This dissertation uses a corpus of tokens retrieved from broadcast news stories and print news articles to examine the array of constructions used to encode stative predications in Modern Standard Arabic. A state is defined as a situation that includes its reference time, whether that time is encoding time or another time of orientation. A range…

This study investigates the relationship between three linguistic functions: thetics, miratives and exclamatives. Thetics are an information structure configuration that conveys that the information is new to the addressee. The thetic subtypes selected for this study are the following: existentials (e.g. "There are apples in the…

A primary function of prosody in many languages is to convey information structure--the "packaging" of a sentence's content into categories such as "focus", "given" and "topic". In English and other West Germanic languages it is widely assumed that focus is signaled prosodically by the location of a…