Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Phonological Trends In The Lexicon: The Role Of Constraints, Michael Becker

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation shows that the generalizations that speakers project from the lexical exceptions of their language are biased to be natural and output-oriented, and it offers a model of the grammar that derives these biases by encoding lexical exceptions in terms of lexically-specific rankings of universal constraints in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004). In this model, lexical trends, i.e. the trends created by the phonological patterning of lexical exceptions, are incorporated into a grammar that applies deterministically to known items, and the same grammar applies stochastically to novel items. The model is based on the Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm …

Word, Phrase, And Clitic Prosody In Bosnian, Serbian, And Croatian, Adam Werle

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

I investigate the phonology of prosodic clitics--independent syntactic words not parsed as independent prosodic words--in Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian. I ask, first, how clitics are organized into prosodic structures, and second, how this is determined by the grammar. Following Zec (1997, 2005), I look at several clitic categories, including negation, prepositions, complementizers, conjunctions, and second-position clitics.

Based on a reanalysis of word accent (Browne and McCawley 1965, Inkelas and Zec 1988, Zec 1999), I argue that in some cases where a preposition, complementizer, or conjunction fails to realize accent determined by a following word, it is not a proclitic-- that …

The Role Of Lexical Contrast In The Perception Of Intonational Prominence In Japanese, Takahito Shinya

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In this dissertation, I examine the effects of lexical accent on the perception of intonational prominence in Japanese. I look at how an F0 accent peak is perceived relative to another flanking F0 peak in the same utterance with respect to perceived intonational prominence. Through four experiments, I show that the lexical prosodic structure plays a significant role in the perception of intonational prominence.

I first show that two distinct perceptual processes are at play in the perception of relative perceived prominence in Japanese: accentual boost normalization and downstep normalization . Accentual boost normalization normalizes the accentual boost of an …

Variables In Natural Language, Meredith Landman

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

A central goal of generative linguistics is to determine what constitutes a possible grammar of a natural language. This thesis works toward that goal in positing a constraint on the possible semantic types of variables in natural language. Specifically, I argue here that the logical forms (LFs) of natural languages do not contain higher-type variables, i.e., variables of a type higher than that of an individual, type e (see Chierchia (1984) and Baker (2003) for similar proposals). I refer to this constraint as the No Higher-Type Variables constraint (NHTV).

Assuming that the domain of individuals, D, includes at least objects, …

The Syntax And Semantics Of Questions In Swedish, Elisabet Britt Engdahl

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This dissertation provides an explicit syntactic and semantic account for a reasonably large sample of question constructions in Swedish. Within generative grammar, the existence of non-local dependencies as in constituent questions has been taken as evidence for the need to postulate transformational rules in the grammar of natural languages. Recently a number of linguists have proposed ways of handling such dependencies without transformations. Until now, these proposals have been based on English. In this study, we investigate the possibility of extending non-transformational approaches to languages like Swedish where question formation differs from English in a significant way. In Swedish, more …

Capturing The Adjective, Muffy E. A. Siegel

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Capturing the Adjective presents a formal, Montague Grammar treatment of an intuitively accessible distinction among adjectives. Many adjective meanings are computed relative to the properties corresponding to the common nouns they modify, but adjectives may also be absolute modifiers of individuals. Marya is a beautiful dancer may mean either that Marya is beautiful as a dancer – she dances beautifully (relative) or that Marya herself is beautiful (absolute).

The dissertation documents the relative/absolute distinction in Russian (where it is morphologically marked as long versus short) and in English (where it is not so marked, and some adjectives are exclusively relative …