In this dissertation I discuss several aspects of the syntax, semantics and discourse properties of what I call Spanish verbless clauses -i.e. non-finite utterances with clausal properties: Spanish PredNP "muy listo este tio" "very intelligent this guy", Spanish PP complement clause "me sorprende lo caro del piso" "it amazes me how expensive this…

Clause connectives are linguistic forms that convey relations between clauses in a sentence. They are typically compared, whether within a language or across languages, on the basis of a shared syntactic category, such as coordination and subordination, or a semantic one, such as sequence, cause, or addition. While the inadequacy of the…

Makary Kotoko (MK), a Central Chadic B language, is spoken in the north of Cameroon just south of Lake Chad. Published works on MK to date include about a dozen articles on different aspects of the grammar of the language, primarily by H. Tourneux. The present work, which is based on a substantial corpus of recorded texts, is a systematic…

This dissertation proposes a theory of categorial grammar called Multi-Modal Categorial Grammar with Structured Phonology. The central feature that distinguishes this theory from the majority of contemporary syntactic theories is that it decouples (without completely segregating) two aspects of syntax--hierarchical organization (reflecting…

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that…

Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this parallelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordination, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three…

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…

In 3 experiments, the author examined how readers' eye movements are influenced by joint manipulations of a word's frequency and the syntactic fit of the word in its context. In the critical conditions of the first 2 experiments, a high- or low-frequency verb was used to disambiguate a garden-path sentence, while in the last experiment, a high- or…

"Do so" anaphora is a fairly widely used in English, but has received relatively little treatment in the literature (especially when compared with verb phrase ellipsis). There are, however, two aspects of this anaphor that have gained prominence: (i) its use as a test for constituency within the verb phrase, and (ii) the semantic restriction it…

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…

The goal of this study was to explore the contribution that a dynamic usage based (DUB) perspective can bring to the establishment of objective measures to assess L2 learners' written texts and at the same time to gain insight into the dynamic process of language development. Four hundred and thirty seven texts written by Dutch learners of English…

Morphosyntactic skills in spontaneous and elicited production of a 7-year-old boy with specific language impairment (SLI) were examined and compared to those of younger, mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched, typically-developing children. This study focused on inflectional phrase structures as well as complex constructions in order to…

There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to distributional information at many grain-sizes. Much of this research has focused on the distributional properties of words, the units they consist of (morphemes, phonemes), and the syntactic structures they appear in (verb-categorization frames, syntactic constructions). In a series…

"The Style and Structure of 'Minnesang'" approaches a broad corpus of the medieval German love lyric from the perspective of historical phraseology and formulaicity. Overturning previous concerns of prosodic restriction in verse and the misapplication of contemporary notions of fixity, the dissertation provides an overview of…

This study presents a comparative analysis of the clausal architecture and sentential negation in East (Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian), West, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Upper and Lower Sorbian), and South (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Slovenian) languages. Using the Minimalist Program, I analyze the syntactic structure…