Language shifting among the Hodenosaunee of Southern Ontario : Edwaenagé: tsgó -- Shogwaya> dihs> oh nidwawenó :de: shogwá:wi: tsáhohwejáda:t

Through aggressive legislative and educational policies Indigenous languages globally have been shifted to the language of the dominant society. Globalization has brought previously geo-politically and/or geo-linguistically isolated people and language . groups into close proximity that necessitated interaction and at times intense power struggles. There are currently approximately 6,000 spoken languages in the world, more than half are either endangered, dying or disappearing altogether. Canadian statistics reveal an overall 3 % decline in the intergenerational transmission of language. Of the original 60 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada, 8 are extinct, 13 are nearly extinct, and 23 are critical. The remaining languages have a slim chance of survival. Within the next 100 years only 4 Indigenous languages will remain. The Hodenosaunee languages of Southern Ontario are not incl~ded among the list of languages that will survive the next 100 years. There are, without a doubt, complex challenges in the maintenance of Indigenous languages within a dominant-culture influenced environment. Given the increasing awareness of the social impact of linguistic integrity and preservation of languages on Indigenous people as a whole, this study considers how language is currently being used; the social, economic, and political implications of language shifting; the need to shift our social consciousness in order to understand the urgency in privileging our Hodenosaunee languages; as well as ways in which we might achieve those goals as individuals, as families, and as a community.

Cross-Linguistic Transfer (CLT) in Bilingual Speakers : Neural Correlates of Language Learning

Le but de cette thèse est d'étudier les corrélats comportementaux et neuronaux du transfert inter-linguistique (TIL) dans l'apprentissage d’une langue seconde (L2). Compte tenu de nos connaissances sur l'influence de la distance linguistique sur le TIL (Paradis, 1987, 2004; Odlin, 1989, 2004, 2005; Gollan, 2005; Ringbom, 2007), nous avons examiné l'effet de facilitation de la similarité phonologique à l’aide de la résonance magnétique fonctionnelle entre des langues linguistiquement proches (espagnol-français) et des langues linguistiquement éloignées (persan-français). L'étude I rapporte les résultats obtenus pour des langues linguistiquement proches (espagnol-français), alors que l'étude II porte sur des langues linguistiquement éloignées (persan-français). Puis, les changements de connectivité fonctionnelle dans le réseau langagier (Price, 2010) et dans le réseau de contrôle supplémentaire impliqué dans le traitement d’une langue seconde (Abutalebi & Green, 2007) lors de l’apprentissage d’une langue linguistiquement éloignée (persan-français) sont rapportés dans l’étude III. Les résultats des analyses d’IRMF suivant le modèle linéaire général chez les bilingues de langues linguistiquement proches (français-espagnol) montrent que le traitement des mots phonologiquement similaires dans les deux langues (cognates et clangs) compte sur un réseau neuronal partagé par la langue maternelle (L1) et la L2, tandis que le traitement des mots phonologiquement éloignés (non-clang-non-cognates) active des structures impliquées dans le traitement de la mémoire de travail et d'attention. Toutefois, chez les personnes bilingues de L1-L2 linguistiquement éloignées (français-persan), même les mots phonologiquement similaires à travers les langues (cognates et clangs) activent des régions connues pour être impliquées dans l'attention et le contrôle cognitif. Par ailleurs, les mots phonologiquement éloignés (non-clang-non-cognates) activent des régions usuellement associées à la mémoire de travail et aux fonctions exécutives. Ainsi, le facteur de distance inter-linguistique entre L1 et L2 module la charge cognitive sur la base du degré de similarité phonologiques entres les items en L1 et L2. Des structures soutenant les processus impliqués dans le traitement exécutif sont recrutées afin de compenser pour des demandes cognitives. Lorsque la compétence linguistique en L2 augmente et que les tâches linguistiques exigent ainsi moins d’effort, la demande pour les ressources cognitives diminue. Tel que déjà rapporté (Majerus, et al, 2008; Prat, et al, 2007; Veroude, et al, 2010; Dodel, et al, 2005; Coynel, et al ., 2009), les résultats des analyses de connectivité fonctionnelle montrent qu’après l’entraînement la valeur d'intégration (connectivité fonctionnelle) diminue puisqu’il y a moins de circulation du flux d'information. Les résultats de cette recherche contribuent à une meilleure compréhension des aspects neurocognitifs et de plasticité cérébrale du TIL ainsi que l'impact de la distance linguistique dans l'apprentissage des langues. Ces résultats ont des implications dans les stratégies d'apprentissage d’une L2, les méthodes d’enseignement d’une L2 ainsi que le développement d'approches thérapeutiques chez des patients bilingues qui souffrent de troubles langagiers.

