Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of counterdirectionality, a semantic notion encompassing various sorts of reversals, involving either movement along a path, or---more abstractly---the restoring of an object or a state of affairs to a prior condition. Counterdirectionality is a relationship between an asserted event and a presupposed event in a strict temporal ordering. Across languages, it is frequently expressed by presuppositional adverbs that mean BACK (as in English Ali flew back from New York, Bina hugged Ali back, The door swung back open). The distribution of BACK-adverbs tends to overlap in a systematic way with that of …

Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to present an analysis of associative plurals in Japanese, Turkish, and Armenian that captures their associative interpretation along with a series of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that do not seem to stem directly from these special meanings. For associative plurals, group affiliation is established through spatio-temporal or conceptual contiguity rather than a shared description (Moravcsik 2003). Approaches to English-like additive plurality are unable to capture associative plurals because they predict a plurality based on similarity, where every element of a plural noun is either an element of the corresponding singular or a concatenation of those …

The Near-Synonymous Classifiers In Mandarin Chinese: Etymology, Modern Usage, And Possible Problems In L2 Classroom, Irina Kavokina

Masters Theses

Many Chinese classifiers are nearly synonymic – they can be used with the same head nouns without changing the meaning of the sentence, in other words, such classifiers can be used interchangeably or almost interchangeably. This poses a challenge for Chinese language learners, especially those who lack such a grammatical category in their own native language. Another complication arises from the ambiguous English translations of many classifiers.

In this paper we investigate the collocation behavior of near-synonymous Chinese classifiers, focusing on their semantic nuances and interchangeability. Analyzing 6 pairs of classifiers — 栋 and 幢, 匹 and 头, 批 and …

The Online Processing Of Even's Likelihood Presupposition, Erika Mayer

Doctoral Dissertations

Even is a focus-sensitive semantic operator that introduces a presupposition about likelihood. Under many semantic accounts, even’s likelihood presupposition requires the sentence with even to be less likely than a set of contextually-relevant alternatives. On one hand, even’s presupposition is complex, and this complexity may cause delays in processing. On the other hand, despite—and indeed because—of this complexity, even has the potential to be highly informative to readers. In this dissertation, I investigate whether and how even interacts with lexical predictability in online processing. If comprehenders are able to rapidly process even, they may be able to …

'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.

Long(Er) Object Movement In Turkish, Duygu Göksu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on long object movement (LOM), which is a type of A-movement from the embedded object position inside an infinitive to the matrix subject position. In the literature, LOM is usually equated with restructuring. The dissertation demonstrates that LOM is not a uniform phenomenon in Turkish. Verbs that allow LOM fall into two types and exhibit distinct behaviors, with only one type counting as restructuring. The infinitival complements of one class of LOM verbs show dependency on the matrix domain for structural case-checking of an embedded object. These verbs are analyzed as restructuring LOM verbs selecting a reduced-size …

Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones

Masters Theses

Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work …

Phonotactic Learning With Distributional Representations, Max A. Nelson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the possibility that the phonological grammar manipulates phone representations based on learned distributional class memberships rather than those based on substantive linguistic features. In doing so, this work makes three primary contributions. First, I propose three novel algorithms for learning a phonological class system from the distributional statistics of a language, all of which are based on partitioning graph representations of phone distributions. Second, I propose a new method for fitting Maximum Entropy phonotactic grammars, MaxEntGrams, which offers theoretical complexity improvements over the widely-adopted approach taken by Hayes and Wilson [2008]. Third, I present a series of …

Tense In Conditionals: Ins And Outs, Zahra Mirrazi

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with the role of tense in bringing about the semantic and pragmatic differences in conditionals. Investigating the contribution
of tense and aspect in Farsi conditionals, this dissertation expands the typology of
temporal morphology in antecedents of conditionals.
First, I make a novel observation that Farsi morphologically distinguishes between hypothetical and factual conditionals. Conditionals with zero tense in their
antecedent require the truth of their antecedent to be unsettled in the context, and
they yield hypothetical interpretation. Conditionals with present tense in their
antecedent require the truth of their antecedent to be settled in the projected context …

Examining Variability In Spanish Monolingual And Bilingual Phonotactics: A Look At Sc-Clusters, Katerina A. Tetzloff

