The Comprehension Hypothesis (CH) is the most powerful hypothesis in the field of Second Language Acquisition despite the presence of the rivals the skill-building hypothesis, the output hypothesis, and the interaction hypothesis. The competing hypotheses state that consciously learned linguistic knowledge is a necessary step for the development…

When discussing focus particles, it has been common practice to rely on the dichotomy of inclusive vs. exclusive particles, "a la" Konig (1991). Inclusive focus particles are often further divided into scalar particles, such as "also", "too", and "either", and non-scalar particles, such as "even". In this thesis, I advance a comparative analysis…

There have been long argumentations about this topic and people are still having difficulty in explaining precisely what the agreement values the mother NP phrase should have from two conjunct daughters which have different AGR (Agreement) values. Especially, this could be more complicated when the values of gender, number, and person of each…

Language generativity can be described as the ability to produce sentences never before said, and to understand sentences never before heard. One process often cited as underlying language generativity is response generalization. However, though the latter seems to promise a technical understanding of the former at a process level, an…

This paper will seek to determine what types of legislative or policy measures should be considered as morally acceptable ones for the state to implement as part of a language maintenance effort. It will approach the issue from a liberal-egalitarian perspective. As a first step, a series of normative constraints that liberal-egalitarians would…

The present paper revolves around MaxiECPC, one of the various sub-corpora that make up ECPC (the European Comparable and Parallel Corpora), an electronic archive of speeches delivered at different parliaments (i.e. the European Parliament-EP; the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados-CD; and the British House of Commons-HC) from 1996 to 2009. In…

This article reports on some of the recent projects and individual works in the field of Legal Linguistics as examples of cooperation between Applied Linguistics and law. The article starts by discussing relevant prototypical concepts of Legal Linguistics. Legal Linguistics scrutinizes interactions between human beings in the framework of legal…

In this article, we present a study of imageability ratings for a set of 1599 Norwegian words (896 nouns, 483 verbs and 220 adjectives) from a web-based survey. To a large extent, the results are in accordance with previous studies of other languages: high imageability scores in general, higher imageability scores for nouns than for verbs, and an…

Deriving the meaning of unknown words from context and its relationship to text comprehension was investigated in 24 individuals with Down syndrome and in 24 typically developing children matched for the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) score. The study consisted of three phases. Unknown words were identified during the first phase (PPVT).…

As the scope of rhetorical inquiry broadens to cover intersemiotic and intertextual phenomena, scholars are increasingly in need of new, defensible analytic procedures. Several scholars have suggested that methods of discourse analysis could enhance rhetorical criticism. Here, I introduce a discourse-based method that is empirical, delicate, and…

Infants begin to segment words from fluent speech during the same time period that they learn phonetic categories. Segmented words can provide a potentially useful cue for phonetic learning, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore the contexts in which sounds appear. We present two experiments to show that, contrary to the…

The history of Chinese language is characterized by a clear shift from monosyllabic to disyllabic words (Wang, 1980). This dissertation aims to provide a new diachronic explanation for the rise of disyllables in the history of Chinese and to demonstrate its significance for Modern Chinese prosody and lexicalization. A corpus of 300 Lianmian words…

Slogans, or linguistic memes, are short, memorable phrases that are present in commercial, political, and everyday discourse. Slogans propagate similarly to other memes, or cultural units, through an evolutionary mechanism first proposed by Dawkins (1976). Heuristic inquiry, as presented by Moustakas (1990), provided a template from which to…

This dissertation explores, analyzes, and compares the usage of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms will be considered as well as their locative and temporal uses. I observe that in both languages the demonstratives can be used to refer to referents. However, they depart from the common assumption that…

Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle & Marantz 1993; Marantz 1997) is founded on the premise that the syntax is the only computational component of the grammar. Much research focuses on how this premise is relevant to the syntax-morphology interface in DM. In this dissertation, I examine theory-internal issues related to the syntax-semantics…