Research over the past two decades has reported a robust relationship between relative social status and first-person singular (FPS) pronoun use in English. For my dissertation study, I wanted to test the replicability of those findings using American Sign Language (ASL) data that I collected for this purpose. In alignment with previous work, I…

In this dissertation, I investigate how people navigate ambiguity in everyday speech, with a focus on quantifier-negation sentences. Combining corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling in the Rational Speech Act framework, I explore preferred interpretations of quantifier-negation and examine the contexts and prosodies…

How do children learn the meaning of words like "pretty" and "tall," which are not only gradable and context dependent (Kennedy & McNally 2005), but encode speaker subjectivity? Despite their complex semantics (Stephenson 2007; Lasersohn 2009; Bylinina 2014), these and other adjectives like them, are some of the most…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

This dissertation developed a new learner corpus of Japanese and introduced an error and linguistic annotation scheme specifically designed for Japanese particles. The corpus contains texts written by learners who are in the first year to fourth year university level Japanese courses. The texts in the corpus were tagged with part-of-speech and…

It is standardly believed that some occurrences of expressions designate singularly, while other occurrences of expressions designate plurally. For instance, the singular expression the student may be used on an occasion to talk about one particular student, while the plural expression the students may be used on an occasion to talk about several…

The relationship between language and thought has fascinated us for centuries. The relationship between the two is far beyond what the two words represent on the literal level, and the discussions around it have been covered in various fields from philosophy and psychology to linguistics. Even complicating the situation, the relationship between…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

In this dissertation I argue that truth-conditional semantics for vague predicates, combined with a Bayesian account of statistical inference incorporating knowledge of truth-conditions of utterances, generates false predictions regarding negations and metalinguistic inference. I thus propose a fundamentally probabilistic semantics for vagueness…

Standards of academic writing are documented in style guides adopted by academic disciplines, style guides such as the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and Scientific Style and Format." Some of the standards in these style guides are expressed as prescriptive or proscriptive rules that provide academic…

The present study aimed to catalogue and compare usage patterns of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in Modern Standard Arabic and English by native and learner writers. Building upon an analysis of a multi-genre monolingual Arabic corpus, use of both Arabic and English VPCs was explored in a bilingual L1 (first language) Arabic L2 (second…

Text classification typically performs best with large training sets, but short texts are very common on the World Wide Web. Can we use resampling and data augmentation to construct larger texts using similar terms? Several current methods exist for working with short text that rely on using external data and contexts, or workarounds. Our focus is…

This dissertation examines complementizer agreement (CA) phenomena in which phi-features appear on a complementizer, clause-linking marker, or otherwise, syntactically speaking, at the C[superscript 0] position. This dissertation will argue that CA is in fact a straightforward output of the syntax module under standard Minimalist assumptions, and…

Syntactic structures are unobserved theoretical constructs which are useful in explaining a wide range of linguistic and psychological phenomena. Language acquisition studies how such latent structures are acquired by human learners through many hypothesized learning mechanisms and apparatuses, which can be genetically endowed or of general…

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…