Doctoral Dissertations

Current models of generative phonology have failed to address the variability that is observed in bilingual language patterns patterns. This dissertation addresses exactly that issue by examining the perception of Spanish sC-clusters in Spanish monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals. Surface sC-clusters in onset position are prohibited in Spanish and are repaired by inserting a prothetic /e/ (sC $\rightarrow$ esC). English differs in that it allows sC-cluster onsets, and the structure of the sC-cluster has been shown to differ based on the sonority profile (i.e., s+stop clusters are bisyllabic, s+liquid clusters are tautosyllabic). A batch version of a Harmonic Grammar Gradual Learning …

Restrictive Tier Induction, Seoyoung Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes the Restrictive Tier Learner, which automatically induces only the tiers that are absolutely necessary in capturing phonological long-distance dependencies. The core of my learner is the addition of an extra evaluation step to the existing Inductive Projection Learner (Gouskova and Gallagher 2020), where the necessity and accuracy of the candidate tiers are determined. An important building block of my learner is a typological observation, namely the dichotomy between trigram-bound and unbounded patterns. The fact that this dichotomy is attested in both consonant interactions and vowel interactions allows for a unified approach to be used. Another important piece …

What Did You Expect? An Investigation Of Lexical Preactivation In Sentence Processing, Jon Burnsky

Doctoral Dissertations

Language users predictively preactivate lexical units that appear to the comprehen- der to be likely to surface. Despite ample language experience and grammatical competence, it appears that language users tend to preactivate verbs in some contexts, called role-reversal contexts, that would create plausibility violations if they were to actually appear; these verbs assign thematic roles to their arguments in such a way that it leads to implausibility. These anomalous predictions provide a window into the mechanisms underlying lexical preactivation and are the case study that this dissertation focuses in on. This dissertation is an exploration of what linguistic information is …

Nahuatl Discourses And Political Speeches As Ways To Negotiate The Racial Monolingual Ideology Of The Mexican State In Hidalgo, Mexico, Vanessa Miranda Juárez

Doctoral Dissertations

This research focuses on language use as a means of linguistic, cultural, and communal negotiations with political economic forces of assimilation and systematic racial discrimination. I specifically analyze how the use of Nahuatl and Spanish within a Nahua community in Mexico, San Isidro Atlapexco Hidalgo, signifies ideological and power relationships. I pay particular attention to the dynamics of interaction and communicative practices within assemblies—a key form of local governance. Here, I show that the collective force displayed in such spaces might be the engine to transgress, oppose, and challenge the highly racialized language ideology of the state that advocates Spanish …

The Linearization Of V(P)-Doubling Constructions, Rong Yin

Doctoral Dissertations

When an item moves, it is usually pronounced once but in some cases, it is pronounced multiple times. So, a question is: What determines whether a moved item gets pronounced in only one of its positions or in multiple positions? This dissertation aims at providing an answer to this question by designing a linearization process that yields the correct phonetic realization of a moved item, with a focus on V(P) movement. In particular, this dissertation provides a detailed analysis of how V(P)-doubling cases are linearized and thus show how a V(P) ends up being pronounced multiple times. Regarding the proposed …

The Syntactic And Semantic Atoms Of The Spray/Load Alternation, Michael A. Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

What is the relationship between the word spray in the sentence John sprayed the paint onto the wall and its identically pronounced counterpart in John sprayed the wall with the paint? At some level, we recognize these two uses of spray as the same word. But the fact that they combine with their arguments in different ways means they cannot be identical. The relationship between these two uses of spray—called the spray/load alternation—is productive in a way that a descriptively adequate grammar of English should capture. Other verbs show the same pattern, adults and children extend …

The Acquisition Of Advanced Level Chinese Heritage Language (Chl) Learners：A Comparative Analysis Concerning The Aspect Marker “Le了”, Jingjing Ao

Masters Theses

Over the decades, research on heritage language learners has been quite popular, but most studies concern Russian, Spanish and other languages rather than Chinese. The Chinese heritage language learner’s studies focus mainly on K-12 students and their learning motivations, writing characteristics, and identification recognition and those concerned with language acquisition address their vocabulary and verbal Chinese development. There have been very few studies about learning grammar. This study emphasizes on the acquisition of the aspect marker LE among advanced learners.

