Pidgins, narrowly defined, are auxiliary languages reserved for communication with linguistic outgroups. Although implicitly recognized as a class of languages by many linguists, there has been little systematic typological investigation of pidgins. This dissertation presents the first large-scale typological study of morphology and functional…

Research over the past two decades has reported a robust relationship between relative social status and first-person singular (FPS) pronoun use in English. For my dissertation study, I wanted to test the replicability of those findings using American Sign Language (ASL) data that I collected for this purpose. In alignment with previous work, I…

This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…

The initial high expectations of applied linguistic work did not endure. Applied linguistics is divided between adopting either a modernist or a postmodernist approach. Despite their relevant critique of modernism, the relativism promoted by postmodernist perspectives is an inadequate response to the challenges of the field. A non-reductionist…

We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children's acquisition of "wh"-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 "wh"-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of "wh"-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of…

Based on Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, Lakoff's definition and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges, this paper takes New York Times and China Daily from January 23rd to April 8th, 2020 as corpus sources, randomly selects 39 COVID-19 reports, and makes a contrastive study of hedges among them, aiming at exploring the similarities and…

This dissertation is about the learnability of different generative, Separationist approaches to nominal morphosyntax. The core of my investigation is number, gender, and declension class, as manifested across nouns, adnominals (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, and quantifiers), and articles. An extreme position would require that all of…

The unique orthographic complexities of Japanese, which utilizes multiple types of scripts (morphographic kanji and syllabic hiragana and katakana) for the same spoken language, place unique demands on early learners. Much research has centered on the average ability of Japanese readers, but given the varying challenges of these scripts, attention…

In this thesis, I use a combination of simulations and empirical data to demonstrate that a small set of structural and functional principles - the basic tenets of predictive coding theory - succinctly accounts for a very wide range of properties in the language processing system. Predictive coding approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference via…

Anglicisms play a pivotal role in shaping media discourse in Kazakhstan, potentially influencing both the style and content of media texts. The communicative and pragmatic features of anglicisms in Kazakhstani news feeds, in addition, are deeply impacted by globalization. This research aims to analyze how anglicisms influence the perception and…

Classifier systems constitute one of the most prominent features of East and South-East Asian languages (Li, 2013). Classifiers categorize referent nouns based on salient semantic features such as humanness, animacy, shape, or others (Aikhenvald and Mihas, 2019). The work described in this dissertation constitutes a thorough quantitative…

The references to the kinematic dimension of experience in the technical sphere yield constitutive concepts related to technical consistency and constancy. On the norm side, the design principle of developing an applied linguistic intervention that is reliable becomes prominent, and on the factual side the internal technical consistency of the…

Natural language contains a variety of means for expressing possibilities consistent with what is known. Particularly well-studied among them are the epistemic modal auxiliaries "might" and "must": (1) a. Ann: "Where is Peter?" b. Mary: "He {might/must} be in his office." There is broad agreement that…

Research on "parentese," the acoustically exaggerated, slower, and higher-pitched speech directed toward infants, has mostly focused on maternal contributions, although it has long been known that fathers also produce parentese. Given recent societal changes in family dynamics, it is necessary to revise these mother-centered models of…

Technological advances have made the ability to translate no longer exclusively belong to humans. Today, machine translation has turned into a tool with superior performance to convert text between languages without the need for human intervention. One of the translation research foci is the studies of causative translation, especially from…