The ability to generate novel utterances compositionally using generative knowledge is a hallmark property of human language. At the same time, languages contain non-compositional or idiosyncratic items, such as irregular verbs, idioms, etc. This dissertation asks how and why language achieves a balance between these two systems--generative and…

Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…

Over the past two decades the concept of semantic prosody has attracted considerable research interest since Sinclair (1991) observed that "many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment" (p. 112). Sinclair (2003) also noted that semantic prosody conveys its pragmatic meaning and attitudinal…

Transitivity has been extensively researched from a semantic point of view (e.g., Hopper & Thompson, 1980). Although little has been said about a prototypical intransitive construction, it has been suggested that verbs that denote actions with an agent and a patient/theme cannot be intransitive (e.g., Guerssel, 1985). However, it has been…

The present study examines and compares the extent to which advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish heritage speakers acquire the syntactic and semantic properties that regulate the grammatical representation of double complementizer questions in Spanish, a CP-related structure not present in English. Results from an aural sentence completion…

The study of SLA began around the beginning of the 70s with the emergence of both theoretical and empirical studies. Undoubtedly, the acquisition of tense/aspect, besides other topics, has attracted much interest from researchers. This study investigated the use of telic and atelic verb forms in the oral production of Turkish speakers of English…

Wish expression is the way by which wishes are expressed. These wishes are either fulfilled or unfulfilled. There are certain devices that are used in English and Arabic and these devices are used to express wishes. Fulfilled wishes are expressed by most devices of wish expression in both English and Arabic. In turn, unfulfilled wishes are…