Conditionals, or if-then sentences, form a crucial ingredient of everyday reasoning and argumentation, as they enable us to express our thoughts about possible states of the world. They are used in... Show moreConditionals, or if-then sentences, form a crucial ingredient of everyday reasoning and argumentation, as they enable us to express our thoughts about possible states of the world. They are used in very different ways, and the main aim of this dissertation is to investigate to what extent these different uses of conditionals are connected to one another and to their grammatical features.The first part of this dissertation presents an analysis of conditionals in terms of implicatures of 'unassertiveness' and 'connectedness'. Insights from semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and neighbouring fields are combined. In the second part, the analysis is tested on a corpus of spoken and written Dutch discourse. To investigate the relation between the meaning and grammar of conditionals, several cluster analyses are conducted. The results show that grammatical features such as verb tense and modal marking do not, or only weakly, license generalised implicatures of unassertiveness and connectedness. This outcome sheds light on difficulties in applying general categories of conditionals to language use data, and it suggests that the fundamentals of categorising conditional constructions need revision.The dissertation shows the benefits of combining semantic and pragmatic analyses of conditionals. It provides an extensive discussion of classifications of conditionals, an overview of the grammatical features of Dutch conditionals, and it presents cluster analyses using state-of-the-art machine-learning techniques. The study should therefore be of interest to anyone concerned with the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of conditionals, and to anyone working on Dutch grammar, corpus linguistics, theories of argumentation, and the interface between semantics and pragmatics. Show less
This study of an indigenous community combines the use of archival documents with evidence from archaeological excavations to offer an anthropological analysis, drawing on the concepts of... Show moreThis study of an indigenous community combines the use of archival documents with evidence from archaeological excavations to offer an anthropological analysis, drawing on the concepts of dialogics, doxa, and practice to show how we can understand historically obscured people and histories. A network of pueblos de indios integrated themselves in colonial society in Honduras through service in a coastal watch, while resisting exploitation beyond the legal requirements of encomienda. The circulation of people between towns as spouses allowed for the sharing of colonial experiences and tactics of persistence. This network perpetuated indigenous practices, including the cultivation, circulation, and use of cacao, likely for ritual, and the use of chipped stone tools. Masca, later known as Candelaria, was one such indigenous town located in the district of San Pedro Sula. Its people identified as a community defined by the presence of their houses, church, agricultural fields, and cacao plantations. The community used a variety of techniques to persist under colonization until the nineteenth century. These included exploiting the colonial legal system, the continued use of indigenous family name by community elites, moving the entire community to avoid violence, and exploiting the casta system to change the perceived identity of individuals. Show less
Today, many deaf children can be given access to oral language thanks to a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound thanks to electric stimulation... Show moreToday, many deaf children can be given access to oral language thanks to a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound thanks to electric stimulation of the auditory nerve. In this study, the acquisition of personal pronouns is considered to be a measure for the effectiveness of cochlear implantation in congenitally deaf children. Pronouns are morphemes with low perceptual prominence. They are semantically complex and lack morphophonological regularity. Building on these insights, the acquisition of pronouns is quite a challenge for hearing-impaired children. The goal of this study is to examine whether a cochlear implant provides deaf children with sufficient auditory input to acquire low salient and complex functional items like personal pronouns and to compare the results to those obtained in hearing peers. Different developmental steps in pronoun acquisition have been examined including the building of the pronominal paradigm and its morphological attributes and the acquisition of co-referring and binding relations between pronouns and their antecedents. The results show that although cochlear-implanted children start out with a delay in the acquisition of pronouns, they are able to partially catch up with their hearing peers during the later stages. By the age of seven, most cochlear-implanted children have attained a target production and comprehension of pronouns. Based on these results, cochlear implantation below 24 months may be considered to be an effective way to provide pre-lingual deaf children with the necessary sensory input to acquire pronouns despite their initial deprivation of spoken language input. Show less
