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…

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…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained 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 article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period…

While metadiscourse use has been well-attended in second language (L2) writing research, relatively less effort has been made in documenting changing patterns of metadiscourse use among L2 writers. The present study addressed this gap by probing a diachronic change of interactive metadiscourse in research articles published in "English…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language. Strong cross-linguistic tendencies in syllable size and shape are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure, a type which is also privileged in abstract models of the syllable. Syllable patterns such as those found in Itelmen "qsa?txt??"…

Morphophonological alternations can make target-like production of grammatical morphemes challenging due to changes in form depending on the phonological environment. This article explores the acquisition of morphophonological alternations involving the interacting patterns of vowel deletion and stress shift in Russian-speaking children (aged…

This paper aims at highlighting the syntactic and semantic variation of the Swedish verb "lata" "let" from both a synchronic and diachronic point of view. On the basis of corpus data containing Old and Modern Swedish texts from the 13th to the 19th centuries, the syntactic and semantic development of the verb is investigated within the framework…

This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

This paper examines the history of four Chinese vernaculars which have developed written forms, and argues that five of the patterns Hanan identifies in the early development of Bai Hua can also be found in the early development of written Wu, Cantonese, and Minnan. In each of the cases studied, there is a clear pattern of early use of the…

The phonetics and phonology of the Kyungsang dialect of Korean is distinct from those of the standard Seoul dialect with regard to segments and lexical pitch. However, whether the distinctive phonetics and phonology of Kyungsang Korean are maintained by younger speakers is questionable due to the increased exposure to Seoul Korean and the…

This study employs a relational database consisting of thousands of Old High German (OHG) nominal attestations to reconstruct noun class paradigms found primarily in the four OHG texts extensive enough to provide complete nominal paradigms: "Isidor", "Benediktinerregel", "Tatian" and Otfrid von Weissenburg's "Evangelienbuch". This study captures…

The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of…