Syntax Commons^™

Covert Scrambling To The Edge In Tshangla: An Analysis Of Wh- In-Situ, Tshering Y. Dorji

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the syntactic derivation of wh- in-situ constructions in Tshangla, an understudied Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan. Argument wh-items can remain in-situ in islands—including sentential subjects, adjunct clauses, relative clauses, and coordinate structures—while projecting their scope to the matrix level. This island-insensitivity for certain wh-items suggests a lack of movement in the narrow syntax, yet diagnostic tests, including crossover effects, reconstruction effects, and parasitic gap licensing, provide compelling evidence for a movement-based account. I propose an analysis involving covert LF scrambling to the left edge of an island clause. This movement is driven by semantic requirements …

Girl Grammar: A Syntactic And Pragmatic Analysis Of Girl And Miss Girl, Evelyn A. Powers

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Based on observation, personal interaction, and informal interviews/linguistic judgements, this thesis presents the unique and asymmetrical grammaticality patterns of the terms Girl and Miss Girl. To account for these asymmetries, I provide a syntactic framework rooted in Minimalism and Rizzi’s (1997) expanded CP hypothesis, alongside a pragmatic explanation based on Barros and Frank’s (2023) attentional maintenance and attentional shift paradigm.

Miss Girl behaves as a typical R-expression when used as a 3rd person subject, but Girl has a very restricted distribution, inconsistent with either R-expressions or pronouns (it is acceptable as the subject of a main clause, ungrammatical in object …

Prism: Priming Relationships In Syntax And Mathematics, Michelle J. Zhu

Honors Scholar Theses

The implementation of sheltered education programs has become increasingly prevalent in schools as new research in second language acquisition emerges. Yet despite this growing attention to ESL instructional practice, far less is known about the cognitive processes that underlie how bilingual students engage with academic content. This study investigates cross-domain structural priming between mathematical and linguistic processing in monolingual and bilingual individuals, focusing on how bilingual experience influences syntactic attachment preferences. Prior research suggests that mathematical and linguistic structures share underlying cognitive representations, and that exposure to structures in one domain can influence processing in another. Additionally, bilingualism has been …

Análisis Verbal De La Concordancia Negativa En Estudiantes De Español Como L2 Y Hablantes De Herencia De Una Universidad De Estados Unidos De América, Natalia C. Gallardo Linares

LSU Master's Theses

La concordancia negativa (NC) constituye un rasgo central de la negación en español, en el que un marcador negativo preverbal (no) coocurre con ítems de concordancia negativa (NCIs) posverbales, como nada, para expresar una única negación semántica. Investigaciones previas sobre la adquisición de la concordancia negativa se han centrado principalmente en el papel de la competencia lingüística y de las influencias interlingüísticas, por lo que se ha prestado relativamente menos atención a la contribución de factores lingüísticos internos, como el tipo de verbo. La presente tesis examina la adquisición de la concordancia negativa en español con especial …

Investigating Bilingual Language Learning Using Artificial Grammars, Kyla Kelly

Honors Theses

Language development research has established that infants can learn language rapidly and without explicit instruction through implicit learning mechanisms like statistical learning. These mechanisms can be used to learn word boundaries, sounds, meanings, and grammar rules of language. One method for investigating this is artificial grammar learning (AGL), in which people are exposed to sequences of nonwords to see if they can unconsciously learn their underlying grammars. While much of statistical learning and AGL research has focused on a monolingual perspective, most of the world’s population is multilingual. Studies like Weiss, Gerfen, and Mitchel (2009) and Mitchel and Weiss (2010) …

It’S Giving Nonfactive Small Clause Selection, David Garsten

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

In this paper I examine the syntax and semantics of English nonfactive verbs, bare nominals, and small clauses through the colloquial constructions it’s giving and screams+NP. I aim to explain the formality of nonfactives with DP small clauses in American English, as well as the informality of bare nominals in adjectival positions. First I propose a semantics for two nonfactive heads: v_ATT and v_EVI. I demonstrate that all variation in the selection of English small clause type can be reduced to selection by category, and that these nonfactive heads have lost the ability to c-select for …

Addendum To The Mapbook Of Syntactic Variation In American English: Survey Results, 2020–2021, Jim Wood, Guilherme M. C. Pereira

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper presents an addendum to the Mapbook of Syntactic Variation in American English (Wood et al. 2020), reporting the results of additional acceptability-judgment surveys conducted by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project in 2020–2021. Using the same survey design, data-processing pipeline, and mapping techniques as the original mapbook, we extend the empirical record to a new set of syntactic constructions, including additional uses of hella, causal where, the alternative one construction, intensificational fully, and several cases of object omission with transitive verbs, which we call “lonely transitives”. As in the original work, we provide geospatial visualizations of …

I Can’T Even With This Thesis: A Syntactic And Pragmatic Analysis, Ester Luna

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This project focuses on the construction I can’t even, a sentence coined in the early 2000s that expresses a speaker’s strong emotion to the point where they are lost for words. The most typical emotion conveyed using I can’t even is exasperation, as in example (1), but it can also be an indication of extreme happiness, like in (2).

