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…

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…

This study concerns the development of the determiners MINE/MY and THINE/THY in the Early Modern English period. The -N forms had essentially been ousted before words starting with consonants over the Middle English period, and over the subsequent centuries, these forms also fell into disuse before words starting with initial vowels and…

The observation of informalities in academic writing has become tremendous in recent years, as revealed by a plethora of cross-cultural and diachronic studies. Different users of English have already been explored; however, none has centered on the case of English as a Second Language (henceforth ESL) writers, such as Filipino academic writing…

This paper investigates performative manifestations of sincerity across Anglo-Norman and Middle English. In particular, it locates adverbial sincerity markers used to qualify performative speech act verbs in late medieval letters (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), at a point when Middle English was rapidly replacing Anglo-Norman as the…

In the current study, data from A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) are used to consider contexts with the have-perfect and temporal adverbs of the definite past time such as yesterday, last night, ago. Data analysis is conducted within the framework of a usage-based approach, which gives evidence to the hypothesis that in Early Modern…

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 corpus-based diachronic study aims to investigate the change in the use of English relative clauses over a 45-year time span. It does not only focus on change over time but also change between two varieties of English (British and American). The data were taken from the Brown family of corpora. Each corpus in the Brown family corpora consists…

Across the centuries, the question of the origin of language has captivated the human imagination. Many theories have been proposed to address fundamental questions such as: Where do languages come from? How do they evolve? What are the societal drivers of this change? Historically, one of the biggest challenges in addressing these questions has…

Russian legal-administrative documents from the early fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth century (Middle Russian) show extensive variation in expressing possessivity within the noun phrase. Possessor expressions can be conveyed by morphologically derived possessive adjectives, adnominal genitives, or by combinations of those constructions…

Prepositions can be found with and without adjacent complements in many forms of popular spoken French. The alternation appears in main clauses ("il veut pas payer pour ca [approximately] il veut pas payer pour" "he doesn't want to pay for [it]") and, though with a more restricted social and geographic distribution, in relative…

Holmberg's Generalization (Holmberg 1986) was originally stated to describe the "object shift" phenomena found in the modern Scandinavian languages. This dissertation argues that object shift is merely a subcase of scrambling, a type of adjunction, and that Holmberg's Generalization is a subcase of a universal constraint, the "Generalized Holmberg…

Constituent structure is considered to be the very foundation of linguistic competence and often considered to be innate, yet we show here that it is derivable from the domain-general processes of chunking and categorization. Using modern and diachronic corpus data, we show that the facts support a view of constituent structure as gradient (as…

A statistical analysis of 3,170 entries in the Kotelova and Sorokin dictionary "Novyje slova i znacenija: slovar'-spravocnik po materialam pressy i literatury 60-x godov," Moscow, 1973 and the Stejnfel'dt dictionary "Castotnyj slovar' sovremennogo Russkogo Literaturnogo Jazyka," Moscow, n.d. establishes a clear-cut correlation between the new…

A study comparing the dialects of Ozark and Appalachian English addresses a possible relationship between the two dialects. The study compares selected structures in the two dialects in order to (1) examine similarities and differences, (2) investigate the behavior of a range of ages (10-70+) to determine patterns of change, (3) examine…