De l'intime au social : l'écriture de l'enfance dans le roman francophone contemporain de Maurice et de la Réunion

Dans cette thèse, qui interroge la mise en écriture de l’enfance dans le roman contemporain de Maurice et de la Réunion, il s’agit d’analyser les dimensions suivantes : les modalités narratives, la construction, l’évolution et les fonctions du personnage enfant dans l’économie des textes, les rapports qu’il entretient avec les membres de sa famille et de son entourage immédiat, ainsi que la relation entre ces œuvres et leur contexte social et discursif. Notre corpus inclut quatorze récits d’enfance fictionnels de dix écrivains et écrivaines des Mascareignes, publiés de 1987 à 2012 : du côté mauricien, Nathacha Appanah, Ananda Devi, Marie-Thérèse Humbert, Shenaz Patel, Amal Sewtohul et Carl de Souza; du côté réunionnais, Danielle Dambreville, François Dijoux, Axel Gauvin et Jean-François Samlong. Dans ces romans, si la diversité et l’hybridité narratives, discursives et symboliques témoignent de l’imaginaire pluriel de ces sociétés hétérogènes, l’on retrouve néanmoins certaines grandes tendances, comme une écriture axée sur la mémoire du narrateur adulte ou sur l’expérience immédiate de l’enfant; des personnages enfants principalement souffrants, mal-aimés, subalternes et révoltés; ainsi que des familles et des sociétés dont le fonctionnement, les discours et les idéologies paraissent inappropriés, voire tout à fait néfastes. Si certains de ces choix esthétiques reconduisent certaines conventions, d’autres incarnent une perspective tout à fait nouvelle, voire transgressive. Par exemple, les emprunts à d’autres formes génériques comme le conte ou le théâtre, certaines écritures tout à fait singulières, ainsi que le fréquent mélange des voix et des langages se distinguent clairement des normes établies. La maltraitance extrême des petites et jeunes filles et l’apparition de la figure de l’enfant violent semblent également inédites. Le point de vue et l’expérience de l’enfant jettent enfin un regard global, approfondi et foncièrement critique sur les sociétés mauricienne et réunionnaise du présent (surtout dans le cas mauricien) comme du passé (années 1930 à 1970), procédant ainsi à un contre-discours s’opposant aux images exotiques et bucoliques de l’île paradisiaque. Du statut de témoin à celui d’acteur, l’enfant permet à l’auteur d’aborder une série de motifs et de problématiques distinctifs de l’imaginaire et des littératures de l’océan Indien, tels que l’altérité, l’identité, l’histoire, la mémoire, etc.

Hugo Loetscher et l’impureté linguistique : äs tischört und plutschins : traduction et analyse des procédés d’adaptation

Hugo Loetscher (1929-2009) a joué un rôle important dans la littérature suisse alémanique du 20e siècle. On lui accole souvent l’étiquette de « cosmopolite suisse », tant il a réussi le pari de s’intéresser au vaste monde sans jamais renier son milieu et son pays d’origine. L’essai dont il est question ici, äs tischört und plutschins. Über das Unreine in der Sprache, eine helvetische Situierung, adopte une perspective suisse pour proposer une réflexion sur le lien entre langue, littérature et nation, sur la place des langues minoritaires dans le monde globalisé et sur l’idéal – critiquable selon Loetscher – de « pureté » linguistique. Ce mémoire, en plus de présenter une traduction de l’essai de Loetscher, qui était jusqu’à ce jour inédit en français, réfléchit à l’actualité de ce texte dans le contexte québécois et au processus de traduction d’un auteur suisse germanophone pour un public francophone diversifié, en s’appuyant sur les théories de la stylistique comparée d’Alfred Malblanc et du skopos de Katharina Reiß et Hans J. Vermeer. Notre étude se penche d’une part sur le rôle d’éléments péritextuels comme les notes de bas de page qui, dans le processus d’adaptation, permettent au translatum, c’est-à-dire au résultat de l’acte de traduction, au texte cible, de respecter son objectif de départ, son skopos. D’autre part, l’analyse aborde la question d’une possible utilisation de régionalismes (québécois ou suisses) dans un translatum en français standard dont le texte source porte lui-même sur la diversité linguistique et les variantes régionales et dialectales.

Design and Development of an Adaptable Frame -Based System for Dravidian Language Processing

This work is aimed at building an adaptable frame-based system for processing Dravidian languages. There are about 17 languages in this family and they are spoken by the people of South India.Karaka relations are one of the most important features of Indian languages. They are the semabtuco-syntactic relations between verbs and other related constituents in a sentence. The karaka relations and surface case endings are analyzed for meaning extraction. This approach is comparable with the borad class of case based grammars.The efficiency of this approach is put into test in two applications. One is machine translation and the other is a natural language interface (NLI) for information retrieval from databases. The system mainly consists of a morphological analyzer, local word grouper, a parser for the source language and a sentence generator for the target language. This work make contributios like, it gives an elegant account of the relation between vibhakthi and karaka roles in Dravidian languages. This mapping is elegant and compact. The same basic thing also explains simple and complex sentence in these languages. This suggests that the solution is not just ad hoc but has a deeper underlying unity. This methodology could be extended to other free word order languages. Since the frame designed for meaning representation is general, they are adaptable to other languages coming in this group and to other applications.