• (1) He tried to get my number AGAIN. I can’t even.
• (2) You came all the way from New York to watch me perform? I can’t even.

While the modal can and the adverb even normally require the …

The Interplay Of Morphology, Syntax, And Semantics In Kuria Verb Extensions Within The Mara Region, Mary Charwi

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Verb extension morphological affixes that significantly alter verb meaning are a defining characteristic of Bantu languages. This paper investigates the morphosyntactic behaviour, semantic implications, and functional roles of extensions within Kuria, a Bantu language of Tanzania. The study adopts Hyman’s morphocentric approach, specifically the CARP template (Causative-Applicative-Reciprocal-Passive), as its foundational framework to test whether Kuria adheres to this pan-Bantu default ordering. The data were collected in Tarime District (2014-2015) using a mixed methods approach, comprising questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and video stimuli with 13 rural and urban speakers, and text analysis (the Kuria Bible). Through rigorous morphosyntactic parsing, the analysis reveals …

The Syntax And Semantics Of Reciprocal Constructions In Chibarwe: A Lexical Mapping Account, Tendai Chirimaunga

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Bantu languages have a robust structure, which is usually stated to be agglutinative, accommodates affixations of a wide range of morphemes both as prefixes (to the left of the root), as well suffixes (to the right of the root) before placing the terminal vowel. In their verbal morphology, the reciprocal is one of the many derivational affixes that have, however, not gained similar prominence as the study of the applicative and the causative construction. The thrust of this study is to investigate the syntax and semantics of reciprocal constructions in ChiBarwe, a marginalised cross-border language spoken in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. …

Diverse Presentations Of Aphasia: A Comparative Analysis Of Polysynthetic And Analytic Languages Through Kanien'keha (Mohawk) And English Morphology And Syntax, Halle L. Elder

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

This paper looks to compare two linguistically diverse languages, English and Kanien'keha, a native American language commonly known as Mohawk. The comparison will revolve around the morphology and syntax typologies of these two languages. In addition to the morphological and syntactic comparison, I will discuss how aphasia presents itself in different language typologies, placing this comparison onto English and Kanien'keha. The research questions I look to answer are: How does word formation and sentence structure differ between English and Kanien'kéha? Does aphasia present differently in analytic and polysynthetic languages like English and Kanien'kéha? The morphological data and syntactic data are …

It’S Hella Cool: Investigating The Properties Of Hella, Lydia Lee

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

Hella is known as a strongly characteristic feature of Northern California, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area (Waksler 2000, Boboc 2016). Based on data collected from public Twitter posts from 2013–2020 and examples drawn from Boboc (2016) and Waksler (2000), this paper investigates the origin, syntactic properties, and sociolinguistic aspects of hella. This study also draws on 1,389 responses to sentences (1)–(3), adapted from Boboc (2016), which were included in the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project’s survey work conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk in 2019.

1. This seat reclines hella!
   ‘This seat reclines a lot.’
2. I spoke Spanish today for the …

The Creation Of Gender In Conlangs, Alexis L. Campos, Ixchel Mireles, Bryon Haynes, David Kamal, Zachariah Gonzalez

Team - Mere Wudu - Documents

This PowerPoint presentation is an example of grammatical gender and language structure in the world of Mere Wudu using the language of "Letic"

Unifying Comprehension And Competence Through Merge: A New Linking Hypothesis Connecting Electrophysiological Data To Linguistic Intuitions, Kevin Patrck Guzzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation integrates neuroscience and linguistics to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying syntactic processing. To do this, we focus on Early Syntactic Negativities (ESNs) which are rapid negative electrophysiological responses known to be elicited by phrase structure violations due to an unexpected lexical category. We examine ESNs elicited in two previously undocumented elliptical constructions, sluicing and swiping, employing event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral acceptability judgments. Our investigation builds upon Collins and Stabler’s (2016) formalization of minimalist syntax, proposing a novel Merge Hypothesis of ESNs. This hypothesis posits a direct link between ESNs and violations of the Merge operation, a fundamental …

