreement with one conjunct is used. An agreement form elicitation survey was constructed to gain insight into these issues. It was completed by 405 native speakers of Icelandic. The results of this survey indicate that the distribution of resolution in Icelandic is indeed affected by the Individuation Hierarchy, while it does not adhere to the prediction made by the Agreement Hierarchy. This is argued to be due to interaction effects of the two hierarchies and the approach of the present study. Gender resolution rules are followed by speakers in most cases. However, speakers use neuter agreement in resolution where it was not anticipated. The same applies to singular agreement: when agreement with one conjunct was expected, the neuter singular is widely used instead. Two gender defaults are argued to account for these patterns: a normal case default in resolution and an exceptional case default in singular agreement.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis discusses the subsegmental structure of glides and liquids. These segments are characterised by two seemingly contrastive characteristcs: phonological uniformity and phonetic diversity....Show moreThis thesis discusses the subsegmental structure of glides and liquids. These segments are characterised by two seemingly contrastive characteristcs: phonological uniformity and phonetic diversity. It will become apparent that these two contrastive characteristics make glides and liquids unlike other natural classes, which instead show both phonological and phonetic uniformity. This different nature of glides and liquids makes it difficult to establish which phonological features are present in the subsegmental structure of these segments, since it will be shown that features are unable to capture both the phonological uniformity and phonetic diversity at the same time. In order to overcome this problem, this thesis will argue in favour of abandoning a feature-based approach to subsegmental structure and instead resorting to an element-based approach. Unlike features, element are able to capture phonological uniformity and phonetic diversity at the same time. Moreover, it will be shown that the phonetic details and phonological behaviour of glides and liquids supports an element-based approach.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis focuses on the description of the ablative case clitic of Iraqw, a Cushitic language of Tanzania. The ablative case clitic of Iraqw is reported to have multiple functions and is...Show moreThis thesis focuses on the description of the ablative case clitic of Iraqw, a Cushitic language of Tanzania. The ablative case clitic of Iraqw is reported to have multiple functions and is attested to be used for expressing source, location, time, reason, and (simile) adverbial constructions. Especially the apparent extension of source to location marker is remarkable, as Iraqw has a separate goal marker and this particular Source=Location≠Goal syncretism is extremely rare in languages of the world. The ablative case clitic is part of the adverbial case clitics of Iraqw, which consist of the ablative, directional, instrumental, and reason case clitics. These clitics introduce an extra oblique argument to a clause and are closely tied to the verb. The source semantics of the ablative clitic inherently express Place and Path. In locational clauses the notion of Path is expressed in a durative aspect and the clitic therefore does not function as a primary locative marker. The ablative is also used in other contexts. It can be extended into the temporal domain to describe a temporal source and into the causal domain to denote the cause of an event. The ablative clitic is used in adverbial constructions that describe similarity and is grammaticalized in certain intensifying verbal adverbs. In conclusion the ablative case clitic is a source marker, and not a locative marker. Therefore I propose the pattern Source≠Location≠Goal for Iraqw.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis investigates the structure keep V-ing in English and the grammaticalization process of keep in this construction from a diachronic perspective. In Present-Day-English, this structure...Show moreThis thesis investigates the structure keep V-ing in English and the grammaticalization process of keep in this construction from a diachronic perspective. In Present-Day-English, this structure conveys a continuative aspectual meaning when the V-ing is characterized by an atelic Aktionsart (activities and states) and an iterative aspectual meaning when the V-ing is telic (accomplishments and achievements). This thesis was written from a Functional Discourse Grammar perspective (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008). Within this framework, grammaticalization is seen as the combination of contentive and formal change. Using corpus data from two historical English corpora, COLMOBAENG and COHA, comprising the Late Modern English and Present Day English periods, two stages of the grammaticalization process were observed: i. Location → Continuation, ii. Continuation → Iteration. On the contentive side, the second phase shows an increase in scope from an operator expressing phasal aspect at the layer of the Configurational property to an operator of event quantification at the layer of the States-of-Affairs. On the formal side, it has been observed that it has a very high degree of grammaticaliy based on Keizer’s criteria (Keizer 2007). Diachronically, the most relevant formal change is the combination with -ing verbs.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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Contrary to most studies of Polder Dutch, which argue that Polder Dutch and Standard Dutch have different social connotations (Stroop 1998, 2010; Van Bezooijen 1999, Van Bezooijen and Van den Berg...Show moreContrary to most studies of Polder Dutch, which argue that Polder Dutch and Standard Dutch have different social connotations (Stroop 1998, 2010; Van Bezooijen 1999, Van Bezooijen and Van den Berg 2001), this thesis aims to demonstrate that present-day language users do not distinguish between the two varieties. Combining two matched guise experiments it shows not only that non-linguists are not able to name ‘Polder Dutch,’ but also that they do not rate the two varieties differently on a range of evaluative scales, providing evidence that Polder Dutch is not perceived to be distinguishable from Standard Dutch.