The incorporation of empirical and theoretical knowledge from the language acquisition literature into formal diachronic syntax has been largely exiguous despite the growth of the latter as a subfield in formal linguistics over the past thirty years. In this dissertation, it is shown that a greater knowledge of diachronic phenomena, particularly…

Among the Altaic languages, Turkic and Mongolian have a lot of similarities due to their prolonged contact and a common lineage. The two languages share several parallels in vocabulary, sound correspondence, phonotactic rules, and grammar. This study aimed to explore the comparative-historical aspects of Turkic-Mongolian language parallels in…

This article examines the impact of social media on the linguistic and communicative practices in post-socialist countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Mongolia -- the contexts very much under-represented in the discussion of translingualism. Relocalisation of social media-based linguistic resources in the languages used in these…

This article focuses on claims about the origin and evolution of language from the point of view of the formalist-functionalist debate in linguistics. In linguistics, an account of a grammatical phenomenon is considered "formal" if it accords center stage to the structural properties of that phenomenon, and "functional" if it…

The article analyses the emotional perception and comprehension of emotional words, the role of emotional expressions in their sentences, their use, their function, their meanings, their phonetic, grammatical, and syntactic analysis. Opinions of Uzbek and world linguists were presented on the basis of evidence. The article also includes novels by…

In the current study, data from A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) are used to consider contexts with the have-perfect and temporal adverbs of the definite past time such as yesterday, last night, ago. Data analysis is conducted within the framework of a usage-based approach, which gives evidence to the hypothesis that in Early Modern…

Scholars have long debated whether Old and Middle English (ME) are different diachronic stages of one language, or whether they are two closely related languages that have different historical roots. A general assumption is that Middle and Modern English descend from Old English (OE), similar to the way Middle and Modern German descend from Old…

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…

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) "language universals." One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

The rise of English as a global lingua franca and the increasing use of it into the multilingual and multicultural contexts appear to be further indexing a number of new issues. These issues include from the discussion of its ownership -- that it is no longer only the language of native speakers of it, as statistically non-native speakers make up…

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…

Faroese is at the tail end of a change from an Icelandic-type syntax in which V-to-T is obligatory to a Danish-type system in which this movement is impossible. While the older word order is very rarely produced by adult Faroese speakers, there is evidence that this order is still marginally present in the adult grammar and thus only dispreferred,…

Bih is a Chamic (Austronesian) language spoken by approximately 500 people in the Southern highlands of Vietnam. This dissertation is the first descriptive grammar of the language, based on extensive fieldwork and community-based language documentation in Vietnam and written from a functional/typological perspective. The analysis in this work is…

As is well known, the Insular Celtic languages (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton and the now-extinct Manx and Cornish) utilize a class of verbal abstracts known as "verbal nouns" to perform the functions that are fulfilled in other Indo-European languages by infinitives and supines. Yet in many ways the Celtic verbal noun remains somewhat of an…