Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Margi language'

This dissertation explores the troubled relationship between Hispanic-American Modernism and modernity through the close study of a representative array of authors (José Martí, Rubén Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Augusto Dhalmar and Pedro Prado). My analysis departs from the revisionist theories of Angel Rama and Ivan A. Schulman, which changed the traditional views about the movement towards a more complete vision of its role as a literature that is highly subversive. During the XIX century, America experienced a vigorous cultural awakening unsupported by an incomplete modernization whose more fundamental principles are challenged by the systematic use of primitivism by these authors. I propose that by analyzing how primitivism is used as an essential tool for criticism, a deeper understanding of a highly codified literature and its importance as precursor of the Vanguard may be reached.

Thesis (M.S. in Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES))--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2004.
Thesis advisor(s): Xiaoping Yun. Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-62). Also available online.

The development of distributed training strategies for statistical prediction functions is important for applications of machine learning, generally, and the development of distributed structured prediction training strategies is important for natural language processing (NLP), in particular. With ever-growing data sets this is, first, because, it is easier to increase computational capacity by adding more processor nodes than it is to increase the power of individual processor nodes, and, second, because data sets are often collected and stored in different locations. Iterative parameter mixing (IPM) is a distributed training strategy in which each node in a network of processors optimizes a regularized average loss objective on its own subset of the total available training data, making stochastic (per-example) updates to its own estimate of the optimal weight vector, and communicating with the other nodes by periodically averaging estimates of the optimal vector across the network. This algorithm has been contrasted with a close relative, called here the single-mixture optimization algorithm, in which each node stochastically optimizes an average loss objective on its own subset of the training data, operating in isolation until convergence, at which point the average of the independently created estimates is returned. Recent empirical results have suggested that this IPM strategy produces better models than the single-mixture algorithm, and the results of this thesis add to this picture. The contributions of this thesis are as follows. The first contribution is to produce and analyze an algorithm for decentralized stochastic optimization of regularized average loss objective functions. This algorithm, which we call the distributed regularized dual averaging algorithm, improves over prior work on distributed dual averaging by providing a simpler algorithm (used in the rest of the thesis), better convergence bounds for the case of regularized average loss functions, and certain technical results that are used in the sequel. The central contribution of this thesis is to give an optimization-theoretic justification for the IPM algorithm. While past work has focused primarily on its empirical test-time performance, we give a novel perspective on this algorithm by showing that, in the context of the distributed dual averaging algorithm, IPM constitutes a convergent optimization algorithm for arbitrary convex functions, while the single-mixture distribution algorithm is not. Experiments indeed confirm that the superior test-time performance of models trained using IPM, compared to single-mixture, correlates with better optimization of the objective value on the training set, a fact not previously reported. Furthermore, our analysis of general non-smooth functions justifies the use of distributed large-margin (support vector machine [SVM]) training of structured predictors, which we show yields better test performance than the IPM perceptron algorithm, the only version of the IPM to have previously been given a theoretical justification. Our results confirm that IPM training can reach the same level of test performance as a sequentially trained model and can reach better accuracies when one has a fixed budget of training time. Finally, we use the reduction in training time that distributed training allows to experiment with adding higher-order dependency features to a state-of-the-art phrase-structure parsing model. We demonstrate that adding these features improves out-of-domain parsing results of even the strongest phrase-structure parsing models, yielding a new state-of-the-art for the popular train-test pairs considered. In addition, we show that a feature-bagging strategy, in which component models are trained separately and later combined, is sometimes necessary to avoid feature under-training and get the best performance out of large feature sets.

The aim of this essay is to critically consider Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things from a postcolonial feminist perspective, with a special focus on how she models different representations of women, taking as a background the discussions within postcolonial feminism about subalternity and the representations of women from the so-called Third World in theory and literature, as well as the concept of agency from Cultural Studies. This purpose is reached by studying and comparing three main female characters in the novel: Mammachi, Baby Kochamma and Ammu, centering on their different ways of relating to the male hero of the novel, Velutha, an Untouchable in the lingering caste system of India. The essay argues that Roy has contributed with diverse representations of subaltern women in the ‘Third World’ who—despite their oppressed and marginalized status—display agency and are portrayed as responsible for their own actions.

