Results from traditional assessment measures used with Spanish-English bilingual children may not be representative of this population’s morphosyntactic abilities due to their dynamic proficiencies. Short-term learning tasks such as structural priming may provide more comprehensive information on bilingual children’s morphosyntactic abilities. The purpose of this thesis was to analyze items from the experimental version of the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment-Middle Extension (BESA-ME) in order to select appropriate item types to be used on a structural priming task. The Experimental BESA-ME was administered to 137 children with typical development and 37 children with language impairment between the ages of 7;0 to 9;11. Results revealed that appropriate items for a structural priming task were third-person singular, past tense, and possessives in English, and conditionals, subjunctives, and direct object clitics in Spanish. Depending on the purpose of the structural priming tasks, additional items also showed potential for use. / text

O lakota é uma língua do tipo head-marking falada no centro dos Estados Unidos, principalmente nos estados de Dakota do Norte e Dakota do Sul. O presente trabalho visa analisar e demonstrar um aspecto da língua ainda pouco explorado: a morfologia da classe de palavras tradicionalmente conhecida como pronome. Há nesta língua evidências de que tal classe é composta de uma raiz verbal precedida por morfemas pessoais, os mesmos usados nos verbos regulares, e seu uso dentro de uma sentença é similar ao da clivagem. Da mesma forma que os pronomes pessoais, os substantivos, os números e os pronomes interrogativos também podem receber os mesmos morfemas em determinados contextos e, assim, exercer função de núcleo do predicado. O modelo teórico adotado para a análise da língua é a Gramatica de Papel e Referência (Van Valin & Lapolla, 1998), um modelo funcionalista que busca compreender a manifestação de estruturas gramaticais levando em consideração seus aspectos semânticos e pragmáticos. Suas principais motivações são como desenvolver um modelo teórico baseando-se em línguas de tipologias diversas, especialmente aquelas de estruturas diferentes das do inglês ou de outras línguas europeias e de que modo a interação entre sintaxe, semântica e pragmática pode ser melhor descrita em sistemas linguísticos diferentes. A metodologia consiste em extrair e analisar as sentenças pertinentes de duas das maiores obras em língua lakota atualmente disponíveis: os livros Dakota Texts (Deloria, 1932) e New Lakota Dictionary (Ullrich, 2008). As sentenças serão analisadas de acordo com sua estrutura morfológica e sintática, bem como pelo uso que é feito das ocorrências. Além disso, será necessário apresentar também o uso das marcas de pessoa nos verbos, em especial aqueles usados na identificação e categorização de entidades, a fim de estabelecer paralelos entre as duas ocorrências. / Lakota is a head-marking language, spoken in the Midwest Region of the United States, mainly in the states of North Dakota and South Dakota. This work aims to analyze and demonstrate one aspect of the language that has been little explored: the morphology of the part of speech traditionally known as independent pronoun. In this language, there is evidence that such part of speech is composed of a verbal root preceded by personal morphemes, the same ones used in regular verbs, and its usage within a sentence is similar to that of the cleft sentence. As well as personal pronouns, nouns, numbers and interrogative pronouns may also have the same morphemes in certain contexts and, then, are able to perform the function of core of the predicate. The theoretical model adopted to analyze the language is Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & Lapolla, 1998), a functionalist model that seeks to understand the manifestation of grammatical structures, considering their semantic and pragmatic aspects. Its main motivations are how to develop a theoretical model based on languages of different typologies, especially those whose structures are different from the English ones and other European languages, and how syntax, semantics and pragmatics can best be described in different linguistic systems. The methodology consists of extracting and analyzing relevant sentences from two of the greatest works in Lakota language that are currently available: Dakota Texts (Deloria, 1932) and New Lakota Dictionary (Ullrich, 2008). The sentences will be analyzed according to their morphological and syntactic structures, as well as the usage made of the occurrences. In addition, it is also necessary to present the usage of personal marks in verbs, especially those used in the identification and categorization of entities, in order to draw parallels between the two occurrences.

