Light verb constructions have been treated as a relevant linguistic topic because they show unique characteristics that are not found in other verb constructions in Korean. Thus, previous studies are mainly focused on specific characteristics: (i) the relationship between light verbs and v and (ii) the affixation of accusative case particles. However, in this thesis, I examine more important issues related to light verb constructions in Korean: (i) how light verb constructions can works as predicates in clauses, (ii) the nature of the relationship between the complement and the light verb in light verb constructions, and (iii) where the complement and the light verb are present in the surface structure in Korean. Operating under the assumption that the light verb construction is a way of presenting a predicative type similar to lexical verbs or adjectives in Korean, I claim that (i) the lexical-semantic and syntactic information of all predicates, including light verb constructions, is determined in the “lexical conceptual structure” (e.g., Levin & Rappaport 1998), (ii) the conceptual categories in the lexical conceptual structure become the lexical items in the lexicon differently in light verb constructions than in lexical verb constructions, and (iii) the light verb construction is built by incorporation which is similar to semantic noun incorporation (e.g., Dayal 2010). In addition, in this thesis I will present new characteristics of light verb constructions in Korean: (i) the function of each component in the light verb construction such as the modifier and the modified item, (ii) the relationship between components in the light verb construction (i.e., s-selection), (iii) the existence of a functional projection between two components (i.e., Event Phrase), and (iv) the generation of the negation particle an ‘not’ under the head of vP.

This thesis presents a feature-based approach to aspect. I argue that both viewpoint aspect and lexical aspect are generated from the presence of functional properties that operate at three levels of syntactic structure: lexical, predicate, and clausal. The same aspectual feature has a different effect on the aspectual properties of the clause as a whole depending on the level at which it is active and the contrasts in which it participates. I illustrate this for English and Japanese, showing that a small number of syntactic features can capture the differences and similarities between the aspectual systems. I propose that aspect in English is determined by two functional heads: AspQ, which encodes quantity (i.e., telicity), and AspA, which encodes atomicity (i.e., punctuality). AspQ may either be a root modifier, lexically encoding quantity, or head a separate functional projection within the vP system, where it is licensed by a quantized argument. AspA may also be a root modifier, lexically encoding atomicity; it may also appear in the inflectional domain, where it encodes clausal non-atomicity (i.e., imperfective aspect). I propose that Japanese is like English in that AspA may be active at the root level; however, it differs from English in that AspA may also be active at the vP level, where it encodes the fact that the predicate is represented as a single unit. Japanese also differs from English in that it does not make use of the feature AspQ, meaning that Japanese has no quantity distinction, and makes use of the feature State, which heads a functional projection where light verbs such as iru ‘be’ are merged. Thus, the differences in the aspectual systems of English and Japanese are attributed to a few features that are active at different levels of syntactic structure.

This thesis presents a feature-based approach to aspect. I argue that both viewpoint aspect and lexical aspect are generated from the presence of functional properties that operate at three levels of syntactic structure: lexical, predicate, and clausal. The same aspectual feature has a different effect on the aspectual properties of the clause as a whole depending on the level at which it is active and the contrasts in which it participates. I illustrate this for English and Japanese, showing that a small number of syntactic features can capture the differences and similarities between the aspectual systems. I propose that aspect in English is determined by two functional heads: AspQ, which encodes quantity (i.e., telicity), and AspA, which encodes atomicity (i.e., punctuality). AspQ may either be a root modifier, lexically encoding quantity, or head a separate functional projection within the vP system, where it is licensed by a quantized argument. AspA may also be a root modifier, lexically encoding atomicity; it may also appear in the inflectional domain, where it encodes clausal non-atomicity (i.e., imperfective aspect). I propose that Japanese is like English in that AspA may be active at the root level; however, it differs from English in that AspA may also be active at the vP level, where it encodes the fact that the predicate is represented as a single unit. Japanese also differs from English in that it does not make use of the feature AspQ, meaning that Japanese has no quantity distinction, and makes use of the feature State, which heads a functional projection where light verbs such as iru ‘be’ are merged. Thus, the differences in the aspectual systems of English and Japanese are attributed to a few features that are active at different levels of syntactic structure.

This thesis deals with the nature and definition of phonological similarity and shows that, when similarity plays a role in the motivation of phonological processes, it is evaluated over abstract, phonological features and not purely phonetic properties. Empirical evidence for this position is drawn from the domain of consonant harmony. Typological studies of consonant harmony (Hansson 2001, Rose and Walker 2004) have argued that segments which interact in consonant harmony processes must be highly similar to one another. This thesis provides analyses of a range of consonant harmony processes and demonstrates that, in each case, the notion of similarity needed in order to determine participating segments is evaluated over contrastive feature specifications. Contrastive specifications are established according to language-specific feature hierarchies (Jackobson and Halle 1956, Dresher 2003, forthcoming) with some features taking scope over others. Languages analyzed in some detail include Bumo Izon, Kalabari Ijo, Hausa, Dholuo, Anywa, Tzutujil and Aymara. Two definitions of similarity are proposed in order to account for two sets of cases. In one set of consonant harmony processes, interacting segments are similar in the sense that they constitute the natural class of segments contrastively specified in the harmonic feature. In another set of cases, participating segments must be similar according to the following definition; they must differ in only a single marked and contrastive feature specification.

