As the United States becomes ever more pluralistic and globalization makes the world more closely connected, it has never been more necessary to build an educational system that helps students grow into competent world citizens who can communicate effectively in languages other than English. Despite the growth of foreign language education in the…

This dissertation makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with an eye toward creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The aim of the present dissertation is to create a grammar library of information structure for the…

This dissertation investigates licensing conditions of dependent indefinite pronouns, such as negative concord items and pronouns that depend on the presence of a c-commanding quantifier. In Chapter 2, I examine freestanding negative concord items in Russian. I provide a novel empirical generalization that freestanding negative concord items…

Rhotics and laterals pattern together in a variety of ways that suggest that they form a phonological class (Walsh-Dickey 1997), yet capturing the relevant set of consonants and describing the behavior of its members has proven difficult under feature-based phonological theory (Wiese 2001). In this dissertation, I argue that an articulatory…