Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

Language is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, demanding explanation in a theory of human cognition. However, language presents unique practical challenges for quantitative empirical research, making many linguistic theories difficult to test at naturalistic scales. Artificial neural network language models (LMs) provide a new tool for studying…

English has emerged as an international language. The hegemonic positioning of English is problematic for previously colonized places such as the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The remote coral atoll Pacific Island nation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands has a history of colonization. Critical Literacy supports reflective analysis of…

This study investigates the politeness strategies employed by Saudi EFL teachers when expressing their disagreements on Twitter. It examines the factors affecting Saudi EFL teachers' choice of politeness and disagreement strategies. It compares Saudi EFL teachers' disagreement expressions with those of American ESL teachers on Twitter. Four…

In this work, based on an oral corpus of semi-directed interviews conducted in French with 40 L1 Chinese speakers learning French in France and in English with 29 L1 Chinese speakers learning English in the United States, I investigated the quotative system in non-native speech of English and French as it is used in the Chinese diaspora in Paris…

This dissertation explores four Korean discourse markers derived from question words: "mwe" (what), "way" (why), "ettehkey" (how), and "mwusun" (which; what kind of). Most Korean question words have an additional function as indefinite words that refer to a nonspecific referent (Kim, 2000; Yang, 2005). In…

This dissertation focuses on when and how children learn about the meanings of the propositional attitude" verbs know" and "think". "Know" and "think" both express belief. But they differ in their veridicality: "think" is non-veridical and can report a false belief; but "know" can only…

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on the study of how utterances composed of human-level languages can be understood and generated. Typically, there are considered to be three intertwined levels of structure that interact to create meaning in language: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Not only is a large amount of…

A Korean particle "-(n)un" is widely known as a topic and/or contrast marker. Despite this seemingly well-established view on the meaning/function of "-(n)un," however, its exact nature is far from clearly understood. The main purpose of this dissertation is to shed light on the meaning of "-(n)un," by looking at it…

This dissertation explores discourse anaphora in English and Korean by using a neo-Gricean pragmatic approach with corpus-based data. Very little study of Korean discourse anaphora has yet taken place at the inter-sentential level, except works looking at zero anaphor and a logophoric reflexive pronoun "caki" "self." This…

This dissertation is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the variable word order and prosody of copular constructions ("Nicolas es feliz" versus "'Feliz' es Nicolas," "Es Nicolas 'feliz,'" "Es 'feliz' Nicolas," "Nicolas is 'happy'") in the Spanish of first- and second-generation…

Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) has for long been considered as a Null-subject language due to its variability in regards to subject expression (e.g. "Era bom porque eu diminuia de peso...era muito gordinha" "That was good because then I could lose some weight...(I) was a bit chubby." C33:179). Such variability has been…

Makary Kotoko (MK), a Central Chadic B language, is spoken in the north of Cameroon just south of Lake Chad. Published works on MK to date include about a dozen articles on different aspects of the grammar of the language, primarily by H. Tourneux. The present work, which is based on a substantial corpus of recorded texts, is a systematic…

"Do so" anaphora is a fairly widely used in English, but has received relatively little treatment in the literature (especially when compared with verb phrase ellipsis). There are, however, two aspects of this anaphor that have gained prominence: (i) its use as a test for constituency within the verb phrase, and (ii) the semantic restriction it…

"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…