From a usage-based approach, this dissertation explores the relationship between structural variability and discourse subjectivity in a series of interviews from the "New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish Survey" (Bills and Vigil 2008). Focusing on the use of cognitive and speech verbs, the analysis will demonstrate that a) structural…

This is a study of processes of structural and functional diversification of the uses of three cognate verbs across the Indo-Iranian language family: "do/make", "be/become", and "give". First, this study identifies over sixty distinct construction types in which these verbs are used, including complex predicate…

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…

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form…

Gives an elementary description of German syntax which is coherent and provides students with finite, countable categories: (1) the predicate, (2) its nominal complements, and (3) modifiers. Analyzes each category and gives examples with teaching suggestions. (EKN)

This paper proposes an explanation for the limited possibilities of realized conjunctions in multitermed coordinations. It argues that conjunction "&" heads a fully articulated phrase (&P), which can iterate &P shells, similar to "V" in Larson's (1988) VP-shell hypothesis. This structure enables a single & to unify any number of conjuncts, and…

The goal of this paper is to explore the ramifications of a nontraditional view of cognition and social interaction for the study of grammatical structure. (Contains 77 references.) (JL)

An analysis of Kilega, a Bantu language spoken in eastern Zaire, focuses on the relative positions of subject and verb and agreement patterns, with particular attention to WH-movement. It is found that Kilega is a subject-verb-object language, but exhibits some variant patterns. WH-movement triggers verb-subject inversion and shifts agreement. The…

A discussion of autosegmental phonology (AP), a theory of phonological representation that uses graphs rather than strings as the central data structure, considers its principal constraint, the "No Crossing Constraint" (NCC). The NCC is the statement that in a well-formed autosegmental diagram, lines of association may not cross. After…

The report of research on English grammar argues that the intransitive resultative construction requires head-movement of the secondary predicate to the main predicate in order to assign the theta-role to the postverbal NP in LF. Then, this construction is taken as an instance in which theta-role assignment is derivational, supporting the findings…

Examines the structures present in the writing samples of bilingual respondents to written questions in Spanish in order to determine which forms represent a departure from standard Spanish; discusses the patterns that develop; and offers insights into the factors underlying this systemic departure from standard written Spanish. (26 references)…

This study explores sound-symbolic, or mimetic, words in the Japanese language, the majority of which are never entered in Japanese dictionaries, and which may not be fully understood in all their nuances by native speakers. The extensiveness of the sound-symbolic system is related to the semantic under-differentiation of Japanese verbs. An…

The extent to which Basque displays ergative characteristics (an ergative language treats the underlying subject of intransitive clauses alike in some manner and differently from the underlying subject of transitive clauses) in its syntax is examined. The amount of evidence needed to conclude that Basque or any other language is ergative is…

The nature of grammatical relations such as subject and object are examined. The ways in which subjects differ from language to language are described and the way in which a language can do without a subject relation is revealed. Three primitive functional properties of sentences which underlie the syntactic relations of subject and topic are…

Analysis of the communicative skills of a nine-year-old deaf boy with minimal schooling showed pantomiming and gestures to be his major mode of communication. Certain semantic patterns prevailed. Use of left or right hand also had semantic correlates. Formal and idiosynacratic signs were discovered in the boy's vocabulary. (Author/PJM)