Linguists (Chomsky, 1957 1 1965; Katz & Postal, 1964) have described in detail the kind of competence each speaker needs to cope with the complex structure of his language. Their description outlines what a speaker must intuitively know about his language in order to use it fluently. [...]

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This paper investigates errors in compositions written by junior and senior high school students. Two types of errors are specifically targeted, one relating to grammar in subject-verb agreement and another relating to the word class of prepositions. The aim of the present study is to focus on aspects which are of particular difficulty for the students, and to unveil underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms which affect the students’ acquisition process, for example, a potential influence of the mother tongue. The study is also expected to yield information about potential differences in error frequency and language construction between proficiency levels. The study is cross-sectional and includes altogether fifty-six samples collected from 7th and 9th grade at junior high school, and Year 1 and Year 3 at senior high school. Each group has produced fourteen compositions of free writing, and each text consists of approximately 200-300 words. The topic of the writing task was related to the supernatural and the head title was set as Do you believe in ghosts? A few taxonomies (James, 1998) and a method referred to as Error Analysis (Ellis, 1994), (both deriving from Second Language Acquisition research) are used to categorize, describe and explain error frequencies of certain error types. The results of the study show that the error frequency generally decreases from one expected proficiency level to another. The highest number of errors was found in 7th grade students’ writing, and the lowest in Year 3 students’ writing. Regardless of proficiency level, what is most troublesome for the students with subject-verb agreement is to master the 3rd person –s inflection. Prepositions, on the other hand, which account for a lower number of errors in the compositions compared to the number of subject-verb agreement errors, tend to be used erroneously when the students are confused about when and which a particular preposition should agree in a specific contextual meaning in English.

This thesis is a sketch grammar of 'Are'are, a Southeast Solomonic language belonging to the Oceanic family, spoken mainly in the southern part of Malaita by approximately 18 000 speakers. Previous academic works documenting and describing 'Are'are are almost nonexistent. This sketch grammar is based on data collected during consultation sessions with the main language consultant in New Zealand and during six weeks of fieldwork in Hauporo, West 'Are'are and Honiara in the Solomon Islands. 'Are'are is a head marking language with SVO word order whose noteworthy features include: (i) distinction between alienable and inalienable possession marking, (ii) several valency-increasing devices available to a single verb stem, (iii) verb serialization, (iv) three categories of prepositions distinguished by different patterns of object marking and (v) remarkably small consonant inventory compared to other languages spoken on Malaita. After the introduction to the language and its speakers, Chapter 2 lays out the sound system and introduces the major phonological and morphophonemic processes. Chapter 3 introduces the grammatical profile of the language, including a discussion on tense, aspect and mood and lexical categories attested in the language. Nouns and the structure of the noun phrase are discussed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 is concerned with verbs and the verb phrase. Prepositions are examined in Chapter 6. The structure of verbal and non-verbal clauses is the topic of Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 describes complex constructions such as coordination, subordination and serial verb constructions. The appendices provide a preliminary report on the language vitality, a brief discussion on dialects of 'Are'are and also a sample text.

This thesis concerns the form-meaning mapping of multimodal communicative actions consisting of speech signals and improvised co-speech gestures, produced spontaneously with the hand. The interaction between speech and speech-accompanying gestures has been standardly addressed from a cognitive perspective to establish the underlying cognitive mechanisms for the synchronous speech and gesture production, and also from a computational perspective to build computer systems that communicate through multiple modalities. Based on the findings of this previous research, we advance a new theory in which the mapping from the form of the combined speech-and-gesture signal to its meaning is analysed in a constraint-based multimodal grammar. We propose several construction rules about multimodal well-formedness that we motivate empirically from an extensive and detailed corpus study. In particular, the construction rules use the prosody, syntax and semantics of speech, the form and meaning of the gesture signal, as well as the temporal performance of the speech relative to the temporal performance of the gesture to constrain the derivation of a single multimodal syntax tree which in turn determines a meaning representation via standard mechanisms for semantic composition. Gestural form often underspecifies its meaning, and so the output of our grammar is underspecified logical formulae that support the range of possible interpretations of the multimodal act in its final context-of-use, given the current models of the semantics/ pragmatics interface. It is standardly held in the gesture community that the co-expressivity of speech and gesture is determined on the basis of their temporal co-occurrence: that is, a gesture signal is semantically related to the speech signal that happened at the same time as the gesture. Whereas this is usually taken for granted, we propose a methodology of establishing in a systematic and domain-independent way which spoken element(s) gesture can be semantically related to, based on their form, so as to yield a meaning representation that supports the intended interpretation(s) in context. The ‘semantic’ alignment of speech and gesture is thus driven not from the temporal co-occurrence alone, but also from the linguistic properties of the speech signal gesture overlaps with. In so doing, we contribute a fine-grained system for articulating the form-meaning mapping of multimodal actions that uses standard methods from linguistics. We show that just as language exhibits ambiguity in both form and meaning, so do multimodal actions: for instance, the integration of gesture is not restricted to a unique speech phrase but rather speech and gesture can be aligned in multiple multimodal syntax trees thus yielding distinct meaning representations. These multiple mappings stem from the fact that the meaning as derived from gesture form is highly incomplete even in context. An overall challenge is thus to account for the range of possible interpretations of the multimodal action in context using standard methods from linguistics for syntactic derivation and semantic composition.

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This creative project attempts to teach the eight parts of speech by using easily-remembered rimes stating the use of each part and appropriate and familiar visual symbols with which each part may be associated.The parts of speech are symbolized by court personalities of the Later Middle Ages. The noun, which names persons, places and things, is represented by the queen, who likewise had the prerogative of naming things; and the pronoun, which takes the place of the noun, is represented by the court minister, who sometimes took the queen's place. The last part, the interjection, which shows strong feeling, is represented by the court jester who laughed and cried at will.All material in the book relates the parts of speech to the addle Ages, and many pictures are used to illustrate the sample sentences.The book is written in first person with each Part of Speech speaking for himself.

This thesis presents an account of some of the mental mechanisms and processes that take the addressee from a linguistic input to the interpretation of that input. Because on-line interpretation involves our knowledge of language, the relation between input processing and grammar is evaluated. The full interpretation of a linguistic input also involves pragmatic, i.e. central cognitive processes, but these processes are the least well understood within psycholinguistics. Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) gives us a way of making our understanding of these processes more explicit. However, Relevance theory claims turn out to be incompatible with psycholinguistic models which postulate an autonomous syntactic parser, such as the 'Garden-path' model. A review of the experimental literature reveals that the findings claimed to support the 'Garden-path' model do not in fact support it. Likewise, the principle of Lexical Preference, proposed to account for how verb subcategorization frames are accessed, turns out not to be supported by the experimental evidence. Full interpretation involves computing a conceptual representation, and an account is given of what constitutes conceptual structure. This leads to the proposal that verbs are represented as structured concepts. This view of verb representation together with Relevance theory can account for when arguments of verbs can be left implicit. Finally, an account is given of how the addressee computes the propositional form communicated by an utterance, by building hypotheses about the conceptual structure of the proposition on-line. These hypotheses are based on structural information stored under the concepts referred to by the utterance. This proposal can account for psycholinguistic research findings, with pragmatics playing an integral role in the explanations: it is no longer grafted onto the model as a psycholinguistic afterthought.