HWR for Indian Languages: A Comprehensive Survey

Few major Research works are going in the field of Handwriting Word Recognition (HWR) of Indian languages. This paper surveys the major works of offline/online handwritten word recognition. Techniques involved in word recognition are also discussed. Major works carried out in Bangla, Urdu, Tamil and Hindi are mentioned in this paper. Advancement towards HWR in other Indian languages are also discussed. Application of offline HWR is also discussed

Degrees of Free Word-Order and Freely Rewriting Restarting Automata

In natural languages with a high degree of word-order freedom syntactic phenomena like dependencies (subordinations) or valencies do not depend on the word-order (or on the individual positions of the individual words). This means that some permutations of sentences of these languages are in some (important) sense syntactically equivalent. Here we study this phenomenon in a formal way. Various types of j-monotonicity for restarting automata can serve as parameters for the degree of word-order freedom and for the complexity of word-order in sentences (languages). Here we combine two types of parameters on computations of restarting automata: 1. the degree of j-monotonicity, and 2. the number of rewrites per cycle. We study these notions formally in order to obtain an adequate tool for modelling and comparing formal descriptions of (natural) languages with different degrees of word-order freedom and word-order complexity.

Restarting automata with restricted utilization of auxiliary symbols

The restarting automaton is a restricted model of computation that was introduced by Jancar et al. to model the so-called analysis by reduction, which is a technique used in linguistics to analyze sentences of natural languages. The most general models of restarting automata make use of auxiliary symbols in their rewrite operations, although this ability does not directly correspond to any aspect of the analysis by reduction. Here we put restrictions on the way in which restarting automata use auxiliary symbols, and we investigate the influence of these restrictions on their expressive power. In fact, we consider two types of restrictions. First, we consider the number of auxiliary symbols in the tape alphabet of a restarting automaton as a measure of its descriptional complexity. Secondly, we consider the number of occurrences of auxiliary symbols on the tape as a dynamic complexity measure. We establish some lower and upper bounds with respect to these complexity measures concerning the ability of restarting automata to recognize the (deterministic) context-free languages and some of their subclasses.

On the Gap-Complexity of Simple RL-Automata

Analysis by reduction is a method used in linguistics for checking the correctness of sentences of natural languages. This method is modelled by restarting automata. All types of restarting automata considered in the literature up to now accept at least the deterministic context-free languages. Here we introduce and study a new type of restarting automaton, the so-called t-RL-automaton, which is an RL-automaton that is rather restricted in that it has a window of size one only, and that it works under a minimal acceptance condition. On the other hand, it is allowed to perform up to t rewrite (that is, delete) steps per cycle. Here we study the gap-complexity of these automata. The membership problem for a language that is accepted by a t-RL-automaton with a bounded number of gaps can be solved in polynomial time. On the other hand, t-RL-automata with an unbounded number of gaps accept NP-complete languages.

On the Descriptional Complexity of Simple RL-Automata

Analysis by reduction is a method used in linguistics for checking the correctness of sentences of natural languages. This method is modelled by restarting automata. Here we study a new type of restarting automaton, the so-called t-sRL-automaton, which is an RL-automaton that is rather restricted in that it has a window of size 1 only, and that it works under a minimal acceptance condition. On the other hand, it is allowed to perform up to t rewrite (that is, delete) steps per cycle. We focus on the descriptional complexity of these automata, establishing two complexity measures that are both based on the description of t-sRL-automata in terms of so-called meta-instructions. We present some hierarchy results as well as a non-recursive trade-off between deterministic 2-sRL-automata and finite-state acceptors.

The Degree of Word-Expansion of Lexicalized RRWW-Automata

Restarting automata can be seen as analytical variants of classical automata as well as of regulated rewriting systems. We study a measure for the degree of nondeterminism of (context-free) languages in terms of deterministic restarting automata that are (strongly) lexicalized. This measure is based on the number of auxiliary symbols (categories) used for recognizing a language as the projection of its characteristic language onto its input alphabet. This type of recognition is typical for analysis by reduction, a method used in linguistics for the creation and verification of formal descriptions of natural languages. Our main results establish a hierarchy of classes of context-free languages and two hierarchies of classes of non-context-free languages that are based on the expansion factor of a language.