U našem radu pokušaćemo da, na korpusu drama za odrasle, koje su u štampanom obliku dostupne javnosti, izdvajanjem samo nekih interpretativnih problema, ukažemo na ono za šta pretpostavljamo da je po-etička osnova Popovićevog rukopisa. Njihova priroda nametnula je aparaturu i strategije koje pripadaju postmodernizmu. To je stoga što i sam pisac, verujemo, jeste postmoderni pisac.Pre svega, Popovićev opus hronološki posmatrano, interferira s postmodernizmom u srpskoj književnosti, pa nas zanima priroda veze ove dve pojave. Takođe, u Popovićevom delu značajno je prisutna, prvenstveno jezička, građa preuzeta iz srpskog književnog nasleđa, te tradicionalne kulture, a upravo je odnos prema tradiciji jedno od relevantnih pitanja koje postmoderna postavlja. Slično se može reći i za problem književnog redefinisanje obrazaca kulture. Doslednim preoblikovanjem farse, temeljnim postupka prema žanru kojim se A. Popović služi, on je ne samo na tragu opštih književnih težnji dvadesetog veka, nego posebnim poetskim postupcima čini vidljivim one kulturne pojave koje su u vreme nastanka Popovićevog opusa bitno uticale na kulturnu matricu Srbije, ali i naznačile ono što će se u kulturi (pa tako i u književnosti) tek dogoditi.U hermetičnim tekstovima, dakle onima koje smo svrstali u drugu tendenciju Popovićevog opusa, predstavljanje značenja kao nepredstavljivog, realizovano je i kao igranje (jezičkih) igara, što je drugo ime za apofatičku misao koja, verujemo, prožima Popovićevo celokupno delo. Nihilizam neće završiti u samoubistvu nijednog njegovog lika (što bi predstavljalo tragičnu preteču postdramskog teatra u verziji Sare Kejn), nego u samožrtvovanju (u drami Afera Ljiljak i njenom negativu – Ružičastoj noći), svojevrsnoj razradi Popovićeve teme potrage, koja signalizira suštinsko nepristajanje na logos vidljive stvarnosti. On zna da je nasleđeni koncept o diskurzivnim hijerarhijama – obmana, ali nije napustio ideju potrage za aksisom.Time što problematizuje binom centar-margina, što dekonstruiše velike narative kulture uspostavljajući tako svojevrsni kontinuitet s nasleđem (i onim koje je ostalo skrajnuto), što ukida hijerarhije kulturnih kodova, što tematizacijom jezika diskutuje metafiziku prisustva i označiteljske prakse kulturnog kanona kojem pripada, Popović postavlja okvir za (re)konstrukciju poetičkih načela svog opusa. Konačno, tezom o apofatizmu, koja svoju paralelu ima u ruskom postmodernizmu, ma koliko na prvi pogled bila nespojiva s Popovićem i njegovim dramama, onakvim kako ga pamti ideološki opterećeno književnoj nasleđe, verujemo da odgovaramo na pitanje zašto Popović piše, tada i tako.
In our paper-work we shall try, concerning the corpus of dramas for adults, which are in printed forms available to the public, to point to what we assume is po-etic basis of Popovic's writings, by singling out certain interpretative problems. The nature of those works imposed apparatus and strategies that belong to the postmodernism. It is because the writer himself, as we belive, is postmodern writer.First of all, Popovic's oeuvre, chronologically speaking, interferes with postmodernism in Serbian literature and we are interested in the conection between these two phenomena. Also, in his literary work there is a significal presence of, primarly linguistic, material taken from Serbian literary heritage and traditional culture, and the relationship to the tradition is the one of the relevant questions that postmodernism raises. The same can be said about the problem of literary redefining cultural patterns. By consequent reshaping of farce genre аs the fundamental Popovic`s mood, he is not just on the trail of XXth centuryliterary aspiration, but through special poetic procedures he makes visible those cultural phenomena that had, at the time when Popovic`s oeuvre appeared, significant impact on cultural matrix of Serbia and indicate what in culture (incuding literature) will only happen in the future.In hermetic texts, those considered as the second tendency of Popovic`s oeuvre, representing void as unimaginable, implemented as a play (language) games, is another name for the apophatism, which, we believe, permeates entire Popovic`s oeuvre. Nihilism will not end up in suicide of any of his characters (which would be a tragic forerunner of postdramatic theater in Sarah Kane`s version) but in self-sacrificing (in drama Afera Ljiljak and its opposite – Ružičasta noć), a kind of working out of Popovic`s theme – quest, which signals a fundamental refusa of visible reality. He knows that inherited concept of discursive hierarchies is deception but he did not abandon the idea of searching for Axis.By problematizing binary opposition center – margine, by deconstruction of the grand narratives of culture which means establishing specific kind of continuity with legacy (even with those remained sidelined), by terminating the hierarchy of cultural codes, by discussing the metaphysics of presence and practice of signification to which he belongs (by focussing language), Popovic sets the framework for (re)construction оf poetic principles of his ouvre.Finally, through the thesis on apophatism which has its parallel in Russian postmodenism, although, at first glance, that thesis is incompatible with Popovic and his dramas, as it is remembered by ideologically laden literary legacy, we believe that we have answered the question why Popovic has been writing, then and so.

