In this dissertation I set out to solve a series of puzzles related to the notion of a DP periphery, defined as an area around the edge of a given domain targeted by operations such as movement and agreement. In solving these puzzles, I argue for a peripheral area in the nominal domain. Early arguments for a peripheral boundary in the nominal…

We still know surprisingly little about how grammatical structures are selected for use in sentence production. A major debate concerns whether structural selection is competitive or noncompetitive. Competitive accounts propose that alternative structures or structural components actively suppress one another's activation until one option reaches…

This paper aims at giving an analysis of certain syntactic peculiarities of reciprocal pronouns within verbs of psychological state, commonly known as psych-verbs. The analysis reveal that psych-verbs constructions have a peculiar property in that the binding conditions of reciprocal pronouns are satisfied in Experiencer-Subject (ES) psychverbs…

This study demonstrates how native and learner corpora can enhance modal verb treatment in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks used in mainland China. Data analysis compares modal verbs in the textbook and native corpus by referring to distributional features, semantic functions and co-occurring constructions; and the analysis of the…

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…

The present study is a follow-up study of Çakir (2016b) which focused on the wh-adverbial & which NP constructions asymmetry within island structures in Turkish. The characteristics of wh-adverbial nasil "how" is compared with the which-NP constructions "hangisekilde" "in what way" and "hangihalde"…

Tourism has been growing fast as a global industry. Promoting national tourism is therefore an important part of a country's economic plan and can contribute to its economic success. Tourism slogans have always been part of the promotion of national tourism. Almost every country has their own catchy, pungent taglines to attract new tourists. This…

This study investigates the learning of linguistic structures associated with African American English (AAE) among four non-AAE-speaking teachers of AAE-speaking students. It considers implicit and explicit learning/development of a second dialect in two novel ways. First, it focuses on the understanding of a socially-stigmatized dialect by…

This study describes the thematic roles of Somali; a language that manifests unorthodox grammatical structures due to the use of the focus particle. A mapping of some language features related to the semantic-syntactic interface is carried out. The effect of the meaning of the lexical items is tested to whether it affects the syntactic structures…

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we…

The work of L.S. Vygotsky was popularised in the West between two great waves of educational thought: constructivism and cognitivism. Reception was therefore colored by three metaphors introduced by Jerome Bruner: 'construction', 'scaffolding' and 'narrative'. Narratives were to be characterized by features we call SELF: Subjects, Expectancy and…

Accurate recovery of predicate-argument dependencies is vital for interpretation tasks like information extraction and question answering, and unbounded dependencies may account for a significant portion of the dependencies in any given text. This thesis describes a Generalized Categorial Grammar (GCG) which, like other categorial grammars,…

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in "The minimalist program." MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in…

A key debate in the psycholinguistic study of grammatical language production is whether the process is a syntactocentric one, driven by grammatical information and grammatical rules, or a dynamic, interactive one, involving both semantic and syntactic information. Examining how speakers produce subject-verb number agreement has been useful in…

In this dissertation, I aim to provide a theory on the distribution of structural Case in Korean. I propose the following Structural Case Assignment Hypothesis (SCAH) regarding the assignment of structural Case: "Structural Case is assigned by phase heads (C: nominative; v: accusative) to every argument in the c-command domain of the phase…