This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking…

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP…

This study aims to analyze the syntax of serial verbs in the Punjabi language. The serial verb construction (SVC) is a widespread phenomenon across the world languages and in Punjabi as well. The SVC in Punjabi specifically is used as a full event described by two sub-events, with each event described by a separate verb coming together in a…

This paper aims to give an account of the multiple determination (determiner spreading) phenomenon in Arabic. Determiner spreading is the syntactic representation and phonological realization of multiple determiners within the same determiner phrase. As a cross-linguistic phenomenon, determiner spreading has been investigated in other languages…

This paper presents an analysis of the structure of relative clauses with an indirect object or adjunct gap in two Mundaka Basque varieties ("Mundaka Basque I" and "Mundaka Basque II"). In Mundaka Basque I, relativization of indirect objects and adjuncts is grammatical when the relative clause is in subject or direct object…

This thesis is a study of the syntax of multi-verb constructions, in which a single clause contains more than one verbal element. Multi-verb constructions are of special interest in light of the hypothesis that clausal structure is headed by a verb. Implemented in terms of extended projections, this hypothesis states that clausal functional…

This dissertation explores aspects of Me'phaa morphosyntax, from verb roots to verb-initial word orders. I argue that patterns of agreement map directly onto the syntax of argument structure, which in turn feed the language's unique manifestation of ergativity. Me'phaa agreement morphology is richly complex, and I show that this is due, in part,…

This piece of work proposes to descriptively investigate the structures of complex verbs in Meiteilon. The categorization of such verbs is based on the nature of semantic and syntactic functions of a lexeme or verbal lexeme. A lexeme or verbal lexeme in Meiteilon may have multifunctional properties in the nature of occurrence. Such lexical items…

This article adopts the surface overlap and derivational complexity hypotheses to study crosslinguistic transfer in the adult second language (L2) acquisition of English genitive alternation (between the s-genitives and the of genitives) by intermediate and advanced Egyptian Arabic-speaking learners. While the "s"-genitive (e.g.…

This dissertation examines primarily the syntactic, but also the semantic/pragmatic behavior of sentential complement clauses in Turkish and proposes a new classification of such complements. A head-final language, Turkish lacks an overt, lexical complementizer akin to English "that". The most frequent types of sentential complementation…

In this dissertation I set out to solve a series of puzzles related to the notion of a DP periphery, defined as an area around the edge of a given domain targeted by operations such as movement and agreement. In solving these puzzles, I argue for a peripheral area in the nominal domain. Early arguments for a peripheral boundary in the nominal…

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have language difficulties of unknown origin. Syntactic profiles are atypical, with poor performance on non-canonical structures, e.g. object relatives, suggesting a localized deficit. However, existing analyses using ANOVAs are problematic because they do not systematically address unequal…

This dissertation presents the results of a typological study that investigated the global distribution of antipassive constructions, as well as the distribution of the relevant antipassiverelated features. The sample includes data from 445 languages, which represent 144 language families and isolates. This larger study is informed by an in-depth…

In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on…

This dissertation examines complementizer agreement (CA) phenomena in which phi-features appear on a complementizer, clause-linking marker, or otherwise, syntactically speaking, at the C[superscript 0] position. This dissertation will argue that CA is in fact a straightforward output of the syntax module under standard Minimalist assumptions, and…