In this dissertation I discuss several aspects of the syntax, semantics and discourse properties of what I call Spanish verbless clauses -i.e. non-finite utterances with clausal properties: Spanish PredNP "muy listo este tio" "very intelligent this guy", Spanish PP complement clause "me sorprende lo caro del piso" "it amazes me how expensive this…

The so-called compound use of ki 'im has been interpreted mainly either with exceptive ("except" or "unless") or adversative meaning ("but" or "rather"), although it has sometimes also been interpreted in other ways such as "only" or "surely". These various meanings have been applied…

Studies of L2 writing development usually measure T-units and clausal subordination to assess grammatical complexity, assuming that increased subordination is typical of advanced writing. In this article we challenge this practice by showing that these measures are much more characteristic of conversation than academic writing. The article begins…

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from…

Clause connectives are linguistic forms that convey relations between clauses in a sentence. They are typically compared, whether within a language or across languages, on the basis of a shared syntactic category, such as coordination and subordination, or a semantic one, such as sequence, cause, or addition. While the inadequacy of the…

Makary Kotoko (MK), a Central Chadic B language, is spoken in the north of Cameroon just south of Lake Chad. Published works on MK to date include about a dozen articles on different aspects of the grammar of the language, primarily by H. Tourneux. The present work, which is based on a substantial corpus of recorded texts, is a systematic…

The present study examined the effectiveness of mechanical and meaningful production of output on the learning of English relative clauses by Iranian EFL learners. The study involved two groups of learners (N = 36) who completed a pre-test, three activities and a post-test over an 8-week period. The collaborative dialogue of the participants was…

Phrasal verbs present numerous challenges to second language learners of English, who often view verb + particle combinations as random (Side, 1990). This article proposes a pedagogical approach that focuses on particles as a means of spotlighting systematicity within this traditionally problematic area of English vocabulary. Informed by cognitive…

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the…

This dissertation proposes a theory of categorial grammar called Multi-Modal Categorial Grammar with Structured Phonology. The central feature that distinguishes this theory from the majority of contemporary syntactic theories is that it decouples (without completely segregating) two aspects of syntax--hierarchical organization (reflecting…

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that…

Two self paced listening experiments examined the role of prosodic phrasing in syntactic ambiguity resolution. In Experiment 1, the stimuli consisted of early closure sentences (e.g., "While the parents watched, the child sang a song.") containing transitive-biased subordinate verbs paired with plausible direct objects or intransitive-biased…

Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this parallelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordination, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three…

This study is an attempt to investigate the effect of direct and indirect feedback on the writing performance of Iranian learners of Japanese as a foreign language. During one academic semester, three indirect feedback types including underlining, coding and translation were used as well as direct type of feedback in order to see which one makes a…

Many EFL learners seem to believe that they can come to grips with the problem of vocabulary learning with a 'hit-or-miss' approach. However, a growing number of recent research reports indicate that they need to learn a repertoire of vocabulary in a systematic way for effective communication. This paper explores the development and evaluation of…