This dissertation investigates Control phenomena in three distinct domains of the grammar of Modem Greek (subjunctive complements, "V-ondas" adjuncts and ke-complements) and proposes a unifying syntactic account of Control by appealing to the tense properties of these domains. I argue that Control in Greek is best analyzed as an instance of…

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…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are effective tools for education. However, developing them is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process. A major share of the effort is devoted to acquiring the domain knowledge that underlies the system's intelligence. The goal of this research is to reduce this knowledge acquisition bottleneck and better…

Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even…

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral" + "classifier" + "object noun," the object noun is constrained by selectional…

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays a critical role in semantic and syntactic aspects of speech comprehension. It appears to be recruited when listeners are required to select the appropriate meaning or syntactic role for words within a sentence. However, this region is also recruited during tasks not…

This paper reports on the oral reading of five grade 2 to 6 isiXhosa (L1) speakers reading isiXhosa (L1) and English (L2) texts. It examines the readers' oral reading miscues (or errors) to understand the extent to which these miscues constitute a language or a literacy problem in this group of readers. Conclusions are that (a) these readers read…

This paper reports a longitudinal investigation into the productive vocabulary development in the written Chinese of the Cantonese-speaking elementary children in Hong Kong. Data gathering took place using two vocabulary tests which selected prescriptive vocabulary from the textbooks and the 2007 Vocabulary List. The two assessment tests also…

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…

We report on the case of an elderly bilingual woman presenting with a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia. The participant's native language was Friulian (L1), a predominantly oral Romance language, and her second language was Italian (L2), formally learned at primary school in oral and written forms. We investigated her linguistic abilities…

I describe the results of an experiment that bears on how children learn the lexical and syntactic properties of abstract verbs ("seem," "try") in order to distinguish the subclasses of raising ("seem") and control verbs ("try"). Previous research suggested that an inanimate subject in certain contexts leads children to suppose that the subject…

We use the variationist method to elucidate the expression of future time in English, examining multiple grammaticalization in the same domain ("will" and "going to"). Usage patterns show that the choice of form is not determined by invariant semantic readings such as proximity, certainty, willingness, or intention. Rather, particular instances of…

This paper describes a study in which Systemic Functional Linguistics was applied to describe how people who stutter use language. The aim of the study was to determine and describe any differences in language use between a group of 10 adults who stutter and 10 matched normally-fluent speakers. In addition to formal linguistic analyses, analyses…

How long does it take the human mind to grasp the idea when hearing or reading a sentence? Neurophysiological methods looking directly at the time course of brain activity indexes of comprehension are critical for finding the answer to this question. As the dominant cognitive approaches, models of serial/cascaded and parallel processing, make…

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…