Knowledge of collocations facilitates second language (L2) learning by enhancing accuracy and fluency. However, acquiring L2 collocations is often challenging for learners. One factor contributing to this difficulty is incongruency between first and second languages (e.g., "draw distinctions" in English corresponds to do…

This study investigated whether structural priming, as a reflection of error-driven learning mechanisms, could facilitate second language (L2) learning of the dative alternation in Mandarin. We sought evidence of learning from both priming and acceptability judgment data. Participants were 25 native speakers and 41 classroom learners (CLs). After…

The present study aims at analysing the role of infinitival clauses (INFCs) in German child-adult dialogue. In German subject-less INFCs are a grammatical sentence pattern. Extensive corpora of spontaneous speech between 6 children aged 1;5 to 2;10 and adults were analysed applying structural and contextual analyses. We extended Freudenthal, Pine…

Previous research indicates that heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish produce both subjunctive and indicative mood in expected subjunctive contexts. The present study sheds new light on this pattern by testing the effects of morphological regularity on HSs' mood production in volitional contexts, where Spanish-dominant speakers (e.g.,…

Based on the bilingual children's and adults' code-switching (CS) dependency treebanks, this paper investigates the syntactic features and pragmatic functions of the Chinese-English bilingual children's CS and compares them with bilingual adults'. It is mainly found that (1) As to the bilingual children, the mixed sentences present the longest…

This dissertation investigates the syntax of case(-value)-assignment ([kappa]-ASSIGNMENT) and Phi(-feature)-agreement ([phi]-AGREEMENT) in nominal and verbal domains, with an emphasis on nomino-verbal infinitives and their cross-clausal dependencies, examining Kashmiri before extending to Hungarian. Although unrelated, both languages exhibit…

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…

Purpose: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous: For example, "she" could refer to any female. Nonetheless, errors in pronoun interpretation rarely occur for adults with typical development (TD) due to several strategies implicitly shared between the talker and listener. The purpose of this study was to test the impacts of syntactic,…

The relationships between the use of nouns and verbs, and other word classes have been well established in the typical language development literature. However, questions remain as to whether the same relationships are seen in the language use of individuals who use graphic symbol-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The aim of…

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning--the prior--and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a…

The question of whether L2 learners can use discourse cues online during pronoun resolution remains debated in the field. We examine one factor that has been argued to impact pronoun resolution in native speakers, implicit causality (IC) bias, a property related to certain verbs in which one of verb's arguments are considered to be the cause of an…

Purpose: Assessing whether a book is relevant or suitable for use in teaching materials is not an easy and haphazard matter, various methods and theories have been offered by researchers in studying this matter. Taking a study of the context of textbooks, researchers found the urgency that textbooks are a foundation for education, socialization…

The subject at hand of this paper is intransitive prepositions, which E. Klima (1965) defined as prepositions that do not select syntactic objects. This word group comprises those linguistic units which traditional grammar used to consider as bicategorical, sometimes as adverbs, and in other instances as prepositions created through conversion.…

Support (one object preventing another from falling) is linguistically encoded by adults and children in a highly structured and differentiated way, with basic locative expressions or Light verbs (e.g., in English, the block is "on/put" on the box) encoding Support-from-Below, and lexical verbs (e.g., she "stuck" the block on…

Despite having different semantic profiles, near synonyms are usually presented in dictionaries as being contextually interchangeable, which may lead EFL learners to assume their contextual interchangeability. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies on how near synonyms are similar or different in their semantic and grammatical preferences.…