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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Linguistics
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, …
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 …
Comparative Deletion And Constraints On Transformations, Joan W. Bresnan
Comparative Deletion And Constraints On Transformations, Joan W. Bresnan
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
No abstract provided.
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 …