published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation describes and evaluates a thesis about the means of identifying verbs early in learning a language, and a first language in particular. The thesis is presented briefly in the first section. The second section provides a critical review of theories about children's early part-of-speech identifications. Section 3 presents a new theory of verb identification. I argue that learners initially identify members of a category, predicator, that subsumes verbs and adjectives. Predicators have argument structures. Learners identify a predicator through an inference that the word must take noun-phrase arguments because the phrase containing the word is interpreted into a nonseparable phenomenon--a property or relation that exists or occurs only by virtue of one or more individuals (i.e., the bearers of the property, or the participants in the relation), the referent(s) of the argument(s). Actions are prototypical of that which is nonseparable (being dependent for their realisation upon one or more participants), and so words for actions will usually be identified as predicators. This tendency will be augmented when an unfamiliar predicator appears in an utterance with its one or more noun-phrase arguments, and the noun phrases are interpretable (by the learner) into the one or more individuals that are the participants in an ongoing action (or other nonseparable phenomenon); under these conditions, the learner should readily divine that the novel word is a predicator and the noun phrases are its arguments. These conjectures form the nonseparability hypothesis. To identify verbs in particular, a learner must first discover a distinction between verbs and adjectives, where it exists in a language, through distributional analyses within phrases. Subsequently, details of syntax and morphology will reveal to the learner a predicator's subcategory (verb or adjective). Section 4 contains reviews of literatures that provide support, in varying degree, for the theor

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine whether a verb-focused language intervention was effective in increasing children’s verb-vocabulary. In particular, this study investigated whether the treatment resulted in changes to children’s production of target words compared to control words for children who are late talkers. Method: The study utilised a single-subject, multiple baseline across behaviours design. Four children, aged 26-to-39 months who exhibited delayed expressive language development participated in the study. At the beginning of the study, all children had poor expressive language performance indicated by a mean length of utterance two standard deviations below the mean expected for their age and limited vocabulary measured by the New Zealand Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. New verb-vocabulary items were randomly assigned to intervention and untreated control conditions and probed at regular intervals over a period of eight weeks. Results: All the participants showed increased use of the target verbs compared to the control verbs during the intervention and post-intervention phase. Conclusion: The findings suggest that a verb-focused language intervention was effective in increasing the verb-vocabulary of late talkers. Further research is warranted to determine whether similar results can be found with a larger cohort and whether these gains are sustained over time.

Graduate / 0290

Graduate / 0290

No description available.

Within the framework of Government-Binding Theory, this thesis argues that the Germanic languages, including German and related languages, should be analyzed as having INFL-second underlying work order. Contrary to traditional generative treatments of the so-called "verb-second" (V2) phenomenon, it is claimed here, in light of certain subtle asymmetries, that the final target site of the moved verb is INFL (I$ sp0)$ in sentences with pre-verbal subjects and COMP (C$ sp0)$ in those with pre-verbal non-subjects. / It is further maintained that an analysis, as modified and extended in the thesis, in which verb movement is triggered by the Empty Category Principle (ECP) is superior, on both conceptual and empirical grounds, to other theories advanced by generativists to date. A wide variety of clause types in the modern Germanic languages, including in particular German V2 complements and Icelandic infinitival complements, are examined, the final chapter being devoted to a proposal concerning German "parentheticals".

Typescript. / Bibliography: leaves 303-312. / xiii, 312 leaves ill