Bilingual Notaries in Hellenistic Egypt : A Study of Language Use

The impact of Greek-Egyptian bilingualism on language use and linguistic competence is the key issue in this dissertation. The language use in a corpus of 148 Greek notarial contracts is analyzed on phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. The texts were written by bilingual notaries (agoranomoi) in Upper Egypt in the later Hellenistic period. They present, for the most part, very good administrative Greek. On the other hand, their language contains variation and idiosyncrasies that were earlier condemned as ungrammatical and bad Greek, and were not subjected to closer analysis. In order to reach plausible explanations for those phenomena, a thorough research into the sociohistorical and linguistic context was needed before the linguistic analysis. The general linguistic landscape, the population pattern and the status and frequency of Greek literacy in Ptolemaic Egypt in general, and in Upper Egypt in particular, are presented. Through a detailed examination of the notaries themselves (their names, families and handwriting), it became evident that there were one to three persons at the notarial office writing under the signature of one notary. Often the documents under one notary's name were written in the same hand. We get, therefore, exceptionally close to studying idiolects in written material from antiquity. The qualitative linguistic analysis revealed that the notaries made relatively few orthographic mistakes that reflect the ongoing phonological changes and they mastered the morphological forms. The problems arose at the syntactic level, for example, with the pattern of agreement between the noun groups or a noun with its modifiers. The significant structural differences between Greek and Egyptian can be behind the innovative strategies used by some of the notaries. Moreover, certain syntactic structures were clearly transferred from the notaries first language, Egyptian. This is obvious in the relative clause structure. Transfer can be found in other structures, as well, although, we must not forget the influence of parallel Greek structures. Sometimes these can act simultaneously. The interesting linguistic strategies and transfer features come mostly from the hand of one notary, Hermias. Some other notaries show similar patterns, for example, Hermias' cousin, Ammonios. Hermias' texts reveal that he probably spoke Greek more than his predecessors. It is possible to conclude, then, that the notaries of the later generations were more fluently bilingual; their two languages were partly integrated in their minds as an interlanguage combining elements from both languages. The earlier notaries had the two languages functionally separated and they followed the standardized contract formulae more rigidly.

Why Don't Students Talk? Causes of Foreign Language Communication Apprehension in English Classes: A Comparison of High Apprehensive and Low Apprehensive Upper Secondary Students.

OBJECTIVES. Oral foreign language skills are an integral part of one's social, academic and professional competence. This can be problematic for those suffering from foreign language communication apprehension (CA), or a fear of speaking a foreign language. CA manifests itself, for example, through feelings of anxiety and tension, physical arousal and avoidance of foreign language communication situations. According to scholars, foreign language CA may impede the language learning process significantly and have detrimental effects on one's language learning, academic achievement and career prospects. Drawing on upper secondary students' subjective experiences of communication situations in English as a foreign language, this study seeks, first, to describe, analyze and interpret why upper secondary students experience English language communication apprehension in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes. Second, this study seeks to analyse what the most anxiety-arousing oral production tasks in EFL classes are, and which features of different oral production tasks arouse English language communication apprehension and why. The ultimate objectives of the present study are to raise teachers' awareness of foreign language CA and its features, manifestations and impacts in foreign language classes as well as to suggest possible ways to minimize the anxiety-arousing features in foreign language classes. METHODS. The data was collected in two phases by means of six-part Likert-type questionnaires and theme interviews, and analysed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The questionnaire data was collected in spring 2008. The respondents were 122 first-year upper secondary students, 68 % of whom were girls and 31 % of whom were boys. The data was analysed by statistical methods using SPSS software. The theme interviews were conducted in spring 2009. The interviewees were 11 second-year upper secondary students aged 17 to 19, who were chosen by purposeful selection on the basis of their English language CA level measured in the questionnaires. Six interviewees were classified as high apprehensives and five as low apprehensives according to their score in the foreign language CA scale in the questionnaires. The interview data was coded and thematized using the technique of content analysis. The analysis and interpretation of the data drew on a comparison of the self-reports of the highly apprehensive and low apprehensive upper secondary students. RESULTS. The causes of English language CA in EFL classes as reported by the students were both internal and external in nature. The most notable causes were a low self-assessed English proficiency, a concern over errors, a concern over evaluation, and a concern over the impression made on others. Other causes related to a high English language CA were a lack of authentic oral practise in EFL classes, discouraging teachers and negative experiences of learning English, unrealistic internal demands for oral English performance, high external demands and expectations for oral English performance, the conversation partner's higher English proficiency, and the audience's large size and unfamiliarity. The most anxiety-arousing oral production tasks in EFL classes were presentations or speeches with or without notes in front of the class, acting in front of the class, pair debates with the class as audience, expressing thoughts and ideas to the class, presentations or speeches without notes while seated, group debates with the class as audience, and answering to the teacher's questions involuntarily. The main features affecting the anxiety-arousing potential of an oral production task were a high degree of attention, a large audience, a high degree of evaluation, little time for preparation, little linguistic support, and a long duration.