On The Ambiguity Of Wh-Expressions In Thai, Naparat Meechanyakul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deals with an ambiguity problem of wh-indeterminates in Thai. Thai wh-phrases are indeterminates in that their interpretations depend on licensing conditions and structural environments. In this dissertation, observed ambiguous interpretations of object wh-arguments in Thai are described and analyzed through the lens of a phase-based approach under the Minimalist Program. The ambiguity problem concerns the fact that ʔàraj ‘what’ and khraj ‘who’ receive two possible interpretations, namely indefinite/NPI and interrogative, when they appear as an internal argument of serialized verb phrases and under c-commanding negation. Other wh-phrases in the language, namely the locative wh …

Revealing Students’ And Teachers’ Perceptions Of Challenges And Strategies In Arabic Reading Comprehension, Osama Othman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the perceptions of Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) students and teachers regarding the influence of eight textual features on reading comprehension. These features are: vowelization, word patterns, roots, vocabulary, case endings, word order, punctuation marks, and text organization. It also investigates reading comprehension strategies employed by both groups to overcome comprehension challenges associated with these features. Data were collected from 102 AFL students and 26 AFL teachers through questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 6 students and 11 teachers. Results revealed that students generally rated the influence of these features more highly than teachers. The …

The Syntax Of Natural Language, Michael Diercks, Beatrice Santorini, Anthony Kroch

Pomona Faculty Books

An introductory textbook to the syntax of natural language from the perspective of generative syntactic theory. Suitable for undergraduate courses and introductory graduate courses.

The Grammar Of Approximating Number Pairs (Anps) In Mandarin Chinese, Xuehuai He

Pomona Senior Theses

"There are twenty or thirty people." What exactly does this mean? Is it exactly twenty or thirty, or is it an approximate range? What about "twenty or twenty-six people"?

Approximating number pairs (ANPs) are a kind of approximative expression that takes a number pair and expresses a quantity close to it. There are constraints on the structure and choice of numerals: many combinations would be ungrammatical or denote a precise disjunction rather than being approximative. Studies like Eriksson et al. (2010) statistically generalized the grammar of ANPs through corpus studies on select European languages. However, these surface-level generalizations fail to …

A (Great) Many Of Many Constructions, Jim Wood, Squid Tamar-Mattis

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

In this paper, we discuss a series of constructions across various English dialects involving the word many, drawing examples from the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) and web searches. The constructions include both standard and colloquial forms, including formally singular and plural constructions, as well as those employing a lot of and a great many. We connect these constructions to existing linguistic analyses, particularly those proposed by Kayne (2002, 2006, 2007a,b, 2017).

Another One: On The Syntax Of ‘Alternative One’, Ester Luna

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper discusses the use of one as a disjunction marker occurring immediately after a DisjP, such as He was in Tennessee or Kentucky, one. Little research has been published on this construction, which is used predominantly by Southern American English speakers. My project aims to fill this gap in the literature by describing the distribution of one and examining various hypotheses for its syntactic derivation using data from Montgomery (2004) and the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. Based on my descriptive analysis, I propose to treat this "alternative one" as a proform and matrix clause adjunct.

I compare …

Mapping The ‘Alternative One’ Construction In American English, Guilherme M. C. Pereira

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

Alternative one is an understudied construction accepted by speakers of some American English dialects in sentences like (i), where the word one appears immediately after a disjunction.

(i) I need to talk to John or Malcolm, one.
'I need to talk to John or Malcolm, one or the other.'

(Montgomery 2006:152)

In this paper, I present maps of acceptability judgments of this construction in the U.S., using data from a survey administered by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project in 2020 and 2021. The maps confirm the geographical distribution claimed for alternative one in the Dictionary of American Regional English (Cassidy …

I Have A Survey On Lonely Transitives! Do You Want?, Linda Do

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

In this paper, I describe a recently observed grammatical construction that the YGDP has termed "lonely transitives" (LonTs). Used by some speakers of English in informal contexts, the construction consists of a traditionally transitive verb used without an object. LonTs can only be used if there is sufficient prior linguistic or situational context to recover the null object and if the sentence retains the same meaning as the verb used with an overt object. Using the results of a survey I conducted, I discuss the syntactic distribution of LonTs and suggest that it may be much wider than previously established …

I Have Some Maps. Do You Want?, Ella Moran

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper investigates the distribution of the 'lonely transitive' (or LonT) construction using YGDP survey data. I analyze the distribution of this construction by interpolating acceptability judgment data to create a series of maps showing the likely acceptability of various LonT sentences for English speakers across the US. I find that the distribution of LonTs does not seem to be geographically conditioned and that a markedness hierarchy exists between the verbs want, have, and need.

