Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Hebrew language Compound words'

Lexical compounding refers to the process of word formation through union of lexicalized morphemes. Given that young Chinese readers learn print vocabulary as unanalyzed whole, I am uncertain whether children can effortlessly decompose bound morphemes from disyllabic words for lexical compounding to occur. With this concern, I propose a lexical blending process in parallel with lexical compounding, where words are constructed from previously learnt words that have not yet been decomposed as morphemes. This thesis investigated the mechanisms behind the lexical blending process, as well as its role in word reading among young Chinese readers, in five studies Studies One and Two examined the factors that favor lexical blending to occur. In Study One, I located a high proportion of disyllabic words and bound morphemes within a corpus of Chinese textbooks in Hong Kong. Around 40-50% of disyllabic words in Grade One to Grade Three are composed of one or more bound morphemes, which set a favorable environment for lexical blending to occur. In Study Two, I found that younger readers tended to commit more selection errors, defined as “naming the target character as a character that forms a highly frequent two-character compound word with it” (Shu, Meng, Chen, Luan and Cao, 2005), than older readers during character reading, suggesting that their representations of bound morphemes were not precise. An experiment on morpheme name judgment demonstrated that bound morphemes and low frequency morphemes embedded in high frequency words were most prone to selection errors. I further examined the lexical blending process and its contribution to reading development in Studies Three and Four. Adopting a cross-sequential design in Study Three, I found that lexical blending concurrently and longitudinally predicted Chinese word reading, after lexical compounding and other reading-related variables were partialled out. In Study Four, I located lexical class and structural relation knowledge as significant component skills of lexical blending. The process of lexical blending proceeded first with structural arrangement of words, followed by morphological decomposition and union of morphemes to eventually form a blended word. I also tested Chinese dyslexic readers’ performance on lexical blending in Study Five. Dyslexic readers exhibited difficulties in lexical blending and all the related component skills, when compared with chronological-age (CA) matched controls. Process-wise, the dyslexic readers were weaker than CA controls in both structural arrangement and morphological decomposition, while having particular difficulties in the latter process. I conclude that lexical blending is an important word formation process for young Chinese readers. To aid mastery of lexical blending, readers should be aware of the syntax in phrases and sentences, as it provides cues on structural arrangement of blended words. In addition, I suggest explicit instruction on lexical blending skills in the curriculum, with a particular focus on morphological decomposition, in order to meet the learning needs of dyslexic readers.
published_or_final_version
Psychology
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy

Theories of phonological word formation (e.g. Selkirk 1980, 1986; Nespor & Vogel 1986; Lahiri & Plank 2010) assume that prosodic units are not isomorphic with syntactic units. However, the prosodic status of compounds remain uncertain, at least in so far as language planning and phonological encoding is concerned. Theories are not transparent about the prosodic status of compounds: although a noun-noun compound in English consists of two lexical words (and therefore two prosodic words), it can also act as a single prosodic item by exhibiting main stress on the first unit and carrying inflection. Thus the question remains controversial - should these items be treated as a single prosodic unit, similar to a monomorphemic word, or as two distinct units for the purpose of post-lexical representation? Recursive word formation may suggest that compounds are a single unit. Psycholinguistic evidence measuring speech onset latency in native speakers of Dutch and Portuguese also shows compounds being treated as single prosodic units (Wheeldon & Lahiri 1997, 2002; Vigario, 2010). Although recent studies have produced evidence for the prosodification of compounds in native speakers, little is known about the process in non-native speakers. Our research questions are as follows: what is the post-lexical planning unit in English, and how do non-native fluent speakers of English plan these units for the purpose of phonological encoding? To investigate our hypotheses, we focus on the phonological encoding of compounds with and without encliticisation, for native and non-native speakers of English. In a series of delayed priming tasks, we found overwhelming evidence that reaction times reflected the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online tasks, however, speech latencies only reflected the size of the first prosodic unit. Taken together,these results suggest that, despite containing two lexical and prosodic words, English compounds are planned as single prosodic units, exhibiting encliticisation and reaction times similar to those of monomorphemic words. As shown by the results in this study, this naming paradigm has proved extremely beneficial for eliciting data about the structure of prosodic units in speech production. Not only was it successful for native speakers of Dutch, European Portuguese, and English, we also found that it was easily implemented into a study of post-lexical encoding in non-native speakers of English.

