Linguistics Commons^™

Text Linguistics And The Problem Of The Syntax, Ramazon Radjabovich Bobokalonov, Polatshoh Ramazonovich Bobokalonov

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Introduction. The article deals with the problems of linguistic textual studies in Uzbekistan, its development and ways of solving the ongoing research work. The scientific article provides information on the work of scholars on Uzbek language synthesis. The article aims to build the knowledge, skills and competencies of researchers and masters conducting research. Uzbek linguists, following World and Russian linguistics in the field of text linguistics, are entering a new scientific stage of linguistics and text linguistics. Scientific potential is being created in the linguistics of the text. In the field of text study, special attention is paid to filling …

Functional Differentiation In The Language Network Revealed By Lesion-Dymptom Mapping, William Matchin, Alexandra Basilakos, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Brielle C. Stark, Gregory Hickok, Julius Fridriksson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Theories of language organization in the brain commonly posit that different regions underlie distinct linguistic mechanisms. However, such theories have been criticized on the grounds that many neuroimaging studies of language processing find similar effects across regions. Moreover, condition by region interaction effects, which provide the strongest evidence of functional differentiation between regions, have rarely been offered in support of these theories. Here we address this by using lesion-symptom mapping in three large, partially-overlapping groups of aphasia patients with left hemisphere brain damage due to stroke (N = 121, N = 92, N = 218). We identified multiple measure by …

Get My Syntax On, Heidi Lei

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

In this paper, I describe and analyze an instance of micro-syntactic variation in American English, a construction I refer to as get my X on. There is considerable flexibility in the construction, involving the types of determiners allowed, the phrasal verbs used, and most notably, the structure of the DP my X. In Standard American English, the X following a possessive pronoun is generally restricted to nouns. However, in this construction, X can be a lexical verb like sing, teach, or even celebrate. Some speakers of African American English accept only the bare verb, rejecting …

Syntaxe De La Phrase Complexe: Le Cas De La Proposition Relative En Amazighe (Tachelhit), Chadia Derkaoui

Dirassat

Syntax of the complex sentence: the case of the relative clause in Amazigh (Tachelhit)

After a brief presentation of the complex sentence in Amazigh, we will focus, in this article, on the study of the relative clause and on the analysis of its structure. We will try to demonstrate, by relying on formal criteria such as position and syntactic function, that there is indeed a homogeneous class of relative pronouns and a relative subordinate with its specificities but also that it may have in common with other languages.

Cross-Linguistic Morphosyntactic Influence In Bilingual Speakers Of Jamaican Creole And Jamaican English, Taryn R. Malcolm

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingualism in Jamaica is of considerable consequence, as most individuals are early bilinguals, speaking both a variety of Jamaican Creole (JC) from birth and having standardized English (sE) as the language of instruction in education. Immigrants from Jamaica to the United States are an ideal population to examine how cross-linguistic influence (CLI) impacts morphosyntax as JC and sE differ in morphosyntactic constructions, including verb tense- marking, subject-verb agreement, and copula use. While much of the work in the field of CLI has examined spoken language pairs with varying degrees of similarity (or difference) between the languages, examining CLI in a …

Basic Tools For College Composition Success For Beginner Esl Learners, Gina M. Vellani

English OER Repository

Basic Tools for College Composition Success is a practical classroom resource for instructors of beginner level ESL students. This resource teaches paragraph writing skills and syntax. Paragraph genres included in this resource are descriptive and narrative. Most paragraph examples are authentic writings from beginner ESL college students.

How Humans Produce And Interpret Sentences Using Syntax, Jun Tamura

International Programs

Humans are able to use languages freely and understand the meaning of languages. This universal linguistic ability of humans can be accounted for by “syntax” in our brains, for which I will provide three pieces of supportive evidence.

The Phonology And Syntax Of Grammatical Tone In Copala Triqui, Jamillah Shantel Rodriguez

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Copala Triqui is an Otomanguean language of Oaxaca, Mexico with a highly complex tone system. In Copala Triqui, the lowering of tone from an upper register tone to a lower register tone acts as a conveyor of grammatical information. Tone lowering occurs across many syntactic environments in the language (Hollenbach, 1984; Broadwell; 2011; Broadwell, 2016; Broadwell & Clemens, 2017; Rodriguez & Clemens, 2020). In this thesis, I consider two aspects of tone lowering: i) the representation of tone lowering in the phonology and ii) the syntactic trigger for tone lowering across multiple environments.

