The standard semantic analysis of natural language disjunction maintains that or is the Boolean join. This dissertation makes a case for a Hamblin-style semantics, under which disjunctions denote sets of propositions. Chapter 2 shows that the standard semantics does not capture the natural interpretation of counterfactual conditionals with disjunctive antecedents. Together with a standard minimal change semantics for counterfactuals, the standard semantics predicts that these counterfactuals are evaluated by selecting the closest worlds from the union of the propositions that or operates over. Their natural interpretation, however, requires selecting the closest worlds from each of the propositions that or operates over. This interpretation is predicted under a Hamblin-style semantics if conditionals are analyzed as correlative constructions. Chapter 3 deals with the exclusive component of unembedded disjunctions. The exclusive component of a disjunction S with more than two atomic disjuncts can be derived as an implicature if S competes in the pragmatics with all the conjunctions that can be formed out of its atomic disjuncts. The generation of these pragmatic competitors proves challenging under the standard analysis of or, because the interpretation system does not have access to the atomic disjuncts. Under a Hamblin semantics, however, the required pragmatic competitors can be generated by mapping each non-empty subset [special characters omitted] of the denotation of S to the proposition that is true in a world w if and only if all the members of [special characters omitted] are true in w. Chapter 4 investigates the interpretation of disjunctions under the scope of modals. When uttered by a speaker who knows who may have what, a sentence of the form of Sandy may have ice cream or cake naturally conveys that Sandy has two rights: the right to have ice cream, and the right to have cake. Under the standard analysis of or and modals, however, the sentence is predicted to be true as long as Sandy has at least one of the rights. A Hamblin style analysis allows for the derivation of the requirement that Sandy has two rights as an implicature of domain widening.

This dissertation proposes a novel theory of the phonology-morphology interface called Optimal Interleaving (OI). OI is based on Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC), which is proposed by McCarthy (2007a) as a serial architecture for Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993]). OI adds to OT-CC the hypothesis that morphological spell-out (Halle & Marantz 1993's 'vocabulary insertion') occurs in the phonological component of the grammar. OI thus allows phonological and morphological operations to be interleaved in a fashion similar to that assumed in the theory of Lexical Phonology (Kiparsky 1982a,b, Mohanan 1982). Chapters 2 and 3 argue that OI makes a number of correct predictions about phonologically-conditioned allomorph selection. Chiefly, OI derives the empirical generalization that allomorph selection is always opaque with respect to phonology conditioned by the competing allomorphs (Paster 2005, 2006, to appear). It does so while keeping phonologically-driven allomorphy in the phonology and governed by phonological constraints. OI therefore avoids a version of the Duplication Problem (Clayton 1976) which is faced by theories which derive the opacity generalization by attributing all allomorph selection to subcategorization in the morphology (Paster 2005, 2006, to appear; Bye 2007). Chapter 4 shows that OI, and more generally OT-CC, can be applied to non-derived environment blocking (NDEB: Kiparsky 1973a). It is shown that OI makes five correct predictions about NDEB which are not collectively predicted by any other theory of this phenomenon. OI achieves these results without having to make any special assumptions specific to NDEB. This places OT-CC at a considerable advantage as a theory of opacity relative to rule-based phonology, where NDEB requires stipulated restrictions on rule application like the Strict Cycle Condition (Kean 1974, Mascaró 1976). Chapter 5 shows that OI also lends itself to the two other main types of serial phonology/morphology interactions: 'cyclic' overapplication of a process, and underapplication of a process in a morphologically-derived environment. The chapter also critiques existing theories of these effects, particularly OO-faithfulness (Benua 1997), Stratal OT (Kiparsky 2000), and the phonological application of the theory of phases (Marvin 2002).

