This dissertation is about the learnability of different generative, Separationist approaches to nominal morphosyntax. The core of my investigation is number, gender, and declension class, as manifested across nouns, adnominals (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, and quantifiers), and articles. An extreme position would require that all of…

Anchored on Labov's notion that some linguistic features may exhibit variants among speakers of the same language within the same community as well as on Parker and Riley's language variation theory, this inquiry which employs a qualitative-content [manifest] analysis assumes that "Surigaonon" exhibits some linguistic variations hence…

The purpose of this research is to investigate the variable production of English Object-Experiencer (OE) psych predicates among 80 L1 Thai EFL first-year university students. Psych verbs are notable for posing difficulty for learners due to a unique property that violates Grimshaw's (1990) Thematic Hierarchy. The participants were given a cloze…

This study employs a relational database consisting of thousands of Old High German (OHG) nominal attestations to reconstruct noun class paradigms found primarily in the four OHG texts extensive enough to provide complete nominal paradigms: "Isidor", "Benediktinerregel", "Tatian" and Otfrid von Weissenburg's "Evangelienbuch". This study captures…

This dissertation is a description of Xinaliq, a Northeast (Nakh-Daghestanian) Caucasian language spoken primarily in the village also called Xinaliq, which lies at an elevation of 7,000 feet in the Kuba district of Azerbaijan, near the border with Daghestan. Currently there are approximately 1,500 residents in the village. Most of them are…

This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych-verbs (e.g. "gustar" "to like") across four different proficiency levels. In particular, psych-verbs constitute a testing ground for the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycok &…

The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndetically coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then…

The reconstruction of genealogical relationships between languages is traditionally performed through lexical comparison and the establishment of regular sound changes. The historical analysis of other aspects of linguistic structure, like syntactic patterns or the function of grammatical elements, is normally understood to depend on a previously…

An experiment testing adult Polish speakers' ability to supply dative forms of unfamiliar nouns revealed strong effects of type frequency (performance was better on inflections that apply to large classes) and neighbourhood density (participants were more likely to supply the target inflection with nonce nouns belonging to densely populated…

Discusses allomorphic relationships, easily stated phonologically, but obscured when not stated as morpholexical rules. Rules belonging to the phonological component sometimes must be regarded as lexical redundancy rules that capture generalizations about morphological selection. (CB)

Much of the confusion surrounding the meaning and distribution of "(i)ci and la" and other partially cognate deictic terms in French can be dissipated if the terms are assumed to be related to the three grammatical persons: "(i)ci" is confined to the first person, "la" has taken over the second person, and…

In this article we examine language processing and development in Catalan or Spanish-speaking children with SLI, focusing on the study of the verb. We analyse the key initial phase of its process of acquisition and aim to define common features of the SLI group that distinguish them from children with normal language development. We intend to…

This article offers a new definition of the concept of auxiliaries, based on the conviction that auxiliarity is a grammatical function rather than a semantic, logical or metaphorical one. Examples are taken from Spanish. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Explores how an anthropological perspective provides a necessary basis for an account of several aspects of the language acquisition process. Discussion focuses on how the patterns of development in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics appear to be profoundly influenced by the range of adult language structures. (Author/CB)