Brown's Stages Of Morphosyntactic Development Applied To The Typical Development Of Italian, Marie Laiche

LSU Master's Theses

Background: In A First Language (1973), Roger Brown called for an increase in crosslinguistic data and analysis of morphosyntax across languages as more research in this field is crucial for working out the overarching determinants of language acquisition order and for the ability to accurately compare child language acquisition across different languages. An increase in this research would benefit linguistic researchers and speech-language-pathologists offering services to or evaluating children speaking a different language or more than one language. The current study seeks to add to the field of crosslinguistic research by adapting Brown’s guidelines of English language acquisition to the …

Linguistic Status Of Address: Address As A Syntactic Unit, Zebo Yovkacheva Phd Student

Philology Matters

This article discusses the linguistic aspect of address. The syntactic category of address attracted the attention of Russian linguists for a long time. The object of their study was address, the natural condition for the existence of which was oral and written forms of dialogical speech. A multilateral analysis of the essence and functioning of circulation in the Russian language was first presented in the works of A.A. Shakhmatova and A.M. Peshkovsky. In modern syntactic works and academic grammars, the methods of expression and distribution of addresses in oral and written dialogical speech, their bridges in the utterance, the nature …

Who Wants In On This Linguistic Analysis?, Lane Fischer

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper brings together previous research on the Midland English dialect region construction want + [intransitive preposition] heretofore referred to as the wants in phenomenon. I will build on past research of wants in and present its construction, background, sociolinguistic relevance and will then present further questions I have about the construction, my hypotheses on these questions, and results from my own intuitions as a speaker of the Midland dialect and a linguistic survey. With reference to a similar Midland construction, need + [past participle], I ultimately propose that although these two constructions share many of the same syntactic restrictions, …

On The Syntax Of West Kalimantan: Asymmetries And A'-Movement In Malayic And Land Dayak Languages, Carly Joann Sommerlot

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation focuses on five Malayic and five Land Dayak languages of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, exploring voice, A’-movement, and extraction asymmetries through a Minimalist framework. The main goal of this dissertation is to bridge the gap between documentation and syntactic analysis in a few ways: a) by using data from all underdocumented, and several undocumented languages; b) by providing syntactically motivated description of ten different languages; and c) by using contemporary syntactic principles, Case licensing and Phase Theory, to explain microvariation found in the voice system of these ten languages. Specifically, I offer an analysis of voice in West Kalimantan …

Reconstraining Massive Pied-Piping In English: A Non-Interrogative Cp Analysis, Daniel Garrett Amy

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation focuses on the distribution of "massive pied-piping" (Heck 2008) constructions in English. Compared to other forms of wh-movement and pied-piping, broadly speaking, massive pied-piping is limited in the environments in which it may occur. The primary goals of this dissertations are to examine (i) whether massive piped-piping is restricted to non-subordinated clauses (cf. wh-movement), (ii) what effect prosody has on relative clause interpretations, and (iii) how the distribution of massive pied-piping can be explained given a wider pattern of acceptability. To address these questions, I combine traditional syntactic and semantic judgments with two psycholinguistic experiments that utilize a …

Investigating The Relationship Between Individual Differences And Island Sensitivity, Catherine Pham, Lauren Covey, Alison Gabriele, Saad Aldosari, Robert Fiorentino

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

It is well-attested that native speakers tend to give low acceptability ratings to sentences that involve movement from within islands, yet the source of island effects remains an active debate. The grammatical account posits that island effects result from syntactic constraints on wh-movement, whereas the resource-limitation view posits that low ratings emerge due to processing-related constraints on the parser, such that islands themselves present processing bottlenecks. The current study addresses this debate by investigating the relationship between island sensitivity and individual differences in cognitive abilities, as it has been argued that the two views make distinct predictions regarding whether a …

