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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Negative Polar Questions And Answers In English And Korean, Keunhyung Park
Negative Polar Questions And Answers In English And Korean, Keunhyung Park
Theses and Dissertations
The meaning of positive polar questions (PPQs) is relatively straightforward, so the truth conditions of PPQs can be decided easily. In contrast, the meaning of negative polar questions (NPQs) may vary, and simple yes-no answers to NPQs have seemingly unpredictable interpretations. For example, a simple yes answer to a PPQ like ‘Did you have lunch today?’ is easily interpreted as ‘I ate lunch.’ In contrast, the same yes answer to an NPQ like ‘Did you not eat lunch today?’ is not obvious out of context. Why are NPQs more ambiguous than PPQs? Based on our empirical observations of the difference …
Modality, Control And Restructuring In Arabic, Yasser Albaty
Modality, Control And Restructuring In Arabic, Yasser Albaty
Theses and Dissertations
The dissertation examines theories of modality and control with data from Standard Arabic (SA). In particular, I show that complementations of particular modal and control verbs in SA are not clausal, but smaller phrases. This challenges proposed accounts in the literature of modality in SA as well as theories of control within Minimalism. I alternatively argue for a novel account of both constructions that posits a monoclausal (i.e., restructuring) structure.
First, Chapter 2 investigates modality verbs in SA and shows that subjunctive complements of modality do not exhibit the properties of clausal complementation. I examine the syntax-semantics properties of modality …
The Syntax Of Copular Clauses In Arabic, Bader Yousef Alharbi
The Syntax Of Copular Clauses In Arabic, Bader Yousef Alharbi
Theses and Dissertations
Copular clauses in several languages have received much attention in recent years, however in Arabic they have been largely overlooked. In general, copular clauses have been classified into four types: the predicational clause, the specificational clause, the identificational clause, and the identity clause. This thesis aims to characterize and analyze the various copular clause types in Arabic, and goes further to discuss the taxonomic status of the copular clause with a postcopular definite description and the nature of the pronominal element (PE) in Arabic copular clauses. The thesis then explores the predicational clause type in more depth, focusing specifically on …
The Syntax Of Elliptical Constructions In Jordanian Arabic, Juman Albukhari
The Syntax Of Elliptical Constructions In Jordanian Arabic, Juman Albukhari
Theses and Dissertations
ABSTRACT
THE SYNTAX OF ELLIPTICAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN JORDANIAN ARABIC
by
Juman Al Bukhari
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2016
Under the Supervision of Professor Nicholas Fleisher
The syntax of Arabic elliptical constructions is unsettled, as there are few studies that have been done in the Arabic descriptive literature, as well as in Jordanian Arabic (henceforth, JA) specifically. Therefore, this paper will investigate some elliptical constructions in JA in particular to figure out the analysis of these constructions. In order to pursue this research, it is crucial to determine how JA elliptical data behave inasmuch as some examples are diagnosed as gapping …
Non-Native Speaker Attentional Capacity And The Processing Of English Phrasal Verb Constructions, Aubrey Dillard
Non-Native Speaker Attentional Capacity And The Processing Of English Phrasal Verb Constructions, Aubrey Dillard
Theses and Dissertations
The effect of syntactic and semantic complexity on attention and processing in second language acquisition (SLA) has long been of interest to both practitioners and researchers of SLA. Theoretical models of attention in SLA (Schmidt 1990, Tomlin and Villa 1994, Robinson 1995) have spurred a great deal of empirical research in the field, and VanPatten's (1994, 2004, 2007) work on the effect of attention to form and meaning on comprehension of input has been very influential in the field. From a language processing viewpoint, Clahsen and Felser (2006, 2009) have hypothesized that the different ways in which native and nonnative …
Using A Cognitive Architecture In Incremental Sentence Processing, Jeremiah Lane Mcghee
Using A Cognitive Architecture In Incremental Sentence Processing, Jeremiah Lane Mcghee
Theses and Dissertations
XNL-Soar is a specialized implementation of the Soar cognitive architecture. The version of XNL-Soar described in this thesis builds upon and extends prior research (Lewis, 1993; Rytting,2000) using Soar for natural language processing. This thesis describes the updates made to operators creating syntactic structure and the improved coverage of syntactic phenomena. It describes the addition of semantic structure building capability. This thesis also details the implementation of semantic memory and describes two experiments utilizing semantic memory in structural disambiguation. This thesis shows that XNL-Soar, as currently instantiated, resolves ambiguities common in language using strategies and resources including: reanalysis via snip …
Six Discourse Markers In Tunisian Arabic: A Syntactic And Pragmatic Analysis, Chris Adams
Six Discourse Markers In Tunisian Arabic: A Syntactic And Pragmatic Analysis, Chris Adams
Theses and Dissertations
The following study is a description and analysis of six discourse markers in Tunisian Arabic. In it I will attempt to determine the syntactic and pragmatic roles of each marker, describing its function in discourse. The final analysis will be based on the pragmatic model of relevance theory.
I have based my study on thirty-two (32) texts in Tunisian Arabic, looking at frequently-occurring discourse markers in these texts and analyzing them based on their discourse roles in terms of local cohesion and pragmatic inference.
The conclusions of this study focus on the conceptual and procedural content of each discourse marker. …
Crossing Dependencies In Persian, Jonathan M. Dehdari
Crossing Dependencies In Persian, Jonathan M. Dehdari
Theses and Dissertations
Languages occasionally have syntactic constructions that are difficult, if not impossible, to describe using a context-free grammar. One such construction is a crossing dependency. Crossing dependencies have been well studied for Dutch and Swiss German (Huybregts, 1976; Shieber, 1985), and recently for Tagalog (Maclachlan and Rambow, 2003). In this paper I propose that Persian exhibits crossing dependencies. In this SOV language, a light verb construction in the future tense becomes interrupted by a future auxiliary verb, which agrees with its subject in person and number. The future auxiliary also splits passive constructions in a similar manner. These forms present interesting …