ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- Creators: Gelderen, Elly van
- Creators: Bansal, Ajay
Grammaticalization theory provides a framework for analyzing language change. This thesis uses the concepts relevant to grammaticalization theory in an examination of ‘only’ and ‘just’ to determine how changes in their usage conform to the theory. After an introduction providing a sampling of the myriad ways ‘only’ and ‘just’ are used in Modern English, I provide an overview of grammaticalization theory in Chapter 2. Included in this chapter are a history of the major concepts of grammaticalization theory, an explanation of the commonly-accepted parameters and tools used to test and demonstrate grammaticalization, and a brief discussion of current arguments against grammaticalization theory. Chapter 3 presents my analysis of ‘only’ and ‘just’. I show that ‘only’ has grammaticalized from an adjective to a more grammatical adjective, from an adjective to an adverb, and from an adjective to a complementizer. I then show that ‘just’ has grammaticalized from an adjective to a more grammatical adjective and from an adjective to an adverb. Although some proponents of grammaticalization theory question the grammaticalization pathways leading from adjective to adverb and from adjective to complementizer, I argue that in the cases of ‘only’ and ‘just’ these pathways do indeed exist. I use the Oxford English Dictionary and corpora to support and demonstrate the validity of my argument.
This thesis deals with evaluating the performance of Presto in processing big RDF data against Apache Hive. A comparative analysis was also conducted against 4store, a native RDF store. To evaluate the performance Presto for big RDF data processing, a map-reduce program and a compiler, based on Flex and Bison, were implemented. The map-reduce program loads RDF data into HDFS while the compiler translates SPARQL queries into a subset of SQL that Presto (and Hive) can understand. The evaluation was done on four and eight node Linux clusters installed on Microsoft Windows Azure platform with RDF datasets of size 10, 20, and 30 million triples. The results of the experiment show that Presto has a much higher performance than Hive can be used to process big RDF data. The thesis also proposes an architecture based on Presto, Presto-RDF, that can be used to process big RDF data.