A great deal of current work in phonology discusses the functional grounding of phonological patterns. This dissertation proposes that functional factors can motivate phonological constraints in two ways. ‘Functionally grounded’ constraints are induced from learners' immediate linguistic experience. ‘Formally grounded’ constraints generalize beyond literal functional facts; as learners do not have direct evidence for these constraints, they must be innate. As this proposal distinguishes between constraints which are and are not induced, questions about how learners induce constraints are also central. The dissertation describes a computational model in which virtual learners hear acoustically realistic segments, learn to identify these segments in a realistic way, and induce attested phonotactic constraints from this experience. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the proposed distinction between functionally and formally grounded constraints. Chapter 2 explores a novel class of functionally grounded constraints which impose parallel phonotactic restrictions on the edges of all prosodic domains. Restrictions on domain-initial η, ?, and h are discussed in particular detail. While these tend to reflect perceptual facts, individual constraints on marked domain-initial onsets cannot all be induced from learners' perceptual experience. For this reason, these domain-edge constraint schemata and all constraints belonging to the schemata are formally grounded. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to functionally grounded constraints. The empirical focus is a restriction on word-initial p found in languages including Cajonos Zapotec, Ibibio, and Moroccan Arabic. Chapter 3 presents experimental results showing that initial p is uniquely perceptually difficult and uniquely acoustically similar to initial b. These phonetic facts are taken to be the basis for initial p's phonological markedness. In order to show that the constraint *#P can be consistently induced by all learners, chapter 4 describes a computational model based on the acoustic and perceptual data collected in these experiments. Virtual learners are exposed to either pseudo-French, where word initial p is attested, or pseudo-Cajonos Zapotec, where there is no initial p. With only very conservative assumptions about the nature of learners' perceptual experience, the model consistently induces the constraint *# P from realistic input. Chapter 5 concludes, emphasizing the importance of testing these proposals empirically.

Abstract not available

This dissertation presents studies of tone sandhi in four major southeast Chinese dialects, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Chaozhou and Amoy, with major emphasis on Fuzhou. The dissertation argues that the sandhi found in two of these dialects is the result of an interaction between duration and tone, which interaction can be expressed easily within the limits of the "metrical theory" on stress, first developed in Liberman and Prince (1977) and expanded in recent works, most notably Hayes (1980). Fuzhou and Shanghai, which have some of the more complicated sandhi systems of the Chinese languages, are argued to have two or three syllable stress-feet, with a strongly stressed syllable grouped together with weakly stressed syllables. The weakly stressed syllables are shown to have shortened duration and loss of part of all of the original distinctive tonal contour. The details of this loss and constraints on the tonal phonology of Fuzhou and Shanghai form the bulk of the discussion of this dissertation. These dialects are contrasted to the Southern Min dialects of Amoy and Chaozhou, for which no such local level sandhi exists, and for which the analysis argues for phrase-lev phrase-final tonal changes from the traditional 'combination' form to the traditional 'isolation' form. This unorthodox approach to tonal changes in these dialects is shown to simplify morphological processes and local tone rules which exist in these languages. Finally, a fragment of Fuzhou external sandhi patterns is examined and the analysis argues that the same types of rules which apply to form stress-feet re-apply at the phrase-level. Certain complications are brought about in external sandhi due to the special nature of clitics in stress rules, and the part which thematic roles play in defining domains, but the general pattern is clear: phrase-level stressing in Fuzhou is a fairly local pattern, which forms a clear contrast to Southern Min dialects.

Abstract not available

One of the goals of linguistic theory is to discover generalizations about the syntax and semantics of natural languages, and to construct theories of human cognitive capacity and development that explain these generalizations. Each statement about a language is theory-laden, that is, the characterizations of a possible generalization are determined by a theory (regardless of whether or not it is explicit) about the nature of human language. Further, statements about a particular language carry varying degrees of theoretical commitment. Compare the statements in (1) and (2): (1) The basic word order in English is such that the object noun phrase follows the verb, while in Hopi, the object noun phrase precedes the verb. (2) English has a rule to expand the VP node which has as a special case: VP (→) V NP; whereas the corresponding rule in Hopi has as a special case: VP (→) NP V. Though, in a sense, the method for checking both (1) and (2) is the same, (2) presupposes a claim that (1) does not: the incorporation of context-free phrase structures rules (PS rules) will lead to a revealing theory about how humans acquire the languages they do. However, if PS grammars are adopted as a component of the representation of the knowledge (or belief system) humans acquire in this domain, as was a natural assumption in the early days of generative grammar, we require some theory about these rules from which generalizations stated in terms of them follow. For example, alongside (1) and (2) consider (3) and (4): (3) English is a prepositional language; Hopi is postpositional. (4) English has (a subcase of) a rule: PP (→) P NP; for Hopi: PP (→) NP P. As Greenberg (1963) noticed, statements like (1) and (3) are not unrelated. In fact, with much greater frequency than chance, (5) and (6) hold: (5) If a language has VO order, it will be prepositional. (6) If a language has OV order, it will be postpositional. In Montague grammar, there has been little attempt to account for such generalizations. This dissertation proposes a theory of syntax which shares some of the features of Montague's work, yet attempts to give a principled explanation of low-level generalizations. The first two chapters are an introduction to the theory. Montague's methodology of stating a tight connection between the syntax and semantics is embraced and some of his technical apparatus is borrowed. Some ways in which the theory differs from common practice in Montague grammar are in (7). (7) Phrase structure rules are discarded entirely. Given category assignments to lexical items, hierarchical organization of phrases is defined universally. For languages with strict word order, left-to-right ordering of constituents of phrases is specified by a language-particular word order convention, which by its very nature is cross categorial. Chapters three and four extend and elaborate on the proposal in the first two chapters. A "wrap" convention is introduced for discontinuous constituents, as are category changing and relating rules which account for nominalizations and the double role played by adjectives in English. In the fifth and final chapter, word order conventions for other languages (Hopi among them) are adduced, and the first steps toward a theory of ordering conventions are taken. The goal of the dissertation is to offer support for the view that while (1) and (3) are generalizations about the languages in question, (2) and (4) are not. Thus the focus of interest shifts away from a theory which explains how children acquire a set of PS rules to one which must explain how they acquire word order conventions.