Compounds, i.e. combining two lexical morphemes, are used for various reasons, e.g. naming, reduction of letters and words, drawing attention and producing expressive and humorous effects, etc. Compounding is not a unique concept to the German language, but is regarded as one of its characteristic features. As the stylistic norms differ from language to language, it renders the task of translating compounds challenging. There are various translation strategies for translating compounds, the tendencies of which are explored in this study. The analysis is based on a Swedish translation of Kühn’s (2016) Das Handbuch für digitale Nomaden and focuses on noun and adjective compounds, as they are the most frequent compounds in German. Concerning noun compounds, the study shows a tendency towards translation strategies, which are close to the source text material in form and meaning, whereas translations of adjective compounds tend to use strategies, which are similar in meaning, but not in form, e.g. a paraphrase. On this basis, it is concluded that even though German and Swedish share linguistic similarities, they differ when it comes to stylistic norms, as German is considered more nominal, whereas Swedish has a more verbal mode of expression.

The concept of "family" has undergone major changes over the past 50 years. This thesis examines changes in attitudes and values that can be detected in German and Swedish during this time. In order to investigate these changes in the concept of "family" I have analyzed how the German focus word Familie and the Swedish focus word familj are used in newspaper articles from the 1960s, 1980s and early 2000s. The empirical data consists of German and Swedish newspaper corpora from the three different periods. The theoretical point of departure is a social constructionist perspective, where family is considered to be something constructed and negotiated in language use. The method is corpus linguistic discourse analysis: compound words, collocations and multi-word patterns that include the focus words are analyzed using large text corpora. The study is both about changes in HOW the words familj and Familie are used and WHAT is said about the family in public language use. The thesis shows changes in both Swedish and German language use. I conclude that two different sub-concepts are being constructed and negotiated: the family as a GROUP OF PERSONS and family as a WAY OF LIVING TOGETHER. As regards the family as a group of persons this sub-concept has undergone major changes during the period studied. Differences in Swedish and German language use indicate more and sometimes earlier changes in the Swedish concept of family. The sub-concept of family as a way of living together is more constant. The observed changes can also be seen against a background of Swedish and German conceptual norms of family that do not change to the same extent. New family structures such as nätverksfamiljer (reconstituted families) and regnbågsfamiljer (rainbow families) are partly constructed as deviations from these conceptual norms. The thesis also shows that the sub-concept of family as a group of persons has become even more complex, especially in Swedish language use and particularly in so-called bio boxes, where pets are mentioned as family members and couples without children label themselves as familj.
Begreppet ”familj” har genomgått stora förändringar de senaste 50 åren. I den här avhandlingen studeras vilka förändringar i synsätt och värderingar som kan upptäckas i det tyska och det svenska språkbruket under denna tid. För att undersöka dessa förändringar i begreppet ”familj” analyseras hur det tyska fokusordet Familie och det svenska fokusordet familj används i tidningstext från 1960-talet, 1980-talet och början av 2000-talet. Det empiriska materialet består av tyska och svenska tidningskorpusar från de tre olika perioderna. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten är ett socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv, där familj betraktas som någonting som konstrueras och förhandlas i språkanvändning. Metoden är korpuslingvistisk diskursanalys: med hjälp av stora textkorpusar analyseras sammansatta ord, kollokationer och flerordsmönster där fokusorden ingår. Det handlar här både om förändringar i HUR orden familj och Familie används och i VAD som sägs om familj i offentligt språkbruk. Avhandlingen visar på förändringar i både den svenska och den tyska språkanvändningen. Jag kommer fram till att två olika delbegrepp konstrueras och förhandlas: familj som PERSONGRUPP och familj som SAMLEVNADSFORM. När det gäller familj som persongrupp genomgår det delbegreppet stora förändringar under den studerade tidsperioden. Förändringarna visar sig vara större och ibland tidigare i det svenska materialet än i det tyska materialet. Delbegreppet familj som samlevnadsform är mer konstant. De förändringar som kan observeras sker också mot en bakgrund av svenska och tyska normbilder av familj, som inte förändras i samma grad. Nya familjebildningar som nätverksfamiljer och regnbågsfamiljer konstrueras delvis som avvikelser från dessa normbilder. Avhandlingen visar också att delbegreppet familj som persongrupp blir allt mer mångfacetterat, särskilt i svenskt språkbruk och i synnerhet i s.k. faktarutor, där även husdjur nämns som familjemedlemmar och par utan barn får etiketten familj.

