Across the Germanic language family, we find a type of movement traditionally termed "topicalization," which may be realized in Germanic languages which possess the so-called Verb-Second (V2) constraint, as well as those without it. I will henceforward call this phenomenon "fronting" to avoid theoretical assumptions. This…

In Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) and Contemporary Standard Polish (CSP) nominal possession is conveyed by means of the adnominal genitive. In this construction the dependent follows the noun it modifies and is marked morphologically for possession in the genitive case. The head noun is marked morphologically for any one of the six…

This paper analyzes "wh"-questions in the English Language based mainly on Chomsky's Minimalist Programme of transformational grammar as the theoretical model. The four main objectives of this paper are as follows: first, it undertakes a cross linguistic typological analysis of "wh"-questions and it then discusses the derivation of…

This dissertation explores the robust confluence of syntactic and cultural factors involved in the structure and content of chengyu. It unpacks a number of structural tendencies in the data sample, and illuminates selected underlying cultural themes. The presence of syntactic and semantic parallelism within chengyu, as an expression of the…

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationships between humility and forgiveness. The participants were 346 university students. The Heartland Forgiveness Scale and Humility Scale were used as measures. Humility has four dimensions; openness, self-forgetfulness, modest self-assessment, focus on others. The relationships between…

Every text has a communicative purpose that it performs by dividing itself into generic stages. These stages are assigned specific goals and have differing linguistic structures. This paper makes an attempt to investigate whether there is a definable co-relation between linguistic features and stages in the genre of look-good advertisements. It…

In this study, we examined whether Chinese character structure influenced readers' saccadic targeting in Chinese reading. Readers' eye movements were recorded when they read single sentences containing one-character or two-character target words. Both the one-character words and the two constituent characters of two-character words either had a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the discourse patterns characterizing individual special education teachers as they participated in a collaborative professional development (PD) group, and how these individual discourse patterns influenced other group members' opportunities to learn about reading instruction for upper elementary…

The purpose of this study was to determine if Morphological Instruction (knowledge of the Germanic, Latin, and Greek words, roots, and affixes of English) was an effective instructional approach towards accelerating the acquisition of spelling, vocabulary, and reading comprehension and closing at least a 6,000 word gap between English language…

The general goal of this dissertation is two-fold: first, I provide a unified structure for spatial expressions (local cases and adpositions) and second, I propose a novel approach to vocabulary insertion and generation of portmanteau morphemes. I propose a novel structure for local case affixes, based on data from 114 languages and argue that…

In broad terms, this paper is concerned with adjunct construction in Persian, which is an Indo-Iranian Language. During the recent century, specially in its final decades, different researches have been done about adjuncts and adjunction among different languages, but despite the fact that they are very important in Persian language, no attempts…

This dissertation uses syntactic, semantic and morphological evidence from English nominalization to probe the interaction of event-structure and syntax, develop a typology of structural complexity within nominalization, and test hypotheses about the strict ordering of functional items. I focus on the widely assumed typology of nominalization…

Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether children's choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults' choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed…

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child…

Prosody carries a lot of information relevant for our understanding of spoken messages. In addition, prosody plays an important role in signalling attitudes and emotions. Prosodic features also constitute an important resource that participants use to achieve mutual understanding in interaction. The aim of this study was to point to possible…