The goal of the dissertation is to determine aspects of the structure of the human language faculty, a cognitive system, specifically focusing on human syntactic systems, (unique in the animal kingdom) which enable us to creatively produce an unlimited number of grammatical sentences (like the one you just read, probably never before written or…

In this dissertation, I defend "semantic singularism", which is the view that syntactically plural terms, such as "they" or "Russell and Whitehead", are semantically singular. A semantically singular term is a term that denotes a single entity. Semantic singularism is to be distinguished from "syntactic singularism", according to which…

This dissertation explores the mechanisms behind the linguistic expression of causation in English, Hiaki (Uto-Aztecan) and Spanish. Pylkkanen's (2002, 2008) analysis of causatives as dependent on the parameterization of the functional head v[subscript CAUSE] is chosen as a point of departure. The studies conducted in this dissertation confirm…

Most approaches to argument realization in English are grounded in lexical semantic structure. While it is widely acknowledged that there is an intimate relationship between information structure and grammatical relations such as "subject," there have been few attempts to formalize this observation. This dissertation proposes an "interface model…

The argument structure of complex predicates such as causatives and applicatives is closely associated with the functional heads that introduce core and non-core arguments: Voice, causative and applicative. These elements merge in a sentence structure at various cycles of derivation and take complements whose "size" accounts for the meaning and…

The aim of this study was to provide evidence for knowledge of the syntax governing the verbal form of large numbers in preschoolers long before they are able to count up to these numbers. We reasoned that if such knowledge exists, it should facilitate the maintenance in short-term memory of lists of lexical primitives that constitute a number…

The sentences we process in normal conversation tend to refer to information that we are familiar with rather than abstract, unrelated information. This allows for the use of knowledge stores to help facilitate comprehension processes. In many sentence comprehension studies, the stimuli are designed such that the use of world knowledge is limited.…

The language of advertisements aims at precise, clear, pointed, and arresting communication. Like all communicative endeavours, in advertising, getting the message across is of prime importance. However, the use of language in advertising is of a particular character because the advertiser cannot afford to be delinquent or uncritical. The aim of…

This study examines a major linguistic event underway in New York City. Of its 10 million inhabitants, nearly a third are speakers of Spanish. This community is socially and linguistically diverse: Some speakers are recent arrivals from Latin America while others are lifelong New Yorkers. Some have origins in the Caribbean, the historic source of…

As historical relationships of Slavs and Albanians in the western Balkans have been subject to a wide range of scholarly interpretations, this dissertation seeks to present the facts of linguistic evidence of Slavic-Albanian contact, and apply them to an informed understanding of Slavs' and Albanians' interactions historically. Although individual…

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is the process of generating natural language text from an input, which is a communicative goal and a database or knowledge base. Informally, the architecture of a standard NLG system consists of the following modules (Reiter and Dale, 2000): content determination, sentence planning (or microplanning) and surface…

This technical report details the derived variables developed for users of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) data. The derived variables fall into the categories education, employment and social, and help to simplify the complexity of the LSAY data by providing useful indicators for analysis. To help LSAY data users understand…

This technical paper details the derived variables developed for users of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) data. These variables fall into the categories of education, employment and social, and help to simplify the use of the data by providing useful indicators for analysis. This paper provides descriptions, formats and…

Since the seminal work of Alan Juffs, second language (L2) sentence processing has become a central research topic in the field of L2 acquisition. Beyond a general hunger for new data offered by new experimental techniques and designs, intellectual concerns with system-wide understanding of first-language (L1)-L2 differences extended to the…

The structure of Biblical Hebrew (BH) verse remains an open question today despite the extensive amount of investigation that the question has inspired. Much headway has been made in terms of describing the features and devices that find expression in BH verse, but little has been done to make a compelling and consistent distinction between BH…