This dissertation aims to analyze the Western Armenian (WA) verbal morphology from a diachronic perspective and perform an internal reconstruction to trace the modern Western dialects back to Classical Armenian (CA) or an older, unattested variant of Armenian. The dissertation's methodology (Chapter 1) is based on comparative dialectology (Chapter…

Multi-word sequences are important components of language because they are building blocks that can be used to create long stretches of discourse. They are word combinations that have particular importance because of their co-occurrence and function in discourse that suggest that they are stored and retrieved from memory as a whole rather than as…

An ongoing debate in phonology concerns the extent to which the phonological typology is shaped by synchronic learning biases. The two best-studied types of synchronic bias are complexity bias, a bias against formally complex patterns, and substantive bias, a bias against phonetically unnatural patterns. While most previous work has focused on…

Categorization of objects' parts varies across human populations. This dissertation provides evidence that the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of this categorization are closely linked. English speakers apply mostly terms with abstract geometrical meaning, like "top," to the parts of any arbitrary object. However, in the languages…

This dissertation examines the question of how phonological alternations are learnt. In constraint-based models of phonological learning, it is hypothesized that prior learning of phonotactics from the lexicon facilitates the learning of alternations. While this is an influential assumption, the empirical evidence for it is equivocal. In this…

Conversation Analysis (CA) has established repair (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977; Schegloff 1979; Kitzinger 2013) as a conversational mechanism for managing contingencies of talk-in-interaction. In this dissertation, I look at a particular sort of "repair" termed TCU-continuations (or otherwise known increments in other…

Socrates articulated it best, "Speak, so I may see you." Indeed, language represents an invisible probe into the mind. It is the medium through which we express our deepest thoughts, our aspirations, our views, our feelings, our inner reality. From the beginning of artificial intelligence, researchers have sought to impart human like…

Evidentiality is commonly concerned with two basic notions: evidence type and the speaker's commitment towards the truth of the proposition expressed (Chafe and Nichols 1986). Throughout a detailed study of the morphosyntax and semantics of deverbal agentives (DAs), this dissertation investigates indirect evidentiality and its interaction with two…

The study of definite descriptions has been a central part of research in linguistics and philosophy of language since Russell's seminal work "On Denoting" (Russell 1905). In that work Russell quickly dispatches analyses of denoting expressions with forms like "no man," "some man," "a man," and "every…

This dissertation presents a comprehensive instrumental acoustic analysis of phonation type distinctions in Marathi, an Indic language with numerous breathy voiced sonorants and obstruents. Important new facts about breathy voiced sonorants, which are crosslinguistically rare, are established: male and female speakers cue breathy phonation in…

Individual voices are not uniformly similar to others, even when factoring out speaker characteristics such as sex, age, dialect, and so on. Some speakers share common features and can cohere into groups based on gross vocal similarity but, to date, no attempt has been made to describe these features systematically or to generate a taxonomy based…

The triad dimensions of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) has been widely used for assessing second language performance and development. Unlike accuracy and fluency, the construct of Chinese syntactic complexity has not been comprehensibly conceptualized or operationalized. Moreover, not tailored to the typological differences such as the…

The three structural possibilities marking a noun with an English article are "a," "the," and "Ø" (the absence of an article). Although these structural possibilities are simple, they encode a multitude of semantic and pragmatic functions, and it is these complex form-function interactions that this study explores and…

As the Greek verbal system has become the subject of various dissertations and monographs, the future tense-form has been generally overlooked in the discussion. This dissertation seeks to overcome this lacuna by suggesting that the future tense-form functions as a rhetorical feature that expresses the author's expectation of an alternative state…

The purpose of this dissertation is to reconsider reflexives in Japanese through the following three steps: (a) separation of genuine reflexive elements from elements that are confounded as reflexives, (b) classification of reflexive anaphors into subtypes based on their semantic difference, and (c) classification of predicates that occur with…