VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The syntax and semantics of tense-aspect stem participles in early Ṛgvedic Sanskrit

In this thesis I investigate the syntax and semantics of tense-aspect stem participles in the Ṛgveda, focusing primarily on the data from the earlier books II–VII and IX, seeking to establish a comprehensive and coherent analysis of this category within the linguistic system of Ṛgvedic Sanskrit. In recent literature tense-aspect stem participles are usually treated as semantically equivalent to finite verbs wherever possible, but contradictorily where they differ from finite verbs their adjectival nature is emphasized. I argue that tense-aspect stem participles are a fundamentally verbal formation and can be treated as inflectional verb forms: they are adjectival verbs rather than verbal adjectives. At the same time, however, they constitute an independent sub-category of verb form which is not necessarily semantically dependent on corresponding finite stems.
I examine the syntactic and semantic properties of tense-aspect stem participles both in relation to finite verbal forms and their wider syntactic context, formalizing the evidence in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Consequently I am able to categorize the syntactic and semantic deviations which many participles exhibit in comparison to finite verbal forms. I contend that many such forms cannot be treated synchronically (and sometimes diachronically) as participles, but form distinct synchronic categories. My analysis permits a considerably more refined definition of the category of tense-aspect stem participles, dependent on clear morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria, as opposed to the usual, purely morphological, definition.
From a diachronic perspective I argue that the category of tense-aspect stem participles as found in the Ṛgveda more closely reflects an inherited Proto-Indo-European category of tense-aspect stem participles than is usually assumed. I also reconsider theoretical treatments of participial syntax and semantics, and develop a more precise typology of non-finite verb systems which adequately accounts for Sanskrit participles.

Keywords: participles
Sanskrit
lexical-functional grammar
syntax
semantics
Advisor: Willi, A
Tucker, E
Milton and material culture

In contradistinction to critical trends which have rendered Milton’s thought disembodied, this thesis studies how seventeenth-century material culture informed Milton’s poetry and prose at the epistemic level and by suggesting a palette of forms for literary play.
The first chapter explores the early modern culture of fruit. At the epistemic level, practices of fruit cultivation and consumption inform Milton’s imagination and his vocabulary, thereby connecting their historic-material lives with their symbolic ones. Milton further turns commonplace gestures of fruit consumption into narrative devices that frame discussions of agency, aspiration, sinful and right practice.
The second chapter examines two floral catalogues to discover how they find shape through the epistemologies of flowers, ceremony, and decorative arts. Here material culture shapes literary convention, as one catalogue is found to secret ceremonial consolation in its natural ingenuousness, while the other’s delight in human physicality upsets the distinctions between inner virtue and outer ornament, faith and rite.
In the third chapter, urban epistemologies of light, darkness, movement, and space are examined through urban phenomena: skyline, suburbs, highways, theft, and waterways. By interpellating contemporary debates, these categories anatomise fallen character, intent, action, and their consequences. Milton’s instinctive distaste for urban nuisances is interesting in this Republican figure and is subversive of some ideologies of the text.
Discursive and material aspects meet again in the fourth chapter in a discussion of his graphic presentations of geography on the page. Usually prone to analyses of textual knowledge, they are also informed by the embodiment of knowledge as material object. Milton’s search for a fitting cartographic aesthetic for the Biblical narrative and for the rhetoric of his characters leads him to an increasing consciousness of the ideologies energising these material forms.
The fifth chapter explores Milton’s engagement with forms of armour and weapons. Military preferences for speed and mobility over armour help Milton explore the difference between unfallen and fallen being. Milton also uses his inescapably proleptic knowledge of arms and armour as a field of imaginative play for representations that are both anachronistic and typological. These lead to a discussion of imitation in the mythic imagination.
In each of these studies, we witness Milton’s consciousness of his temporal and proleptic location, and his attempts to marry the temporal and the pan- or atemporal. In the conclusion I suggest that Milton’s simultaneous courting of the atemporal while he is drawn to or draws on temporal material culture imply an incarnational aesthetic.

Keywords: early modern literature
biblical narratives
early modern England
Milton
material culture
Advisor: Purkiss, D
A dislocation model of plasticity with particular application to fatigue crack closure