Hella Much Variation: Intensification In Northern California English, As Seen Through The South Bay, Clara Mcmahon

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

In this paper I present a unified syntactic analysis to account for all of the typical usages of the Northern California lexical item hella. Specifically, I focus on hella’s usage in the South Bay—a subregion of the San Francisco Bay Area which corresponds roughly to Santa Clara County. Contrary to Boboc (2016), who proposes that Bay Area speakers do not allow hella to modify silent elements, I provide evidence that hella is a degree word which can license silent elements for South Bay speakers. Using a silent MANY and a silent MUCH (Kayne 2005), all of hella’s …

Diaspora Documentation Of West Albay Bikol, Nhia Borja

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper presents a comprehensive linguistic analysis and cultural documentation of West Albay Bikol, a dialect spoken in Bikol, Philippines. Drawing upon narratives spoken by a native speaker, this study aims to expand the literature on Bikolano language and add the dialects of Balugo and Polangui to the conversation. The motivation for the project stems from a personal aspiration to learn West Albay Bikolano and provide authentic language examples.

The paper comprises six chapters. The first chapter briefly overviews Bikol dialects and Central Philippine languages and reviews existing literature on the overall Bikol language. The second chapter is an examination …

Exploring Etymology Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

The English language is a borrowed language, a blend of words from many languages from around the world. We see this in the various ways sounds are represented by letters and letter combinations. In transparent or shallow orthographies, there is high predictability and consistent letter-sound correspondence whereas in opaque or deep orthographies, there are many ways to spell the same sound as well as there are many sounds for the same spellings (Burkins & Yates, 2021; Moats, 2020). This assignment description is a guided inquiry for preservice teachers to explore the concept of etymology by watching and reflecting on six …

How Phonological And Syntactic Overlap Impact Cognate Processing Speeds In Bilinguals, Ella Marie Peterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This paper investigates individuals who are proficient in two languages (bilinguals) and the speeds at which bilinguals process cognates (words with comparable form and meaning across languages). This paper cites two ongoing experiments: The Language Identification (LID) task and the Self-Paced Listening (SPL) task. Findings from the LID suggest that phonological overlap in cognates facilitates bilingual language processing speeds, when cognates are presented in isolation. Findings from the SPL suggest that syntactic overlap in cognates also facilitates bilingual language processing speeds, when cognates are presented in sentences. These findings are significant in that the tasks present cognates to participants in …

The Influence Of Visual Perspective On The Cognitive Effort Required For Mental Representation, Jeffrey P. Hong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Mental representation is the process by which an individual simulates an event in their mind’s eye. This process is the foundation of the ability to remember the past, engage in prospective thinking, or imagine fictitious scenarios. An individual can mentally represent any event through their own eyes—the first-person perspective or from the viewpoint of an external observer—the third-person perspective. The perspective of representation influences outcomes related to memory, visuospatial processing, affect, social cognition, clinical diagnoses, and language processing. In turn, an individual’s tendency to favour either perspective is shaped by related factors.

The current research consists of four experiments, designed …

Mirativity In English Response Particles: An Analysis From The Syntax/Semantics Interface, Randi Martinez

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

Responses to questions can provide significant insight about linguistic structure and meaning. In this paper, I propose an analysis of the structure of assertions and various responses to assertions, bringing together semantic and syntactic considerations. The analysis incorporates a Speech Act Phrase (SAP, Speas & Tenny 2003), which is taken to encode illocutionary force. I present novel data on a polar response particle (PRP) form that has not yet been considered in the literature, namely, the English yeah-huh/nuh-uh responses. I show that these are polarity-based responses that signal disagreement and mirativity. I discuss the syntactic and discourse-related restrictions for yeah-huh/nuh-uh …

Completive All In English And The Status Of All, Carolina Fraga

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

In this paper I discuss a novel construction in English, restricted to existentials and possessive have sentences, exemplified by sentences such as There’s all sand in my hair. I argue that the syntax and the semantics of this construction, which I have labeled the completive all construction, can be explained only if all is understood to be modifying a silent element (in the sense of Kayne 2004). In particular, I propose that completive all sentences contain a silent SPACE element and a silent preposition WITH. All is the modifier of a PP headed by silent WITH and the nominal …