Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Greek language Greek language Mē (The Greek word)'

Zugl.: Oxford, Univ., Diss., 1995 u.d.T.: Meissner, Torsten: S-stem nouns and adjectives in ancient Greek : a study in Greek and Indo-European word formation
Includes bibliographical references and index

Developmental Language Impairment (DLI) is a language disorder characterized by difficulties in both language production and comprehension most readily observable on the morphological level. Previous research suggests that DLI subjects are atypical regarding word decomposition and word formation.
Given these observations, two questions arise: What is the extent of DLI insensitivity to word-internal structure and to morpheme features? and Is this insensitivity equally evident in inflectional, derivational and compounding processes? Three experiments address these questions: plural formation, nominal compounding and diminutive formation and comprehension.
These word formation processes are very productive Greek and are observed from (2;0) onwards in non-impaired children cross-linguistically. Nominal roots (bound) are mapped to other bound morphemes: inflectional affixes for plural formation, derivational affixes and inflectional affixes for diminutive formation, and lexical morphemes and inflectional affixes for compound formation.
In this thesis, the performance of Greek DLI subjects was compared to that of non-impaired controls using elicited production and comprehension tasks that probed real and novel word formation. Results show that DLI children are not sensitive to morphological features and have difficulty knowing where root boundaries are. Given the atypical performance of DLI children, the initial hypothesis on the building of an atypical competence appears to be supported.

This thesis introduces an extractive summarization system for Greek news articles based on sentence clustering. The main purpose of the paper is to evaluate the impact of three different types of text representation, Word2Vec embeddings, TF-IDF and LASER embeddings, on the summarization task. By taking these techniques into account, we build three different versions of the initial summarizer. Moreover, we create a new corpus of gold standard summaries to evaluate them against the system summaries. The new collection of reference summaries is merged with a part of the MultiLing Pilot 2011 in order to constitute our main dataset. We perform both automatic and human evaluation. Our automatic ROUGE results suggest that System A which employs Average Word2Vec vectors to create sentence embeddings, outperforms the other two systems by yielding higher ROUGE-L F-scores. Contrary to our initial hypotheses, System C using LASER embeddings fails to surpass even the Word2Vec embeddings method, showing sometimes a weak sentence representation. With regard to the scores obtained by the manual evaluation task, we observe that System A using Average Word2Vec vectors and System C with LASER embeddings tend to produce more coherent and adequate summaries than System B employing TF-IDF. Furthermore, the majority of system summaries are rated very high with respect to non-redundancy. Overall, System A utilizing Average Word2Vec embeddings performs quite successfully according to both evaluations.

