This thesis discusses traditional and liberal views on certain English expressions by examining them as they are discussed in traditional school grammars, in descriptive grammars, and in current magazine articles and as they are used in the best writing of today.

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Middle Eastern Studies / Kitāb al-jumal fī l-naḥw (KJN) is a short grammatical treatise dating back to the early centuries of Arabic grammatical development. There is no consensus in modern scholarship surrounding its authorship, or even the century in which it was composed. The text is sometimes attributed to the famous 8th century grammarian al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī, but this hypothesis is often rejected in favor of attribution to lesser-known 10th century grammarian Ibn Shuqayr. Contemporary attempts to date this text and identify its author have given inconclusive results, largely due to issues with the methodology employed up to this point. In this thesis, I propose a new methodology for dating Arabic grammatical texts. This method concerns the use of terminology to refer to vowels. The distinction between declensional and non-declensional vowel terminology that remains in use today was first introduced by Sibawayh in his Kitāb, in which he states that the terms rafʿ, naṣb, jarr, and jazm are reserved for syntactically determined vowel endings, while ḍamm, fatḥ, kasr, and sukūn are used for vowels that are not related to syntax. In works composed during the period before the Kitāb, as I will illustrate, vowel terminology is used in a disorganized and inconsistent fashion. In contrast, grammarians after the Kitāb adhere to Sibawayh’s distinction with remarkable consistency. Thus, vowel terminology represents a clear dividing line between pre-Kitāb (late 8th-early 9th centuries) and post-Kitāb works (late 9th century and onwards) and is a valuable method for dating texts. In this thesis, I will summarize the controversy surrounding the provenance of KJN, demonstrate the advantages that the method of vowel terminology has over the other approaches taken in contemporary scholarship in an attempt to date the text, and present material from a wide range of grammatical works in order to validate this approach. Finally, I will apply this method to KJN. The results of this study show that the use of vowel terminology in KJN is much more consistent with an earlier (8th century) dating of the text than with the later (10th century) dating that has often been proposed. / text

This dissertation investigates the interaction between the basic rules for tense interpretation, on the one hand, and temporal types of VPs or sentences, time expressions and syntactic distribution of tense forms, on the other. This dissertation proposes an analysis in which each tense form is associated with at least three time identities, the zero time point, the event time and the reference time. The zero time is defined as the time from which a situation is considered and interpreted, the event time as the time at which a situation takes place and the reference time is the time at which the situation holds and which is part of the event time under consideration. Concerning the temporal structures of situations expressed by VPs or sentences, this dissertation proposes a six-type temporal classification and treats temporal types not as atomic but as reducible to temporal features. By so doing, this dissertation brings to light the internal structure among various temporal types. Regarding the relation between tense and time expressions, this dissertation analyzes it to be one of temporal inclusion and provides a successful account of why time adverbs do not necessarily mark both ending points of a given homogeneous situation, though this is true with a nonhomogeneous situation. In accounting for tense interpretation in complement clauses, this dissertation maintains that complement tense forms and matrix tense forms can be interpreted in the same way and they differ only in the interpretation of the zero time point. In the matrix clause, tense is interpreted with respect to the speech time and, in the complement clause, tense is interpreted relative to the reference time of the matrix clause. Because the zero time is used instead of the speech time in the proposed basic tense rules, these rules are general and powerful enough to be applicable to tenses in any syntactic environment.

This thesis discusses rule incompatibility phenomena (i.e., ungrammaticality resulting from two or more applications of movement rules in particular ways) and their related theoretical problems. The discussion concludes that the transformational component is exempted from many tasks which have been assigned to it, and the component should be reduced to a great extent. Rule incompatibility phenomena cannot be accounted for well by devices in the transformational component, such as the SD and SC of transformational rules, rule ordering, or constraints on rule application. The task of explaining the phenomena must be transferred to S-structure or the LF-component. A proposal is made that the phenomena are to be handled by constraints on binding theory, which operates at S-structure. Under the assumption of the free indexing theory, instances of rule incompatibility involve ambiguity in binding, or phrases not eligible to be binders. Thus, they are ruled out by the Unique Ā-Binding Constraint (UĀBC), which states that Ā-bound expressions must be uniquely bound to binders, and the Constraint on Incomplete Ā-Binders, which states that incomplete phrases cannot Ā-bind expressions. These constraints release the transformational component from the task of explaining the grammaticality judgments. Some cases of rule incompatibility can be accounted for either by the wh-island constraint or by the UĀBC. But, Chomsky's bounding theory must be revised, and given a revised bounding theory, the wh-island constraint does not hold. Nonexistence of the wh-island constraint indicates that rule incompatibility phenomena must be accounted for by the other alternative (i.e., the UĀBC), and that the transformational component is exempt from the wh-island constraint. Of the two possible indexing theories, the free indexing theory can handle rule incompatibility phenomena, but the other theory (the simultaneous indexing theory in our terminology) cannot. The choice of the free indexing theory releases transformational rules from the task of assigning indices to traces. It is furthermore suggested that the transformational component may be exempt from even the Subjacency Condition and the rule Move-α, and therefore, may be abandoned completely.

