Chinese Students' English has its own characteristics. It is of significance to analyze and study these characteristics. The paper uses the corpus approach to study the misuse of tenses in Chinese College students' CET-4 compositions of the sub-corpus of "Non-major College Students" in the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Nine…

Using corpus approach, over the past two decades, a growing number of researchers started to blame textbooks for neglecting important information on the use of grammatical structures in real language use and provided ample information about the mismatch between language used in textbooks and real language in use. Likewise, the prescribed Malaysian…

The primary goal of the present study is to gain more insight into the phenomena of Expletive Negation. Chapter 1 starts with the observed hallmark properties of EN and theoretical backgrounds. In chapter 2, I show the pragmatic contribution of two scalar meanings of undesirability and unlikelihood. It is further shown that the base of scale…

This thesis aims to examine the development of morphosyntax with longitudinal English production from Diany, a Mandarin-speaking child, starting from the second week Diany arrived in the U.S.A. (age 4;9). The study is particularly interested in whether Diany's acquisition of verbal morphemes and verb movement supports relevant hypotheses in the…

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."…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

A robust finding from studies investigating the Aspect Hypothesis is that learners at the early stages of acquisition show a strong preference for using the progressive aspect as associated with activity verbs. As they advance in their acquisition of the second or foreign language, learners move from this prototypical association to associations…

Although the hippocampus is not considered a key structure in semantic memory, patients with medial-temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) have deficits in semantic access on some word retrieval tasks. We hypothesized that these deficits reflect the negative impact of focal epilepsy on remote cerebral structures. Thus, we expected that the networks that…

In the present article we provide evidence for the occurrence of transfer of conceptualization patterns in narratives of two German-Turkish bilingual groups. All bilingual participants grew up in Germany, but only one group is still resident in Germany (n = 49). The other, the returnees, moved back to Turkey after having lived in Germany for…

Syntactic priming is the tendency for a speaker to produce a structure that was encountered in recent discourse and is measured by calculating how frequently speakers use the modelled structures as opposed to alternatives. Recent lab-based studies have shown that carrying out syntactic priming activities with trained interlocutors positively…

Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even…

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral" + "classifier" + "object noun," the object noun is constrained by selectional…

The present study explores the relationship between controlled productive knowledge of collocations and L2 proficiency, the role of frequency in controlled productive knowledge of collocations, and the quantifiability of controlled productive collocational knowledge growth alongside L2 proficiency and word frequency levels. A proficiency measure…

Purpose: There is a pressing need for psychometrically sound naming materials for Spanish/English bilingual adults. To address this need, in this study the authors examined the psychometric properties of An Object and Action Naming Battery (An O&A Battery; Druks & Masterson, 2000) in bilingual speakers. Method: Ninety-one Spanish/English…

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…