The relationship between structural linguists and applied linguists is notoriously uncomfortable; each tends to view the others' focus and methods with suspicion. Despite this uneasy relationship many TESOL-focused master's programs are housed in Linguistics Departments. This article reflects on my experience in 1 such department and makes…

The present study investigates the phonological effect triggered by the different types of phonetic pause used in Quran on morphology, syntax, and semantics. It argues that Quranic pause provides interesting evidence about the close relation between phonology and semantics, from one side, and semantics, morphology, and syntax, from the other…

This dissertation explores the diversity and unity of coordination constructions in natural language. Following the goal of bridging syntactic typology with formal semantics, it takes the typological variation in NP coordination patterns as a challenge for semantic theory. Hybrid Coordination in Russian and Comitative Coordination in…

This dissertation considers the problem of the semantic function of verbal aspectual morphology in Polish and other Slavic languages in the framework of generative syntax and semantics. Three kinds of such morphology are examined: (i) prefixes attaching directly to the root, (ii) "secondary imperfective" suffixes, and (iii) three prefixes that…

This dissertation investigates licensing conditions of dependent indefinite pronouns, such as negative concord items and pronouns that depend on the presence of a c-commanding quantifier. In Chapter 2, I examine freestanding negative concord items in Russian. I provide a novel empirical generalization that freestanding negative concord items…

"Do so" anaphora is a fairly widely used in English, but has received relatively little treatment in the literature (especially when compared with verb phrase ellipsis). There are, however, two aspects of this anaphor that have gained prominence: (i) its use as a test for constituency within the verb phrase, and (ii) the semantic restriction it…

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…

This dissertation explores co-construction of a situated activity in a current unit by mainly focusing on hearers' actions. The "co-construction" involves a process of interaction in which speakers and hearers jointly construct the form and the meaning of ongoing utterances even when they disagree with each other (Jacoby & Ochs,…

Syntactic structure has been considered an integral component of agreement computation in language production. In agreement error studies, clause-boundedness (Bock & Cutting, 1992) and hierarchical feature-passing (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002) predict that local nouns within clausal modifiers should produce fewer errors than do those within…

Is the structure of lexical representations universal, or do languages vary in the fundamental ways in which they represent lexical information? Here, we consider a touchstone case: whether Semitic languages require a special morpheme, the consonantal root. In so doing, we explore a well-known constraint on the location of identical consonants…

Goldberg's (1995) recognition that, in addition to various word-level constructions, sentences also instantiate meaningful argument structure constructions enables a non-polysemy-based analysis of various verb 'alternations' (Levin 1993). In such an analysis, meaning variations associated with the use of the same verb in different argument…

This dissertation represents a study of the formation of "-sja" passives of Russian verbs of governing and wanting. I explore five imperfective verbs of governing: "zavedovat" "manage"; "komandovat" "command"; "pravit" "govern"; "rukovdit" "direct"; and "upravljat" "manage"; as well as four imperfective verbs of wanting: "iskat" "seek"; "trebovat"…

This dissertation is a grammatical description of several features of the morphology and phonology of the Mocho' language. Mocho' (Motozintleco) is a moribund Mayan language spoken in the Chiapas region of Mexico near the border of Guatemala. This dissertation, based on data collected during several field trips and supplemented with unpublished…

The investigation of the comprehension of L1 relative clauses across different languages has shown that subject relatives (SRs) are acquired earlier and responded to more accurately than object relatives (ORs). Most of this work has been based on SVO nominative-absolutive languages. In this article we present the results obtained in a binary…