Denne oppgaven handler om animatumkategorien i russisk og tar utgangspunkt i regelen om at ord som betegner levende vesener, får genitivlik akkusativ. Jeg ser nærmere på to områder, hvor det er kjent at det er usikkerhet i bruken av genitivlik akkusativ, nemlig små sjødyr og mikroorganismer. Jeg har undersøkt hvordan disse ordene bøyes, både ved hjelp av en informantundersøkelse og en korpusundersøkelse. ...

In this study we have tested Bengali adult native speakers’ word order choices with respect to information structure and have compared their preferences to the Bengali native children acquirers. The study shows that Bengali word order scrambling is available in various type of sentences like declaratives, wh-questions and focus constructions. The scrambling is not at all optional in this language; ...

The thesis presents a study of the nontrivial interface of morphology, phonology and semantics found in the distribution of three Russian aspectual prefixes O, OB and OBO. These prefixes can be semantically identical when occur in the forms of the same paradigm (e.g. obo-drat’.INF. vs. ob-deru.1 PERSON.SG.FUT. ‘flay’), but can also carry strikingly different meanings that even yield minimal pairs ...

In this thesis, I will account for coda lenition processes in Danish using local conjunction within optimality theory. These processes include deaspiration, stops becoming approximant and vocalization in syllable-final position. No such process occurs syllable-initially or intervocalically, nor does the following onset have any effect. I will show that these coda conditions, as well as lenition-caused ...

The Russian language is famous for having verbal Aspects, as Comrie puts it, “different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (1976: 3). Traditionally, Russian verbs are considered to occur in pairs of Perfective and Imperfective verbs. Apart from the pairs, for many verbs there are other related verbs (Aktionsarten). These verbs are mostly derived from Imperfectives by ...

Children tend to omit functional categories in early language. The present thesis considers the production of such function words as articles and monosyllabic prepositions in child English. The analysis is conducted within a framework of the prosodic account. The development of early articles has received a lot of attention in the literature, while monosyllabic prepositions have not been discussed ...

The present work investigates the semantics of the Russian prefix вы- in so-called natural perfective verbs. Traditionally it is considered that prefixes of natural perfective verbs do not change the meaning of the base verb and thus do not have lexical meaning, i.e. they are “empty”. The only meaning they are supposed to have is the meaning “to bring an action to the end”, which is claimed to be a ...

This thesis is concerned with the interaction of two phenomena: vowel epenthesis and stress assignment. Vowels are potential targets for stress, and they count for determining the stress window in systems where stress is grammaticaly predictable. Epenthetic vowels, however, are often exceptional in this respect. There is an array of languages where epenthetic vowels shun stress, or in some other way ...

The most controversial and divisive political issue in Britain in the last decade was the decision to go to war in Iraq. The legitimisation and justification for making this decision was argued through a carefully considered discourse constructed by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his associates. A key role in mediating and manifesting the discourse of Blair was played out by the media. If Blair was ...