Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Roots Of Modality, Aynat Rubinstein

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the interplay of grammar and context in the interpretation of modal words like ought, necessary, and need. The empirical foci of the discussion are patterns in the use of strong and weak necessity modals in conversation, and the interpretation of syntactically and semantically versatile modals like need in the various grammatical configurations they appear in across languages.

It is argued that a sensitivity to collective commitments in a conversation is necessary for understanding certain aspects of modal strength, in particular the traditional distinction between strong and weak necessity modals (exhibited by must and ought …

Verbalizing In The Second Language Classroom: The Development Of The Grammatical Concept Of Aspect, Prospero N. Garcia

Open Access Dissertations

Framed within a Sociocultural Theory of Mind (SCT) in the field of Second Language Acquisition (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), this dissertation explores the role of verbalizing in the internalization of grammatical categories through the use of Concept-based Instruction (henceforth CBI) in the second language (L2) classroom.

Using Vygotsky's (1986) distinction between scientific and spontaneous or everyday concepts applied to L2 development (Negueruela, 2008), this study focuses on the teaching and potential development of the grammatical concept of aspect in the Spanish L2 classroom, and the role of verbalizing in its internalization. It is proposed that verbalizing mediates between the learners' …

Stress In Harmonic Serialism, Kathryn Ringler Pruitt

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a model of word stress in a derivational version of Optimality Theory (OT) called Harmonic Serialism (HS; Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy 2000, 2006, 2010a). In this model, the metrical structure of a word is derived through a series of optimizations in which the 'best' metrical foot is chosen according to a ranking of violable constraints. Like OT, HS models cross-linguistic typology under the assumption that every constraint ranking should correspond to an attested language.

Chapter 2 provides an argument for modeling stress typology in HS by showing that the serial model correctly rules out stress patterns …

The Role Of Contextual Restriction In Reference-Tracking, Andrew Robert Mckenzie

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the semantics and syntax of switch-reference (SR). It makes novel generalizations about the phenomenon based on two empirical sources: A broad, cross-linguistic survey of descriptive reports, and semantic fieldwork that narrowly targets the Kiowa language of Oklahoma. It shows that previous attempts at formalizing switch-reference cannot work, and offers a new theory of switch-reference that derives the facts through effects that emerge from the interaction between the syntax and the semantics.

The empirical investigation results in four major findings: First, SR is introduced by its own head, instead of being parasitic to T or C. Second, switch-reference …

Goals, Big And Small, Martin Walkow

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the interaction of syntax and morphology in the morpholog- ical realization of AGREE-relations. I present two case studies of derivational interactions of AGREE-processes where the morphological realization of the later processes are affected by the earlier ones. The two cases studied differ in the way probes and goals interact. The first part of the dissertation explores restrictions on clitic combinations where two goals vie for the features of one probe. The second part discusses the reverse situation, where two probes are agreeing with the same goal.

The first configuration arises in restrictions on clitic combinations where v …

Syntax-Prosody Interactions In Irish, Emily Elfner

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is an empirical and theoretical study of sentence-level prosody in Conamara (Connemara) Irish. It addresses the architecture of the syntax-phonology interface and the relation between syntactic constituent structure and prosodic structure formation. It argues for a fully interactional view of the interface, in which the phonological form may be influenced by a number of competing factors, including constraints governing syntax-prosody correspondence, linearization, and prosodic well-formedness. The specific proposal is set within the framework of Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), an indirect-reference theory of the syntax-prosody interface in which correspondence between syntactic and prosodic constituents is governed by a …

Presenting Complex Ideas Using Simple Syntax In Fiction For Low-Literate Immigrant Adults, Anne Marjatta Vainikka

Language Acquisition Work by Anne Vainikka

No abstract provided.

What's In A Letter?, Aaron J. Schein

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Sentiment analysis is a burgeoning field in natural language processing used to extract and categorize opinion in evaluative documents. We look at recommendation letters, which pose unique challenges to standard sentiment analysis systems. Our dataset is eighteen letters from applications to UMass Worcester Memorial Medical Center’s residency program in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Given a small dataset, we develop a method intended for use by domain experts to systematically explore their intuitions about the topical make-up of documents on which they make critical decisions. By leveraging WordNet and the WordNet Propagation algorithm, the method allows a user to develop topic seed …

Emergent Systemic Simplicity (And Complexity), Joe Pater

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

Across phonology and syntax, the typological probability of one structure being present in a linguistic system often depends on other related aspects of that system. For example, voiced [g] is more probable in a language if it contains voiced [b] than if it does not, and a left-headed PP is more probable in a language that contains left-headed VPs than in one that has right-headed VPs. These dependencies can be seen as preferences for systemic simplicity, for uniform expression of laryngeal contrasts across place, and for uniform syntactic headedness. Both the systemic and the probabilistic nature of these generalizations pose …

Emergent Systemic Simplicity (And Complexity), Joe Pater

Joe Pater

Across phonology and syntax, the typological probability of one structure being present in a linguistic system often depends on other related aspects of that system. For example, voiced [g] is more probable in a language if it contains voiced [b] than if it does not, and a left-headed PP is more probable in a language that contains left-headed VPs than in one that has right-headed VPs. These dependencies can be seen as preferences for systemic simplicity, for uniform expression of laryngeal contrasts across place, and for uniform syntactic headedness. Both the systemic and the probabilistic nature of these generalizations pose …

Implications Of Harmonic Serialism For Lexical Tone Association, John J. Mccarthy, Kevin Mullin, Brian W. Smith

John J. McCarthy

In some languages, notably Kikuyu, the association of tones and syllables is completely predictable. In this chapter, we show that a derivational version of Optimality Theory, Harmonic Serialism, cannot account for Kikuyu if underlying representations include preassociated tones. If richness of the base is to be maintained, then underlying representations can contain associated tones in no language, even a language with contrastive tone association. This leads to a discussion of alternative ways of lexically encoding these contrasts, such as sequences of identical tones and diacritic accents.

Reduplication In Harmonic Serialism, John J. Mccarthy, Wendell Kimper, Kevin Mullin

John J. McCarthy

In standard Optimality Theory, faithfulness constraints are defined in terms of an input-output correspondence relation, and similar constraints are applied to the correspondence relation between a stem and its reduplicative copy. In Harmonic Serialism, a derivational version of Optimality Theory, there is no input-output correspondence relation, and instead faithfulness violations are based on which operations the candidate-generating GEN component has applied.

This article presents a novel theory of reduplication, situated within Harmonic Serialism, called Serial Template Satisfaction. Reduplicative correspondence constraints are replaced by operations that copy strings of constituents. Depending on the constraint ranking, phonological processes may precede or follow …

Phonotactics As Phonology: Knowledge Of A Complex Restriction In Dutch, René Krager, Joe Pater

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster, where the second member of the cluster is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighborhood density. The experiment also suggests that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure: it has a weaker effect on judgments when the last consonant begins a new syllable. We provide an account in terms of Hayes and Wilson's Maximum Entropy model …