In this dissertation I investigate the Mandarin "you"-existential sentence. My focus is on its syntax. I also discuss in less detail some semantic peculiarity of the "you"-existential. I begin my investigation of the syntax of "you"-existentials by first looking into what they are not. To this end, I present five…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

This research is analytical in nature and a comparative study of code-mixing and code-switching among the children of 2 to 5 belonging to the educated and uneducated background. The focus of the research is how the children mix and switch Punjabi and Urdu at their early age. This study of code-mixing and code-switching in Urdu and Punjabi is found…

Virtually all researchers understand the requirement of presenting their studies in peer-reviewed English-medium journals. Russian scientific writers understand this necessity too; however, evidence suggests that these particular researchers are under-performing relative to similar non-native English speakers. The considerable challenge Russians…

The present paper explores the use of connectives in the persuasive discourse of 30 Tunisian third-year English majors and 30 Tunisian third-year Arabic majors. The study aims to look at the potential impact of Arabic rhetoric on Tunisians' EFL writing. A quantitative analysis of the students' Arabic and English essays on the same argumentative…

To comprehend a text, one needs to understand the relationship of various elements in it. The skill that helps connect the non-textual components to the textual ones is making inferences. This research aims to reveal different types of inferences made by the students with German-language proficiency of level B1. A qualitative research approach was…

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT)…

Two self-paced reading experiments using a paraphrase decision task paradigm were performed to investigate how sentence complexity contributed to the relative clause (RC) attachment preferences of speakers of different working memory capacities (WMCs). Experiment 1 (English) showed working memory effects on relative clause processing in both…

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…

Presents a comparative semantic analysis of English, French, and Dutch transitive constructions that takes into account the entity that sets the event in motion, the object it affects, and the process that links both. (18 references) (Author/CK)

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are…

This paper proposes a set of hypotheses on the nature of interrogration as a possible language universal. Examples and phrase structure rules and diagrams are given. Examining Tamazight and English, genetically unrelated languages with almost no contact, the author distinguishes two types of interrogation: (1) general, querying acceptability to…

Recent work in word-order typology has demonstrated that the dominant order of verbs and objects (or complements) correlates well with the general ordering tendencies of languages. The work on German reported in this paper suggests, however, that certain traits, such as the order of adverbials, are influenced not only by general ordering…

Discusses the relative merits of feature versus model based semantics for the interpretation of verb phrases in English, French, and German. The article concludes that the simplicity afforded by features is offset by the depth of analysis achieved with event models that are additionally able to support a sophisticated approach to machine…