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…

The thesis of this dissertation is that, in the New Testament Pauline letters, the article is used with a noun only if the writer assumes identifiability on the part of the reader, and does not wish to give prominence to the constituent concerned. Otherwise, the anarthrousness of a constituent that is assumed by the author to be known and…

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…

English-speaking children exhibit difficulty in their comprehension of raising patterns, such as (1), in which the NP the boy is semantically linked to the VP in the embedded clause, but is syntactically realized as the subject of the matrix clause. (1) Raising pattern: [s "The boy" seems to the girl [s _ to be happy]]. This dissertation…

This paper documents the acoustic reflexes of ATR harmony in Kinande followed by an analysis of the dominance reversal found in class 5 nominals. The principal findings are that the ATR harmony is reliably reflected in a lowering of the first formant. Depending on the vowel, ATR harmony also affects the second formant. The directional asymmetry…

This dissertation examines the particle "ye" in the IV century BCE Chinese Guodian manuscripts by providing a synchronic analysis of its functions and a diachronic hypothesis relating all functions to focus marking. I have subdivided the around 600 occurrences of "ye" into four main functions: focus marker, topic marker, clause connection…

This article discusses some apparently paradoxical behavior of the English demonstratives "this/these" and "that/those" as determiners of proper nouns and as metaphorical signals of epistemic and affective stance within the proximal-distal opposition. It is argued that the apparent paradoxes are actually cases of shifting perspectives or points of…

The CARIN theory (C. L. Gagne & E. J. Shoben, 1997) proposes that people use statistical knowledge about the relations with which modifiers are typically used to facilitate the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations. However, research on semantic patterns in compounding has suggested that regularities tend to be associated with pairings of…

Simultaneous speech and turn-taking patterns vary considerably across cultures. Research on varieties of Spanish has confirmed that frequent, lengthy overlaps within and between turns are common. In this paper it is suggested that when speakers engage in simultaneous talk, they observe Grice's Cooperative Principle by adjusting their utterances so…

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…

Explores the hypothesis that the meaning of a word, especially a noun, relates directly to the types of relationships that the speaker has to the various referents that the word lets him construct, and that the referents have with their environment. Polysemic, metonymic, and metaphoric uses then tend to become confused with the actual lexical…

Argues that the i-within-i condition (Chomsky, 1981) is both empirically inadequate and theoretically incoherent. A definition for circular chains, a condition on the interpretation of the reference of free pronominals and anaphors, is proposed that adequately accounts for the data involving referential circularity that had been previously…

Offers a detailed analysis of the English suffix "-ee" (employee, refugee, etc.) based on 1,500 naturally occurring tokens of 500 word types. Argues that certain semantic constraints, taken together, amount to a special-purpose thematic role that actively constrains productive use of derivational morphology. (Author/MSE)

Inalienable possession (iposs) in Mandarin Chinese has traditionally been thought restricted to associative (genitive) phrases where the possessor is juxtaposed to the possessum. In addition to such phrases, this analysis looks at five other possibilities where intrinsically relational nouns arise: zero anaphora; double subjects; passive of bodily…

A study of reciprocals in Japanese compares two kinds: (1) a verbal suffix "aw"; and (2) an NP argument "otagai." Although "otagai" appears to be taken care of by syntactic binding theory, it is proposed that there is no evidence for the existence of a syntactic position of the object NP in the case of "aw." The suffix can be characterized as…