"Do so" anaphora is a fairly widely used in English, but has received relatively little treatment in the literature (especially when compared with verb phrase ellipsis). There are, however, two aspects of this anaphor that have gained prominence: (i) its use as a test for constituency within the verb phrase, and (ii) the semantic restriction it…

Construction grammars (Lakoff, Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1987; Langacker, Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical pre-requisites, Stanford University Press, 1987; Croft, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective, Oxford University…

The thoughts on a language history within a European context sketched out here represent an attempt to extend the concepts of regional and particularly national language history by adding a third dimension: transnational language history in Europe. After a few general thoughts on the extended area of research, in which so-called external language…

The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndetically coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then…

Numerous distributional cues in the child's environment may potentially assist in language learning, but what cues are useful to the child and when are these cues utilised? We propose that the most useful source of distributional cue is a flexible frame surrounding the word, where the language learner integrates information from the preceding and…

This thesis presents a corpus of beginning learner German with a reliable error annotation scheme and an approach for detecting and diagnosing grammatical errors in learner language. A constraint-based dependency parser provides the foundation for a flexible and modular analysis of German by representing parsing as a constraint satisfaction…

This study examined the basic utility of topic models, a computational linguistics model for text-based data, to the investigation of the process of couple therapy. Linguistic analysis offers an additional lens through which to examine clinical data, and the topic model is presented as a novel methodology within couple and family psychology that…

Many cognitive scientists regard language as a rich source of evidence about the human mind. Much research over the past forty years has been driven by the assumption that words reveal underlying concepts. At the same time, cross-linguistic work has shown that languages differ dramatically in how they partition the world by name. To maintain the…

Previous research has emphasized the importance of a positive identity in the rehabilitation of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and although identity is constructed and negotiated socially, through the use of language, there is little research available on the linguistic tools used by this population in constructing their identities.…

This dissertation investigates the morphosyntax and pragmatics of Levantine Arabic negation from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. It is shown that the complex distribution of the negation morphemes "ma," "la" and "-sh" is subject to morphosyntactic and pragmatic constraints. The morphosyntactic…

This article presents data from three production experiments investigating the prosodic means of encoding information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put target words either in wide, informational, or…

Theories of how people construct linguistic form during production are largely based on English and closely related languages. We report three experiments that used a structural priming paradigm to investigate grammatical encoding in Mandarin Chinese, in particular the way conceptual information is mapped onto grammatical structure. The results…

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence…

The purpose of this article was to test the predictions of a speech production model of cross-linguistic influence in French-English bilingual children. A speech production model predicts bidirectional influence (i.e., bilinguals' greater use of periphrastic constructions like the hat of the dog relative to monolinguals in English and reversed…

Various measures for identifying the onset of babbling have been proposed in the literature, but a formal definition of the exact procedure and a thorough validation of the sample size required for reliably establishing babbling onset is lacking. In this paper the reliability of five commonly used measures is assessed using a large longitudinal…