Prosodic Phrasing and Modifier Attachment in Standard Arabic Sentence Processing
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This dissertation investigates the syntax-prosody interface in Standard Arabic, focusing on the ambiguity of a modifier (relative clause or adjective phrase) in relation to the two nouns in a complex noun phrase. Ambiguity resolution tendencies for this construction differ across languages, contrary to otherwise universal parsing tendencies. One explanation proposed is Fodor's (2000) Implicit Prosody Hypothesis: that readers mentally project onto a text a default prosodic phrasing (possibly different between languages), which then influences their syntactic ambiguity resolution.
THE USE OF LE BY L1 CHINESE SPEAKERS AND THE ACQUISITION OF LE BY L2 CHINESE LEARNERS
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
GITA MARTOHARDJONO
The perfective marker V-le is claimed to be one of the most problematic items in the acquisition of L2 Chinese, perhaps because no unified and comprehensive treatment of it exists in the literature. Although much has been written on this topic, the semantic and pragmatic functions of V-le have remained elusive. While linguists and grammarians all agree that V-le performs multiple functions, there has been no consensus on its meaning and usage. Adding to this complex situation is that V-le is not always syntactically obligatory in Mandarin Chinese. Even though scholars are well aware of the phenomenon of "optionality" with Chinese aspect markers, disagreement and ambiguity prevail. Smith (1997) claims that V-le, like other aspect markers in Chinese, is always syntactically optional. Li and Thompson (1981) claim that the use of V-le depends largely on the speaker's viewpoint as to whether an event is "bounded" or not. Both seem to suggest global optionality. In contrast, textbooks written for Chinese L2 learners discuss V-le as obligatory in various different contexts. Having found no established and unified treatment of V-le that reflects native speaker's knowledge regarding its obligatory and optional use, we conducted a larger survey of 482 native speakers, 316 adolescents and 166 adults, in an attempt to capture some generalizations on the obligatory and optional use of -le in various contexts. Our results show a range of frequencies, from very high (98% to 100%) in the context of accomplishment predicates and activity predicates as the first event in a sequence; to high (67% to 84%) in the context of achievement predicates; to variable (31% to 64%) in the context of resultative verb complements. We argue that this pattern of V-le suppliance can be derived by positing a hierarchy of boundedness in the predicate and that it follows a redundancy principle in discourse. The results from learners' data suggest that they acquired the knowledge of the perfective marking in the obligatory context after 300-400 hours of classroom instruction. They consistently used -le with accomplishment verbs and activity verbs as the first event in a sequence. They also consistently omitted -le with resultative verb complements, a hint of their implicit understanding of the semantic cues given by the predicates. In sum, the learners had a good understanding of the semantic properties of the verb class and had acquired a good, but not yet native-like, knowledge about the interaction between the perfective marker V-le and the lexical and semantic properties of different verb type categories.
THE DP HYPOTHESIS THROUGH THE LENS OF JAPANESE NOMINAL COLLOCATION CONSTRUCTIONS
Year of Dissertation:
2009
In Japanese, bare noun phrases can refer to the object that is introduced in a previous context, whereas in English, the definite article is required for a common noun phrase to refer. The research question of this discussion is whether Japanese syntactically projects a determiner phrases (DP) although it does not have an article such as the in English. If Japanese does not project DP unlike English, the definiteness of referential arguments needs to be parameterized in syntax and in semantics. On the other hand, if Japanese projects DP, it suggests that DP is part of Universal Grammar (UG) and thus that no parameterization is called for. This thesis presents three pieces of evidence to support the DP hypothesis for Japanese by examining nominal collocation constructions such as watasitati 3-nin `we three' and watasitati sensei `we professors'
The Acquisition of L2 Reading Comprehension: The Relative Contribution of Linguistic Knowledge and Existing Reading Ability
Author:
Leigh Garrison-Fletcher
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Gita Martohardjono
The study presented here examines the development of second language (L2) reading comprehension among adolescents who speak Spanish as their native language (L1) and are just beginning to learn English. The existing research on L2 reading comprehension among adolescents has focused on the transfer of reading skills from the L1 to the L2 and on the role of L2 linguistic knowledge. The research has suggested that reading skills transfer from the L1 to the L2, but that L2 linguistic knowledge plays the strongest role in L2 reading comprehension. However, previous research has not fully investigated the role of the L1 in the L2 reading development of adolescent learners. Crucially, students with low levels of L1 reading have not been included in the research, and such students must be studied in order to get a complete picture of the role of L1 reading in L2 reading.