To investigate the acquisition characteristics of advanced CHL learners, this study adopted the advanced CHL learners as the research group …

La Adquisición De Los Verbos Posicionales En Niños Bilingües De Zapoteco-Español En Un Contexto De Pérdida Lingüística, Ana D. Alonso Ortiz

Doctoral Dissertations

The present study investigates the acquisition of positional verbs on bilingual children of Zapotec and Spanish in the indigenous community of Hidalgo Yalalag in Oaxaca, Mexico. The main research question is how bilingual children of Zapotec-Spanish acquire positional verbs in a language shift and language displacement context. Ninety-four young scholars between the ages of five to ten years old took part in this study. They participated in three tasks, a vocabulary task, an acceptability task, and a production task. A sociolinguistic questionnaire was also employed. The vocabulary task goal was to recruit and identify participants for the study. The acceptability …

Critical Language Awareness In The Multilingual Writing Classroom: A Self-Study Of Teacher Feedback Practices, Emma R. Britton

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite the increasing amount of ethnolinguistic diversity in US schools and universities, traditional approaches to university writing instruction continue to advance the teaching of standard written American English (SWAE) from uncritical ideological standpoints (Bommarito & Cooney, 2016). To disrupt the naturalization of monolingual and standard language ideologies, existing scholarship shows the potential of critical language awareness (CLA), as a pedagogical approach which aims to develop students’ awareness of the relationships between languages, language varieties, language ideologies, power, and social inequities, alongside the teaching of SWAE (Fairclough, 1992). Because the production of student texts is central to a CLA pedagogy (Gilyard, …

Learning Phonology With Sequence-To-Sequence Neural Networks, Brandon Prickett

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation tests sequence-to-sequence neural networks to see whether they can simulate human phonological learning and generalization in a number of artificial language experiments. These experiments and simulations are organized into three chapters: one on opaque interactions, one on computational complexity in phonology, and one on reduplication. The first chapter focuses on two biases involving interactions that have been proposed in the past: a bias for transparent patterns and a bias for patterns that maximally utilize all of the processes in a language. The second chapter looks at harmony patterns of varying complexity to see whether both Formal Language Theory …

The Event Structure Of Attitudes, Deniz Özyıldız

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on what it means to think that or to think whether something is the case. First, I show that the type of clause that think combines with makes a difference in the kind of attitude a thought report ascribes, and in the kind of eventuality that it describes. With a declarative complement, think entails belief and introduces an eventuality description that may (but need not be) stative. With a question complement, think introduces an eventuality description that is necessarily dynamic, and often deliberative. In this case, there is no entailment of belief, but one of agnosticism and …

Visual, Lexical, And Syntactic Effects On Failure To Notice Word Transpositions: Evidence From Behavioral And Eye Movement Data, Kuan-Jung Huang

Masters Theses

Evidence of systematic misreading has been taken to argue that language processing is noisy, and that readers take noise into consideration and therefore sometimes interpret sentences non-literally (rational inference over a noisy channel). The present study investigates one specific misreading phenomenon: failure to notice word transpositions in a sentence. While this phenomenon can be explained by rational inference, it also has been argued to arise due to parallel lexical processing. The study explored these two accounts. Visual, lexical, and syntactic properties of the two transposed words were manipulated in three experiments. Failure to notice the transposition was more likely when …

There And Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory, Caroline Andrews

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the relationship between hierarchical syntactic structure and memory in language processing of individual sentences. Hierarchical syntactic structure is a key part of human languages and language processing but its integration with memory has been uneasy ever since Sachs (1967) demonstrated that the syntactic structure of individual sentences is lost in explicit sentence recall tasks much faster than other linguistic information (lexical, semantic, etc.). Nonetheless, psycholinguists have continued to draw on memory in syntactic processing theories, in part due to (i) the explanatory power that memory can give to sentence processing hypotheses, and (ii) the conflicting results that …

Shifting The Perspectival Landscape: Methods For Encoding, Identifying, And Selecting Perspectives, Carolyn Jane Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions. Perspective, or point-of-view, encompasses an individual’s thoughts, perceptions, and location. Many expressions in natural language have components of their meanings that shift depending on whose perspective they are evaluated against. In this dissertation, I explore two sets of questions relating to perspective sensitivity. The first set of questions relate to how perspective is encoded in the semantics of perspectival expressions. The second set of questions relate to how conversation participants treat perspectival expressions: the speaker’s selection of a perspective and the listener’s identification of the speaker’s perspective. In Part I, …

