This thesis builds on the idea that subtle, culturally induced differences in semantic meaning remain between translation equivalent words across different languages. This study further argues that...Show moreThis thesis builds on the idea that subtle, culturally induced differences in semantic meaning remain between translation equivalent words across different languages. This study further argues that these differences in meaning may be approached through the examination of the linguistic contexts within which these words occur. Consequently, this work provides a quantitative methodology for highlighting relevant areas in which such cultural differences may be reflected. The method is based on intuition derived from several existing, structuralist methods and works primarily by comparing the frequency of hypernyms of nouns that appear in the neighborhood of an examined word. This thesis focuses on the indigenous Dolgan language as a case study; one that is purposely exploratory in nature. This minority language poses the research with the additional challenge of working with a small-sized language corpus for computational purposes: it demands a ‘rough’ look at data to act as a means, instead of being a limitation. Overall, the results indicate that culturally determined differences between words exist to a measurable degree, despite the unavailability of an adequately sized dataset. Although the results provide insufficient guidance for drawing anthropological conclusions, the findings reassert that cultural knowledge is encoded within language and reiterate the need to preserve endangered indigenous languages.Show less
Dutch uses cardinal posture verbs (/zitten/ ‘to sit’, /staan/ ‘to stand’, and /liggen/ ‘to lie’) for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention — like the...Show moreDutch uses cardinal posture verbs (/zitten/ ‘to sit’, /staan/ ‘to stand’, and /liggen/ ‘to lie’) for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention — like the posture progressive, e.g. /zitten te lezen/ ‘lit. sit to read: to be reading’. This thesis investigates an understudied posture verb pattern in which a posture verb is combined with a complementive past participle, e.g. /zitten vastgeplakt/ 'lit. sit stuck: to be stuck' and /staan volgepriegeld/ 'lit. stand scribbled full: to be scribbled full'. Previous analyses disagree on the status of this pattern in terms of its productivity (is it fixed or are new combinations possible?), meaning (what does the pattern as a whole express?), and structure (is the complementive participle verbal or adjectival?). By examining over 6,000 attestations of the pattern in a corpus of written Dutch, this thesis evaluates these competing accounts, concluding that (i) the patterns are indeed productive; (ii) constraints on that productivity can be accounted for in terms of the meaning of the pattern as a whole, i.e. 'locativity' and 'resultativity'; and (iii) the pattern's syntax appears highly heterogeneous: some past participles behave like adjectives, others like verbs. Finally, I show that this heterogeneity is compatible with the semantic properties of past participles in general, and of the posture verb-participle pattern in particular.Show less
The thesis quantitatively measures the extent to which a selection of speeches of two Dutch and two UK politicians, Thierry Baudet, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson, contain lexical...Show moreThe thesis quantitatively measures the extent to which a selection of speeches of two Dutch and two UK politicians, Thierry Baudet, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson, contain lexical and grammatical indicators of a populist communication style.Show less
In his 2011 book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal investigated the use of biblical idioms in English popular culture. Additionally, he compiled a list of eighteen...Show moreIn his 2011 book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal investigated the use of biblical idioms in English popular culture. Additionally, he compiled a list of eighteen idioms that were first coined in the King James Bible. Following Crystal’s research topic, this paper investigated these eighteen idioms for frequency and variation in the TIME Magazine Corpus (1923-2006), which consists of 100 million words. The purpose of this paper was to establish the significance of these eighteen idioms in present-day American English. Idioms were searched in the corpus both in their original phrasing and variant forms. The most important conclusion that can be drawn from the results is that the extent to which a biblical idiom lends itself for variation is an important factor in its level of relevance in non-biblical contexts.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
The language used on Twitter is close to natural spoken language. In spoken language forms as 'you all,' 'y'all,' 'yous(e),' 'you-uns,' 'you people,' 'you lot' and other forms are used to...Show moreThe language used on Twitter is close to natural spoken language. In spoken language forms as 'you all,' 'y'all,' 'yous(e),' 'you-uns,' 'you people,' 'you lot' and other forms are used to disambiguate plural 'you'. This thesis analyses by means of a Twitter corpus to what extent new plurals such as 'you guys,' 'you all,' 'y'all' etc. replace the all-purpose 'you' in Tweets.Show less
This thesis analyses the English borrowings in a corpus of Dutch original and translated cookbooks. The main purpose is to determine whether translators’ tendency to explain and clarify causes them...Show moreThis thesis analyses the English borrowings in a corpus of Dutch original and translated cookbooks. The main purpose is to determine whether translators’ tendency to explain and clarify causes them to produce translations that contain fewer anglicisms than similar original Dutch texts. The results show that the anglicisms found in the translations and original texts are similar in terms of type, function, and degree of conventionality, but the total number of anglicisms is larger for the corpus of original texts.Show less