The Acquisition of an L2 Vowel System: A Longitudinal Investigation of Change
Year of Dissertation:
2009
To what extent do the vowels systems of L2 learners change over time and what types of changes can be expected? The study reported here is a longitudinal investigation of change in the vowel systems of five adult native Spanish speakers learning English. It focuses on eleven vowels of English as uttered in CVC words and in various sentential contexts. Vowel productions from each speaker were measured for the acoustic parameters of F1, F2 and duration. These acoustic parameters were then analyzed via the classification matrices of discriminant analysis and compared over time.
THE SYNTAX OF NON-VERBAL CAUSATION: THE CAUSATIVE APOMORPHY OF `FROM' IN GREEK AND GERMANIC LANGUAGES
Author:
Alexandra Ioannidou
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Marcel den Dikken
This is a study of the meaning and syntax of non-(lexical)verbal causation. Macroscopically, it examines the preposition `from' as attested in contexts like "X is/comes from Y". Syntactic diagnostics are applied to formally distinguish the causative from the spatial interpretations of `from'-PPs in Greek, English, Dutch, and German. The syntactic landscape of causative `from' will turn out to be very minimal with `from' directly selecting the Cause-DP, in contradistinction to its spatial counterpart, where `from' always selects for another PP layer. More microscopically then I focus on the causative interpretations only, which are particularly revealing because (i) they give an in-depth view of CAUSE, stripped of all verbal layers—traditionally considered the locus of CAUSE—suggesting that the source of causation in non-(lexical)verbal environments has to be the preposition per se and (ii) they single-handedly provide a rudimentary structure for causation, where `from' introduces the Cause in its complement and is predicated of the Causee. Finally, with a basic predicational structure in place, I offer a detailed cross-linguistic account for the syntactic mechanism that forces the use of particle verbs in causative `from'-less environments.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF STATISTICAL INDUCTION TO MODELS OF SYNTAX ACQUISITION
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Recent challenges to Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry ‘indirect evidence’ about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them, with the deeper implication that innate knowledge is not needed for grammar acquisition. Reali & Christiansen (2005) demonstrated that a simple bigram model trained on child-directed speech can induce the correct form of auxiliary inversion in certain complex English questions (e.g., Is the boy who is crying hurt?). The significance of this achievement is called into question, however, by Experiments 1–6 reported here, which show that the success is highly circumscribed, resting on one particular bigram (<who is> or <that is>) in the grammatical test sentences. The model performs poorly on inversion in related constructions in English and Dutch, which do not afford effective cues accessible to a bigram analysis.
Overt versus null subject pronoun variation in the Turkish spoken in Turkey and in New York City
Year of Dissertation:
2010
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the use of subject personal pronouns in the Turkish spoken in Turkey and in New York City from a variationist perspective. Whereas the variable use of subject personal pronouns in Turkish has been extensively analyzed in many studies conducted in Europe, it has received much less attention in the U.S. This study has as one of its aims replicating the study conducted by Otheguy, Zentella and Livert (2007) where the influence of different social and linguistic variables on the expression of Spanish subject pronouns was examined across Latin American and Caribbean immigrant generations in New York. The present study examines several linguistic and social variables that condition the presence and absence of subject personal pronouns in the speech of 20 adult speakers living in Turkey (TT) and 20 living in New York (TNY). The study compares the rate of subject pronoun use in Turkey with that of NYC and whether contact with English has an influence on the overt pronoun rate.
Processing the not-because ambiguity in English: the role of pragmatics and prosody.
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation investigates the processing of not-because sentences in English (e.g. Jane didn't purchase the blouse because it was silk), which are scopally ambiguous between BEC>NOT (Jane did not buy it) and NOT>BEC (Jane bought it for some other reason) readings. Frazier and Clifton (1996) had found a strong dispreference for NOT>BEC, which could be attributed to high attachment of the because-clause outside the scope of negation, in conflict with an otherwise very general processing tendency to attach incoming constituents low. The present study was designed to evaluate the possibility that no adjustment of the parsing model is necessitated, because the NOT>BEC reading has marked prosodic and pragmatic properties which would not be anticipated by the parser without substantial contextual support.
The Rise of Disyllables in Old Chinese: the Role of Lianmian Words
Year of Dissertation:
2013
The history of Chinese language is characterized by a clear shift from monosyllabic to disyllabic words (Wang, 1980). This dissertation aims to provide a new diachronic explanation for the rise of disyllables in the history of Chinese and to demonstrate its significance for Modern Chinese prosody and lexicalization.