The ability to predict fatigue crack growth rates is essential in safety critical systems. The discovery of fatigue crack closure in 1970 caused a flourish of research in attempts to simulate this behaviour, which crucially affects crack growth rates. Historically, crack tip plasticity models have been based on one-dimensional rays of plasticity emanating from the crack tip, either co-linear with the crack (for the case of plane stress), or at a chosen angle in the plane of analysis (for plane strain). In this thesis, one such model for plane stress, developed to predict fatigue crack closure, has been refined. It is applied to a study of the relationship between the apparent stress intensity range (easily calculated using linear elastic fracture mechanics), and the true stress intensity range, which includes the effects of plasticity induced fatigue crack closure. Results are presented for all load cases for a finite crack in an infinite plane, and a method is demonstrated which allows the calculation of the true stress intensity range for a growing crack, based only on the apparent stress intensity range for a static crack.
Although the yield criterion is satisfied along the plastic ray, these one-dimensional plasticity models violate the yield criterion in the area immediately surrounding the plasticity ray. An area plasticity model is therefore required in order to model the plasticity more accurately. This thesis develops such a model by distributing dislocations over an area. Use of the model reveals that current methods for incremental plasticity algorithms using distributed dislocations produce an over-constrained system, due to misleading assumptions concerning the normality condition. A method is presented which allows the system an extra degree of freedom; this requires the introduction of a parameter, derived using the Prandtl-Reuss flow rule, which relates the magnitude of slip on complementary shear planes. The method is applied to two problems, confirming its validity.

Keywords: plasticity models
fatigue
stress intensity
area plasticity model
dislocation theory
McKellar beta parameter
Prandtl-Reuss flow rule
crack growth
complementary shear planes
slip planes
plasticity induced fatigue crack closure
Advisor: Hills, D
Sackfield, T
Cultural politics of user-generated encyclopaedias: comparing Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike

The question of how the Internet affects existing geo-cultural or geo-linguistic communities in relation to nation-states has continued to receive attention among academics and policymakers alike. Language-based technologies and services that aggregate, index, and distribute materials online may reshape pre-existing boundaries of the relationship between users and content, for instance with different language versions of user-generated encyclopaedias or different local versions of search engines. By comparing two major Chinese online encyclopaedias, Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia, this thesis investigates whether the Internet overcomes, shifts, or reinforces boundaries among Chinese language users. The Chinese language provides an excellent case for examining the boundary question. While the Internet can potentially connect the largest number of native speakers around the world, the majority (i.e. those from mainland China) face an Internet censorship and filtering regime that may limit this very potential. Modern Chinese history has also complicated the cultural-political boundaries among the regions of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
This thesis compares the conditions and outcomes of their respective editorial processes, content features, and users’ reception. Multiple findings emerge from a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including content analysis, webometrics, and search engine result visibility tests. These methods show that boundaries are drawn in the process of creating, linking, and searching content on the Chinese Internet. Their geolinguistic extent differs, a phenomenon that reflects the cultural-political division between mainland China and the rest of Chinese-speaking world. Both the findings and methods of the thesis have important implications for research and policy for understanding the globalizing regionalization and nationalization effects of the Internet.

Keywords: online encyclopaedias; social media; user-generated content; China
Advisor: Schroeder, R
Gender mainstreaming in development organisations: policy, practice and institutional change.

‘Gender and Development’ (GAD) is currently seen as the dominant theoretical model within international development for promoting social justice and equality for women. As a consequence, many development organisations are undertaking gender mainstreaming. The most interesting fact about the vast number of analyses about gender mainstreaming is the consistency with which they tell of GAD influenced policies failing to implement GAD approaches in practice. This should raise suspicion rather than simple condemnation. It is time to ask: ‘How are, often very progressive, gender policies and strategies consistently silenced across the range of organisational contexts?’ This thesis focuses upon the contemporary process of gender mainstreaming in development organisations – a term that specifically refers to a ‘process of organisational change’ that aims to explicitly develop the ‘use of GAD approaches within all projects and programmes’ of development institutions in order to achieve ‘a vision of development that creates gender equitable social change’ in society. Moreover, it takes an approach that specifically details the ‘organisational process’ element of change inferred in the term. As such, this thesis uses the literature of organisational culture as a lens to make previously unnoticed and submerged sites of conflict and acts of resistance visible, allowing an understanding to be gained of how gender mainstreaming has so consistently faced a policy-practice impasse. It develops this analysis using an in-depth case study of Oxfam GB and demonstrates that the process of gender mainstreaming in the organisation has resulted in the removal of ‘responsibility for’ implementing GAD approaches among staff in the organisation. It goes on to highlight that the unwillingness of development organisations and practitioners to recognise gender mainstreaming as an explicitly feminist and political process of change directly couched at the level of the organisation and not just at the level of the actual development project (or society more widely) has resulted in the ‘process of organisational change’ becoming rationalised and technical rather than personal and politically charged. In reaching this understanding of gender mainstreaming, the thesis develops an awareness of organisational change processes and highlights that ‘norms’ and ‘values’ in organisations are often confused. This confusion has led to an ineffective process of change in institutions as well as a poor conceptualisation and practice of gender mainstreaming in international development.
Towards a new literary idiom

