Languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area have been reported to lack a dedicated means of expressing the privative meaning that encodes the absence of a participant in a situation. This micro-typological study identifies alternative strategies that the languages in this area employ to function without dedicated privative markers, namely…

This dissertation represents the first attempt to integrate typological, semantic, and psycholinguistic perspectives to elucidate a semantically "bizarre" and "illogical" phenomenon called "expletive negation" (henceforth, EN) which is well known in Romance languages but has so far attracted little attention outside…

British Columbia (BC), Canada, is home to 34 Indigenous languages, all of them classified as endangered. Considerable work is underway by First Nation communities to revitalize their languages. Linguists classify many of the languages of BC as polysynthetic, meaning that words are composed of many morphemes, or units of meaning. While strong…

This article suggests a method to deal with cross-linguistic differences in children with Specific Language Impairment. The differences in vulnerable structures reflect typological properties of the surrounding language (e.g., Leonard 2014a, 2014b). This article adds a developmental perspective to the discussion by interpreting the vulnerable…

This dissertation is an analysis of the morphosyntax of the Turkish causative construction within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). It is an attempt to capture a range of different phenomena in a principled way within this framework. Important aspects of DM for the analysis herein include the syntactic derivation of words; the…

This dissertation provides a description of aspects of the phonology, morphology, and morphosyntax of Bangime. Bangime is a language isolate spoken in the Dogon language speaking area of Central Eastern Mali. Although the Bangande, the speakers of Bangime, self-identify with the Dogon, their language bears practically no resemblance to the…

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Kove, an Austronesian language spoken in the West New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea. Kove is primarily spoken in 18 villages, including some on the small islands north of New Britain. There are about 9,000 people living in the area, but many are not fluent speakers of Kove. The dissertation…

Clause connectives are linguistic forms that convey relations between clauses in a sentence. They are typically compared, whether within a language or across languages, on the basis of a shared syntactic category, such as coordination and subordination, or a semantic one, such as sequence, cause, or addition. While the inadequacy of the…

This thesis offers a systematic treatment of discontinuous exponence, a pattern of inflection in which a single feature or a set of features bundled in syntax is expressed by multiple, distinct morphemes. This pattern is interesting and theoretically relevant because it represents a deviation from the expected one-to-one relationship between…

Taking up analytical issues raised primarily in Dixon (2000) and Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000), this dissertation combines descriptive work with a medium-sized (50-language) typological study. Chapter 1 situates the dissertation against a concise survey of typological-functional work on causative constructions from the last few decades, and…

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four…

This study introduces a typological model of the "conceptual language-specific approach" to the L2 research on the acquisition of tense-aspect. The model is based on the typological notion of prominence, classifying languages into tense-prominent and aspect-prominent (Bhat 1999) and the L1 research proposal that language-specific…

In this study of the placement of sentence negation in third language acquisition (L3), we argue that there is a qualitative difference between the acquisition of a true second language (L2) and the subsequent acquisition of an L3. Although there is considerable evidence for L2 influence on vocabulary acquisition in L3, not all researchers believe…