L’expression de la marginalité en tant que condition et expérience socio-politique, culturelle, ontologique et artistique sera explorée à travers cinq récits autobiographiques féminins sino-américains, écrits et publiés au cours du XXème siècle. Par leurs positionnements respectifs vis-à-vis du discours politique et littéraire dominant sur l’identité américaine, ces œuvres reflètent le cheminement de la littérature asiatique américaine, depuis l’émergence des premières productions en anglais d’écrivains chinois à la fin du XIXème siècle, jusqu’à son évolution actuelle, en passant par sa période d’éclosion et de maturation, entre les années 1970 et les années 1990, dans une Amérique alors de plus en plus consciente de la nature composite de son tissu socio-culturel. Confrontées à une représentation et à une rhétorique dominantes « centralisatrices », enjoignant les minorités ethniques à l’assimilation, les auteures, prises entre deux territoires et deux cultures, s’interrogent sur le sentiment d’appartenance, qu’elles hésitent à définir par sa fixité ou par sa mobilité géographique, par son ancrage dans un sol et une culture uniques ou par sa capacité à se renouveler. La conception de la frontière (ethnique, culturelle, territoriale, nationale, genrée et générique) comme délimitation catégorielle étanche se laisse alors consolider ou ébranler, voire révoquer au fil des textes analysés. Ainsi, les écrivaines conçoivent leurs récits comme un espace de souscription à ou de contestation des cadres narratifs et esthétiques du genre de l’autobiographie ethnique (immigrante), auquel la littérature ethnique se trouve reléguée par le lectorat euro-américain, ainsi que des conditions de leur inclusion dans le canon littéraire américain
Five autobiographies/autobiographical novels, written and published by Chinese American women writers in the twentieth century, provide the basis for an exploration of the ways in which marginality has been dealt with in Chinese (/Asian) American literature as a sociopolitical, cultural, ontological and artistic condition and experience. Through their relationships with the dominant political and literary discourse on American identity, these narratives mirror the course of Asian American literature, from the emergence of the first publications in English by writers of Chinese ancestry at the end of the nineteenth century to the current phase of this form of literary expression, originating in the 1970s and developing through the 1990s towards the modern day as American society acquired a multi-ethnic consciousness. Confronted with the “centralizing” dominant injunction of assimilation imposed on minorities, these women writers, whose lives, memories and experience bear the imprint of two territories and two cultures, question the sense of belonging, locating it either in geographical fixity or mobility, and associating it with the question of putting down roots, while still acknowledging its ability to re-emerge and thrive beyond the boundaries of national delineation. Within this perspective, borders – defined by ethnicity, culture, geographical location, nationality, gender and genre – are seen as boundaries imposing categories, which are in turn either reinforced or invalidated in the texts explored here. The women writers use their works as a space in which to express their approval or contestation of the narrative and aesthetic frames into which ethnic literature has been confined by the Euro-American readership, frames which characterize ethnic (immigrant) autobiography, and of the conditions determining the integration of their works into the American literary canon

