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<p> This dissertation is an analysis, assuming the framework of Government and Binding Theory, of the syntactic derivation of comparative correlative constructions (hereafter CCs for short) in Mandarin Chinese. It attempts to evaluate the theoretical adequacy of extant treatments of CCs and propose an alternative analysis to the prevailing adjunct approach.</p><p> CC constructions exist crosslinguistically. An English example is <i> The more chocolate I eat, the happier I feel.</i> In Chinese, a simplex CC sentence consists of two non-coordinated clauses; the lexical word <i> yue,</i> which indicates degree, is obligatory in both clauses, as illustrated in (1): (1) tianqi <b>yue₁</b> re, dian-fei <b>yue₂</b> gao. weather [ YUE₁ hot], electricity-fee [YUE₂ high] 'The hotter the weather is, the higher the electricity fee is.'</p><p> Unlike the English comparative phrase, which has been shown to undergo A-bar movement in earlier studies, the <i>yue</i>-constituent remains in situ. I argue that <i>yue</i> is generated in [Spec, DegP] and behaves as an indefinite in-situ degree element on a par with an in-situ wh-element (Li 1992; Tsai 1994; Cheng and Rooryck 2000; Cheng 2003a, 2003b). The <i> yue</i>-variable in each clause is unselectively bound (Lewis 1975, Heim 1982, Cheng and Huang 1996) by an implicit CORRELATIVITY OPERATOR and does not undergo A-bar movement.</p><p> In addition to the idiosyncratic in-situ <i>yue</i>-phrase, another property of CCs is the syntactic interdependency between the constitutive clauses. Earlier studies (Dikken 2005, Taylor 2006, 2009, Tsao and Hsiao 2002) treat the preceding clause as an adjunct. However, an adjunct approach cannot account for the property of syntactic interdependency. As an alternative, I assume Rizzi's (1997) work on the Split CP Hypothesis, arguing that Chinese CCs implicate the information structure in the left periphery and that they are a type of Focus construction. A Chinese CC sentence like (1) is projected by a null functional head Foc⁰. The first clause is focused and base-generated in [Spec, FocP] and the second clause is the complement of the null Foc⁰. The [+focus] feature in Foc⁰ licenses the co-occurrence of <i>yue₁</i> and <i> yue₂.</i> This alternative analysis can capture not only crosslinguistic commonalities but also the language-internal property of topic-prominence in Chinese.</p>

This paper presents some concepts and principles used in the development of a database of multilingual spoken discourse at the University of Hamburg. The emphasis of the first part is on general considerations for the handling of heterogeneous data sets: After showing that diversity in transcription data is partly conceptually and partly technologically motivated, it is argued that the processing of transcription corpora should be approached via a three-level architecture which separates form (application) and content (data) on the one hand, and logical and physical data structures on the other hand. Such an architecture does not only pave the way for modern text-technological approaches to linguistic data processing, it can also help to decide where and how a standardization in the work with heterogeneous data is possible and desirable and where it would run counter to the needs of the research community. It is further argued that, in order to ensure user acceptance, new solutions developed in this approach must take care not to abandon established concepts too quickly. The focus of the second part is on some practical experiences with users and technologies gained in the four years’ project work. Concerning the practical development work, the value of open standards like XML and Unicode is emphasized and some limitations of the “platform-independent” JAVA technology are indicated. With respect to users of the EXMARaLDA system, a predominantly conservative attitude towards technological innovations in transcription corpus work can be stated: individual users tend to stick to known functionalities and are reluctant to adopt themselves to the new possibilities. Furthermore, an active commitment to cooperative corpus work still seems to be the exception rather than the rule. It is concluded that technological innovations can contribute their share to a progress in the work with heterogeneous linguistic data, but that they will have to be supplemented, in the long run, with an adequate methodological reflection and the creation of an appropriate infrastructure.

