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The goal of this thesis is to add a typologically distinct data point to the investigation of access and representation of words in the mental lexicon, which until recently has been biased towards English. We concentrated on Polish, which contrasts with English in the richness of its inflectional and derivational morphology and its morpho-phonological alternations. Using immediate cross-modal and delayed auditory-auditory priming, parallel issues to those examined in English are investigated, as well as questions which cannot be addressed in English, because of differences in morphological properties. Four main findings are reported. First, the representation of morphologically complex Polish words is combinatorial, similar to English; This is supported by: (a) robust priming for items which share the same stem; (b) affix priming for morphologically complex items; (c) suffix-suffix interference for items competing for the same stem; Second, the results on Polish highly and moderately semantically transparent compounds suggest that the former may be represented in a combinatorial format and the latter as full forms. This contrasts with English where both types of compound are claimed to be stored as full forms. Third, initial investigations of the role of semantic transparency in determining how morphologically complex words are represented, suggest that transparent items are stored decompositionally whereas opaque items are stored as full forms. This conforms to the English findings, but contrasts with Semitic languages. Further investigations indicate that semantic compositionality may be more important that transparency, although more research is needed here. Finally, the results suggest that phonological alternants of the same stem, whether regular or irregular, are stored in a single lexical entry, and, in the auditory modality, map directly onto the same abstract underlying representation. Overall the results support the claim that the Polish lexicon IS organised morphemically in a combinatorial, phonologically abstract format

<p> This dissertation is an investigation into compound verbal structures in Hiaki in which a verb of motion is modified by an adjoined lexical verb or verb phrase. It provides the first in-depth documentation and analysis of this structure in Hiaki, an endangered language indigenous to North America, and it explores the extent to which complex predicates of motion may be said to form a discrete class crosslinguistically, either in structural or semantic terms, by comparing Hiaki with genetically and typologically distinct languages such as Korean and Warlpiri. </p><p> The study asks the following questions: 1) What is the underlying structure of a Hiaki compound verb? In particular, what is the structure when the head verb is intransitive and thus cannot take the second verb or verb phrase as its complement? 2) To what extent can complex motion predicates in different languages be said to map to identical underlying syntactic structures? That is, if we compare these constructions in Hiaki with those in languages with different surface morphosyntactic realizations, how do the allowable surface forms constrain the possible underlying structures? 3) Is there evidence to suggest a cline or typology of complex motion predicate constructions? </p><p> The overall goals of the dissertation project are the detailed documentation, description and theoretical analysis of complex motion constructions in Hiaki, the crosslinguistic comparison of these constructions, and the expansion of an existing database of transcribed and interlinearized Hiaki texts.</p>

This thesis is a proposal for a new approach to the investigation of the language of telephone conversations. It strives to integrate the framework of analysis advocated by conversation analysts (originally the first to examine these conversations) and that of pragmaticists, in an attempt to provide description and explanation of telephone behaviour. It is based on the examination of telephone talk in Ecuadorian Spanish and British English. Such an approach requires the examination of these conversations at four levels - the level of their underlying structure which is analyzed in terms of skeletons, paths and moves, the linguistic realization of moves in relation to features of context, the politeness orientations behind moves and their linguistic realizations, and finally, the socio-cultural motivations behind linguistic choices and politeness orientations. In addition, this thesis constitutes a study in cross-cultural communication in that it attempts to determine basic similarities and differences in the organization of telephone conversations in two languages and cultures, which can provide insights into broader differences in the linguistic and politeness systems of those two languages.