This thesis investigates the choice between reflexive pronouns (e.g., "herself") and personal pronouns (e.g., "her") in the expression of subject coreference in English locative prepositional phrases. A persistent puzzle for syntactic theories of pronoun licensing, commonly known as binding theories, it has long been observed…

Attitude verbs like "think" and "want" describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

We test children's distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with "the" or "some" in the subject are categorically collective in their interpretations. We further demonstrate that children's collective…

This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…

The relationship between language and thought has fascinated us for centuries. The relationship between the two is far beyond what the two words represent on the literal level, and the discussions around it have been covered in various fields from philosophy and psychology to linguistics. Even complicating the situation, the relationship between…

This study aimed to investigate the production of stress in English compound nouns and phrasal verbs by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Corder, 1982; Selinker, 1972), it was hypothesized that (1) there is a positive relationship between English proficiency levels and accuracy in stress assignment in compound nouns and…

The researcher in this study applied the notions of quantitative method, theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics to examine the correlation between the linguistic theory of end-weight principle and English adjective clauses in Q1-SCOPUS applied linguistics articles and Thai EFL learners' descriptive essays. The significance of this study…

The aim of the present work was to investigate the processing of coreferential relations, focusing on their relationship with the working memory. In a reading process, it is essential that readers continuously perform mental operations that involve the working memory, such as storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. For this reason, it…

This study examines the correlation between the theory of pragmatic discourse of givenness and CP adverbial clauses from the two datasets: Q1 SCOPUS applied linguistics research articles and Thai undergraduate students' writing. The first set was 24 applied linguistics research articles from journals of "English for Specific Purposes"…

This dissertation uses the Conceptual Blending Hypothesis from the socio-cognitive method presented and refined by Kecskes (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2020) to explain how the lexical choice of bilinguals differs across sociocultural situations. Quantitative (lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication) and qualitative (lexical…

A number of previous studies on Chinese relative clauses (RC) have reported conflicting results on processing asymmetry. This study aims to revisit the prevalent debate on whether subject-extracted RCs (SRC) or object-extracted RCs (ORC) are easier to process by using the eye-movement technique. In the current study, the data are analyzed in terms…

This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai…

This paper studies mood distribution in the complement of Spanish assertive matrices when the matrix subject is modified by the quantifier "poco/a/s". The focus of this study is solely complement clauses, and adjectival and adverbial clauses are not considered. Following Mejías-Bikandi's (1994, 1998) account that the distribution of mood…

The use of collocation has always been considered as a good yardstick by which the idiomaticity of second language (L2) use is reliably judged. Hence, this study aims at investigating the relationship between optimizing the lexical approach and improving the collocational accuracy and the ability to operate on the idiom principle in the writing of…