This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

Traditionally, the difficulties associated with mathematics were largely seen as coming from the cognitive demands of mathematics itself. It is now accepted that language and mathematics are connected in mathematics learning and teaching, and, the potential challenges of language in mathematics have been investigated by a number of researchers.…

In an effort to document demographic changes in the academic linguistics community, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has commissioned an annual report detailing information about job titles, students, degrees awarded, average salaries, and more. The report offers information about trends in student enrollment and employment by industry.…

This thesis investigates the argument structure of Tsou, a Formosan language within the Austronesian family. The investigation studies both simplex and complex predicates as well as describes the valency groupings and alignment patterns emerging from various clausal configurations. Assuming the stance that language description should respect…

Our communication process is composed of the flow of information between interlocutors. It is well known that the information is not always delivered in explicit ways or merely by literal meanings. In addition to the literal meanings of the lexical items and their combination into utterances, both speakers and listeners calculate pragmatic factors…

This study analyzes the complex predicates in Bangla (Bengali); serial verb constructions (SVCs) and verb compounds (VCs). Based on semantics, syntactic behavior and prosody, I claim that the predicates belong to two different modules of grammar: SVCs in syntax and VCs in the lexicon. Additionally, I show that clausal tense marked in the last verb…

Unaccusative verbs like "fall" are special in that their sole argument is syntactically generated at the object position of the verb rather than at the subject position. Unaccusative verbs are derived by a lexical operation that reduces the agent from transitive verbs. Their insertion into a sentence often involves a syntactic movement from the…

In English the nonfinite form is simply a bare verb, but in languages with a morphological distinction it usually takes the form of an infinitive. During the relevant stage the child, unlike an adult, sometimes uses an infinitive as the main verb of a root clause. Luigi Rizzi and certain other researchers therefore favor the term "root…

The purpose of this study is to experimentally investigate the comprehension of elided phrases in Korean and English, focusing on the patterns exemplified below. (1) Korean a. VP-ellipsis: Sungki-ka phalan kabang-ul sa-ss-e-yo. Sunhuy-to-yey-yo Sungki-NOM blue bag-ACC buy-PST-DECL-POL Sunhuy-also-be-POL "Sungki bought a blue bag. Sunhuy did…

Extracting and representing semantic information from large scale corpora is at the crux of computer-assisted knowledge generation. Semantic information depends on collocation extraction methods, mathematical models used to represent distributional information, and weighting functions which transform the space. This dissertation provides a…

This study investigates the licensing conditions on Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) in Jordanian Arabic (JA). JA exhibits both types of NSIs that are discussed in the literature: Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) and Negative Concord Items (NCIs). Although these two sets of items seem to form a natural class in the sense that they show certain…

Since 1980, the number of people in the United States who speak a language other than English at home has increased by 140% (United States Census Bureau, 2010). Therefore a greater percentage of students now are multilingual. Throughout the world, multilingualism is considered the norm and monolingualism is the exception (Auer & Wei, 2008). In…

When being a student in grade school as well as in high school (1934-1946), grammar was heavily emphasized in English/language arts classes, particularly in grades four through the senior year in high school. Evidently, teachers and school administrators then saw a theoretical way to assist pupils in writing achievement. Grammar and writing were…

Programming is recognised as one of seven grand challenges in computing education and attracts much attention in computing education research. Most research in the area concerns teaching methods, educational technology and student understanding/misconceptions. Typically, evaluation of learning outcome takes place during or immediately following…

Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of…