This dissertation presents arguments in favour of an explicit Logical Form representation of components responsible for direct referentiality and domain restriction in definites, with a focus on Austro-Bavarian German, Standard Swedish, and Standard Canadian English.It provides a semantico-pragmatic analysis of the ban on wh-subextraction out of DPs with the "strong" articles in Austro-Bavarian and demonstratives in English which assumes their direct referentiality. The ungrammaticality of question formation is proposed to result from the pathological uninformativeness of its possible answers. The ban on wh-subextraction thus emerges as a new testing tool for direct referentiality.I further propose an analysis of the cases where strong articles and demonstratives do not behave directly referentially. Assuming structural decomposition of strong articles and demonstratives into a determiner head and a relational head, I propose that directly referential interpretation results from a silent individual pronoun occupying the specifier of the relational head, whereas covarying interpretations arise as a result of either a restrictive relative clause occupying this position, or else a relational noun functioning as the relational component itself. I proceed to extend this approach to account for the distribution of strong and weak definite articles in DPs with restrictive relative clauses. A strong-DP is predicted to be used in all contexts where it is taken for granted that there is more than one individual with the nominal property because of the pragmatic pressure to use an LF with a component which triggers an "anti-uniqueness" presupposition. I show the latter to be a required feature of the semantic model for strong articles and demonstratives on independent grounds.In the second part I analyze the pattern of the free-standing article omission in Swedish. I identify the omission with the use of a covert restrictor-less definite article, which accounts for why it is easily available with context-sensitive modifiers whose semantics has to make reference to a domain restrictor, but is limited to the cases of "global uniqueness" with context-insensitive ones. Thus Swedish, I propose, illustrates the case of a "rudimentary" article which, if the only one available, would make the problem of incomplete descriptions unsurmountable. This conclusion relies on, and thus provides evidence for, the unavailability of either domain restriction at the NP-level or implicit global restriction of the domain of individuals as a means of modelling the behaviour of Swedish definites. / La thèse avance des arguments en support de la représentation explicite des éléments responsables pour la référence directe et pour les restrictions du domaine dans les expressions définies et se base sur les données de l'austro-bavarois, le suédois et l'anglais canadien.Je propose une analyse sémantique-pragmatique de l'agrammaticalité du mouvement wh des syntagmes nominales avec les articles "fortes" en austro-bavarois et avec les démonstratifs en anglais qui les traite comme directement référentiels. Il est proposé que les réponses possibles à telle question ne portent pas d'information nouvelle, ce qui donne comme le résultat l'agrammaticalité de la question. L'agrammaticalité du mouvement wh devient donc une diagnostique pour la référence directe.Je propose aussi une analyse des cas où les articles fortes et les démonstratifs ne sont pas directement référentiels. En assumant une décomposition structurelle des articles fortes et des démonstratifs en une tête déterminative et une tête relative, je propose que l'interprétation directement référentielle se produit au cas où un pronom personnel silencieux occupe le spécificateur de la tête relative, tandis que l'interprétation qui admets une covariation se produit au cas où soit une proposition relative occupe le spécificateur en question, soit un nom relatif fonctionne comme une tête relative. J'applique cette analyse à la distribution des articles fortes et faibles dans les syntagmes nominales avec des propositions relatives restrictives.La seconde partie développe une analyse de l'omission de l'article défini indépendant dans le suédois. Je traite l'omission comme l'usage d'un article défini silencieux qui ne peut pas restreindre le domaine de la quantification, ce qui explique pourquoi elle est possible avec les modificateurs qui fournissent leur propres restrictions contextuelles, tandis qu'elle est possible seulement dans les cas de l'unicité "globale" avec les modificateurs qui ne fournissent pas des restrictions contextuelles. L'analyse met en évidence l'indisponibilité soit de la restriction du domaine sur le niveau nominal, soit de la restriction implicite globale.