In sum, the three studies suggest that, on one hand, Chinese compound words, particularly the opaque ones, seem to be represented as holistic orthographic units in the mental lexicon. On the other hand, the meanings of the component morphemes are activated in visual recognition of Chinese compound words, suggesting a decomposed access. The implications of these results for a model of Chinese compound word representation and access, as well as the dispute between morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic decomposition accounts of morphological processing in other languages, were discussed.
Study 2 adapted the transposed-letter similarity effect in English (Forster, Davis, Schoknecht, & Carter, 1987; Acah & Perea, 2008) into transposed-character similarity effect in Chinese to further examine the orthographic representation of Chinese compound words. Study 2 examined the processing of both transposable and untransposable compound words to distinguish the decomposed account (which assumes morpheme-to-word activation) and the holistic account (which assumes activation of word-level orthographic representation) of the mental representation of Chinese compound words. It was found that transposable word-word pairs (e.g., [special characters omitted], means tie in English-[special characters omitted], means lead in English) did not produce significant priming effects. This result is inconsistent with the decomposed account, but is explicable in terms of the holistic account. Two follow-up experiments show that the transposed-character similarity effects differ for transparent (e.g., [special characters omitted], means proud in English) and opaque words (e.g., [special characters omitted], means careless in English). Transposed nonwords show significant facilitation effect to the original words when the original words were opaque (e.g., [special characters omitted]) but not when they were transparent words (e.g., [special characters omitted]). It suggests that opaque words are more likely than transparent words to be represented as orthographic wholes. The findings of word-level orthographic representation and the influence of semantic transparency provide convergent evidence for the conclusions reached by Study 1.
The first two studies are concerned with whether Chinese two-character compound words have decomposed or holistic orthographic representations in the mental lexicon. Study 1 made use of the high frequency orthographic neighbor inhibition effect (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996; Davis & Lupker, 2006) in the masked priming paradigm. It was found that a high frequency orthographic neighbor (e.g., [special characters omitted] means virtually in English) inhibited recognition of a low frequency target word (e.g., [special characters omitted], means brief in English). The high frequency orthographic neighbor inhibition effect was supposed to be caused by lexical competition between prime and target words (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). Therefore, the observation of inhibition in Study 1 suggests that the prime words have word-level representations that compete with those of target words for lexical access. It is argued that the activated word-level lexical representation is likely to be orthographic representation, rather than phonological and semantic representations, because the influence of phonology was found to be limited in a follow-up experiment, and the semantic relatedness between the prime and target words was low. Furthermore, because the inhibition effects were stronger for semantically opaque than transparent compound words, it seems that opaque words are more likely than transparent words to be represented as unitary units.
The third study investigated whether or not the meaning of a component morpheme would be activated in the process of recognizing a Chinese two-character compound word. Current accounts of morphological processing disagree on whether morphological processing is form then meaning, or form with meaning (Feldman, O'Connor, & Del Prado Martin, 2009; Davis & Rastle, 2010). The focus of the debate is actually whether morpheme meaning activation occurs at early stage of compound word processing. This study attempted to contribute to that debate by trying to dissociate morphological processing of form and meaning. The method was to investigate masked priming effects produced by prime-target pairs that contained a pair of semantically related morphemes but without any overlap in orthography, phonology or whole-word meaning (e.g., [special characters omitted] /surprised in English/-[special characters omitted]/break one's promise in English/). Since there was no overlap between the prime and the target in form, any priming effects produced could be attributed unequivocally to activation of morpheme meaning (e.g., [special characters omitted], both means eat in English). The results of Study 3 show that morpheme meaning activation without form overlap occurred as early as the first 60ms of word processing. This finding is more consistent with the form-with-meaning than the form-then-meaning account.
This dissertation reports on three studies of the cognitive representations and processes in visual recognition of Chinese two-character compound words. Because Chinese two-character compound words are composed of two spatially separated characters which themselves are words, there has been a debate about whether these words are represented and processed in the mental lexicon as unitary wholes or as combinations of the component characters (Zhang & Peng, 1992; Taft & Zhu, 1995).
Zhang, Lingyan.
Advisers: Yujing Ni; Ling-po Shiu.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-07(E), Section: A.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-153).
Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Abstract also in Chinese; includes Chinese.