Late Pleistocene and Holocene environmental evolution of the Murchisonfjorden area, Nordaustlandet, Svalbard

The purpose of this study was to establish the palaeoenvironmental conditions during the late Quaternary in Murchisonfjorden, Nordaustlandet, based on foraminiferal assemblage compositions, and to determine the onset and termination of the Weichselian glaciations. The foraminiferal assemblage compositions were studied in marine sediments from three different archives, from sections next to the present shoreline in the Bay of Isvika, from a core in the Bay of Isvika and from a core from Lake Einstaken. OSL and AMS 14C age determinations were performed on samples from the three archives, and the results show deposition of marine sediments during ice-free periods of the Early Weichselian, the Middle Weichselian and the Late Weichselian, as well as during the Holocene in the investigated area. Marine sediments from the Early and Middle Weichselian were sampled from isostatically uplifted sections along the present shoreline.Sediments from the transition from the Late Weichselian to early Holocene time intervals were found in the bottom of the core from Lake Einstaken. Holocene sediments were investigated in the sections and in the core from the Bay of Isvika. The marine sediments from the sections are comprised of five benthic foraminiferal assemblages. The Early Weichselian is represented by two foraminiferal assemblages, the Middle Weichselian, the early and the late Holocene each by one. All five foraminiferal assemblages were deposited in glacier-distal shallow-water environments, which had a connection to the open ocean. Changes in the composition of the assemblages can be ascribed to differences in the bottom-water currents and changes in the salinity. The Middle Weichselian assemblage is of special importance, because it is the first foraminiferal assemblage to be described from this time interval from Svalbard. Four benthic foraminiferal assemblages were deposited shortly before the marine to lacustrine transition at the boundary between the Late Weichselian and Holocene in Lake Einstaken. The foraminiferal assemblages show a change from a high-arctic, normal marine shallow-water environment to an even shallower environment with highly fluctuating salinity. The analyses of the core from 100 m water depth in the Bay of Isvika resulted in the determination of four foraminiferal assemblages. These indicated changes from a glacier-proximal environment during deglaciation, to a more glacier-distal environment during the Early Holocene. This was followed by a period with a marked change to a considerably cooler environment and finally to a closed fjord environment in the middle and late Holocene times. Additional sedimentological analyses of the marine and glacially derived sediments from the uplifted sections, as well as observations of multiple striae on the bedrock, observations of deeply weathered bedrock and findings of tills interlayered with marine sediments complete the investigations in the study area. They indicate weak glacial erosion in the study area. It can be concluded that marine deposition occurred in the investigated area during three time intervals in the Weichselian and during most of the Holocene. The foraminiferal assemblages in the Holocene are characterized by a transition from glacier-proximal to glacier-distal faunas. The palaeogeographical change from an open fjord to a closed fjord environment is a result of the isostatic uplift of the area after the LGM and is clearly reflected in the foraminiferal assemblages. Another influencing factor on the foraminiferal assemblage composition are changes in the inflow of warmer Atlantic waters to the study area.