This dissertation investigates whether or not linguistically misleading classroom instruction can affect second language (L2) acquisition. Of particular interest are linguistically inappropriate classroom rules which are superficially logical but linguistically false.A case in point is provided by French reflexive and reciprocal verbs, which are formed with the clitic se. The reflexive/reciprocal clitic se does not behave on a par with object clitic pronouns as many reliable syntactic diagnostics suggest (Kayne 1975, Reinhart & Siloni 2005). Superficially, however, se generally resembles object clitic pronouns, due to similarities in distribution and form. It is, then, not surprising that classroom French L2 instruction consistently misrepresents se verbs as syntactic transitive constructions, and se itself as a reflexive/reciprocal object pronoun. Two experimental tasks (contextualized grammaticality judgments and truth value judgments) are designed to examine whether Russian- and English-speaking L2 learners of French adopt the linguistically inaccurate classroom generalization or converge on a native-like representation of se. Both tasks involve constructions where se and clitic pronouns behave differently. In addition, a questionnaire on se taps participants' recollection of any explicit classroom instruction. The most important finding of the dissertation is that although about half of participants refer to se as an object pronoun in the se questionnaire – thus showing that they remembered the classroom generalization – L2 learners still clearly make the relevant native-like distinction between se and true object pronouns in the experimental tasks. Learners' failure to internalize superficially logical but linguistically false generalizations at the level of linguistic competence – as opposed to the level of learned linguistic knowledge (Schwartz 1993) – suggests that adult language acquirers must still employ language-specific learning mechanisms and go beyond instruction. While focusing on the L2 acquisition of French reflexive and reciprocal verbs by native speakers of Russian and English, the present dissertation also reformulates the existing literature on the related phenomena in light of current developments in theoretical syntax and develops an analysis of reflexive and reciprocal verbs which has adequate empirical coverage and also does away with certain previous stipulations. / La présente dissertation cherche a déterminer si des consignes linguistiquement trompeuses données en salle de classe peuvent avoir un effet sur l'acquisition d'une langue seconde (L2). On s'intéressera en particulier aux règles pédagogiques qui sont superficiellement logiques mais linguistiquement fausses. Un cas illustratif est fourni par les verbes réfléchis et réciproques du français, qui se forment avec le clitique se. Ce pronom réfléchi/réciproque ne se comporte pas de la même manière que les pronoms clitiques objets, tel que le suggèrent de nombreux diagnostiques syntaxiques fiables (Kayne 1975, Reinhart & Siloni 2005). Superficiellement, toutefois, le se ressemble globalement aux pronoms clitiques objets, à cause de certaines similarités au niveau de la distribution et de la forme. Il n'est donc pas surprenant que le français L2 pédagogique présente fréquemment les verbes se comme des constuctions syntaxiques transitives, et le se lui-même comme un pronom objet réfléchi/réciproque. Deux tâches expérimentales (des jugements de grammaticalité contextualisés et des jugements de valeur de vérité) sont conçus pour découvrir si les anglophones et russophones apprenant le français comme L2 adoptent la généralisation pédagogique (qui est lingusitiquement erronée) ou convergent vers la représentation du se des locuteurs natifs. Les deux tâches comportent des constructions où le se et les pronoms clitiques se comportent différemment. De plus, un questionnaire au sujet du se fait appel aux souvenirs que peuvent avoir les participant de toute instruction pédagogique explicite. La découverte la plus importante de cette dissertation est le fait que bien qu'environ la moitié des participants désignent le se comme un pronom objet dans le question qui porte dessus – ce qui démontre qu'ils ont retenu la généralisation pédagogique – il est clair que les apprenants de L2, tels des locuteurs natifs, font encore la distinction pertinente entre le se et les véritables pronoms objets dans les tâches expérimentales. L'incapacité des apprenants à assimiler des généralisations superficiellement logiques mais linguistiquement fausses au niveau de la compétence linguistique – par opposition au niveau des connaissances linguistiques apprises (Schwartz 1993) – suggère que les acquérants adultes de L2 doivent encore employer des méchanismes d'apprentissage particuliers à la langue et aller au-delà de l'instruction. Tout en mettant l'accent sur l'acquisition L2 des verbes réfléchis et réciproques du français par les anglophones et les russophones, la présente dissertation reformule également la recherche existente portant sur les phénomènes reliés à la lumière des récentes avancées dans la syntaxe théorique et développe une analyse des verbes réfléchis et réciproques qui jouit d'un soutien empirique adéquat et élimine également certaines stipulations précédentes.

