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…

This dissertation examines complementizer agreement (CA) phenomena in which phi-features appear on a complementizer, clause-linking marker, or otherwise, syntactically speaking, at the C[superscript 0] position. This dissertation will argue that CA is in fact a straightforward output of the syntax module under standard Minimalist assumptions, and…

This dissertation approaches the idea of lexical types such as word, clitic and affix from an oblique angle. Starting with Cardinaletti & Starke's (1999) diagnostics for the Weak Pronoun, I deconstruct the category of clitic, breaking it down into two binary qualities: the syntactic primitive of being linked to a head of a different basic…

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 examines two information-structural phenomena, Givenness and Focus, from the perspective of both syntax and pragmatics. Evidence from English, German and other languages suggests a "split" analysis of information structure--the notions of Focus and Givenness, often thought to be closely related, exist independently at…

In this dissertation, I take a look at Middle Low German nominal phrases as evidenced in the Lubecker Ratsurteile, a collection of court proceedings published by Wilhelm Ebel in 1955, which cover the years 1421-1550. By digitizing the corpus, I was able to perform a corpus analysis on noun phrases, where I concentrated on determiner use and form,…

Across the Germanic language family, we find a type of movement traditionally termed "topicalization," which may be realized in Germanic languages which possess the so-called Verb-Second (V2) constraint, as well as those without it. I will henceforward call this phenomenon "fronting" to avoid theoretical assumptions. This…

This dissertation investigates syntactic priming in second language (L2) development among three speaker populations: (1) less proficient L2 speakers; (2) advanced L2 speakers; and (3) LI speakers. Using confederate scripting this study examines how German speakers choose certain word orders in locative constructions (e.g., "Auf dem Tisch…

In real time interaction, the ordering of words is one of the resources participants-to-talk rely on in the negotiation of shared meaning. This dissertation investigates the emergence of syntactic right-expansions in spoken German as a systematic resource in the organization of talk-in-interaction. Employing the methodology of conversation…

"The Style and Structure of 'Minnesang'" approaches a broad corpus of the medieval German love lyric from the perspective of historical phraseology and formulaicity. Overturning previous concerns of prosodic restriction in verse and the misapplication of contemporary notions of fixity, the dissertation provides an overview of…

This study tracks changes in three primary characteristics of Early New High German (ENHG) publications from 1499 to 1710: the complexity of the syntactic system of the language, the pictorial saturation of the publications, and the relationship between verbal text and illustrations on the ENHG printed page. Drawing on findings from literary…

The languages of the world encode possession in a variety of ways. In Slavic languages, possession on the level of the clause, or predicative possession, is represented by two main encoding strategies. Most Slavic languages, including those in the West and South Slavic sub-groupings, use a "have" verb comparable to English have and German "haben."…

This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-a-vis language-specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial…

This dissertation investigates the methods used by intermediate, advanced and superior level learners of German when quoting formerly uttered speech in direct discourse. The study shows that that there are different methods of speech reporting at different levels of language proficiency. Each level of speakers in the study used the quotative…

This dissertation investigates the media's portrayal of the linguistic situation of the predominantly Turkish migrant communities in Germany by analyzing data gathered from films, television clips, interviews, radio clips and the Internet, paying specific attention to the vowel systems of each speaker. I observe that the most salient aspect in…