In this dissertation I discuss several aspects of the syntax, semantics and discourse properties of what I call Spanish verbless clauses -i.e. non-finite utterances with clausal properties: Spanish PredNP "muy listo este tio" "very intelligent this guy", Spanish PP complement clause "me sorprende lo caro del piso" "it amazes me how expensive this…

This dissertation explores co-construction of a situated activity in a current unit by mainly focusing on hearers' actions. The "co-construction" involves a process of interaction in which speakers and hearers jointly construct the form and the meaning of ongoing utterances even when they disagree with each other (Jacoby & Ochs,…

This article presents the results of four studies exploring the acquisition of the language-specific syntactic and semantic properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam, languages that behave differently with respect to the syntax and semantics of multiple interrogatives. A corpus analysis investigated the frequency of…

The alphasyllabary of Kannada comprises more than 400 symbols called "akshara"; each symbol is visuo-spatially complex with a consistent representation at the dual levels of the syllable and the phoneme. We investigated reading difficulties in Kannada among 8-12 year old children by conducting a between-groups followed by a case series…

Lexicographers, teachers and interpreters of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) are challenged by the degree of lexical variation that exists in this young language. For instance, most numerals between one and twenty have two or more variants in common use (McKee, McKee, and Major 2008), a situation that contrasts with most established spoken…

Jurgen Meisel argues that "grammatical variation...can be described...in terms of parametric variation", and--crucially for his arguments in this paper--that "parameter settings do not change across the lifespan". To this extent he adopts the standard generative view, but he then departs from what he calls "the literature on historical…

The present study is concerned with the upper limits of SLA--specifically, mastery of the syntax-discourse interface in successful endstate learners of second-language (L2) French (near-native speakers). Left dislocation (LD) is a syntactic means of structuring spoken French discourse by marking topic. Its use requires speakers to coordinate…

The role of Broca's area in sentence processing has been debated for the last 30 years. A central and still unresolved issue is whether Broca's area plays a specific role in some aspect of syntactic processing (e.g., syntactic movement, hierarchical structure building) or whether it serves a more general function on which sentence processing…

Linguistic antisexism is different from the institutional feminization of language. It involves practices of double gender marking which work to avoid the gender dichotomy. Working on a French written corpus, this paper will examine the forms of double gender marking, looking at typographic, morphosyntactical and rhetorical levels; then, it will…

There are many different kinds of words in the English language. Instruction in grammar and syntax helps young writers sort out when to use a plural or singular noun, or when to use an apostrophe. Silly Stories, a variation of a popular party game, reinforces the importance of word choice and conventions in writing. This article describes a…

This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych-verbs (e.g. "gustar" "to like") across four different proficiency levels. In particular, psych-verbs constitute a testing ground for the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycok &…

Clause connectives are linguistic forms that convey relations between clauses in a sentence. They are typically compared, whether within a language or across languages, on the basis of a shared syntactic category, such as coordination and subordination, or a semantic one, such as sequence, cause, or addition. While the inadequacy of the…

This dissertation investigates second language (L2) development in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics. Specifically, it examines the acquisition of definiteness and specificity in Russian within the Feature Re-assembly framework (Lardiere, 2009), according to which the hardest L2 learning task is not to reset parameters but to reconfigure,…

This thesis offers a systematic treatment of discontinuous exponence, a pattern of inflection in which a single feature or a set of features bundled in syntax is expressed by multiple, distinct morphemes. This pattern is interesting and theoretically relevant because it represents a deviation from the expected one-to-one relationship between…

Makary Kotoko (MK), a Central Chadic B language, is spoken in the north of Cameroon just south of Lake Chad. Published works on MK to date include about a dozen articles on different aspects of the grammar of the language, primarily by H. Tourneux. The present work, which is based on a substantial corpus of recorded texts, is a systematic…