Spanish Nominalizations And Case Assignment, Dr. Jeff Renaud, Tania Leal

Celebration of Learning

Nominalizations are syntactic structures wherein verbal roots co-occur with verbal and nominal properties, classifying them as verbal (VN) (El andar el niño tan tarde) or nominal (NN) (El andar errabundo del niño). While NNs mark agents genitive (del niño), VNs require nominative agents (el niño). NNs co-occur with adjectives (errabundo), whereas VNs co-occur with adverbs (tan tarde). Alexiadou et al. (2011) posit separate syntactic structures for the two. In this study, we investigate via self-paced reading task the types of case available in each structure, providing evidence of …

Touch Down In Pittsburghese, R. Thomas Mccoy

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

In standard American English, down may take a DP object only if the DP indicates a path, as in I walked down the street. However, for some speakers of Pittsburgh English, it is also grammatical for down to take a DP object indicating a location or goal, as in She works down Baltimore (meaning ‘She works down in Baltimore’). In this work, I describe the distributional properties of this usage, which I name “touch down.” Based on these properties, I propose the syntactic analysis that touch down licenses a silent preposition where standard American English has an overt …

The Variable Expression Of Transitive Subject And Possesor In Wayuunaiki (Guajiro), Andres M. Sabogal

Linguistics ETDs

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. …

Perspectives On Truth: The Case Of Language And False Belief Reasoning, Jill De Villiers

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Many theorists take language – vocabulary, mental verbs, syntax, counterfactuals, discourse – to be a significant help in the development of explicit Theory of Mind. Does conversation, with all its point-of-view indicators, betray another’s perspective? By comparing how different linguistic markers behave across clausal environments, I demonstrate that they fall into distinct classes, only one of which – tense – patterns with the truth of the clause in terms of perspective. Sentences with embedded finite complements thus have a special role in representing the truth or falsity of others’ beliefs. Children who master embedded sentential complements can then more readily …

Influence Of Predicate Sense On Word Order In Sign Languages: Intensional And Extensional Verbs, Donna Jo Napoli, R. Sutton Spence, R. Müller De Quadros

Linguistics Faculty Works

We present evidence for the influence of semantics on the order of subject, object, and verb in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) sentences. While some have argued for a prevailing pattern of SVO in Libras, we find a strong tendency for this order in sentences that do not presuppose the existence of the verb’s object, but not in sentences that do, which instead favor SOV. These findings are coherent with those of a recent study on gesture. We argue that the variable influence of the relevant predicates is particularly salient in sign languages, due to the iconic nature of the visual …

A Study Of Sociolinguistic Variation In A Small Community : Puerto Rican Spanish In Amsterdam, New York, Zahir Mumin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New York based on the duration of time that they have lived on the Island of Puerto Rico. Previous research on Puerto Rican Spanish in the US has focused particularly on final /s/ deletion (Poplack, 1980b, 1980c), final liquid production of /l/ and /ɾ/ (Ramos-Pellicia, 2007), …

Harmonic Syntax Of The Twelve-Bar Blues Form: A Corpus Study, Jonah Katz

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

THIS PAPER DESCRIBES THE CONSTRUCTION AND analysis of a corpus of harmonic progressions from 12-bar blues forms included in the jazz repertoire collection The Real Book. A novel method of coding and analyzing such corpus data is developed, with a notion of ‘‘possible harmonic change’’ derived from the corpus and logit mixed-effects regression models that describe the difference between actually occurring harmonic events and possible but non-occurring ones in terms of various sets of theoretical constructs. Models using different sets of constructs are compared using the Bayesian Information Criterion, which assesses the accuracy and efficiency of each model. The principal …

Because, X: A New Construction Of Because In Popular Culture, Stephanie Walla

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis explores the new language fad, Because, X, which originated on the Internet and was named the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year in 2013. Since the construction is relatively recent, there has been little formal research conducted on it beyond Internet articles and discussions. The research presented in this thesis aims to understand this new construction through detailed syntactic, semantic, and quantitative analyses. This includes investigating instances of the Because, X construction from its origins in 2011 to recent occurrences as well as gathering participant judgments on the construction from two different studies conducted for this work.

