Research master thesis | Asian Studies (research) (MA)
open access
For the past two decades, states have been engaged in negotiations concerning acceptable state behavior in cyberspace. Many states have submitted their views on the matter and most recently, cyber...Show moreFor the past two decades, states have been engaged in negotiations concerning acceptable state behavior in cyberspace. Many states have submitted their views on the matter and most recently, cyber norms negotiations have been opened up to the entire membership of the United Nations through the Open Ended Working Group. Chinese representatives have been an active participant in these negotiations since their inception, with their own preferred cyber norms to promote. The success of this promotion, however, has been limited due to several factors. In this research, this attempted norm promotion is examined in detail through primary documentation to assess what these limiting factors entail.Show less
Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
open access
Neoliberalism has altered the way in which the subject consumes and subsequently reflects upon media. A popular media genre on the internet nowadays is instruction videos, which can be consumed for...Show moreNeoliberalism has altered the way in which the subject consumes and subsequently reflects upon media. A popular media genre on the internet nowadays is instruction videos, which can be consumed for various reasons, but usually rely on the notion of conveying to the viewer a certain set of skills. Since these media are therefore consumed for a specific purpose intended, the viewer already pre-establishes a certain attitude and understanding, and furthermore gains a reflective understanding of this phenomenon itself. This thesis aims to reconsider the notion of spectatorship through a lens of phenomenology, in order to reevaluate the idea of a spectator's own understanding of their experience of a medium, which this thesis names "cognitive spectatorship," and shows how the genre of instruction videos and this new viewing attitude play into the Neoliberal ideology.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Conceptual Engineering is the practice of improving the concepts we use for a specific purpose. However, despite involving words and their meanings, this practice has not been looked at from the...Show moreConceptual Engineering is the practice of improving the concepts we use for a specific purpose. However, despite involving words and their meanings, this practice has not been looked at from the perspective of linguistics. This paper takes a small, niche scientific community, namely the Royal Society, and investigates to what extent Newton’s proposed distinction between mass and weight, which can be thought of as an instance of Conceptual Engineering, was consistently used in scientific journal articles between 1700 and 1920. Before Newton’s Principia, the lemma weight referred to both the amount of matter that makes up an object and the force of gravity acting on the matter. In 1687, Newton proposed that the former concept should be referred to as mass, and the latter as weight. Success, for this project, is differentiation based on sense and not on any other extra-linguistic factors. To discover whether the project was successful, 1500 tokens of mass and weight from the Royal Society Corpus were annotated for their lemma, ‘sense’, ‘object’, ‘subfield’, ‘author’, ‘year’, ‘type’, ‘plurality’, and part-of-speech. This data was analysed by looking at the frequencies of the respective senses over time, along with Ctrees and Random Forests to identify annotations that were the most important in predicting the lemma, and Principal Component Analysis to visually inspect clustering and patterns over time. The results showed that sense was not an effective predictor of the lemma, but that the extra-linguistic factors of ‘object’, ‘author’ and ‘subfield’ had great predictive power. Furthermore, the Principal Component Analysis confirmed clustering based on ‘object’, ‘author’ and ‘subfield’ rather than based on ‘sense’. It was concluded that Newton’s Conceptual Engineering of mass and weight was unsuccessful. From the perspective of Conceptual Engineering more generally, this work showed future research on more diverse communities with less coherent language ideologies is necessary when investigating cases of Conceptual Engineering, and also that linguists can be important contributors to Conceptual Engineering research in the future.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Comparative Correlative (CC) constructions, such as “the bigger they are, the harder they fall” are a relatively understudied construction within English syntax. The existing research further...Show moreComparative Correlative (CC) constructions, such as “the bigger they are, the harder they fall” are a relatively understudied construction within English syntax. The existing research further points to a great deal of disagreement on the nature of this construction. The aim of my research was to conduct a diachronic study of the CC construction, using a corpus-based approach, in order to show that the construction has remained largely the same from its earliest attestation in Old English through to the Middle English period. Five hypotheses are explored in this work: (1) there are two terms which express the same construction; (2) CC constructions are hypotactic, not paratactic; (3) the date given for the lexical change of swa to the is earlier than previously proposed; (4) the current syntactic structure can be explained by a process (micle-deletion) that took place in the Old English period, and lastly (5) that the Latin CC construction influenced the syntax of the OE construction. The results from this analysis show that hypotheses (1), (2) and (4) are true, while (3) remains unclear and (5) proves false.Show less
