This dissertation is about the learnability of different generative, Separationist approaches to nominal morphosyntax. The core of my investigation is number, gender, and declension class, as manifested across nouns, adnominals (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, and quantifiers), and articles. An extreme position would require that all of…

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…

Agreement asymmetry is one of the significant linguistic phenomena that Arab and Western linguists (Ghaly, 1995; Parkinson, 1995; Benmamoun, 1998; Collins, 2001; Dayf, 1986) and Aoun, 1994) have tried to account for within the framework of the Government and Binding theory. They focused upon the number asymmetry in different varieties in Arabic.…

This paper takes issue with the view of conceptual structures as autonomous syntactic structures generated by syntactic formation rules. Instead, it adopts the position developed by Croft and Cruse (2004), in showing that linguistic knowledge -- knowledge of meaning and form -- is basically conceptual structure. In fact the, fundamental problem…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

This article investigates whether first-language (L1) Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (L2) can acquire the knowledge that the reflexive pronoun jibun 'self' within the head noun phrase of Japanese relative clauses cannot refer to the relative clause subject. Successful acquisition would suggest that learners are able to…

Montrul's (2008) onset age hypothesis predicts that, if attrition occurs in early bilingualism, it will be more severe in simultaneous than in sequential bilinguals. This study tested that prediction in an eye-tracking experiment focused on the processing of Spanish gender agreement during sentence reading. Heritage Spanish speakers exposed to…

Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for input-based language acquisition theories. Two analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children's (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents' use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child's use of inflectional affixes and their…

Effects of concreteness and grammatical class on lexical-semantic processing are well-documented, but the role of sensory-perceptual and sensory-motor features of concepts in underlying mechanisms producing these effects is relatively unknown. We hypothesized that processing dissimilarities in accuracy and response time performance in nouns versus…

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the presence of predictions in language comprehension comes from event-related potential (ERP) studies which show that encountering an adjective whose gender marking is inconsistent with that of a highly expectable noun leads to an effect at the adjective. Until now the mechanism underlying this…

This paper investigates the difference between the production of grammatical determiners and lexical determiners in the production of adjective-noun phrases (NPs) in Danish. Models of sentence processing (Garrett in "Psychology of learning and motivation," Academic press, New York, pp 133-177, 1975; Bock in "J Mem Lang"…

The present study aims at establishing grammatical constraints on the borrowing of nouns (Ns) and verbs (Vs) in Urdu and English by adopting Noam Chomsky's Methodological Naturalism within the field of generative grammar as the theoretical framework of the study. For this purpose, the corpus of Pure Urdu and Pure English sentences from textbooks…

Understanding language requires the ability to compose the meanings of words into phrase and sentence meanings. Formal theories in semantics have framed the hypothesis that all instances of meaning composition, irrespective of the syntactic and semantic properties of the expressions involved, boil down to a unique formal operation, that is, the…

This research paper presents a quasi-experimental empirical study investigating the effects of structured input and structured output tasks on the acquisition of English causative forms. This research is framed on VanPatten's (1996) input processing theory. The grammatical form chosen for this investigation is affected by a processing strategy…

In this dissertation I set out to solve a series of puzzles related to the notion of a DP periphery, defined as an area around the edge of a given domain targeted by operations such as movement and agreement. In solving these puzzles, I argue for a peripheral area in the nominal domain. Early arguments for a peripheral boundary in the nominal…