The Khotons, in the west of Mongolia, were originally Turkic people who spoke the Khoton language, until the 19th century, which is currently considered extinct. This study aimed to prove that the Khoton language belonged to the Turkic languages; and to standardize the Swadesh inventory in relation to the Khoton words. The Swadesh inventory of…

This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…

Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

As a kind of indirect and coded language, metonymy not only inspires others but also helps one to reach goals set by cultural standards, society values, practices, and beliefs. Metonymy's rhetorical power comes from its ability to change meaning from a literal interpretation to an intended conceptual message, therefore enabling communication both…

The functioning of any language is regulated not only by linguistic rules, but also by norms of social and cultural life. Nowadays, development of lingua cultural approach in worldwide education is conditioned by a re-construal of culture phenomena as a specific form of human existence. Until now, we have been dealing with an absence of sufficient…

In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…

We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains 'atoms' or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

The lives of Kala people are deeply intertwined with marine and riparian environments on which their livelihoods depend. To document linguistic and environmental knowledge in these communities, as part of our community-based, collaborative language documentation project, we utilized three main interdisciplinary documentation methods: (1) River…

Eventualities have been recognized as psychologically and linguistically relevant for more than 50 years. Psychologically, eventualities are complex bundles of information derived from our perceptions of the world. The question for linguists is how much of this complexity is reflected in our eventuality-denoting lexical entries and the…

This paper takes issue with the view of conceptual structures as autonomous syntactic structures generated by syntactic formation rules. Instead, it adopts the position developed by Croft and Cruse (2004), in showing that linguistic knowledge -- knowledge of meaning and form -- is basically conceptual structure. In fact the, fundamental problem…

This paper aims to give an account of the multiple determination (determiner spreading) phenomenon in Arabic. Determiner spreading is the syntactic representation and phonological realization of multiple determiners within the same determiner phrase. As a cross-linguistic phenomenon, determiner spreading has been investigated in other languages…

A particular status of the English language as the language of international communication and connections between the nearly related English and German languages resulted in the emergence of many interlingual borrowings in the Modern English and German language vocabularies. The paper aims to consider the functioning of borrowings (loanwords) in…

Due to intercontinental connections provided by air and shipping, tourism, freight transfer, flexibility and expanding labor mobility, expanding the potential of human capital, the borders between states and their societies have been erased, and the international cultural society has become more diverse. The relevance of this study is conditioned…

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…