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This dissertation is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua (HT), which is a member of the Totonacan language family. HT is spoken by fewer than 1500 people in and around the town of Huehuetla, Hidalgo, in the Eastern Sierra Madre mountains of the Central Gulf Coast region of Mexico. This grammar begins with an introduction to the language, its language family, and its setting, as well as a brief history of my contact with the language. The grammar continues with a description of the phonology of HT, followed by morphosyntactic and syntactic description of all of the major parts of speech, including verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and numbers; the grammar concludes with a description of the sentence-level syntax. A compilation of interlinearized texts appears in the appendix. HT is a polysynthetic, head-marking language with complex verbal morphology. Inflectional affixes include both prefixes and suffixes for which a templatic pattern is difficult to model. In addition to inflectional and derivational morphology, HT verbs are also host to a large number of aspectual derivational morphemes, each of which alters the meaning of the verb in a very specific way. Plural marking on both nouns and verbs for any third person argument is optional and determined by an animacy hierarchy, which is also used to determine verbal argument marking in various morphosyntactic constructions. HT nouns are completely unmarked for case, and certain nouns, including kinship terms and parts of a whole, are obligatorily possessed. The order of the major constituents is pragmatically determined, with a tendency towards VSO order in the absence of pragmatic or contextual clues and SVO order in context-rich textual examples. HT is an under-documented moribund language that is at imminent risk of extinction within the next two-to-three generations. Thus, this dissertation is a major contribution not only to the field of linguistics, but also to the Tepehua people who might one day be interested in the language of their grandparents. / text

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

This paper is about the sound iconicity of the Late Middle Chinese entering tone in two of Du Fu's long narrative poems, "The Journey to the North" and "Singing my Heart out in Five Hundred Characters on the Way from the Capital to Fongxian County", as well as Du Fu's grammar of poetry in these two poems. In poetry, rhyme is an arbitrary and 'visible' figure reiterated with regulation which forms an axis of sequence, and this axis will work jointly with all the other poetic elements—semantics, images, and grammar to form the whole of a poem. In these two poems, all the rhyme characters carry a voiceless —t ending, which is classified with —k and —p endings as the entering tone in Late Middle Chinese reconstructed by Edwin Pulleyblank. These voiceless stops are short, tense, and uncomfortable to utter; when they are repeated fifty and seventy times at the end of each couplet, it naturally brings about a strong, rough, and uncomfortable feeling which correlates with the feeling of suffering in both poems. It is sound iconicity, because an icon resembles the object it stands for in an immediate and concrete manner, and the —t ending rhyme characters do have the characteristics to make the reader grasp the feeling of suffering when she reads the poems. In terms of Du Fu's grammar of poetry, I used Jakobsonian methodology and found how Du Fu's poeticity was created with lexical meaning and grammar. Although Classical Chinese does not have a huge grammatical repertoire (e.g., person, case, gender, finite, non-finite . . .) which can figure in a poem, this language still has its own obligatory categories that will provide for the 'grammar of poetry'. Classical Chinese is already known for its grammatical parallelism in poetry, because this language is extremely isolating and analytical. However, grammatical parallelism is little in these two poems, but there are different kinds of grammatical tropes. They are mainly anti-syntactic inversions interacting with semantics. I found Du Fu a fascinating artist of grammar; he may be anti-grammatical but never agrammatical.

This thesis provides an analysis of Possessor Raising (PR) in a minimalist framework. I examine four languages that exhibit PR, namely Japanese, Korean, Kinyarwanda, and Swahili. I propose that cross-linguistic variation of PR in these languages is captured by the single notion of Multiple Feature-Checking (MFC). In addition to cross-linguistic variation of surface syntax of PR, this thesis also examines a universal feature of PR, namely the relational noun restriction. PR raises an interesting problem with the mapping relation between an argument DP and its grammatical function (GF). A DP is normally associated with a unique GF (i.e., a one-to-one mapping relation), but in some cases such as passive, a DP may be associated with more than one GF, being both an underlying object and a surface subject (i.e., a one-to-many). PR also poses another type of mapping relation, namely a many-to-one relation; under PR, a possessor DP may also bear the GF of its host. In order to capture such a many-to-one relation between a DP and its GF in PR, I propose that this is an example of MFC, which is defined as follows: (i) MFC is possible only if a Formal Feature (FF) of a head (T and v) can escape deletion. (ii) MFC applies to both strong and weak FFs. In contrast to the original formulation of MFC (cf. Chomsky 1995b), which always involves overt movement of DPs and derives multiple specifiers, I argue that MFC also takes place at LF, which involves covert movement of FFs and derives multiple adjuncts of feature bundles onto a head. Given the evidence against overt movement of the subject and object in Japanese and Korean, I argue that PR in these languages is best analyzed in terms of covert MFC. I also provide an overt MFC analysis for Kinyarwanda and Swahili PR. Lastly, I discuss the relational noun restriction on PR, which holds of all PR languages. I propose that this restriction is reducible to the structural position of the possessor of a relational noun, namely its position as complement to the noun.

