We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children's acquisition of "wh"-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 "wh"-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of "wh"-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of…

This article adopts the surface overlap and derivational complexity hypotheses to study crosslinguistic transfer in the adult second language (L2) acquisition of English genitive alternation (between the s-genitives and the of genitives) by intermediate and advanced Egyptian Arabic-speaking learners. While the "s"-genitive (e.g.…

Ellipsis plays a key role in the understanding of the relationship between what is uttered and what is understood. In elliptical utterances, less is said than is understood. How is it that a mere fragment of a sentence can be understood as something more? This dissertation explores the syntax of one type of elliptical phenomena, Stripping. A…

This dissertation examines primarily the syntactic, but also the semantic/pragmatic behavior of sentential complement clauses in Turkish and proposes a new classification of such complements. A head-final language, Turkish lacks an overt, lexical complementizer akin to English "that". The most frequent types of sentential complementation…

In this dissertation I set out to solve a series of puzzles related to the notion of a DP periphery, defined as an area around the edge of a given domain targeted by operations such as movement and agreement. In solving these puzzles, I argue for a peripheral area in the nominal domain. Early arguments for a peripheral boundary in the nominal…

This paper aims at giving an analysis of certain syntactic peculiarities of reciprocal pronouns within verbs of psychological state, commonly known as psych-verbs. The analysis reveal that psych-verbs constructions have a peculiar property in that the binding conditions of reciprocal pronouns are satisfied in Experiencer-Subject (ES) psychverbs…

This dissertation examines complementizer agreement (CA) phenomena in which phi-features appear on a complementizer, clause-linking marker, or otherwise, syntactically speaking, at the C[superscript 0] position. This dissertation will argue that CA is in fact a straightforward output of the syntax module under standard Minimalist assumptions, and…

A class of Modern Standard Arabic complementizers known as "'?inna' and its sisters" demonstrate unique case and word order restrictions. While CPs in Arabic allow both Subject-Verb (SV) and Verb-Subject (VS) word order and their subjects show nominative morphology, CPs introduced by "?inna" ban a verb from directly following…

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in "The minimalist program." MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in…

In this dissertation, I examine the interpretation of NP-ellipsis (henceforth, NPE) in Korean. Some unexpected interpretive and grammatical contrasts arise in Korean between pro-forms such as "caki" "self" and "ku" "'3.S.M" (~"he") in object position and their null counterparts in NPE…

An essential task for the morphosyntactic level within the grammatical component of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is the handling of constituent ordering. This area of grammar, which is known as positional syntax, constitutes the subject of the present paper, in which the ordering of constituents is examined within the framework of a dynamic…

Comparative correlatives, like "the longer you stay out in the rain, the colder you'll get," are prolific in the world's languages (i.e., there is no evidence of a language that lacks comparative correlatives). Despite this observation, the data do not present a readily apparent syntax. What is the relationship between the two clauses?…

This dissertation concerns the interaction of syntax and information structure in Mandarin Chinese and puts the theoretical assumption of parallelism between clauses and noun phrases to the test. It examines and validates the information structural status of the object phrases preposed to clause-internal positions. I argue that Rizzi's (1997)…

The goal of this dissertation is to explore Hindi verbal complex predicates at the syntax/semantics interface using the lexicalist framework of HPSG. The enduring theoretical interest in complex predicates is undoubtedly due to the fact that in some aspects they pattern with prototypical words, whereas in other aspects they pattern with…

This dissertation concerns the distribution of negative polarity items (henceforth, NPIs) in conditionals and conditional-like constructions. NPIs include words such as any and ever and idioms such as "give a damn" and "lift a finger"; these expressions have only a limited distribution. In this dissertation, the distribution of…