FIN-CLARIN: A Framework for Depositing and Disseminating Language Resources for R&D

Researchers and developers in academia and industry would benefit from a facility that enables them to easily locate, licence and use the kind of empirical data they need for testing and refining their hypotheses and to deposit and disseminate their data e.g. to support replication and validation of reported scientific experiments. To answer these needs initially in Finland, there is an ongoing project at University of Helsinki and its collaborators to create a user-friendly web service for researchers and developers in Finland and other countries. In our talk, we describe ongoing work to create a palette of extensive but easily available Finnish language resources and technologies for the research community, including lexical resources, wordnets, morphologically tagged corpora, dependency syntactic treebanks and parsebanks, open-source finite state toolkits and libraries and language models to support text analysis and processing at customer site. Also first publicly available results are presented.

Computational Biology and Language

Current scientific research is characterized by increasing specialization, accumulating knowledge at a high speed due to parallel advances in a multitude of sub-disciplines. Recent estimates suggest that human knowledge doubles every two to three years – and with the advances in information and communication technologies, this wide body of scientific knowledge is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. This may also be referred to as ambient intelligence – an environment characterized by plentiful and available knowledge. The bottleneck in utilizing this knowledge for specific applications is not accessing but assimilating the information and transforming it to suit the needs for a specific application. The increasingly specialized areas of scientific research often have the common goal of converting data into insight allowing the identification of solutions to scientific problems. Due to this common goal, there are strong parallels between different areas of applications that can be exploited and used to cross-fertilize different disciplines. For example, the same fundamental statistical methods are used extensively in speech and language processing, in materials science applications, in visual processing and in biomedicine. Each sub-discipline has found its own specialized methodologies making these statistical methods successful to the given application. The unification of specialized areas is possible because many different problems can share strong analogies, making the theories developed for one problem applicable to other areas of research. It is the goal of this paper to demonstrate the utility of merging two disparate areas of applications to advance scientific research. The merging process requires cross-disciplinary collaboration to allow maximal exploitation of advances in one sub-discipline for that of another. We will demonstrate this general concept with the specific example of merging language technologies and computational biology.

Dasher - A data entry interface using continuous gestures and language models

Existing devices for communicating information to computers are bulky, slow to use, or unreliable. Dasher is a new interface incorporating language modelling and driven by continuous two-dimensional gestures, e.g. a mouse, touchscreen, or eye-tracker. Tests have shown that this device can be used to enter text at a rate of up to 34 words per minute, compared with typical ten-finger keyboard typing of 40-60 words per minute. Although the interface is slower than a conventional keyboard, it is small and simple, and could be used on personal data assistants and by motion-impaired computer users.

“Un claror de fuente” : presencia de la lírica española medieval y áurea en la poesía de Ángel Escobar (Cuba, 1957-1997)

Integran este número de la revista ponencias presentadas en Studia Hispanica Medievalia VIII : Actas de las X Jornadas Internacionales de Literatura Española Medieval, 2011, y de Homenaje al Quinto Centenario del Cancionero General de Hernando del Castillo.

Intercultural Management and Leadership in the Context of Language Academies

Throughout this undergraduate thesis, a study of intercultural management and leadership will be carried out with a special focus on language academies. We begin by analyzing the importance of cultural values and their effects on the perception of a leader. We then study the role of Strategic Human Resources Management in an intercultural environment. Finally, as an original contribution to this thesis, an investigation is performed that examines three local language academies and their management practices. After reviewing the findings, we hope to propose a sort of ‘best practices’ for language academies that could lead to a more harmonious relationship between teachers and their managers.

Rule-based grapheme-to-phoneme method for the Greek

This paper describes a trainable method for generating letter to sound rules for the Greek language, for producing the pronunciation of out-of-vocabulary words. Several approaches have been adopted over the years for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, such as hand-seeded rules, finite state transducers, neural networks, HMMs etc, nevertheless it has been proved that the most reliable method is a rule-based one. Our approach is based on a semi-automatically pre-transcribed lexicon, from which we derived rules for automatic transcription. The efficiency and robustness of our method are proved by experiments on out-of-vocabulary words which resulted in over than 98% accuracy on a word-base criterion.