This study analyses The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin from the perspective of é
criture fé
minine. After a thorough discussion of the roots of é
criture fé
minine, the theory of the French feminists is put into practice in the analysis of the novels. The study asserts that the concepts of bisexuality, the other and the voice are common elements in novels of é
criture fé
minine, thereby the novelists mentioned in the study follow the propositions of Hé
lè
ne Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Lucé
Irigaray. The argument of the study is that the use of é
criture fé
minine as portrayed with reference to the novels, can be an efficient way in deconstructing the patriarchal system of language. Literature has a significant influence on social life, however women cannot make themselves heard using the language of patriarchy. Therefore an alternative such as é
criture fé
minine is essential. This study shows how this alternative can be practiced in various ways and it also creates the opportunity to consider the possibilities of alternative lives if this kind of thinking is widespread.

Cette thèse compare deux situations sociolinguistiques très différentes, celles du picard en France et du mari en Russie. L'un des résultats attendus est la mise au point d'une grille d'analyse valable pour toute situation de coexistence d'idiomes inégaux, quelles que soient leurs relations typologiques ou génétiques. Dans ce but, nous proposons une transposition de la théorie des Principes et Paramètres à la sociolinguistique. La première partie décrit les modalités d'existence des deux langues comme langues minoritaires. Après un historique de leur développement, nous étudions leur inscription dans un paysage linguistique multilingue, notamment du point de vue de leur visibilité et des dynamiques diglossiques à l'œuvre. Les parties suivantes étudient la place du picard et du mari dans les politiques linguistiques nationales et éventuellement régionales. La deuxième partie s'intéresse à l'aménagement du status, à travers l'arsenal juridique des États, la Charte Européenne des Langues Régionales ou Minoritaires, et enfin les dispositifs régionaux. On distingue l'aménagement linguistique « par en haut » (institutionnel) et « par en bas » (à l'initiative des locuteurs eux-mêmes). L'enseignement des deux langues fait l'objet d'un développement particulier.La troisième partie concerne l'aménagement du corpus, en étudiant les questions de standardisation et de modernisation. Dans ces deux parties, nous nous appuyons sur nos enquêtes pour évaluer l'efficacité des politiques telle que la ressentent les locuteurs eux-mêmes. En conclusion, nous rassemblons les différents principes et paramètres sociolinguistiques mis en évidence et tentons leur modélisation
This dissertation compares two very different sociolinguistic situations: the situation of Picard in France and the situation of Mari (Cheremis) in Russia. One of the expected results is to elaborate an evaluation grid that could be applied to any situation of co-existing unequal languages, regardless of their typological or genetic relationships. For this purpose, we suggest to transpose to sociolinguistics the Principles and Parameters Theory. In part I we describe the modes of existence of the two languages as minority languages. We give a brief survey of their historical development, and then describe how they are inserted into multilingual environments, with special consideration given to their visibility and diglossic dynamics.Parts II and III are dedicated to the place of Picard and Mari in the nationwide and eventually regionwide linguistic policies. In part II we focus on status planning, by looking at the French and Russian legal arsenals, the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, and the regional regulatory regimes. We distinguish between two modes of language planning: “top-down” (official) and “bottom-up” (originating from the speakers themselves). We develop a more detailed analysis of the teaching of the two languages.Part III deals with corpus planning, from the point of view of standardization and modernization. In parts II and III we use our sociolinguistic surveys to evaluate the efficiency of language policies as they are perceived by the speakers themselves.In conclusion, we sum up the different sociolinguistic Principles and Parameters we have found and try to model them

