The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

This dissertation is an investigation of serial verb constructions in Lao (Tai-Kadai, SVO) and the events that they encode. Serial verb constructions (SVCs), structures where multiple verbs appear in a single clause, raise several important questions for syntactic theory. One issue is how the verbs are related; proposals involving coordination…

Modern intelligent agents will need to learn the actions that humans perform. They will need to recognize these actions when they see them and they will need to perform these actions themselves. We want to propose a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and consists of…

The ability to generate novel utterances compositionally using generative knowledge is a hallmark property of human language. At the same time, languages contain non-compositional or idiosyncratic items, such as irregular verbs, idioms, etc. This dissertation asks how and why language achieves a balance between these two systems--generative and…

Children must acquire multiple language dimensions to ultimately achieve adult levels of language competence. Two such language dimensions, finiteness marking and the verb lexicon, are considered areas of weakness in specific language impairment (SLI). Given these weaknesses, the question arises of whether these two dimensions are related in…

There is significant variation in the literature on how demonstratives are characterized semantically, leading to divergent syntactic analyses of demonstratives. A major source of this disagreement regards how distance specifications relate to the demonstrative: whether [+/- speaker] is an integral property of the demonstrative or not. I argue…

This dissertation offers a novel account of the syntax of sentence adverbs. The need for a new account is clear from the lack of descriptive coverage and theoretical coherence in current work on adverbial syntax. Descriptively, the majority of work has so far neglected the fact that sentence adverbs behave syntactically like typical focusing…

Among known communication systems, human language alone exhibits open-ended productivity of meaning. Interest in the psychological mechanisms supporting this ability, and their evolutionary origins, has resurged following the suggestion that the only uniquely human ability underlying language is a mechanism of recursion. This "Unique…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the nature of word order variation in declarative and interrogative clauses in Turkish within the framework of the generative syntax. The specific issue that will be examined in this dissertation concerns the role of discourse-pragmatics in word order variation. I will argue that all movement…

This dissertation introduces Minimal Reduplication, a new theory and framework within generative grammar for analyzing reduplication in human language. I argue that reduplication is an emergent property in multiple components of the grammar. In particular, reduplication occurs independently in the phonology and syntax components, and in both cases…