This thesis has its starting-point in a recognition that, so far, Maurice Blanchot's work has been considered as posing its critic an impossible problem. In recognising this, however, it does not seek merely to provide advance justification for its own shortcomings. On the contrary, it sets out to demonstrate that the impossibility of accounting for Blanchot's work arises not simply because he is a 'difficult' author, but because his sole ambition has been to call into question the entire categoric framework of possibility in terms of which we seek to approach him.
The task it seeks to fulfil is thus to locate the gradually occurring break with traditional categories which is at the heart of Blanchot's work. On the basis of close attention to the variants between his finished works and the original texts which constitute them, it seeks to transform his work from the forbidding, self-sufficient universe it is generally taken to be, and, by replacing Blanchot in his neriod, to show how he brings about a gradually evolving transmutation of the forms and structures within which literature is traditionally contained.
The period it examines lies between the appearance of Thomas l'obscure in 1941 and that of L'Espace littéraire in 1955. More precisely, by detailed study of L'Arrêt de mort and of the development of his criticism from La Part du feu to L'Espace littéraire, it seeks to reveal how, in the domain of fiction and in that of criticism, Blanchot sets about subverting the very structure of language, preparing the way for the new literary idiom which is his today, and in which fiction and theory coexist in a single philosophical discourse of great originality.
The response of submerged structures to underwater blast

The response of submerged structures subject to loading by underwater blast waves is governed by complex interactions between the moving or deforming structure and the surrounding fluid and these phenomena need to be thoroughly understood in order to design structural components against underwater blast.
This thesis has addressed the response of simple structural systems to blast loading in shallow or deep water environment. Analytical models have been developed to examine the one-dimensional response of both water-backed and air-backed submerged rigid plates, supported by linear springs and loaded by underwater shock waves. Cavitation phenomena as well as the effect of initial static fluid pressure are explicitly included in the models and their predictions were found in excellent agreement with detailed FE simulations.
Then, a novel experimental apparatus has been developed, to reproduce controlled blast loading in initially pressurised liquids. It consists of a transparent water shock tube and allows observing the structural response as well as the propagation of cavitation fronts initiated by fluid-structure interaction in a blast event. This experimental technique was then employed to explore the one-dimensional response of monolithic plates, sandwich panels and double-walled structures subject to loading by underwater shock waves. The performed experiments provide great visual insight into the cavitation process and the experimental measurements were found to be in good agreement with analytical predictions and dynamic FE results.
Finally, underwater blast loading of circular elastic plates has been investigated by theoretically modelling the main phenomena of dynamic plate deformation and fluid-structure interaction. In addition, underwater shock experiments have been performed on circular composite plates and the obtained measurements were found in good correlation with the corresponding analytical predictions. The validated analytical models were then used to determine the optimal designs of circular elastic plates which maximise the resistance to underwater blast.

Keywords: sandwich plate
fluid-structure interaction
shock waves
dynamic loading
underwater blast
blast mitigation
finite elements
blast loading
shock tube
cavitation
Advisor: Tagarielli, V
Petrinic, N
Haematopoietic stem/progenitor cell interactions with the bone marrow vascular niche

Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is used as a source of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) for transplantation but shows defective homing to the bone marrow niche and delayed haematological reconstitution. Following transplantation, HSCs will home to the bone marrow in response to the CXCL12 chemokine, adhere to the bone marrow sinusoidal endothelial cells and then migrate into and lodge in bone marrow niches. In addition to CXCR4, a variety of molecules have been described as being important in these processes. In this laboratory, junctional adhesion molecule-A (JAM-A) was shown to be expressed on human UCB CD133⁺/CD34⁺ cells and regulated by hypoxia. In this thesis, further phenotypic studies show that this molecule is most highly expressed on human CD41a⁺ megakaryocytes and CD14⁺ monocytes/macrophages in UCB. JAM-A was also found to be expressed on all human UCB CD133⁺ cells, which have been shown by others to encompass the HSCs and early myeloid-lymphoid precursors and on the majority of CD34⁺ haematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs). While it is also present on bone marrow sinusoidal endothelium (BMEC), JAM-A is not detected on cultured bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs). JAM-A blockade, silencing and overexpression experiments showed that JAM-A contributes to, but is not solely responsible for, the adhesion of CD34⁺ haematopoietic progenitor cells to IL-1β activated BMEC-60 cells and fibronectin. Lack of significance in cell migration suggested that JAM-A is more likely to act as an adhesion molecule or a regulator of adhesion rather than as a migratory molecule in such cells. Further functional studies using the proximity ligation assay highlight a potential association of JAM-A with CXCR4 and the adhesion molecules, tetraspanin CD82 and integrin β1. Mechanistic studies were commenced to establish if JAMA could modulate CXCR4 signalling following CXCL12 stimulation, but time constraints prevented these from being completed. These preliminary experiments which were carried out first in the Jurkat cell line lacking JAM-A or transduced to express JAM-A, however, suggest that JAM-A may modulate CXCL12-induced Rap1 phosphorylation and ERK1/2 phosphorylation. The former pathway is important for integrin function and the latter pathway is important in cell adhesion. The results described here, although requiring finalisation, support the hypothesis that JAM-A acts as an adhesion molecule and also may fine tune CXCR4 and integrin mediated functions on human CD34⁺ cells, thereby potentially regulating engraftment of these cells to the bone marrow niche.

