This thesis is a pilot study investigating the influence of Information Structure on naturalness of (non-)canonical word order permutations among Russian Heritage speakers residing in mainland...Show moreThis thesis is a pilot study investigating the influence of Information Structure on naturalness of (non-)canonical word order permutations among Russian Heritage speakers residing in mainland Portugal. The obtained word order patterns are compared to the data collected from a homogenous group of monolingual Russian speakers from St Petersburg. The thesis in particular focuses on whether (in)definiteness plays a role in the distribution of extralinguistic information (TOPIC/FOCUS) in Heritage Russian. Through short dialogue recordings of Colloquial Russian, ratings of Subject FOCUS and Object FOCUS are elicited amongst the two participant groups, as part of the acceptability judgement task. It was hypothesised that Russian Heritage Speakers would map Word Order based on Information Structure similar to L1/1 speakers of Russian. For Subject and IO FOCUS sentences, the obtained results indicate that Russian Heritage speakers are non-target like. Russian Heritage speakers transfer the preference for VOS/SV DO IO order from European Portuguese as opposed to Russian OVS/S DO V IO.Show less
Master thesis | Classics and Ancient Civilizations (MA)
open access
Current Word Order Analysis in Ancient Greek is not entirely satisfactory as it focuses on describing word order variation only in clauses, whereas in other parts of a sentence consisting of...Show moreCurrent Word Order Analysis in Ancient Greek is not entirely satisfactory as it focuses on describing word order variation only in clauses, whereas in other parts of a sentence consisting of multiple constituents there also appears variation in word order. Because of for example the occurrence of hyperbaton in these parts of the sentence, this variation seems meaningful and can possibly be described in the same terms as the variation in clauses. Therefore, in this thesis, it is proposed to apply the model not only to clauses but also to smaller segments of the text. Just like any other spoken language, the language of the messenger stories in Euripides can be segmented into Intonation Units (IU's). IU's are separated from one another by a pause or other prosodic feature such as pitch. Because of the lack of recorded data, IU-segmentation of ancient texts is in this thesis done by making use of the meter and of the syntactical segmentation criteria suggested by Scheppers (2011).Show less