Phonological interactions among sonorant sounds, and between sonorants and obstruents, are widespread in Romance languages. In this dissertation, I examine in detail such interactions in two dialects of Sardinian (Italo-Romance), Campidanese and Nuorese, showing that sonorant relationships differentiate the synchronic grammars of these dialects. The synchronic patterning of nasals and liquids, and how these two sonorant subclasses interact with obstruents, is significantly different between the two dialects. In particular, nasals trigger phonological nasalization of vowels and of the rhotic in Campidanese but not in Nuorese. The arguments for a phonological analysis of vowel nasalization in Campidanese are reviewed, expanded, and tested against an acoustic study. The historical traces of interaction between /n/ and /r/ in this dialect are linked to the synchronic rhotic nasalization process highlighted by an acoustic study of fieldwork data. In Nuorese, on the other hand, /n/ does not initiate phonological nasalization either of vowels or of the rhotic, and it is the target of total assimilation when followed by any segments but an oral stop. Nasals in the two dialects thus pattern in two very different ways phonologically: nasals are process triggers in Campidanese and process targets in Nuorese. The rhotic also shows distinct patterns in the two dialects, interacting with /n/ in Campidanese and with /s/ in Nuorese. The two dialects, with those asymmetries, thus display complementary sonorant patterns. I argue that a model able to capture such complementarity of patterns is the theory of the contrastive hierarchy (Dresher 2008). The Campidanese and Nuorese sonorant patterns, so radically different, lead one to question whether sonorants form a homogeneous phonological class cross-linguistically. Campidanese and Nuorese show that the make-up of such a class appears to be language-specific. Since the sonorant class is a universal class of sounds, its heterogeneity, in turn, questions the notion of phonological classhood at large. The data and the analysis presented in this dissertation thus feed the debate around phonological classhood. According to the theoretical model adopted in the present dissertation, the language-specific make-up of a class of sounds is all that can be labeled a ‘phonological’ class. Classes of sounds can be described in phonetic terms, but classes phonetically defined do not necessarily amount to phonological classes.

The present study offers strong evidence that the World Wide Web is a unique domain of use that can be categorized as a banalised context based on certain defining criteria. Italian Internet Terminology is worthy of investigation because of its unprecedented extent and rich context of use. The goal of chapter one is to make a case for the utility of a corpus-based study, explain the primary theoretical underpinnings of the study, which I base on the concept of central meaning linked to the compositionality of elements, and give important historical and sociological motivations for such a study . In chapter two, I explain how term are selected and discarded, how my corpus is created, and how it proves suitable and representative of this lexical domain. In the third chapter, I elucidate the classificatory system I employ which allows me to view the lexical items in grammatical context. To gain a better understanding of the conceptual system of the terms studied, I introduce another important analytical framework: qualia structures. In chapter four, the analysis of the morphosyntactic and semantic character of the terminology allows for greater insight into the processes and pattering of denomination of Internet terminology. To conclude this study, I show that Italian Internet terminology is a banalised language governed by a systematic set of morpho-syntactic rules in which Italian selects, uses, and lexicalizes terms based on core units of meaning.

This thesis deals with aspects of Persian phonology and morpho-phonology which are less studied or controversial, and has two specific goals: (i) to examine the structure of the Persian vowel system with the goal of understanding the asymmetries in patterning of different vowels in the system; (ii) to examine some suffixation processes in Persian with the goal of understanding the seeming irregularities in morphophonemics. The more generals goals of this work are to contribute to the discussions of: (i) determining dimensions of contrast in a vowel system; (ii) interactions of vowels and consonants at a morpheme boundary. Although the main focus of this work is on the synchronic status of these issues in Persian from a theoretical viewpoint, many discussions in the thesis benefit from an historical and/or an experimental investigation. As such, the thesis contributes both to the field of theoretical and experimental phonology, and offers both synchronic and historical perspectives on many issues at hand.

