The phenomenon of Russian honorific agreement was first mentioned and used as evidence in Agreement Hierarchy by Greville Corbett (1979). Since then it has received little attention in the...Show moreThe phenomenon of Russian honorific agreement was first mentioned and used as evidence in Agreement Hierarchy by Greville Corbett (1979). Since then it has received little attention in the literature, unlike the other, more famous, cases of semantic agreement, e.g. hybrid nouns (Corbett 2015), pancake sentences (Enger 2004). This thesis is dedicated to investigating honorific agreement in Russian on the basis of independently collected data from the Russian National Corpus and a number of individually selected literary works.Show less
This thesis investigates the morphological status of COVID-related splinters. It examines whether the splinters cov(i)-, -demic, and quaran- are in the process of becoming combining forms, in...Show moreThis thesis investigates the morphological status of COVID-related splinters. It examines whether the splinters cov(i)-, -demic, and quaran- are in the process of becoming combining forms, in similar vein to forms like -(a)holic, a splinter which has developed into a combining form. Corpus-based investigation and feature-based analysis have shown that cov(i)- and -demic indeed behave like combining forms in word formation processes, while quaran- does not. However, an analysis of its lexical structure has indicated that it is not impossible for quaran- to become a combining form eventually.Show less
The Dialect of Vlasotince is a Torlak variety of South Slavic spoken in and around the small town of Vlasotince in southern Serbia, between Kosovo (KiM) and Bulgaria. This grammar sketch aims to...Show moreThe Dialect of Vlasotince is a Torlak variety of South Slavic spoken in and around the small town of Vlasotince in southern Serbia, between Kosovo (KiM) and Bulgaria. This grammar sketch aims to provide a succinct description of its phonology, morphology and select syntactic features as currently used by the inhabitants of Vlasotince, supplemented with a small number of texts to illustrate its use in practice. Due to Vlasotince’s considerable growth since the end of WWII (Vukmirović 2013: 106) and the proliferation of media and schooling in the standard language, what is most commonly heard on the street nowadays is a variety with stronger influence from the standard language than is usually found in the works on Torlak dialectology from the past century, yet one that clearly retains much of its distinctive character. It is this contemporary, commonly used register, sprinkled with influences from the standard, that I have tried to describe here. It should serve as a representative snapshot of the way people from Vlasotince speak amongst themselves today.Show less
Most researchers agree that frequency plays a role during the processing or accessing of words. Hay (2001) argues that there is a type of frequency called relative frequency which has an important...Show moreMost researchers agree that frequency plays a role during the processing or accessing of words. Hay (2001) argues that there is a type of frequency called relative frequency which has an important effect on the processing of derived forms through a two-route model of morphological processing. She argues that complex forms with a frequency lower than the frequency of their base forms (e.g. uncommon) are more likely to be perceived as decomposable than a complex form with a higher frequency than the frequency of their base words (e.g. uncanny). She reports the results of an experiment which provides evidence for this view. Since it is reasonable to assume that these relative frequency effects also occur in other languages, I replicated her experiment for Dutch. The results of my experiment suggest that relative frequency effects are observed in the processing of Dutch derived forms.Show less
Changes in thin film morphology and their underlying processes can prove important for the performance of future extreme ultraviolet (EUV) optics. A ruthenium coated diffraction grating was...Show moreChanges in thin film morphology and their underlying processes can prove important for the performance of future extreme ultraviolet (EUV) optics. A ruthenium coated diffraction grating was inspected using atomic force microscopy (AFM) prior to and after exposure to high intensity EUV light under a grazing incident angle, in order to determine whether such change occurs due to EUV irradiation. AFM images show signs of structural change, most noticeable at the bottom of the grating, possibly caused by heating through absorption of the EUV radiation. Closer study of the top grating section showed signs of a change in thin film morphology as well. We used statistical and dynamic scaling analysis of multiple AFM images to verify this hypothesis, but it could not confirm this change beyond doubt, nor dismiss the claims outright. Possible explanations for a change in thin film morphology were proposed, such as thermally assisted diffusion causing roughening and coarsening, as well as oxidation of the layer.Show less
This research attempts to give a description of the verbal morphology of the moribund Mawayana language from the Arawakan language family. Little has been written about Mawayana, but there is a...Show moreThis research attempts to give a description of the verbal morphology of the moribund Mawayana language from the Arawakan language family. Little has been written about Mawayana, but there is a corpus of stories and elicited texts. That corpus has been used for this research. Several suffixes have been found, including valency marking suffixes and TAME-markers. Also quite a few clitics may occur on verbs, including the typical Arawakan pronominal elements. Other clitics do not have clear cognates in related languages and may or may not be innovations of Mawayana. In general, quite some restructuring of the verbal morphology has taken place in Mawayana and/or the closest related language Wapishana since the two split apart. The result in Mawayana seems quite chaotic, but this may be due to the limited size of the corpus. Still, there is some clear structure that becomes more clear once the many clitics have been divided on morphosyntactic or semantic grounds.Show less
