This document constitutes the first phonological grammar Betsimisaraka Malagasy, a form of the Malagasy (Austronesian) language spoken in the island nation of Madagascar. Betsimisaraka specifically is the name of an ethnic group with approximately a million members living on the East Coast of the island, as well as the various dialects they speak.…

This thesis presents an analysis of the system of transitivity, voice and valency alternations in Huasteco of San Luis Potosi (Mayan) within a functional-typological framework. The study is based on spoken discourse and elicited data collected in the municipalities of Aquismon and Tancanhuitz de Santos in the state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. The…

This dissertation is an analysis of the morphosyntax of the Turkish causative construction within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). It is an attempt to capture a range of different phenomena in a principled way within this framework. Important aspects of DM for the analysis herein include the syntactic derivation of words; the…

Ho, an under-documented North Munda language of India, is known for its complex verb forms. This dissertation focuses on analysis of several features of those complex verbs, using data from original fieldwork undertaken by the author. By way of background, an analysis of the phonetics, phonology and morphophonology of Ho is first presented. Ho has…

This dissertation addresses a number of issues about the grammar of Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. Inuktitut is a dialect within the Inuit dialect continuum which is a group of languages/dialects within the Eskimo-Aleut language family. (Eastern Canadian Inuktitut has an ISO 693-3 language code of "ike".) Typologically, it is an ergative…

Despite longstanding arguments concerning the grammatical categories, functions, and status of the Korean and Japanese copulas within each language system, hardly any attention has been given to their comparative study. Researchers have asked about the function and status of the variant forms of the Japanese copula, and whether they should be…

This dissertation describes the phonetic characteristics of a phenomenon that has previously been denominated "unstressed vowel reduction" in Andean Spanish based on the spectrographic analysis of 40,556 unstressed vowels extracted from the conversational speech of 150 residents of the city of Cusco, Peru. Results demonstrate that this…