<p> This study looks at two aspects of American Sign Language (ASL) grammatical structures, classifiers and role shifting, and analyzes how those structures might be affected by differing ages of acquisition in participants who are prelingually deaf. Twenty-four prelingually deaf participants with different ages of acquisition of ASL and educational backgrounds were involved in this study. Participants were asked to retell a one-minute wordless cartoon video clip into ASL and answer questions relating to their language usage. These retellings were analyzed specifically regarding two ASL grammatical structures: classifiers and role shifting. The results indicated that the age when the participant learned ASL mattered on how well they were able to sign classifiers and perform role shifting correctly. Age of acquisition did not seem to be the only correlation however; other factors such as attitude, socialization and environment seemed to influence how well a person was able to portray these structures correctly.</p>

<p> Wamesa [WAD] is an endangered Austronesian language spoken in the south-eastern Bird's Head of New Guinea, in the Indonesian province of West Papua. This dissertation provides a description and formal analysis of the phonology and morphology of the Windesi dialect based on the author's fieldwork with speakers of the language.</p><p> Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the language, its speakers, and the cultural, geographic, and linguistic context in which Wamesa is spoken. It also provides background on the fieldwork which forms the basis of this dissertation and the resulting corpus. Chapter 2 describes the phonology of Wamesa, including its phoneme inventory, phonotactics, and productive phonological processes, with phonetic detail. The second half of the chapter gives an account of the phonological adaptation of loan words into Wamesa. Chapter 3 gives a formal analysis of stress assignment in the language based in Optimality Theory. Chapter 4 describes the Wamesa clitics and affixes, and Chapter 5 gives an account of the three major word classes, nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as well as modes of spatial expression and a selection of other minor word classes. Chapter 6 gives a formal synchronic analysis of the infixation of verbal subject agreement affixes in Wamesa, followed by a diachronic account of how the pattern might have arisen from incremental improvements in speech production and perception.</p><p> This dissertation provides the first in-depth description of the grammar of Windesi Wamesa, as well as the first formal analysis of its structures. The data presented here will be of interest for typological and historical studies of Austronesian, particularly the understudied South Halmahera-West New Guinea subgroup to which Wamesa belongs. In addition to enriching our understanding of this family, the dissertation presents data and analyses which will be of interest for morphological and phonological theory more narrowly. </p>

This thesis investigates the representation and acquisition of word-level stress in Turkish. Two general proposals are made in the thesis, one related to formal phonology, the other about second language (L2) acquisition of word-level prosody. The first proposes that the presence/absence of the Foot is parametric; that is, contra much previous research (see e.g. Selkirk 1995, Vogel 2009), it is argued in this thesis that the Foot is not a universal constituent of the Prosodic Hierarchy; rather, some languages, such as Turkish and French, are footless. Several types of evidence are presented in support of this proposal, from both Turkish and French, with a focus on the former language. A comparison of regular (word-final) and exceptional stress in this language reveals, for example, that regular "stress" is intonational prominence falling on the last syllable of prosodic words in the absence of foot structure. Exceptional stress, on the other hand, is argued to be the result of certain morphemes coming into the computation already footed in the lexicon, and being footed on the surface, too, because of faithfulness to this information. The grammar, then, assigns the other properties of this foot, such as binarity and foot type, which are vacuously satisfied for regular morphemes, as they are not footed, and as the grammar has no mechanism that assigns feet or stress. The result is a unified analysis of regular and exceptional stress in Turkish.Second, the thesis proposes a path for the L2 acquisition of prosody, the