Syntactic movement is central to mainstream generative theories of syntax (Chomsky, 1957; 1981; 1995; 2001). Under this view, sentences contain words that have moved and words that have not. Children only ever hear words in their moved positions so it is unclear how they could determine the ways these constituents must be merged and moved from…

Mandarin Chinese is widely believed to observe the Phrase Structure Condition (first proposed in Huang 1982; hereafter 'PSC'), a PF filter on phrase-structural representations that forbids the occurrence of two (or more) syntactic constituents in the postverbal field. This idea has proved highly important and influential, as witnessed by the fact…

Although a growing body of research has sought to understand the relationship between word order and information structure, previous information structure (IS) analyses of verb-subject order have produced conflicting results for Medieval French, which have subsequently led to conflicting claims about the importance of IS to its word order as well…

F0 contours convey multiple types of information, including lexical and post-lexical meanings, as well as affective and socio-indexical indicators. This dissertation investigates the interaction between lexical tone and sentence-level intonation in Thai, focusing on how sentence position influences the acoustic realization and perceptual…

Comprehenders encounter a variety of syntactic structures through reading or spoken conversation. In some cases, sentences can be ambiguous and have more than one meaning. In "The spy saw the cop with the binoculars," one interpretation is that the spy is looking through the binoculars, while an alternative is that the cop has the…

This dissertation presents the judgment of what is 'correct' American Sign Language (ASL) structure by the younger generation, using the word order strategies that were used in older generation signers, as well as younger generation attitudes towards the ideology of ASL being a SOV language. This study used an on-line survey to evaluate 83…

Relative clause (RC) production is an important language milestone for children. Incorporating a felicitous context when assessing RC production is of theoretical and clinical value. This study investigated how a felicitous context influenced elicited production of RCs from monolingual English-speaking and bilingual Mandarin-English speaking…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

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…

An important component of academic writing in English is the word combinations or collocations writers use while expressing meaning and performing various rhetorical functions. It is essential for second language (L2) writers to gain command of these lexico-grammatical combinations (Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008a, 2008b) as they develop their L2…

Second language acquisition has been observed to be variable in its outcome such that, unlike native speakers, all second language learners do not achieve total success. Second language acquisition is made of macro and micro processes. External and internal (e.g., age, individual differences) factors are assumed to affect language processing in…

The present study examines the relative order of noun-adjective sequences within code-switched Determiner Phrases. Several hypotheses have been considered: is this a property defined by the determiner (Bartlett, 2013), the noun (Arnaus et al., 2012) or the adjective (Cantone & MacSwan, 2009)? Or on the contrary, if a carrier phrase is present,…

Mixed languages like Media Lengua incorporate grammar from one source language (here, Quichua) but lexicon from another (here, Spanish). Due to their linguistic profile, they provide a unique window into bilingual language usage and language representation. Drawing on sociolinguistic, structural and psycholinguistic perspectives, the current…

Negation has been researched in second language acquisition in several languages (Bernini 2000; Donaldson 2017; Eskildsen 2012). However, there are very few studies that have discussed the acquisition of negation in L2 Spanish. In Alexandrino's (2010) dissertation, Grammaticality Judgment Tasks are employed to indicate that the acquisition of…

A class of Modern Standard Arabic complementizers known as "'?inna' and its sisters" demonstrate unique case and word order restrictions. While CPs in Arabic allow both Subject-Verb (SV) and Verb-Subject (VS) word order and their subjects show nominative morphology, CPs introduced by "?inna" ban a verb from directly following…