The thesis of this dissertation is that, in the New Testament Pauline letters, the article is used with a noun only if the writer assumes identifiability on the part of the reader, and does not wish to give prominence to the constituent concerned. Otherwise, the anarthrousness of a constituent that is assumed by the author to be known and…

The three structural possibilities marking a noun with an English article are "a," "the," and "Ø" (the absence of an article). Although these structural possibilities are simple, they encode a multitude of semantic and pragmatic functions, and it is these complex form-function interactions that this study explores and…

Russian legal-administrative documents from the early fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth century (Middle Russian) show extensive variation in expressing possessivity within the noun phrase. Possessor expressions can be conveyed by morphologically derived possessive adjectives, adnominal genitives, or by combinations of those constructions…

This dissertation examines the particle "ye" in the IV century BCE Chinese Guodian manuscripts by providing a synchronic analysis of its functions and a diachronic hypothesis relating all functions to focus marking. I have subdivided the around 600 occurrences of "ye" into four main functions: focus marker, topic marker, clause connection…

This study contributes an approach to understanding the cognitive models underlying rhetorical arguments about the "first wave" of women's rights discourse in the United States, which began to emerge more publically with the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and started to gain momentum in 1851 and beyond. The usage of the lexical item "sphere" (in…

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…