碩士
國立中正大學
心理學研究所
100
Abstract The present study investigated bilingual compound processing by examining the frequency effects of constituents and the semantic transparency effects of L1 and L2 compound words with lexical decision tasks. The semantic transparency and the word type of Chinese compound words were manipulated In Exp1. The results indicated a significant semantic transparency effect between the semantic transparent and opaque Chinese compound words with Chinese non-compound words were the most fast and accurate among all types of words. The frequencies of constituents in L1(Chinese) and L2(English) compound words are manipulated in Exp2. The results suggested a significant frequency effect of the second constituents in L2(English) compound words, but not in L1(Chinese). The semantic transparency and the lexical status of L1(Chinese) and L2(English) compound words are manipulated in Exp3. The results showed significant semantic transparency and lexical status effects. The present findings provided evidences for decompositions of both L1 and L2 compound words and supported the cross-language activation in bilingual mental lexicon.

碩士
國立高雄師範大學
華語文教學研究所
101
The purpose of this study is to investigate the structure of a word network consisting a collection of Chinese compound words with the same morpheme yī (yī+X and X+yī), in which any words are connected to each other by various kinds of semantic relevance. In the research process, firstly, the researcher summarized its meaning from two reliable Chinese dictionaries Hanyu Da Cidian and Chong Bian Guoyu Cidian, and used a concept map as a tool to show the systematic relations between the senses of yi. The cognitive linguistic theory was used to explain its semantic evolution and a sense network model of the polysemous word yī. Next, the researcher collected compound words yī+X and X+yī from Practical Audio-visual Chinese, Far East Everyday Chinese, Taiguoren Xue Hanyu. The number of words which occur in these Chinese books is 20. Word structure analysis and semantic transparency estimation are the ways to find out the relationships among yī, yī+X and X+yī is. The results show that the ambiguity of the individual word yī can be used in different contexts to express two or more different meanings. All of them are directly or indirectly derived from its original meaning. From a view of cognitive linguistics, we can see that the most striking types of semantic change is triggered by metaphor. In the course of metaphorical processes in which the source domain corresponds to the target domain, a mapping across different domains of yī has been developed along the following path, which is unidirectional: person (indicating the number of people) > object (indicating the number of things) > activity (indicating the frequency of actions) > space (indicating any actions in a short time) > time (indicating a very short time) > quality (indicating the same). It proceeds from left to right and can be defined in terms of metaphorical abstraction, where a given category is more abstract than any other category to its left and less abstract than anything to its right. After yī turning to be a morpheme of compound words yī+X and X+yī, the semantic changes can be classified into three types: (1) the word meaning the compound is transparent; that is, yī keeps its core meaning, such as yīxiē, yīyuè, wéiyī; (2) the word meaning is stressed on the second morpheme, and the meaning of yi turns to be opaque and merely emphasizes the whole word meaning, such as yīdìng, yīgòng, yīlián; (3) the two morphemes are combined to form a word compound and their meanings are extended to other meanings based on their similarity, which is known as metaphoric extension, and thus the compound meaning is completely different from the literal meaning, such as yīyàng, yīwèi, yīxiàng. Since the results of the study show that the structure of a word network of yī, yī+X and X+yī is quite similar to the cognitive structures, the researcher designs some teaching techniques based on human cognition and applies them to teaching Chinese lexicon for Thai students.

