Pidgins, narrowly defined, are auxiliary languages reserved for communication with linguistic outgroups. Although implicitly recognized as a class of languages by many linguists, there has been little systematic typological investigation of pidgins. This dissertation presents the first large-scale typological study of morphology and functional…

Although a growing body of research has sought to understand the relationship between word order and information structure, previous information structure (IS) analyses of verb-subject order have produced conflicting results for Medieval French, which have subsequently led to conflicting claims about the importance of IS to its word order as well…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

This study examined the production of L3 French words by Spanish--English bilinguals who had no prior knowledge of the L3. Using a shadowing task, 39 Spanish L1/English L2 and 18 Spanish monolingual speakers produced 26 tokens of word-initial voiceless plosive consonants in French, Spanish and English (15 Spanish and French tokens for the…

This dissertation investigates how parametric variation of linguistic properties leads to similarities and differences in language processing across the levels of words, grammatical features, and sentences. For a truly generalizable theory of psycholinguistics, the languages surveyed should not be constrained to English (Garnham, 1994; Norcliffe…