The Emptiness Of The Present: Fronting Constructions As A Window To The Semantics Of Tense, Petr Kusliy

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is devoted to the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English and the phenomenon of the Sequence of Tense. It provides and analyzes previously unobserved data from verb phrase fronting constructions in which the simultaneous interpretation of a present tense embedded under a matrix past tense is available. These data are theoretically unexpected and challenging because most theories of English tense disallow this interpretation for Present-under-Past configurations. An account that captures the new data is proposed. It establishes a connection between the simultaneous interpretation of Present-under-Past and the mode of semantic composition between a verb and its complement. …

Talking About Her(Self): Ambiguity Avoidance And Principle B. A Theoretical And Psycholinguistic Investigation Of Romanian Pronouns, Rudmila-Rodica Ivan

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation answers a deceivingly simple question: why can her in Hermione talked about her refer to the sentence subject in Romanian, but not in English? The Romanian facts, which are surprising for both classic and competition-based accounts of the Binding Theory over the last 40 odd years, bring us to the following overarching question: what are the constraints on pronominal reference? To address these main questions, I carry out a psycholinguistic investigation of Romanian pronouns and argue that the distribution and interpretation of pronominal forms is jointly determined by pragmatic and morphosyntactic constraints. I discuss evidence from four experiments, …

Emergent Typological Effects Of Agent-Based Learning Models In Maximum Entropy Grammar, Coral Hughto

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation shows how a theory of grammatical representations and a theory of learning can be combined to generate gradient typological predictions in phonology, predicting not only which patterns are expected to exist, but also their relative frequencies: patterns which are learned more easily are predicted to be more typologically frequent than those which are more difficult. In Chapter 1 I motivate and describe the specific implementation of this methodology in this dissertation. Maximum Entropy grammar (Goldwater & Johnson 2003) is combined with two agent-based learning models, the iterated and the interactive learning model, each of which mimics a type …

Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation develops a formal and psycholinguistic theory of person-based prominence effects, the finding that certain categories of person such as "first" and "second" (the "local" persons) are privileged by the grammar. The thesis takes on three questions: (i) What are the possible categories related to person? (ii) What are the possible prominence relationships between these categories? And (iii) how is prominence information used to parse and interpret linguistic input in real time? The empirical through-line is understanding obviation — a “spotlighting” system, found most prominently in the Algonquian family of languages, that splits the (ani- mate) third persons into …

Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers And Focus-Sensitivity, Alexander Goebel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the role of Focus-sensitivity for a typology of presupposition triggers. The central hypothesis is that Focus-sensitive triggers require a linguistic antecedent in the discourse model, whereas presuppositions of triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity are satisfied as entailments of the Common Ground. This hypothesis is supported by experimental evidence from two borne out predictions. First, Focus-sensitive triggers are sensitive to the salience of the antecedent satisfying their presupposition, as operationalized via the Question Under Discussion, and lead to interference-type effects, while triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity are indifferent to the QUD-structure. Second, Focus-sensitive triggers are harder to globally accommodate than triggers lacking …

The Role Of Translation Style In Fostering Cultural Connections Through World Literature, Bridget Baudinet

Masters Theses

While many high school English instructors in the United States teach world literature in translation, few of them explicitly present the literature as translated. High school English students would benefit from learning more about the linguistic origins of the world literature they read. This awareness would increase student understanding of the source culture and benefit their language skills. Various translation theorists have suggested methods to teach translational awareness, but few have offered advice on the type of translation to select. In my research, I examined the question of whether students would derive more cultural knowledge, and specifically language-related knowledge, by …

The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein

Doctoral Dissertations

The main intellectual problem I address in this study is how everyday communication activates the relationship between creativity, conflict, and change. More specifically, I look at how the communication of creativity becomes a process of transformation, innovation, and change and how people are propelled to create through everyday communication practices in the face of conflict and opposition. To approach this problem, I use the case of communication in modern-day Belarus to show how creativity becomes a vehicle for and a source of new social and cultural routines among the independent grassroots communities and initiatives in Minsk. On one level, I …