To investigate the influence of L2 proficiency and syntactic similarity on English passive sentence processing, the present ERP study asked 40 late Chinese-English bilinguals (27 females and 13 males, mean age = 23.88) with high or intermediate L2 proficiency to read the sentences carefully and to indicate for each sentence whether or not it was…

This research work aimed at making use of Machine Translation to help students avoid some syntactic, semantic and pragmatic common errors in translation from English into Arabic. Participants were a hundred and five freshmen who studied the "Translation Common Errors Remedial Program" prepared by the researchers. A testing kit that…

This dissertation explores the semantics and syntax of switch-reference (SR). It makes novel generalizations about the phenomenon based on two empirical sources: A broad, cross-linguistic survey of descriptive reports, and semantic fieldwork that narrowly targets the Kiowa language of Oklahoma. It shows that previous attempts at formalizing…

This dissertation presents a theory of grammatical aspect in which perfects and prospectives form a sub-group separate from perfectives and imperfectives. I claim that aspects in this sub-group display a number of similar semantic and syntactic behaviors because of the way in which they relate event and reference times. While perfectives and…

Work in theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that human linguistic knowledge forms a continuum between individual lexical items and abstract syntactic representations, with most linguistic representations falling between the two extremes and taking the form of lexical items stored together with the syntactic/semantic contexts in…

Many patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) are impaired in syntactic production. Because most previous studies of expressive syntax in PPA have relied on quantitative analysis of connected speech samples, which is a relatively unconstrained task, it is not well understood which specific syntactic structures are most challenging for these…

In order to interpret a sentence, hearers must often access information that is not explicitly stated, drawing on pragmatic knowledge and/or the discourse context. A problem with previous work on the acquisition of English focus particles such as "only," "also," "even," etc. is that it has often ignored such factors. Using a context-based…

Generative semantics is (or perhaps was) a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of George Lakoff, John R. Ross, Paul Postal and later McCawley. The approach developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid 1960s, but stood largely in opposition to work by Noam Chomsky and his students. The nature and genesis of…

This study aimed to discover semantic and syntactic problems Persian native speakers might have while reading English and Persian texts and different strategies they use to overcome those problems. To this end, a convenient sample of 40 intermediate students studying English Literature at Shiraz University was selected. Twenty of them were asked…

The study aims to investigate to what extent Chinese EFL learners' language use is influenced by English textbooks. Such influence may suggest the existence of lexical priming effects. Based on detailed and systematic analysis of a learner English corpus, in comparison with a textbook corpus, the present study revealed striking similarities of the…

Arithmetic word problem (AWP) solving is a highly demanding task for children with learning disabilities (LD) since verbal and mathematical information have to be integrated. This study examines specifically how syntactic awareness (SA), the ability to manage the grammatical structures of language, affects AWP solving. Three groups of children in…

Grammatical gender embedded in determiners, nouns and adjectives allows indirect and more rapid processing of the referents implied in sentences. However in a language such as Spanish, this useful information cannot be reliably retrieved from a single source of information. Instead, noun gender may be extracted either from phono-morphological,…

The study of definite descriptions has been a central part of research in linguistics and philosophy of language since Russell's seminal work "On Denoting" (Russell 1905). In that work Russell quickly dispatches analyses of denoting expressions with forms like "no man," "some man," "a man," and "every…

In this dissertation I provide a principled, unified account of modality and causation in Serbian dative anticausatives using a typological, cognitive approach. This analysis is set within a larger claim that the causative and modal meanings crosslinguistically arise in the same morphosyntactic environments, indicating a shared conceptual base…

Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reading comprehension difficulties, but the level of processing at which comprehension is most vulnerable and the influence of language phenotype on comprehension skill is currently unclear. We explored comprehension at sentence and passage levels across language phenotypes. Children with ASD…