Scalar inference, the process by which we infer meanings stronger than what was explicitly said, has long been a central topic of investigation in theoretical semantics-pragmatics, as well as in psycholinguistics. Upon encountering the sentence "Mary ate some of the deep dish", for instance, hearers regularly compute the pragmatic…

Children learn words in a social environment. In my dissertation, I examine how caregivers' social cues facilitate young children's word learning in settings that mirror their typical, dynamic learning environments. In Chapter 1, I overview prior work examining how social cues may support word learning, focusing on possible mechanisms underlying…

The study explores the following question: Within Exod 25-40, why is it emphasized repeatedly that the craftspeople, who build the tabernacle and its accessories, are filled with "hokmah" and the Spirit of God, and what significance does this have for understanding the tabernacle and the theology of the Pentateuch? A closely related…

In this dissertation, I address two outstanding questions regarding how linguistic and extra-linguistic information are brought together in the interpretation of language situated within a discourse. The first part of this dissertation experimentally addresses how alternatives invoked by sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator 'only' are…

School and university classrooms remain the standard around the world for second language instruction. However, over the past 20 years various methods of language learning have permeated the educational landscape to include self-study textbooks, language learning software and online teachers. Some models are evidence based while others lack…

This dissertation uses a corpus of tokens retrieved from broadcast news stories and print news articles to examine the array of constructions used to encode stative predications in Modern Standard Arabic. A state is defined as a situation that includes its reference time, whether that time is encoding time or another time of orientation. A range…

Three worries seem to plague Grice's theory of meaning. If, as Grice seems to hold, utterer intentions, including the meaning intention (M-intention), are to be epistemically prior to what some utterance--what some sentence or phrase-means, then one should be able to translate utterances from a language radically different from one's…

The dissertation presents a new account of how direct discourse works in natural language. After presenting preliminary discussions of the views of quotation given by Tarski, Quine, and Davidson in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is devoted to historical investigations into Frege's theory of quotation and direct discourse. Although Frege's theory is often…

The goal of this study is to characterize the temporal phenomena in the Korean conjunctive constructions. These constructions consist of three components: a verbal stem, a clause medial temporal suffix, and a clause terminal suffix. This study focuses on both the temporality of the terminal connective suffixes and the grammatical meanings of the…

The rapid increase of computer-mediated communications (CMCs) in various forms such as micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), online chatting (e.g. digital reference) and community-based question-answering services (e.g. Yahoo! Answers) characterizes a recent trend in web technologies, often referred to as the "social web". This trend highlights…

This study of John 1:1-18 describes how John (the speaker) presented his message to his audience within their activity of verbal communication. By focusing on verbal meaning, this interpretation analyzes how John presented and expressed his meanings through language by interpreting this text based on the seamless interrelation between John's…

This dissertation explores, analyzes, and compares the usage of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms will be considered as well as their locative and temporal uses. I observe that in both languages the demonstratives can be used to refer to referents. However, they depart from the common assumption that…

Many philosophers believe that if "S" is an unambiguous, context-sensitive, declarative sentence and "p" is a proposition asserted (without conversational implicatures) by a literal utterance of "S" in a context "c," then "p" is fully determined by the linguistic meaning of "S" in…

Many sentences of modal discourse are "inconstant": "Paris Hilton could have been a politician", for example, seems to be true in some contexts, false in others. In this dissertation, I explore this topic, which we can call the "inconstancy of de re modal attributions". My goal is to develop, motivate, and defend a…

Evidentiality has usually been defined as the grammaticalized expression of a speaker's evidence source for a proposition, where "evidence" is conceptualized as a speaker's source-type for a particular proposition (Aikhenvald 2004). How this evidence source-type and the evidential are related has yet to be formally modeled in…