Prosodic Acquisition Path Hypothesis (PAPH). The PAPH predicts different levels of difficulty and paths to be followed by L2 learners based on the typological properties of their first language (L1) and the L2 they are learning, and also on the basis of a hierarchical tree representation of the relationships proposed to hold between prosodic parameters. Most foot-related parameters are incorporated in the proposal, as well as the new parameter proposed in this thesis about the presence/absence of the Foot. The PAPH predicts that once the Foot is projected in an L1, learners of a footless L2 will not be able to expunge it from their grammar, but will, instead, be restricted to changing the values of foot-related parameters. Not every one of these parameters is, however, hypothesized to be equally easy to reset; depending on a variety of factors such as their location on the parameter tree and markedness, certain parameters, such as Foot-Type, are hypothesized to be easier to reset than others, such as Iterativity.The predictions as concerns the learning path are tested through an experiment, which examines productions of English- and French-speaking learners of L2 Turkish. The results of the experiment largely confirm the predictions of the PAPH. None of the English-speaking learners of Turkish were able to rid their grammar of the Foot, though they were able to make various Universal Grammar (UG)-constrained changes to their grammar, such as resetting Extrametricality from 'Yes' to 'No', and at later stages, Foot-Type from 'Trochaic' to 'Iambic', thereby having increasingly more word types with final stress. French-speaking learners, on the other hand, produced target-like footless outputs, with word-final prominence, from the initial stages of acquisition. At no stage did any of the learners have UG-unconstrained representations such as weight-insensitive iambs, which are not permitted by the inventory of feet provided by UG. / Cette thèse examine la représentation et l'acquisition de l'accent lexical en turc. Deux propositions principales sont avancées, la première concernant la phonologie théorique et la seconde, l'acquisition en langue seconde (L2) de la prosodie lexicale. Il est d'abord proposé que la présence ou l'absence d'un pied prosodique est paramétrique. Contrairement à ce qui est suggéré dans plusieurs travaux (Selkirk 1995, Vogel 2009), il est proposé dans cette thèse que le pied n'est pas un constituant prosodique universel. Au contraire, certaines langues, dont le turc et le français, ne possèdent pas de pied. Plusieurs arguments en faveur de cette position provenant de ces deux langues, en particulier du turc, sont avancés. La comparaison entre un accent régulier (sur la fin du mot) et un accent exceptionnel en turc révèle que «l'accent » est simplement une proéminence de l'intonation portant sur la dernière syllabe d'un mot prosodique en l'absence d'une structure de pied. L'accentuation exceptionnelle, en échange, est le résultat de l'introduction dans la computation de morphèmes déjà structurés en pieds dans le lexique. Cette structure de pied est maintenue en surface, suivant les contraintes de fidélité. La grammaire assigne ensuite les autres propriétés à ce pied, telles que la binarité et le type de pied. Ces propriétés sont satisfaites par défaut dans le cas des morphèmes réguliers, puisque ceux-ci ne sont pas structurés en pied. Le résultat est une analyse unifiée de l'accentuation normale et exceptionnelle en turc.En deuxième lieu, cette thèse propose une voie pour l'acquisition L2 de la prosodie, que nous appelons l'Hypothèse de la Voie de l'Acquisition de la Prosodie (HVAP). L'HVAP prédit différents niveaux de difficulté et différentes voies d'acquisition en fonction des propriétés typologiques de la langue première (L1) de l'apprenant et de la langue L2 visée, ainsi que sur la base d'un arbre de dépendance représentant les relations entre les paramètres prosodiques. La plupart des paramètres concernant les pieds sont incorporés dans cette analyse, en plus du nouveau paramètre régissant la présence ou l'absence de pied. L'HVAP prédit que si le pied est présent dans la L1, un apprenant L2 d'une langue qui ne possède pas de pied sera incapable de l'éliminer de sa grammaire et sera contraint de changer les valeurs de d'autres paramètres concernant les pieds. Ces paramètres ne sont pas tous également faciles à changer. Dépendamment de leur position dans l'arbre de paramètres et de l'effet de marquage, il est prédit que certains paramètres tels que le type de pied seront