Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Natural Selection And The Syntax Of Clausal Complementation, Keir Moulton

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the syntax and semantics of clausal complements. It identifies semantic underpinnings for some syntactic properties of the arguments of propositional attitude verbs. The way clausal arguments compose with their embedding predicates is not uniform and semantic differences emerge from the syntactic context clausal arguments appear in. Three case studies are taken up: clausal arguments of nouns, dislocated clausal arguments (sentential subjects and topics), and infinitival complements with overt subjects (AcI constructions). Chapter Two assembles evidence to support Stowell’s (1981) claim that the clausal complements of nouns are modifiers. It is shown that the clausal complements of nouns …

A Blog-Mediated Curriculum For Teaching Academic Genres In An Urban Classroom: Second Grade Ell Students’ Emergent Pathways To Literacy Development, Dong-Shin Shin

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the academic and social goals that three second-grade English language learners in a U.S. urban school bring to their blog-mediated academic writing practices, and the interrelated nature of those goals. This study aims to bridge the dichotomy between approaches to studying computer-mediated language and literacy development that are oriented toward academic goals inside school, and those that are oriented toward social goals outside school. The study also aims to investigate connections between language use and language development by highlighting linguistic features of semiotic choices that the students made for their texts. This builds upon recent research studies …

Two Types Of Definites In Natural Language, Florian Schwarz

Open Access Dissertations

This thesis is concerned with the description and analysis of two semantically different types of definite articles in German. While the existence of distinct article paradigms in various Germanic dialects and other languages has been acknowledged in the descriptive literature for quite some time, the theoretical implications of their existence have not been explored extensively. I argue that each of the articles corresponds to one of the two predominant theoretical approaches to analyzing definite descriptions: the `weak' article encodes uniqueness. The `strong' article is anaphoric in nature. In the course of spelling out detailed analyses for the two articles, various …

Optionality And Variability: Syntactic Licensing Meets Morphological Spell-Out, Cherlon Ussery

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores case and verbal agreement in Icelandic. Case and agreement generally pattern together, but there are exceptional instances in which case and agreement come apart. In Icelandic, verbs agree with Nominative DPs. However, in some constructions, agreement with a Nominative is optional. In the standard account of case and agreement (Chomsky 2000), both types of features are determined simultaneously via the same syntactic operation. The standard theory, therefore, predicts that case and agreement should pattern the same way, and that neither should be optional. Moreover, based on fieldwork conducted at the University of Iceland, I present data that …

An Investigation Of Temporal Resolution Abilities In School-Aged Children With And Without Dyslexia, Elena Zaidan

Open Access Dissertations

Dyslexia is a clinical diagnosis often associated with phonological processing deficits. There are, however, other areas of concern, such as the presence of auditory temporal processing (ATP) disorders. One method of investigating ATP is the gap detection (GD) paradigm. This study investigated GD performance using the Gaps-in-Noise © (GIN) test in three groups of 30 children, aged 8 to 9 years. GD thresholds and gap identification scores (%) were determined for each participant. The three groups of participants included (Group I) children with dyslexia and phonological deficits, (Group II) children with dyslexia and no significant phonological deficits, and (Group III) …

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 …

Successful Features: Verb Raising And Adverbs In L2 Acquisition Under An Organic Grammar Approach, Anne Marjatta Vainikka

Language Acquisition Work by Anne Vainikka

No abstract provided.

Tradition And Modernity In Scottish Gaelic Language Media, Ann Stewart

Final Reports of EFS student participants

No abstract provided.

The P-Map In Harmonic Serialism, John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

According to the P-Map, a phonological mapping is less faithful to the extent that there is more perceptual distance between its input and output. Although this idea is attractive, it cannot be implemented in the standard parallel version of Optimality Theory. This note explains why and shows how a derivational version of OT, Harmonic Serialism, can solve this problem.

Weighted Constraints In Generative Linguistics, Joe Pater

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

Harmonic Grammar (HG) and Optimality Theory (OT) are closely related formal frameworks for the study of language. In both, the structure of a given language is determined by the relative strengths of a set of constraints. They differ in how these strengths are represented: as numerical weights (HG) or as ranks (OT). Weighted constraints have advantages for the construction of accounts of language learning and other cognitive processes, partly because they allow for the adaptation of connectionist and statistical models. HG has been little studied in generative linguistics, however, largely due to influential claims that weighted constraints make incorrect predictions …

Harmony In Harmonic Serialism, John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

What OT constraint favors autosegmental spreading? Existing proposals for the pro-spreading markedness constraint make implausible typological predictions. This paper presents a new proposal that depends on Harmonic Serialism to avoid those unwanted predictions.

The P-Map In Harmonic Serialism, John J. Mccarthy

John J. McCarthy

According to the P-Map, a phonological mapping is less faithful to the extent that there is more perceptual distance between its input and output. Although this idea is attractive, it cannot be implemented in the standard parallel version of Optimality Theory. This note explains why and shows how a derivational version of OT, Harmonic Serialism, can solve this problem.

Classified Bibliography Of Works On Ot With Candidate Chains (Ot-Cc) And Harmonic Serialism (Hs), John J. Mccarthy

John J. McCarthy

No abstract provided.

Harmony In Harmonic Serialism, John J. Mccarthy

John J. McCarthy

What OT constraint favors autosegmental spreading? Existing proposals for the pro-spreading markedness constraint make implausible typological predictions. This paper presents a new proposal that depends on Harmonic Serialism to avoid those unwanted predictions.

Studying Gen, John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

In Optimality Theory, phonological patterns are accounted for with output constraints ranked in a hierarchy. There is little explanatory role for a theory of operations, and hence little has been said about the Gen component. This situation has changed with the emergence of a derivational version of Optimality Theory called Harmonic Serialism.

One of the principal differences between Harmonic Serialism and standard Optimality Theory is that Harmonic Serialism's Gen is limited to doing one thing at a time. Harmonic Serialism's analyses and explanations depend on knowing what it means to “do one thing at a time”, and that requires a …

Classified Bibliography Of Works On Ot With Candidate Chains (Ot-Cc) And Harmonic Serialism (Hs), John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.