This analysis explores the reflection of semantic features of emotion verbs that are metaphorized on the morphosyntactic level in constructions that express these emotions. This dissertation shows how the avoidance or distancing response to fear is mirrored in the morphosyntax of fear constructions (FCs) in certain Indo-European languages through the use of non-canonical grammatical markers. This analysis looks at both simple FCs consisting of a single clause and complex FCs, which feature a subordinate clause that acts as a complement to the fear verb in the main clause. In simple FCs in some highly-inflected Indo-European languages, the complement of the fear verb (which represents the fear source) is case-marked not accusative but genitive (Baltic and Slavic languages, Sanskrit, Anglo-Saxon) or ablative (Armenian, Sanskrit, Old Persian). These two directional case inflections are generally used to represent the notion of movement away from. In simple FCs in these languages, the movement away is the subject/Experiencer’s recoiling or desire to distance him-/herself from the fear Source. In this way the grammar of simple FCs of these languages mirrors, or metaphorizes, the reflexive avoidance behavior of the fear response. In the subordinate clause of complex FCs in certain Indo-European languages (such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Baltic and Slavic languages, French, and Catalan), irrealis mood marking on the verb together with a negative particle that does not affect syntactic negation of the verb syntactically mark the potentiality of the feared event or state represented by the subordinate clause (which has not yet occurred and may not occur) and its undesirability for the subject/Experiencer of the fear verb in the main clause. In this way the negative particle + irrealis mood fear clause metaphorizes on the morphosyntactic level the primary semantic features of the emotion of fear: anticipation of a potential undesired event that the Experiencer seeks to negate. The analysis of complex FCs is followed by a case study proposing the evolution of these constructions in Latin from negative purpose clauses. This dissertation includes previously published material.

O lakota é uma língua do tipo head-marking falada no centro dos Estados Unidos, principalmente nos estados de Dakota do Norte e Dakota do Sul. O presente trabalho visa analisar e demonstrar um aspecto da língua ainda pouco explorado: a morfologia da classe de palavras tradicionalmente conhecida como pronome. Há nesta língua evidências de que tal classe é composta de uma raiz verbal precedida por morfemas pessoais, os mesmos usados nos verbos regulares, e seu uso dentro de uma sentença é similar ao da clivagem. Da mesma forma que os pronomes pessoais, os substantivos, os números e os pronomes interrogativos também podem receber os mesmos morfemas em determinados contextos e, assim, exercer função de núcleo do predicado. O modelo teórico adotado para a análise da língua é a Gramatica de Papel e Referência (Van Valin & Lapolla, 1998), um modelo funcionalista que busca compreender a manifestação de estruturas gramaticais levando em consideração seus aspectos semânticos e pragmáticos. Suas principais motivações são como desenvolver um modelo teórico baseando-se em línguas de tipologias diversas, especialmente aquelas de estruturas diferentes das do inglês ou de outras línguas europeias e de que modo a interação entre sintaxe, semântica e pragmática pode ser melhor descrita em sistemas linguísticos diferentes. A metodologia consiste em extrair e analisar as sentenças pertinentes de duas das maiores obras em língua lakota atualmente disponíveis: os livros Dakota Texts (Deloria, 1932) e New Lakota Dictionary (Ullrich, 2008). As sentenças serão analisadas de acordo com sua estrutura morfológica e sintática, bem como pelo uso que é feito das ocorrências. Além disso, será necessário apresentar também o uso das marcas de pessoa nos verbos, em especial aqueles usados na identificação e categorização de entidades, a fim de estabelecer paralelos entre as duas ocorrências. / Lakota is a head-marking language, spoken in the Midwest Region of the United States, mainly in the states of North Dakota and South Dakota. This work aims to analyze and demonstrate one aspect of the language that has been little explored: the morphology of the part of speech traditionally known as independent pronoun. In this language, there is evidence that such part of speech is composed of a verbal root preceded by personal morphemes, the same ones used in regular verbs, and its usage within a sentence is similar to that of the cleft sentence. As well as personal pronouns, nouns, numbers and interrogative pronouns may also have the same morphemes in certain contexts and, then, are able to perform the function of core of the predicate. The theoretical model adopted to analyze the language is Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & Lapolla, 1998), a functionalist model that seeks to understand the manifestation of grammatical structures, considering their semantic and pragmatic aspects. Its main motivations are how to develop a theoretical model based on languages of different typologies, especially those whose structures are different from the English ones and other European languages, and how syntax, semantics and pragmatics can best be described in different linguistic systems. The methodology consists of extracting and analyzing relevant sentences from two of the greatest works in Lakota language that are currently available: Dakota Texts (Deloria, 1932) and New Lakota Dictionary (Ullrich, 2008). The sentences will be analyzed according to their morphological and syntactic structures, as well as the usage made of the occurrences. In addition, it is also necessary to present the usage of personal marks in verbs, especially those used in the identification and categorization of entities, in order to draw parallels between the two occurrences.