This dissertation deals with language documentation from a theoretical and practical perspective. Alongside a theoretical discussion of language documentation, I present my own language documentation project carried out among the Kurripako of Venezuela. What is language documentation? How should it be carried out? And what does it include? These are some of the questions that I address in this dissertation through the analysis of my own project.I argue that language documentation is a multipurpose, data-driven gathering of records of a language that should take into account the needs of various interested parties such as researchers and community members. In this way, the needs and desires of many should be taken into account in the planning and execution of such a project.I provide examples of those different parts by looking at my project among the Kurripako. In this sense, each chapter addresses a different part of a project. Chapter 2 addresses theoretical and pragmatic issues. Chapter 3 addresses information about the language, its speakers, dialect variation and a grammatical sketch. Chapter 4 examines argument marking structure in depth and concludes that Kurripako is an active-stative language. Chapter 5 examines the active-stative split in texts and argues that text collection needs to be complemented by elicitation in order to be able to fully address grammatical aspects. Chapter 6 provides information on the context of the project and explains the interests that speakers had in collecting particular types of texts. I finalize by arguing that there needs to be much more work on the theory of language documentation as well as evaluations of these theoretical proposals in order to serve all needs that language documentation wishes to.I do not intend to present my language documentation project as an exemplar of how language documentation should be done, but merely use it to reflect upon issues that such a project raises. There more questions that came to light and that remain to be answered than issues that have been provided with an answer. It is my hope that this will also encourage others to tackle some of these questions.

The tree model of segment structure proposed by Clements (1985) is an important innovation in phonological theory, making possible a number of interesting and arguably correct predictions about the form of assimilation rules, locality of rule application, and the organization of the distinctive feature system. Clements's proposal has given rise to an expanding literature, including Sagey (1986), Schein and Steriade (1986), Archangeli and Pulleyblank (forthcoming), and McCarthy (forthcoming). In this paper, I argue that the tree model as it stands faces a serious empirical shortcoming: it fails to provide an adequate account of diphthongization rules, here defined as rules that convert a segment (vowel or consonant) into a heterogeneous sequence. I propose a revised tree model, which for clarity and explicitness uses coindexation rather than association lines to indicate temporal association. I argue that my proposal solves the diphthongization problem, and that it also makes it possible to restrict the power of segment structure theory in the following way: the "feature- bearing units" (Clements 1980) for any feature are always elements of the prosodic tier, and not nodes in the segment tree.

Language games have fascinated linguists in that they can provide unusual insight into the grammars of languages. The evidence provided by the study of a language game has usually been used by linguists to argue for certain phonological and morphological analysis of the source language. Recent studies of the mechanism that derives language games also discuss broader theoretical issues like the nature of this mechanism, its reflection of internal structure of the syllable and morpheme, its relationship with the morphological and phonological processes in natural languages, and the proper phonological and prosodic representations in describing the formation of language games (e.g., McCarthy 1981, 1982; Yip 1982 ). Chinese secret languages are language games spoken by children, thieves, or fortune tellers. They are also called Fanqie languages because their formation follows the traditional Chinese Fanqie principle which divides a syllable into an Initial and a Final. (1) gives some examples illustrating this traditional division of syllables . (1) Initials and Finals in Chinese (Tones are omitted): a. /ma/; Initials: /m/; Finals: /a/ b. /kuai/ [kway]; Initials: /k/; Finals: /uai/ [way] c. /pan/; Initials: /p/; Finals: /an/ d. /tuan/ [twan]; Initials: /t/; Finals: /uan/ [wan] e. /uan/ [wan]; Initials: none; Finals: /uan/ [wan]. Within a syllable the first consonant is the Initial, what remains is the Final. (1) e. is an example of the "zero Initial" syllable. Chao (1931) describes eight varieties of Chinese secret languages in terms of this traditional view on the Chinese syllable. In these languages each syllable is typically split into two syllables with the addition of a fixed Initial and /or a Final. For example, one of the Mandarin secret languages derives [may ka] from the base word /ma/, the fixed Initial /k/, and the fixed Final /ay /. Departing from this traditional view, Yip (1982) proposes to treat the formation of these secret languages as instances of reduplication within the framework of CV phonology (McCarthy 1979, Clements & Keyser 1983). In this paper I examine the behavior of nasal segments in Taiwanese secret languages described by Li (1985) in the hope of revealing the relationship between the phonological structure of the source language and that of the secret languages, and throwing some light on the understanding of the formal mechanism and principles employed by Chinese secret languages. I follow Yip in treating the formation of Chinese secret languages as reduplication,3 and assume an autosegmental model of phonology that incorporates underspecification (e.g. Archangeli & Pulleyblank 1986) and feature geometry (e.g. Clements 1985a; Sagey 1986). In Section 1, an introduction of three types of Taiwanese secret languages is given. Section 2 shows that the spreading of nasality of the nasalized vowels throughout the whole reduplicated domain in the secret language argues for the existence of a floating nasal feature in Taiwanese and the treatment of this domain as a basic morphological word. The behavior of the syllable final consonants in these Taiwanese secret languages presented in Section 3 calls for an assimilatory treatment rather than the dissimilatory one proposed by Yip (1982). Section 4 discusses some theoretical implications with respect to the theory of reduplication in analyzing the syllabic nasals in Taiwanese secret languages. Finally, a conclusion summaries the preceding sections.

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