Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Bibliography: leaves 246-251. / Ph.D.

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Bibliography: leaves 194-202. / Ph.D.

Texte remanié : Doctorat en Philosophie : Massachusetts Institute of Technology : 1977. / parue sous le titre " Contraints on variables in syntax " Bibliogr. p. 298-304. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 2002. / "December 2002." Includes bibliographical references (p. 152-159). Also available on the Internet.

published_or_final_version / English Studies and Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Arts

This dissertation investigates, within a Government-Binding framework, the licensing mechanisms which regulate the distribution of sentence-internal constituents. It is proposed that the licensing requirements apply across components, in the spirit of the Projection Principle of Chomsky (1981). Under the extended view of licensing proposed here ("Universal Licensing"), maximal projections must comply with the appropriate licensing requirements at every syntactic level of representation. / This allows for a more constrained model of grammar, under which a number of facts follow in a principled way; this is the case particularly with respect to constructions involving null operators. Thus, from the D- and S-Structure conditions on null operator licensing, we derive the cross-linguistic as well as the language-internal distribution of resumptive pronouns. Furthermore, some of the well-known, but so far stipulated, constraints on parasitic gap (PG) constructions are shown to follow from general principles: we explain for instance the fact that PGs must be sanctioned at S-Structure, as well as the inability of adjunct movement to license PGs. / The consequences of Universal Licensing on the distribution of PGs are examined with particular reference to adnominal PGs in French genitival relatives. It is shown that the properties displayed by these little-studied ("double dont") constructions, in conjunction with the Universal Licensing Principle, shed significant light on a number of issues, among which the thematic structure of nominals, and the nature of the locality constraints on null operator identification.

Even though there has been little agreement as to how the phenomenon of serialization is to be defined, it is generally assumed (i) that there is a close meaning dependency (of some kind) between the event descriptions serialized (serials hereafter), (ii) that the serials cannot be modified independently by such sentential operators as tense, aspect, mood, etc., and (iii) that these aspects of serialization are closely related to the fact that a serial construction refers to a `single event'.However, these assumptions have not been materialized into an explicit analysis of serialization. In particular, it has not been clearly accounted for how the concept of single event is attributed to the meaning dependencies between serials that are apparently so diverse as to defy a unique semantic characterization. Thus, in previous studies, the apparent heterogeneity of meaning dependencies has led to `fragmentation' of serialization into coordinating and subordinating types, and of the subordinating type, in turn, into a variety of lexically governed subtypes.This dissertation argues against such fragmentation and provides a unified semantic analysis of serialization, drawing on the philosophical discussions of event individuation and causation. Under my analysis, the sense of inseparable connection between serials is represented by a counterfactual dependency between them. The counterfactual dependency only entails that the first serial is necessarily related to the second, without specifying the nature of the necessary relatedness. Thus, the variety of meaning dependencies observed in the literature can be accommodated as particular instances of the counterfactual dependency.Moreover, the single event reading of serialization is attributed to the `counterfactual' dependency between serials: in virtue of the dependency, the serials are not identified independently of each other, and hence are construed as constituting a single event unit. A variety of structural constraints on serialization observed in the literature are then analyzed as natural consequences of the conceptual unity of the serialized events as a whole. / Department of English

This dissertation presents three different approaches to representing Regular Formal languages, i.e., regular expressions, finite acceptors and regular grammars. We define how each method is used to represent the language, and then the method for translating from one representation to another of the language. A toolkit is then presented which allows the user to input their definition of a language using any of the three models, and also allows the user to translate the representation of the language from one model to another. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pitermaritzburg, 2014.

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