Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

The paper shows that children acquiring Yemeni Ibbi Arabic4 (henceforth referred to as YIA) go through a stage equivalent to the Root Infinitive (RI) stage found in non-null subject languages in spite of the fact that YIA is a null subject and does not have an infinitive construction. Spontaneous speech of two YIA children (2;1-2;11) showed…

English and Chinese have typological differences in finiteness. English has morphological finite and nonfinite distinction, whereas Chinese has no morphological finiteness, and multiple verbs in a clause appear in the form of bare verbs with optional aspectual morphemes, such as the perfective morpheme "le". The current study explores…

This paper presents an investigation of verb morphology in the spontaneous productions of three preschool Egyptian Arabic- (EA) speaking children with language impairment (LI) and a group of typically developing children. The typological characteristics of Arabic, such as its rich morphology, lack of infinitival form and complex verb system, make…

The goal of this study is to characterize the temporal phenomena in the Korean conjunctive constructions. These constructions consist of three components: a verbal stem, a clause medial temporal suffix, and a clause terminal suffix. This study focuses on both the temporality of the terminal connective suffixes and the grammatical meanings of the…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

This dissertation is an analysis of the morphosyntax of the Turkish causative construction within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). It is an attempt to capture a range of different phenomena in a principled way within this framework. Important aspects of DM for the analysis herein include the syntactic derivation of words; the…

Purpose: This study investigated whether past tense use could differentiate children with language impairment (LI) from their typically developing (TD) peers when English is children's second language (L2) and whether L2 children's past tense profiles followed the predictions of Bybee's (2007) usage-based network model. Method: A group of L2…

This dissertation provides a description of aspects of the phonology, morphology, and morphosyntax of Bangime. Bangime is a language isolate spoken in the Dogon language speaking area of Central Eastern Mali. Although the Bangande, the speakers of Bangime, self-identify with the Dogon, their language bears practically no resemblance to the…

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Kove, an Austronesian language spoken in the West New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea. Kove is primarily spoken in 18 villages, including some on the small islands north of New Britain. There are about 9,000 people living in the area, but many are not fluent speakers of Kove. The dissertation…

This study reports evidence of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) that surfaced from English compositions of SiSwati learners of English in Swaziland, where English is a second language. Although CLI has been studied widely in other languages, it has not been studied in SiSwati and English, and its implications for instruction are not known.…

This thesis offers a systematic treatment of discontinuous exponence, a pattern of inflection in which a single feature or a set of features bundled in syntax is expressed by multiple, distinct morphemes. This pattern is interesting and theoretically relevant because it represents a deviation from the expected one-to-one relationship between…

Taking up analytical issues raised primarily in Dixon (2000) and Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000), this dissertation combines descriptive work with a medium-sized (50-language) typological study. Chapter 1 situates the dissertation against a concise survey of typological-functional work on causative constructions from the last few decades, and…

This thesis is a comprehensive study of lexical and clause-linkage properties of converbs in an underdescribed language, Sakha (aka Yakut). Following Haspelmath (1995b) a converb is defined as a non-finite verb form which mainly indicates an adverbial subordination. Converbs are attested in diverse languages of the world, but are used extensively…