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…

Research over the past two decades has reported a robust relationship between relative social status and first-person singular (FPS) pronoun use in English. For my dissertation study, I wanted to test the replicability of those findings using American Sign Language (ASL) data that I collected for this purpose. In alignment with previous work, I…

This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…

Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

The interaction between root (i.e. non-epistemic) modal verbs and functional heads like tense and aspect has been investigated in a wealth of recent literature, particularly in the context of counterfactual conditionals (Iatridou, 2000; Arregui, 2009; a.o.) and actuality entailments (Bhatt, 1999; Hacquard, 2006). In this work, I continue this…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

This dissertation seeks to answer three loosely-related questions regarding ergativity. First, what is the nature of the morphological phenomena known as ERG=GEN and ERG=POSS? After providing a thorough description with ample data from a wide range of sources, a typological survey of 40 ergative languages concludes that together, they are a fairly…

This dissertation represents the first attempt to integrate typological, semantic, and psycholinguistic perspectives to elucidate a semantically "bizarre" and "illogical" phenomenon called "expletive negation" (henceforth, EN) which is well known in Romance languages but has so far attracted little attention outside…

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…

In phonetics research, language alternation--including code switching (speaker-initiated) and cued switching (researcher-prompted)--can be used as a tool to investigate various aspects of speech production and perception in bilingual or multilingual speakers (Bullock & Toribio, 2009a). Studies on the production of voice onset time (VOT) during…

This dissertation examines primarily the syntactic, but also the semantic/pragmatic behavior of sentential complement clauses in Turkish and proposes a new classification of such complements. A head-final language, Turkish lacks an overt, lexical complementizer akin to English "that". The most frequent types of sentential complementation…

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Potawatomi, a critically endangered Algonquian language now only spoken as a first language by a handful of elders in northern Wisconsin. Throughout, the goal is to present an authoritative linguistic description of Potawatomi by drawing on direct elicitation, a corpus of new texts gathered in close…

In this dissertation, I investigate specificational copular clauses (Higgins 1973). My aim is to not only propose an analysis for how such specificational copular clauses are derived but also to use such constructions as a testing ground for evaluating and/ or revising different aspects of linguistic theory. The language I primarily use towards…

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 is a study of processes of structural and functional diversification of the uses of three cognate verbs across the Indo-Iranian language family: "do/make", "be/become", and "give". First, this study identifies over sixty distinct construction types in which these verbs are used, including complex predicate…