Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

Research in first-language (L1) sentence processing has found evidence that language comprehenders use binding condition A as a filter to rule out noun phrases that are binding-inaccessible before proceeding with the task of finding the correct antecedent. Sturt (2013) notes that this strategy does not appear to apply to advanced speakers of…

It is well known that persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate deficits in sentence processing. Specifically, many show difficulties with syntactic re-analysis, or the ability to revise one's interpretation of a sentence due to a temporary ambiguity. Emerging evidence suggests that structural priming, individuals' tendency to unconsciously re-use a…

In this dissertation I investigate the Mandarin "you"-existential sentence. My focus is on its syntax. I also discuss in less detail some semantic peculiarity of the "you"-existential. I begin my investigation of the syntax of "you"-existentials by first looking into what they are not. To this end, I present five…

Verb-object idioms such as "kick the bucket" are very common in Spanish. This research set out to find what systematic differences exist between the literal and idiomatic interpretations of idioms of this kind from three different experimental perspectives: production, perception, and acceptability judgments focused on verbal aspect.…

This dissertation explores how items encountered in the comprehension of language are stored in memory and subsequently accessed. Processing and comprehending language frequently requires the retrieval of items in memory so that a current linguistic element can be assigned an interpretation. For example, in a sentence such as "Miles loved his…

Interaction has received attention in different fields of applied linguistics. In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), scholars have perceived interaction as a platform where L2 learners can engage in language experimentation. It has been considered in light of Long's (1981) Interaction Hypothesis, which posits that negotiation of…

Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…

There is an interesting emphatic construction (called a "koso -e" construction) in Old Japanese, in which the focus particle "koso" concords with the exclamatory ("-e") sentence ending form. When "koso" focuses on an irrealis/subjunctive conditional clause, the overall sentence expresses a peculiar…

Lexical semantics provide many important resources in natural language processing, despite the recent preferences for distributional methods. In this dissertation we investigate an under-represented lexical relationship, that of scalarity. We define scalarity as it relates to adjectives and introduce novel methods to identify words belonging to a…

The representational product of sentence comprehension is the result of the interplay between episodic and semantic memory and our knowledge of the grammatical devices of our language which guide how we retrieve information from these systems. Past participles, being a part of speech derived from verbs but used in a prenominal position (e.g. words…

Ellipsis plays a key role in the understanding of the relationship between what is uttered and what is understood. In elliptical utterances, less is said than is understood. How is it that a mere fragment of a sentence can be understood as something more? This dissertation explores the syntax of one type of elliptical phenomena, Stripping. A…

Few questions concerning the character of our talk about the world are more basic than how predicates combine with names to form truth-evaluable sentences. One particularly intriguing fact that any account of predication needs to make room for is that natural language allows for quantification into predicate position, through constructions like…

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…

The goal of this study is to characterize the temporal phenomena in the Korean conjunctive constructions. These constructions consist of three components: a verbal stem, a clause medial temporal suffix, and a clause terminal suffix. This study focuses on both the temporality of the terminal connective suffixes and the grammatical meanings of the…