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…

Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction…

The sentence production system transforms preverbal messages in the mind of a speaker into coherent grammatical utterances. During this process, which unfolds rapidly, the system has to link meaning information from the speaker's message to appropriate lexical and grammatical information from the speaker's memory. It usually does so with fluency…

We still know surprisingly little about how grammatical structures are selected for use in sentence production. A major debate concerns whether structural selection is competitive or noncompetitive. Competitive accounts propose that alternative structures or structural components actively suppress one another's activation until one option reaches…

The current project investigates developmental aspects of acquiring locative verb constructions in English as a second language. Locative verbs, such as "to pour," "to spill," "to spray," and "to sprinkle," constitute a prototypical case of an overgeneralization problem in language learning: Whereas some of…

The goal of this study is to characterize the temporal phenomena in the Korean conjunctive constructions. These constructions consist of three components: a verbal stem, a clause medial temporal suffix, and a clause terminal suffix. This study focuses on both the temporality of the terminal connective suffixes and the grammatical meanings of 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…

This dissertation examines Spanish Direct Object clitic pronouns in Argentine spoken Spanish of adults and children (ages 4;0-7;0). It concentrates on (Finite verb + Nonfinite verb) constructions that allow both pre-verbal (Proclisis) and a postverbal (Enclisis) clitic placement. Previous corpus studies have shown that lexical (finite verb),…

The data on language acquisition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) primarily come from studies in English reporting particular morphemes that differentiate them from their typically developing (TYP) peers, but markers of impairment vary cross-linguistically. There is some cross-linguistic evidence that SLI disrupts language…

Transitivity has been extensively researched from a semantic point of view (e.g., Hopper & Thompson, 1980). Although little has been said about a prototypical intransitive construction, it has been suggested that verbs that denote actions with an agent and a patient/theme cannot be intransitive (e.g., Guerssel, 1985). However, it has been…

The fundamental problem faced by automatic text understanding in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is to identify semantically related pieces of text and integrate them together to compute the meaning of the whole text. However, the principle of compositionality runs into trouble very quickly when real language is examined with its frequent…

This work focuses on the licensing conditions and logical structure of understood-argument constructions, or complement-drop constructions, in English. There are two main types of such arguments: Indefinite Understood Arguments (IUA) and Definite Understood Arguments (DUA). IUA readings occur in such cases in "He ate, He cooked". In such cases,…

Research that examines diachronic change and modality posit that modal verbs follow certain universal paths of development (e.g. Cornillie, 2007; Bybee & Fleischman, 1995; Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca, 1994). The present study examines the development of Spanish modality in Mexico through the use of multivariate analyses, relative…

Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…

Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) has for long been considered as a Null-subject language due to its variability in regards to subject expression (e.g. "Era bom porque eu diminuia de peso...era muito gordinha" "That was good because then I could lose some weight...(I) was a bit chubby." C33:179). Such variability has been…