This is the first typological study devoted to Medieval Cypriot (MC). The objective of the study is to provide both syntactic and pragmatic factors which are determining for the word order of the language and to open new ways to recording mechanisms of word order change. Cypriot syntax deserves this attention, as it is a language highly interesting for the typologist as for the researcher of other linguistic areas; Modern Cypriot is VOS, and exhibits a series of exceptions to the general rules of V-initial languages. Medieval Cypriot conforms to most of Greenberg�s Universals (1963) which are pertinent to type VSO in that it has V in initial position in all unmarked clauses, in that it is prepositional, that adjectives mostly follow the noun they qualify, and so on. However, the comparison of MC to Greenberg�s Universals is not the aim of this work. Apart form the order of the main constituents, this research mainly focuses on revealing mechanisms of syntactic change not generally known, and on unveiling particular traits of the Cypriot VSO order that are not common to other VSO languages. The analysis can be defined as diachronic for it deals with the language written over a span of many years, as assumed from studying the texts. Some words and structures, used in the beginning of the narrative, seem to decrease in frequency in the end, or vice versa. It is diachronic considering it also allows for comparison with later (colloquial) and earlier (written) constructions of the language. However, it is mostly a synchronic analysis; the patterns observed are from within the same language spoken by the same people living in the same period, more importantly from within the same work. Makhairas is thus the only broad evidence of his period, offered both as a diachronic and a synchronic linguistic testimony of his time. As no language exists in vacuo, my description of MC starts with a historical approach to the language under study; it is almost impossible to realise the problems of colloquial, literary and foreign features without being aware of the earlier history of Greek in general and of Cypriot in particular, in some of its earlier documents. I refrained as far as possible from entering the field of comparative criticism with Medieval Greek. In this way I decided to focus on discussions based exclusively on the Cypriot forms and patterns, as presented and justified by the evidence in Makhairas, and as witnessed by history which, for many centuries, has singled out Cypriot from the rest of the dialects and the Greek language itself. So, alternative views, criticism and discussion of same mechanisms of change recorded within the broader Greek language have been more or less avoided. The exposition of the MC word order patterns is based on my hypotheses that word order, as I understand it, is founded on purposes of communication and that languages with extreme flexibility of order, such as Medieval Cypriot, may adopt patterns that display rigidity of order in a number of their elements. It is within these areas of rigidity that new mechanisms of change may be detected. I also hypothesised that the same syntactic changes within languages of the same branch may be merely coincidental, and that Greek or forms of Greek may well adopt foreign elements, only (but not exclusively) if these acquire the Greek endings, or if they appear as independent affixes, as is the case with the post-medieval referential Cypriot marker �mish� which is from Turkish. Acquiring particular elements from other languages does not mean acquiring their order. However, acquiring patterns that are similar to Greek from a borrowing language which has the same patterns does not exclude syntactic borrowing. Since Modern Cypriot is V-initial, I presumed that this might have also been its order in the Middle Ages. I judge that major mechanisms of syntactic change of the same period may have been triggered by factors internal to Cypriot rather than by the more general, universal mechanisms of change. Moreover, I speculated that MC was a far more marginalised language in the Middle Ages than what history and literature have taught us. Its creative dynamism and potentiality to �juggle� between words and patterns has been its greater forte. Cypriot has not been studied as a dialect, in this work. I avoided having only a partial or a shadowed understanding of its word order patterns. Exhaustive descriptions that show its particularities in the process of completion appear with both rigidity (in some elements) and flexibility of order, and most importantly, they exhibit a long-life endurance. I have also been concerned with forms and /or patterns of Greek such as the future and other periphrastic tenses, although they are already known and have been analysed at length in Greek linguistic studies. I concentrate here on some of these from a Cypriot perspective. Cypriot has never been classified as Balkan Greek or mainland Greek. Following this study, it will be clarified further that any attempt to fit MC into a framework defined along these categorisations will be successful only in some areas of the general Greek syntax. In fact, Cypriot opens the way for a further understanding of Greek syntax with its (almost) boundless flexibility; it is through MC and the unique data of Makhairas that the study of the Greek syntax is being enriched. Areas of fine-grained classificatory criteria result in connecting some MC syntactic traits to those of Greek and accrediting to the language its own word order singularities in what can be righteously called here the Cypriot syntax. Additionally, the study aims to open new areas of investigation on diachronic syntactic issues and to initiate new and revealing answers concerning configurational syntax. To determine the syntactic traits of MC a meticulous work of counting was needed. The counting of the order of the main constituents from both the more general narrative patterns of the Chronicle as well as of those passages thought to be more immediate to the author�s living experience(s) was done manually. The primarily and more difficult task of considering, following and explaining pragmatic word order patterns in the Chronicle has been the stepping stone of this research. Earlier (and forgotten) stages of Greek, and patterns exclusive to Cypriot, assembled in a unique lexicon and with special Cypriot phrasal verbs, have provided answers to explaining the Cypriot structure. In addition to statistics, areas of language contact have also been explored, both in the morphology and in the syntax. More importantly, the extreme word order freedom of MC that illustrates word order processes based entirely on internal structural changes, aims to contribute to discussions regarding morphology and syntax versus morphosyntax. Chapter 1 provides all the background information of the history and language in Cyprus, prior to the Middle Ages. Chapter 2 deals with the description of the data and the methodology used to assess them. Chapter 3 exhibits the MC verbal forms, both finite and non-finite; it examines non-finites more closely, inasmuch as they play an important role in the change of the order of major constituents and uncover and explain the role of V-initial structures. Chapter 4 is the core chapter of this work. It displays Cypriot particularities of word order, reveals data concerned with the word order of the major constituents within the clause and unfolds explanatory accounts of them; lastly, it classifies MC as a V-initial language. Chapter 5 summarises conclusions, adds a further note on the Cypriot morphosyntactic traits while placing the results into the contemporary scholarship on VSO languages, also suggesting additional research areas into the MC patterns. The examples from Makhairas have been written in the monotonic system, where only one accent has been used; other special symbols have been eliminated or modified in the interest of making the text readable in the absence of the right font. However, Ancient Greek words appear with their appropriate accents. Abbreviation C indicates structures or words that remained unchanged in Cypriot over a long period of time, and G means a form or word accepted in both their written and spoken forms over a long period of time in Greek. A morphemic analysis of each form of the glosses has not always been given. I limited myself to glossing some elements only, for the better understanding of some examples.