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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While monitoring eye movements during visual world paradigm studies, earlier research showed that the appropriate second noun phrase (NP2) is anticipated as upcoming referent before this NP is...Show moreWhile monitoring eye movements during visual world paradigm studies, earlier research showed that the appropriate second noun phrase (NP2) is anticipated as upcoming referent before this NP is auditorily encountered, when enough information is available to guide the anticipation process. Anticipatory effects are determined in both SVO-languages (e.g. English) and verb-final languages using case-markers (e.g. Japanese). Dutch lacks case- marking but allows verb-second SVO and verb-final SOV sentences. The aim of this study was to determine whether participants anticipate an upcoming NP2 object in Dutch SVO and SOV sentences. As SOV sentences are embedded clauses that cannot occur on their own, they were preceded by a main clause. Since we wanted to compare sentence constructions that were contentwise as equal as possible we did the same for the main SVO clauses. While linguistically encountering the two preceding main clauses, the different structure and prosody indicated already the word order of the upcoming critical sentence, i.e. SVO or SOV. For the SVO sentences, the preceding main clause, the subject NP1 and the verb provided information for object NP2 anticipation. In the SOV case, the information provided by the subject NP1 becomes extra important, as it was the only linguistic element that could be used as a guider of what element was coming next. To investigate whether the NP1 can lead NP2 anticipation, concrete and abstract NP1s preceded the NP2, such as the abstract NP1 ‘girl’ and the concrete NP1 ‘pilot’. It was hypothesized that if the NP2 was concrete, the lexical semantics of the NP provided enough information to come up with an upcoming NP2 object in SOV sentences, without the need of a verb. Overall, results showed that participants primarily preferred to look at the NP1 image during the spoken sentence. After sentence offset, a wrap-up effect of fixations to the NP2 was determined in all conditions, possibly indicating a late interpretation and integration of the NP2 with the previous constituents. Across all conditions, the NP2 image received proportionally as much fixations as the distractor images until sentence offset. This demonstrates that in both SVO and SOV sentences, upcoming NP2s were not anticipated. A possible explanation is that Dutch listeners are less pro-active anticipators because of the flexibility of Dutch word orders. The anticipatory process becomes too costly as the risk of anticipating upcoming constituents incorrectly is too high.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis presents a corpus-based description of the use of kong2 in present-day Taiwanese Southern Mǐn (TSM). First a description of TSM phonology is given. This is followed by the synchronic...Show moreThis thesis presents a corpus-based description of the use of kong2 in present-day Taiwanese Southern Mǐn (TSM). First a description of TSM phonology is given. This is followed by the synchronic description of the use of kong2 in TSM. Finally, a brief overview of the process of its grammaticalization is presented.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis proposes a sketch description of Brazilian Bergamasch, a Gallo-Italian language spoken in the town of Botuverá, in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Brazilian Bergamasch...Show moreThis thesis proposes a sketch description of Brazilian Bergamasch, a Gallo-Italian language spoken in the town of Botuverá, in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Brazilian Bergamasch is a non-standard variety of Bergamasch, an Italian language currently spoken in the Italian region of Lombardy, which was brought to Brazil by Italian immigrants in the late 19th century. This thesis has two main goals. Firstly, it aims to provide a grammatical and sociolinguistic sketch of the language, since Brazilian Bergamasch is currently undescribed. The description focuses on the analysis of the sociolinguistic situation present in the community, as well as on the main linguistic structures of the language (lexicon, phonology, morphology, syntax). In both cases, emphasis is given to the features that diverge from the standard variety spoken in Italy. On the basis of numerous discrepancies due to the geographic origins of the community founders on the one hand, and language internal and contact induced change on the other hand, it is argued that Brazilian Bergamasch can in fact be classified as a linguistic system independent from Standard Bergamasch. Secondly, the thesis provides a short wordlist of the basic lexicon of the language. The wordlist, which counts around 770 items, is organized by semantic fields and aims to contribute to projects of language maintenance that are currently being discussed and implemented by the community.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis investigates whether the 'that' that occurs in English relative clauses is the same element as the one that occurs in English complement clauses, and aims to determine what syntactic...Show moreThis thesis investigates whether the 'that' that occurs in English relative clauses is the same element as the one that occurs in English complement clauses, and aims to determine what syntactic category each of these elements belongs to. Ought relative 'that' be analysed as a complementiser, a relative pronoun, or as something else? In order to provide a satisfying answer to this question, I have critically evaluated the arguments presented in existing literature.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The thesis focuses on Megrelian, a language spoken by approximately 500.000 people in the west of the country of Georgia. It is genealogically related to Georgian, the official language of the...Show moreThe thesis focuses on Megrelian, a language spoken by approximately 500.000 people in the west of the country of Georgia. It is genealogically related to Georgian, the official language of the country. Every speaker of Megrelian is bilingual and speaks Georgian from an early age onwards. Georgian is the language of bureaucracy, education and virtually all written communication. Hence, a lot of influence of this standard language on Megrelian is to be expected. However, this influence has not been studied yet (at least not outside Georgia). In addition, Megrelian features several strategies for the grammatical concept of subordination. It shows a conjunction /namda/, which is functionally parallel to English 'that', in 'I saw that John arrived', and finds its parallel in Georgian /rom/. Furthermore, an enclitic element /=ni/ can be added to the end of the embedded clause (in adverbial, complement, and relative clauses alike). /namda/ and /=ni/ can also be combined. Also, Megrelian has several ways to nominalise verbs, which can then be used to form subordinated clauses. This thesis will explore the different strategies of subordination in Megrelian and will try to distinguish which strategy is used for which function. Furthermore, while the Georgian language is bound to have influence on the minority language, it interesting to see if it will also have its impact on a syntactic operation like subordination. In terms of data, it is of interest that numerous folk tales and poems in Megrelian have been gathered around the turn of the century by Georgian scholars, although in more recent years, the amount of fieldwork is very sparse. This thesis seeks to combine these two sources and add contemporary data of spoken Megrelian, as well as make public some of the older narratives.