Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Syntax (2)
- Accommodation (1)
- Ambiguity avoidance (1)
- Belarus (1)
- Binding Theory (1)
-
- Cultural discourse analysis (CuDA) (1)
- Cultural identity (1)
- Discourse processing (1)
- Discourse-Phonology Interface (1)
- Fieldwork (1)
- Focus-sensitivity (1)
- Information Structure (1)
- Khoisan (1)
- L2 Intonation (1)
- L2 Phonology (1)
- L2 Prosody (1)
- L2 Spanish (1)
- Language processing (1)
- Linearization (1)
- Linguistics (1)
- Obviation (1)
- Ojibwe (1)
- Person (1)
- Phonology (1)
- Presupposition (1)
- Principle B (1)
- Pronouns (1)
- Prosodic marking of focus (1)
- Prosody (1)
- Prosody and focus (1)
Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Emptiness Of The Present: Fronting Constructions As A Window To The Semantics Of Tense, Petr Kusliy
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
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
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
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
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 People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein
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 …
The Production And Perception Of Subject Focus Prosody In L2 Spanish, Covadonga Sanchez
The Production And Perception Of Subject Focus Prosody In L2 Spanish, Covadonga Sanchez
Doctoral Dissertations
New information can be introduced in discourse through different strategies, including syntactic and prosodic ones. This project provides an account of the syntactic and intonational strategies used for focus-marking in Peninsular Spanish, Mainstream American English and L2 Spanish using parallel experimental designs and a unitary method of analysis within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework for the study of intonation. It provides a comprehensive description of specific phonological categories and their phonetic implementation not only in monolingual speech, but also as they develop in the L2 grammar of Spanish learners with different experiences with the target language, following the premises of the L2 …
Optimal Linearization: Prosodic Displacement In Khoekhoegowab And Beyond, Leland Kusmer
Optimal Linearization: Prosodic Displacement In Khoekhoegowab And Beyond, Leland Kusmer
Doctoral Dissertations
Understanding the relationship between syntactic structures and linear strings is a challenge for modern syntactic theories. The most complete and widely accepted models — namely, the Headedness Parameter and the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne, 1994) — each capture aspects of this relationship, but are either too permissive or two restrictive: A Headedness Parameter relativized to individual categories permits nearly any linear order which keeps phrases contiguous, even those that violate the Final-Over-Final Constraint (Sheehan et al. 2017); by contrast, the Linear Correspondence Axiom is well-known for ruling out head-final configurations generally. Subsequent models of linearization have typically been modifications of …