Other Linguistics Commons^™

Acquisition Of Violations Of English Principle B By Native Speakers Of Japanese Or Chinese, Clarion C. Mendes

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This work focuses on Principles A and B of Binding Theory as applied to English. While English has a very strict interpretation of Binding Theory, it has a violation of Principle B with sentences with locative prepositional phrases and verb phrases of caused movement or perception.

In contrast, Chinese and Japanese have a very liberal interpretation of Binding Theory. The study is involved with investigating whether or not Japanese or Chinese speakers adapt to the English violation which is typically not taught in a classroom setting, but something acquired through natural exposure.

A custom survey was designed to see if …

An Examination Of Tag-Questions And Ellipsis In English And Spanish, Tiffany Judy

Presidential Scholars Theses (1990 – 2006)

In this paper, I will examine how tag-questions function in English and test if they function in the same way in Spanish. Then, I will compare the differences between the two languages and propose a structure and method for forming tag-questions in each language. Also, I will examine how ellipsis functions in each language and how it supports the analysis of the tag-questions. Finally, I will show that a few of the apparent differences between the two languages are incorrect and I will give my proposed solution.