Due to the fact that both the subject and the topic can occupy the initial position of the sentence, English subject is always deemed as the UNMARKED TOPIC (Lambrecht, 1994), while the topic is not always the subject. In accordance with Rizzi's (1997) topicalization, both the subject and the topicalized constituents can be topics. Many other…

In this dissertation I investigate the Mandarin "you"-existential sentence. My focus is on its syntax. I also discuss in less detail some semantic peculiarity of the "you"-existential. I begin my investigation of the syntax of "you"-existentials by first looking into what they are not. To this end, I present five…

Generative AIs such as Google Bard are known to be equipped with techniques and grammatical principles of human language based on a large corpus of text and code that allow them to generate natural-sounding language, and also identify and correct grammatical errors in human-written texts. Still, they are not perfect language generators, and this…

The use of present and past participles and gerunds was summarized and illustrated from various examples cited or given, on the basis of the writer's teaching experience, and extensive review of different English grammar books, reference books, magazines, newspapers, books, English dictionaries, and online articles, in order for English language…

Google Translate is a free and practical online translation service that allows millions of people around the globe to translate words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs into an intended target language. However, in 2015, some Google Translate users in Indonesia, filed complaints, asserting that the machine was often inaccurate, speculating that…

Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of…

In children acquiring various languages, the early mastery of determiners strongly predicts syntactic development. What makes determiners important is not yet clear as there is a linguistic controversy regarding their syntactic behaviour. Some consider determiners to be similar to adjectives and to modify common nouns, while others consider the…

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs -- "zenzen" 'at all' and "amari" '(not) very' -- as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine the change in specific English microstructure features according to language ability in preschool Spanish-English dual language learners. Method: We collected English narratives from 22 Spanish-English dual language learners with typical language development (TD) and 22 Spanish-English dual language…

The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were…

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the…

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…

We examined whether the position of modifiers in English influences how words are encoded and subsequently retrieved from memory. Compared with premodifiers, postmodifiers might confer more perceptual significance to the associated head nouns, are more consistent with the "given-before-new" information structure, and might also be easier…

This study investigates whether repeating a prime sentence aloud strengthens short-term and longer-term priming of adverb-first word order among adult intermediate L1 English-German L2 learners (N = 30). Compared to an earlier study (Jackson & Ruf, 2017), in which similarly proficient L1 English-German L2 learners heard, but did not repeat,…