This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai…

This dissertation approaches the idea of lexical types such as word, clitic and affix from an oblique angle. Starting with Cardinaletti & Starke's (1999) diagnostics for the Weak Pronoun, I deconstruct the category of clitic, breaking it down into two binary qualities: the syntactic primitive of being linked to a head of a different basic…

Cognitive linguists claim that verb-particle constructions are compositional and analyzable, and that the particles contribute to the overall meaning in the form of image schemas. This article examined this claim with a behavioral experiment, in which participants were asked to judge the sensibility of short sentences primed by image-schematic…

We test the interpretation of pronominal forms in L2 speakers of English whose L1 is Spanish. Previous research on learners of nonnull subject languages has shown conflicting results. The aim of the present study is to reconcile previous evidence and shed light on the factors that determine learners' difficulty to interpret pronominal forms in the…

In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on…

This article looks into the theme--rheme pattern of presidential press conference that can be employed by speakers to organize the text in order to have a texture. Since a message should be conveyed in clause contextually and co-textually. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to analyze and describe the theme-rheme pattern employed in…

This dissertation first addresses various shortcomings in definitions of "applicative" when compared to what is actually found across languages. It then proposes a four-way distinction among applicative constructions, relevant at least to Bantu, a large family of languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa. Because of the gradual nature of…

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…

This study investigates the degree to which native-English-speaking learners of Spanish can generate expectations for information likely to occur in upcoming portions of an unfolding linguistic signal. We examine Spanish clitic left dislocation, a long-distance dependency between a topicalized object and an agreeing clitic, whose felicity depends…

Two experiments used eye-tracking during reading to investigate the role of the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of noun phrases (NPs) in the processing of complex sentences in Korean. To do so, the animacy of the first NP was varied in both experiments to manipulate the relative markedness of NPs. In addition, case markings of the…

Examining post-election statements made by UC System, UT-Austin, and UW-Madison executive leadership, this study employs word frequency, collocation, and a three-pronged latent semantic analysis to explicate the associative diction, major concepts, and institutional priorities expressed by said leadership to answer the research question,…

The ability to generate novel utterances compositionally using generative knowledge is a hallmark property of human language. At the same time, languages contain non-compositional or idiosyncratic items, such as irregular verbs, idioms, etc. This dissertation asks how and why language achieves a balance between these two systems--generative and…

This study aims at describing the functions of passive voice and how authors reflect their stance through those functions in Turkish academic discourse. Depending on the findings of a corpus based research, this study makes a counterpoint to functionalist views on the ground that passivization does not necessarily result in promoting agents in…

This research examines the interpersonal meaning in Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY)'s speech. This is based on the details of speech or writing to define an investigation. The object of this research is the used moods and modality types in interpersonal meaning of SBY's speech under the title "Toward Harmony among Civilizations" by Dr.…

We report the results from two experiments examining native and non-native German speakers' sensitivity to crossover constraints on pronoun resolution. Our critical stimuli sentences contained personal pronouns in either strong (SCO) or weak crossover (WCO) configurations. Using eye-movement monitoring during reading and a gender-mismatch…