Several studies provide considerable insight into the role that frequency plays in language development. However, no study has investigated the direct relationship between frequency and grammatical acquisition in children with specific language impairment (SLI). In this study, we focus specifically on the influence of the frequency of functional…

Parents often turn to educators and healthcare professionals for advice on how to best support their child's language development. These professionals frequently suggest implementing the "one-parent-one-language" approach to ensure consistent exposure to both languages. The goal of this study was to understand how language exposure influences the…

An experiment was carried out to compare the time course of the acquisition of two basic spelling mechanisms in Spanish, a shallow system, and French, a deep system. The first was lexical. It relies on the orthographic lexicon, a hypothetical structure containing the orthographic representations of words accessible for word spelling. To evaluate…

The purpose of this study is to examine Foucault's discourse-oriented theory, his explanation of the power-knowledge relation, his notions of technologies of domination and technologies of the self, and the Foucauldian critique of the assumed neutrality of education and school counseling. The theory that we shall seek to elaborate here puts…

Almost forty years after Stalnaker's (1974) initial call for "the development and application of a pragmatic theory in which detailed explanations of phenomena relating to linguistic contexts can be given" (p. 214), a unifying construct definition and theory still does not exist to explain fully pragmatic knowledge and ability (Roever,…

We perform motion events in all aspects of our daily life, from walking home to jumping into a pool, from throwing a frisbee to pushing a shopping cart. The fact that languages may encode such motion events in different fashions has raised intriguing questions regarding the typological classifications of natural languages in relation to…

This dissertation concerns the acquisition of the interaction between lexicosemantic properties of verbs and syntax, focusing on symmetrical and asymmetrical verbs in different syntactic structures. Based on linguistic evidence, it is shown that two conceptual categories, Mutuality and Number, interact to give rise to four event-types: Single…

Literature on speech rhythm has been focused on three major questions: whether languages have rhythms that can be classified into a small number of types, what the criteria are for the membership in each class, and whether the perceived rhythmic similarity between languages can be quantified based on properties found in the speech signal. Claims…

This dissertation establishes the syntactic representation and derivation of relative clause (RC) constructions in Bizkaiera Basque. Using native speaker introspection, grammaticality judgment under direct elicitation and formal experiments, I show that Bizkaiera follows the Head raising strategy in RC construction. Evidence for this comes from…

This dissertation investigates the syntax and semantics of nine Chinese "measures for verbs" (Chao 1968:615), which are words used with numerals to form event quantifiers counting the eventualities denoted by the predicate of a sentence. Based on their syntactic behavior, I argue that the nine words can be divided into two groups. The…

Evidentiality is commonly concerned with two basic notions: evidence type and the speaker's commitment towards the truth of the proposition expressed (Chafe and Nichols 1986). Throughout a detailed study of the morphosyntax and semantics of deverbal agentives (DAs), this dissertation investigates indirect evidentiality and its interaction with two…

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on the study of how utterances composed of human-level languages can be understood and generated. Typically, there are considered to be three intertwined levels of structure that interact to create meaning in language: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Not only is a large amount of…

This paper describes a series of interactive, synchronous online training workshops in which linguistics graduate students studying in Australia, UK, USA and Saudi Arabia participated. The aim of the workshops was to develop graduate students' research skills in linguistics, to introduce them to latest trends and developments in linguistic…

International students and direct entrants--those entering a higher year of a degree--often come from socioeconomic or cultural backgrounds different from traditional students, and have different educational backgrounds. It is assumed such students need help with unfamiliar assessment tasks such as essays, reports, and so on, and many sources aim…

Drawing on 95 text histories from a longitudinal project on writing for publication in 4 national contexts, this article analyses the language ideologies enacted in referees' and editors' comments on articles submitted for publication in English-medium "international" journals. It considers how orientations to "English,"…