The Arabic traditional grammar as well as Chomsky's mainstream theory may not be able to provide a good analysis of some fixed Arabic phrases. The challenge of such data directly stems from the fact that the general syntactic rules assumed by the two opposing theories cannot explain the syntactic and the semantic aspects of the fixed Arabic data.…

The subject at hand of this paper is intransitive prepositions, which E. Klima (1965) defined as prepositions that do not select syntactic objects. This word group comprises those linguistic units which traditional grammar used to consider as bicategorical, sometimes as adverbs, and in other instances as prepositions created through conversion.…

The first part of this paper discusses the rationale for universal grammar (UG) theory to explain first language acquisition. It also illustrates the issues of language acquisition Chomsky argued which could not be supported by behaviourist theories and shows how Chomsky proposed a solution to this problem through his theoretical model of…

Semantic composition in language must be closely related to semantic composition in thought. But the way the two processes are explained differs considerably. Focusing primarily on propositional content, language theorists generally take semantic composition to be a truth-conditional process. Focusing more on extensional content, cognitive…

Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature and scope of the principle of compositionality (Partee, 1995) from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive…

This dissertation articulates and defends a view about linguistic competence called 'variabilism'. According to variabilism, the epistemic demands of full linguistic competence vary in a particular way. More specifically, variabilism holds that different individual lexical application conditions (individually essential metaphysical ways of being…

This dissertation investigates the nature of the interface between morphosyntax and cognition. My goal is to connect formal semantic theories of meaning with theories of cognition, drawing on the initial hypothesis that the interface between language and cognition is transparent. I look at different forms of adjectival comparatives -- positive and…

Establishing dependencies during language comprehension requires access to previously encoded information. In the current study, we investigate the speed and accuracy of processing dependencies containing subject-verb agreement. Three speed-accuracy tradeoff experiments investigate the accessibility of number information across different amounts…

Human language is an incredibly rich yet incredibly constrained system. Learning and generalizing these systematic constraints from small, sparse, and underspecified data presents a fundamental inference problem. Therapidity and ease by which humans learn these constraints has made this a foundational study in cognitive science, linguistics, and…

Questions exist as to whether AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can aid learning. This study examined whether in-class exercises involving error detection in text generated by ChatGPT can aid students' foreign language writing. Participants were Arabic-English speakers who were classified as ranging from modest to competent English users according to…

Writing proper English sentences poses a significant challenge for Arabic-speaking postsecondary students studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL) due to substantial differences between Arabic and English syntactic structures. This basic qualitative study explored the perceptions of Arabic-speaking EFL learners at an Arabian university…

In the English "tough" construction (TC), knowledge of "tough" movement is necessary for target performance (the object-interpretation only; e.g. "John is easy to see" e). The acquisition of the English TC raises a learnability problem for first-language (L1) Korean learners of English as a second language (L2): (1)…

The present paper investigates the acquisition of L3 Polish by L1 Italian university students of L2 Russian. The participants had never studied the L3 prior to the experiment, but took a meta-linguistically explicit course in Slavic Linguistics focussing on Polish/Russian contrastive grammar. The main research question is whether or not the…

The expansion of the English language produced by non-native speakers has, in recent decades, been discussed by applied linguists from various theoretical perspectives. The discussion has highlighted evidence showing that the multiplicity and diversity of English uses have given rise to an acceleration in the rate of inter-variety contacts where…

Until recently, second language writers were typically separated from their peers in mainstream composition courses. However, as the field considers the possibility of integrating second language writers into mainstream composition classrooms, important questions arise. For instance, how are teachers of First Year Composition (FYC) prepared for…