Literary and linguistic patterns delineate structure and theme in many documents of the ancient Mediterranean world. In this dissertation, I utilize the Aeschylean tragedies of the "Persians" and the "Oresteia", the narratives of Genesis and Judges from the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament narratives of the Gospel of Mark…

Pidgins, narrowly defined, are auxiliary languages reserved for communication with linguistic outgroups. Although implicitly recognized as a class of languages by many linguists, there has been little systematic typological investigation of pidgins. This dissertation presents the first large-scale typological study of morphology and functional…

This dissertation aims to analyze the Western Armenian (WA) verbal morphology from a diachronic perspective and perform an internal reconstruction to trace the modern Western dialects back to Classical Armenian (CA) or an older, unattested variant of Armenian. The dissertation's methodology (Chapter 1) is based on comparative dialectology (Chapter…

Language forecasting, i.e., predicting the future state of a language, has long been regarded with a fair amount of skepticism. This is partly due to language change often being considered sudden, random, unpredictable, and viewed as the result of complex interacting factors that are not well understood (e.g., Keller 1994:72; Bauer 1994:25; Labov…

Although a growing body of research has sought to understand the relationship between word order and information structure, previous information structure (IS) analyses of verb-subject order have produced conflicting results for Medieval French, which have subsequently led to conflicting claims about the importance of IS to its word order as well…

The incorporation of empirical and theoretical knowledge from the language acquisition literature into formal diachronic syntax has been largely exiguous despite the growth of the latter as a subfield in formal linguistics over the past thirty years. In this dissertation, it is shown that a greater knowledge of diachronic phenomena, particularly…

There is a growing body of research from various perspectives in heritage language (henceforth HL) acquisition as an emerging field. Some studies proposed that HL acquisition is a differential acquisition compared with the baseline language (i.e., the language spoken by the parents or caregivers) (Kupisch & Rothman, 2018; Dubiel &…

Tikal, notably conservative in culture among its peer polities, maintains that tendency in the case of monumental texts. In this dissertation I draw on a corpus of Late Classic monuments (ca. AD 600-900) to argue, through analysis of morphological forms, that scribal tradition at Tikal was not only conservative but intentionally so. Literacy…

Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, which can affect listeners' phonological and lexical representations. I explore how different exposure to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two vowels in American English, /ae ai/, affects listeners' lexical processing behaviors across three perception tasks: perceptual similarity, priming, and…

This dissertation investigates the ways that natural languages evolve and what it means in the overall cultural evolution of society. Computational and modeling advances have made possible to explore large-scale text data and test hypothesis of language evolution. Similar to biological systems, natural languages are evolving systems with words as…

Some links between linguistic meanings and markers change systematically and cyclically in what are known as "grammaticalization paths." Although the empirical observations that give rise to these characterizations are cross-linguistically robust, the representations and cognitive processes that support these shifts are still not well…

This dissertation explores the effects of frequency on the learning and use of linguistic constructions. The work examines the influence of frequency on form choice in production and meaning inference in comprehension and discusses the effect of each modality on diachronic patterns of change in language. In production, high frequency of a form…

Standards of academic writing are documented in style guides adopted by academic disciplines, style guides such as the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and Scientific Style and Format." Some of the standards in these style guides are expressed as prescriptive or proscriptive rules that provide academic…

The question of whether second languages (L2s) are best learned implicitly or explicitly has been a topic of much empirical discourse, with the majority of studies pointing to the benefits of explicit instruction when learning L2 grammar rules. However, given the focus on grammar, it is unclear how generalizable these findings are to other…

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…