This thesis aims to examine the development of morphosyntax with longitudinal English production from Diany, a Mandarin-speaking child, starting from the second week Diany arrived in the U.S.A. (age 4;9). The study is particularly interested in whether Diany's acquisition of verbal morphemes and verb movement supports relevant hypotheses in the…

This dissertation examines linguistic spatial frame of reference (FoR) usage across three cohorts, detailing the lexical and structural realization of particular spatial FoR classes within each linguistic community, as well as which linguistic and nonlinguistic factors are predictors of spatial FoR class usage. This study was designed to determine…

Previous research shows that American learners of Japanese (AJs) tend to differ from native Japanese speakers in their compliment responses (CRs). Yokota (1986) and Shimizu (2009) have reported that AJs tend to respond more negatively than native Japanese speakers. It has also been reported that AJs' CRs tend to lack the use of avoidance or…

The Indo-European language family contains many "small words" with various adverbial meanings and functions, including preverbs. The term "preverb" is used to label any of a variety of modifying morphemes that form a close semantic unit with a verb, including both words and prefixes (Booij and Kemenade 2003). Some Indo-European languages not only…

Researchers have recently described a new processing task in which rating words on the basis of their survival or fitness relevance leads to better recall and recognition performance than several other well known deep processing tasks. The present study was designed to determine whether this survival processing advantage could be observed when…

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a "mixed" language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media…

In bilingual language processing, the parallel activation hypothesis suggests that bilinguals activate their two languages simultaneously during language processing. Support for the parallel activation mainly comes from studies of lexical (word-form) processing, with relatively less attention to phonological (sound) processing. According to…

The primary objective of this dissertation is to reconstruct the history of the Omotic societies of southwestern Ethiopia. Although historical, anthropological, and linguistic studies exist for this region, the gaps in our knowledge are great. Information on the history of Omotic people, their economic and political systems, beliefs and values,…

This dissertation is focused on analyzing phonological contact between Slavic and non-Slavic languages in southeastern and northeastern Europe, with the particular goal of describing how the social context of language contact interacts with linguistic factors to shape the outcome of contact-induced change. On the basis of case studies drawn from…

The institutionalization of separate standard varieties for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the 1990s was hailed by many Bosnians as the long-denied recognition of the Bosnian idiom as distinct from the Serbian and Croatian varieties it had so often been subordinated under. Yet the accompanying codification of Bosnian standard language forms has…

Linguistic research on the Mayan languages up to the mid 1980s was almost exclusively descriptive in nature. At best, analyses were speculative and pre-theoretical. Since then, research based on contemporary theories of syntax have begun to emerge. In adopting the formal architecture of OT-LFG, I argue that my dissertation can be included amongst…

This dissertation addresses the variable nature of the linguistic phenomenon known as Differential Object Marking (DOM) as it is manifested in Spanish. More commonly known in the literature as the personal "a" or the accusative "a", this phenomenon has been attributed primarily to marking animate, predominantly human, direct…

The central goal of this dissertation is to explore the relative perceptibility of vowel epenthesis in English onset clusters by second language learners whose native language is averse to onset clusters. The dissertation examines how audible vowel epenthesis in different onset clusters is, whether this perceptibility varies from one cluster to…

This dissertation investigates lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York. English-origin lexical material was extracted from a stratified sample of 146 Spanish-speaking informants of different ages, national origins, classes, etc., living in New York City. ANOVAs and Pearson correlations determined whether lexical borrowing frequency and the type…