This study explores the ways in which the semantics of personal middle construc tions is encoded across languages. In Dutch, German and English, middles are syntactically unergative and the implicit Agent is syntactically inert. In Greek and French, middles are syntactically indistinguishable from generic passives: they exhibit a derived subject and a syntactically represented Agent. What unites the two types of middle is the interpretation they receive. The cross-linguistic variation invites the following question: what determines the choice of structure employed to convey the middle interpretation Any attempt to address this question requires a characterization of the mid dle interpretation itself. I make the following novel proposal: middles ascribe a dispositional property to the understood object. Disposition ascriptions are subject-oriented generic sentences. The core properties that middles share across languages follow: the genericity of an otherwise eventive predicate the promotion to subject position by syntactic movement or base-generation, and the interpre tation of the otherwise internal argument: the demotion and interpretation of the otherwise external argument. The crosslinguistic variation relates to the following two factors. First, the different means available to languages to encode genericity distinguishes between unergative and imaccusative middles. Unaccusative middles obtain in languages like French and Greek, which encode genericity in the morphosyntax in the form of imperfective aspect . Languages where genericity is not expressed by aspectual morphology, i.e. German. Dutch and English, employ unergative structures. An additional factor at play within Germanic is the nature of the anaphoric system. I attribute the illicit ness of zich in middles to the nature of the Dutch reflexive paradigm, which includes a complex anaphor, zichzelf. In the absence of a com plex anaphor in German, sich can function as an argument but also as a marker of valency reduction its occurence in middles is expected. The approach makes predictions for other structures besides middles and other Germanic languages, such as Afrikaans and Frisian.

This thesis investigated the binding processes involved in the encoding of complex structure in immediate verbal recall. Chapters 2 to 6 compared participants' recall of sentence-lists embedded within an intact story structure (coherent condition) with their recall of the constituent sentences of stories that had been re-ordered prior to presentation (incoherent condition). Dual task methodology was employed to probe the binding processes that underpin recall for within- and across-sentence information. Superior recall for sentence-lists in the coherent than incoherent condition was robust to manipulations of attentional load in Chapters 2 and 3, and simple semantic category judgements in Chapters 4 and 5. However, the coherence advantage effect was not simply impenetrable, but diminished in Chapter 6 with concurrent comprehension of visual scenes. The coherence advantage effect was identified consistently in the recall of across-sentence information, but was more variable in the recall of within-sentence information. This implied that the binding processes operating within- and across-sentences are relatively distinct. It is argued that automatic language processes contribute to within-sentence binding, and that domain-general integrative processes operate across sentences. In Chapter 7, participants were asked to recall semantically anomalous sentences that were organised into lists that shared, or did not share, semantic category information. Participants were able to utilise global semantic organisation across lists of anomalous sentences, providing indirect evidence that integrative binding processes contribute to the coherence advantage effect, rather than simply the availability of schematic knowledge to drive retrieval. It is argued that global story structure across a sentence-list permits greater integration of meaning across sentences, and the more efficient use of limited storage capacity. Contemporary theories of story recall should acknowledge both the role of integrative processes and the role of capacity constraints within immediate memory.

The concept of style is relevant for both analysis and synthesis of designs. New styles are often formed by the adaptation of previous ones based on changes in design criteria and . context. Thus, design styles undergo change over time. A formal characterization of style is given by shape grammars, which describe the compositional rules underlying a set of designs. Grammar rules describe form elements and their organization through shapes and spatial relations. Stylistic change can be modelled by grammar transformations, which allow the transformation of the structure and vocabulary of 11 grammar that is used to describe a particular style. In order for grammars to be useful beyond a single application, they should have the capability to be transformed according to changing design needs. The problem of goal driven grammar transformations based on changes in style goals has not been addressed previously. lssucs of formalizing stylistic change necessitate a lucid and formal definition of style in the design language generated by a grammar. A significant aspect of the definition of style, which !k1S not been addressed in studies of grammars, is the representation of aesthetic qualities attributed to the style. This work investigates the aforementioned issues with the development ofa style description scheme by describing the aesthetic qualities of primitives and spatial relations in a grammar. The description scheme is based on the semantic differential method which has been used earlier to characterize styles in product design. The utility of the style description scheme is tested through examples of Greek temple facade design and mobile phone design. The main contributions of this thesis are: • It presents a technique for the formal definition of style(s) in the design language generated by a grammar.

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This dissertation is an investigation of the formal status of agreement morphology and its relationship to null arguments. Rejecting Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) claim that valuedness is the formal correlate of interpretability, it is suggested that a more elegant account of the data follows if φ-features of verbal affixes are taken to be valued in the lexicon. Interpretability is argued to be determined in the syntax, according to whether the affix is in a position to receive a Ө-role or not and as such the proposal diverges from that of Pesetsky and Torrego (2005a, 2005b), who also argue for the separation of interpretability and valuedness, but consider both to be lexical properties of a given category. Positing the existence of verbal affixes with valued interpretable φ-features is uncontroversial and this is the analysis adopted for environments such as the participial clause in Finnish, object and complementiser agreement in Modem Standard Arabic and a range of contexts in Modem Irish in which 'pronominal agreement' and full NP or free pronominal arguments are in strictly complementary distribution. It is shown that valued uninterruptible features, while not present in the lexicon according to the Chomskyan model, are necessarily created in the course of the derivation, leading to the conclusion that the computational component must contain an operation for deleting such features under identity with matching identical features of a nominal category. Since this should be no less able to apply to lexically valued uninterpretable features, there is no principled reason to suppose that such features do not exist and this is the analysis adopted for constructions such as certain Finnish adjunct clauses and SVO structures in Modem Standard Arabic, in which agreement and overt arguments co-occur. An important consequence of allowing the interpretability of φ-features to be determined in the syntax is the possibility that the same affix could be interpretable in one environment and uninterruptible in another, exhibiting different syntactic behaviour accordingly, and this is argued to be the case for Finnish possessor agreement and finite verb agreement in Modem Standard Arabic, obviating the need to posit a lexical split as other analyses (e.g. Fassi Fehri, 1993, Toivonen, 2000) have had to. Optional arguments are accounted for by recourse to the idea of a null pronominal with interpretable unvalued-features which probes an agreement head with uninterpretable valued φ-features, a natural consequence of the dissolution of the biconditional relationship between interpretability and valuedness and a direct analogue in Minimalist terms of the category pro of Chomsky (1982) and Rizzi (1986).

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