Japanese -te iru and -te aru: The Aspectual Implications of the Stage-Level and Individual-Level Distinction
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation investigates semantic and syntactic properties of the forms –te iru and –te aru in Japanese, as well as pragmatic effects of statements with these forms.
Morphological and Phonological Factors in the Production of Verbal Inflection in Adult L2 Learners and Patients with Agrammatic Aphasia
Author:
Malgorzata Szupica-Pyrzanowski
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Gita Martohardjono
Failure to supply inflection is common in adult L2 learners of English and agrammatic aphasics (AAs), who are known to resort to bare verb forms. Among attempts to explain the absence of inflection are competing morphological and phonological explanations. In the L2 acquisition literature, omission of inflection is explained in terms of: mapping (Epstein et al., 1996; Prévost & White, 2000), failed modular interaction (Lardiere, 1998), L1 morpho-syntactic constraints governing the activation of the L2 features (Hawkins & Liszka, 2003), L1 prosodic organization which differs from that of L2 (Goad, et al., 2003), and L1 phonological constraints on final consonant clusters (Lardiere, 2003).
Input Consistency in the Acquisition of Questions in Bulgarian and English: A Hypothesis Testing Model
Year of Dissertation:
2011
The goal of this dissertation is to address several major empirical and theoretical issues related to English-speaking children's difficulties with auxiliary use and inversion in questions. The empirical data on English question acquisition are inconsistent due to differences in methods and techniques used. A range of proposals about the source of auxiliary omission and inversion errors have been presented but they remain with a limited cross-linguistic scope and cannot explain the data in full. This dissertation addresses the issues by investigating the influence of various target-specific properties on children's production of wh- and yes/no questions in a cross-linguistic perspective.
ADICITY AND REFERENCE: MIDDLE VOICE AND ITS COMPONENTS
Year of Dissertation:
2009
ADICITY AND REFERENCE: MIDDLE VOICE AND ITS COMPONENTS
Prosody and Parsing in a Double PP Construction in Hebrew
Author:
Ronit Webman Shafran
Year of Dissertation:
2011
It is a standard finding that speakers reliably produce prosodic cues to clause boundaries and listeners use these cues in parsing sentences. However, considerable uncertainty remains regarding whether the same applies to syntactic phraseboundaries. A long series of studies in the parsing literature on ambiguous PP attachment constructions, such as Susan hit the man with the umbrella,has yielded mixed results.
Understanding and interpreting Japanese NP1 wa NP2 da sentences: Mechanism and contextual factors
Year of Dissertation:
2013
This dissertation investigates the contextual factors that affect the understanding and interpretation of one Japanese topicalized construction, NP1 wa NP2 da sentences, by native speakers of Japanese. The construction allows two possibilities in the relation between the NP1 and the NP2. When the two NPs are not syntactically connected (Type I), the sentence is generally vague, and a particular context is required to specify the meaning. When they are syntactically connected (Type II), they can refer to a semantically identical referent, and the sentence is naturally interpreted as an identity sentence. The aim of the study is to examine how context determines the meaning of Type I and Type II NP1 wa NP2 da sentences. These sentences were examined in a set of controlled experimental contexts by two kinds of test: Understandability and Interpretation.