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. 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? 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.

This dissertation investigates the argument structure of verb phrases by identifying the syntactic roles and locations of the functional heads it consists of. Since the early 1990s, it has been widely accepted that the basic verb phrase consists of two distinct projections of a functional layer v/VoiceP, and a lexical layer √/VP (Chomsky 1995, Hale & Keyser 1993, Harley 1995; 2008a, Kratzer 1996, Marantz 1997). Recent developments in generative grammar, however, suggest that it may comprise of three projections (Pylkkanen 2002; 2008, Cuervo 2003, Collins 2005, Alexiadou et al. 2006, Harley 2013a, Merchant 2013): two functional projections – Voice, which introduces the external argument and licenses accusative Case; verbalizing v, which marks the eventuality type be/do/become/cause – and an acategorial lexical root (Cuervo 2003, Harley 2013a). In this dissertation, I explore the consequences of adopting the tripartite theory of verb phrases with two particular foci: (i) the structure of applicative and causative constructions and the interactions between the two; (ii) languages where the applicative and causative constructions are formed by attaching affixes to the verbal root. The main proposal of this dissertation is that various morpho-syntactic behaviors of applicatives and causatives and their cross-linguistic variation can be captured with two tools: (i) the hypothesis of the tripartite verb structure; and (ii) an understanding of the selectional criteria of the functional heads – Voice, Appl, and v – and their head-specific properties. The tripartite assumption solves for us some empirical puzzles and raises some new questions. I show that the three major achievements of the tripartite hypothesis are that it provides a syntactic account of the constraints on applicative and causative affix ordering, the distinct patterns of functional heads in their ability to introduce arguments, and the disparate morpho-syntactic behaviors of the three causative types due to the size of their complements. I then provide answers to some new questions that follow from the transition to the tripartite hypothesis. I elaborate the selectional mechanisms of the Voice, Appl, and v heads involved in applicatives and causatives. I reinterpret previously established facts about applicatives and causatives within the updated verbal structure.