Credit and Debt in medieval England, c.1180-c.1350

Schofield, Phillipp, and N. J. Mayhew, eds., Credit and Debt in medieval England, c.1180-c.1350 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2002), pp.x+164 RAE2008

The development of learner autonomy through Internet resources and its impact on English language attainment

Wydział Neofilologii: Instytut Filologii Angielskiej

Integrative motivation and global language (English) acquisition in Poland

This study investigated the consistency of a measure of integrative motivation in the prediction of achievement in English as a foreign language in 18 samples of Polish school students. The results are shown to have implications for concerns expressed that integrative motivation might not be appropriate to the acquisition of English because it is a global language and moreover that other factors such as the gender of the student or the environment of the class might also influence its predictability. Results of a hierarchical linear modeling analysis indicated that for the older samples, integrative motivation was a consistent predictor of grades in English, unaffected by either the gender of the student or class environment acting as covariates. Comparable results were obtained for the younger samples except that student gender also contributed to the prediction of grades in English. Examination of the correlations of the elements of the integrative motivation score with English grades demonstrated that the aggregate score is the more consistent correlate from sample to sample than the elements themselves. Such results lead to the hypothesis that integrative motivation is a multi-dimensional construct and different aspects of the motivational complex come into play for each individual. That is, two individuals can hold the same level of integrative motivation and thus attain the same level of achievement but one might be higher in some elements and lower in others than another individual, resulting in consistent correlations of the aggregate but less so for the elements.

Language legislation in Ireland and the United Kingdom: Exploring the gaps between theory and practice

The central objective in this thesis is to explore the gaps between the normative justifications advanced for language rights and language legislative protection and the effective realisation of those rights and legislative provisions in practice. This objective is achieved by examining the scope and application of language rights and legislative provisions within language legislation in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Drawing on Canadian jurisprudence advocating for language rights to be recognised as “purposeful”, the thesis considers the extent to which Ireland and the United Kingdom have limited the acceptance of positive obligations as they relate to the provision of language services in the public sphere. In arguing that language rights are distinct in nature, the thesis suggests that in order for language rights to be effectively realised, an approach to language rights and language legislation more generally must be underpinned by a substantive vision of equality, otherwise language rights and legislative provisions merely amount to symbolic recognition and vacuous rhetoric as opposed to being substantive and enabling rights and provisions. Having said that, the thesis also recognises and elucidates the practical difficulties that arise in the realisation of language rights and language legislative provisions and in doing so seeks to stimulate further dialogue about the nature and limits of language rights and language legislation.

Textual criticism and medieval Irish studies

Many textual scholars will be aware that the title of the present thesis has been composed in a conscious revisionary relation to Tim William Machan’s influential Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts. (Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville, 1994)). The primary subjects of Machan’s study are works written in English between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the latter part of the period conventionally labelled Middle English. In contrast, the works with which I am primarily concerned are those written by scholars of Old and Middle Irish in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Where Machan aims to articulate the textual and cultural factors that characterise Middle English works as Middle English, the purposes of this thesis are (a) to identify the underlying ideological and epistemological perspectives which have informed much of the way in which medieval Irish documents and texts are rendered into modern editions, and (b) to begin to place the editorial theory and methodology of medieval Irish studies within the broader context of Biblical, medieval and modern textual criticism. Hence, the title is Textual Criticism and Medieval Irish Studies, rather than Textual Criticism and Medieval Irish Texts

H.M.'s personal crossword puzzles: understanding memory and language.

The amnesic patient H.M. has been solving crossword puzzles nearly all his life. Here, we analysed the linguistic content of 277 of H.M.'s crossword-puzzle solutions. H.M. did not have any unusual difficulties with the orthographic and grammatical components inherent to the puzzles. He exhibited few spelling errors, responded with appropriate parts of speech, and provided answers that were, at times, more convincing to observers than those supplied by the answer keys. These results suggest that H.M.'s lexical word-retrieval skills remain fluid despite his profound anterograde amnesia. Once acquired, the maintenance of written language comprehension and production does not seem to require intact medial temporal lobe structures.