Keywords: Leukaemia
umbilical cord blood transplantation
CXCL12 umbilical cord blood
migration
junctional adhesion molecule-A
haematopoietic stem/ progenitor cells
Chemokine (C-X-C motif) receptor 4
CXCR4
adhesion
bone marrow vascular niche
JAM-A
Chemokine (C-X-C motif) ligand 12
Advisor: Watt, S
Hale, S
Experimental pancreatic islet treansplantation

Two major problems preventing the clinical application of pancreatic islet transplantation were investigated. The problem of allograft rejection was studied in rats, made diabetic by streptozotocin treatment. It was shown that DA rats given LEW renal allografts and treated with cyclosporine accepted their grafts, and subsequently developed a strain-specific unresponsive state that allowed successful transplantation of LEW islets without further immunosuppression, whilst BN islets were rejected normally. The effect was demonstrated to be independent of the site of islet transplantation, and, once an islet allograft had been accepted, it was possible to remove the original renal allograft without affecting the transplanted islets. The effect was shown to apply to another strain combination (LEW into PVG), and also to animals made unresponsive to renal allografts by another method (donor-specific blood transfusion).
The problem of separation of adequate numbers of viable islets from the pancreas was studied in the rat, dog, pig and human. To aid the investigation, supravital staining techniques were developed, using neutral red to identify the islets, and fluorescein diacetate and ethidium bromide to assess islet viability. A variety of islet isolation techniques were investigated, and a new technique for isolation of islets from the dog pancreas, yielding up to 160,000 islets from 1 pancreas with a maximum purity of 80%, was developed. The structural integrity and in vitro function of the isolated islets was demonstrated, but it was not possible to prevent diabetes by autotransplantation of islets to the portal vein of pancreatectomised dogs.
A method for isolation of islets from the human pancreas was developed from that used in the dog, yielding up to 80,000 islets from a whole pancreas, with a maximum purity of 40%. The technique was shown to be both simple and reliable. The structural integrity and in vitro function of the isolated islets was demonstrated, and the viability of the islets proven by successful transplantation under the kidney capsule of nude mice.

Advisor: Morris, P
Censorship and society in Munich, 1890-1914

The present study began as an attempt to discover what mechanisms existed in Wilhelmine Germany to prevent the expression of radical views about politics and society by artists, writers and journalists. As the work progressed, it became clear that, because of the federal structure of the Reich, conditions varied considerably in different parts of the country} and that it would be both more practicable and more interesting to limit the investigation to a single city, Munich, which had a very active avant-garde, and where the strength of political clericalism made the debate about freedom of expression particularly fierce. Contemporary discussion centred mainly on two distinct, though related, topics: freedom of the press and freedom of the stage; and the sources available made it seem desirable, in addition to outlining the general legal background, to construct two detailed case-studies in order to investigate them. The choice of the satirical paper Simplicissimus on the one hand, and Frank Weedekind's plays on the other, soon proved to have been very appropriate.
The history of Simplicissimus is interesting for three main reasons. In the first place, it sheds light on nearly all the major legal and practical issues connected with the liberty of the press in this period. Secondly, although Simplicissimus won a European reputation for its skilful satirical treatment of German and international affairs, the men who produced it were closely Identified with a particular community; and they commented acutely on events in Bavaria which had considerable bearing on Munich intellectuals' freedom to express themselves. Finally, a wealth of private and official documents makes it possible to study the relationship between an original and sometimes highly provocative paper and the state in exceptional detail.
The case of Frank Wedekind forms an ideal counterpart to that of Simplicissimus. The authorities had much more power to control the theatre - which was regarded by many people ae an important channel of communication. than to control the press, and Wedekind's frequent and very well documented conflicts with the Munich censor reveal the weakness of a playwright's position compared with that of a journalist. Furthermore, Wedekind was for a time one of Simplicissimus' most 'subversive' collaborators; he was one of the acknowledged leaders of the Munich avant-garde. which was subjected to bitter attacks by Bavarian conservatives; and the nature of his plays meant that he became involved in the debate about pornography and low-grade literature which went on throughout the period.
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