This dissertation describes and analyses a selection of morphosyntactic phenomena from the nominal, verbal and clausal domains of Barese, an upper southern Italian dialect of Puglia. Chapter 2 analyses pragmatically unmarked and marked sentential word orders in Barese. Barese is a null-subject language whose unmarked transitive word order is (S)VO, in which syntactic constituents can be displaced in accordance with their pragmatico-semantic relevance to the discourse. One peculiarity of Barese regards intransitives encoding a loco-temporal (c)overt argument, where VS and SV orders may both mark sentence-focus. While VS encodes a null loco-temporal argument, SV serves to encode broad focus whenever S is ‘accessible’ in the mind of both discourse participants forming part of their ‘common ground’. Chapter 3 examines the structure of Barese nominal expressions, focusing on the interaction between adjectives, possessives and demonstratives. Barese nominals nearly systematically precede adjectives and possessives, except for a small class of rudimentary evaluative adjectives which may occur prenominally. These orders, derived via the phrasal movement of the nominal across its modifiers, are contrasted with the head movement of a morpholexically restricted class of kinship nominals which can be modified by a defective set of enclitic possessives. The final section analyses the behaviour of Barese demonstratives, which only occur in prenominal position. In particular, a peculiar Barese structure which combines the definite article with the distal demonstrative pronoun is analysed, highlighting how it specifically marks discourse-old referents. Chapter 4 describes the mechanisms of auxiliary selection and past participle agreement operative in Barese. In relation to the former, Barese displays three different factors which may determine auxiliary selection, namely person, tense and mood. These three dimensions of variation are analysed in terms of parameter hierarchies which formalise the complexity of the semantic features involved in the selection of the auxiliaries HAVE and BE. It is argued that this complexity reflects different diachronic stages of auxiliary selection across different generations of speakers. The final section investigates Barese active past participle agreement which, unlike auxiliary selection, displays a conservative distribution licensed by direct objects and Undergoer subjects. The peculiarity of Barese, however, is that agreement is morpholexically limited to a small number of ‘strong’ participles which mark agreement exclusively through metaphonetic alternation. The final chapter is concerned with Barese progressive and andative periphrases which variously show inflected forms of the lexical verb in the 2SG-3SG of the present in place of the infinitive. These structures have been argued for Salentino and Sicilian dialects to have developed from instances of coordination with Latin AC ‘and’, which were then reinterpreted as instances of (pseudo-)coordination, namely subordination. In contrast, a different origin for these inflected forms of the lexical verb is proposed for Barese, where AC-coordination is not historically attested. It is argued that the loss of the infinitival ending -RE produced morphophonological identity, viz. syncretism, between the 3SG(/2SG) present and the infinitive, enabling the latter to be reinterpreted as a finite form within the periphrasis. This spred further across the neighbouring dialects to include more grammatical persons (3SG/2SG > 1SG > 3PL > all), as well as past and irrealis paradigms.

Cette thèse porte sur le maba, une langue nilo-saharienne du groupe maban, parlée à l’Est du Tchad par quelques 300.000 locuteurs. Cette langue est très peu décrite, et nous avons tenté de faire ressortir les caractéristiques phonologiques et morphosyntaxiques de la langue.Dans un premier temps, nous avons décrit l’inventaire des phonèmes ainsi que la formation des mots. Puis nous avons abordé le système nominal, c’est-à-dire le nom, les déterminants du nom ainsi que le constituant nominal. L’une des particularités du maba sont les coverbes, lexèmes actualisés soit à l’aide d’un morphème nominal ou d’un verbe support. Nous avons traité le système verbal, décrivant la morphologie du verbe ainsi que les TAM et les opérations de modifications de la valence. Nous nous sommes attachée à décrire les propositions complexes, qu’elles soient complétives ou adverbiales, subordonnées, coordonnées ou juxtaposées. L’un des points saillants du système est la fréquence de l’emploi des converbes, formes verbales non finies, dans le discours. Pour terminer la description, nous nous sommes attardée sur le discours, mettant en évidence quelques mécanismes de focalisation et de topicalisation, et revenant sur le discours rapporté.L’une des traits caractéristiques de la langue est la complexité du nombre, tant nominal que ver-bal, ceci étant une particularité des langues nilo-sahariennes de façon générale. Le marquage du nom-bre est morphologique – suffixation, ou syntaxique – indiqué par l’accord entre le nom et ses dépen-dants, le nom et le verbe ou le verbe et l’objet. / This thesis concerns Maba, a Nilo-Saharan language from the Maban group, spoken by some 300,000 speakers in Eastern Chad. The language has been very little studied up to now, and my aim in this thesis has been to research and describe its phonological and morphological characteristics.I begin by describing the phoneme inventory and the rules governing word formation. This is followed by a consideration of the nominal system, including sections on the noun, the noun determi-nants and the noun phrase. One of the points of special interest in the language is the use of co-verbs. Co-verbs are lexemes which are accompanied either by a nominal morpheme or by a support verb. The thesis continues with a description of the verbal system, including the verb morphology, the TAM sys-tem and modifications in valency. This is followed by a discussion of complex clauses, including com-pletive and adverbial clauses, subordinate clauses, and coordinate and juxtaposed clauses. Then the discussion returns to the co-verbs, examining the frequency of use of the ‘non-finished’ verb form in the discourse. To close the description, we look at other aspects of discourse, showing some topicalisa-tion and focalisation mechanisms, and finishing with reported speech.One of the characteristics of the language which is featured in this thesis is the complexity of number, be it nominal or verbal number. This complexity is a particularity of Nilo-Saharan languages as a whole. Number is marked morphologically, by suffixation, or syntactically, by concord between the noun and its dependants, the noun and the verb or the verb and the object.