This dissertation explores the consequences of cumulative interaction among markedness constraints in Harmonic Grammar (HG; Legendre, Miyata & Smolensky 1990, Smolensky & Legendre 2006), showing how HG inherently restricts cumulativity, allowing clear predictions about possible and impossible interactions to be made. Chapter 2 addresses the ability of HG to model certain patterns with a more limited constraint set than is feasible in Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004). The particular focus here is on positional licensing constraints. The partially-overlapping contexts of these constraints lead to typologically-meaningful gang effects, allowing HG to capture patterns of disjunctive licensing that require the addition of positional faithfulness constraints in OT. With a smaller constraint set, the HG typology is restricted beyond what is possible in OT where more constraints are necessary.

This dissertation investigates the mechanisms that determine perspective in human sentence processing. It is claimed that processing perspective involves three different kinds of mechanism: a pragmatic and processing default that presumptively attributes attitudes to the speaker of the utterance, a set of partially conventionalized surface cues that signal that the speaker intends to contravene this default, and a general abductive inferencing procedure that selects the best representation of the general context from what is known about the perspectives of individual agents in the discourse, in combination with what was asserted by the speaker. To this end, I develop the notion of an ‘agent profile’ which stores known and anticipated information about individuals in memory, one of which determines a perspectival parameter in a general, non-linguistic representation of context. I show that attributing perspective exclusively to a non-speaker agent may be difficult to achieve, but once achieved, is the most economical decision in certain environments. Experimental results from a wide range of expressions and constructions are presented, including epithets, appositives, and matrix reports which convey a non-speaker perspective, as in free indirect discourse.

Reported speech inevitably involves one's comprehension of a message and its reproduction for conveying the message to another, reflecting the major function of language and the major purpose of second language learning. This study presents an examination of reported speech in Japanese as a first and a second language within the framework of discourse analysis and second language pedagogy. Questions are raised as to: (1) What is the structure of reported speech in Japanese? (2) What is the principle governing the selection of styles of reported speech? (3) What is the structure of reported speech in Japanese as a second language? (4) What are the pedagogical implications of this study? First a survey of the literature is presented pertaining to the historical background of discourse analysis and second language pedagogy in terms of their theoretical foundations. Then an analysis of problem (1) is presented in which, unlike the conventional treatment of reported speech in Japanese, four different types of reported speech are proposed: Direct Quotation, Semi Direct Quotation, Semi Indirect Quotation and Indirect Quotation. Question (2) is then pursued and a generalization is obtained, which presents two hypotheses: "The Correlation between Communicative Orientation and Reported Speech" and "The Correlation between Information Structure and Reported Speech." Question (3) is treated in the framework of the interlanguage hypothesis. Learner's utterances are observed to be generated as an outcome of testing hypotheses which manifest processes of "transfer", "developmental difficulty", "risk-avoidance strategy" and "self-correction". Finally pedagogical implications are discussed which create strong links between formal learning environments and informal learning environments, so that learners can test hypotheses optimally. To materialize such a need, a methodological framework is proposed, which aims to develop an "i + 1 comprehensible input/output" from the outset of teaching and learning a second language.