Historically, English language arts educators have strongly disagreed about the role of grammar instruction in students’ literacy development (Weaver, 1996; Mulroy, 2003), and despite the importance of teachers’ beliefs and the continuing controversy over grammar instruction, few studies have explored teachers’ beliefs about the role of grammar instruction in English language arts education. The purpose of this qualitative, interpretive research was to investigate six middle school English language arts teachers’ beliefs and practices related to grammar and the teaching of grammar. Social constructivism (Fosnot & Perry, 2005) and phenomenology (Schutz, 1967; Seidman, 1998) served as theoretical frameworks for the study. Four questions guided the research: (1) What are teachers’ definitions of “grammar” as related to the teaching of English language arts? (2) What are teachers’ beliefs about “grammar” and the teaching of grammar in English language arts? (3) What are teachers’ reported sources of knowledge for grammar and the teaching of grammar in English language arts? (4) How does a professional development course on grammar instruction influence teachers’ beliefs? Data collection and analysis for this study occurred over a ten-month period. Data sources included an open-ended questionnaire; three in-depth, phenomenological interviews with each teacher (Seidman, 1998) before, during, and after the professional learning course; teacher artifacts and emails; field notes and transcriptions from videotaped course sessions; and a researcher’s log. Constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) was used to analyze data, and richly descriptive participant portraits (Merriam & Assoc., 2002) report the findings. Trustworthiness and rigor have been established through adherence to guidelines for establishing credibility, confirmability, dependability, and transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). The participants defined grammar in terms of rules, correctness, communication, and in relationships with various forms of literacy. They believed that students gain power through a mastery of Standard American English, grammar instruction is necessary to bolster students’ performance on standardized tests, and both traditional and innovative methods for teaching grammar are valuable. They found the collaborative professional learning course to be worthwhile and useful for developing innovative approaches to grammar instruction. Finally, they reported a need for more easily accessible Internet resources for teaching grammar.

In this thesis I extend a class of grammars called conjunctive grammars to a stochastic form called stochastic conjunctive grammars. This extension allows the grammars to predict pseudoknotted RNA secondary structure. Since observing sec- ondary structure is hard and expensive to do with today's technology, there is a need for computational solutions to this problem. A conjunctive grammar can handle pseudoknotted structure because of the way one sequence is generated by combining multiple parse trees. I create several grammars that are designed to predict pseudoknotted RNA sec- ondary structure. One grammar is designed to predict all types of pseudoknots and the others are made to only predict a pseudoknot called H-type. These grammars are trained and tested and the results are collected. I am able to obtain a sensitivity of over 75% and a speci city of over 89% on H-type pseudoknots

This thesis investigates verbal and prepositional representations of change under a non-localistic analysis based on the mereology of events, i.e., a system of aspect that uses event parts as primitives in lieu of path parts. Localistic analyses, developed from motional concepts (e.g., Verkuyl 1993, Asher & Sablayrolles 1994), do not extend to non-motional data (e.g., changes of state or possession) except via metaphor, thereby bypassing essential generalizations about change. / It is argued that, instead of modeling change after the tripartite source-route-goal divisions of a spatial path, the various combinations of two eventive primitives---distinguished point and distinguished process---are sufficient and necessary in accounting for abstract and concrete data, including the four aspectual verb classes of states, activities, achievements and accomplishments (Vendler 1967). The medial lexical specification, route, is shown to be unnecessary, being an epiphenomenon of two distinguished points interacting, or inferable through pragmatic considerations. This is shown by examples from English and French. / Event mereology unifies concrete with abstract change under a single system of features for verbs (e.g., arrive and inherit ), prepositions, and their associated phrases (in the house and in debt). Underspecification and complementation further economize the lexical representations while accounting for cases of semantic ambiguity. Such issues as homogeneity in states/processes, resultatives, aspectual verbs (continue, stop), agentivity, and the effects of aspectual coercion by English aspectual morphemes (-ed, -ing) are examined and re-formulated where necessary. / The event-mereological approach is demonstrated to be compatible with various current syntactic analyses, and one such analysis (Travis 1999) is investigated in detail. Event mereology is also shown to extend to more complex aspectual patterns observed of serial verb constructions in Edo (Stewart 1998).