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis .investigates the function of a topicalized constituent .in the narrative non-direct speech texts .in 2 Kings. Many traditional BH grammarians described the :function of a topicalized constituent as "emphasis". Recent BH grammarians pointed out that extralinguistic factors like the total communicative context should also be considered in the description of a function for a topicalized constituent. The shift from the structural to a more pragmatic approach is illustrated in this study. The pragmatic approach proved to be not only possible, but also advantageous to the study of function in BH. The aim of this study was to test the viability and results of the various theories and categories of the BH linguists. This study also researched whether their linguistic approaches are indeed an improvement on the descriptions as defined by the traditional grammarians. In other words, to see whether and in which way more recent studies of BH could aid the understanding of the function of a topicalized constituent in BH word order. The methodology utilized in this study is briefly outlined as follows: 1. This study examined the description of word order in terms of the traditional and more recent approaches. The categories used to describe the function of a topicalized constituent were our main focus. At the end we compiled a theoretical frame of reference that we regard as representative of modem attempts to acquire a more refined comprehension of BH word order. A theoretical linguistic framework was formulated which could be used in our description of a sentence in BH in 2 · Kings. This attempt could be described as eclectic because it used the diverse perceptions from the various linguistic approaches. Richter's theoretical linguistic framework (with its limitations) together with contributions of Van der Merwe, Buth and Gross were used as a basis for the description of the sentences. 3. Sentences were analysed systematically and holistically at the different levels of description, namely morphology, morphosyntax, sentence syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Because of the difficulty in defining semantics and with pragmatics still in disarray, this study defined some semantic-pragmatic concepts it worked with. 4. In the description of sentences we incorporated and tested the viability of the different categories of various grammarians. By carefully considering the context of each sentence, this study posed the question: which, if any; of the categories could adequately describe the semantic-pragmatic function of a topicalized constituent in 2 Kings.

Over the past decade, there have been diverse theoretical perspectives and increasing empirical literature on bilingualism and specific language impairment (SLI), some of which highlighted the complex nature of accurately diagnosing SLI in bilingual populations. The goal of the current study is to enhance our understanding of morphosyntax development in an understudied bilingual population - Mandarin-English children who are growing up in an L2-dominant environment (English) in the United States. The study included a total of 55 bilingual Mandarin-English children between the ages of four and seven years, including 53 typically developing (TD) children and 2 children diagnosed with SLI. Using a newly developed screening test - the Bilingual English-Mandarin Oral Screener (BEMOS), we compared Mandarin performance in both TD and SLI children on 7 morphosyntax tasks which respectively measure passive -bei, possessive -de, prepositional phrases, noun classifiers, quantifier and scope, aspects (imperfective “-zai” and perfective “-le”), and sentence repetition. Our analysis of TD bilingual children revealed a trend towards a significant age effect in the total score and a near-significant effect in the preposition and the aspect sub-sections of the screener. When age was considered, perceived Mandarin proficiency by parents was associated with TD bilingual children’s performance. All students performed poorly on the classifier section, but our error analysis showed a predominant response pattern of imitation, suggesting bilingual children have growing sensitivity and are attentive to semantic similarity of nouns. Overgeneralized use of the general classifier “ge” was also observed in the errors. Both children with SLI scored lower overall compared to their age- and gender-matched TD peers, especially in the classifier and quantifier & scope sections. Reliable clinical markers were not identified due to the two SLI children’s distinct performance. Clinical implications and future research needs were also discussed. / text