Examining grammatically idiosyncratic English expressions often helps reveal not only to ESL (English as a second language) teachers and learners but also to experts on English how intricately language is composed. This paper aims to expound one such idiomatic expression of the "try and V" construction by exploring the phenomenon from diverse…

The purpose of this dissertation is to reconsider reflexives in Japanese through the following three steps: (a) separation of genuine reflexive elements from elements that are confounded as reflexives, (b) classification of reflexive anaphors into subtypes based on their semantic difference, and (c) classification of predicates that occur with…

This work investigates the differences between two widespread types of causative constructions: the so called lexical causative as in Gianna opened the door or the corresponding Italian sentence Gianna ha aperto la porta, and the periphrastic causative, as in the Italian Gianna ha fatto aprire la porta (Gianna had the door opened/made the door…

Although standard exclamatives have been studied for the last thirty years, (as far as I know) rhetorical exclamatives have not been studied at all in any language, (as far as I know). The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the systematic internal characterization of rhetorical exclamatives in Spanish, from a syntactic, semantic and…

Electrophysiological studies investigating similarities between music and language perception have relied exclusively on the signal averaging technique, which does not adequately represent oscillatory aspects of electrical brain activity that are relevant for higher cognition. The current study investigated the patterns of brain oscillations…

The present study examines and compares the extent to which advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish heritage speakers acquire the syntactic and semantic properties that regulate the grammatical representation of double complementizer questions in Spanish, a CP-related structure not present in English. Results from an aural sentence completion…

Purpose: The existing literature on language outcomes in children born prematurely focuses almost exclusively on standardized test scores rather than discourse-level abilities. The authors of this study looked longitudinally at school-age language outcomes and potential moderating variables for a group of twins born prematurely versus a control…

In an effort to document demographic changes in the academic linguistics community, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has commissioned an annual report detailing information about job titles, students, degrees awarded, average salaries, and more. The report offers information about trends in student enrollment and employment by industry.…

Our communication process is composed of the flow of information between interlocutors. It is well known that the information is not always delivered in explicit ways or merely by literal meanings. In addition to the literal meanings of the lexical items and their combination into utterances, both speakers and listeners calculate pragmatic factors…

This study analyzes the complex predicates in Bangla (Bengali); serial verb constructions (SVCs) and verb compounds (VCs). Based on semantics, syntactic behavior and prosody, I claim that the predicates belong to two different modules of grammar: SVCs in syntax and VCs in the lexicon. Additionally, I show that clausal tense marked in the last verb…

Extracting and representing semantic information from large scale corpora is at the crux of computer-assisted knowledge generation. Semantic information depends on collocation extraction methods, mathematical models used to represent distributional information, and weighting functions which transform the space. This dissertation provides a…

This study investigates the licensing conditions on Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in Jordanian Arabic (JA). JA exhibits both types of NSIs that are discussed in the literature: Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) and Negative Concord Items (NCIs). Although these two sets of items seem to form a natural class in the sense that they show certain…

Since 1980, the number of people in the United States who speak a language other than English at home has increased by 140% (United States Census Bureau, 2010). Therefore a greater percentage of students now are multilingual. Throughout the world, multilingualism is considered the norm and monolingualism is the exception (Auer & Wei, 2008). In…

This study investigates how syntactic and semantic load factors impact sentence comprehension and BOLD signal under moderate hypoglycemia. A dual session, whole brain fMRI study was conducted on 16 healthy participants using the glucose clamp technique. In one session, they experienced insulin-induced hypoglycemia (plasma glucose at [image…

Recent ERP studies report that implausible verb-argument combinations can elicit a centro-parietal P600 effect (e.g., "The hearty meal was devouring..."; Kim & Osterhout, 2005). Such eliciting conditions do not involve outright syntactic anomaly, deviating from previous reports of P600. Kim and Osterhout (2005) attributed such P600 effects to…