Within the theoretical and methodological framework of Conversation Analysis, the present study explores the nature of the native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) identities in repair practices of English conversation. It has identified and analyzed in detail repair sequences in the data and has also conducted quantitative analyses in…

Body parts have played an important role in the development of theories describing grammaticalization processes (Heine and Kuteva, 2002, pp. 62-63 and 165-171). Within Uralic linguistics, this particular area of study has not yet received a great deal of attention, although the agglutinative character of most of these languages is known to have…

This dissertation proposes a dynamical computational model of the timecourse of phonological parameter setting. In the model, phonological representations embrace phonetic detail, with phonetic parameters represented as activation fields that evolve over time and determine the specific parameter settings of a planned utterance. Existing models of…

Language modeling is one of many problems in language processing that have to grapple with naturally high ambient dimensions. Even in large datasets, the number of unseen sequences is overwhelmingly larger than the number of observed ones, posing clear challenges for estimation. Although existing methods for building smooth language models tend to…

As we witness the prosperity of the social media in the past few years, and feel the explosion of "user-generated content" on the Internet, there is little question that we have entered an era of Big Data. Those social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora and Twitter have been important sources for a wide spectrum of users.…

This dissertation is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the variable word order and prosody of copular constructions ("Nicolas es feliz" versus "'Feliz' es Nicolas," "Es Nicolas 'feliz,'" "Es 'feliz' Nicolas," "Nicolas is 'happy'") in the Spanish of first- and second-generation…

The current dissertation represents one of the first systematic studies of the distribution of speech errors within supralexical prosodic units. Four experiments were conducted to gain insight into the specific role of these units in speech planning and production. The first experiment focused on errors in adult English. These were found to be…

This paper addresses how teachers can be trained to enable cumulative knowledge-building. It focuses on the final intervention stage of the "Disciplinarity, Knowledge and Schooling" ("DISKS") project at the University of Sydney. In this special issue, Maton identifies "semantic waves" as a crucial characteristic of…

This study was designed to examine whether a variety of cognitive and linguistic factors theoretically considered to be predictive of reading comprehension skills in elementary school children were also predictive of listening comprehension skills in 131 five-year-old children. The results showed that the predictors of young children's listening…

Based on Adaptation Theory, the article analyzes the production process of hedges. The procedure consists of the continuous making of choices in linguistic forms and communicative strategies. These choices are made just for adaptation to the contextual correlates. Besides, the adaptation process is dynamic, intentional and bidirectional.

Heritage grammars, linguistic varieties emerging in the context of intergenerational language loss, are known to diverge from the corresponding full-fledged baseline varieties in principled and systematic ways, as typically illustrated by errors made by heritage speakers in production. This dissertation examines "covert" restructuring of aspect in…

Two of the major claims of the cognitivist approach to metaphor, the paradigm which has emerged as dominant over the last three decades, are (1) that metaphor is a conceptual, rather than strictly linguistic, phenomenon, and (2) that metaphor exemplifies processes which are at work in cognition more generally. This view of metaphor is here placed…

This dissertation examines the particle "ye" in the IV century BCE Chinese Guodian manuscripts by providing a synchronic analysis of its functions and a diachronic hypothesis relating all functions to focus marking. I have subdivided the around 600 occurrences of "ye" into four main functions: focus marker, topic marker, clause connection…

The objective of this research is to provide an improved automated computational tool to study aphasic production. Using the speech production of Italian aphasic patients, the present study demonstrates the possibility of applying an integrated algorithm to automatically assess and generate error patterns typical of aphasic speech. Philological…

A robust result in research on the production of grammatical agreement is that speakers are more likely to produce an erroneous verb with phrases such as "the key to the cabinets", with a singular noun followed by a plural one, than with phrases such as "the keys to the cabinet", where a plural noun is followed by a singular. These asymmetries are…