Thai has imperfective aspectual morphemes that are not obligatory in usage, whereas English has obligatory grammaticized imperfective aspectual marking on the verb. Furthermore, Thai has verb final deictic-path verbs that form a closed class set. The current study investigated if obligatoriness of these grammatical categories in Thai and English…

In many languages there are words that behave like lexical verbs and on the one hand and like functional categories expressing distinctions of tense, aspect, modality, etc. on the other. The grammatical status of such words is frequently controversial; while some authors treat them as belonging to one and the same grammatical category, others…

A structural priming experiment investigated whether grammatical encoding in production consists of one or two stages and whether oral bilingual language production is shared at the functional or positional level [Bock, J. K., Levelt, W. (1994). Language production. Grammatical encoding. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), "Handbook of psycholinguistics"…

Drawing on naturally-occurring data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA) in conjunction with data elicited from native speakers by means of questionnaires, this paper provides a bottom-up, usage-based analysis of instances of depictive secondary predicates involving mainly verba…

The research demonstrated that there are differences in the processing of sentences containing anaphoric pronouns (e.g., "After Mark arrived, he used the phone.") and cataphoric pronouns (e.g., "After he arrived, Mark used the phone."). Reading time was measured on sentences containing 2 clauses; a pronoun appeared in 1 clause, and a proper name…

Complement constructions vary significantly in English and Persian. There are more complementation structures in English than in Persian and a complement structure in Persian might have more than one equivalent in English. Producing complement structures (CSs) in English is very difficult for native speakers of Persian, especially in an EFL…

This study aims to investigate the cultural identity of Korean English and to make the intercultural communications among non-native speakers successful. The purposes of this study can be summarized as follows: 1) to recognize the concept of English as an International Language (EIL), 2) to emphasize cross-cultural understanding in the globalized…

This dissertation analyzes two derived Biblical Hebrew verbal forms, the Niphal and the Hitpael. Present scholarship on Biblical Hebrew does not agree on the definition or relationship of these two stems. In chapter 1 I outline the two major problems for the Niphal and Hitpael: (1) unified definitions for each, and (2) their functional overlap. An…

Language is a product of both biological and cultural evolution. Clues to the origins of key structural properties of language can be found in the process of cultural transmission between learners. Recent experiments have shown that iterated learning by human participants in the laboratory transforms an initially unstructured artificial language…

Many studies have shown that listeners can segment words from running speech based on conditional probabilities of syllable transitions, suggesting that this statistical learning could be a foundational component of language learning. However, few studies have shown a direct link between statistical segmentation and word learning. We examined this…

The current study aimed at finding the probable differences between the move structure of Iranian MA graduates' thesis discussion subgenres and those of their non-Iranian counterparts, on the one hand, and those of journal paper authors, on the other. It also aimed at identifying the moves that are considered obligatory, conventional, or optional…

Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about "verb disposition": the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

The present article investigates the acquisition of the pronominal systems by French and Italian monolingual children and by bilingual German-French and German-Italian children, demonstrating a stable asymmetry: object and reflexive clitics are acquired later than nominative clitics and strong subject and object pronouns. We will widen the scope…

This paper presents an alternative analysis of the two Japanese existential verbs: aru and iru. By appealing to the notion of conceptualisation that pervades the cognitive linguistic literature, I demonstrate that the two verbs pattern as motion verbs, and not simply as verbs of existence and/or location. Throughout the paper, I demonstrate that…