Native Language Adaptation To Novel Verb Argument Structures By Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Electrophysiological Investigation, Eve Higby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals have to learn two different grammatical systems. Some aspects of these grammars may be similar across the two languages (for example, the active-passive alternation) while others may exist in only one of the two grammars (for example, the distinction between recent and distant past). This dissertation investigates the degree to which grammar information specific to only one language is available when processing the other language. In particular, the current study focuses on the application of grammatical structures from the bilinguals’ second-learned language to their first-learned language, a direction of language transfer not often investigated. Based on a Shared Syntax …

Forming Wh-Questions In Shona: A Comparative Bantu Perspective, Jason Zentz

Linguistics Graduate Dissertations

Bantu languages, which are spoken throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa, permit wh- questions to be constructed in multiple ways, including wh-in-situ, full wh-movement, and partial wh-movement. Shona, a Bantu language spoken by about 13 million people in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, allows all three of these types. In this dissertation, I conduct the first in-depth examination of Shona wh-questions, drawing on fifty hours of elicitation with a native speaker consultant to explore the derivational relationships among these strategies. Wh-in-situ questions have received a wide variety of treatments in the syntactic lit- erature, ranging from covert or disguised movement to postsyntactic binding …

Latin Nominatives With And Without Verbs, Joseph C. M. Davis

Publications and Research

Although the nominative case has typically been viewed as a syntactic device marking the subject of the verb of a sentence, that case in Latin must instead be understood as a communicative tool operating at the discourse level if its entire distribution is to be accounted for. Attested instances of the Latin nominative case without any verb force this shift. Nominatives with and without verbs alike can be accounted for if concentration of attention at the discourse level is treated as the operative factor. Once the function of the Latin nominative case is properly understood, its distinction from other grammatical …

Esperanto: A Diachronic Study Of Language Word Order, Daniel Seth Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Language Production System In Shaping Grammars., Dana Mcdaniel Phd, Cecile Mckee, Wayne Cowart Phd, Merrill F. Garrett

Faculty Publications

We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems. Our extension focuses on production, and we use that to explore explanations for certain subject/object asymmetries in extraction structures.

I Accidentally This Thesis Because East: The Influence Of The Internet On Spoken Language In Eastspeak, Emma S. Manning

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the variety of English spoken in East Dorm at Harvey Mudd College. It describes aspects of the syntax and phonology of Eastspeak, focusing in particular on how Eastspeak has been influenced by the language of the internet. This includes tendencies toward brevity and language play, as well as the use of specific constructions used on the internet, and playful pronunciations that are influenced by creative misspellings used online. Specific Eastspeak phenomena discussed include conversion, deletion, and unusual determiner and quantifier use.

How To Ask Questions In Mandarin Chinese, Woan-Jen Liing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis re-examines the four main question-types in Mandarin Chinese, namely, particle questions, háishì questions, A-not-A questions and wh-questions, whose previous accounts are argued to be unsatisfactory due to various faulty assumptions about questions, particularly the stipulation of `Q'. Each of the four Mandarin Chinese question-types is re-accounted based on the view that questions are speech-acts, whose performance are done by way of speakers' subconscious choice of sentence-types that mirror their ignorance-types, as proposed in Fiengo (2007). It is further demonstrated that viewing questions as speech-acts instead of a structurally marked sentence-type allows a simpler and more intuitive account for …

The Interplay Of Syntactic Parsing Strategies And Prosodic Phrase Lengths In Processing Turkish Sentences, Nazik Dinctopal-Deniz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many experiments have shown that the prosody (rhythm and melody) with which a sentence is uttered can provide a listener with cues to its syntactic structure (Lehiste, 1973, and since). A few studies have observed in addition that an inappropriate prosodic contour can mislead the syntactic parsing routines, resulting in a prosody-induced garden-path. These include, among others, Speer et al. (1996) and Kjelgaard and Speer (1999) for English. The studies by Speer et al. and Kjelgaard and Speer (SKS) showed that misplaced prosodic cues caused more processing difficulty in sentences with early closure of a clause (EC syntax) than in …