Understanding verbs typically activates posterior temporal regions and, in some circumstances, motion perception area V5. However, the nature and role of this activation remains unclear: does language alone indeed activate V5? And are posterior temporal representations modality-specific motion representations, or supra-modal motion-independent…

Cloud computing paradigm has gained tremendous momentum and generated intensive interest. Although security issues are delaying its fast adoption, cloud computing is an unstoppable force and we need to provide security mechanisms to ensure its secure adoption. In this dissertation, we mainly focus on issues related to policy management and access…

This dissertation explores, analyzes, and compares the usage of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms will be considered as well as their locative and temporal uses. I observe that in both languages the demonstratives can be used to refer to referents. However, they depart from the common assumption that…

Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle & Marantz 1993; Marantz 1997) is founded on the premise that the syntax is the only computational component of the grammar. Much research focuses on how this premise is relevant to the syntax-morphology interface in DM. In this dissertation, I examine theory-internal issues related to the syntax-semantics…

Classifier languages are often described as lacking genuine number morphology and treating all common nouns, including those conceptually count, as an unindividuated mass. This study argues that neither of these popular assumptions is true, and presents new generalizations and analyses gained by abandoning them. I claim that no difference exists…

The current study compares the productivity (number of responses) and the typical responses to taxonomic and slot-filler prompts in 39 African American children from low-income backgrounds and a diverse group of 21 children from middle-income backgrounds. The authors tested the hypothesis that socioeconomic status would exert a global influence on…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of part-whole (e.g., "car-motor") and functional associations (e.g., "car-garage") on single word (Experiment 1) and sentence production (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, a classical picture-word task was used. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli and distractors were embedded into a sentence.…

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment…

In this dissertation, I aim to provide a theory on the distribution of structural Case in Korean. I propose the following Structural Case Assignment Hypothesis (SCAH) regarding the assignment of structural Case: "Structural Case is assigned by phase heads (C: nominative; v: accusative) to every argument in the c-command domain of the phase…

The Dublin Core "1:1 Principle" asserts that "related but conceptually different entities, for example a painting and a digital image of the painting, are described by separate metadata records" (Woodley et al., 2005). While this seems to be a simple requirement, studies of metadata quality have found that cultural heritage…

This dissertation attempts to unify two reductionist hypotheses: that there is no relational difference between specifiers and complements, and that verbs do not have thematic arguments. I argue that these two hypotheses actually bear on each other and that we get a better theory if we pursue both of them. The thesis is centered around the…

This dissertation will show how linguistic description and an Autolexical account of the bound verb root [take] shed a light on the nature of complex verb constructions in American Sign Language (ASL). This is accomplished by creating a new ASL Verb Complex Model unifying all verbs into one category of VERB. This model also accounts for a variety…

Ample evidence exists to support the conclusion that enterprise search is failing its users. This failure is costing corporate America billions of dollars every year. Most enterprise search engines are built using web search engines as their foundations. These search engines are optimized for web use and are inadequate when used inside the…

This dissertation examines the cross-linguistic behavior of Thematic Resultative Expressions in English and Japanese from the viewpoint of syntax-semantics mappings of event aspects, and discusses the source of some of their well-recognized syntactic and syntactico-semantic properties. Thematic Resultative Expressions (e.g. "John smashed the…

The main goal of this dissertation is to consider the different types of indefinites in Russian as a system and provide a semantic account for each of them that would be able to naturally explain their distribution. The four sets of so-called 'indefinite pronouns' ("-to," "-nibud'," "-libo," and…