Text in Afrikaans
An account of certain functional aspects of Afrikaans exocentric compounds is presented in this dissertation. This study builds on the preliminary survey presented in the dissertation 'n Korpusanalise van Afrikaanse eksosentriese komposita (Van Niekerk, 2001). Exemplary material is obtained from an extensive corpus, consisting of lexicographical and academic matter, as well as colloquial spoken language. Language is man's primary means of communication, used to convey knowledge and information. Lexical items are used to name and refer to all kinds of concepts, aspects, objects, persons and other references. Of particular importance to this study, however, is the expressive functionality of language, whereby it is used as an instrument to voice affect, judgement, opinion, perception and other emotional aspects. Exocentric compounds are singled out as lexemes of particular importance, utilized by Afrikaans speakers/writers to express themselves referentially and emotionally. In this study the researcher has endeavored to describe and explain certain aspects of exocentric compounds in terms of the cognitive process of conceptual blending, as explained in The way we think by Fauconnier and Turner (2003). Exocentric compounding is highly functional with regard to etnobiological naming of botanic and zoological references, especially as bahuvrihi compounds. More prominent, however, is the use of compounds to voice a wide variety of expressive values and connotations, both positive and negative. Humor is constantly referred to as probably the most important function of exocentric compounds. Other expressive functional aspects of exocentric compounds are discussed, such as insult, scorn and ridicule in nicknames and slurs, the softening effect of euphemism in contrast to the intensifying effect of dysphemism, idiomaticity, irony, et cetera, some of these aspects overlapping significantly. Exocentric compounds are creatively used as highly descriptive expressions in the informal register of colloquial Afrikaans, as well as in different dialects and sociolinguistic varieties. Based on observations in connection with the diverse use and optimal functionality of exocentric compounds in domains of every possible kind, the conclusion is reached that exocentric compounds is an essential part of the Afrikaans lexicon.
Afrikaans & Theory of Literature
D.Litt. et Phil.(Afrikaans)

Text in Afrikaans
In hierdie verhandeling word 'n voorlopige bestekopname van Afrikaanse ekosentriese komposita aangebied. Die korpus waaruit voorbeeldmateriaal geput is, sluit leksikografiese en akademiese werke, asook die spreektaal in. Na aanleiding van 'n komparatiewe bespreking van morfologiese, kategoriale en semantiese onderskeidingskenmerke van ekso- en endosentriese komposita, word daar tot die gevolgtrekking gekom dat die onderskeid tussen eksosentriese en endosentriese lekseme noodsaaklik is. Eksosentriese komposita word deurgaans bespreek as 'n prototipiese kategorie, met kern- en randelemente. Anders as by endosentriese samestellings, ontbreek 'n hipnimie-relasie tussen prototipiese eksosentriese samestellings en enige van hul konstituente. Alhoewel eksosentriese komposita uiteraard dubbelsinnig en semanties ondeursigtig is, is die ondeursigtighied gradeerbaar, vanaf redelik deursigtig tot heeltemal ondeursigtig. 'n Inventaris word aangebied van eksosentriese samestellings, soos dit verdeel kan word in subgroepe op grond van ontstaanswyses, semantiese kenmerke en strukturele kenmerke van die woorde. Ten slotte word die verdere studie van funksionele aspekte van eksosentriese komposita in die vooruitsig gestel.
Afrikaans & Theory of Literature
M.A. (Afrikaans)