We present a visual world eye-tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive sentences in Tseltal is Verb--Object--Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information…

Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which…

Adjectival participles have been classified by their syntactic and semantic functions in many languages. Among the semantic functions, it is proposed that "reversible/irreversible interpretation" of those forms have a distinctive property. Like English, German, Greek and Turkish, it is claimed that Japanese adjectival forms have…

This study examines word order variation in negative word + "más" constructions in Caracas Spanish, with "más" pre-posed or post-posed in relation to the negative word. We empirically analyze the effect of formal syntactic and semantic constraints, the contribution of priming and frequency, as well as several social factors on…

In this dissertation, I investigate the structural positions of "i/ka"-marked DPs and "un/nun"-marked DPs in the light of Kratzer (1988; 1995) and Diesing (1990; 1992). In Korean, unlike German (and English in part), vP-external subjects and vP-internal subjects are not distinguishable at the surface. However, by adopting…

Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

This study is aimed to re-examine the Interface Hypothesis via investigating the adult L2 acquisition of the word order variation of numeral classifier indefinites at the syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse interfaces in L2 Chinese. A computerized acceptability judgment task was administered to 41 advanced and intermediate adult Korean learners…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

In this paper the results of an investigation of word order in Russian Sign Language (RSL) are presented. A small corpus of narratives based on comic strips by nine native signers was analyzed and a picture-description experiment (based on Volterra et al. 1984) was conducted with six native signers. The results are the following: the most frequent…

This dissertation proposes a novel analysis of the syntax and semantics of Comparative Correlative sentences in English such as "the bigger they are, the harder they fall or the faster we drive, the sooner we'll get there." The analysis is cast in a framework that distinguishes between argument structure and word order, called…

This dissertation contains three studies that investigate whether attested patterns of constituent order distribution and change in the world's languages can be attributed, in part, to cognitive preferences for some constituent orders over others. To assess these preferences, seven experiments employed an "elicited pantomime" task.…

During the last years there has been an increasing interest in examining the brain responses to word order variations. In one ERP study conducted in Spanish, Casado, Martin-Loeches, Munoz, and Fernandez-Frias (2005) had participants read Spanish transitive sentences with either an SVO (subject-verb-object) or an OVS order. The word order of a…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the nature of word order variation in declarative and interrogative clauses in Turkish within the framework of the generative syntax. The specific issue that will be examined in this dissertation concerns the role of discourse-pragmatics in word order variation. I will argue that all movement…

Adults are able to access semantic and syntactic information rapidly as they hear or read in real-time in order to interpret sentences. Young children, on the other hand, tend to rely on syntactically-based parsing routines, adopting the first noun as the agent of a sentence regardless of plausibility, at least during oral comprehension. Little is…

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…