Reduplication, the copying operation employed in natural language morphophonology (e.g., Ilokano pluralization, [kaldin] 'goat'; [kal-kaldin] 'goats'; Hayes and Abad, 1989, p. 357), creates repetition structures within surface word forms. Though reduplication and surface repetitions have been extensively studied, two questions remain unresolved.…

This dissertation is about the learnability of different generative, Separationist approaches to nominal morphosyntax. The core of my investigation is number, gender, and declension class, as manifested across nouns, adnominals (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, and quantifiers), and articles. An extreme position would require that all of…

This dissertation sets out to find an answer to the question why not all logically conceivable patterns are found typologically. In other words, my aim is to find paradigmatic gaps and explain their absence. In doing so, I use the mathematical notion of monotonicity (which is a more general term to convey order preservation) as proposed by Graf…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

In recent years, an array of studies has focused on 'translationese' (i.e., unique features that manifest in translated texts, causing second language (L2) writings to be similar to translated texts but different from native language (L1) writings). This intriguing linguistic pattern has motivated scholars to investigate potential markers for…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…