In Modern Standard Arabic punctuation marks are less frequent than in European languages. Using discourse markers is instead preferred, which tends to yield long clauses. This, in turn, is assumed to foster sentence splitting in translation from Arabic into English and into Spanish. This assumption was tested on a sample of 470 554 words from a…

Eventualities have been recognized as psychologically and linguistically relevant for more than 50 years. Psychologically, eventualities are complex bundles of information derived from our perceptions of the world. The question for linguists is how much of this complexity is reflected in our eventuality-denoting lexical entries and the…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

Many bilinguals switch languages in daily-life conversations. Although this usually happens within sentence context and with another speaker, most research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of language switches has studied individual words. Here, we examined how context influences both switching frequency and the temporal cost…

We consider the reference-based approach for Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) that involves scoring a textual constructed student answer comparing to a teacher-provided reference answer. The reference answer does not cover the variety of student answers as it contains only specific examples of correct answers. Considering other language…

To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in…

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…

Dependency distance has increasingly become a key measure of interest in cross-linguistic corpus studies from multiple perspectives. Based on a syntactically annotated corpus of 400 PhD dissertation abstracts written by native English (L1) and English as a foreign language (L2) academic writers, the current study investigated the mean dependency…

This dissertation examines the acquisitional process of middle se constructions by English- and Korean-speaking L2 learners of Spanish. Although clitic se is well known for its multifunctionality, there is a general tendency in the literature to analyze any use of "se" as a reflexive marker. This tendency is especially prominent in the…

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…

Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns ("The sheep is/are fat"), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas…

Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows infinite embedding of the prenominal genitive "-s," whereas the…

Challenges in reading Chinese as a foreign language involve the large proportion of two-character compound words which have complex intra-word morphological structures and scriptal distance between learner's native language (L1) and Chinese as a second or foreign language. This study extended a previous investigation on the processing of Chinese…

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…

To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…