This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Kove, an Austronesian language spoken in the West New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea. Kove is primarily spoken in 18 villages, including some on the small islands north of New Britain. There are about 9,000 people living in the area, but many are not fluent speakers of Kove. The dissertation…

In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that…

An analysis of noun classes in Tikar, a Benue-Congo language spoken in west central Cameroon, looks at patterns in the noun class system, concord system (possessives, demonstratives, demonstrative adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, third-person pronouns, relative pronouns, copula, adjectivals, and numerals) with an eye to determining whether…

Gives an account of converb (adverbial participle or gerund) systems in eight languages from Paleoasiatic and Altaic families spoken in northeastern Siberia. The rich converbal system is not the only relevant and peculiar feature common to the languages, but it is not common in other languages. The characteristics of converbs are described, and…

An analysis of the evolution of reflexive verbs focuses on reflexive to middle voice development in two-form middle systems, which include Russian, Old Norse, Turkish, and Hungarian. The diachronic processes associated with these systems are examined. The changes in the languages over time represent a gradual change in the semantics of the…