Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer-i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short…

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…

This dissertation is a typological study of verb-final languages, the purpose of which is to examine various grammatical phenomena in verb-final languages to discover whether there are correlations between the final position of the verb and other aspects of grammar. It examines how finality of the verb interacts with argument coding in simple…

The DP Hypothesis proposes that nominal phrases can be analyzed as consisting of Determiner Phrase (DP) on top of Noun Phrase (NP); however, there is a debate on whether this hypothesis works for all languages. Given that previous studies on Chinese leave this question unresolved, this dissertation investigates new empirical evidence to test…

This dissertation explores the diversity and unity of coordination constructions in natural language. Following the goal of bridging syntactic typology with formal semantics, it takes the typological variation in NP coordination patterns as a challenge for semantic theory. Hybrid Coordination in Russian and Comitative Coordination in…

This study examines how Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) intersects with the typological characteristics of Korean in the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs). Korean has two types of RC constructions: head-external and head-internal. The head-external relative has its head to the right of the RC, whereas the…

This contrastive grammar based on modern linguistic theory considers noun and verb phrases as the primary morphological and syntactical structure of language. A section on the noun phrase examines: (1) types of noun phrase constructions; (2) gender and number; (3) elements, expansion, and substitutes of the noun phrase. The material on the verb…

This report presents a general study of the structure of Dravidian languages, nothing predominant and significant patterns and similarities among the languages in the areas of phonology, morphology, and syntax. There is also a discussion of the main differences of various subgroups or particular languages from the typical patterns. Background…

How would translators approach a process in which they have to make decisions on mapping the grammatically enforced regular number mechanism of a language such as English onto a system like Japanese, where there is no regular coding of number in a noun phrase? Utilizing the concepts of motivation for representation of number, and of "formal-shift"…