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…

Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

This paper aims to give an account of the multiple determination (determiner spreading) phenomenon in Arabic. Determiner spreading is the syntactic representation and phonological realization of multiple determiners within the same determiner phrase. As a cross-linguistic phenomenon, determiner spreading has been investigated in other languages…

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong,…

The study aims at investigating the discourse marker "hasa" 'now' in Jordanian Arabic using relevance theory. The study also examined the grammaticalization of "hasa" and how it developed to be a discourse marker. The study also explored the functions of "hasa" in Jordanian Arabic. The data, which consisted of 500…

Studies of English academic writing have revealed a shift to a compressed style, with preferences for lexical and phrasal types of noun modifiers over clausal modifiers. However, condensed noun phrases may result in a loss of explicitness since they lack grammatical markers specifying the semantic relations between head nouns and modifiers. This…

This paper presents the results from two studies on anaphoric reference to quantifying expressions (QEs) in Swedish, contributing to the current cross-linguistic discussion on this issue. For English it has been shown that the polarity of the QE (positive vs negative) determines the anaphoric set reference (to the referens set, REFSET, or to the…

The current study aims at exploring some syntactic and semantic underlying problems in three English translations of the meanings of Surat Quraish; that is in English translations of AbdelHaleem, Khan and Mohammed Taj Al-Din Al-Hilai and Pickthall. Also, the study aims at probing how the three translators deal with some syntactic and semantic…

This paper argues against the assumption that Spanish--and more generally Romance--imperfective past (IMP) is an intrinsically anaphoric tense. It is a widely accepted view that IMP requires a temporal discourse antecedent to be licensed. My aim is to show that such requirement is not actually in force when IMP combines with a stative/atelic…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

Perceptive verbs have important function, especially in Cognitive Linguistics perspective, because these verbs are directly related to real experience. Cognitive linguistics focuses on the study of the relationship between language, mind, and socio-physical experience. Thus, this paper discusses how the lexical semantic characteristics…

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

This paper is devoted to the study of correlation between semantic and pragmatic potential of a compound word, which functions in informal speech, and the mechanisms of secondary nomination, which realizes the potential of semantic-pragmatic features of colloquial compounds. The relevance and the choice of the research question is based on the…

This dissertation examines primarily the syntactic, but also the semantic/pragmatic behavior of sentential complement clauses in Turkish and proposes a new classification of such complements. A head-final language, Turkish lacks an overt, lexical complementizer akin to English "that". The most frequent types of sentential complementation…

This thesis is about strong island effects and intervention effects. Strong island effects are contexts where operator-variable dependencies cannot be established. The paradigmatic cases of strong island violations in Chinese occur in "why"-questions. This thesis explores a basic contrast: "why"-questions fail to be interpreted…