The focus of this thesis is the description and analysis of clausal complementation in Sundanese, an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia. The thesis examined a range of clausal complement types in Sundanese, which consists of (i) "yen/(wi)rehna" "that" complements, (ii) "pikeun" "for" complements,…

This dissertation presents a variationist sociolinguistic study of the variable placement of subject personal pronouns before or after verbs in Spanish in New York City (e.g. "ella canta"; "canta ella", both "she sings"). It pursues a line of inquiry that partially replicates recent work by Otheguy & Zentella…

This is a study of two Australian learners of Indonesian during a short stay abroad. It examines their contrasting success in acquiring L2 address terms, in tandem with their contrasting experiences of the L2 culture setting. It thereby helps explain the persistent finding of great individual variation in L2 gains--and in particular pragmatic…

One of the aspects of knowing a word is the knowledge of which words it is usually used with. Since knowledge of collocations is essential for appropriate and fluent use of language, learning collocations should have a central place in the study of vocabulary. There are different opinions about the best ways of learning collocations. This study…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…

Subject-verb concord in English existential constructions is often viewed as problematic from both prescriptive and descriptive approaches to grammar and causes considerable confusion among teachers and learners of English as a second language (ESL). This paper aims to disentangle debates over the curious usage of the "there" + plural noun phrase…

Are subjects produced differently based on the transitivity of the clause they are embedded in? Based on data from a narrative reading experiment, it is shown that transitive subjects are produced with a lower f0 than intransitive subjects and that this difference is statistically significant (p less than 0.05). It is suggested that the purpose…

This paper examines the modification of nominal compounds by attributive adjectives in English. It draws on a distinction between compound-external (i.e. syntactic) and compound-internal (i.e. morphological) modification. An analysis is presented of more than 1000 pertinent cases, which are roughly equally divided into two-, three- and four-noun…

This research investigated 12-month-olds' ability to use person-specific language to determine to which of several absent things a person is referring. Infants were introduced to two experimenters who played separately with a different ball. One researcher asked infants to retrieve her object when both balls were hidden. Infants selected the…

Listeners expect that a definite noun phrase with a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., "the big"...) will refer to an entity that is part of a set of objects contrasting on the scalar dimension, e.g., size (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Carlson, 1999). Two visual world experiments demonstrate that uttering a referring expression with a…

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However…

Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as "John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well". They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focusing and the integration account. The focusing…

Because there has been little research on focus on form during the post-task phase in task-based language teaching, this experimental study investigates the effects of task repetition after having directed learners' attention to form during the main task. The study comprises two interventions, where each consisted of a task with a focus on a…

L2 learners' problems with English articles have been linked to learners' L1 and their access to universal semantic features (e.g., definiteness and specificity). Studies suggest that L2 adults rely on their L1 knowledge, while child L2 learners rely more on their access to semantic universals. The present study investigates whether child L2…

Previous research has suggested that some discourse relations are easier to convey implicitly than others due to cognitive biases in the interpretation of discourse. In this article we argue that relations involving a perspective shift, such as confirmation relations, are difficult to convey implicitly. We assess this claim with two empirical…