Raw text data online has increased the need for designing artificial systems capable of processing raw data efficiently and at a low cost in the field of natural language processing (NLP). A well-developed morphological analysis is an important cornerstone of NLP, in particular when word look-up is an important stage of processing. Morphological analysis has many advantages, including reducing the number of word forms to be stored computationally, as well as being cost-efficient and time-efficient. NLP is relevant in the field of medicine, especially in automatic text analysis, which is a relatively young field in Swedish medical texts. Much of the stored information is highly unstructured and disorganized. Using raw corpora, this paper aims to contribute to automatic morphological segmentation by experimenting with state-of-art-tools for unsupervised and semi-supervised word segmentation of Swedish words in medical texts. The results show that a reasonable segmentation is more dependent on a high number of word types, rather than a special type of corpora. The results also show that semi-supervised word segmentation in the form of annotated training data greatly increases the performance.
Rå textdata online har ökat behovet för artificiella system som klarar av att processa rå data effektivt och till en låg kostnad inom språkteknologi (NLP). En välutvecklad morfologisk analys är en viktig hörnsten inom NLP, speciellt när ordprocessning är ett viktigt steg. Morfologisk analys har många fördelar, bland annat reducerar den antalet ordformer som ska lagras teknologiskt, samt så är det kostnadseffektivt och tidseffektivt. NLP är av relevans för det medicinska ämnet, speciellt inom textanalys som är ett relativt ungt område inom svenska medicinska texter. Mycket av den lagrade informationen är väldigt ostrukturerat och oorganiserat. Genom att använda råa korpusar ämnar denna uppsats att bidra till automatisk morfologisk segmentering genom att experimentera med de för närvarande bästa verktygen för oövervakad och semi-övervakad ordsegmentering av svenska ord i medicinska texter. Resultaten visar att en acceptabel segmentering beror mer på ett högt antal ordtyper, och inte en speciell sorts korpus. Resultaten visar också att semi-övervakad ordsegmentering, dvs. annoterad träningsdata, ökar prestandan markant.

This thesis combines a philosophical interpretation of Epicurean attitudes to language with literary analysis of the language of DRN. Chapters 1-2 describe Epicurean attitudes to diachronic and synchronic linguistic phenomena. In the first chapter I claim that the Epicurean account of the first stage of the development of language involves pre-rational humans acting under a ‘strong’ form of compulsion. The analogies with which Lucretius describes this process were motivated by a structural similarity between the Epicurean accounts of phylogenetic and ontogenetic psychology. Chapter 2 explores the Epicurean account of word use and recognition, central to which are ‘conceptions’. These are attitudes which express propositions; they are not mental images. Προλήψεις, a special class of conception, are self-evidently true basic beliefs about how objects in the world are categorized which, alongside the non-doxastic criteria of perceptions and feelings, play a foundational role in enquiry. Chapter 3 offers a reconstruction of an Epicurean theory of metaphor. Metaphor, for Epicureans, involves the subordination of additional conceptions to words to create secondary meanings. Secondary meanings are to be understood by referring back to primary meanings. Accordingly, Lucretius’ use of metaphor regularly involves the juxtaposition in the text of primary and secondary uses of terms. An account of conceptual metaphor in DRN is given in which the various conceptual domains from which Lucretius draws his metaphorical language are mapped and explored. Chapter 4 presents a new argument against ‘atomological’ readings of Lucretius’ atoms/letters analogies. Lucretian implicit etymologies involve the illustration, via juxtaposition, of language change across time. This is fully in keeping with the Epicurean account of language development. Chapter 5 describes Lucretius’ reflections on and interactions with the Greek language. I suggest that the study of lexical Hellenisms in DRN must be sensitive to the distinction between lexical borrowing and linguistic code-switching. I then give an account of morphological calquing in the poem, presenting it as a significant but overlooked strategy for Lucretian vocabulary-formation.

The Greeks and Romans were acquainted with dark skinned people from Africa from an early stage. It has been generally accepted that such people were referred to as aithiopias; by the Greeks, and modem commentators have accepted the term to be a synonym of the English term 'Negro' . Such an assumption ignores the wide variety of connotations associated with the terms aithiops and aithiopia. Furthermore, the trend in scholarship in the field of race relations in antiquity has been to study the interaction between Greeks and foreigners based on implicit, and often invalid, theory. The aim of this study is to examine the uses of the terms aithiops and aithiopia in the context of Greek ideology. Previous studies in the field have employed naive semiological approaches to the issue of racism in Greece and Rome, whereby references to Negroes have simply been weighed up in order to determine the extent of negative attitude toward Negroes in antiquity. In this regard, the following study departs radically from the approaches of its predecessors in that, although it is not intended as a narrow linguistic study of the terms aithiops and aithiopia, the focus of the examination concerns the semantics of these terms and the connotations thereof. Through an analysis of these terms in their ideological context, not only do we gain an insight into the processes which underlie Greek perceptions of group boundaries, but we may gain a deeper understanding of our own perceptions of race and racism. The study is confined to pre-Hellenistic literature (although later works are often used to illuminate Classical and Archaic passages) since it was the perceptions of the authors from this period which shaped the ideas of subsequent authors. In addition, during the Hellenistic period, the focus of Greek literary activity shifted from Athens to Alexandria, allowing Hellenistic authors far more contact with Negroes than was enjoyed by their predecessors. For the purpose of this study, Lycophron's Alexandria has been assumed to be the last pre-Hellenistic work, although this point may be debatable.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1997.