Collins et al. 2008 offers a principles-and-parameters-based analysis of an AAVE construction first described in Spears 1998, in which nominal phrases such as "John's ass" appear to have exactly the same denotation, and behavior with respect to familiar conditions on anaphora, as the possessor ["John," and similarly for pronominal possessors.…

This study examines the effect of proficiency and similarity between the first and the second language on grammatical gender processing in L2. In three experiments, we manipulated gender agreement violations within the determiner phrase (DP), between the determiner and the noun (Experiment 1), the postposed adjective and the noun (Experiment 2)…

There is a considerable linguistic debate on whether phrasal verbs (e.g., "turn up," "break down") are processed as two separate words connected by a syntactic rule or whether they form a single lexical unit. Moreover, views differ on whether meaning (transparency vs. opacity) plays a role in determining their syntactically-connected or lexical…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

The primary goal of the present study is to gain more insight into the phenomena of Expletive Negation. Chapter 1 starts with the observed hallmark properties of EN and theoretical backgrounds. In chapter 2, I show the pragmatic contribution of two scalar meanings of undesirability and unlikelihood. It is further shown that the base of scale…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

This study tracks changes in three primary characteristics of Early New High German (ENHG) publications from 1499 to 1710: the complexity of the syntactic system of the language, the pictorial saturation of the publications, and the relationship between verbal text and illustrations on the ENHG printed page. Drawing on findings from literary…

One of the major innovations of the "TOEFL iBT"® test is the incorporation of integrated tasks complementing the independent tasks to which examinees respond. In addition, examinees must produce discourse in both modes (speech and writing). The validity argument for the TOEFL iBT includes the claim that examinees vary their discourse in…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

Educators continue to have difficulty reforming English curricula in ways that better serve the needs of second language learners. This difficulty is perpetuated, in part, by the inability to predict how such changes will affect morphosyntactic development. To date, ESL research has failed to effectively ascertain how multiple causes influence the…

Much recent work in natural language processing treats linguistic analysis as an inference problem over graphs. This development opens up useful connections between machine learning, graph theory, and linguistics. The first part of this dissertation formulates syntactic dependency parsing as a dynamic Markov random field with the novel…

Linguistic research on the Mayan languages up to the mid 1980s was almost exclusively descriptive in nature. At best, analyses were speculative and pre-theoretical. Since then, research based on contemporary theories of syntax have begun to emerge. In adopting the formal architecture of OT-LFG, I argue that my dissertation can be included amongst…

The focus of this dissertation considers a text-linguistic approach to Hebrew syntax as a viable and practical approach to the study of grammar and syntax. To achieve this goal it is necessary first to define and compare a text-linguistic model to that of the approach expressed by traditional Hebrew syntax. The second task applies a…

Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate whether there is a functional primacy of syntactic structure building over semantic processes during Chinese sentence reading. In both experiments, we found that semantic interpretation proceeded despite the impossibility of a well-formed syntactic analysis. In Experiment…