The research relates to the use of conditionals in the warning paragraph of medicinal contraindications in a patient information leaflet (PIL) or Package Leaflet (PL), and whether aspects of the...Show moreThe research relates to the use of conditionals in the warning paragraph of medicinal contraindications in a patient information leaflet (PIL) or Package Leaflet (PL), and whether aspects of the language used can be identified as a source of anxiety for patients with prescription medicines.Show less
Negation has interested many a linguist, there are books and papers on this subject, ranging from world-wide cross-linguistic typologies to small highly specific in-depth case studies. However,...Show moreNegation has interested many a linguist, there are books and papers on this subject, ranging from world-wide cross-linguistic typologies to small highly specific in-depth case studies. However, some parts of the world are as yet under-explored on the subject of negation. This thesis aims to fill in a few of those blanks and hopes to contribute to our understanding of non-standard negation in the indigenous languages of South America. The main focus lies on non-standard negation, such as negative existentials, prohibitives and privatives, and how these relate to the standard negation as expressed in the respective languages. These types of non-standard negation have not yet been fully investigated in South American languages and this study aims to reveal particular areas in which more research should be done. The study is based on a sample of 26 languages from different language families and geographical areas within South America. The approach to the topic is of a typological nature and focuses on synchronic data. The different types of negation can be diachronically related, however. Therefore, this study serves as a foundation for follow-up research examining the diachronic processes of negation in these language families.Show less
Dothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical...Show moreDothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical investigation into one of the language’s more idiosyncratic features, namely its double marking of negation. A corpus of 46 negative Dothraki sentences was analysed to determine the position of negation with in a sentence. These results were discussed in reference to a number of theories on the syntax of negation in natural languages. This was done with the ultimate aim of discovering whether negation in Dothraki adheres to the syntactical patterns of natural languages, or whether it is constructed differently and in that way evidence of the language’s artificiality. This thesis ultimately concludes that the double marking of negation in Dothraki can be accounted for by existing theories based on negation in natural languages, arguing that Dothraki resembles languages like Berber in that NegP is the left-most phrase in the split-IP, with the subject in the specifier of TopP.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The aim of this thesis was to propose an account for the different uses of the Greek particle μή with an intersubjective approach (Verhagen 2005). The main finding is that the analyzed...Show moreThe aim of this thesis was to propose an account for the different uses of the Greek particle μή with an intersubjective approach (Verhagen 2005). The main finding is that the analyzed constructions (complement clauses, main clauses, conditional clauses) show family resemblances for 3 characteristics: expressing undesirability, negation and/or giving the addressee responsibility. The most prototypical constructions show all three characteristics, less prototypical constructions show less (cf. Geeraerts 1997).Show less
According to Miestamo (2005:18), a lot of cross-linguistic research has been undertaken on what is called standard negation (Dahl 1979; Payne 1985; Forest 1993; Honda 1996). However, in these works...Show moreAccording to Miestamo (2005:18), a lot of cross-linguistic research has been undertaken on what is called standard negation (Dahl 1979; Payne 1985; Forest 1993; Honda 1996). However, in these works, little attention is paid to the negation of existential clauses. Recently, a typological study of negative existential clauses was carried out by Vesselinova (2013), who focuses on how this special type of negation relates to standard negation. Since affirmative existential clauses are often related to possessive and locative clauses (Lyons 1967; Clark 1978; Payne 1997), this thesis examines negative existential clauses according to their relation with negative possessive and locative clauses in a geographically and genetically balanced sample of 12 languages. This relation is compared to the way their affirmative counterparts relate to each other. The data used in this study comes from descriptive grammars, linguistic articles on the languages, and personal communication with speakers. It appears that in the majority (66,67%) of the sample languages negative existential, possessive and locative clauses are related to each other in the same configuration as their affirmative counterparts, while a minority of the sample languages is asymmetric in this respect. The pattern that is found in most of the sample languages is that in which all three clause types are related to each other. None of the sample languages follows a pattern in which negative existential clauses are not related to either negative possessive or negative locative clauses.Show less
