A key debate in the psycholinguistic study of grammatical language production is whether the process is a syntactocentric one, driven by grammatical information and grammatical rules, or a dynamic, interactive one, involving both semantic and syntactic information. Examining how speakers produce subject-verb number agreement has been useful in…

This dissertation investigates the Mandarin Chinese nominals [Numeral-Classifier-("de")-Noun] and their functions as preverbal and post-verbal subjects and topics. It starts with a close analysis of the internal structure of the Chinese nominals. I propose a set of syntactic structures that capture the behaviors and distinctions between…

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…

Classifier languages are often described as lacking genuine number morphology and treating all common nouns, including those conceptually count, as an unindividuated mass. This study argues that neither of these popular assumptions is true, and presents new generalizations and analyses gained by abandoning them. I claim that no difference exists…

This dissertation examines six different types of noun phrases that commonly occur in American Sign Language. These noun phrases all include at least a head noun and one of four signs resembling a pronoun. Videos of natural ASL discourses are gathered, multiple instances of the six types of noun phrases are identified, and their meanings are…

This dissertation provides a syntactic account for the Jarai noun phrase and for the three regions of the Jarai clause: the operator domain, the inflectional domain, and the theta domain. Within the noun phrase, I argue that demonstrative-final word order involves phrasal movement of the demonstrative's complement into Spec,D, where it…

Researchers in the field of second language acquisition continue to establish links between cognition and emotion (Dewaele, 2013; MacIntyre, 2002; MacIntyre & Gardner, 1989, 1991b, 1994; Segalowitz & Trofimovich, 2011). The purpose of the present study is to investigate to what extent physiological and self-report measures predict…

This research proposes a unified approach to the semantics of the so-called bare nominals, which include proper names (e.g., "Mary"), mass and plural terms (e.g., "water," "cats"), and articleless noun phrases in Japanese. I argue that bare nominals themselves are monadic predicates applicable to more than one…

The goal of this study was to find and trace word order patterns in Possessive Noun Phrases ("PNP's") in formulaic language within notarial documents dating from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, originating from the Monastery of Sahagun, Leon, Spain. The overall results show clear trends, which reveal a diachronic process that…

This dissertation is an analysis of two types of nominal compounds in Turkish, primary compounds and synthetic compounds within the framework of Distributed Morphology. A nominal primary compound is formed by two nouns, and its meaning is largely determined by world knowledge. A synthetic compound, on the other hand, is formed by a noun and a…

This dissertation investigates the syntax and semantics of nine Chinese "measures for verbs" (Chao 1968:615), which are words used with numerals to form event quantifiers counting the eventualities denoted by the predicate of a sentence. Based on their syntactic behavior, I argue that the nine words can be divided into two groups. The…

This dissertation concerns the interaction of syntax and information structure in Mandarin Chinese and puts the theoretical assumption of parallelism between clauses and noun phrases to the test. It examines and validates the information structural status of the object phrases preposed to clause-internal positions. I argue that Rizzi's (1997)…

The study of definite descriptions has been a central part of research in linguistics and philosophy of language since Russell's seminal work "On Denoting" (Russell 1905). In that work Russell quickly dispatches analyses of denoting expressions with forms like "no man," "some man," "a man," and "every…

Previous research in the area of children's knowledge of number agreement morphology has yielded mixed results. Some researchers have found evidence for sensitivity to agreement morphology at as early as 16 months, while others report that children do not comprehend number agreement morphology until as late as five or six years old. Studies of…

In this dissertation, I examine the interpretation of NP-ellipsis (henceforth, NPE) in Korean. Some unexpected interpretive and grammatical contrasts arise in Korean between pro-forms such as "caki" "self" and "ku" "'3.S.M" (~"he") in object position and their null counterparts in NPE…