Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Syntax

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Doctoral Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

Typology

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay Nov 2023

'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the morpho-syntactic makeup of personful expressions
in natural language; special focus is given to referential uses of personal pronouns. The central thesis guiding the inquiry is that utterance contexts, which serve to fix the semantic values of person indexicals, are specifically a kind of centered situation. This treatment of contexts puts restrictions on what kinds of person features are definable, and the resulting inventory of such features (in conjunction with independently-motivated pragmatic constraints on the use of referential expressions) provides a novel explanation for the typology of person systems.


Typology Of Bizarre Ellipsis Varieties, David Erschler Oct 2018

Typology Of Bizarre Ellipsis Varieties, David Erschler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation deals with the typology and analysis of several types of ellipsis that have received little or no attention so far in the literature. The theoretical goal of the dissertation is to propose analyses of sluicing and gapping that will be able to account for cross-linguistic variation in this domain. While the overall approach of the dissertation is typological, a particular focus is made upon data from Russian, Georgian (the South Caucasian language family), as well as Digor and Iron Ossetic (Iranian; Indo-European).