Research master thesis | Classics and Ancient Civilizations (research) (MA)
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Throughout history people have tried to explain phenomena that were abstract to them, attributing to these events all kinds of reasons ranging from physical to supernatural ones. A system of shared...Show moreThroughout history people have tried to explain phenomena that were abstract to them, attributing to these events all kinds of reasons ranging from physical to supernatural ones. A system of shared beliefs and norms develops, guiding and explaining to them how to act and respond to all kinds of events, among which is death. How people behave after a death has occurred varies widely across cultures. The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of death held in ancient Mesopotamia and to try to find answers of how it came to be. The first two chapters are dedicated to providing an overview of the Mesopotamian concept of death. The remaining chapters of the current study analyse certain facets of the concept of death which can be traced back to environmental factors. The facets included are: the realm of death, examining its portrayal, location, hierarchy, and type of government; death and burial; the concept of death related to everyday life.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis aims to describe the noun class system and its interaction with semantics in the Tanzanian Bantu language Kimbugwe (ISO 639-3). This thesis adds to the existing literature on Kimbugwe,...Show moreThis thesis aims to describe the noun class system and its interaction with semantics in the Tanzanian Bantu language Kimbugwe (ISO 639-3). This thesis adds to the existing literature on Kimbugwe, but also has typological value, and shows the linguistic diversity of the area the language is spoken in. The main research question of the thesis is; ‘How does the noun class system of Kimbugwe interact with semantics?’. The thesis shows that the noun class system interacts with semantics on a lexical level, through the inherent semantics of the noun classes, on a morphological level, through the derivational semantics of the noun classes, and on a syntactic level, through the semantic agreement of the noun classes.Show less
Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
under embargo until 2024-08-31
2024-08-31T00:00:00Z
The topic I discuss in this work is that of the practices of collecting and exhibiting of Orientalia at the turn of the Early-Modern period in Europe. In particular, I focus on the setting up of...Show moreThe topic I discuss in this work is that of the practices of collecting and exhibiting of Orientalia at the turn of the Early-Modern period in Europe. In particular, I focus on the setting up of rooms dedicated to the showcasing of goods coming from the Orient and analyse how the exhibiting practices altered the perception of the Orient in the European societies of that period. The main research question upon which this whole work is hinged is: how did the collecting and exhibiting practices of Orientalia change in Western society during the Early-Modern period, to what degree can the evolution of these practices be seen as a way for Westerners to familiarise with the Orient, and with what consequences for the understanding of the Orient in European Early-Modern society? In order to find an answer to this question, the analysis I propose here is devoted to the study of several objects, spaces and practices, not only from a historical but also theoretical perspective. The central case study of this work is the Rijksmuseum Lacquer Room (assembled in Leeuwarden at the end of the 17th century). However, this study takes its steps from an analysis of the way Orientalia were treated during the Middle Age and Late Renaissance and surveys the shift which took place during the Early-Modern period and the reasons behind it. Such a historical analysis takes place in the first two chapters of this work, where I first focus on Europe in general and then specifically to the case of the Early-Modern Netherlands. The last two chapters of this work are instead dedicated to a discussion linked to the theoretical aspects regarding the collections of Orientalia and their showcasing in Oriental-style Rooms. In particular, I focus on the concepts of domestication and on the agency of objects, and later on issues related to Orientalism and that of collecting as a gendered practice. Starting from this analysis I propose further insights on the conception of the Orient in the context of Early-Modern Netherlands and suggest new prompts for future research.Show less
Research master thesis | Asian Studies (research) (MA)
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This thesis focuses on a fluid genre of glorificatory literature called Māhātmya. I critically edit, translate, and analyze a selection of Sanskrit Māhātmyas to increase our understanding of how...Show moreThis thesis focuses on a fluid genre of glorificatory literature called Māhātmya. I critically edit, translate, and analyze a selection of Sanskrit Māhātmyas to increase our understanding of how these kinds of texts come to being and how we can understand their processes of composition and transmission. I use a fourfold typology – which in itself is a result of the research – to point out different aspects of intertextuality found in the selection of texts. Analyzing these Māhātmyas contributes to a more nuanced understanding regarding issues of textual reuse, and sheds light on the concept of authorship, especially regarding the authorless religious literature of Hinduism.Show less
