How can syntactic and learnability analyses inform each other, and thus deepen our understanding of syntax and its acquisition? This dissertation illuminates this question through three case studies in Korean syntax. I examine cases in which two structures that display distinct syntactic properties share extremely similar surface forms, thus…

In this dissertation I investigate the Mandarin "you"-existential sentence. My focus is on its syntax. I also discuss in less detail some semantic peculiarity of the "you"-existential. I begin my investigation of the syntax of "you"-existentials by first looking into what they are not. To this end, I present five…

Acquisition of the perfective marker "-le" in Mandarin Chinese is a daunting task for second language learners. To date, there has been no consensus on what it is about "-le" that makes it such a challenge to learners. This study investigates the acquisition of "-le" from both a lexical perspective and a discourse…

This dissertation interrogates the representation of syntactic locality constraints, specifically intervention locality, within child grammar. Our focal point is the Intervention Hypothesis, which suggests that children are governed by a strict version of featural Relativized Minimality, leading to comprehension difficulties when partial featural…

The current study investigates the expression of progressive and habitual aspect in second language Spanish, integrating theoretical insights from usage-based and concept-oriented approaches to second language acquisition, along with quantitative sociolinguistic methods. To address the full breadth of forms involved, the study examines variation…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

The objective of this research is to build automated models that emulate VerbNet, a semantic resource for English verbs. VerbNet has been built and expanded by linguists, forming a hierarchical clustering of verbs with common semantic and syntactic expressions, and is useful in semantic tasks. A major drawback is the difficulty of extending a…

This study aims to identify whether the acquisition of the English copula by Arabic-speaking learners of English provides evidence for a performance or representational-based account of errors. The representational theory tested in this study is the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2007) which proposes that language…

The present study contributes to our understanding of the effects of age and type of linguistic input in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language in adulthood. I examine the Spanish syntax (word order) of three groups of speakers, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico and two bilingual English-Spanish speakers born and raised in the…

Data from elicited language tasks can add to the literature on the development of the complex syntax structures of embedded complement clauses in typically developing children. In the current study, preschool-age children (n = 27) participated in two elicited language tasks focusing on three types of embedded complement clauses: infinitival…

English ditransitive verbs show a complex alternation between the double object construction (DOC, (1)) and prepositional object datives (POD, (2)). This dissertation examines the acquisition, representation, and learnability of the dative alternation among L2 English learners, presenting experimental data from participants with L1 backgrounds of…

Mandarin Chinese verbs are composed of one to four characters that function together as a conceptual unit. However, in modern spoken Chinese, most of these verbs are two-character compounds. This dissertation is focused on adult second language (L2) learners' acquisition of these two-character verb compounds. Specifically, the acquisition of a…

This thesis is a study of the syntax of multi-verb constructions, in which a single clause contains more than one verbal element. Multi-verb constructions are of special interest in light of the hypothesis that clausal structure is headed by a verb. Implemented in terms of extended projections, this hypothesis states that clausal functional…

Adult first language (L1) English speakers who are advanced second language (L2) learners of Spanish demonstrate near-ceiling levels of accuracy for some features of Spanish, such as [Person] and [Number] for verbs (McCarthy, 2012; Rodgers, 2011). While for other features, such as [Aspect] for copulas (i.e. ser and estar), and [Person] and…