There is a growing body of research from various perspectives in heritage language (henceforth HL) acquisition as an emerging field. Some studies proposed that HL acquisition is a differential acquisition compared with the baseline language (i.e., the language spoken by the parents or caregivers) (Kupisch & Rothman, 2018; Dubiel &…

Due in part to its complex nature, there is still much to uncover in the investigation of the neural processes that contribute to synchronization between speakers and listeners during communication in the context of social cognition, specifically between native and nonnative English speakers and listeners. This study used a novel method of…

This dissertation investigates a typologically rare linguistic phenomenon found in Irish from three different perspectives: how it challenges phonological theory, how it is used by contemporary speakers, and how its written representation affects its acquisition. Initial consonant mutation (ICM), as it appears in the Celtic languages, is known to…

This dissertation provides a formal and functional analysis of grammatical voice in Sasak, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. The research addresses two primary questions, which are (1) how does Sasak clause structure and morphosyntax vary across dialects? and (2) what shapes speakers' syntactic production, namely grammatical…

Scholars have long debated whether Old and Middle English (ME) are different diachronic stages of one language, or whether they are two closely related languages that have different historical roots. A general assumption is that Middle and Modern English descend from Old English (OE), similar to the way Middle and Modern German descend from Old…

The study abroad (SA) experience is often viewed as an opportunity to gain proficiency in a foreign language due to immersion in the target language and culture. Nevertheless, the increased amount of research conducted on SA over the last two decades indicates that it does not necessarily lead to gains in all areas (Collentine & Freed, 2004;…

The traditional Philadelphia allophonic /ae/ system (henceforth: PHL shown in (1) below) is characterized by a set of complicated conditioning factors and a dramatic acoustic distinction between the two allophones. In recent years, some Philadelphians have begun to exhibit a new allophonic system (NAS, shown in (2) below). Like PHL, NAS is…

This dissertation provides a comparative analysis of Complementizer Agreement (C-agr) in modern dialects of West Germanic from a diachronic perspective, attributing the rise and development of C-agr to the initiation and progression of a Linguistic Cycle specific to C-agr. Approached as a historical process of reanalysis and compensatory renewal…

This dissertation establishes the syntactic representation and derivation of relative clause (RC) constructions in Bizkaiera Basque. Using native speaker introspection, grammaticality judgment under direct elicitation and formal experiments, I show that Bizkaiera follows the Head raising strategy in RC construction. Evidence for this comes from…

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…

In the past century, French has shifted from being the native language of many Louisianans to being an endangered dialect. Since the creation of the state agency CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) in the 1960's, efforts have been made to revitalize French in Louisiana, and since the 1980's, some parishes have offered…

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a description of some aspects of the syntax of Indonesian Teochew, a Southern Min Chinese language spoken in Indonesian. This dissertation examines two dialects of Indonesian Teochew: Jambi Teochew, which is spoken in Jambi City, Sumatra, and Pontianak Teochew, which is spoken in Pontianak, West…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

This dissertation offers a new dynamic account of the evolution of the demonstrative system in pre-Qin Chinese based on a comprehensive linguistic analysis of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of demonstratives attested in two corpora of excavated texts, i.e. the oracle-bone inscriptions dated to the late…

Richards (2006, 2010) suggests that wh-movement is prosodically driven. Based on the position of the Comp(lementizer) and the marking of prosodic phrase edges, he claims that if Comp is on one side and the language marks the opposite side of prosodic phrases, then the wh-phrase does not move since Comp and wh-phrase can create a prosodic wh-domain…