Cette étude se concentre sur l'usage des termes familiaux dans les Archives Epistolaires Royales de Mari. Elle y constate l'existence d'un rapport hiérarchique entre le destinataire et l'expéditeur dans cette correspondance et propose d'expliciter ce système politique exprime à partir du vocabulaire de la famille. Elle aborde donc les origines et l'importance de la notion de respect ainsi que ses conséquences sur la façon de s'adresser au roi. Cela nécessite de s'interroger sur l'autorité de ce dernier en Mésopotamie et en Syrie ; son rôle comme juge, la notion d'étranger, et le droit de l'homme. Ces sujets ont été traités à la fois philologiquement et sociologiquement en s'intéressant aux constantes de la mentalité sémitique depuis l'époque de Mari jusqu'a la période préislamique. Cela a permis d'étudier la notion de famille « politique» qui finalement est une transposition de la famille biologique, sur plusieurs niveaux: la famille « biologique» du roi, la famille « politique » internationale composée des rois contemporains, celle de leurs « serviteurs» et celle des femmes qualifiées de « servantes ». Le chercheur a appliqué le système proposé sur les lettres qui sont difficilement comprises ou mal placées dans leur contexte historique, pour leur rendre leur place dans le corpus épistolaire et donner un éclairage nouveau a l'histoire de Mari.

Perpetuating African ancestral customs, Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans avoid the African American identity crises illuminated by the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. The poetry of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Waring Cuney incorporate W.E.B. DuBois’ double-consciousness theory to reveal the identity issues and ancestral alienation plaguing African Americans at the turn of the twentieth-century. In comparison, unique political and social circumstances in New Orleans allowed enslaved Africans to practice their ancestral customs weekly. The preservation of this heritage fostered a black community in New Orleans rich in traditions, pride and self-conviction. The development of Mardi Gras Indian culture and the allusions to Africa in Harlem poetry reveal the power of ancestry to establish identity.

This thesis explores Herman Melville’s relationship to sceptical philosophy. By reading Melville’s fictions of the 1840s and 1850s alongside the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I seek to show that they manifest by turns expression, rebuttal, and mitigated acceptance of philosophical doubt. Melville was an attentive reader of philosophical texts, and he refers specifically to concepts such as Berkeleyan immaterialism and the Kantian “noumenon”. But Melville does not simply dramatise pre-existing theories; rather, in works such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he enacts sceptical and anti-sceptical ideas through his literary strategies, demonstrating their relevance in particular regions of human experience. In so doing he makes a substantive contribution to a philosophical discourse that has often been criticised – by commentators including Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift – for its tendency to abstraction. Melville’s interest in scepticism might be read as part of a wider cultural response to a period of unprecedented social and political change in antebellum America, and with this in mind I compare and contrast his work with that of Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau. But in many respects Melville’s distinctive and original treatment of scepticism sets him apart from his contemporaries, and in order to fully make sense of it one must range more widely through the canons of philosophy and literature. His exploration of the ethical consequences of doubt in The Piazza Tales, for example, can be seen to anticipate with remarkable precision the theories of twentieth-century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. I work chronologically though selected prose from the period 1849-1857, paying close attention to the textual effects and philosophical allusions in each work. In so doing I hope to offer fresh ways of looking at Melville’s handling of literary form and the wider shape of his career. I conclude with reflections on how Melville’s normative emphasis on the acknowledgement of epistemological limitation might inform the practice of literary criticism.

Cette étude interroge les différentes relations que la littérature québécoise contemporaine noue avec l’espace, et particulièrement les lieux de confins que rien ne semble prédisposer à une entrée en littérature : la campagne, la forêt, la petite ville et le Nord. Peu de recherches ont été menées sur ce que représentent ces espaces dans l’imaginaire contemporain. Ce sujet est d’autant plus crucial en littérature québécoise que ces “provinces littéraires” sont associées à des idéologies passéistes héritées de l’histoire littéraire du Québec (la “littérature du terroir”). Comment le poète et naturaliste Pierre Morency (1942-), le romancier Louis Hamelin (1959-) et l’écrivain et essayiste Pierre Nepveu (1945-) prennent en compte cet héritage pour écrire ces confins qui, depuis le début du XXe siècle, subissent de profonds changements ? L’étude s’attache à montrer comment s’élabore une vie intellectuelle qui permet au sujet d’adopter une attitude réflexive propice à l’écriture. Le premier chapitre expose après Beaudoin et Morency en quoi la question de la représentation de l’espace est problématique dans l’histoire littéraire québécoise. Dans le sillage des travaux de Genette, le second chapitre envisage le livre et le texte comme des espaces matériels. Un troisième chapitre étudie la description (Hamon) de quelques paysages privilégiés (Roger). Le dernier chapitre montre comment l’écriture des confins interroge la subjectivité en adoptant une perspective qui combine les approches philosophique (Heidegger), psychanalytique (Anzieu) et esthétique (Simard-Laflamme). La réflexion s’ouvre sur une mise en relation de ces textes avec le discours écologique contemporain.

