Bilingualism in Jamaica is of considerable consequence, as most individuals are early bilinguals, speaking both a variety of Jamaican Creole (JC) from birth and having standardized English (sE) as the language of instruction in education. Immigrants from Jamaica to the United States are an ideal population to examine how cross-linguistic influence…

This study aims at investigating how borrowed nouns from English are inflected for plural and gender in Colloquial Saudi Arabic (CSA). The attempt is also made to account for the possible linguistic factors which may affect this inflection in light of some theories in morphology. The analysis is based on more than 250 loanwords collected from…

Using data from Arizona, United States, the present study seeks to further our understanding of lone other language items (LOLIs) in bilingual discourse and their status as either borrowings or codeswitches by measuring the degree of incorporation that can indicate a LOLI's status as a borrowing or codeswitching. To accomplish this aim, nouns from…

This paper presents the results of a study on cross-linguistic transfer in Andean Spanish word order. In Andean Spanish the object appears in preverbal position more frequently than in non-Andean Spanish, which has been attributed to an influence from Quechua (a Subject-Object-Verb language). The high frequency of preverbal objects could be…

The languages of the world encode possession in a variety of ways. In Slavic languages, possession on the level of the clause, or predicative possession, is represented by two main encoding strategies. Most Slavic languages, including those in the West and South Slavic sub-groupings, use a "have" verb comparable to English have and German "haben."…

The effects of language transfer have been amply documented in second language (L2) acquisition and, to a lesser extent, in the language contact/loss literature (Cook, 2003). In both cases, the stronger and often dominant language encroaches into the structure of the less dominant language in systematic ways. But are transfer effects in these two…

Recent research in language contact has investigated bilingual deviations from monolingual norms where syntax interfaces with the lexical and discourse components of the grammar (e.g. Iverson & Rothman 2008; Lozano 2006; Montrul 2004, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli et al. 2004). Such studies generally show that the…

This dissertation uses the generative framework to study the syntax and pragmatics of word order variation in the Andean Spanish of Bolivia and Ecuador. While Standard Spanish has basic order SVO, in Andean Spanish the object frequently appears in preverbal position, resulting in alternative orders (e.g. OVS). Previous studies have attributed this…

An English translation of a grammar of the language used by the Roma, a group of wanderers living in many countries, united by a common language, and often called Bohemians or gypsies, begins with a translator's preface concerning the group's history and the development of the language and dialects. Preliminary material contains a brief history of…

Moroccan Arabic has two competing syntactic constructions for possessive marking: a synthetic one and an analytic one. The distribution of these constructions is investigated in semi-spontaneous narratives (frog stories) from four Moroccan cities and from the diaspora community in the Netherlands. This distribution is found to depend very much on…

The grammar of the Korean language presented here is descriptive and structural, and does not align with any particular theory. An introductory chapter gives some background information about the language and related research. Subsequent chapters treat: writing and sound systems, including some sound rules and suprasegmental features; morphology…

This analysis describes the phonology and grammar of the contact vernacular referred to as Roper Creole, spoken at Ngukurr on the Roper River. The analysis deals primarily with the creole used between native Roper Creole speakers. The phonology is similar to that of the Aboriginal languages of the area, with the addition of a few English sounds.…

This grammar of Pashto was designed to accompany a set of beginning- and intermediate-level instructional materials for teaching the Pashto language to English speakers, but can be used separately as a reference by readers who are not learning the language. Introductory sections in English and Pashto describe the content and organization. The…