This thesis considers how different groups of Spanish speakers (monolinguals, early bilinguals and late bilinguals) organize and limit grammatical optionality related to the placement of Spanish pronominal clitics with many complex infinitival constructions (Spanish clitic-climbing). In examining empirical work on the process and outcome of early and late dual language exposure and how early and late bilinguals acquire and limit grammatical optionality, this study will contribute to our understanding of 1) the nature of language-related cognition at different ages; 2) the systematic nature of bilingual language behaviour in child and adults (transfer, cross-language influence, etc.); 3) the cognitive and contextual factors associated with age of exposure to bilingualism to explain bilingual language behaviour; and 4) the importance of incorporating a clear model of language variation (language-internally and cross-linguistically) into a formal model of (bilingual) language. The empirical study conducted here tested how highly proficient heritage speakers (HS) of Spanish (native speakers of Spanish and Spanish-English bilinguals) deal with the optionality of clitic-climbing structures compared to monolingual speakers (native speakers) and highly proficient adult L2 speakers of Spanish (Spanish-English bilinguals). Forty participants completed a picture elicitation task testing a lexical limitation of the optionality, and an acceptability-preference task testing the speakers’ judgments on structural, semantic and lexical limitations of the optionality. Results show that all groups of speakers exhibited knowledge of syntactic constraints associated with pronominal placement in Spanish (optional clitic-climbing) infinitival sentences. All groups also performed similarly in exhibiting sensitivity to non-categorical factors that have been shown to guide the preferences of monolingual Spanish speakers. However, in the production task, the heritage speakers significantly outperformed the monolingual and non-native speakers of Spanish in their use of the Spanish-specific variant (proclisis). I explain these results through both cognitive and contextual factors related to age of exposure to bilingualism, and I discuss how the production results may underestimate a monolingual-bilingual difference for this optional domain.

This thesis investigates the functional categories in the vP domain, including aspect, modality, and focus. For this research initiative, five constructions were examined: the Mandarin temporal adverbial, the Mandarin excessive ta, the Mandarin de/bu, the Turkish question particle –mI, and the Armenian auxiliary constructions. These constructions involve functional categories that are expected to appear at the C/IP periphery; however, they surface inside the vP domain. The existence of these low grammatical elements raises non-trivial questions such as how functional categories should be mapped out in the structure, and whether a unified structure can be proposed to account for the cross-linguistic phenomena examined in this thesis. The investigation of these constructions showed that there are cross-domain interactions between low and high functional categories. While Mandarin temporal adverbial constructions showed interactions between viewpoint aspect and lexical aspect via the distributions of the temporal adverbials and various co-occurrence restrictions, the other four constructions demonstrated interactions between the low and the high categories via intervention effects. I argue that low functional categories must be licensed by their counterparts in the C/IP domain, and that the licensing relation and the structural conditions imposed on this relation can be captured if an Agree relation is established between the functional categories in these two domains. The analysis also reveals that low functional categories are the result of feature lowering from v* to some functional projection below it, and the formal features of the low functional categories must assign their values to their counterparts in the C/IP domain via Agree to provide a meaningful input to LF. I propose a parallel analysis between CP and vP to account for the existence of the low grammatical elements in two respects: (1) C and *v, as phase heads, have an edge feature (EPP) and Agree features that need to be valued and/or checked at a functional projection lower than the each phase head; (2) the formal features of C can appear at *v if they are licensed by an associate feature present in the C/T domain for the purpose of Full Interpretation (Chomsky 1995, 2000).

This thesis considers how different groups of Spanish speakers (monolinguals, early bilinguals and late bilinguals) organize and limit grammatical optionality related to the placement of Spanish pronominal clitics with many complex infinitival constructions (Spanish clitic-climbing). In examining empirical work on the process and outcome of early and late dual language exposure and how early and late bilinguals acquire and limit grammatical optionality, this study will contribute to our understanding of 1) the nature of language-related cognition at different ages; 2) the systematic nature of bilingual language behaviour in child and adults (transfer, cross-language influence, etc.); 3) the cognitive and contextual factors associated with age of exposure to bilingualism to explain bilingual language behaviour; and 4) the importance of incorporating a clear model of language variation (language-internally and cross-linguistically) into a formal model of (bilingual) language. The empirical study conducted here tested how highly proficient heritage speakers (HS) of Spanish (native speakers of Spanish and Spanish-English bilinguals) deal with the optionality of clitic-climbing structures compared to monolingual speakers (native speakers) and highly proficient adult L2 speakers of Spanish (Spanish-English bilinguals). Forty participants completed a picture elicitation task testing a lexical limitation of the optionality, and an acceptability-preference task testing the speakers’ judgments on structural, semantic and lexical limitations of the optionality. Results show that all groups of speakers exhibited knowledge of syntactic constraints associated with pronominal placement in Spanish (optional clitic-climbing) infinitival sentences. All groups also performed similarly in exhibiting sensitivity to non-categorical factors that have been shown to guide the preferences of monolingual Spanish speakers. However, in the production task, the heritage speakers significantly outperformed the monolingual and non-native speakers of Spanish in their use of the Spanish-specific variant (proclisis). I explain these results through both cognitive and contextual factors related to age of exposure to bilingualism, and I discuss how the production results may underestimate a monolingual-bilingual difference for this optional domain.