F0 contours convey multiple types of information, including lexical and post-lexical meanings, as well as affective and socio-indexical indicators. This dissertation investigates the interaction between lexical tone and sentence-level intonation in Thai, focusing on how sentence position influences the acoustic realization and perceptual…

The present dissertation reports two experiments that examine implicit and explicit language learning methods and their impacts on early vocabulary, grammar, and phonological acquisition, in addition to working memory, proactive/reactive control, and fluid intelligence, as well as learner motivation. Experiment 1 investigated adult L2 acquisition…

The current research investigates interactions between lexical and structural processing in the construction and interpretation of transitive and dative sentence structures, and relates speakers' choice of structure in sentence production to STM processes and recent/long-term language experience conditioned on lexical information. Study 1…

A primary function of prosody in many languages is to convey information structure--the "packaging" of a sentence's content into categories such as "focus", "given" and "topic". In English and other West Germanic languages it is widely assumed that focus is signaled prosodically by the location of a…

Southern Pomo is a moribund indigenous language, one of seven closely related Pomoan languages once spoken in Northern California in the vicinity of the Russian River drainage, Clear Lake, and the adjacent Pacific coast. This work is the first full-length grammar of the language. It is divided into three parts. Part I introduces the sociocultural…

This dissertation is concerned with the specific relationship between copular sentences and existential sentences, and what about that relationship is responsible for the well-known restrictions on definiteness and predicates that are observed in the existential cases. Instead of starting with the well-known paradigms which illustrate restrictions…

The argument structure of complex predicates such as causatives and applicatives is closely associated with the functional heads that introduce core and non-core arguments: Voice, causative and applicative. These elements merge in a sentence structure at various cycles of derivation and take complements whose "size" accounts for the meaning and…

My dissertation undertakes a complete study of the stress patterns, syntactic construction, and rhetorical style of hypermetric verse in Germanic alliterative poetry. This project allows me to fill a gap in the study of Germanic meter while simultaneously investigating the connection between metrical and literary scholarship. Hypermetric meter…

My study explores Adjunct Control in two South Asian languages, Telugu (Dravidian) and Assamese (Indo-Aryan), within the Minimalist Program of syntactic theory. Adjunct Control is a relation of obligatory co-referentiality between two subjects, one in the matrix clause and one in an adjunct/subordinate clause of the same structure. Telugu and…