Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-173).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-270).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-165). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

An intriguing aspect of the French language is its complex system of interrogative structures; there exist many question variants to express the same content. For example, Où est-ce que tu vas? Où tu vas? C'est où que tu vas? Où c'est que tu vas? and Tu vas où? are potentially all ways of expressing "Where are you going?" In this dissertation, I examine the use of WH-questions from the Barnes-Blyth Corpus (1984) of Spoken French. Coveney (2002) contributed one of the first truly comprehensive studies on variation of interrogatives in Spoken French. This dissertation builds upon his work by contributing more in depth pragmatic analyses plus a more complete investigation of the system at play. My study begins with a WH-question inventory, categorization and description of structures found in the corpus and elsewhere when appropriate. In contrast to studies attributing variation to socio-stylistic choices, according to the data in this study, there is structural diversity of French interrogative structures within a single socio-stylistic context explainable by pragmatic differences. Therefore, Lambrecht's (1994) information structure framework is applied to the interrogatives in the corpus. Interrogatives prove to be a complicated case for information structure analysis; only the activation of the open proposition serves as a useful indicator of question structure choice. Highly active open propositions are often realized with in situ structures whereas inactive open propositions are often realized with fronted structures. These findings are consistent with initial observations by Coveney. Further, I examine the system involved in interrogative choice, which incorporates many areas of grammar including pragmatics, socio-stylistics, syntax and semantics. I propose the concept of answerability as an umbrella term to explain several seemingly diverse factors affecting WH-questions use. I explore the application of Optimality Theory to contextualized interrogative choices since it permits a complete analysis by allowing a combination of constraints from the various pertinent components of grammar. In conclusion, by implementing this combination of analyses, I not only contribute to the long-standing discussion regarding interrogative structure usage in French, but I also clarify the explanatory power of pragmatics and Optimality Theory for this particularly complex system. / text

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

In this thesis, a comparative linguistic investigation of morphological deficits in two English-speaking and two Greek-speaking agrammatic aphasic patients is presented. Adopting the Strong Lexicalist Hypothesis, the study focuses on the subjects' ability to repeat, comprehend and produce nominal and verbal inflections. The hypotheses investigated concern the effects of language-specific features in agrammatic performance and the role of morphological principles in the two languages. Finally the implications of the data for linguistic theory are investigated. / The data show that language-specific features are crucial in determining aphasic performance. Principles of well-formedness of lexical items appear to remain unaffected. Morphological deficits are found to manifest themselves at different levels: the lexical and the postlexical. A Storage Hypothesis which reflects the word structure of complex lexical items in the brain is proposed. Finally, it is proposed that only through a Strong Lexicalist framework can one achieve uniform interpretations of morphological deficits in aphasia.

In this thesis, I attempt to provide a linguistic solution to the problem of failure of substitutivity in intensional contexts, with specific emphasis on sentences containing verbs of propositional attitude, for example, "believe", "say", "think", "realize", etc. Many solutions to this problem have been proposed in the philosophical literature (the major ones will be reviewed in this thesis) and most of the linguistic analyses to date have been based upon the logical concepts invoked in the former. Using the pragmatic notion of "point of view" as defined by Reinhart (1975), I provide an alternate solution that takes into account the intuitions of speakers of natural language. My solution is based on the fact that different points of view can result in different referents for an expression, and that this difference is essential to the semantic interpretation and truth value of intensional sentences. I also discuss so-called identity statements of the form 'a = b' (where 'a' and 'b' stand for coreferential expressions), arguing that there is both semantic and syntactic evidence for the claim that natural language utterances of this form do not express identity.

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

This thesis investigates chain formation processes in syntax within the general framework of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1993, 1994, 1995), where comparison among derivations plays a central role. It is primarily concerned with interactions between Grammatical Function changing (Baker 1988a) and wh-movement. Constructions such as antipassive, applicative, and Object Preposing: (special "passive") from typologically different languages are examined together with their implications for extraction. On a theoretical level this thesis proposes a modification of the notion of reference set (Chomsky 1994, 1995), which fixes the domain of comparison for the purpose of economy. In particular, the notion of reference set is defined in terms of non-distinctness of numerations; this in turn is sensitive to the Interpretability of features (Chomsky 1995). It is also argued that the Minimal Link Condition is an economy condition that elects among convergent derivations on the basis of the notion of chain link comparability. The system advanced here, in combination with some independently motivated Minimalist assumptions, explains phenomena which have so far defied a unified account, thereby providing important empirical support for the leading ideas of the Minimalist Program.

In this dissertation, I investigate the structural representation of mood in a Minimalist framework. This investigation is based on the study of mood particles in Modern Standard Arabic and the way they interact with (i) the verb and (ii) negation. Arabic subjunctive particles are compared to subjunctive Balkan particles. / The main suggestion is that Arabic clause structure involves an inflectional projection Modal Phrase (ModP) that hosts the subjunctive particle ?an as well as other mood particles all of which check verbal mood morphology through the operation Agree. / The subjunctive particle ?an is compared to Balkan subjunctive particles and is argued to be an inflectional element rather than a lower complementizer in the sense of Rizzi (1997). In particular, it is suggested that Arabic and Balkan subjunctive particles fall into two types: (i) Type 1 inflectional particles that check a mood feature with the verb and that may occur in clauses lacking the CP layer. These include Arabic ?an and Romanian sǎ, and (ii) Type 2 lower Comp particles that do not check any verbal feature and that require the projection of the CP layer. These include Greek na and Bulgarian da. / As far as the interaction of mood particles with negation, it is suggested that some mood particles including subjunctive ?an may select NegP and check verbal mood across negation. Other particles, however, may not select NegP and are incompatible with negation.