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis concerns the semantic relations between coordination, conditionality and interrogativity. Some aspects of these relations have been noted in work concerning grammaticalization, typology...Show moreThis thesis concerns the semantic relations between coordination, conditionality and interrogativity. Some aspects of these relations have been noted in work concerning grammaticalization, typology and formal semantics. A notable example is the Russian question marker li, which is also found in the form for the disjunctive marker ili 'or' and the form for the conditional marker esli 'if'. While aspects of these relations have been examined in the past, this thesis fills out the gap in the study of the relations between coordination, conditionals and questions by putting them together in a semantic map. To examine the possible universality of these relations, the use of these concepts is investigated in three unrelated languages: Dutch, Macedonian and Wolof. The relations are indicated per language in separate semantic maps and finally plotted together in a single one to examine the overlap and differences between them. The most similarities are expected between Macedonian and Dutch, as they are both from the same family, namely Indo-European, while Wolof is an Atlantic language from the Niger-Congo family. This turns out to indeed be the case. Some of the relations are language specific, but there are universal cross-linguistic patterns, such as the relation between propositional questions and disjunction, which is found in all three of these languages. Thus, this contributes to the insight of the cross-linguistic universality of these concepts.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The conceptual link between space and time is accounted for by two different theories: Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT, Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM, Walsh 2003). Within...Show moreThe conceptual link between space and time is accounted for by two different theories: Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT, Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM, Walsh 2003). Within a linguistic framework, CMT provides evidence for an asymmetric conceptual link between space and time, opposed to the symmetric link predicted by ATOM. Casasanto and Boroditsky (2008) and Casasanto (2010) presented evidence in favour of CMT from non-linguistic psychophysical tasks. Longer lines appeared to positively affect participants’ estimation of duration, analogous to metaphors for duration using spatial words such as long and short, but duration did not influence the perception of space (Casasanto and Boroditsky 2008). A subsequent study revealed language specific differences in effects of different stimulus types, parallel to the typical duration metaphors found in these languages (Casasanto 2010). The present investigation of Dutch shows that the relation between duration metaphors and the perception of space and duration is less straightforward than what might be expected on the basis of the accounts of Casasanto and Boroditsky (2008) and Casasanto (2010). The results of an experiment with speakers of Dutch reveal a symmetric link between space and duration in the case of space presented in the form of one-dimensional length, but an asymmetric link is reported in case of more-dimensional size. Overall, this provides evidence for ATOM rather than CMT.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis investigates the linguistic expression and conceptualization of lexical temporal concepts in Kavalan, a highly endangered Austronesian (Formosan) language spoken on the east coast of...Show moreThis thesis investigates the linguistic expression and conceptualization of lexical temporal concepts in Kavalan, a highly endangered Austronesian (Formosan) language spoken on the east coast of Taiwan. The first part consists of a grammar sketch. The second part is the core component, describing and analyzing lexical time in Kavalan based on fieldwork data. The lexical temporal concepts are taken from Haspelmath’s (1997) typological semantic classification of temporal NP-based adverbials. The conceptualization of these concepts is examined using the Conceptual Metaphor Theory as advanced by Lakoff & Johnson (e.g. 1980, 1999b) and adjusted and expanded by Moore (2000, 2006, 2014). Expressions motivated by various TIME IS SPACE metaphors are found to be fairly frequent in Kavalan. The third and final part contains a small typological study, in which Kavalan’s linguistic behavior in terms of temporal expression and conceptualization is compared to that of four other Formosan languages: Tsou, Saisiyat, Isbukun Bunun, and Paiwan. A general pattern is the different encoding of temporal clauses in past situations as opposed to those in future and generic/habitual situations (Zeitoun 1997). Both Kavalan and Saisiyat are curiously found to deviate from this two-way distinction by being more implicit. Tsou is an obvious outlier in various respects, as expected from its likewise diverging general linguistic properties.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis presents a systematic study on plural words, a particular type of nominal plurality marking, in Austronesian languages. Building on previous studies, I explore how plural words in...Show moreThis thesis presents a systematic study on plural words, a particular type of nominal plurality marking, in Austronesian languages. Building on previous studies, I explore how plural words in Austronesian languages are distributed, and discuss the diachronic developments of these plural words.Show less