plus facile à changer que d'autres, comme l'Itérativité. Les prédictions de cette théorie concernant la voie d'apprentissage sont ensuite testées à l'aide d'une expérience visant à examiner la production en turc d'apprenants ayant le français ou l'anglais comme langue première. Les résultats de cette expérience confirment largement les prédictions de l'HVAP. Aucun des apprenants du turc parlant l'anglais comme langue première n'ont été en mesure de se débarrasser du pied dans leur grammaire. Ils ont toutefois été capables de faire certains changements contraints par la Grammaire Universelle (GU), comme par exemple changer le paramètre d'Extramétricalité de oui à non et, à une étape subséquente, changer le type de pied de trochaïque à iambique, résultant en un nombre plus élevé de mots portant l'accent principal sur la dernière syllabe. Les apprenants francophones, en échange, produisent des structures sans pieds avec accent final, comme la cible en turc, à partir du début de l'acquisition. Aucun des apprenants n'ont présentés de structures non-contraintes par la GU tels que des pieds iambiques non-sensibles au poids prosodique, un type de pied exclu par la GU.

Previously, J. Lambek et al. have used Production Grammars to study the kinship terminology of English, Hindi, Sanskrit and Malagasy. This technique is applied here to the kinship terminology of Burmese and four closely related Indonesian languages: Indonesian, Javanese, Madurese and Sundanese. The production grammars are then compared, noting differences between Burmese and the others, and differences within the group of Indonesian languages. Particular attention is paid to the reduction rules, as they are indicative of the structure of the grammar. It was found that although differing in the structure of its kinship descriptions, Burmese is quite similar to the Indonesian languages on the level of reduction rules. A computer program was used to check the grammars and to generate sample derivations. Finally, kinship data is included for four other Indonesian languages.

<p> A central question in second language acquisition (SLA) is the interaction of internal and external variables, and this dissertation contributes to the field by investigating the effects of bilingualism and aging on language development under different instructional conditions. Prior research suggests that bilingual young adults generally have an advantage over monolinguals in learning a non-primary language (e.g., Cenoz &amp; Valencia, 1994; Sanz, 2000, 2007), an advantage that is more evident in less explicit instructional conditions (e.g., Lado, 2008; Lin, 2009). In addition, research suggests that older adults are better able to learn non-primary languages under less explicit than explicit conditions (Midford &amp; Kirsner, 2005; Lenet et al., 2011). To aid in explaining the role of bilingualism, aging, and instructional conditions on development, this study also measures attentional control (ANT and Simon task), language aptitude (MLAT), and non-linguistic implicit sequence learning (ASRT). </p><p> Ninety-four participants who were either young adults (age 18-27) or older adults (age 60+) and either monolingual English speakers or bilingual English/Spanish speakers completed the Latin Project (Sanz, Stafford, &amp; Bowden), targeting the assignment of thematic roles to nouns in Latin, which differs in cues from that of English or Spanish. Participants completed a vocabulary lesson and quiz, a battery of four assessments as pre, immediate post, and delayed posttests, and task-essential practice either with or without previous grammar explanation (more and less explicit instruction). Language development was measured via accuracy and reaction time. Results revealed a bilingual advantage in accuracy, largely due to increased aptitude compared to monolinguals, and especially for bilinguals in the more explicit condition, a finding that differs from studies that used metalinguistic feedback as explicit instruction (e.g., Lado, 2008). In addition, older adults' accuracy did not vary by condition, suggesting that grammar explanations prior to practice are not as disruptive as is metalinguistic feedback (Lenet et al., 2011), nor did it generally differ from young adults' accuracy. Attentional control and non-linguistic implicit sequence learning predicted changes in latency rather than accuracy. These findings add to our understanding of bilingual effects on cognition, mitigate negative stereotypes of aging and learning, and have implications for foreign language pedagogy.</p>