The central concern of this thesis is to describe the views of the young men in Feridun Zaimoglus book Kanak Sprak (2000) on their own identity ("Kanaken"), on the identity of other foreigners such as (college "Ali") and the Germans ("Alemannen") with help of close-reading. The book contains short-stories or "protocolls", written in the special language "KanakSprak", a mixture of Turkish and German street gang slang. There are claims that Zaimoglus texts are written based on hiphop/rap language. The categories in this work are identity, youth(sub)culture, territory, style and Hiphop. Other than close-reading the analysis will also take help of different research areas such as youth research and soliology.

Föreliggande avhandling syftar till att utveckla läsningen och tolkningen av inskrifterna på de i dagsläget 46 kända vikingatida runblecken. Målet är att ge en så tydlig bild som möjligt av inskriftsgenren vikingatida runbleck. I detta syfte har upprepade fältundersökningar av runblecken genomförts med stereomikroskop. På grundval av på så vis etablerade nya läsningar föreslås nya tolkningar till de mest problematiska ställena i de tidigare tolkade runblecksinskrifterna. Nya tolkningsförslag ges även för runblecksinskrifter som tidigare har ansetts vara olexikaliska. Utöver nya läsningar och tolkningar resulterar denna studie i en kartläggning av relationen mellan runblecksinskrifternas innehåll och form å den enda sidan och runbleckens fyndmiljöer och utseende å den andra.
The aim of this dissertation is to represent as clearly as possible the genre of Viking-Age runic plates by developing readings and interpretations of the inscriptions on the 46 metal plates with runes from the Viking Age known today. Several investigations of the runic plates have been conducted with a stereomicroscope for this purpose. On the basis of the new readings thus established, new interpretations have been proposed for the most problematic sections of previously interpreted inscriptions. New interpretations are also offered for inscriptions on runic plates which have previously been considered non-lexical. As well as providing new readings and interpretations, this study has resulted in clarification of the relationship between the form and content of the inscriptions on the runic plates on the one hand and on their find circumstances and appearance on the other.

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (G2P) is the task of converting a word, represented by a sequence of graphemes, to its pronunciation, represented by a sequence of phonemes. The G2P task plays a crucial role in speech synthesis systems, and is an important part of other applications, including spelling correction and speech-to-speech machine translation. G2P conversion is a complex task, for which a number of diverse solutions have been proposed. In general, the problem is challenging because the source string does not unambiguously specify the target representation. In addition, the training data include only example word pairs without the structural information of subword alignments. In this thesis, I introduce several novel approaches for G2P conversion. My contributions can be categorized into (1) new alignment models and (2) new output generation models. With respect to alignment models, I present techniques including many-to-many alignment, phonetic-based alignment, alignment by integer linear programing and alignment-by-aggregation. Many-to-many alignment is designed to replace the one-to-one alignment that has been used almost exclusively in the past. The new many-to-many alignments are more precise and accurate in expressing grapheme-phoneme relationships. The other proposed alignment approaches attempt to advance the training method beyond the use of Expectation-Maximization (EM). With respect to generation models, I first describe a framework for integrating many-to-many alignments and language models for grapheme classification. I then propose joint processing for G2P using online discriminative training. I integrate a generative joint n-gram model into the discriminative framework. Finally, I apply the proposed G2P systems to name transliteration generation and mining tasks. Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance in both the G2P and name transliteration tasks.