Procedural Meaning Explicatures in the Development of New Subordination Strategies in Romance

The sociocultural changes that led to the genesis of Romance languages widened the gap between oral and written patterns, which display different discoursive and linguistic devices. In early documents, discoursive implicatures connecting propositions were not generally codified, so that the reader should furnish the correct interpretation according to his own perception of real facts; which can still be attested in current oral utterances. Once Romance languages had undergone several levelling processes which concluded in the first standardizations, implicatures became explicatures and were syntactically codified by means of univocal new complex conjunctions. As a consequence of the emergence of these new subordination strategies, a freer distribution of the information conveyed by the utterances is allowed. The success of complex structural patterns ran alongside of the genesis of new narrative genres and the generalization of a learned rhetoric. Both facts are a spontaneous effect of new approaches to the act of reading. Ancient texts were written to be read to a wide audience, whereas those printed by the end of the XV th century were conceived to be read quietly, in a low voice, by a private reader. The goal of this paper is twofold, since we will show that: a) The development of new complex conjunctions through the history of Romance languages accommodates to four structural patterns that range from parataxis to hypotaxis. b) This development is a reflex of the well known grammaticalization path from discourse to syntax that implies the codification of discoursive strategies (Givón 2 1979, Sperber and Wilson 1986, Carston 1988, Grice 1989, Bach 1994, Blackemore 2002, among others]

The French Constitutional Council as the Rottweiler of the Republican Ideal in the Language Field: Does Jurisprudence Really Reflect Reality? EDAP 03/2012, 2012

France is known for being a champion of individual rights as well as for its overt hostility to any form of group rights. Linguistic pluralism in the public sphere is rejected for fear of babelization and Balkanization of the country. Over recent decades the Conseil Constitutionnel (CC) has, together with the Conseil d’État, remained arguably the strongest defender of this Jacobin ideal in France. In this article, I will discuss the role of France’s restrictive language policy through the prism of the CC’s jurisprudence. Overall, I will argue that the CC made reference to the (Jacobin) state-nation concept, a concept that is discussed in the first part of the paper, in order to fight the revival of regional languages in France over recent decades. The clause making French the official language in 1992 was functional to this policy. The intriguing aspect is that in France the CC managed to standardise France’s policy vis-à-vis regional and minority languages through its jurisprudence; an issue discussed in the second part of the paper. But in those regions with a stronger tradition of identity, particularly in the French overseas territories, the third part of the paper argues, normative reality has increasingly become under pressure. Therefore, a discrepancy between the ‘law in courts’ and the compliance with these decisions (‘law in action’) has been emerging over recent years. Amid some signs of opening of France to minorities, this contradiction delineates a trend that might well continue in future.

Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history

Greek speakers say "ovpa", Germans "schwanz'' and the French "queue'' to describe what English speakers call a 'tail', but all of these languages use a related form of 'two' to describe the number after one. Among more than 100 Indo-European languages and dialects, the words for some meanings (such as 'tail') evolve rapidly, being expressed across languages by dozens of unrelated words, while others evolve much more slowly-such as the number 'two', for which all Indo-European language speakers use the same related word-form(1). No general linguistic mechanism has been advanced to explain this striking variation in rates of lexical replacement among meanings. Here we use four large and divergent language corpora (English(2), Spanish(3), Russian(4) and Greek(5)) and a comparative database of 200 fundamental vocabulary meanings in 87 Indo-European languages(6) to show that the frequency with which these words are used in modern language predicts their rate of replacement over thousands of years of Indo-European language evolution. Across all 200 meanings, frequently used words evolve at slower rates and infrequently used words evolve more rapidly. This relationship holds separately and identically across parts of speech for each of the four language corpora, and accounts for approximately 50% of the variation in historical rates of lexical replacement. We propose that the frequency with which specific words are used in everyday language exerts a general and law-like influence on their rates of evolution. Our findings are consistent with social models of word change that emphasize the role of selection, and suggest that owing to the ways that humans use language, some words will evolve slowly and others rapidly across all languages.

Language support for immigrant children: a study of state schools in the UK and US

In recent decades, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers have sought a new way of life in large numbers, often leaving their countries of origin behind in search of places that offer a better way of life. The purpose of this study was to investigate how elementary and middle school students in state schools in Reading, England (primarily speakers of Asian languages), and Richmond, Virginia (primarily speakers of Spanish), were supported academically, when most children's first language was not English. The authors were interested in exploring whether or not there were cultural or structural differences in the way each country helped or hindered these students as they progressed through the school systems. Three UK schools in a district of approximately 100,000 and three US schools in a district of approximately 250,000 were the focus of this exploration from 2000 to 2003. Findings indicated that there were cultural and legislative differences and similarities. Teachers and administrators in both countries attempted to provide services with limited and sometimes diminishing resources. Community support varied based on resources, attitudes toward various ethnic groups, and the coping strategies adopted by these groups in their new environments. Marked differences appeared with regard to the manner in which assessments took place and how the results were made available to the public.